COURTESY OF MICHAEL CIRELLI
The opening of the North Portal to the railroad tunnel beneath Seattle began with great hoses eroding an approach into the waterfront bluff north of Virginia Street. Here a crew is lining that cut with the concrete retaining wall seen completed and nearly 99 years old in the shadows of the "now" view.		PAUL DORPAT

The unidentified photographer who recorded this view stands on one of several tracks that so packed the waterfront a century ago that its official name was Railroad Avenue.

The narrow-gauged tracks and the little electric engine, far left, are parts of a temporary short line that helped dig the railroad tunnel beneath Seattle. This is its Virginia Street portal, and the scene is littered during the construction of the concrete retaining wall, center left. The still-unlined hole itself is lost in the shadows at the center of the scene, immediately to the left and behind the large, temporary construction shack on the right.

Work began on this North Portal in May 1903, about two months before the tunnel crew of nearly 1,000 workers started opening the south entrance in July. When the two crews met about 100 feet below the Central Business District in late October 1904, they were off by less than an inch.

The tunnel was built in part to help get the trains off the waterfront and onto reclaimed tideflats south of Pioneer Square. After the Northern Pacific bought up much of the waterfront in the late 1890s it announced its intention to build a palatial passenger and freight depot there. Pioneer Judge Orange Jacobs objected. "In the future if I should desire to go to the waterfront to catch a tomcod I might be charged more for passing over private property than the fish would be worth."

In the end, of course, the Great Northern Railroad's tunnel proposal won easily and the NP joined the GN in the 1906 opening of the Union Depot we more commonly call the King Street Station. Thereafter, the rolling stock on Railroad Avenue began its long passage from rails to rubber.

Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 of Paul Dorpat's books, "Seattle Now & Then," are $19.95 each from Tartu Publications, P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.