Category: Olympia history (Page 1 of 10)

Turning the corner at Block 46

April 11, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

We are at least a decade into a counterrevolution in downtown Olympia. Urban Olympia LLC is systematically tearing up old surface lots and replacing them with housing. This brings us to the history of Block 46 of Sylvester’s Plat. The eastern portion of this block is currently on the developer’s list as they plan for a five story apartment building on what used to be a patch of concrete. For a hundred years, this block served as a laboratory for our ambitions. It shifted from a muddy shoreline to an industrial rail hub, then to a stagnant field of parking, and now toward a high-density residential future.

To understand why a five story apartment building is rising here, you have to look past the surface of the parking lots and into the dredge spoils of 1910.

The Disappeared Shoreline

In the late 19th century, Block 46 was essentially a frontier of the tide. The 1891 plat shows a few single family homes and a duplex, but the geography was different back then. Before the city was tamed by engineering, this was the edge of the Swantown Slough. It wasn’t a scenic beach with sand. Instead, it was a muddy shoreline much like the mudflats you see today near Buzz’s Bar and Grill on Mud Bay Road.

The transformation of this block was dictated by the Carlyon Fill of 1910 and 1911. Dr. P.H. Carlyon was a dentist and mayor with a relentless vision for the permanence of Olympia. He spearheaded the dredging of 2 million cubic yards of material from the bottom of Budd Inlet. This massive slurry was pumped behind bulkheads to create 29 blocks of new upland, including the area right next door to Block 46.

While the fill added land to the east, it fundamentally changed how people used Block 46. By stabilizing the area around downtown, the project allowed the Union Pacific to stretch its tracks across the city to reach a new terminal. The block was no longer a quiet residential edge. It became a strategic corridor for the Olympia Branch spur line.

Rails and the 1959 Disaster

By 1915, the Union Pacific had established a permanent foothold. They acquired a local startup line to connect downtown to the mainline at East Olympia. This 7.4 mile spur was the lifeblood of the city’s early 20th century economy. It carried beer from the brewery, plywood, and timber products.

Most noteable to us today, you could board the train in downtown Olympia and ride to Seattle, Portand or Tacoma. Passenger rail service has been lost to us for decades, but we can imagine how twice a day service by modern rail would have felt 110 years ago.

The presence of the rail line carved through the heart of Block 46. By the 1947 Sanborn maps, the domestic character of the block was starting to fade. The oil industry arrived on the east side. Maxwell Oil and Gull Oil established a footprint right next to the tracks. Yet, a surprising amount of housing stuck around on the south and west upland portions. Remnants of that era still stand today as the last two houses on 7th Avenue.

The most violent chapter in the rail history of the block occurred on Friday, March 13, 1959. A 900 ton segment of rail cars was left uncoupled and without brakes at the Tumwater border. The cars hurtled downhill and gained terrifying speed. They smashed into the Union Pacific Depot at over 60 miles per hour.

You can imagine living in of the houses on Block 46 as the rail cars flew buy and then hearing the unimaginable noise as they destroyed the depot.

The crash killed an employee and leveled a significant portion of the station. Though the depot was eventually rebuilt, the event marked a slow turning point. The industrial intensity of the rail line began to wane. It left behind underutilized land that would eventually become the hallmark of our 20th century downtown, the parking lot.

The Era of Stagnation

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the history of Block 46 became a story of divestment. Local families began selling their interests. Diamond Parking moved in and acquired two lots for vehicle storage. The Union Pacific eventually sold its interests to developers. The parking lots were leased specifically to various state agencies as they looked to keep their employees heading downtown by car.

In recent years, much of the block had settled into a low-value equilibrium. It was mostly asphalt. It generated a modest $7,000 annually in property taxes for local government. This was the stagnant parking lot phase, contributing very little to the city’s vibrancy or budget bottom line.

The Legion and Jefferson Project

Today, at least some of the asphalt is being torn up for a five story, 84,449 square foot mixed use development represents the first major residential investment on this block in a generation. It will house 91 units above ground-floor commercial space. The design uses a brick warehouse aesthetic that nods to the industrial past of the neighborhood.

Building here is not easy. Because the site sits on the soft silts of the historic shoreline, the foundation must rest on piles.

It is also fueled by a controversial financial tool called the Multi-Family Tax Exemption.

The Math of the Tax Gap

Critics often frame this tax exemption as a giveaway to developers. However, the fiscal reality of Block 46 suggests a different story.

Currently, the parking lot pays $7,000 a year. Once the apartment building is finished, the assessed taxes will jump to at least $100,000 (a best guess I arrived at by looking at a smaller apartment building nearby). Under the eight year exemption, the city essentially foregoes the $93,000 tax gap to make the high density project viable. This results in a short term loss of roughly $744,000.

But the math changes in year nine. The moment the exemption expires, the building begins paying its full $100,000 share. It takes only eight years of full payments for the city to repay its original investment. By year 17, which is less than two decades into the life of a building meant to last fifty years, the tax debt has broken even. Every year after that, the building generates 14 times the annual revenue of the original parking lot.

The But For Reality

This leads to a central mystery of urban planning called the “But For” test. Would this housing exist without the incentive? For decades, new housing in downtown Olympia was almost nonexistent. If a building isn’t built because the math doesn’t work for the developer, the city doesn’t lose millions in potential taxes. It simply continues to collect $7,000 a year from a parking lot. You cannot lose taxes on a building that does not exist.

What we don’t often ask is the impact urban sprawl has had in the “But For” context. But for building Henderson Boulevard from the interstate down to Eskridge, would Southeast Olympia exist the way it is today?

But for widening Mud Bay Road after Cooper Point, would the west side have grown the way it has? We don’t often talk about the subsidy that exists for suburban sprawl, especially as it reaches out into the woods in isolated pockets of neighborhood level development, but it does exist. So squinting at an eight year tax exemption instead of a permanent subsidy seems rich.

Beyond the property tax, we have to consider the hidden math of density. Ninety-one new households mean hundreds of people buying groceries and dining at downtown restaurants. It is also far cheaper for a city to provide services to 100 people on one city block than to 100 people spread across suburban sprawl.

