Seattle: 1900-1920 -From Boomtown, Through Urban Turbulence ...

Part Onebusy installing utilities and leveling the city’s downtown hills. Housing constructionpeaked in the years 1908 1909 as the city geared up for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-PacificExposition. By 1907 the number of lumber mills had doubled, though none of Seattle’smills approached the size of Tacoma’s. While Tacoma’s twenty-one mills, keyed to theexport and Midwest markets, produced about 80,000 board feet a day, Seattle’s twentysevenmilled only 47,000 board feet a day.Spurred by the demand in Alaska for boats and barges, machinery, and heavy andlight hardware, the shipbuilding and foundry industries expanded steadily throughout thefirst two decades of the century. The pioneer Clarence Bagley noted a dozen shipyardsemploying about nineteen hundred men at the beginning of the century. Moran Brothers’yard, the city’s largest, was subsidized by $135,000 from a community subscription drive,earning it a Navy contract in 1902 to build the USS Nebraska. The city fairly shook whenthe steel hull of the battleship was launched in October 1904.The long shed for the Nebraska’s construction runs through the middle of the 1901 artist’s birds-eye of the MoranBrothers Shipyard south of Charles Street, below.