291230 - The Denny Hill Hermit

When the New York Times ran a preview on this broadcast, they labeled their piece with what might be an alternate title to this episode of Empire Builders: "Seattle, the City of Seven Hills." I do not have a continuity for this broadcast, but here is the essence of the press release issued for this date’s program, as reported in the Seattle Times of December 30, 1929:

DENNY HILL WILL GET RADIO ‘SPOT’ FOR NBC TONIGHT

Nation-Wide Audience is to Turn Attention to
Remainder of Big Bump Topic of Empire Builders

 

Seattle people have looked and talked about, and thought of Denny Hill for quite some time. Tonight a nation-wide radio audience will turn its attention to what is left of the big bump.

Dumping of Denny Hill into Puget Sound is to be the incident around which tonight’s Empire Builders transcontinental program is written. KOMO dialers are promised thrills not only by the rapid succession of events in this story but also by portrayal of the resourcefulness of modern engineering. Most of the story is laid in Seattle, and the continuity is based upon a plot written by Walter W. Dickson, local author.

Twenty-five stations of the NBC will carry the program. KOMO bills it for 7:30 o'clock. The “Old Timer,” heard weekly in Empire Builder broadcasts, will play a prominent part, as will Virginia Gardiner in the dramatization [of the] Denny Hill story. Bob MacGimsey, three-part whistler, and Andy Sannella’s Orchestra will provide the incidental music during the half hour.

Harvey Hays ("The Old Timer") and Virginia Gardiner. Author's collection

The Christian Science Monitor also weighed in with their own description of the program, written as a review and printed the following day in a radio review column they called “The Listener Speaks.”

After various excursions into other types of presentations, the Empire Builders' radiocast through the WJZ chain on Monday at 10:30 was devoted to a dramatization of a comparatively recent incident in the history of Seattle. It was this kind of entertainment which made the first series of these programs so deservedly popular and it is evident that the sponsors are attempting to continue this interest.

There is always more glamour attached to incidents in the dimmer distance -- especially in the days of explorers and venturesome settlers -- but this story of a hermit on one of the hills of Seattle whose little fortress was being menaced by advancing steam shovels was romantic and interesting enough. His devotion to a mining partner whose memory had been temporarily obscured lent a touch of genuine character to the tale.

 

Ask any native Seattleite – anyone born in the 1920’s or 1930’s – and of all the memories still accessible from their youth, they will undoubtedly recall the stories and the impact of the Denny Regrade. They may have even seen, as a youngster, some of the final events of the regrade activity.

The December 30, 1929, broadcast of Great Northern Railway’s Empire Builders was a story centered about one of early Seattle’s most ambitious and remarkable engineering projects. The natural topography of Seattle is defined largely by the effects of Vashon Glacier, which ground its way through the area roughly 14,000 years ago. In its wake, the glacier helped delineate the confines of two significant fresh water lakes (Lake Union and the vastly larger Lake Washington), with Puget Sound on the west, the Cascade Mountain foothills to the east, and numerous hills blocking in the remaining dry land. In its formative years, Seattle boosters liked to refer to the young city as the “New York of the West,” and it was also promoted as “the City of Seven Hills” (despite there being at least ten or twelve notable hilltops in the city’s environs).

The heart of downtown Seattle – the retail core – emerged in the area where it basically remains today: the sloping hill fronts that slide down to meet Elliot Bay at water’s edge. Early logging of these hills led to the moniker “Skid Road.” Although the area was blessed with a calm, deep-water port and abundant nearby timber, the shoreline rose quickly up the hills that lined much of the eastern shore of Puget Sound. Numerous regrading projects took place over the years to increase the available flatlands for development of the city.

Circa 1909 postcard view of Denny Regrade hydraulic excavation.

Among the very earliest permanent non-Native settlers of Seattle were the members of the Arthur A. Denny party, who arrived in 1851 and struggled to establish a foothold – some of them on Alki Point, the others in the vicinity of what is now the Pioneer Square area near the Seattle waterfront. In the 1850’s, the Pioneer Square site was an island.

The Denny Party also included William and Sarah Bell, who elected to claim land just north of the Pioneer Square group. This area now makes up part of the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. To the north and east of Bell’s site was a hill that was eventually named after A.A. Denny, as was a main street laid out in the area.

In the summer of 1897, the Klondike Gold Rush transformed Seattle into a bustling center of commerce. The downtown core was strained to its limits, and it became clear that expansion to the north was needed. However, Denny Hill blocked that expansion, and needed to be leveled. The enormity and cost of such a project was just too daunting for the city at that time, so only about half of Denny Hill was leveled. This first phase, which concentrated on an area along 1st Avenue from Pine Street to Denny Way, began in 1898 and was completed on January 6, 1899.

A second phase of the regrading, which leveled an area between 2nd and 5th avenues, began in 1908 and was completed on October 31, 1911.

The last major effort in leveling Denny Hill was accomplished between February of 1929 and December, 1930. During this phase, large earth-moving shovels removed 4 million cubic yards of earth (I’d just call them “steam shovels,” but one reference says they were electrically powered).

Some of the final excavation activity to level the last of Denny Hill, September, 1929.

Most of the earth removed from the regrading of Denny Hill ended up in Elliot Bay, either to extend the waterfront into the bay, or later simply dumped into deeper water. Earth from other regrading activity in Seattle (and possible including some from Denny Hill) was used in creating Harbor Island and for filling in expansive tide flats in what is now the SoDo (south of downtown) area of Seattle - including part of today's Boeing Field Airport.

Some property owners (many of them homeowners) refused to cooperate with the regrading project. During certain phases of Seattle regrading, private land owners had to bear the financial cost of the regrading, and resisted on those grounds. As a result, there exist many photos of houses and other structures left high and dry on precarious mounds of residual hill portions. The late historian Walt Crowley (1947-2007) explained it thus:

When property owners balked at selling, engineers carved around their lots, sometimes leaving houses stranded a hundred feet in air atop "spite mounds." These man-made buttes fell by 1911, giving Seattle a vast new tabula rasa upon which to sketch its urban visions.

[HistoryLink.org Essay 1123; "Seattle Neighborhoods: Belltown-Denny Regrade -- Thumbnail History" by Walt Crowley]

 

One way or another, these property owners ultimately acquiesced. It appears that Walter Dickson’s story, incorporated into the Empire Builders broadcast of December 30, 1929, as "The Denny Hill Hermit" was based on these real-life holdouts.

A remarkable Photoshop compilation by Clayton Kauzlaric showing structures in 1914 about to fall victim to the Denny Regrade, incorporated into a modern-day image of the same intersection (6th and Marion, Seattle).

Today, the Denny Hill Regrade is largely unknown to most Millennials and others with abbreviated knowledge of Seattle history. The real estate that once made up the regrade area is now assimilated into the South Lake Union neighborhood, and includes most of what we now call the Denny Triangle and Belltown, although these are not officially recognized city demarcations.

The video below, created in 1970, provides a good 19-minute primer on the topic, suitably titled "The story of the Denny Regrade"
[Item 3271, Record Series 1204-05, Seattle Municipal Archives].