Wallace Redux

I’ve never been to Wallace, Idaho but I simply couldn’t get that place out of my head in spite of the controversy[1] surrounding its Center of the Universe claim. Seemingly, there is an odd story for each of its 960 residents. This one involves a stoplight.

It all comes down to geography and in this case topography, as is natural on Twelve Mile Circle. Here is Wallace:

Wallace occupies a small, relatively flat valley carved out by the south fork of the Coeur D’Alene River. It sits at about 2,800 feet above sea level. Surrounding hills thrust steeply upward several hundred feet above the valley floor. Homes and businesses fill the flatlands. Wallace has precious room to spare.

I’ll use a Street View image to further explain the situation. Go ahead and rotate it around 360 degrees. That will provide a good understanding of the buildable surface as constricted by rapid elevation changes.


Blocking a Freeway

Did you notice that this image comes from the deck of an elevated freeway? That’s part of the story too. Viaducts take longer to build, require more material, and present greater engineering challenges than surface freeways. They are also significantly more expensive to build and maintain, and yet, an elevated freeway traverses Wallace.

No interstate highway in the United States travels further than Interstate 90. It takes a daunting 3,099 miles journey between Boston, Massachusetts and Seattle, Washington. However, one small complication left this mighty highway incomplete until 1991. Every car and truck had to exit the interstate at Wallace, slow down to a crawl, and suffer its infamous stoplight firsthand before returning to freeway speeds.

The residents of Wallace had nothing personal against freeways in general but they didn’t want one flattening their town either. Original designs identified a surface route that would have obliterated their business district. The physical limitations of a narrow river valley offered few affordable alternatives. Sensing destruction and growing concerned, Wallace submitted documentation to the National Register of Historic Places to protect every single building from the onslaught of bulldozers and road graders.

The Wallace Historic District comprised 80 acres and 485 buildings. It later expanded to protect another 1,000 acres and 301 buildings. So Wallace halted freeway construction rather effectively. Traffic plodded slowly past the only stoplight blocking progress across an entire continent. Residents withstood relentless traffic as their only leverage against obliteration. Pressure mounted on highway builders to fix the problem.


The Solution

IMG_0728 (Wallace, Idaho via the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes, surface streets and I-90). Photo by John Russell; (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The Viaduct in Wallace

Only one overland route remained through town: the steep hillsides confining Wallace where homes could not be built. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reporting on the highway’s 1991 completion, described the final segment as a “cantilevered, five-story-high S-curve” hugging the mountains [link no longer available].

The residents of Wallace held a mock funeral for their stoplight just to show there were no hard feelings. They placed their beloved traffic signal in a custom-designed coffin and enshrined it in the Wallace District Mining Museum where visitors can still view it today.

This will probably be my final story about Wallace. Even so, feel free to explore one more fascinating fun fact on your own. I’ll leave that story untouched (no pun intended) to preserve just a tiny shred of decorum here.


12MC Loves Footnotes!

[1]Matthew of the prullmw site countered this claim with photographic evidence from the Fremont District of Seattle, which led me to conclude that the true Center of the Universe must be somewhere within the Pacific Northwest. Drawing a circle that incorporates both Wallace, ID and Seattle, WA produces the following result:

Walla Walla via Google Maps

The Center of the Universe should be located somewhere within this area. Hey, isn’t Walla Walla firmly entrenched within that circle? Now, Matthews’ claim is starting to make more sense! Suspicious. Very suspicious.

Comments

4 responses to “Wallace Redux”

  1. Steve_CTMQ Avatar

    Hello?! Anyone?! IDMQ is just dying to be completed!

    There is an official highway sign on I-90 in Western MA near where the Appalachian Trail crosses it stating that travelers are at the highest point on I-90 until somewhere in SD. I love that sign.

    I mean really, who cares about that besides me and maybe 2 other people per year who read it.

    Another strange thing about I-90 is that if you pick it up from I-91 in Northampton (in the middle of the state) and travel west, you get one of those little toll cards. Upon reading it you learn that every exist west costs exactly $0.00. When you hit the NY border, yup, you have to stop at a booth, hand it to the toll taker and be on your way – for free. (This occurs going East as well.)

    Note: MA is considering adding actual tolls to the tolls to recoup some budgetary shortfall.

    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar

      Steve, I think we’ve established that you probably won’t be completing a Delaware Museum Quest once you finish Connecticut (and I tend to agree after a full day of touring around northern Delaware today… although I took a bunch of great geo-weirdness photos), so perhaps YOU might be the right person to complete the Idaho Museum Quest.

  2. Jeff Rundell Avatar
    Jeff Rundell

    I grew up in Pullman, went to college there and Ellensburg, did my Army basic training at Ft Lewis and live in Seattle less than a mile from Fremont, all within the Center of the Universe circle! I feel so important.

    In junior high school my (male) friends and I spent a certain amount of time speculating about the “bordello” in Wallace, which we thought and/or hoped was still open.

    From the above photo it appears that Wallace has quite recovered from being trashed by the eruption of Dante’s Peak in 1997.

  3. frank debenedetti Avatar

    Another one of the major headlines in the history of Wallace, ID is Bunker Hill Silver Mine, which despite the fact that it is the second largest Superfund Cleanup site of all-time, and despite the fact that even after the massive EPA clean-up, still dumps 70 tons of toxic silver and zinc sludge each year into the Coeur D’ Alene River that flows downriver some 60 miles until it reaches the beautiful Coeur D’ Alene Lake. I visited Northern Idaho several times back in the 1990’s and was horrified to learn about the Silver mine and the poisoning of generations of children raised there. The mine provided many great jobs to locals for years, but at what cost? The river flows along right next to you drive along the 90 Freeway, between Coeur D’ Alene and Wallace.

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