Category: Olympia history (Page 1 of 11)

A few weeks back I wrote about a version of Olympia and Thurston County that kept its streetcars, tied them into regional rail, and grew up into something closer to a Pacific Northwest urbanist’s dream. Fun as a distraction, that essay gave me a chance to chase some historical what-ifs toward the best possible outcome.

This one runs the tape the other way. What if development here had gone worse instead of better? What if the highway planners of the 1950s had gotten the route they actually wanted, straight through the heart of Olympia, instead of the one they eventually settled for through Tumwater?

Short answer, it would’ve been bad on its own. 

The longer answer, and the real point of this essay, is that a downtown freeway wouldn’t have stayed bad in just one place. Within a decade or two it would’ve run out of room, and the region would’ve ended up building a second, larger highway south of town to relieve it. Olympia would’ve gotten hit twice: once downtown, and once across what’s now protected rural land between the airport and Nisqually.

What Tumwater actually lost, and why it matters here

Local memory likes to say Interstate 5 killed downtown Tumwater. It’s a clean  story, and it’s mostly wrong. Tumwater’s old river-based downtown had been dying for decades before anyone even drew up an interstate. The shift started in the early 1900s as railroad routes changed, and the real blow came in 1938, when the new Capitol Way bypassed the historic downtown completely. By the time I-5 construction started in the 1950s, Tumwater’s businesses had already moved toward Trosper Road. The city council signed off on running the freeway through the old downtown canyon partly because there wasn’t much of a downtown left to save.

That doesn’t mean the highway’s arrival was gentle, though. The route needed a 200-foot-wide path cut straight through Tumwater’s historic heart, and people were furious at first. The city council came around once the engineering made sense. In exchange for going along with it, Tumwater got some real concessions: a sewer line tied into Olympia’s system, an upgraded water system near the freeway, and a new Custer Way Bridge to replace the dangerously narrow 1915 Boston Street Bridge. By the time the route opened in 1958, the Trosper Road interchange had taken over as the city’s commercial center for good, and about a hundred buildings had been torn down or moved to clear the way.

There’s an irony underneath all this. Tumwater had already given up something once before, for pretty similar reasons. Back in 1915, the state wanted to dam the Deschutes Estuary to create what became Capitol Lake. Tumwater fought the idea for decades. Leopold Schmidt’s Olympia Brewing Company depended on the estuary’s connection to the Puget Sound to barge goods down to Olympia’s deepwater port, and a freshwater dam threatened both that route and their water rights. The Olympia Power and Light Company also feared the lake would damage their operations. The opposition finally broke at a 1941 town meeting, by which point Tumwater’s commercial center had already started drifting away from the river anyway. The lake was finished in 1951. Seven years later, the same city gave up its downtown to the freeway too, for pretty much the same reason. The thing being protected had already stopped being worth protecting.

None of this had to fall on Tumwater at all. For a while, the actual plan was to run the freeway straight through Olympia instead.

After World War II, Highway 99 funneled all through-traffic straight into the Olympia-Tumwater city centers, and the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Capitol Way became a real bottleneck, with through-traffic and local drivers fighting over the same narrow streets. A 1948 traffic survey started the planning for a limited-access route, called at different points the “Olympia Freeway” or the “Olympia Bypass.” The early designs were ambitious in the worst way.

Around the same time, that same pressure to move traffic through downtown showed up in a real political push to convert Olympia’s downtown streets to one-way. It was a kind of duct-tape-and-bailing-wire freeway, improvised out of streets that were already there.

The proposed route would have run through, or along, the Percival Creek Canyon near where the auto mall sits today, past the area that’s now Marathon Park, and from there crossed Capitol Lake through an underground tunnel or viaduct, coming up at the intersection of Adams Street and Tenth Avenue, right in the city core.

As if a tunnel wasn’t bad enough, engineers also proposed an elevated highway above Seventh Street as a cheaper alternative. It would’ve been a real-life Robert Moses nightmare, splitting downtown Olympia in two. And this wasn’t just idle talk. In the early 1950s, the City of Olympia and the state Department of Highways actually signed an agreement to move forward with the downtown route.

It fell apart in 1954. Not because anyone changed their mind about what it would do to the city, but because a Department of Highways review found it too expensive. Tunneling under a lake, or building an elevated structure through dense downtown blocks, cost more than the state wanted to spend. So engineers shifted to the Tumwater Canyon route instead: solid bedrock, cheaper to grade, and already half-emptied of the businesses that would’ve fought it.

And it’s worth remembering the downtown route wasn’t just a few blocks downtown. Getting from Percival Canyon to the Capitol Campus by tunnel or elevated causeway would’ve meant cutting across a good chunk of what’s now southwest Olympia. The impact on the east side of that route would’ve been just as serious, not some afterthought tacked onto the downtown disruption.

Why that wouldn’t have been the end of it

Here’s the part that makes this counterfactual worse than it looks at first. Say the 1954 cost review had gone the other way, and Olympia got its tunnel or its elevated highway through downtown. What if there was a governor who really liked the idea of a downtown interchange and pushed for it? What if the federal government stepped in to cover extra costs? 