The transition of Block 46 from a mudflats shoreline to a rail through-way, then to a parking lot, and finally to a residential hub is a microcosm of Olympia itself. The exemption isn’t a permanent subsidy. It is a deferred revenue strategy to speed through the parking lot era. The city is accepting a short term plateau to guarantee a massive, permanent increase in the tax base for the next half century. On the corner of Legion and Jefferson, we are finally trading the stagnation of the 20th century for the density of the 21st.

The Carlton and the Choices We Made to Get Here

March 21, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

This is the start of what I hope to be a long-term project. I want to track the history of parking lots in downtown Olympia. They’ve become a dominant land use type. I made a map that shows just how pervasive these empty spaces really are.

It hasn’t always been this way. A few examples remain, but our blocks were historically covered in buildings. This density was a social good. Mixed uses like housing, workshops, and shops were tightly packed together. Everything was walkable because we didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have cars.

There’s another side to this that we don’t talk about enough. These dense blocks are more economically productive. They generate more tax revenue than suburban lots or big box stores. It’s a bit of a hidden truth that cities end up paying for the services of suburban and rural residents. Parking lots just eat away at the economic health of our local government.

Think about what we lose to sea level rise. If we don’t act by 2095, downtown Olympia will lose about 370 acres. That’s over 600 million dollars in value based on 2018 data. The land in low-lying Olympia is worth about 1.6 million dollars per acre. Land outside the flood zone is worth less than a third of that. The land most likely to be lost is our older city. It’s the part built before cars. It’s ironic that we’ll probably keep the car-dependent parts of town while the rising tide, caused by car pollution, takes the most productive core.

And, in an era of nearly every local government dealing with structural deficits, it’s worth looking at the literal structures causing the problem.

Scandal and Padlocks at the Hotel Carlton

My first case study is the gravel lot at State and Columbia. If you look at old Sanborn maps, you see a vibrant mix of life. There was a metal shop, a second-hand clothing store, the Salvation Army, and several restaurants. The main anchor was the Carlton Hotel.

The building started as the Carlton House. It stayed that way for a couple of generations. In 1891, it was the center of a local scandal. A seventeen-year-old girl named Lizzie Jacobs was taken there for safety after a failed elopement. Her suitor, John Beggs, got into a fight with Lizzie’s mother and knocked her to the sidewalk. The couple fled in a horse-drawn carriage before an officer stopped them.

By 1902, the place was renamed the Hotel Carlton. The new manager wanted a first-class establishment to show off Olympia’s prosperity. By 1908, you could get breakfast or dinner there for 25 cents. But things took a turn during Prohibition. In 1931, a lawsuit claimed the hotel was bought specifically to be a liquor joint. A federal court issued a padlock order. The hotel was forced to close for an entire year as a penalty.

By 1933, the owners tried to move past the legal trouble with a new name. The final chapter came in 1947, when it was called the Hotel Hutson. That August, the city ordered the building to be torn down. It was seemingly the end of a structure that had been a part of the landscape for decades. And that is where the history of the building goes cold. But before we continue, I want to talk about something else.

Naturally Occurring Affordability

If you look at old crime reports and news snippets from before 1947, it’s clear the Carlton and the Hutson were housing people who were down on their luck. It had become what we now call naturally occurring affordable housing. Nobody set out to build low-income housing here. It just happened because the building was 50 years old and rundown enough to be cheap.

We saw the same thing a few years ago with the Angelus Hotel at 4th and Columbia. These places stay affordable because they are old and lack new investment. They are rare now because modern rules make them impossible to build. Features like shared bathrooms or tiny rooms were often prohibited by modern codes. When these buildings get sold, the cost of safety upgrades is so high that the owners have to raise the rent. That moves them out of reach for the folks below the working class.

Even when we build on top of old parking lots, using more liberalized rules that allow for building in a way that we could 100 years ago, we have to wait decades for that cycle to restart. This creates a conflict between fixing up the city and keeping it stable for residents. The city effectively subsidizes its own gentrification. We trade historical affordability for a modern landscape that is legally and financially inaccessible to the people who live there now.

The Housing Crisis and the City Fathers

Back in 1947, the city certainly didn’t care about low-end housing. They ordered the Carlton torn down despite a massive housing shortage. This was after service members from Fort Lewis and McChord Field started flooding Olympia. The crisis was so bad that people were renting out converted chicken coops.

Even with that level of desperation, Olympia’s leadership rejected federal housing funds. Local landlords actually celebrated the decision with New Year’s toasts in 1943 because they knew it meant they could keep the rents high. They were happy the city turned down the money. The mayor who rejected the money made a half-hearted public appeal for landlords to keep rents low, but it didn’t do much. At the same time, the city was moving to destroy Little Hollywood, the shantytown on the edges of the Deschutes Estuary. The city knew there was a shortage, but they still opted to tear down what little housing existed.

The Ghost of the Carlton

Even with the demolition order, buildings didn’t vanish immediately. Aerial photos from the fifties still show a building at that spot, but not the angular-roof version that was the Carlton. There was also a newer flat-roof building used by the Olympia School District. It seems the old hotel address was absorbed into the school district offices.

In the 1970s, the location started hosting a senior center. A local nonprofit found a good deal in the abandoned school offices. Seniors would go there to pick up bus passes well into the 1980s. When the senior center finally moved across the street to the modern community center, the Carlton’s footprint was finally gone into a parking lot.

We decided after the 1940s that cars were more important than anything else we could do with the land. But it’s heartening that the Carlton survived long enough to be used for something good. It helped educate children and support seniors before it finally became a lot for cars.

Looking at this gravel lot today, we don’t necessarily see a place to leave a car. We can see the lost economic vitality that could be funding our services. We can see the naturally occurring affordable housing that we regulated out of existence for decades. We can see the choice we made to trade a vibrant, productive community for a flat surface that contributes nothing to our future, exempt the moral backing of climate change and sea level rise.

