By Jean Godden

I have a souvenir, an ugly lump of concrete, sitting on my living room book shelf. Once it was part of the Pioneer Square on-ramp to state route 99, one of the first sections of the aerial roadway built back in the 1950s and one of the first ramps to be removed.

There will be many more lumps of concrete spilled in days to come. The entire Alaskan Way Viaduct is coming down, its cement (unlike the substance in my souvenir) will be reprocessed and used for infrastructure elsewhere, perhaps to pave a surface roadway on the waterfront, a bicycle path or pedestrian walkway. 

Although it has been a long time coming, the ugly old viaduct is scheduled for demolition after the SR-99 tunnel opens for travel sometime in 2019. The contractor has been working tirelessly to complete that two-mile-long tunnel, one of the longest roadway tunnels in the U.S. 

The upper deck of the tunnel roadway was half finished when Bertha completed digging in April of this year. On Nov. 2, workers began loading precast panels into the tunnel to build the roadway's lower deck. You can actually watch the crews working away installing the rebar and pouring cement on a WashDOT video. It's history in the making.

Seattle isn't the only city to take down a major roadway. In 1991, San Francisco demolished the double-deck Embarcadero freeway, damaged by the 1989 Port Loma Earthquake. Since then, San Francisco's waterfront has blossomed with park areas, public art, an iconic Ferry Terminal and other attractions, including a public market modeled after Seattle's Pike Place Market.

Even earlier, in 1974, Portland demolished Harbor Drive, six lanes of Highway 99, freeing land along the Willamette River. The former roadway was transformed into public open space, pedestrian walkways and upscale development. There are other grand examples of highways beaten into park spaces, such as Boston's Big Dig and Milwaukee's Riverwalk project. Success of these projects is prompting others to consider eliminating highways such as Route 710 in Pasadena, Ca., Interstate 70 in Denver and the Scajaquada Expressway in New York state.

Meanwhile in Seattle, work continues on our Viaduct takedown. Marshall Foster, director of Seattle's Office of Waterfront Management, contemplates a busy year in 2018. Utility replacement -- relocating electrical and natural gas lines attached to the Viaduct -- will begin in late spring and summer. Work will also start on Pier 62, the "Concert Pier." That project dovetails with conclusion of the seawall replacement.

One of the year's most important steps will be formation of a Local Improvement District (LID). The district will identify properties benefiting from waterfront development. Those properties -- more than 5,000 of them -- will be assessed by the city in order to pay for public improvements. Foster figures the City Council will be voting on the LID formation sometime in the summer of 2018. Ratepayers will include large commercial properties, homeowners' associations and real estate developments.

The waterfront makeover has required careful coordination among partner agencies. The state continues to work on the tunnel and will start building the surface roadway even before demolition of the Viaduct. Also much involved is King County Metro, which will be routing buses around construction sites. There will be temporary route shifts to Fourth and then to First Avenue and a new permanent pathway up Columbia Street. Foster assured West Seattle bus commuters of easy access into town.

Once all preliminary work is complete, the earthquake-damaged and waterfront-dominating Viaduct will at long last be razed. Foster estimates the grand removal will happen in January, 2019. You need not mark your calendars, since giant projects sometimes take longer than expected. Still it's a good bet that we will at last be rid of the obstructive, patched-together Viaduct sometime in 2019.

Seattle can expect to reap great rewards from the Viaduct removal, the biggest change since Denny Hill was sluiced into Elliott Bay. The city will gain miles of public space, 20 acres of parks and a promenade to the Pike Place Market. The view from the promenade will echo vistas the Viaduct offered. Seattle will gain a waterfront doorway unmatched anywhere in the world. And, with luck, I may score another chunk of concrete, a souvenir from Seattle's so-called "worst mistake."