That alone would’ve gutted the city core about as badly as the real freeway gutted Tumwater’s canyon. But here’s the thing: a freeway squeezed onto an isthmus between a lake and a bay only has so much room to grow. Once traffic outgrew it, and it would have, there’d be nowhere left to add lanes.

So the same pressure that built the original bottleneck at Fourth and Capitol would’ve built up again, on a larger scale, probably within a generation. And the fix wouldn’t have been to widen the downtown route. It would’ve meant building an actual interstate-grade bypass south of the city, cutting between Olympia Airport and Nisqually to route traffic around the bottleneck entirely. Olympia would’ve ended up with the worst of both options: a freeway carved through downtown that still couldn’t handle the load, and a second, bigger highway carved through the rural south county to make up the difference.

That second highway is the part worth sitting with. Right now, the land between the airport and Nisqually stays mostly rural, and that’s partly thanks to the Growth Management Act’s boundaries. When an interstate bypasses a rural area, it often ends up protecting it. No exit ramp means no incentive for strip malls and drive-thrus, so farmsteads tend to stay whole instead of getting sliced up by rights-of-way. Towns near the freeway often trade their identity for convenience. Places the freeway skipped tend to keep something real, even if it looks like neglect from the road.

In this counterfactual, south Thurston County doesn’t get that protection. It becomes the freeway. The corridor between the airport and Nisqually, still pretty rural today, would’ve turned into the kind of stretch you see near any highway exit: gas stations, chain restaurants, parking lots. The thing that currently protects that land, sitting outside the highway grid, would never have had the chance to exist.

Chase this far enough and the whole regional map starts to shift. In our actual history, Lacey grew up because it was rejecting Olympia’s effort to annex eastwards, and the suburbs spread out along Pacific Avenue and Martin Way instead. Take that away, and the suburban growth pattern here would’ve followed the new southern route instead. Tumwater, already centered on its Trosper Road interchange, would’ve kept stretching east until it ran into Tanglewilde from the south, soaking up the space that Lacey actually grew to fill. Something like the South Sound Shopping Center would probably still exist, just not where it is now. It would sit at a Rich Road or Rainier Road interchange on the new southern interstate instead, anchoring the kind of sprawl that, in real life, never had a highway to grow around.

The lucky accident

None of this was planned as a mercy. The 1954 decision to abandon the downtown route was a budget call, made by engineers weighing tunnel costs against bedrock costs. Highway budget writers don’t think about the impact on the community, no one in the room was thinking about what it would spare. But that’s what it did. Tumwater absorbed one real wound: its historic canyon, cut open for a freeway, after it had already gave up on a similar fight once before over Capitol Lake. Downtown Olympia and rural south Thurston County absorbed nothing. The cheaper option just happened to also be the option that kept the damage contained to one place instead of two.

It’s a strange thing to be grateful for a highway department’s spreadsheet. But measured against the alternative, that’s roughly what happened.

There’s a version of Olympia where you step off the commuter train at 7th Avenue and walk up into daylight at what was an old Greyhound station. You’re already downtown. You wait four minutes for a streetcar, and then 20 minutes later, you’re home. That city was closer to real than you’d think. What killed it wasn’t destiny. It was a series of small, ordinary choices that added up. These are the same choices that killed streetcars and rail mass transit in a lot of places, but we can pull at the threads here and think about what might have been.

The First Hinge: Who Owns the Wire

By the 1920s, the Stevens family had built Olympia’s streetcar system. When they sold their stake to what would eventually become Puget Sound Energy, they handed the city’s transit future to a company that had no real reason to care about it.

A utility company runs streetcars as a side hustle of selling electricity, treating ridership as an afterthought, and when the automobile started pulling riders away in the early 1930s, non-local owners had no particular reason to fight. In September 1933, the company ended the system, and local government stepped in with a motor bus network. The tracks were pulled up or paved over.

Now imagine the Stevens family sells instead to the City of Olympia, or to a proto-PUD, more than a decade before the Thurston PUD was actually formed. A city-owned system doesn’t need to sell electricity. It needs to move people. When ridership falls, it looks to updgrade the noisy, slow and bumpy cars with something new.

With a few more years to hold on, the solution in our real history was the PCC car, introduced in 1936. A consortium of transit operators, facing the same threat from the automobile, had commissioned the most advanced streetcar yet built: rubber-cushioned wheels, streamlined body, a cellular construction that made the ride smoother than anything that had run on rails before. Cities that were still operating when the PCC arrived had a genuine fighting chance. In this version of Olympia, the city’s system is still running and it gets PCC cars.

Building Out: The 1930s Through the 1950s

The original Olympia streetcar network was T-shaped, running east to Central Street and west to Rogers. In the years after the system upgrades to PCC cars, the city keeps building it out.

