By Jean Godden

Everyone talks about Jeff Bezos and how he brought Amazon, HQ1, to Seattle. But few discuss who and what delivered Amazonia, the vast South Lake Union campus, to the Emerald City.

Long before you could order two-day delivery on everything from T-shirts to Tide, South Lake Union bordered "the prairie," a meeting ground for indigenous peoples. South Lake Union also abutted Denny Hill, which later was sluiced into Elliott Bay and graded into flatland by R. H. Thomson, the city engineer who drove the nation's largest urban land use project. 

In 1910, a Seattle committee took Thomson's advice and hired Virgil Bogue, a City Beautiful devotee, to draw up a plan for the flatland. Bogue proposed a grandiose center with six municipal buildings, including a city hall, courthouse, library and art museum. The center would sit astride roads drawing people into Seattle from North, South and East. 

However, there were skeptics. Landowners around the civic center said that the plan would entail raising the ground 30 feet (land just sluiced into the bay) and would cost more than $100 million. "No sane person would agree," said one letter writer. Voters, shaken by an economic downturn, rejected the plan on March 5, 1912. 

 South Lake Union languished, left like a forgotten pimple on the Seattle landscape. Its poorly-drained acres were devoted to florists' warehouses, commercial laundries, print shops and the Seattle Times. The Times owned 13 surface parking lots, the outlying ones called "the notorious rape lots."

 But there still were visionaries. One creative thinker was Seattle Times columnist John Hinterberger (aka "Hint"). In the early 1990s, Hint imagined a grand in-city park, dubbed "The Commons" Located north of Denny along Westlake, The Commons would be like New York's Central Park, an in-city playground for city dwellers. 

Once again, there were naysayers. They said that, at $300 million, it would be too expensive: a benefit only for yuppies working at nearby bio-techs. Opponents bad-mouthed the proposal, despite Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen's advancing $100,000 to buy and donate land. 

The Commons went to the ballot in 1995 and failed. In 1996, voters again rejected The Commons. 

After the devastating loss, Allen took back the property acquired with his loans. Vulcan, Allen's real estate division, began development. Up went cranes, in went a street car and a reengineered Mercer Street. And then came Amazon. 

While the Commons was dying, Amazon was just coming to life. 

 Jeff Bezos founded his company in July 5, 1994 as Cadabra Inc., selling cut-rate books out of his Bellevue garage. Bezos later changed the name to Amazon when his lawyer thought it sounded too much like cadaver.

The rest, of course, is Horatio Alger on steroids. Seattle-based Amazon grew from bargain books to the largest internet-based retailer in the world. The company has poured $38 billion into the economy; it has 40,000 employees working here and 8.1 million square feet of office space (projected to grow to 12 million). Seattle is the biggest company town in America.

Although some noisy socialists disparage Amazon's success, Seattle's position atop the economic boom remains the envy of many. Amazon heard from 238 bidders from 43 U.S. states, seven Canadian provinces and three Mexican states. They're vying to become Amazon's HQ2 and to have "whatever Seattle's having."

What comes with being the fastest growing city in the nation? With having the most construction cranes? With adding 57 newcomers each day? Along with bragging rights and benefits, there is a downside. Seattle rents are high, affordable housing is scarce, congestion is a pain and homelessness -- accelerated by the housing crisis -- is an ever-present roommate.

Although long-timers may miss the slower-paced town of yesteryear, Seattle should count its blessings. We should try to right the ship that's sailing up the Amazon. The city needs to carefully conserve its gold-rush-like profits -- the many millions in South Lake Union construction and property taxes -- and make plans for how to best sustain the windfall.

Wouldn't it be great if enhanced revenues could speed up and enhance that in-city park -- a later-day downtown Commons -- the one we missed in the 1990s? With the Viaduct coming down, with resources growing, we may soon have the spectacular Elliott Bay parkland, the metropolitan park that we have sought since the days of R. H. Thomson's regrade, Bogue's civic center and Hinterberger's Commons. It's a promise denied that we now can fulfill.