Ramps to Nowhere: SR 520's Ghost Ramps in the Arboretum

For decades, a set of freeway ramps stood in the wetlands at the north end of the Washington Park Arboretum, connected to nothing. They were built in the early 1960s to link SR 520 to the R. H. Thomson Expressway, a planned north-south highway that would have cut through the east side of the Arboretum, as well as the Rainier Valley, the Central District, Madison Park, Montlake and other neighborhoods. [1]

The expressway was never built. The Arboretum Foundation says the City of Seattle abandoned the plans in 1967, after years of strong opposition from environmental and neighborhood groups, and that Seattle voters killed the project for good in a 1972 referendum. Wikipedia dates a citizens' freeway revolt against it to May 4, 1969, and says the plan was dropped in 1971. Wikipedia also traces the revolt to opposition to SR 520 itself: in 1962 the architect Victor Steinbrueck objected to the 'naked brutality of unimaginative structures' such as the planned crossing of Portage Bay. [1][2]

One ramp was put to use, as the on-ramp from Lake Washington Boulevard to eastbound SR 520. The others stood unused and became known as the ramps to nowhere. They were popular with sunbathers and swimmers, who dove off them. Writer Knute Berger called them 'garden follies' and 'very expensive diving boards,' and also celebrated them as symbols of grassroots citizen activism. After WSDOT announced in 2013 that it would dismantle them, a local art collective wrapped a pair of their support columns in reflective acrylic in 2014, an installation called Gate to Nowhere. [1][2]

Most of the ramps, along with the adjacent SR 520 on-ramps and off-ramps at Lake Washington Boulevard, were removed in 2017 at the start of the SR 520 Bridge Replacement Project. One portion, just west of Lake Washington Boulevard and Foster Island Road, was kept as parking for construction crews. From February to mid-April 2024, crews with enormous excavators demolished that final remnant. Ray Larson, associate director of UW Botanic Gardens, said the last ramps had been described as 'temporary onramps' when they were built in 1962, were never meant to be permanent, and sat on fill that included large pieces of rubble and concrete. [1]

One piece stays on purpose. WSDOT and its contractor left a single bent, four columns and a support beam, in the landscape to commemorate the former freeway route and the activism that stopped it. The two acres under the last ramps are to go back to the Arboretum, and the rest of the 28-acre peninsula, which the state condemned in 1959 to build the original Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, is to follow when the SR 520 project is completed at the end of this decade. [1][2]