The original
city streetcar system in Seattle ceased operations in April 1941 and was replaced with a network of
electric trolleybuses and motor buses. City councilman
George Benson first proposed the idea of building a streetcar line along the Seattle waterfront in 1974, a year after he was elected to the council, to be operational in time for the national
Bicentennial on July 4, 1976. The line would use vintage streetcars, and the goal was to create an attraction that would bring tourists and local residents to the waterfront, to help rejuvenate the area, which had already begun a slow transition from a purely industrial district to one with shops and cultural attractions such as the (then-planned, later built)
Seattle Aquarium. Eventually, the proposal garnered enough support from the public and Benson's fellow council members that funds were allocated for an engineering and design study, "More than 70 percent" of the affected business owners endorsed taxing themselves to provide an estimated $1 million to fund completion of the streetcar project. The extension opened for regular service on June 23, 1990. The line's fourth ex-Melbourne streetcar, No. 272, entered service earlier that month. On June 1, 2002, the King County Council approved legislation to rename the line in honor of councilmember Benson, christening it the "George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line". The streetcar stations were rebranded and repainted in August 2003.
Cancellation of service The streetcar ceased operation on November 18, 2005, when the maintenance barn was demolished to make room for the
Seattle Art Museum's
Olympic Sculpture Park. A new maintenance barn was proposed to be built at Occidental Park to allow the resumption of operations as early as summer 2007. However,
Metro cancelled involvement after delays made the new facility unlikely to be completed before the demolition of the
Alaskan Way Viaduct began. An alternative proposal by the
Port of Seattle was to extend the line northward along
Myrtle Edwards Park to
Smith Cove, where a new maintenance barn would be built on Port property. This proposal was not pursued. In 2007, two years into the suspension of service, the route was named by National Geographic Society as one of the 10 Great Streetcar routes. In spring 2012, a large portion of the trackage and the stations at Pike, University, Madison and Washington streets were demolished in as a part of the construction project drilling a
deep bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The City of Seattle began studying the possibility of bringing streetcars back to the city center in late 2012. The locally preferred alternative for this project adopted in late 2014 supported a route along 1st Avenue and not Alaskan Way. James Corner Field Operations, the Manhattan-based landscape-architecture firm hired to recommend a new vision for the Seattle waterfront once the Viaduct has been demolished, also recommended the Streetcar not be returned to Alaskan Way, but to nearby First Avenue instead. While future plans for the line were determined, the streetcars were stored in an old warehouse in SoDo for more than a decade. In 2015, the Federal Transit Administration informed King County that if the streetcars are not put back in service soon, Metro would need to pay $205,000 to compensate the agency for its remaining investment in the cars. At the same time, the warehouse used to store the streetcars was in poor condition and the land needed for expansion of a neighboring bus base. The plan closely mirrors one suggested in May 2009 by then Seattle Mayor,
Greg Nickels. The remaining three cars were sold by King County to
St. Louis, for potential use on the heritage
Delmar Loop Trolley line. The specific cars sold to St. Louis were Nos. 482, 512, and 518, and they left Seattle in early June 2016. The streetcars retained by King County Metro are Nos. 272 and 605 (along with 525, which never entered service, and has been kept only as a source of parts). Because the warehouse in which they had been stored since the end of Waterfront Streetcar service in 2005 was due to be torn down, to make way for expansion of a Metro bus garage, the streetcars were moved out in early June 2016, to a private site in
Arlington, Washington, where they will be stored indefinitely, awaiting possible future developments in the proposals for their return to service. ==Route==