Mount Baker Tunnel

The portals you are passing through are older than the freeway system they now carry, and they were built with art.

The Mount Baker Tunnel was completed in nineteen forty, bored through the clay of Mount Baker Ridge to link the new Lake Washington floating bridge with Rainier Avenue South. At the time, it ranked as the world's largest-diameter soft-earth tunnel, each of the twin bores twenty-nine feet across, driven through unstable glacial clay that made every foot of excavation a gamble against collapse. The contractor was Bates and Rogers Construction, and the workers broke through the north bore on April sixteenth, nineteen forty, digging from opposite ends until the two headings met. The tunnels officially opened on July second of that year.

What sets the Mount Baker Tunnel apart is what its builders put on the outside. The east portals were given an Art Deco treatment designed by architect Lloyd Lovegren, featuring nested concrete arches that reinterpret Gothic forms in the stripped-down geometric language of the nineteen thirties. Then the New Deal stepped in. The Federal Art Project commissioned sculptor James FitzGerald to create murals for the portal face. FitzGerald designed Portal of the North Pacific, a set of relief panels depicting the wildlife and peoples of the Pacific Northwest in the bold, flattened style the era favored. Engineering and art, publicly funded and permanently installed in the fabric of a working road tunnel.

The tunnel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two. In the nineteen eighties, a third bore was added to the north of the originals, opening in nineteen eighty-nine. The full Interstate Ninety interchange project through this corridor was completed in nineteen ninety-three. Today the tunnel also carries Sound Transit's Link light rail on its Two Line, threading trains through the same ridge that cars and trucks have crossed for more than eighty years.

The east portals, along with the Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge just beyond them, are a designated Seattle landmark. Drive through here and you are inside a piece of New Deal public works that most commuters never think to look at twice.