Trail supporters outworked the detractors.
Committee member Estell Berteig spotted then-Mayor Wes Uhlman standing alone at Seattle Center during an event. “I only recognized him from newspaper pictures,” she says.
She lifted her newborn daughter from the stroller and walked over. “Who’s this?” she remembers him asking.
“I said, this is a little girl that’s going to need a bicycle trail.” He laughed.
Her daughter, Alissa, rides the trail to this day.
On Sept. 12, 1971, Uhlman and King County Executive John Spellman marched toward Matthews Beach from opposite directions. Where they converged, at an 11-mile “hike-in” that Hille had organized, some 2,000 people rallied.
THEN: Mayor Wes Uhlman addresses the crowd from a makeshift stage at Matthews Beach during the “hike-in” rally. (Courtesy Merrill Hille)
The next day, Uhlman wrote to neighborhood committee chair Jim Todd: “No longer can it be alleged that this facility is desired by a small or homogeneous group.”
The mayor had his own name for it — “the linear trail park concept” — which the women resisted but he kept using anyway. Perhaps bureaucratic fog was the point: A thing nobody can remember is a thing nobody can organize against.
But what to call it, really?
Hille, Mamie Rockafellar and Berteig all had read Robert Nesbit’s 1961 biography of Judge Thomas Burke, who founded the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway with financier Daniel Gilman. The book, “He Built Seattle,” was pressed upon them by University of Washington archivist Richard Berner.
Sitting in the Berteig living room, the three shouted the answer simultaneously: Burke-Gilman!
NOW: At Matthews Beach Park, bicyclists in Burke-Gilman Trail anniversary jerseys gather where marchers had converged in 1971. Second from left is Peter Breyfogle of Fix the Burke-Gilman, the group behind the Sept. 12… (Jean Sherrard)More
“Such an enormous achievement,” says Peter Breyfogle of Fix the Burke-Gilman, a Seattle Parks Foundation partner working to rebuild the trail’s oldest and most worn miles. Nearly half a million people now use the trail each year. “After 55 years, we need to ensure that legacy by maintaining and enhancing the Burke-Gilman for future generations.”
The trail today, with a gap in Ballard, runs about 20 miles from Shilshole Bay in Seattle to Bothell.
Burke-Gilman Trail today
Seattle Department of Transportation (Map by Fiona Martin / The Seattle Times)
55th anniversary celebration of the Burke-Gilman “Hike-In”: 9 a.m.–3 p.m., Sept. 12, Matthews Beach Park, 5100 N.E. 93rd St., Seattle; free. More info: burkegilman50.org
1 of 2 | NOW: On the same stretch of trail they marched on years ago, Merrill Hille, 87, and son Erik, 58, raise signs updating the 1971 message with: “It is now the Burke-Gilman Trail.” With them is with Erik’s son, Magnus, nearly 2. (Jean Sherrard)
I have a vivid memory of the very last train to run on the line. It was in the autumn of 1971 when a historic logging locomotive that had been on display at the UW’s College of Forestry was steamed up and moved to the Northwest Rail Museum in Snoqualmie. The loco’s progress was slowed by the weeds and blackberry strands that had grown over the tracks. Several volunteers rode the pilot with machetes to cut back the overgrowth.
The tracks had been little used over the previous years–I recall seeing a party train on evening in 1968 oe 69, A UW collegue recalled seeing the Empire Builder crawl down the line a few years earlier when the main line had been blocked by a landslide. Before the UW Heating Plant converted to natural gas, an occasional freight train would drop off a couple of coal hoppers,