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Voices of Bellevue: Fred Herman
Eastside Heritage Center’s oral history collection contains almost 200 interviews. In the following abridged excerpt from his oral history Fred Herman, the first Bellevue city planner, describes how he and his colleagues laid out the downtown grid in the 1950s.
Fred: Bellevue, when it started, was the nearest thing to a clean sheet of paper that I think any planner ever encountered. That was a beautiful thing to see because there was almost nothing here that you had to renew or tear down. Urban renewal was for some other place, not here. This was a clean sheet, so if you looked at the culture at that time, it was different from what it was when older cities were built. When older cities were built there were horses and carts, and there were many, many pedestrians because the buildings were tight together. They were not separated. They needed alleys, for example, to deliver products and to take garbage away.
When we looked at this new city that was going to grow here, we didn’t have any wagons. Garbage, well, there were other ways to handle that besides alleys. We didn’t have any pedestrians we could identify anyplace. We had lots of cars, not an awful lot of them, but quite a few cars, and so we looked at the speed of a car as opposed to the speed of a pedestrian, things like that, and the dollar value of land, which at that time was relatively cheap in terms of its use. So we said, “Maybe we should try to design blocks that fit the car”. Public transportation was not a reality. There was a bus that went to Seattle in the morning and came back at night. That was a private enterprise.
We laid out the pattern into a square, from 100th to 112th and from Main to 12th and we divided the pattern up into major streets, which were 100th, 104th, 108th, and 112th, and Main, 4th, 8th, and 12th, those were the primary six lane streets. Then we divided those big blocks into quarters, with 102nd, 106th, etc., 2nd, 6th, 10th, and so on. Those were the secondary streets. This gave us pretty good-sized square blocks, bigger than the typical older city block because it was serving essentially the automobile to get around for circulation.
Photo Caption:Fred Herman, ca. 1968. (Eastside Heritage Center, 1991.01.01.)
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To learn more about Bellevue and Eastside history, contact the Eastside Heritage Center at (425) 450-1049 or visit www.EastsideHeritageCenter.org.
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