PORT ANGELES — A wooden trail more than a century old that links downtown to the city’s upper reaches has been revealed in all its zigging and zagging glory.
Last week, workers from city Public Works and Utilities and Parks and Recreation cleared brush and debris and removed tree limbs from the switchback path known as the Zigzag, located just south of the intersection of Oak and First streets.
“A landmark in Port Angeles is visible again,” city spokeswoman Teresa Pierce said in a prepared statement.
“With increased foot traffic to the new Country Aire store, cleaning up the Zigzag follows in the city’s commitment to be ‘In Partnership with the Community.’”
The Zigzag begins at the end of Oak Street and stretches back and forth up a bluff for about 200 paces to Second Street.
It took about $1,000 to unmask the path, Public Works & Utilities Director Glenn Cutler said.
“It’s been probably a few years until we’d gotten someone who actually called in and said, ‘You know, I can’t see up or down from there when we walk down. The vegetation used to be a lot shorter,” Cutler said last week.
The original Zigzag was built in the 1890s, when the streets were dirt and people rode horses and carriages or just walked, Clallam County Historical Society Executive Director Kathy Monds said.
After all, the first car in Port Angeles was a 1906 Buick, according to Port Angeles, Washington: A History, Volume I (there was no Volume II, Monds said.)
The Zigzag is in a class with downtown’s Laurel Street stairs from First Street to the bluff, Cutler said.
“For pedestrian access to the bluff and the downtown area, they are very important.”
The Zigzag was a main pedestrian arterial between downtown businesses and fast-growing Cherry Hill “when the town was looking to grow out of just the downtown area,” Monds said.
The path’s current version is probably the third or fourth incarnation of the Zigzag, which was prone to collapsing from slides, Cutler said.
The city kept rebuilding it because otherwise pedestrians would have to walk west to Cherry Street or east to Lincoln to get to Second Street.
There were already “old memories” of the Zigzag by July 1959, according to a headline atop a Port Angeles Evening News article written by Jack Henson, famously known as The Wandering Scribe.
Soon after Port Angeles was incorporated in 1890, the city fathers turned their attention to the bluff, Henson said in the Evening News, a predecessor to the Peninsula Daily News.
“One of the first acts of the newly incorporated city of Port Angeles was to build the Oak St. zig zag,” Henson wrote.
“It was a notable civic improvement.”
The original path “zigged and zagged its way down hill almost to the base of the bluff and then took off as a straight walkway high in the air to 1st St,” Henson wrote.
“Early day folks here ‘pointed with pride’ to that old zig zag.”
But those slides got some people in trouble.
“Several absent-minded people who had forgotten that the zigzag on Oak Street had been washed away, came very near walking off the bluff this week,” said a Jan. 12, 1896, news item in the Democrat-Leader newspaper of Port Angeles.
And in the Jan. 31, 1896, edition of the same publication was this lighthearted note:
“The new zigzag on Oak Street is a thing of beauty and joy for as long as another slide don’t come.”
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