Puget Street gets a spur north to San Francisco Street in 1939, a short southwest line runs down Decatur to 9th Avenue. Eastside Street also gets a spur, and Division is now the terminus of a westside extension.

This stable era, the 1940s and 1960s, is when the system becomes something people actually count on. But it also ends as the PCC cars age and car-driven growth starts pushing the edges of Olympia. Interstate 5 does come through, but we need something else to save our rail network.

The Second Hinge: Forward Thrust

In the 1960s, Seattle-area voters were asked to approve Forward Thrust, a package of transit bonds that would have funded a regional rail system running on its own dedicated tracks, built with federal matching funds covering roughly 75 cents of every dollar. In real history, voters said no. The money went to Atlanta, which built MARTA. The Pacific Northwest spent the next several decades building highways instead.

In this history, Forward Thrust passes, and the effects pile up.

A regional rail authority forms decades earlier than Sound Transit did in reality, pulling in federal funds at a scale that was simply gone by the time the real Sound Transit came along.

And Boeing-Vertol, which in real history made a troubled attempt at light rail vehicles for Boston and San Francisco, struggling with chronic problems that plagued the cars for years, now has a well-funded local partner involved from the start. The collaboration produces something that works: a vehicle with smooth propulsion, a lightweight aluminum alloy frame, and a modular design that’s actually easy to maintain. The “Seattle-Spec” LRV succeeds in the field tests by early adopters in Olympia and Seattle. By the mid-1970s, transit authorities in Boston, San Francisco, and eventually London and Melbourne are buying American, and the Pacific Northwest has become an unexpected exporter of rail technology.

For Olympia, the immediate consequence is more modest: the city now has access to modern vehicles and a regional system extending south.

The Great Expansion: 1960s Through the 1980s

The 1960s and 1970s are when the system finally grows to match where the city has spread, the eastside line pushing out past Boulevard Road to St. Martin’s University, a new line dropping south down Capitol Way into Tumwater, and two loops filling in what the old spurs couldn’t reach: one connecting Boulevard Road with North Street on the outer eastside, another using 22nd Avenue on the interior southeast side. The Division Street line reaches Evergreen State College. South Puget Sound Community College gets connected via the old Black Lake Road grade.

The most consequential development isn’t a new route, though. It’s political. Lacey, which in real history incorporated as its own city in 1966, instead holds an election to re-annex into Olympia. The streetcar is the promise, and service to Lacey is the condition. Lacey becomes a neighborhood rather than a separate city, and because it never fully separates, it never builds up the political pressure for the kind of sprawl that real-history Lacey ended up with. Growth does occur east of Carpenter Road, clustering around Tanglewilde and Thompson Place, but it stays modest

The 1990s Regional Connection

Just as the regional rail system reaches Fort Lewis, extending south from the original Forward Thrust network through Tacoma and Lakewood, Burlington Northern announces plans to abandon the Fones Road line, nine miles of track cutting through what is now Lacey. In real history, that corridor becomes the Woodland Trail. Here, Thurston County holds a public vote to join the regional transit system and grabs the corridor for rail before it’s gone.

The new commuter line is built similar to regional rail around Chicago or Philadelphia. The new expansion connects to the regional system at Dupont and runs into downtown Olympia, with a station in Lacey placed at roughly where Depot Park sits today. The St. Martin’s streetcar line is extended south to meet the regional line. Downtown, the old 7th Avenue subway tunnel gets converted into an underground station, and you rise from it into daylight at the old Greyhound terminal.

The City

The story is about choices: the Stevens family selling to a utility, Seattle voters rejecting Forward Thrust, Burlington Northern abandoning the line, each one narrowing what the next choice could be.

The Olympia in this history isn’t utopian. I-5 still runs where it runs. Where the streetcar system meets the freeway, expensive bridging projects span the road. The car is still present. But the city has a different shape, denser along the lines, more walkable around the stations, more continuous across what in real history became the Olympia-Lacey seam. You can get from Evergreen to downtown without a car. You can get from downtown to Tacoma without one either.

That city was close. History hinges on small choices that expand with time. That’s what makes it worth imagining, not to mourn a future that didn’t happen, but to understand exactly what was given up, and when, and why.

Somewhere in Thurston County right now, someone’s staring at their Puget Sound Energy bill and doing the math. It’s not adding up. In January 2026, PSE raised residential electric rates somewhere between 9.3 and 13.1 percent, depending on how much power you use. For most households that’s more than eleven extra dollars a month. Not the end of the world on its own, but it’s been going up like this since 2012, and that adds up. Vonny Turner put it plainly on Nextdoor: his bill was running close to $600 a month, and he wanted to know if anyone else was thinking what he was thinking. Richard Ney was. So was Jeff Devlin, a mortgage guy who founded the Best of Olympia Facebook page. He’s not exactly a radical. Nextdoor isn’t exactly a hotbed of anti-corporate politics. On most days, the platform’s better known for people calling the cops on our houseless neighbors. But Devlin and his fellow posters have become the unlikely center of a real conversation about whether Thurston County should finally, after nearly a hundred years of trying, take its electricity away from a private company and give it to a public utility.

