duwamish – Cat's Paw Images

South Orchard Street

If South Park were the deep African wilderness, then South Orchard Street would be its heart of darkness.

We reach this unlikely intersection by following 2nd Ave until its bitter end at the Duwamish shoreline. Nearby, the highway 509 that brought us here traverses what was once a wetland. Acres of pavement and fill proudly announce the reclamation, utilization and civilization of land from wilderness.

We fly on asphalt friction until gravel grinds and rainwater splashes. Unpaved roads and pothole swarms are no obstacle to our momentum. Containers smile and point the way. Abandoned cars gesture caution to temper our exuberance.

South Orchard Street begins here and ends a few hundred feet down the road. No more is needed.

The heart of darkness is a vacant lot across from a blackberry thicket. Behind the thicket, a riparian inlet where salmon spawned before the world began.

The vacant lot is river mud softened by rain and scored with large-tread tire tracks. A barrel pyramid looms in the distance. Cement blocks imply potential architecture as yet unborn. This place is not yet what it will become.

The rusted container signals its mysterious command to trespassers. The abandoned lunar probe sits forever awaiting rescue. The earth wonders why nothing will grow.

Beside the alien container ten thousand cannons lie silent, a machine gun nest of retired metal. These are the pipes that carried the flow, the links that connected the graph, the launch tubes that fired the torpedoes that won the forgotten war. Here retired they must rust.

The barrel pyramid is formidable archeology, more colorful than Cheops and more useful than Chichen Itza. But its moment too has come and gone.

This is the eastern side of the Industrial Container Services site, where the firm’s most battle-scarred and least attractive barrels are stacked. Veterans of toxic waste spills meet containers used at nuclear accidents. They are stained beyond repair, rusted beyond hope. And yet still beautiful.

An engine’s roar returns our attention to South Orchard Street. A pickup truck laden with debris appears, and pauses at the sight of us. In this no-man’s land, no mission could possibly be legal.

A nervous energy fills every opening. Snipers take aim. The innocent hide behind containers. Hammers cock behind trembling fingers. The pickup truck advances, its cargo carefully balanced by slender ropes. The air is dense, unbreathable. A decision is being made.

Then the truck turns around and departs. Mission not accomplished. Perhaps a more legitimate destination awaits, or another moment when the tourists have gone.

The snipers relax. Lungs refill. Oxygen tastes strangely sweet. But South Orchard Street remains. Beside the river, debris was dumped yesterday and debris will be dumped tomorrow.

No place becomes worthless on its own. No place becomes worthless overnight. Perhaps no place is ever worthless at all, except to the unworthy. But day after day, year after year, neglect accumulates into scar tissue upon the landscape. The unwanted becomes unwelcoming.

And eventually, it is no longer the debris that does not belong; it is us.

The complete Flickr set.

Seattle Gear Works, emergency exit

Some days the soul requests not botanical gardens but industrial grit. Not perfection but broken things.

On those days, a drive down the Duwamish into South Park brings satisfaction like no other local road trip.

Our route extends along barely paved roads. We splash through puddles that are small lakes. We dodge potholes deep enough to drown a cyclist. We drive by mountains of barrels, piles of crates, and idle machinery left to rust by the side of the road. We breathe in the chaos of an unregulated economy.

The Duwamish waterfront is a land of enterprise. It has the vibrancy of a third world city. It is the American dream waking up on a Superfund site and stretching its legs.

And while bolts and gaskets may be a nice change from cultivating the land, the broken pallets whisper that sacrifice isn’t always sufficient for success.

Across the street, another brotherly endeavor is doing quite a bit better.

In the black and white South Park landscape, even a spot of color and taste catches the eye. In the back alleys of S Portland St, we turned away from Cain and were surprised by something beautiful.

The emergency back door with the fantastic landscaping belongs to Seattle Gear Works. A family-owned gear manufacturing and repair company, the Gear Works was founded in 1946 by Ingwald Ramberg. It is currently owned and managed by his two sons Roland and Sterling.

What began as a small garage business has grown into an international enterprise with over $20M in annual revenue and over a hundred employees. Gear Works gears are used in virtually every kind of industrial endeavor on the planet, from wind energy to military machinery. The South Park location facing us is actually one of the largest gear manufacturing facilities in the country.

Seattle Gear works, we salute your attention to detail and your taste in landscaping. We’d love to see the inside of your plant.

The complete Flickr set.

Terminal 115 Viewpoint, revisited

Consider the balance between the already seen and the unforeseen.

A place, once visited and photographed, is committed to memory; saved on disk; gently processed for public consumption; and ultimately presented to the internet for the entire planet to view, discuss, perhaps reference. It is caught in amber, stale data already seen and now forever misleading.

Naturally, reality moves on while the virtual stands still. Electrons move fast, but atoms faster still. As the ancients might have said, things change.

Consider Terminal 115 viewpoint, already seen. Its gritty post-war beauty came not from the stagnant river or the military overpass, but from the old fisherman’s shack with its sunken barrels and boarded windows. A surprise, a touch of the handmade in a manufactured world. Unforeseen.

Eight months later, the shack is gone. Taken by the river, or a victim of the messy, unpredictable real world? Perhaps both.

So a second visit converts a place that was, in a way, special into yet another rock pile next to the Duwamish.

To be sure, the 1st Ave S bridge still has its East Berlin chic. It’s mostly the sniper towers.

There are still random things lying on the banks of the Duwamish, particularly at low tide. The river is a liquid steampunk landfill, and you never know what it’ll decide to wash up. This time it was somebody’s metal pipe.

On closer inspection, more things had changed. As it turns out, the previous occupants of 100 SW Peninsula Pl weren’t a marine diving company, as the previous note might have suggested. Instead, behind the fence was an eponymous outfit called Commercial Fence. They demonstrated their business acumen through an inordinate fondness for razor wire.

According to a sign onsite, Commercial Fence has now moved to greener pastures on W Marginal Way S. The vacant lot has presumably been purchased by the Port of Seattle. The Port of Seattle, of course, remains its usual charming self.

Not only that, their first act upon taking over the property was to take down the fisherman’s shack. No doubt the space will be used for something eminently practical.

Alas. Perhaps better to remember the already seen and avoid the location forever more, unless the unforeseen invalidate the memory.

Fisherman’s shack, you’ll be remembered. That is, if we can get ourselves disentangled from the razor wire.

The complete Flickr set.

Jack Perry Memorial Shoreline

As night falls you find yourself somewhere along Alaskan Way, near the hulking ghost of the viaduct, writhing along an endless coil of street-level train lines.

A sign calls out to you and you head west through a landscape of parking lots, chain link fences, and buildings designed for bureaucracy. The road ends at a small rocky patch of waterfront at the mouth of the Duwamish East Waterway. It’s the Port of Seattle’s gift to you, a nicely wrapped box of required public shoreline access.

In front of you is Terminal 18, the largest container processing facility this side of Los Angeles. The sprawling scale of the operation evades comprehension.

The terminal glows under a canopy of incandescent light. The sky resonates with infrared, but you only see pitch black. The crane stoops like a giant to gather containers. The work of a thousand men, performed in a fraction of a second. What is human here? What is machine?

In the distance you see a homeless man shuffle through bushes. You hear voices mutter on the wind. You consider the risk and realize it belongs to another world. What is human?

You hear the water splash against rotting piers, as the terminal dulls the air with bass and snare drum repartee. Containers rise, swing, and fall, transferring endlessly from ships to shore, shore to ships. The source code of the global economy, actions repeated as instructions, caught in the infinite loop of commerce. Empty or full, copied and pasted, repeat business. German ships with Chinese goods unloading on American shores.

You are in someone’s favorite park, a small viewpoint born of unspeakable tragedy and the fortuitous availability of a hundred-and-twenty feet of unpaved shoreline. You are paying tribute to the life of Jack Perry, beloved son and father, someone just like you, someone not even the internet could identify.

The viewpoint is something small, less than promised, an inadequate tribute to a better man. It is also a window into something far greater than photography, than any still image. It is a honeypot for eyes that cannot close. It is an industrial elephant and your camera is blind.

This cannot last, you think. As the night deepens you will eventually tear yourself away and sleep, while the terminal remains standing. It will hum and snarl through the days and nights, a colossal perpetual motion machine bent on forever, until someone finds a way to disconnect it, or until the Earth itself breaks under its feet.

The complete Flickr set.

Terminal 115 Viewpoint

Just north of the barrel pyramids, nestled between W Marginal Way S and the Duwamish, lies a park owned by the Port of Seattle.

You reach it by finding an address on the Port of Seattle’s website, scouring the area for something non-existent, pausing to curse, then using aerial photography to determine the actual location.

For a moment, you wish you hadn’t found it.

The viewpoint is located next to a facility whose owners are clearly not fond of visitors. Depending on which part of the internet you believe, this is either part of the Terminal 115 complex or it belongs to an angry group of divers for hire.

Either way, you wisely decide to stay on the legal side of the fence.

Electric lines cross the Duwamish in front of you, taking advantage of what is effectively the most narrow point in the river at this stage in its controlled meandering.

This is also where the First Avenue South Bridge crosses the river. Yet another drawbridge in a city of drawbridges, this one was built in the mid-1950s and has undergone several moments of reconstruction. At one point in time, it had the honor of having the highest accident rate in the state.

So this is Terminal 115 Viewpoint. Unfortunately, you can’t really see much of Terminal 115, so you can’t reflect on the ways in which the cargo cult has gained acolytes in this day and age. There’s a river and a bridge. The river is here because we couldn’t really move it, and the bridge is here because we needed a workaround for the river.

