This article appears in print in the March 2019 issue and is part of our Seattle Waterfront feature. Click here to subscribe.

After 70 years of protecting Seattle’s waterfront, the city’s original seawall, completed in 1934, left a lot of room for improvement. By early in this century, city leaders knew it needed to be replaced. The Elliott Bay tide infiltrated cracks in the wall, carrying fill soil from underneath Alaskan Way back into the ocean and creating potential hazards, seismic and otherwise; and gribbles—tiny wood-boring marine creatures—ate away at the timbers that held up the wall. This alarming erosion prompted voters to pass a levy in 2012 for the construction of a new barrier.