The conversation feels urgent and new. It isn’t. This is one of the longest-running political fights in Thurston County’s history, a conflict that’s outlasted its participants and its platforms, moving from union halls to legislative hearings to Facebook without changing its basic shape. Private utilities don’t give up territory. They create doubt, back the right candidates, outspend the opposition, and wait. It’s worked for nearly a hundred years.

The legal foundation for public power in Washington goes back to 1930, when voters passed an Initiative that let communities form nonprofit, locally governed Public Utility Districts. It was a Depression-era idea, and it made sense at the time. Private utilities were squeezing people, and the idea that electricity, like roads and schools, should be owned by the public had real political momentum. Thurston County voted to establish PUD No. 1 in 1938. But the vote created a legal entity with nothing behind it. No wires. No substations. No staff. The PUD existed on paper while Puget Sound Power and Light, the company that would eventually become PSE, kept running the actual electricity.

In the early 1950s, Thurston PUD joined a coalition of six districts and tried to buy Puget Power outright. It was a bold move. Puget’s board actually agreed to the sale in October 1952, then reversed course in 1953 after public power advocates blocked a separate merger deal and spooked the company’s leadership. The whole thing fell apart. With no path to electricity, the PUD changed course. In the late 1950s it acquired the Tanglewilde water system near what is now Lacey and quietly became a water utility instead. The argument against letting the PUD handle electricity had always been that a bigger, established provider was simply better suited for the job. It’s a convenient argument if you’re already the established provider, and it would keep getting used for the next seventy years.

By 1960, a new set of PUD commissioners was ready to fight again. They moved toward legally condemning Puget Power’s properties, which would’ve forced a sale. Puget Power did what it knew how to do: it backed a candidate. Vic Francis won a commission seat, joining pro-public-power commissioners Harvey Thompson and John McGuire. Then McGuire died in the spring of 1961 and everything stalled. The commission deadlocked one to one. At the same time, the legislature got into a four-day brawl over HB-197, the “right-to-vote” bill, which would’ve required a public referendum before any utility property could be condemned. It was a procedural wall designed to make condemnation nearly impossible. Francis resigned in early 1962. The special election that followed was won with money. The pro-private-power candidates were better funded, ran on a “no acquisition without a public vote” platform, and won. That was effectively it for the next fifty years.

The new commissioners, having won, tried to unload what was left. They proposed selling the Tanglewilde water system to the City of Olympia and sent out an informal ballot. Only 147 came back. The slim majority who responded said yes to the sale. Harvey Thompson, the only old-guard commissioner still on the board, wasn’t buying it. He argued that 50 percent participation wasn’t a mandate for anything. The sale stalled, the whole thing dragged into September 1962, and ultimately nothing happened. The PUD kept the water system. The institution survived almost by default.

That near-miss opens up an interesting question. If Olympia had taken over the water utility serving those eastern suburbs before Lacey existed as its own city, before it had incorporated and built its own political identity, would Lacey have ever become Lacey?

Instead, the PUD grew. With its electrical ambitions gone, it turned all its attention to water and got very good at it. As of 2026, it’s operating 272 separate water systems serving roughly 10,416 connections across five or six counties, with systems in Pierce, Lewis, King, and Grays Harbor in addition to Thurston. It’s not really one utility so much as a patchwork. At one end you’ve got Tanglewilde-Thompson Place in Lacey, the original acquisition, now serving close to 2,000 residential and commercial units. At the other end you’ve got Group B systems, three to fourteen connections, tucked into cul-de-sacs, often the last remnant of some old private well arrangement that the PUD took on because no one else would.

There’s something almost poignant about it. The PUD was built to democratize electricity and ended up as a decentralized custodian of other people’s water, managing hundreds of small, scattered systems that bigger utilities never wanted. It’s genuinely good at this. But when people now point at the Thurston PUD and say that’s the organization that should take over our electricity, they’re pointing at an institution whose entire working knowledge is wells and pipes. Not wires.

In January 2012, I stopped thinking about public power as an abstract policy question and started thinking about it as something that had actually happened to me. A historic snowstorm hit the Pacific Northwest and knocked the power out. We had young kids at home, including an infant. The first couple of days we told ourselves it would come back soon. It didn’t. When it became clear the outage was going to last days and not hours, we packed up the kids and drove south to Oregon to find a warm room with family. The thing I remember most is a gas station in Lewis County, the first one we found that was still running. The noise. The lines. People’s faces. Everyone trying to get gas so they could get out. That’s my reference point when I try to picture what a Cascadia earthquake might actually feel like to live through.

I didn’t fully understand at the time why the outage had been so bad and so slow to fix. The answer is structural. Private utilities like PSE are accountable to shareholders first. Overhead transmission lines are cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain than buried lines, and that cost advantage is real until a major storm hits and takes down the whole region at once. When that happens, you find out there’s no full-time repair crew standing by, because keeping a full-time crew on standby costs money that cuts into margins. So you bring in contract crews, and so does every other utility in the region dealing with the same storm, and it takes time. Public utilities work differently. They put any surplus back into the grid and they answer to elected commissioners who live in the service area and hear about it directly when the power goes out. In the counties served by public utilities during the January 2012 storm, 95 percent of customers had their power back within 24 hours.

That number became an argument, if not the central argument for the public power campaign that launched in the fall of 2011 and hit the ground a few months after the snow storm. The storm had given advocates something specific and local to point to: we sat in the dark for days and our neighbors didn’t. The Thurston Public Power Initiative built its case around three things. Reliability, local control, and lower rates through access to federal hydropower from the Bonneville Power Administration, which private utilities can’t tap. The argument was solid. The campaign, by the organizers’ own later account, wasn’t well run.

Proposition 1 went on the November 2012 ballot and lost badly. 59 percent voted no. 41 percent voted yes. The Alliance to Protect Thurston Power, the opposition PAC backed primarily by PSE, spent well into the six figures. The pro-initiative side raised around $37,000. PSE’s campaign hit the county with mailers, push-poll calls, and billboards, while separately running community goodwill advertising that presented the company as a generous local partner. The core scare message was about taxes. Independent analysts said the tax claim was misleading, that legal caps made the kind of increase PSE was implying essentially impossible without additional votes. It didn’t matter. The message landed. Voters were also stuck between two wildly different cost estimates: PSE put the acquisition cost close to $1 billion, while the PUD’s own analysis put it at $41 to $153 million depending on which parts of the service area you were talking about. That gap was enough to create real doubt. The Thurston County Chamber of Commerce came out against it. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro said the PUD was taking on too much too fast.

The debate about ideas moved to costs and the better spending campaign was able to muddy the waters. And the pro-campaing could not or would not return to the cold houses and abandoned town in January.

The pattern across a hundred years is pretty consistent. In 1938, Thurston County votes to create a public utility and gets a legal shell. In 1952, a coalition tries to buy out the private utility and the deal collapses. In 1962, a private company backs its preferred candidates, wins the commission, and shuts down the acquisition effort for fifty years. In 2012, a corporation outspends a grassroots campaign sixteen to one and wins the county. In 2026, people are angry about their bills and the conversation is happening on Nextdoor instead of in union halls. The basic dynamic hasn’t changed. The opposition doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to make the alternative scary enough that people stick with what they know.

Jeff Devlin’s change.org petition is just another possible start. So was the 2012 campaign, at the beginning. The question Thurston County has never managed to answer is what it would actually take to break this pattern. What does a movement big enough to overcome a corporate spending campaign look like? This time, is anyone willing to build it?

The General Administration Building is being torn down. This is despite it being perhaps the most important building in Olympia’s history. And this is exactly as it should be.

We should know our history, know where we came from, know why we do the things we do. But preserving a structure that no longer serves our needs ties our hands at precisely the moment we need both arms free. There’s a difference between honoring the past and being imprisoned by it. A community that can’t tell the difference will eventually find itself curating ruins while its living members go unhoused and unserved.

Like much of Puget Sound history, Olympia’s story divides into distinct chapters: the territorial age, post-statehood through the Second World War, and the postwar decades that carried us to today. The great shift, from a community shaped by resource extraction to one shaped by the machinery of governance, happened in the years after the war. The GA Building is the hinge on which that transformation turned. And still, it should go. That age is over, the building costs too much, and we need the land more than we need the structure. The unque mosiac was moved, and I’m glad of that.

The legal conflict that produced the GA Building began in March 1954, when Thurston County Superior Court Judge Charles T. Wright ordered thirteen state agencies to move their headquarters from Seattle back to Olympia. His ruling rested on a constitutional requirement that the executive branch reside at the seat of government. Wright worried that allowing agencies to drift toward the larger city would reduce Olympia to little more than a name on a map. Governor Langlie and Attorney General Eastvold pushed back, arguing for a more flexible reading of the law. The local victory held anyway.

In August 1954, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the lower court in a five-to-four ruling, with Justice Donworth holding for the majority that the framers of the State Constitution intended the entire executive department to be physically located at the seat of government. The court rejected the state’s argument for a modern, logistically convenient interpretation. Thirteen agencies, from the Department of Health to the Horse Racing Commission, were ordered to relocate to Olympia.

The people who drove this weren’t state officials. They were a small group of Olympia residents and business owners, determined to make their city the capital in fact and not just in name, represented by attorneys Smith Troy and John Spiller. Gerry Lemon and the Mottman family led the effort. They won, and it stuck.

The ruling triggered an immediate and massive expansion of Olympia’s built landscape. The GA Building, completed in 1956 at a cost of $4.3 million, was bulging at the seams almost from the day it opened, the first major structure built to house the returning agencies, already overwhelmed by the surge it was meant to contain. Decades of campus planning followed: the State Library, parking facilities, and more office blocks over on the East Campus. It was a major economic victory for Olympia, but it permanently changed the city’s character. The dense, monumental government core we have today is a direct result.

