A little on the dry side, but if you either live, or have lived, in Seattle for any amount of time, this will be a great read. It covers a lot of the landscape modification done historically, including the filling of parts of the bay and the Duwamish River, the building of the Ballard Locks and the regrading of Denny Hill and a few other smaller projects. ( )

We enjoyed this book. It is part history, part engineering, and part field guide to a landscape that no longer exists. At times it challenges the reader to imagine what Seattle used to look like. That cognitive exercise isn’t as simple as picturing a pristine environment with trees instead of skyscrapers. You would also to need to rethink the landscape itself.

Study the old maps and photographs in Too High & Too Steep and you’ll see just how much has changed. Pioneer Square famously has an underground of ghost sidewalks and storefronts. It may be less-well known that there was a swamp nearby and tideflats farther south. Seattle’s two stadiums and the industrial hub of the city today stands on ground filled in with sawdust, brick, debris and fill mined elsewhere. There’s a gouge in the hill where Interstate 90 joins I-5. Man-made. The same is true for the Montlake Cut, ship canal, and Chittenden Locks. Lake Washington is nine feet lower than it used be and the major river that used to pour from it in Renton is gone. It’s difficult to even find the old riverbed now. A significant downtown hill was shoveled and washed out of existence during several regrade projects over the course of thirty years (see the book’s cover photo). The modern city of glass and steel looks nothing like the little town Native Americans and pioneers knew in the 1850s. The land itself would be unfamiliar to them.

Too High & Too Steep might fascinate you even if you were already aware the Underground and the Denny Regrade. As he tells the histories of these topographical rearrangements, author David B. Williams walks to critical places throughout the city and points out the changes and the surviving vestiges of the past. His descriptions amount to an archeological tour of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The old civil engineering projects still show themselves in forms as varied as sagging pavement downtown and the route of the Burke-Gilman Trail. “We may have buried Seattle’s earliest topography, but we can never escape its influences,” he writes. “It is sitting below the surface, regularly popping up, reminding us of our origins and, perhaps, keeping us a bit humble.”

Williams also revels in engineering details and in explaining the social, seismic, and environmental impacts which they wrought. He draws parallels to Seattle’s modern projects like the seawall replacement (originally built in 1934) and the Highway 99 tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct (completed in 1953).

The author takes on a different landscape-changing project in each chapter and offers a variety of maps and illustrations to aide the reader. You can stand on a Fourth Avenue street corner and visualize the 200 foot hill that used to be there. You can walk along Jackson Street and know you’re perched above the old tideflats. Further south you can find the site of the 1874 picnic at which nearly all the city’s residents enthusiastically pitched in to start building their own railroad — one that would cross the water that once covered SoDo. You might not want to visit Harbor Island at all if you’re worried about earthquakes.
We’re history nuts at WA-List and have long-known about these regrading projects. This, however, is the first full-length book we’ve read solely dedicated to the resurfacing of Seattle. We’re pleased with endeavor.

Shelf Appeal: Seattle residents might enjoy reading stories and seeing images of their re-shaped city. Fans of urban histories will be awed by what pioneers managed to do with shovels, wagons, and primitive construction equipment, stunned by the ambitious projects those pioneers decided to undertake, and maybe shocked by what they didn’t know or hadn’t considered.

-- I wrote this review for the Books section of the Washington state website: http://www.WA-List.com