There is one more topic of intensified local interest that I will
briefly notice. I am now and always have been opposed, not to Railroad
Avenue, which extends along the water-front of the city, but to the
network of tracks permitted and authorized to be placed thereon. At the
foot of Columbia Street, crossing Railroad Avenue to the west line
thereof, you cross nine railroad tracks, or eighteen lines of slightly
elevated railroad iron. Such are the existing and authorized conditions.
I have always been opposed to those conditions; first, because they are
unusual, unnecessary and dangerous; unusual, because no city can be
named permitting such a nuisance; unnecessary, because one track, or, to
be liberal, two tracks, with spurs to the warehouses on the west and the
wholesale or commission houses on the east, where the conditions permit
it, would be ample, under the control of an intelligent company or
management, for all the purposes of trade and commerce; dangerous, as
experience has shown: the killed and injured on this interlocked system,
intensified by supervening and dense fogs, speak only by groans and
death-knells. I have opposed this network of tracks because instead of
being an aid to travel and commerce, it is an actual obstruction of
them. The idea of doing the commercial business of a million people, or
one-half a million, with the accompanying passenger traffic, across nine
railroad tracks, carries with it a strong implication of the absurd. In
actual operation this implication becomes an irritating reality. The
City Council has recognized the fact and prohibited the closing by any
railroad company of the mouth of any street for over five minutes; but
this is only a partial aleviation, and not the removal of the
obstruction or danger. Railroad No. 1 closes it for four-and-a-half
minutes; Railroad No. 2 closes it for four-and-a-half minutes; No. 3,
for the same length of time. The closing is really continuous. Thus
legally you can stand in the street, endure the slush and rain for at
least twelve minutes to study the beauties of nature and of an
enveloping fog, and enjoy the beneficence of the clouds in dropping
their garnered fatness down.
The irritation arising from these causes will intensify with the
increase of population and the swelling of the volume of coastwise and
ocean commerce. Let the population of West Seattle reach twenty thousand
or more; let "the mosquito fleet" be doubled and ocean and coastwise
steamers be multiplied, with the consequent enormous, increase of the
volume of business--and the demand for the modification, or entire
abolition, of this irritating nuisance will become imperative. Some of
the railroads have wisely noted the indications of the coming storm and
have tunnelled under the city, deeming it cheaper to pay interest on
permanent tunnel investments, than to pay damages for slaughter and
injury on the avenue. Railroad Avenue is now used, to a great extent, as
a train make-up yard, as a switching-ground and as a depot for loaded
and empty cars. This will be continued with a constantly increasing
exasperation, until the City is compelled to re-purchase at an enormous
expense, that which was granted as a free gift.