It was decided by a single vote. Think about that.

If Justice Hill’s dissent had carried, Washington’s agencies might have spread across the state, their headquarters placed in Seattle, Spokane, and Vancouver, closer to the populations they actually served. Olympia might have remained a smaller, seasonal hub, shaped by the rhythms of the legislative session rather than the weight of a permanent government campus. Historic neighborhoods that were later demolished for office blocks and parking garages might still be standing. The city might feel more like a town. But that’s not what happened. The GA Building is what happened, and it deserves to be remembered. It does not need to be kept.

The same argument is playing out right now in Seattle, though the stakes there involve catwalks and ladder cages rather than office buildings. Gas Works Park, on the north shore of Lake Union, started in 1906 as a coal gasification plant, supplying synthetic gas to the city for fifty years before closing in 1956. When Seattle began purchasing the land in 1962, the site was heavily contaminated with coal tar and heavy metals. Landscape architect Richard Haag had a different idea than demolition: he preserved the industrial ruins as sculpture, using bioremediation to treat the soil and incorporating the old machinery into the life of the park. It was a genuinely imaginative act, seeing the past as something to be lived with rather than erased.

The park is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s also become a serious problem. People have died after climbing and falling from the old structures, and deferred maintenance costs have grown untenable. Seattle Parks and Recreation sought approval to remove catwalks and ladder cages that couldn’t be made safe, while preservation groups and the Landmarks Preservation Board pushed back, accusing the city of demolition by neglect. As of early 2026, the city is moving to address the safety issues, but the Landmarks Board has repeatedly denied demolition proposals, insisting instead on a comprehensive preservation plan.

There’s an irony worth sitting with. What began as a public health hazard, a gasification plant poisoning land and air, was preserved in place and has continued to be a hazard in a different form. The commitment to honoring the past extended even to its dangers.

The Gas Works debate illustrates something that’s gone wrong in the preservation movement more broadly, a tendency to become transfixed like Narcissus by a fixed image of the past, unable to look away from the reflection long enough to notice the living world around it. Landmarking, which started as a reasonable tool for protecting genuinely significant places, has increasingly been turned to other purposes. In cities across Washington, it’s been used to block housing density and freeze neighborhoods in forms that suit current residents at the expense of those who need to live there. The practical effect, often though not always intentional, was exclusion, preserving the character of a neighborhood in ways that served the comfortable while denying shelter to those who needed it most.

The consequences aren’t abstractions. Washington has significant and persistent racial homeownership gaps. Black residents are substantially overrepresented among the homeless relative to their share of the general population. A large portion of renters statewide pay more than a third of their income toward housing. When we talk about protecting neighborhood character, it’s worth asking plainly whose character we mean, and at whose expense we’re protecting it.

History isn’t a museum. It’s a conversation between the dead and the living, and the living carry obligations too, not only to remember, but to act, to build, to provide for those who come after. Neighborhoods changed organically for generations, large homes subdivided to house more families, commercial buildings adapted to new uses, waterfronts reimagined as economies shifted. That’s not the destruction of history. That is history. When we use preservation law to stop that process, we’re not saving anything. We’re embalming it.

Gerry Lemon understood this. The same man who led the legal fight to make Olympia a real capital also gave the city something else entirely, donating the land and mosaic viewpoint overlooking the harbor from Fourth Avenue near Water Street, the gift that became the seed of Percival Landing. Where the 1954 legal victory filled Olympia with government buildings, Lemon’s waterfront gift pointed somewhere different, toward a place of public life, a boardwalk, a gathering place, a shoreline returned to the people who live near it.

It’s hard now to imagine downtown Olympia without Percival Landing. It seems inevitable. But it was a choice, and the alternative is visible in places like Coos Bay or Aberdeen, cities that held onto the industrial character of their waterfronts and found that character had little use for the people who remained. That’s what Olympia replaced.

Lemon was a boating enthusiast and former commodore of the Olympia Yacht Club, a man who understood that the health of a place depended on its usefulness to the people living in it. He also knew his contributions would outlast him not because they’d be preserved unchanged, but because they made possible something that could continue to grow. The GA Building was probably the great civic achievement of his public life. We can honor what it represents without keeping it standing.

We need to know our history, need to understand what brought us here and why. But history isn’t given to us so we can carry it around like a millstone, growing heavier with each year while the people around us go without shelter. It’s given to us so we can learn what it actually means to build something that lasts. And what lasts isn’t the building. What lasts is the act of making a place where people can live well, now and after we’re gone. We should remember. And then we should get back to work.

As soon as Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Olympia didn’t look at the news. It looked inward.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one that feels incredibly familiar to us now. It’s the same collective gut punch we felt when George Floyd was murdered. We hit the streets, we organized, and we finally started asking the hard questions about our own backyard. In the days following Dr. King’s death, the Olympian ran a series of articles based on interviews with the local Black population. These pieces laid bare truths that we deeply know now, but they were radical to see in print back then.

