In 1911, the city of Seattle hired Virgil G. Bogue, a civil engineer who had built railroads across the Andes and the Cascades, to draw a comprehensive plan for the city's future. What he delivered was the most ambitious municipal plan any West Coast city had ever seen: 273 pages covering arterial highways, a monumental civic center, a park and boulevard system, a complete harbor redevelopment, and a 91-mile rapid transit network of subways, elevated lines, and tunnels.
The plan covered 150 square miles and was designed for a city of one million inhabitants. It was modeled on Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago. It was approved 18-3 by the Municipal Plans Commission. And on March 5, 1912, Seattle voters rejected it roughly two to one.
Every major infrastructure fight Seattle has had since can be traced, in part, to that vote. This is the full story of what was proposed, why it failed, and what it would mean to finish it.
President: Kenneth Mackintosh (Waterfront Owners). Convened June 3, 1910. Met every second Thursday for 15 months.
"The plan is elastic, its adoption does not require any expenditure whatsoever; nor does its adoption exclude changes and improvements not specifically provided for therein. Its adoption means simply, the acceptance of it as a plan of action, a method of procedure."
Central Avenue: A 120-foot-wide north-south spine from Orillia to the Snohomish County line, avoiding all railroad grade crossings.
Diagonal streets cutting through the grid. Magnolia Way connecting Ballard to the waterfront. Every arterial with grades under 3%. "Elastic streets" with grass strips that could be widened as the city grew.
Bogue compared Seattle's needs to London's Royal Commission: "Main avenues, 140 feet wide." The Champs Elysees: 250 feet.
A monumental complex at the city's center of population: city hall, courts, library, and a grand central station, all grouped around a plaza with views to the harbor.
"White marble or granite should be adopted and used throughout." Modeled on Cleveland's $10M civic center and the Court of Honor at the Columbian Exposition.
Architect David J. Myers drew the renderings. The design radiated arterial highways in every direction.
A connected park and boulevard system linking neighborhoods that topography had isolated. Suburban boulevards for the growing northern districts.
Detailed comparisons with every major American city's park acreage. Playgrounds for every neighborhood. Extension of the Olmsted park plan already underway.
The longest section of the plan. Bogue studied Hamburg ($100M spent), Antwerp ($45M), Rotterdam ($31M), Liverpool ($200M), Manchester ($75M canal), and New York's Bush Terminal.
His argument: Natural advantages don't build ports. Deliberate investment does. "Unless a seaport city speedily emphasizes its natural advantages, it will encounter the danger of being outstripped by some less favored rival."
District plans for every mile of waterfront: West Seattle, Harbor Island, Duwamish, Central Waterfront, Smith's Cove, Ballard, Lake Union, and both sides of Lake Washington. Sea walls. Dry docks. Drawbridges. A civic monument on Duwamish Head "to be to Seattle and Puget Sound that which the Statue of Liberty is to New York Harbor."
The most visionary element. A complete rapid transit network for a city of 237,000 people, decades before any American city outside New York had one.
Civic Center Station as the hub. A tunnel under Lake Washington to Yarrow Bay. Interurban through-service from Everett to Tacoma. 20+ named routes with detailed engineering specs.
Bogue understood something that took Seattle another century to learn: the city's "hour-glass shape" meant that residents lived 50% further from downtown than they would in a rectangular city of equal area. From the outskirts in any direction, it was six or seven miles to the business center. The distances demanded rapid transit.
His system radiated from Civic Center Station in every direction: south to Georgetown and Renton, north to Green Lake and Ballard, east through Capitol Hill and across Lake Washington via the Yarrow Bay Tunnel, west to the waterfront and ferries. Interurban trains from Everett and Tacoma would pass through downtown on the same tracks, creating a regional through-service.
The engineering was detailed to the grade percentage. Every route was numbered and described. Stations were located. The subway sections would pass under ridges; the elevated sections would cross valleys. Surface lines in the outer districts would be rebuilt as subway or elevated "in the course of time."
The public wanted planning. They just didn't understand this specific plan well enough to vote for it.
"Work performed haphazard and piecemeal, or which does not follow an approved general plan, will cost more, produce less and be less creditable."
"London today is struggling to rid herself of wasteful confusion and evil congestion at a tremendous cost, a price which measures the surprising indifference and short-sightedness of her earlier citizens, when, after the ravages of the great fire of 1666, they turned deaf ears to the emphatic and earnest suggestions of Sir Christopher Wren."
The Burnham Civic exists because the gap Virgil Bogue identified in 1911 has never been filled. Seattle still does not have a master plan. It has zoning codes, comprehensive plans updated by consultants, and capital improvement budgets. None of these are plans. A plan says: here is what the city should look like in fifty years, and here is the sequence of decisions that gets us there.
The 47 Shifts operational order addresses the unsheltered crisis with the same systematic approach Bogue brought to transit and sewers. The Parcel Map identifies every major property owner in downtown Seattle. The Lake City Corridor shows what coordinated mixed-use planning looks like when someone actually does the work.
Bogue was right about the harbor. He was right about the transit. He was right about the civic center. He was right about the boulevards. He was right that "the plan is elastic" and that "its adoption does not require any expenditure whatsoever." He was right that doing nothing costs more than doing something.
He was wrong about one thing: he assumed the plan would sell itself. It didn't. Chicago proved that plans need salesmen. Walter Moody gave 2,000 speeches. Wacker's Manual went to every eighth grader. Seattle had no equivalent. The plan died because nobody taught the public what it meant.
TBC is the campaign the Bogue Plan never had.
The full 273-page Plan of Seattle is in the public domain, digitized from the University of Michigan's copy by Google and hosted by the Internet Archive.
Read It on Archive.org