page_title: Interstate 5 in Washington
section_title: Seattle planning and construction
hierarchical_section_title: Interstate 5 in Washington / History / Seattle planning and construction
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial of Interstate 5, north from Downtown Seattle, 1971, before the construction of Freeway Park. Item 77857, Forward Thrust Photographs (Record Series 5804-04), Seattle Municipal Archives.
context_page_description: Interstate 5 is an Interstate Highway on the West Coast of the United States, serving as the region's primary north–south route. It travels 277 miles across the state of Washington, running from the Oregon state border at Vancouver, through the Puget Sound region, and to the Canadian border at Blaine. Within the Seattle metropolitan area, the freeway connects the cities of Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett.
  I-5 is the only interstate to traverse the whole state from north to south and is Washington's busiest highway, with an average of 274,000 vehicles traveling on it through Downtown Seattle on a typical day. The segment in Downtown Seattle is also among the widest freeways in the United States, at 13 lanes, and includes a set of express lanes that reverse direction depending on time of the day. Most of the freeway is four lanes in rural areas and six to eight lanes in suburban areas, utilizing a set of high-occupancy vehicle lanes in the latter. I-5 also has three related auxiliary Interstates in the state, I-205, I-405, and I-705, as well as several designated business routes and state routes.
context_section_description: A municipal traffic plan from 1946 outlined designs for a north–south freeway through Seattle that was later refined into the early concepts for Interstate 5 in the 1950s. A design from 1954 proposed an eight-lane facility from Downtown Seattle to Ravenna that would cost $194 million (equivalent to $1.47 billion in 2018 dollars) to construct. Alternate plans would have placed the freeway further east on 12th Avenue in Capitol Hill or along Empire Way, which would later be used for the proposed R. H. Thomson Expressway. A larger, twelve-lane freeway through Downtown Seattle with a reversible express lane system was announced in April 1957 ahead of a series of public hearings. The proposal received a mix of strong support and criticism from members of the public, while the city government endorsed the plan with a caveat that right of way along the freeway be reserved for use by rapid transit. The twelve-lane design, sans transit, was approved the following year by the Bureau of Public Roads, allowing for property acquisition to begin. A dedicated office was created to handle property acquisition, which would require 4,500 parcels of land, and 10 percent were condemned by the government.
  The first section of the freeway within Seattle to be built was the Ship Canal Bridge, a double-decker bridge over the Lake Washington Ship Canal between the University District and Eastlake, which began construction in August 1958. Construction of the freeway through Downtown Seattle was delayed after 100 citizens marched on June 1, 1961, in protest of the "trench" design and sought to add a lidded tunnel with a rooftop park. The proposed design change was deferred for later consideration, but delayed the start of construction south of Olive Way to the following year.
  Land acquisition for the downtown section of I-5 was completed in June 1962 after a series of condemnations were settled by the King County Superior Court. Demolition of buildings along the block-wide right-of-way had already begun, including the Kalmar Hotel (built in 1881), which pre-dated the Great Seattle Fire, and the Seventh Avenue Fire Hall (built in 1890), the oldest public building in the city. The demolitions were opposed by local preservationists, among them architects Victor Steinbrueck and Paul Thiry, but proceeded as planned. Thiry described the freeway's construction as when "Seattle began taking one of its wrong turns and started to lose its identity as a city" and proposed a park lid from Columbia Street to Olive Way along the entire downtown section of I-5.
  The Ship Canal Bridge and 2.2 miles (3.5 km) of freeway between Ravenna Boulevard and Roanoke Street were dedicated and opened to traffic on December 18, 1962. The bridge cost $14 million to construct (equivalent to $90.8 million in 2018 dollars) and was among the largest ever built in the Pacific Northwest. After the opening of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge on August 28, 1963, traffic from the bridge was permitted to use a section of I-5 between SR 520 and Mercer Street. Traffic from the North Seattle section, which had been extended north from Ravenna Boulevard to Bothell Way (SR 522), was diverted until a through connection was opened on November 12. The section in the Ravenna neighborhood also included a 300-person fallout shelter under the freeway at Weedin Place that was completed in 1963 and later used for records storage before its abandonment. Some sections of the extensive retaining walls along I-5 were pre-assembled at a plant in Woodinville and hoisted in place by a crane to reduce working hours in residential neighborhoods.
  The remaining downtown section and approaches from the suburbs remained scheduled to be completed by 1967, with the state legislature passing a provision in a spending bill to accelerate construction. The delayed timeline was blamed by the Department of Highways on several uncontrollable factors, among them landslides along Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill, unfavorable weather, a cement masons strike, and relocation of utilities. The section between Olive Way and Mercer 
caption: The completed downtown section of I-5, looking north from University Street in 1971, before the construction of Freeway Park and the Washington State Convention Center
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