This research paper is available in Word (doc or docx) and Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf). Please click on Word or PDF to read “West Seattle, Elliott Bay’s Alternative Railhead”. PDF format is recommended as the fastest download.

The focus of this paper is the Portland and Puget Sound (P&PS) and the Seattle and Southern (S&S) Railroads and the real estate development venture spawned. Both roads were proposals of the late 1880s and were to run north from Portland, Oregon to a point on the north end of the Duwamish Peninsula known as West Seattle. The point was directly across Elliott Bay from Seattle’s commercial core.

The two roads would have wrapped the Peninsula in a steel rail ribbon taking the Peninsula’s shoreline along Puget Sound, the Duwamish River and Elliott Bay as their own. The P&PS was never completed. S&S construction was never initiated. Both roads were casualties of America’s foremost ‘robber barons’ Jay Gould’s and J.P. Morgan’s peculiar form of cartel capitalism.

No objections were heard to the coming of the Duwamish Peninsula railroads’ ribbon of steel except possibly that of the Puyallup Native American Tribe. Railroads, in the time and dominate culture, meant status, reputation, prestige, economic progress, access to new products, ideas, technology and riches. If not for Gould and Morgan, the question remains what would have come of the Peninsula’s 19^th century steel ribbon encirclement and how would that ribbon have shaped the Peninsula and the greater Seattle landscape? Gould and Morgan, in their role as custodians of private wealth, by happenstance, protected the Peninsula’s greatest natural resource; its shoreline. Will that legacy be renewed and improved upon in the 21^st century? 

This research paper is available in Word (doc or docx) and Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf). Please click on Word or PDF to read “West Seattle, Elliott Bay’s Alternative Railhead”. PDF format is recommended as the fastest download.