It took nearly a century for the wrecking ball to finally win at State and Columbia. Now, we are the ones living with the quiet, expensive consequences of that victory.

Racism in Housing and the Importance of the Local Grind

February 21, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

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.

1949 and the accidental, mistaken transformation of Olympia

January 24, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

The layout of downtown Olympia is burned into my brain. It just seems inherent to the space that coming down from the Upper East Side, both State and 4th are one-way. Especially coming from my neighborhood, this doesn’t always make 4th and State the fastest way across town. But it does feel like it’s always been this way, that when we created this part of town, the original layout was two paired one-way streets.

But that’s not actually true. Before the late 40s, downtown was just a normal grid. You could go both ways on every street.

The switch to one-way streets wasn’t some long-planned city project either. It was an accident caused by a massive earthquake in 1949. What started as a quick fix to get around piles of fallen bricks turned into a permanent setup. Then the state highway department saw an opening to turn our local streets into a highway for commuters, and they took it. It’s a classic case of prioritizing fast cars over a walkable neighborhood.

Before 1949, Olympia’s downtown felt a lot tighter and more connected. We didn’t have all these massive parking lots everywhere. Instead, it was just row after row of actual buildings. This was also when the residential neighborhoods surrounding downtown were interconnected using similar grid patterns, before growth had grown beyond Division on the west and Boulevard on the east.

When a street goes both ways, twice as many people see a storefront. You aren’t “eclipsed” by the direction of traffic. But after WWII, engineers became obsessed with “throughput.” They stopped thinking about downtown as a place to be and started seeing it as a hurdle to drive through. They wanted to move the tides of cars as fast as possible. The old two-way grid was standing in their way, but it took a disaster to finally break it.

The real turning point happened on April 13, 1949. It was just before noon when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit. It was the biggest one the region had seen all century. Two people died, and the damage was immense. Eleven buildings were so damaged that they had to be boarded up immediately.

4th Avenue and State Street were a mess. To keep things moving while crews cleaned up the rubble, the city made a quick call: make them one-way. It was supposed to be a temporary fix to manage the chaos. But the streets never went back to the way they were. The earthquake gave engineers the perfect excuse to push a one-way vision that had been bubbling under the surface for years.

By late October, downtown business owners were joining forces to ask for a return to the pre-April alignment downtown. “Promises were made to return to two-way traffic as soon as the emergency was relieved,” said a downtown druggist and head of a business committee.

This is where the State Highway Department really left its mark. As the city debated whether to keep the temporary measure through the fall of 1949, the state didn’t just suggest keeping the one-way streets; they basically mandated it. They decided to fold 4th and State into the state highway system. 4th Avenue became the southbound lanes for the Pacific Highway, and State Avenue took the northbound traffic.

The legislature had passed a law the year before, allowing the Highway Department to take a heavier hand in ensuring state highways efficiently passed traffic. To that end, the highway department studied the issue of now one-way streets in Olympia and gave the city government two options: stay with one-way or lose all the parking along 4th and State.

By doing this, the state prioritized regional travel over the people actually living in Olympia. The main goal was throughput, moving people from the suburbs to their jobs or across the state as fast as possible. Our downtown streets weren’t local roads anymore. They were effectively a highway split in half. Once that highway designation was set in stone, there was no going back. The state had its high-speed corridor, and the city was stuck with the noise and the speed.

Business leaders talked about suing, saying the state was taking too heavy a hand. But no lawsuit followed, and downtown settled into its current pattern. Just less than 10 years later, Interstate 5 bypassed downtown Olympia, but one-way streets stayed.

We’re still paying for that 1949 decision today. On paper, one-way streets move cars fast, but they make life harder for everyone else. Research shows that child pedestrians are 2.5 times more likely to get hurt on one-way streets. It makes sense if you think about it. Drivers get into a highway mindset and stop looking for people.

Looking back, the 1949 earthquake broke the way Olympia functions. We traded a walkable, easy-to-navigate downtown for a system that treats downtown like a bypass. This isn’t even getting into the number of buildings that were torn down in the last 75 years to make way for parking.

I focus a lot of attention on downtown Olympia in this discussion. But it is worth pointing out that most of the mileage for the one-way streets in Olympia goes through formally residential neighborhoods. The city has slowly changed how the blocks are treated around the one-way paired throughfairs, but to me, even if we build denser, mixed-use neighborhoods up the Eastside hill, slower, more people-oriented traffic orientation makes sense as well.

Today, plenty of cities are realizing this was a mistake. They’re converting one-way streets back to two-way streets to lower crime, help local businesses, and stop the constant speeding. It makes you wonder what Olympia would look like if we had just cleared the 1949 debris and stayed the course with our original grid. We might have had a downtown that feels more like a community and less like a race track.

Olympia as Ghost Town

December 13, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 3 Comments

When I wrote last week about Tono, I was thinking about all the non-Tono ghost towns we don’t think about, the ones lost to inaccessibility, or those that never managed to keep their ruins standing. Lewis County has a dozen or so of these across the timber and coal industries (Hurn, Mendota, and others): towns that simply ran out of reason to be.

Tono taught us that history survives the physical. It was a place erased by corporate action and resource exhaustion, its memory surviving in old maps and the stubborn curiosity of GIS layers. I argued that the built environment is not the memory. The detailed records (what we can piece together) are the memory.

But what I’ve always wondered about is a ghost town lost in plain sight. What if Puget City, north of Lacey, had grown during the resource era, died, been forgotten, and then completely paved over in the name of urban progress?

While not a perfect example of growth, decline, and erasure by suburbia, the East Capitol Campus in Olympia is a lost, ghosted city. And it explains a lot about what went wrong in Olympia’s growth after the 1950s.

The Lost City

Tono was a company town that faded out. This Olympia neighborhood was healthy, dense, and killed.

The destruction spanned 18 blocks, bounded by Capitol Way on the west, Jefferson on the east, 11th on the north, and Maple Park on the south. This is now the collection of state office buildings across from the Capitol Campus proper. The neighborhood included a rich tapestry of density that Olympia today desperately tries to rebuild: no fewer than six apartment buildings (two with over 30 units), duplexes, the Girl Scouts clubhouse, and at least one store.

