Site Report #3: Audio Tour
According to professors O’Mara second lecture, rural area slowly became urbanized due to server factors. The advancing in health care creates a sudden population boost due to the decreases in mortality rate. Besides that, the advance in technologic revolutions has made transportation and agriculture industries more convenient for human. Those are the factors that turned rural area into urban area.
In 1846, Oregon Territory was established, which is what we known today as Washington State, Oregon State and part of British Columbia combined (Washington State). However, due to the growing population in the northern and southern area in the 1800s, it pressured the Congress to create the Washington Territory in 1853 (Washington State). Washington State began to grow after the settlement in 1853, which included University District.
University District in the 1800s was relatively undeveloped. The area that is now known as University District was once a forest, including block 34. University District didn’t started to develop until University of Washington relocated from Downtown Seattle to University District in 1895 (The Decision to Move to a New Campus). In the year of 1894, you will find lot of different residential housing living at University district, with little to no commercial businesses around University District, including block 34 (Figure 1).
After the relocation of University of Washington, University District started to develop due to expansion of human population. However, block 34 didn’t get develop until 1900th. This is because University of Washington built their first building Denny Hall closer to NE 45th Street and 15th Ave NE, instead of NE 40th Street, which is where block 34 located.
The development of block 34 is subtle, but yet significant during the 1900th. During this time period, logging started to happen around block 34. This is because the expansion on University of Washington and the new infrastructure University Bridge opened up to the public on lake union on 1919 (Figure 2). Due to the University Bridge development, block 34 started to grow rapidly after 1919.
During 1947, block 34 was coded by the City of Seattle as Business District, Area District C (B-C), Business District, Area District D (B-D), and Second Resident District, Area District C (R2-C) (Figure 3). On 1960, City of Seattle code block 34 as Multiple Resident High-Density Zone (RMH) and Community Business Zone (BC) (Figure 4). If we are able to go back to 1959th, you will be able to capture an intersection between NE 45th street and University Way NE (Figure 5). In figure 5, you will see that this area is a well-developed area with resident’s buildings surrounded by local businesses. Since NE 45th Street and University Way NE is only 3 to 4 blocks away from block 34, with this figure, you will be able to imagine how block 34 look like back in 1960. The only differences were block 34 had higher residential building than NE 45thth Street and University Way NE. Block 34 had lot of apartment buildings with local businesses underneath the apartments.
Fast forward to 2017, you will see that block 34 and the surrounding is well developed for mainly University of Washington student dormitory purposes. It had changes from the original city code Multiple Resident High Density Zone (RMH) and Community Business Zone (BC) to 100% student resident high-density area. This is due to the growing of University of Washington student populations each year; University of Washington decided to expand their campus on 2010 (Seattle Design Commission). They bought the land surrounded by block 34 and hand the land to Mahlum; an urban design company, to work on a project called West Campus Housing- Phase I (Seattle Design Commission). One of the projects is called Alder Hall, which is the building located on block 34.
Due to the size of my audio tour, I can't upload it to Omeka. However, here is a link for the audio tour. You will need to download the file to be able to listen to the audio tour.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B92X42xMBRrcQ3MtRGZzZVVWZU0/view?usp=sharing