What would Seattle be like today if the 'Bogue' plan passed in 1912? Seattle would have subways had voters approved the visionary plan

Virgil G. Bogue had a grand design for the future of Seattle with his 1911 Plan of Seattle. The far-seeing engineer envisioned a big city that would need mass transit, efficient waterfronts and harbors and building designs that kept the city from feeling or looking to crowded. less Virgil G. Bogue had a grand design for the future of Seattle with his 1911 Plan of Seattle. The far-seeing engineer envisioned a big city that would need mass transit, efficient waterfronts and harbors and ... more Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives Image 1 of / 33 Caption Close What would Seattle be like today if the 'Bogue' plan passed in 1912? 1 / 33 Back to Gallery

Imagine a greater Seattle area that is clearly thought out, directed and completely planned for.

Rapid, subway transit lines connect east to west, north to south and neighborhoods across the city. An above-ground rail line links Everett to Tacoma and passes through a central station where Roy Street now intersects with Highway 99.

Downtown buildings are capped in height, much like Paris, so as to let light into downtown streets. Mercer Island is one big park, restricted from development. And city government offices are condensed in a grand civic center across Denny Way from where Seattle Center now sits.

All this and more was envisioned by Virgil G. Bogue, an engineer and -- some might say -- visionary who came to draft a sweeping plan for Seattle in 1911.

Bogue, born in Norfolk, New York in 1846, had trained as a civil engineer and then headed to Peru to work for rail companies throughout most of the 1870s, according to historylink.org. He learned to build railroads through mountains there, and later used those skills to first help survey, and then build, the rail lines across Stampede Pass in Washington for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Eventually, he helped update the waterfront design for Seattle as an independent consultant, and after the failure of the Plan of Seattle, he would help do the same in Tacoma and Grays Harbor.

Ultimately, the plan failed a vote by the populace in 1912, and became one of many relics of what Seattle might have been.

"It was a wonderful plan; it was so visionary," said Leonard Garfield, executive director of the Museum of History and Industry. "But for working people, it was so expensive, and for rich people, it was too much work."

The two-volume master plan was intended to prepare the city for "a population of slightly over a million inhabitants" that Bogue and other planners saw as Seattle's future.

The population of the Seattle area had just crested over 237,000 in 1910, according to U.S. Census Bureau records. Today, the city's population is estimated over 660,000 and the metropolitan area is more than 3.6 million.

To deal with all those people, the plan, commissioned by the forward-looking Municipal Plans Commission, directed where new arterial streets should run, where housing might go, and recommended highway tunnels, raised railways, waterfront designs, improvements and much, much more.

A cursory glance across Seattle today shows how such a sweeping plan may have prevented any number of present-day headaches, not the least of which is traffic.

Bogue somehow foresaw that part of the future and included a vast plan for public transit.

"The city's growth will be retarded with a tendency to develop congested, undesirable and unhealthful districts unless rapid transit facilities are provided," Bogue wrote in the beginning of the section on rapid transit.

Bogue's vision for street cars and other mass transit to help the city spread out may have been the greatest missed opportunity in the plan, said Dennis Meier, strategic adviser with the Seattle Department of Planning and Development.

"What we're doing now is spending a whole lot of money developing a system that could have been developed in that plan," Meier said. "And I guess that would have been a very positive thing. But that's just history."

Another part of the Bogue plan called for a massive civic center to be built just south of Denny Way, in modern-day Belltown. The Denny Regrade project had just opened up the area at the time, and land could be had cheaply.

But that part of the plan faced too much political struggle. The downtown core had developed around Pioneer Square, and business interests there didn't want to see development moving northward and away from them, so they put up a fight to keep the city offices in that area, Meier said.

The costs projected by Bogue didn't help things either. Even though the plan was meant to be enacted on an "as needed" basis, in keeping with growth, Bogue's figures -- many heading into the tens of millions -- were costs that taxpayers couldn't imagine shouldering.

Despite the plan's failure by a margin of 2-to-1 in a vote, parts of it were later used, Meier said.

Bogue's vision for Harbor Island was essentially put into action, as well as some other harbor improvements.

What Virgil Bogue saw for the future of Seattle was, in many ways, an accurate vision of the growing city and what it might need in the future.

"When you look at his approach to Harbor Island, the architecture, the sort of city-beautiful ideas he had for downtown, he definitely was thinking about issues that were going to need attention," Meier said. "It was like, 'Yeah, we're going to grow and we're going to be big.'"

Today, though, as the city builds out Link light rail, expands bus service and mulls new ways to shape housing development, speculating on what might have been is only that -- speculation -- and in the end, the unapproved plan is only an item in the city archives, Garfield said.

"All of that is playing Monday morning quarterback, and that's not what history is really about," he said. "Ultimately, what really counts is what we have done. And in that sense, what we take from the Bogue plan is that ideas that are too grandiose won't have the support of the people."

Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture and business for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or at danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay