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Ghosts of Seattle's Industrial Past · Street Smart Naturalist

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: this is David B.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Williams and the podcast of my newsletter,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: The Street Smart Naturalist, Explorations of the Urban Kind.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Every week I share my observations and adventures with the human
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: and natural world around Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Pacific Northwest.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Today's episode explores remnants of Seattle's early history.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: To learn more about my work,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: including my next book,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the Range of Fire and Ice,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: A Human and Natural History of Washington's Cascades,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: please go to my website, geologywriter.com.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: You'll also find a link to my Substack newsletter and my previous five and
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: a half years of newsletters, as well as images tied to this week's episode.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for joining me on this adventure,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: and welcome to Podcast 87 of the Street Smart Naturalist,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Ghosts of Seattle's Industrial Past, August 6th, 2026.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a while since I wrote a strictly urban newsletter,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: so thought I'd return to that subject this week.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically, I'd like to address two features in downtown Seattle.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: One was something I had long walked by but never thought about why it was there,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: and the other was one I had first noticed last year.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'll start with my recent discovery.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ghost platforms.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: I learned of these from my friend Jennifer Ott, Executive Director of HistoryLink.org.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Walking with me on Alaska Way on the east side of the street,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: she pointed out the raised platforms at the base of several buildings.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Mainly between South Washington Street and Pike Street,
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: on the east side of the street facing west.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jen calls the platforms Ghosts of Seattle's industrial past,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: from the era when what we now call Alaskan Way was Railroad Avenue.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: The short story is that two guys named Daniel Gilman and Thomas Burke built
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: a railroad to the east coast, or at least tried to.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Known as the Seattle Lakeshore and Eastern,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: it went north on trestles built over the water along the Seattle shoreline,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: eventually going through Interbay and around the north ends of Lake Union
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: and Lake Washington.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, Seattleites know it now as the route of the Burt Gilman Trail.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: After the Seattle Lakeshore and Eastern opened in 1887,
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  SPEAKER_00: Other railroads followed their lead and built their own trestle-bound rail routes.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Within a decade or so, nine train tracks paralleled the shoreline.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: They carried all manner of goods and dropped and obtained the loads over the water
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: at the many piers built west of the trestles and on land at warehouses that crowded
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: the length of what became known, not surprisingly, as Railroad Avenue.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: To reach the train cars and facilitate easy loading and unloading,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: builders built elevated platforms along the lengths of their warehouses.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Quite a few of those warehouses remain,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: generally repurposed for something not remotely related to their historic use.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the old ghosts of Seattle's industrial past, the elevated platforms, remain.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: As Jen points out, there really isn't any reason to demolish them.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I love how they are relics that mark the past use and they are being repurposed
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: as time goes on, she says, of wood and clams.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of relics,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: the other feature I want to highlight is the new railing built along the waterfront.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know that handrail is not always the most exciting subject,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: but I have to credit the designers of Seattle's new waterfront park
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: with making handrails interesting.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: The reason They repurposed old wood from Seattle's previous seawall.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: The wood comes from a deciduous tree native to Central and West Africa and is known
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: as azobe, eki, or red ironwood.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: the species has long been exploited and is now threatened due to over-harvesting
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: and habitat loss.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: I first noticed the handrails soon after the opening of the waterfront.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: In particular,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was near the New Habitat Beach at South Washington Street and Alaskan Way,
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  SPEAKER_00: reading interpretive signs attached to the railing.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: What attracted my attention were the numerous holes and tunnels,
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: ranging from about an eighth inch to half inch in diameter in the wood,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: which is about three inches thick and ten inches wide.
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  SPEAKER_00: Most holes went straight into the wood, but some paralleled the grain in tunnel cross-sections.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: They look to be the borings of Puget Sound's most infamous marine menace,
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: the shipworms, which, by the way, are not a worm or even closely related.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're in fact Torito clams.
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  SPEAKER_00: Found in saltwater,
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  SPEAKER_00: particularly in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere,
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  SPEAKER_00: the ravenous mollusks begin life as free-swimming larvae,
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  SPEAKER_00: then land on wood and burrow deeply.
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  SPEAKER_00: The longest individuals of our local species,
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  SPEAKER_00: Bankia cetacea, can reach six feet long, topped by a shell less than an inch wide.
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  SPEAKER_00: Shaped a bit like a medieval conical helmet,
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  SPEAKER_00: the shell drills into the wood,
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  SPEAKER_00: weakening it and causing expensive and extensive damage to ships,
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  SPEAKER_00: piers, piles, and warps.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Ecke plants used for the whalings came from a 1986 project to protect
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  SPEAKER_00: the city's original seawall.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Richard Miller,
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  SPEAKER_00: former director of roadway structures for Seattle,
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  SPEAKER_00: told me that he chose the Ecke because it was resistant to marine borers.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: It grows in sandy delta areas and has a very high silica content.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out marine borers don't like to choose sand.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: But he warned They had to use heartwood and not sapwood, which was prone to shipwood damage.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Miller's team even paid a timber expert to fly to Denmark where
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: the wood was being milled to check each board.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently,
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  SPEAKER_00: not every piece was heartwood,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the Toritos quickly figured this out and honeycombed the ekki.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: The invertebrates were joined by another marine boar,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: a relative of our local roly-polies,
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: or potato bugs, pill bugs, and bibble bugs, as some call them.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: All are isopods.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Our marine species is the non-local Limnoria tripunctata, better known as a gribble.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, gribbles became the face, if you will, of Seattle seawall damage.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Below is a screenshot from a City of Seattle web page on the waterfront.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Note, no mention of shipworms, but they do appear to have correctly identified gribble damage.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Their holes tend to be smaller and more densely packed together.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Gribbles max out at about a quarter inch.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: My theory as to why the focus is on gribbles is that the word is a whole lot cuter
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: and more fun to say than shipworms or Torito Clams.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Shipworms and Gribbles and Elevated Platforms.
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  SPEAKER_00: Each of these is a ghost of the past,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: a reference to early Seattle and its dependence on rail and sea traffic bringing
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: and taking our goods.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: We now live in a world of trucks and cars and planes and of instant gratification
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: where goods magically appear in stores and directly at our homes.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think that we tend to forget the interconnected world we inhabit,
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: especially in Seattle, where the maritime economy is still important.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot separate the story of those who live on land from the sea around us.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: We are all integrated.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps those gribble and shipworm-infested wood planks along
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: the waterfront will help us remind us of that connection.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Once again,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: this is David B.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Williams,
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: author and voice of The Street Smart Naturalist,
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Explorations of the Urban Kind,
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: a weekly newsletter and podcast focusing on the human
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: and natural world around Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Pacific Northwest.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: By the way,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: just three weeks until the publication of my new book about the Cascade Mountains,
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: In the Range of Fire and Ice.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The book launch is September 3rd.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like more details about my upcoming talks for the book,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: check out my website, geologywriter.com.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget to slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the world around you.