In early April 1968, Black residents and activists explicitly labeled Olympia a “racist town.” They pointed to the city’s consistent failure to enact any kind of open housing legislation as the primary evidence. An activist named Dickson was particularly outspoken. He criticized the local hypocrisy of excluding Black people from institutions like the Elks Club while using their tax dollars to provide that same club with fire and police protection. He emphasized that the avenues normally open to any promising individual were closed to him solely because of his race.

In her research for “Blacks in Thurston County, Washington, 1950–1975” Dr. Thelma Jackson documents how systemic real estate practices actively pushed Black families out of the city centers. We often hear the local story that Black residents settled in Lacey because it was close to the military bases at Fort Lewis. Dr. Jackson’s work reveals that the steering was actually driven by legal barriers.

Because Lacey was largely unincorporated and newly developing during the 1950s and 60s, it lacked the exclusionary property deeds that barred non-whites from other neighborhoods. Real estate agents and developers capitalized on this by funneling Black buyers toward the few areas where they were legally allowed to own property. It was segregated by design, and it created a geography that persists in our county’s demographics today. Dr. Jackson notes that these obstacles forced families to find creative workarounds, like using white allies to scout and purchase homes on their behalf just to bypass door-slamming discrimination.

This was true even though these racially restrictive covenants had been legally unenforceable since the late 1940s after the Supreme Court struck them down. That didn’t stop Thurston County developers. They continued to add them to deeds for at least another half-decade after the court decision. They were banking on the fact that social pressure and realtor cooperation would do the work the law no longer could.

The local real estate industry was a major point of criticism. Residents were disturbed by a trend toward “ghettos,” and they accused realtors of steering Black families into specific areas while simultaneously discouraging white buyers from those same spots. John Finley noted that despite high employment, the local racial situation remained as dire as in other states. Others warned that forcing Black families into decaying, older housing would inevitably lead to state-sanctioned neglect.

Workers like Ed Chatman faced such significant difficulty finding any housing at all that activists began considering marches around City Hall. They wanted to force action against the pervasive slights and slurs that defined the community’s daily life.

The path toward open housing in Thurston County in 1968 was a contentious journey. It wasn’t a smooth transition. It was marked by urgent activism and fierce, vocal opposition. The movement gained real momentum in April 1968, shortly after Dr. King’s assassination, when the Thurston-Olympia Open Housing Committee presented petitions with over 1,500 signatures to county commissioners.

Key organizers like Patricia Avery, Herb Legg, and Paul Whelan led the charge, and they were supported by students and faculty from St. Martin’s College. Olympia eventually led the way by passing an emergency open housing ordinance on April 29. Lacey followed in late May, but only after its City Hall was jammed by proponents. Lacey’s path had bumps along the road because councilmen like William C. Ryan and Thomas Huntamer questioned the need for such laws. They suggested that discrimination simply wasn’t a local issue.

Opposition was often out in the open. Duke Stockton, a former teacher and self-described segregationist, was a fixture at these hearings. He argued that these laws infringed upon individual property rights. He was a true believer in being an actual racist, was a local organizer for a racist political party, and regularly spoke on a literal soapbox to rail against integration.

The Greater Olympia Board of Realtors, led by president Lee Childers, endorsed the view that fair housing legislation deprived property owners of a basic individual freedom. Mrs. Maxine Padget, a spokesperson for the realtors, argued that civil rights advocates were attempting to dominate policies even when existing rules weren’t being violated.

One of the most specific fights was over the timeline for filing complaints. The proposed ordinance suggested a 50-day window for a citizen to file an unfair housing statement. The realtors pushed back hard. Mrs. Padget argued the limit should be 30 days, while Lee Childers suggested a 10-day limit. They reasoned that a long delay was unreasonable and unfair to brokers. In reality, a 10-day window would have made it nearly impossible for a victim of discrimination to gather evidence and file a claim.

Childers also argued that the real estate fraternity shouldn’t be the only group subject to these regulations. He felt that any non-discrimination requirements should fall equally upon private homeowners as they did on agents. While some realtors stated they would go along with an ordinance as businessmen, they remained firm that civil rights go both ways and that the protection of property must be maintained above all else.

Legal hurdles further complicated the process. County Prosecutor Harold Koch identified numerous legal loopholes in the proposed county-wide human rights commission. He criticized it as an unenforceable gesture and accused the committee of trying to grant vigilante investigative powers to a group that wasn’t part of law enforcement.

These disagreements led to a fractured system. While proponents wanted one uniform law, Tumwater eventually divorced itself from the area-wide effort by passing its own specific version. This version included blanket defenses for landowners and provisions for private hearings. Bruce Pym argued these additions subverted the entire spirit of the law. Because of these complexities, while the county adopted an ordinance in late May, they deferred action on a human rights commission for a long time.

Ten years later, this history should feel familiar. Where open housing ordinances existed, zoning and economic realities began to undercut the progress. Olympia’s modern housing landscape was forged in the late 1970s, which was a period marked by the largest influx of new residents in our history. Before this, the construction of small multi-family housing, like duplexes and quadplexes, generally tracked with population growth.

