Visitors and even longtime residents in Seattle’s Belltown and Denny Triangle neighborhoods are often surprised to learn about a major hill that existed in the area over one hundred years ago, a hill that was completely razed in one of the most ambitious (and some say foolhardy) public works projects in city history. What is left of Denny Hill is now mostly at the bottom of Elliott Bay, the homes that existed on top of it long gone. Seattle’s goal of creating more developable land by regrading the hill ultimately came to be, but it took decades for the area to be fully built-out after the massive undertaking was completed in 1911.
In this video from the Seattle Municipal Archives, created in the 1980s by the Seattle Engineering Department (which became SDOT), narrator Ward Collier walks through what it took to make the regrade happen and touches on some of …