The Backstory
How can Seattle become more bike-friendly? It starts with a decision.
Communities and industry popped up and grew all along the new rail line, helping to further grow the city and region. Though the railway didn’t quite reach Snoqualmie Pass, as originally planned, it was enough. Northern Pacific needed the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway to maintain its hold on the region amid incoming competition from the Great Northern Railway, so Northern Pacific bought Seattle’s line in 1892 and connected it to the transcontinental lines.
The Seattle boosters had won, and Seattle became the major port they’d hoped it would be. “The city of Seattle should always retain a warm place in its municipal heart for the little railway that came to its rescue in the darkest hours of Seattle’s history and fought for Seattle in its commercial supremacy against all powerful odds,” Burke said after the railway’s sale.
In the late 1960s, Estell Berteig and other northeast Seattle neighbors dug up this forgotten story about the defunct railway that ran through their neighborhood. It was hard to imagine that this quiet, overgrown railway had once saved the city’s business ambitions and transformed the region.
They were inspired to reclaim the story and the railway for the people of the city. Berteig and a group of neighbors and advocates got together to promote a new vision for the railway that would make it the central artery of the city’s walking and biking network. And their history research gave them a name for their idea: the Burke-Gilman Trail.
AS BOLD AND transformative as their idea was for Seattle, it also would reverberate throughout the country, inspiring and setting legal precedents for the national rails-to-trails movement.
The idea for the trail bounced around for a couple of years in the late 1960s, and a group of organizers formed the Burke-Gilman Trail Park Committee. Berteig was a founding member, along with Jim Todd, Sandy Wood, Mamie Rockafellar, Nancy Todd, Merrill Hille, Frank McChesney and Robert Metz.
The committee’s work turned into a full sprint in 1971, when the group of organizers found out that the newly formed Burlington Northern (the result of a major railroad merger) was planning to abandon the rail line. They thought maybe they could get the railroad to simply give the railway to the city.
“People who were investing in land north of the city gave a piece of the property to help save our city,” Berteig said of those original 19th-century land donors, back when the railway first was constructed. “Well, if our upright citizens donated land at the time to save our commercial possibilities, why can’t Burlington Northern donate (the railway) back?”
It turned out the railroad wasn’t going to just give away property for free. But couldn’t they at least give the city first crack at buying it?
A month after news broke that the railway would be abandoned, Berteig and a few other committee members brought some brochures and information to Seattle Center for an environmental fair. They had their information and sign-up sheet on their card table as they spread the word and explained their idea to attendees. That’s when Berteig saw Mayor Wes Uhlman making his way through the fair.
“Under the card table was our sleeping 2-month-old,” Berteig said during a 2018 lecture with Wood and Hille that detailed their group’s efforts to get the trail built. “So I pushed her out in the way of the mayor. I didn’t trip him. He stopped, and he said, ‘Who’s this?’ And I said, ‘It’s a little girl who’s gonna need a bicycle trail.’ ”
Then Berteig and Nancy Todd started talking about the project and mentioned that many of the properties had been donated. “That got his attention, and he said he was really interested in this project,” Berteig said. They followed up with a meeting, and he made the project a priority. He penned a letter to Burlington Northern expressing interest in city ownership of the railway, and the railroad said it would sell it at fair market value.
MAYOR UHLMAN told the committee members that if they were going to pull this off, especially in the midst of the Boeing Bust recession, they were going to need to gather a lot of support and show it in a big way. So committee members, led by Hille, got to work organizing a huge public show of support they called a “hike-in,” a play on the “sit-in” protests of the time. The plan was to get as many people as possible to join two simultaneous walks along the railroad tracks, one from the north and one from the south, converging for a rally at Matthews Beach Park on the Lake Washington shore just off the railway.
None of the Burke-Gilman Trail Park Committee members had organized an event like this before, so they reached out to antifreeway organizers for advice. But some people who were against the freeways were also against the trail. A photo from 1971 depicts a group of maybe 50 people holding signs protesting the plan for the Burke-Gilman Trail. One sign says, “Enjoy But Who Pays?” Another sign noted in a news report but not shown in the photo said: “Yield to private property owners. We don’t walk in your neighborhood. Save our privacy.”
One man told The Seattle Daily Times that he wanted to turn his property into a car parking spot. Others wanted to run trains on the line, though nobody proposed a clear business model for doing so. Others were afraid of the trail, arguing that it would bring crime to their quiet neighborhood, and property values would drop. There just weren’t many precedents to help people understand how such a trail would affect a neighborhood. It was a new idea. The Burke-Gilman Trail would need to be a test case for the city and the nation.
