The project to replace and expand SR-520 will end — eventually — with a new park space recognizing the community effort that stopped a freeway expansion 50 years ago that would have ripped a hole through the Central District and neighborhoods from Montlake to Madison Valley to Leschi.

Representatives from the group Seattle ARCH — Activists Remembered, Celebrated, and Honored — gathered over the weekend where the much-loved “Ramps to Nowhere” have been dismantled as part of the 520 expansion project to recognize a new effort they hope will help the city remember the community that came together in a “Freeway Revolt” to stop the R.H. Thomson Expressway, a 15-mile roadway that would have stretched from the Duwamish to Bothell through the heart of Seattle through the Central District.

“We are really here to recognize an extraordinary moment of Seattle history over 50 years ago and it’s not about any individual,” organizer Kenan Block said Saturday. “It was an astounding moment of citizen activism where the Black Panthers and the gray haired Seattle Garden Club ladies linked arm and arm as neighbors, and, again against all odds, they killed the RH Thompson Expressway.”

Earlier this month, the group says WSDOT crews working on an Arboretum North Entry Project removed all but four columns and a crossbeam of the massive remaining Ramps to Nowhere concrete structures. This section of the ramps will be preserved as a historic marker “recognizing the citizen movement that stopped construction of this major north/south freeway through Seattle neighborhoods some 50+ years ago.”

The stub of a blocked Seattle freeway survived as part of Montlake’s topography and became a symbol of the fight to halt the expansion as well as a popular summer swimming hangout.

Seattle’s Freeway Revolt began in 1960 when voters approved the Bay Freeway, which was set to be a link between I-5 and Seattle Center, and bonds to fund the R.H. Thomson Expressway part of a planned system that would have had a greater freeway density than Los Angeles.

The R.H. Thomson Expressway would have destroyed up to 3,000 homes and displaced as many as 8,000 people. The Bay Freeway would have walled off South Lake Union from the rest of the city. These possibilities fostered a public outcry that resulted in a public outcry from affected residents which saw the citizens suing the city two years later. Widely-attended public hearings on the future of transportation in Seattle ensued before Citizens Against the RH Thomson (CARHT) and Citizens Against Freeways (CAF) formed in 1968.

“An arrogant disregard for the needs and the interests of the people that lived in the area,” Anna Rudd, a former anti-freeway activist, told CHS in 2018 about the city’s plan.

Citizens spent the following four years disputing the funding of the R.H. Thomson, including a Save the Arboretum rally attended by 3,000 people and a Save Mount Baker Ridge rally.

The R.H. Thomson highway would have roughly followed the route of Empire Way — renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way in 1983 — cutting a trench through the middle of the Central District. It would have occupied the block between 27th Ave and Empire Way along its entire length, destroying thousands of homes. And with freeway crossings only at the intersections with major arterials such as Cherry, Union, Yesler, and Jackson, it would have created a wall of traffic and concrete between the neighborhood and Lake Washington.

Plans provided for six highway lanes and additional collector streets along each side, with an estimated traffic volume of 70,000 vehicles per day by 1985. It gave neighborhood residents access to the freeway via on and off-ramps at Madison, Cherry, and Jackson streets.

Activists spent years educating the citizenry on the negative effects of the roadway. In one case, a group was ejected from the Seattle Center Coliseum for canvassing voters before a Seattle Supersonics game.

Their work finally paid off in 1972, when a majority of Seattle residents voted “NO” on the building of the Bay Freeway and “YES” to revoking bond authorization for the R.H. Thomson Expressway in a special election.

42 years later, Seattle ARCH successfully persuaded the Seattle City Council to approve the preservation of a section of the “Ramps to Nowhere” as a monument to the activists who worked to ensure that it was never connected to the expressway.

Now eight years since the approval, the monument will be completed after reconstruction of SR 520 is finished — and as soon as Seattle Parks has budget for the project.

This pedestrian and biking tunnel is probably getting the axe (Image: WSDOT)

In the meantime, WSDOT says the $455.3 million Montlake Project should wrap construction this year.

There is one more major 520 replacement segment to go as the project works its way west. The $1.4 billion Portage Bay Bridge and Roanoke Lid Project is moving forward with Olympia’s order to identify “cost reduction opportunities” as the legislature has struggled to budget the massive undertaking.

A key corner being cut on the planned project is a trail tunnel that had been envisioned as a key connection for bicyclists and walkers “between the SR 520 multi-use path and the rest of the city’s bike and pedestrian network,” the Urbanist reports.

Slicing the feature would save a tiny fraction of the project’s massive budget but with the state desperate for savings, the pedestrian tunnel makes for a tempting target and a likely cut — unless there is another Seattle Freeway Revolt.

Learn more about the Ramps to Nowhere Historic Marker project at seattle-arch.org.

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