It was also the second location of William Winlock Miller (aka Olympia) High School. The state’s appetite for land here was so great that this was the second time the expanded Capitol Campus displaced Olympia High School. The original Olympia HS was on Water Street, a location that no longer exists but was roughly between the diagonal drive and the big old oak by the Sunken Gardens.

The catalyst for this violence was not a coal vein running out, but a court case: State ex rel. Lemon v. Langlie (1954). The ruling, which forced state executive offices to maintain their main offices in Olympia, solidified the city as the seat of government, and in doing so, condemned this residential district.

The Bureaucratic Weapon

The killing wasn’t a sudden demolition; it was a long, cold administrative death. The original buildings: Highway Licensing (1961), Employment Security (1961), and Archives (1964) came first. But the real destruction happened in the 1970s, after the city eliminated the historic cross-streets by vacating rights-of-way in the mid-1960s.

This is the big deal. You can build around a neighborhood; you can’t sustain a community once its streets have been wiped off the map. Ironically, the original right-of-way for 12th Avenue still exists, running straight through the 1991 Natural Resources Building. The built environment was literally erased.

In the 1960s, the state set out to take over 75 properties. The struggle put a human face on the process through the saga of Roy H. Bergh, 77, and his wife Leila, 72. The Berghs resisted the state’s efforts for about 13 years, leading to a prolonged legal battle involving condemnation and, ultimately, their eviction and jailing in 1973. They felt the state had “stolen” their property. The land they went to jail for is now part of the northern flank of the Natural Resources Building, at what used to be the corner of 12th and Franklin.

This ideological erasure was compounded by massive infrastructure projects that completed the destruction. Interstate 5 was constructed along the back edge of the neighborhood, and Plum Street was expanded via Henderson Boulevard into Southeast Olympia. We can’t overstate how radically this shifted access, suddenly, getting into that end of town by car mattered more than moving through the old city grid. While citizens voted to save Watershed Park in 1955, just five years later we were putting a road through it on the way to the third Olympia (William Winlock Miller) High School.

The Brutalist Betrayal

The final product, designed in the 1970s, was a monument to the state’s ambitions, and it failed to provide value to Olympia.

What we have now was designed in the Brutalist tradition, characterized by austere, monolithic concrete forms and monumental scale. This architecture prioritizes power and control over human-scale interaction and community. The new East Campus, most notably the manically vaguely named “Office Building 2” (1975) and the massive underground garage (1975), which famously began leaking almost immediately, was a policy failure if the goal was to create a human-scaled, useful addition to the city.

The creation of the East Campus shifted the center of civic life (the high school) to a contested border with another city (Tumwater) and promoted the development of car-centric districts, reinforced by millions of dollars in bonds for parking facilities.

The result is a landscape largely divorced from human use or utility: massive, useless expanses of lawn that no one occupies; a long stretch of Capitol Way with no sidewalk on its east side; and the bizarre arrangement of walkways threading around the buildings.

This is a space most often transited rather than enjoyed. Protests happen across the street at the Legislative Building. Community events take place downtown or around Capitol Lake. This is a broad civic space that no one uses, or even thinks about, unless they’re forced to inconveniently walk through it because they parked somewhere else.

Around OB2 and the Natural Resources Building, paths curve toward nowhere. A grand staircase ends in grass. Rounded walkways circle a vestigial OB2 entrance along Jefferson.

This area was supposed to be the beginning of “Ceremonial Drive,” a road that would have snaked around the buildings near where the Natural Resources Building now stands and where the old courthouse (now Capitol Court) remains.

What did we lose for that odd arrangement of nothing on Jefferson? Five houses and four duplex units. The East Campus is the grandly designed version of a exclusively zoned single family neighborhood. Nothing in walking distance, so if you leave your house on foot (or accidentally walk through East Campus) it is only for the act of walking, not going anywhere there.

Tono taught me that losing physical structures isn’t the same as losing history, you can reconstruct the past from afar. But the East Campus teaches something else entirely: some change is an ideological act of violence against history.

I’m not arguing the neighborhood should have been frozen in time, or that the state shouldn’t have expanded. But this neighborhood was never allowed to evolve. Today, state offices are at least expected to weave into neighborhoods, imperfect as that system is. The East Campus, by contrast, was simply killed, wiped off the face of the city.

And I point this out without irony as residents of the South Capitol Neighborhood fight a pitched battle against legislative-centric businesses expanding into residential homes, that they were the original target of campus planners’ expansionist ambitions.

Before heading east, the proposal envisioned a southern expansion of the campus. More than 20 acres of the South Capitol neighborhood would have been razed and replaced with new government buildings, along with a rounded road system that would have largely replaced the existing street grid.

But we all know how this ended. The campus expanded east, not south. Instead of annexing a more affluent neighborhood, the state razed a more middle-class community on its eastern flank.

You can’t stand today in the middle of this vast, empty expanse and pretend the past is intact. But because the architecture and landscaping are so empty and silent, the history still exists, in the sad story of the Berghs, the memories of the high schoolers, and the ghosted street grid beneath our feet. The built environment is not the memory. And thank goodness, because in this case, the builders made sure the built environment was a lie.

From Wheelmen to Highways to Bike Lanes: Olympia’s 130-Year Loop

November 29, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

On more than one muddy Saturday in the 1890s, groups of Tacoma bicyclists pedaled south toward Olympia, only to turn back in frustration. The road between Nisqually and the capital was a slog, a stretch so notorious that “weekend wheelmen” abandoned their plans rather than push their gleaming new safety bicycles through miles of muck.

For decades, Olympia had already endured the political humiliation of defending its status as the state capital against the ambition of cities Tacoma. So to have Tacoma cyclists literally turn up their noses at the condition of the road to Olympia? For men like Dr. P.H. Carlyon, that was simply too much. If the state capital was going to command respect, it needed passable routes. If the county wasn’t going to build them, Olympia’s elite would do it themselves.

