David B. Williams (1) (1965–)
Autor de Stories in Stone
Para otros autores llamados David B. Williams, ver la página de desambiguación.
Sobre El Autor
David B. Williams is a freelance writer focused on the intersection of people and the natural world. A geologist by training, he is the author or coauthor of seven books, including most recently Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City, Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's mostrar más Topography, and Waterway: The Story of Seattle's Locks and Ship Canal (with Jennifer Ott). He lives in Seattle. mostrar menos
Obras de David B. Williams
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Williams, David B.
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1965-04-09
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugares de residencia
- Seattle, Washington, USA
- Educación
- Colorado College (BA ∙ Geology ∙ 1987)
Miembros
Reseñas
Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography por David B. Williams
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… (más)
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… (más)
1 
benjfrank | otra reseña | May 21, 2016 |
benjfrank | otra reseña | May 21, 2016 | 
Confession: I'm a mad rock person, I love 'em. I'm interested particularly in what you might call prehistoric and/or "vernacular" stone work (let's include mounds and any painting or scratching or cupping while we're at it), in other words, unselfconscious, pre-architectural human-made structures of pretty much any kind: walls, piles, effigies, hunting blinds. I'm also interested in the structures that animals and insects make unselfconsciously (one reason it astonishes me that it astonishes anyone that humans have "always" made these things). So folks in the know give me books like this one. It's an overview of the phenomenon and Williams does a decent job of exploring these often enigmatic forms from the past. With our modern need to label and categorize everything, one can sort of separate cairn-building as having two different-seeming purposes: usefulness (like trail-marking) and spiritual communion with the locus deii (call it manitou here in north america). The thing we don't grasp too well these days, is how united those two purposes were for pre-literate people and how arbitrary our labeling is (and somewhat deadening). Williams tiptoes cautiously towards a wider understanding, but he is reluctant to make any leaps in case he might look like one of those silly new-age people. So he sticks with the safe superficial narrative of various cultural cairn-building practices and purposes around the world, from Inuksuk to the ice cairns of the Scott expedition (now buried under tens of feet of snow and ice). I learned a few new things, but mostly it was touching on what I already have encountered elsewhere. New England, in fact, abounds with prehistoric rock structures and artifacts, all built, by the way, by the native people, anywhere from five hundred to many thousands of years ago (depending on when the land recovered enough from glaciation to have animals on it to hunt) and NOT wandering Vikings or Celts. In the last ten years archaeologists have just begun to wake up and accept that it isn't just a matter of a few rock mounds, say, like the one destroyed on Monument Mountain that Williams mentions and that the stone walls of New England were not all Yankee-made. For someone new to the subject or curious this is a perfect place to begin.… (más)
Much of this book was silly nonsense. There was some that was good, but not a lot and substantial silliness in between the 'good parts'. It is kind of the west coast approach to natural history....don't offend anyone and be sure to include a little bit of everything. I've seen cairns in the wild in many places in this world and would have enjoyed a more substantial approach to the cultural reasons for their being where they are. That will not be found in this book. Still, though some good stuff.
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- Obras
- 11
- Miembros
- 402
- Popularidad
- #60,416
- Valoración
- 3.8
- Reseñas
- 29
- ISBNs
- 40
