SEATTLE — This city’s urban shoreline on Puget Sound was never built with photo-snapping tourists in mind, or technology entrepreneurs jogging in the rain. In decades past, stretching back to the big-timber-and-fish era of the 1800s, the waterfront was a place of gaff hooks, warehouses and stink.

But as brawny old Seattle faded, the hard parts of its industrial past — a shadow-casting highway viaduct, a crumbling sea wall — remained behind like bleached fossils even as the modern gloss of restaurants, hotels and apartment towers moved in.

Now, a ballet of giant, tightly coordinated engineering works — $4.5 billion worth of building up, tearing down and digging under on the water’s edge — is about to change the city’s storied old coast all over again starting next year. Each of the pieces is major in its own right — a 1.8-mile big-bore tunnel 200 feet below grade at its deepest, an earthquake-conscious sea wall buttressing the piers and an altered city grid that will come with a demolition of the old viaduct. Collectively, they add up to a city on the remake, with a waterfront transformation that will be seismic and aesthetic all at once, not to mention messy and cacophonous.

Hurricane Sandy gets partial credit, city officials said, for bolstering local acceptance of a plan that will mean periodic disruption of commercial and transportation rhythms for at least three years to come. Voters in Seattle cast their ballots last month for a $290 million bond measure to pay for replacement of the most eroded and threatened section of the sea wall — a linchpin of the waterfront package — even as images of East Coast devastation and cleanup filled the news. The measure, which included a 30-year property tax increase to pay for the bonds, passed with 77 percent voter approval.