Thus began the first organized effort to construct bicycle paths in Thurston County.

The Bicycle Craze Reaches Olympia

The 1890s bicycle boom wasn’t unique to this region; it was a national mania. The safety bicycle, with two equal wheels, a chain, and pneumatic tires, transformed cycling into a middle-class pastime. By 1897 the U.S. was producing up to two million bicycles a year; by 1900, as many as five million Americans owned one.

As crazes sometimes take a while longer to reach us, Olympia’s residents were still no exception. While the nationwide fascination of bikes crested in 1896, in 1897 we formed the Olympia Bicycle Path Association, which grew into the Thurston County Bicycle Path Association by 1899. The membership rolls read like the social directory of the era: physicians, businessmen, former territorial officials. This was not a club of hobbyists, it was a political organization capable of getting things done.

Building the First Bike Network

The Association’s work didn’t focus primarily on city streets. Olympia’s dirt roads were rough but rideable. Most of their work was on the countryside. The challenge wasn’t commuting; it was leisure. Riders wanted smooth, scenic routes to Woodland (now Lacey), to South Bay, to Tumwater, to Little Rock, and even toward Nisqually, where a connection to Tacoma awaited.

Several projects stand out:

Franklin Street Path (1899): Construction began in May and marked one of the first formal, graded bike facilities in Olympia.
Little Rock Path (1899): Completed by July and praised as a “splendid path,” it demonstrated the Association’s ability to finish large, coordinated works.
Olympia–Tumwater Route: Following Cleveland Avenue to Custer, this corridor provided one of the most useful regional connections.
Olympia–Nisqually Path: A bold link aimed at stitching Thurston County into the broader Puget Sound biking network.

In a sense, these paths were the 1890s equivalent of mountain bike trails or ski slopes, recreational amenities more than transportation necessities. Their funding and maintenance depended entirely on public enthusiasm to pay a fee toward the path association. So when the bicycle craze collapsed around the turn of the century, the paths faded too. By 1901, the association was effectively defunct.

But for former association president P.H. Carlyon, his few years of advocating for bike path construction set him up for his career defining task.

Carlyon’s Next Act: From Wheelmen to Earthmovers

Dr. P.H. Carlyon had been the president of the Bicycle Path Association in 1898. Just over a decade later, he would become mayor of Olympia. And from 1910–1911, he oversaw one of the largest landscape transformations in city history: the Carlyon Fill, which used more than two million cubic yards of dredged material to reshape what is now downtown Olympia.

In 1913, Carlyon was elected to the state legislature, where he became one of the driving forces behind Washington’s early highway system. Long before the interstate system, Washington built an ambitious network of paved highways connecting cities, routes like Martin Way and Capitol Boulevard that we now take for granted.

It was Carlyon, the former bicycle-path enthusiast, who championed the funding, engineering, and political will for this transformation.

The irony is almost too perfect: the man who once built bike paths so Tacoma riders wouldn’t mock Olympia eventually built the paved roads that would help bicycles vanish from everyday use.

Why the Early Highways Stuck—and the Bike Paths Didn’t

The bicycle paths of the 1890s died because they were built for fun. Highways, on the other hand, were built for commerce, growth, and a modern identity. People had traveled between cities by boat or train. Paved highways were a radical new form of freedom and a new type of economic infrastructure.

Once the state invested in roads, every subsequent decision reinforced the automobile’s dominance. Land was platted for cars. Businesses oriented their entrances around them. Neighborhoods sprawled out to follow them. By the mid-20th century, the original bicycle network was not just forgotten, it was unimaginable.

Today, we can’t picture tearing up paved streets and going back to gravel. The world Carlyon helped build is so complete, so normalized, that even questioning it feels disruptive.

Now, more than a century later, Olympia is again working to expand bike infrastructure. But today’s bike lanes aren’t recreational corridors stretching into the countryside. They’re transportation, intended to help people move within the city, through the very corridors Carlyon and his peers carved out for cars.

Why Is Eastside Street Like This? A Small History of Olympia’s Streets

October 19, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Ever wonder why some streets in Olympia seem to stop for no reason, why vacant lots sit untouched, or why a neighborhood feels like it’s divided by invisible walls? These quirks aren’t random, they’re history frozen in asphalt and parcel lines. Take Eastside Street: a road that almost, but never quite, connects southeast and northeast Olympia. Its story is a window into the city’s past, when rapid development, economic booms, and hurried platting shaped the streets we navigate today.

Inspired by Daniel Garcia’s essay, What Do You Think Olympia Should Look Like?, I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions he raises:

Why did that restaurant close? What is that smell? Why hasn’t anything been built on that vacant lot? Why isn’t downtown more bikeable? Why do so many places close by 8 p.m.? Why was the Artesian Well abandoned?

These are questions that local media might usually tackle. But as we’ve seen, between The Olympian and the JOLT, so many of these questions go unanswered. For me, there are tons of them.

I also want to note Daniel’s massive assistance in taking on hosting duties for the city council races this year on the Olympia Standard podcast.

Why isn’t Eastside the main street on… the Eastside?

One of my longest-standing questions has been: Why doesn’t Eastside Street connect the neighborhoods north of the 4th and State corridor with those to the north?

Eastside effectively ends at State Avenue (even though it technically continues north for another block). Puget Street picks up the role of main drive through the northeast neighborhood, a block east of where Eastside stops. So if you want to go from southeast Olympia to northeast Olympia (or vice versa) you have to dogleg down either 4th or State to get from one quarter of the city to another.

It seems like Eastside could have continued north at some point. But it doesn’t. So why not? The answer lies in the plats that make up Eastside along the corridor.

Eastside Street first appears as part of Swan’s Addition to Olympia in 1871, a significant part of the city that lay east of the Swantown Slough, which partially cut off this side of town from downtown Olympia.

As Washington transitioned from territory to full-fledged statehood in 1889–1890, there was a massive surge in development, anticipating population growth and economic benefits of statehood. This boom lasted until the economic crash of 1893. We can trace this history in the explosion of plats filed with the Auditor’s Office between 1889 and 1891.

This is where the heart of the stunted Eastside Street lies. In early 1889, still months before statehood, the Van Epps and Wiman plat cut off the corridor that Eastside Street in Swan’s plat would have used to connect neighborhoods. Quince Street was recognized in this plat, but Eastside was not.

Months later, the Terrace plat recognized Eastside again — but only partially. An oddly oversized parcel on the south side of this plat (now the site of an apartment complex) disrupted continuity.

Then, just a few weeks later, the College Heights plat north of Terrace included an Eastside Street, but slightly off-center from Terrace’s. , So, even if Eastside had connected through Van Epps and Terrace, it would include the strangely inconvenient dogleg. I suspect this was a result of the rapid pace of development in the year following statehood: planners simply didn’t coordinate across plats.

It is also worth noting that, Swan’s Addition in 1871 also didn’t connect directly to Van Epps; it ended at the current Legion Way. It wasn’t until the McLenndan (1905) and Pattison (1901) plats were laid out that Eastside finally met Van Epps.

This detail of an 1890 map of Olympia during the post statehood boom gives you the proper context of the Eastside route and the land it. Lying right in the middle is Van Epps.

Addressing the possible punch through?

But what if nothing had ever been built where Eastside terminated at Van Epps? Why didn’t later planners just punch a road through to Terrace?

Looking at the current parcel map, it seems like there’s an opportunity to “punch through” Eastside. The current house at 1032 Olympia Ave NE, was built in 1940, might give the impression that we had decades to finish the street. But that home replaced an earlier one, meaning the corridor was never fully clear. The most convincing evidence is from Brian Hovis’ presentation of the Sanborn maps at OlympiaHistory.org. There you see a residential house on the 1908 map.

Lessons from Eastside Street

So what do we take from the story of Eastside, in a “why is Olympia the way it is” point of view?

People weren’t paying attention in the pivotal year of 1890. While Eastside shows up in some plats, it doesn’t appear in all, making continuous construction impossible.

Rapid development and platting ignored overall city planning, in this case. What might seem like an odd street today is the product of historical accidents, economic cycles, and fragmented decision-making. Many of the plats you see before the invention of car-centered, cul-de-sac development took into consideration the square block alignment of the city, to ensure an orderly development of the city. But this time it didn’t.

Civic apologies and understanding you have a problem

October 11, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Move your feet

When you’re playing defense in soccer and find yourself reaching to poke the ball away from an attacker, it’s a good sign you’re standing in the wrong spot. It’s time to move your feet.

A few years back, I was reminded of the three parts of a good apology because of the falling down the stairs act Lakefair was performing.

It basically goes like this:

Acknowledge and express your feelings: State what you did and how you feel about it. Go beyond a simple “I’m sorry” to show that you’re truly sorry, horrified, or disappointed in yourself.

Validate the harm you caused: Name the damage and explain how you understand it affected the other person. This shows you were listening and gives them a chance to correct your understanding. Don’t police their reaction.

Offer a plan for change: Explain how you’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again with real, concrete steps. Instead of saying, “It won’t happen again,” say what you’ll do differently next time.

The Capital Lakefair organization was stuck at Step 1 of a true apology because their public defenses focused on rules and blame-shifting, not on acknowledging the public’s pain or anger.

For this situation to turn around, the leadership needed first to listen, not just to those who were “yelling,” but to the broader perspectives around them. They needed to realize this was about what they did, not how they were being talked about. To quote Aaron Sorkin in The Newsroom, they had a PR problem because they had a real problem.

As predicted by the “Markets are Conversations” principle, public outrage demands a two-way dialogue. If everyone is yelling, the organization is in the wrong place in that conversation and needs to move its stance (and its actions) to move forward.

I was reminded again of these principles when I read “The Ritual of Civic Apology.”

It’s a great read. In short, Beth Lew-Williams explores the recent trend of Western U.S. cities offering belated formal apologies for the historical expulsion and mistreatment of their Chinese residents. She questions the sincerity, effectiveness, and intended audience of these gestures. After visiting Tacoma and a couple of California cities, she concludes that these civic apologies don’t reach full reconciliation. Whatever wound was left hasn’t been healed by performative apologies. Most barely make it past Step 1 (acknowledging the wrongdoing) without fully naming the harm or committing to real repair.

And what are reparations, if not repair work?

That’s why I’m glad the City of Olympia is studying reparations. I sat down with Mayor Dontae Payne recently to talk about the work Olympia is exploring. One of the things we discussed was the basis of Washington’s Covenant Homeownership Program.

Washington State, like many places, used racially restrictive covenants to exclude nonwhite residents from certain neighborhoods well into the 1960s. Even after they were ruled unenforceable in the late 1940s, new covenants were still being filed in Thurston County right up until open housing laws were passed following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. According to the University of Washington, covenants in Thurston County featured harsher-than-normal language, seemingly to make a point.

The Washington Covenant Homeownership Program was created to help repair the damage caused by decades of racist housing policies like restrictive covenants. It helps first-time homebuyers from communities historically shut out of homeownership by offering zero-interest loans for down payments and closing costs. To qualify, buyers must have moderate incomes and be descendants of people who lived in Washington before 1968 and were harmed by those racist housing rules.

Unsurprisingly, a lawsuit was filed to overturn the program by a conservative organization arguing that it’s discriminatory because it limits eligibility by race, calling it “using racism to fix racism.”

And this is where the ritual of civic apology meets the real world of government finance, legal interpretation, and political will. The harm caused by restrictive covenants (and by zoning choices, biased policing, and other forms of institutional racism) continues to ripple outward. Acknowledging the harm is only the first step. We still struggle to unpack and address the deep, systemic causes.

We always have to be ready to move our feet. Because even as Lew-Williams rightly wonders who these civic apologies are really for, it’s clear to me who should be doing the Sisyphean work of building complete ones. It’s us, those of us here now, who benefited from decades of racist systems.