So you walk down the Duwamish shoreline next to the barbed wire and look out across the river. Sunshine makes the day beautiful, and the toxic water is almost inviting. The bridge architecture is not unlike that of prison guard towers you’ve seen in movies, and the aesthetic is gritty and industrial. If Seattle were Berlin, this would have to be part of its Wall.

It’s not a place that invites you in. Instead, it begrudgingly admits its status as a viewpoint, unhappily tolerating your presence while wondering why you’re here. This park is under martial law.

The park’s mood changes from hostility to sadness when you see the derelict shack by the river.

The weathered boards and sunken floats conjure up images of your grandfather’s Seattle. A time when men were men, fish didn’t glow in the dark, and nobody needed a “toxic shellfish” sign in Vietnamese to know when them thar mussels weren’t in their prime.

The mind’s eye imagines trees growing by the banks of a river, shadowing an old man living in a fishing hut. The mind’s eye sees salmon navigating unconstrained waters to die in their very own spawning grounds, a cycle of continuous change kept in motion by everlasting stasis. The minds eye see the cycle broken by a tribe with a different plan in mind, powered by the stored energy of millions of solar cycles.

The mind’s eye also sees a more prosaic reality: a storage shed poorly built allowed to weather the rains and fall into ruin at its own pace, protected by wire from trespassers and adorned by every season’s supply of fresh invasive weeds.

Terminal 115 Viewpoint offers little else to the mere human.

A dusty shoreline littered with plastic garbage. A bench where the lost, incautious or homeless might rest. The fulfillment of a rash promise made by industry – to provide the unwashed masses with token ways to dodge the container ships and reach the river’s edge. A group of sad-looking trees.

And in the distance, the ghost of the Duwamish.

The complete Flickr set.

South Park Bridge

South Park is a small neighborhood in West Seattle, nestled between West Marginal Way and the Duwamish River. It’s a relatively poor neighborhood with depressed property values and an unhealthy proximity to Seattle’s heavy industry. South Park’s soil is laden with heavy metals, and nobody knows exactly what’s in the Duwamish.

South Park used to have a bridge.

The South Park bridge connected the neighborhood to Georgetown and the rest of civilization. It was built in 1931 by a tribe of Seattle engineers unable to envision a bridge that didn’t in some way involve bascules. “How else would a ship get past a bridge? Ships can’t climb over bridges!” they reasoned.

Regardless, one must concede that the drawbridge style did give the bridge a certain aesthetic appeal.

A nearby marina adds to the attractiveness of the area.

Possibly the lowest budget marina in a city that appears to have thousands, the South Park Marina’s most interesting feature is that it’s located downriver from a superfund site (or, as the marina’s describes it, the “fresh, calm waters of the Duwamish River”).

The marina is also across the river from Boeing’s infamous Plant 2, concretely building 2-41 . The source of many of the more toxic elements currently found in the Duwamish, engineers at Plant 2 manufactured airplane parts using heavy metals, cyanide, mineral acids and bases, petroleum products, PCBs, and chlorinate solvents.

All in a day’s work.

Plant 2 was built in 1935, and was key to the US war effort during World War II. At its peak, Plant 2 produced 16 B-17 bombers a day, and an astonishing total of 6,981 were created during the war. Plant 2 also produced B-52s and 737 passenger jets.

During the war, Plant 2 was camouflaged to look like a suburban neighborhood. Netting, fake houses and fake trees were used to cover the factory installations, aiming to make it harder for hypothetical Japanese air raids to hit such a juicy target.

Plant 2 is currently scheduled for demolition.

Returning to the bridge, and fast-forwarding to 2001… Already in a state of disrepair, the South Park bridge’s shaky timbers were rattled by the Nisqually Earthquake. A year later, it was rated at 6 out of 100 on the infamous Federal Highway Administration scale – the bane of many a crumbling piece of infrastructure nationwide.

According to King County, the bridge’s foundations were heavily cracked as they settled into the liquifiable soil underneath. And like a Seattle rock band, the “substandard concrete in the piers was undergoing a self-destructive process that could not be reversed or repaired.”

The South Park Bridge was closed in the interest of public safety on June 30, 2010. The neighborhood threw a large farewell party, and lovingly graffitied its bascule leaves.

The bridge’s leaves were removed in August and September of 2010, leaving a melancholy sight and a neighborhood completely cut off from its urban artery.

In late 2010, after several dramatic failures to raise funds, various King County fund-raising endeavors and a drama-infused federal TIGER grant succeeded in reaching the $100 million mark required for reconstruction. A new South Park bridge will be built, with its reopening date scheduled for 2013.

We’ll be there.

The complete Flickr set.

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