However, a series of contentious debates starting in 1976 fundamentally altered the city’s trajectory. This led to systematic downzoning that prioritized exclusive single-family neighborhoods. A pivotal moment occurred with the Nut Tree Loop proposal. A developer envisioned 21 quadplexes on what is now a neighborhood of expensive single-family homes. This project sparked fierce public opposition.

Residents expressed a fear of the urban and the potential for denser, poorer communities to enter their neighborhoods. Opponents used inflammatory rhetoric. They claimed that multi-family housing would turn Olympia into a ghetto and lead to increased crime. By 1980, despite some city leaders arguing for denser living to prevent sprawl, the city commission succumbed to pressure and began shelving plans for multi-family expansion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Olympia implemented systematic downzones that outlawed anything other than single-family homes in many residential areas. This policy transformed hundreds of existing duplexes and small apartment buildings into non-conforming units. The stated goal was to encourage home ownership, but the practical result was gentrification.

The impact on our city’s racial makeup has been profound. While we passed Open Housing ordinances in 1968 to combat explicit discrimination, the subsequent zoning laws created a different form of segregation. In the Pacific Northwest, income serves as a proxy for race. Because single-family homes are the most expensive housing type, neighborhoods dominated by them have remained predominantly white.

Data shows a clear correlation: the more single-family homes a neighborhood has, the higher its percentage of white residents. In recent decades, the city adopted a nodes approach to density. They concentrated apartments in commercial areas like Capital Mall while protecting single-family neighborhoods. This strategy has led to a stark racial divide. Between 2010 and 2017, the high-density node in Tract 105.1 on the westside became significantly more diverse, while the adjacent single-family neighborhood in Tract 105.2 actually grew whiter.

This isn’t a unique local failing. You can see similar examples across the country of communities using downzoning as a tool to implicitly preserve racial divisions when other methods became illegal. In Arlington, Massachusetts, they once zoned for plenty of apartments. But as integration became a real prospect in the 1960s, their attitude toward development shifted. Activists used both explicit and coded anti-integration language to rally opposition to apartments and push for downzoning.

Unlike earlier efforts, our local downzoning efforts are largely absent of on the surface racial animus. I’m not saying these neighborhood activists weren’t trying to keep their neighborhoods white. I think you can draw a pretty clear conclusion there. I’m just saying there isn’t much smoking gun evidence in the historical record.

However, you don’t have to look far to see downzoning tied directly to the broader civil rights struggle. When you pull back from these small-scale efforts to a nationwide view, you see single-family zoning being discussed in a much different way. When we were downzoning, the NAACP was struggling to find inroads in the courtrooms to fight against exclusionary zoning.

HUD Secretary George Romney tried to force the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, to strike single-family zoning and allow affordable housing in 1970. His effort failed, and his political career ended because of it. Civil rights organizations then retrenched to fight unheralded courtroom battles over zoning in the Midwest and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP in the early 70s, the suburbs were the new civil rights battleground. They argued we should do battle in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and create opportunities for Black families seeking housing closer to jobs. The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing said segregation won’t stop until local governments are deprived of the power to manipulate zoning to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent Black in the 1970s to 11 percent today. The Black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle.

In Olympia, neighborhoods that downzoned saw a smaller increase in racial diversity over the last 10 years. Not only did these neighborhoods stay whiter, but in the middle of a historic housing crisis, these neighborhoods actually had fewer people living in them in 2020 than they did in 2010.

I’ve said this before. But it is well worth repeating: There are few open racists left. Duke Stockton’s don’t stalk city council meetings anymore. That is obviously an advancement in my lifetime. But you don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. There is a huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems before you ever get to the people working to dismantle them.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have actively worked against this kind of zoning for half a century.

I’ve been writing these essays specifically this month because it’s February. I’ve tried to get out of my own way during Black History Month and give space to stories that highlight where we’ve been.

We sure do live in interesting times. It is hard for us to slow down and take a look at our context when we seem to be hurtling downhill. Every day, some new outrages and crises draw our attention away from the ground at our feet. What I am reminded of is that there is always so much to fight for here and now.

Martin Luther King was killed in Tennessee, the country caught on fire, and the right thing to do for Olympians was to finally force the passage of open housing ordinances. They were weak. They didn’t address the underlying zoning. For decades, we lost the plot.

But this slow boring of hard boards in local politics is always there for you if you have passion and perspective.

It is something you can impact. You have more control here than you think.

We are tending a garden in a storm. We can’t stop the wind from blowing. But we can choose which stakes to reinforce and which seeds to protect. It is easy to get overwhelmed by massive, national debates that feel completely out of our hands, but that energy can be better spent on the hard boards right in front of us. By focusing our effort on things we can actually influence, we trade anxious, unattached frustration for tangible progress. We accept that we can’t control the entire city’s direction, but we have agency over how we show up.