One Company's River, Everyone's Canal

In theory, Infrastructure is built for the public good, but that is not always the case. In our research for the book Detroit vs. Seattle, we cover 100 years of history and have unlocked consistent themes. One theme is who benefits from infrastructure projects; in one example, we looked at waterways. 

The Rouge: One River, One Winner

Henry Ford needed a shipping route that could bypass Detroit so he could build his vision for the Rouge Factory in the 1910's. The Rouge River, as it existed, was too narrow and too shallow for that kind of ambition. But Henry found a unique way to gain power over the Rouge River.  The Ford Motor Company had a contract to build ships for the U.S. Navy for WWI at the Rouge Factory. Because the project was tied to the war effort, Henry Ford gained the power to remove 51 property owners through condemnation proceedings, and the federal government paid some costs to dredge the rivers so the Ford Motor Company could create a transport route for the world's largest factory. Henry Ford was also a famous pacifist during WWI. His use of the war to gain access to private land to realize his vision shows how unprincipled he was in gaining power.

The Ford Motor Company (FMC) reaped the economic payoff. As the Rouge River expanded, FMC gained direct access to the Great Lakes shipping system, bypassing Detroit.  One of the single most consequential infrastructure projects in the region's early industrial history had one beneficiary: FMC. Not the community (see footnote below).

A Canal Built to Seattle

Seattle's waterway story starts elsewhere: with citizens who picked up shovels. Seattle sits on a geographic gift: Lake Washington and Lake Union sit just inland from Puget Sound. Citizens knew a canal connecting them to saltwater would let oceangoing vessels dock in freshwater, which is far less damaging to a hull than saltwater. The first attempt to build that canal came from ordinary Seattleites acting on pure civic will; it is called the "Seattle Spirit," where citizens literally started digging the canal themselves. It didn't work. Connecting two lakes to an ocean isn't a project a community can do with shovels, no matter how much spirit it brings.

Major Hiram Martin Chittenden, an Army engineer who'd already built roads through Yellowstone and flood basins along the Ohio River, got the canal built and made Seattle's vision his own.  But here's the part that matters most: Chittenden didn't design a canal for just the shipping industry. He designed it for both large commercial vessels and smaller leisure craft, serving business and citizens at the same time.

The locks opened in 1917, making it the only canal of its kind in the country connecting saltwater and freshwater. A shipbuilding industry grew up around it almost immediately, carrying Seattle through both World Wars as a major shipbuilding center. When that heavy industrial era passed, the locks didn't sit idle or get walled off; they simply shifted to leisure use. Today, roughly 75,000 vessels pass through them every year (See footnote below).

Who benefits from the public investment in infrastructure?

Both waterways transformed their regions. Both took vision, engineering, and outside help to pull off. But ask a simple question of each project: who was this built to benefit? And you get two completely different answers.

Dredging the Rouge benefited Ford Motor Company and launched Henry Ford's vision of complete control over the value chain. The Rouge Factory started shifting factory work out of Detroit in the 1920s.

The Chittenden Locks were built to benefit all of Seattle. The design baked in shared use from day one: commerce and citizens, industry and community, moving through the same water. The gains didn't concentrate in a single company; they spread across a maritime industry and citizens who could all draw on the same asset.

That's the pattern we keep finding as we dig into a century of these two cities' histories for the book. Detroit was built to serve an industry, and Seattle was built to serve its citizens' prosperity through creative work.

Want updates on the book? Sign up here.

---

If you want to know more about the early years of conflicts between Detroit and Auto industry, please read this dissertation by Jacob Dean Hall, called The myth of the motor city: urban politics, public policy, and the suburbanization of Detroit's automobile industry, 1878-1937 that he wrote in 2013, unforuantly Mr. Hall passed away a year after presenting this at the University of Iowa.

If you want to know more about the Chittenden Locks, please check out this book. The Ballard Locks by Anythony Wong

This book builds on the work of historians and researchers like Mr. Wong and Hall and their dedication to turning curiosity into history.