To gather support for the 1971 hike-in, trail organizers called as many elected officials as possible and printed 12,000 flyers to hand out and post around town. They even arranged extra city buses to help with transportation. More than 1,000 people showed up. Many volunteers helped lead the hike-in, including famed mountaineer Tom Hornbein, who a decade earlier was on the first team to climb Mount Everest via its very challenging West Ridge.
Though the hike along the nearly flat railway certainly was easier than climbing the tallest mountain on Earth, the political and legal fight to build the trail would prove to be a formidable challenge despite the strong demonstration of support.
During the rally at Matthews Beach, trail organizers presented Uhlman with a petition in favor of the trail that already had 1,600 signatures. In addition, they had letters demonstrating bipartisan support from state legislators: Republican Gov. Dan Evans and Democrat Sens. Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Uhlman and King County Executive John Spellman spoke at the rally.
BUT DESPITE AN overwhelming amount of support for the trail, there still was a long and difficult battle ahead. Though organizers didn’t know it at the time, the first section of the trail wouldn’t open until 1978.
After a long legal fight, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission sided with the trail committee, setting a precedent that public agencies should have the first opportunity to purchase abandoned rail rights of way for creating public parkland. The decision would have enormous ramifications across the nation.
“That opened the door, actually opened floodgates, to the future of rail-to-trail conversions across the country,” trail committee member Wood said during the 2018 lecture.
The decision snowballed as communities across the nation sought to acquire defunct railway lines and turn them into trails and parks.
The first section of the trail was dedicated in the summer of 1978 along with Kenmore’s trailside Log Boom Park at the north end of Lake Washington. A decade later, Seattle Department of Engineering staff telephoned residents near the trail, interviewed real estate agents selling homes near the trail, talked to Seattle Police Department officers about trail-related crime and studied real estate listings for properties along the route.
Almost everyone had a glowing opinion of the trail. Nearly all properties for sale proudly listed proximity to it as an amenity. Residents loved it, and there was no known property crime increase. In fact, the SPD officers said property crime is most common in places with car access, because burglars can carry more stolen goods in a car than on a bike.
The car-free nature of the trail made it resistant to property crime. One resident even said she had totally changed her mind about the trail. “I was involved in citizens groups opposed to the trail,” she told the interviewer. “I now feel that the trail is very positive.” Not a single resident interviewed said conditions were worse with the trail than they were before.
AS THE BURKE-GILMAN Trail Park Committee was getting started with its campaign, two bicycling brothers on Mercer Island were dreaming of better bicycle paths. Mike and Rick Quam put out a call in July 1970 for people to join them at a Mercer Island elementary school for the first meeting of the Cascade Bicycle Club. Thirty people showed up to the first meeting, and membership quickly grew.
Soon Cascade was throwing its support behind the Burke-Gilman Trail project, but it also was organizing an event that would become an icon for the club: a wintertime ride around Bainbridge Island appropriately named the Chilly Hilly. Thousands of riders still pack the ferries between downtown Seattle and Bainbridge one day every winter for this cold and difficult ride, which has become something of a celebration of winter biking in the Puget Sound region. Photos of hundreds of people biking off the ferry in full rain gear never get old.
The Cascade Bicycle Club grew both ends of its organization at the same time. As it added more members, the club wielded more political power to support bike-friendly projects and policies at the local, regional and state levels. The club also focused on expanding its schedule of rides and events, which increased local interest in recreational bike riding and eventually became a valuable source of revenue.
THEN, IN 1979, the club created the event that would put it on the international map: a 200-mile ride from Seattle City Hall to Portland City Hall. A dozen people met in member Jon Jacobson’s living room one day to discuss the ambitious idea, and they all left with responsibilities and tasks to help make it happen. About 100 people started the first Seattle to Portland ride, but only 69 finished. The STP originally was billed as a race, won by one of the organizers, Jerry Baker.
“The first year, there was a headwind and wet almost all the way,” Baker said during a radio interview shortly before he passed away in 2015, when he was 73. “I’m surprised it ever happened again.”
Baker rode in the STP 36 years in a row and became such a force for cycling in the region that the velodrome in Redmond’s Marymoor Park was renamed the Jerry Baker Memorial Velodrome in his honor.
In addition to organizing races like STP and Chilly Hilly, the growing club advocated for trail and bike lane projects across the region, as well as a major Washington state bike law in 1983 that solidified the bicycle as a legal vehicle with all the rights and responsibilities of any other vehicle.
But as exciting as the rebirth of cycling in the 1970s was, the ’80s saw gas prices plummet and a massive expansion of car-oriented suburban sprawl across the nation. Biking had asserted itself as a part of Seattle, but the cultural momentum was still overwhelmingly in favor of driving cars.