The Seattle Department of Transportation’s Route 40 work has scraped more than old asphalt from the tops of Fremont’s streets. Crews have unveiled century-old red bricks, offering a glimpse of our streetcar past.
According to local historian Valarie Bunn, the bricks were the easiest durable material to place around trolley tracks. Fremont’s streets once carried the Interurban Railway.
As geologist and author David B. Williams noted on his Substack, Streets Smart Naturalist, brick was also the most common hard-surface pavement in Seattle when the city began replacing dirt and planking roads around 1895. Williams also created a map of known brick streets in Seattle.
These aren’t just any bricks. By 1917, the Denny-Renton Clay and Coal Company was reportedly the world’s largest producer of street paving bricks, manufacturing them in Renton and shipping them across the country and overseas.
Fremonsters may recall that a Denny-Renton paving brick surfaced at Troll’s Knoll Park last October when a volunteer hit one while digging.
The current construction is part of SDOT’s Route 40 Transit-Plus Multimodal Corridor Project. Crews are continuing work on sidewalks, bus stop improvements, and installing new asphalt for smoother, more durable streets, according to SDOT.
The bricks will disappear under fresh asphalt, so one could say history will be baked back into the streets again.
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