A framework for approaching racial reparations here should begin with the commitment to give people what they are due and to repair harm done to the broader human community. Justice, rightly understood, is not about assigning guilt to individuals but about restoring balance where it has been lost. The frame for us should be, when one part of the community suffers, the whole is diminished. Addressing historical wrongs, then, is not an act of division but of maintenance.

Sound policy must be grounded in reason and clear-eyed understanding. This is why the work Lew-Williams describes is important, but incomplete. Repairing deep, generational harm isn’t about emotional performance or political convenience. It needs patient study, honesty about causes, and deliberate, thoughtful action. The goal is to act rightly moving forward. To understand we’re in the wrong spot and move our feet.

Smith Troy, Trump and Telling the Truth

October 4, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

We’ve all heard President Donald Trump call the press “the enemy of the people.” Over the course of his terms, he repeatedly attacked news organizations as “fake,” “corrupt,” and even suggested some were engaged in illegal activity.

Beyond insults, he openly questioned the constitutional protections that shield journalists, including the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan precedent, and proposed “opening up our libel laws” so politicians could sue and “win lots of money.”

His rhetoric and actions exemplify a long-standing tension in American democracy: the fragile balance between government power and press freedom. Yet this struggle is far from new, and it is not new here at home. Nearly a century ago, in Thurston County, local politics intersected with criminal libel laws in a way that foreshadows today’s conflicts.

The story begins in November 1938, when Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney Smith Troy filed criminal charges against three men: Ray Gruhlke, Lester Main, and George Johnson. He accused the defendants of distributing handbills that allegedly defamed Troy and his brother Harold, who was an assistant county prosecutor. The charges contended that the statements were malicious and intended to expose the Troys to “hatred, contempt, ridicule, and obloquy,” depriving them of public confidence, consistent with the criminal libel statutes of the time.

Almost immediately, questions arose about the integrity and motives of the public officials involved. The circumstances of the arrests suggested potential overreach, and critics argued that the case may have been politically motivated to protect the interests of Smith Troy while undermining his opponents. Affidavits from law enforcement contained conflicting accounts of the arrests, raising doubts about the accuracy and impartiality of the official record. The court initially denied motions to appoint independent attorneys to investigate the charges, further highlighting the potential for bias. The case only began to take a more credible direction once a Special Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, Harry Ellsworth Foster, was appointed to replace Smith Troy, whose personal involvement as the alleged victim created an obvious conflict of interest.

Over the next several months, the Special Prosecutor’s investigation revealed that the alleged libel stemmed largely from confusion over incomplete court records. The handbills pointed to cases that the Troys were apparently prosecuting improperly, but the cases referenced in the pamphlets had been transferred, and the inconsistencies were clerical rather than malicious.

The defendants admitted their errors, tendered apologies, and Troy accepted them. By May 27, 1939, the court dismissed the case, noting that the controversy had prompted reforms to ensure future records were clearer and less prone to misinterpretation.

The Thurston County case cannot be fully understood without situating it within the broader legal context. Smith Troy would not have been able to pursue charges without statutes defining libel broadly as any malicious publication exposing living or deceased persons to hatred or contempt, or injuring any person in business or occupation. A person could be prosecuted even if the statements were true, unless published with “good motives” and “for justifiable ends.”

By the 1930s, criminal libel prosecutions had become rare, yet the statutes remained on the books through 2009, offering public officials like Troy a tool—however rarely used, to protect reputations through criminal law.

The law’s overreach and constitutional vulnerabilities became clear in 2008, when the Washington Court of Appeals struck down the criminal libel statute as facially unconstitutional. The court held that it violated the First Amendment because it punished false statements without requiring proof of actual malice and, paradoxically, could punish true statements lacking “good motives.” The legislature formally repealed the law in 2009. Modern statutes surrounding protection orders have partially revived criminalized libel in limited circumstances, primarily to address harassment and repeated false statements made with malice.

The Smith Troy case illustrates how criminal libel statutes historically empowered officials to suppress criticism, a temptation not lost on modern politicians. Trump’s attacks on the press echo the same impulse: using legal threats, regulatory power, and public shaming to undermine journalists and chill reporting. Unlike Thurston County in 1938, Trump operates on a national stage, with the ability to influence federal agencies, control access to government events, and challenge the judiciary’s interpretation of defamation law.

Yet the comparison also highlights both the fragility and resilience of press freedom. In Thurston County, the appointment of an unbiased Special Prosecutor and the eventual dismissal showed that legal checks, due process, and transparency can constrain abuses of power. Today, protections like New York Times v. Sullivan perform a similar role, ensuring that even powerful political actors cannot easily weaponize libel law against the press. Without these safeguards, the line between legitimate critique and suppression of dissent blurs, leaving citizens less informed and democracy weaker.

The trajectory from Smith Troy to Trump underscores that the press is both a target and a guardian in any democracy. Laws may criminalize speech, but misuse or selective enforcement erodes trust in both institutions and government itself. Meanwhile, as local news declines and national outlets consolidate, the onus falls more heavily on government to act transparently. A free press alone cannot ensure accountability; officials must make accurate information accessible, clear, and timely, or risk leaving the public in the dark.

History reminds us that power will always test the boundaries of scrutiny. The Thurston County libel case offers a microcosmic lesson: fair process, independent oversight, and transparent government are essential to maintaining the balance between authority and the public’s right to know. Today, as political leaders attack media and propose changes to defamation law, the stakes have moved from local to national. The core principle remains unchanged: the press must remain free to speak, investigate, and hold power accountable, and government must meet its own obligation to be transparent in a media environment that can no longer do it alone.

The City of Puget and how we build cities

August 30, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

There’s something about a neighboring city moving into nearby unincorporated neighborhoods that always gets people excited and wanting a city of their own. At least around here.

That’s exactly what happened in the 1960s when Lacey became a city.

The Birth of Lacey: A Rivalry with Olympia

Lacey’s path to cityhood was shaped by a rivalry with Olympia over annexation and control of fast-growing suburbs.

After World War II, Lacey shifted from farmland to a booming suburb, helped by projects like South Sound Mall. By the early 1960s, Olympia began pushing east, annexing land along Martin Way and Pacific Avenue up to Lilly Road. This sparked a “border war” as Lacey moved to incorporate and protect its own boundaries.

Lacey’s first incorporation vote in 1964 failed, but a second vote in November 1966 narrowly passed by about 200 votes. Almost immediately, conflict reignited. Residents of Lacey’s western “Olympia fringe area,” who had opposed incorporation, voted to leave and join Olympia in early 1967. Lacey sued to block the move, but courts upheld Olympia’s annexation under an old 1890 law (later changed in 1969).

That same year, voters in both cities considered merging into one. Supporters said it would cut costs, improve planning, and solve Lacey’s sewage problems by tapping Olympia’s system. The proposal failed, badly in Lacey, where residents strongly opposed merging.

The 1980s: Lacey Looks North to Puget

In the ’70s and ’80s, Lacey tried to annex eastward but hit resistance from established neighborhoods like Tanglewilde and Thompson Place. Much like Lacey in the ’60s, these neighborhoods didn’t want to join a bigger city, or form their own. They already had regional fire services, and Tanglewilde even formed its own park district, building the county’s only public pool.

So Lacey looked north, toward undeveloped land between those neighborhoods and Hawks Prairie.

During the 1980s, Lacey took an aggressive annexation strategy, focusing on big undeveloped areas with huge growth potential, like Hawks Prairie. This land promised billions in development and tens of thousands of jobs over two decades. Lacey wanted to bring in sewer, water, and other urban services while avoiding the political headaches of older neighborhoods.

At the same time, Lacey played defense. It annexed strategically to stop the proposed City of Puget, an effort by rural residents to block Lacey’s expansion. Just like Lacey vs. Olympia before it, the Lacey vs. Puget City battle took on the same tenor of trying to keep the neighboring big brother from taking over.

The proposed City of Puget was named after an unrealized metropolis on Johnson Point. Puget City was platted in 1870 (and promptly un-platted three years later) as a possible terminus for the railroad. There are actually a handful of homes that sit on “Puget City” parcels in the area, but obviously, the rail road city was never built. As Lacey started their march to the inland sea in the 1980s, rural residents staked their own claim and petitioned the boundary review board for the creation of the 3,000 person City of Puget.

The new city idea died after the Boundary Review Board voted it down 3-2. The board leaned on a rift between residents of the rural areas and developers and residents of larger planned neighborhoods that wanted Lacey’s services.

One big difference between the 1960s and the 1980s? The Boundary Review Board. Created in 1967, these boards added consistency to city formations and annexations. You can’t rewrite history with “what ifs,” but it’s interesting to imagine what Lacey’s future would’ve looked like if it had been blocked like Puget.

Ultimately, Lacey annexed thousands of acres, leapfrogging older neighborhoods to build new subdivisions and warehouses. Those skipped-over neighborhoods fought off annexation attempts for decades, and now, in 2025, Lacey is looking back at them again.

But first: How Cities Grow

This brings me back to my favorite academic paper I’ve read this year, The Neutral Criteria Myth. In a discussion about legislative redistricting, it points out that histories like Lacey’s show how city boundaries might look like simple lines on a map, but they are anything but neutral. These boundaries have long been used to shape communities, deciding who holds power and who gets resources.

Historically, these lines were often drawn with racial and economic bias. Redlining is a clear example, where minority neighborhoods were confined to underfunded areas. At the same time, wealthy, mostly white suburbs drew boundaries to separate themselves from urban centers, creating large gaps in wealth, schools, and public services. The truth is, there is no such thing as a neutral city boundary. These lines have always been about more than geography, they shape opportunity and segregation in ways that last for generations.

City lines affect property values, school funding, and even political representation. Local gerrymandering (redrawing district maps to favor one group) can tilt power and weaken others’ votes. Annexation decisions also play a role: cities often target areas that bring in tax revenue while avoiding neighborhoods that may be costly to serve.

This is exactly the situation Lacey faces today. Decades after growth management laws placed the old Tanglewilde and Thompson Place neighborhoods in Lacey’s Urban Growth Area, the city is now looking back at the areas it skipped over. They have studied what annexing these unincorporated neighborhoods would mean. Their new financial analysis offers a clear answer: annexation would likely cost more than it brings in, at least in the near term. The study examined three growth scenarios, and in every case, the city would face a financial hit. Even after 20 years, the costs of police, fire, and utilities outweigh the tax revenue these areas would generate.

So, annexations have biases towards the needs of the current city residents. Systems like boundary review boards can help short-circuit these biases and bring more rational decision-making, but I think there is a broader model.

One idea I’ve been thinking about is to take city boundary decisions out of the hands of cities themselves. Currently, cities often push annexations for more tax revenue or strategic growth. But what if an independent board handled it instead, similar to the commissions used for legislative redistricting?

This board wouldn’t have a stake in politics or money. Its sole goal would be ensuring that services, water, sewer, police, fire, are delivered efficiently. It would focus on creating logical city limits that make sense for residents and future growth, not just for city budgets. The concept is simple: draw boundaries based on what works best for communities.

In many places, higher levels of government already step in to manage city boundaries rather than leaving decisions to individual cities. They do this because it can bring major public benefits, better planning, stronger services, and less wasteful competition between municipalities. Sometimes this happens through state or provincial laws. Other times, independent boards (like Boundary Review Commissions in the U.S. or Municipal Demarcation Boards in South Africa) take the lead. Their role is to look at the bigger picture: how to manage growth, avoid urban sprawl, and ensure communities are connected logically.

Why does this matter? When cities compete over territory for tax dollars, services suffer and local governments end up fighting instead of cooperating. Provincial or national intervention can fix that. In Canada, provinces sometimes merge or reorganize municipalities so services align and resources are shared fairly. In South Africa, national boards bring diverse communities together under one system, promoting equity and social cohesion.

The goal is simple: instead of a patchwork of self-interested annexations, create a more thoughtful, planned approach to city boundaries, one that serves people.