When I first visited the Neely Mansion with my friend Inger Anne Hage it was a mere 71 years old – my age now.  But now at 116 it looks considerably better than I.  This improvement is the work of the many volunteers who have gathered around it for the restoration and maintenance of this national landmark.

Aaron and Sarah Neely completed the ornate farmhouse east of Kent in 1894.  Aaron was seven when he crossed the Oregon Trail with his parents David and Irene Neely in 1853.  The family came directly to the future White/Green River valley and was thereby among its earliest settlers.

One of the Neely Mansion volunteers, Karen Meador, introduced me to the historical photograph of the mansion and also took the “repeat” during a visit by Neely descendants.  And this would be the proper place to name them.

First the visitors in the “now” photo, left to right. Left to right, Ken Beckman, Aaron Beckman, Grant Beckman, Howard Elliot Neely, and Jane Neely Beckman.  Howard is the 93-year-old grandson of the Aaron Neely who built it. Understanding the difficulty of “reading” the faces of the six figures posing in the “then” we will note two with reserved confidence.  The young boy, third from the left, is – or seems to be -Howard Elliot Neely’s father Aaron Neely Jr., and the woman, far right, his mother Sarah Graham Neely, Aaron Senior’s wife.

The photograph is almost as old as the house, for by 1900 the family missed the social excitements of town life and moved to nearby Auburn.  According to Meador “Through the next several decades the mansion and its 200 fertile acres were leased variously to Swiss, Japanese and Filipino tenant farmers.”  Sometime in the 1960’s it made a transition to disrepair.  That is how we found it while on our way to the Black Diamond bakery.  We peeked in a front window and found a mess.  Now thanks to the Neely Mansion Association this classic Victorian is open and operating.

WEB  EXTRA

(click photos to enlarge)

I came upon this revealing look into the East Green Lake business district directly after winning a barrel full of umbrellas with the low and only bid of $1.50. I wanted one umbrella, but to get it had to purchase them all at a mid-1980s Wallingford estate auction.

But behind the barrel was a box filled with prints and negatives, including this week’s subject. There were about 400 in all, and all by Lennard P. LaVanway, who had been a Green Lake-based commercial photographer. With very few exceptions, all the contents — weddings, babies, homes, churches, businesses — are images from the general Green Lake neighborhood, and they date from 1946-47.

Here, LaVanway’s centerpiece is the Green Lake Theater in 1947. Both films on the marquee — “The Time, the Place and the Girl” (a musical comedy) and “Falcon’s Adventure” — were released in December of ’46. The theater opened in 1937 with Art Deco features including curves, parapets and a decorated tower.

Lorenz Lukan, the manager and part owner, lived nearby at the Woodland Court Apartments. Lukan’s 1966 obituary in Boxoffice, describes him coming to Seattle in 1891 to become an “early-day film distributor and theater owner . . . He operated the Beacon, Arabian and other suburban theaters in Seattle as Lukan’s Far West Theatres.”

It is a testimony to the exceptional buoyancy of the movie business that such a fine theater could be opened in a Seattle neighborhood during the Great Depression. It is also a testimony to television that it would not last. Stripped of its Art Deco qualities, the not-so-old theater’s long-term tenant is now Pacific Color, which has managed to stay open as a photo-service business despite the digital revolution.

WEB EXTRAS

Jean writes: Just across the street from Pacific Color/once Green Lake Theatre, looms the Pit, several years ago slated for development of something-or-other, now a great empty space, a maw; territory behind chain link, beyond the pale. The eye avoids it, an absence, a blank zone. Terra incognita without monsters.

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean a few things, but not as much as I would like.  It is the usual problem: I cannot find the photographs, either in negatives or scans for two subjects that relate to the above.  One of these “missing” – temporarily – is an early 20th century look at the Maust Transit Company’s pie-shaped livery at Winona and 73rd, now a marblecrete apartment or condo.  The original clapboard was Lennard LaVanway’s studio for a few years following the Second World War.  I came upon a few boxs of LaVanways prints and negatives by attending an auction-run estate sale out of his home on 50th Street N. (near the freeway) about 25 years.  I’ll print some examples of his work below.   There are a number of subject that have made it into “now-and-then” over the past 28 years that have to do with Green Lake, and we will insert two of them next.   And here I must thank you for the bonus, above, of the pit.  I hoped for such.   It is mentioned in one of the two stories to follow.

EAST GREEN LAKE, Ca. 1911

Deciding, perhaps, to stay clear of the mud on Woodlawn Ave. N., the unidentified photographer of this postcard set his or her tripod safely on the sidewalk at the alley.  The subject is therefore peculiarly unrevealing of the clapboard businesses on the left.  (For that we include directly below another view – somewhat later of the same block taken from the street.)  Still the view from the alley looks into the heart of the then booming East Green Lake Business district sometime after 1907 and before 1912.

The scene has its charms.  Note the man waving an American flag while being carted by a friend (or an employee) on a wheel borrow through the street soup.  Perhaps it is the pharmacist L.C. Kidd pushing his brother Dr. A.B. Kidd toward their Green Lake Drug Store – the closest storefront on the far left.  In its 1903 anniversary issue the Green Lake News notes, “Probably no man at Green Lake is better known or more popular than Dr. Kidd.”

The 1907 date was picked because the Green Lake State Bank was built then at the southeast corner of Woodlawn and 72^nd Street.  The modest one story structure can be seen over the heads of the couple (father and daughter?) on the sidewalk.  Appropriately the bank was the district’s first brick building and stayed so until the surviving two story brick business “block” was built in 1912 across 72^nd Street from the bank on the northeast corner of the intersection.  Here in the “then” scene its more typical pioneer clapboard predecessor is still standing.

The two-story frame building on the right (at the southwest corner) was replaced in 1949 with the stepped structure that appears in the “now’ scene. (When I find it or reshoot it.) The ’49 building was designed to continue the modern lines of the Greenlake Theatre with which it shares the block.  So it had no second floor windows.  The second floor occupant’s may have complained for that cheerless arrangement lasted about one years.  Windows were installed in 1950.

This scene may have been photographed in the late winter of 1911.  “Sure I bet on Hi Gill” is hand written on the border of the original postcard.  The controversial Gill was elected Seattle Mayor in 1910 the same year that Seattle women got the vote.  In a February, 1911 election Gill was recalled as soft on vice.  Most of the 23,000 newly registered women voted against him. But not the owner of this postcard.

Then Caption.  In December 2002 I wrote the following caption: In the about 93 years that separate these views (I hope to find the “now” later and insert it.) of the East Green lake Business District practically all the structures have been replaced.  The brick bank building at the southeast corner of Woodland Ave. and 72^nd Street has been drastically remodeled.  The last I looked, which was three hours ago while returning home from dinner with Jean and Karen near Green Lake, the bank corner and everything else on that full block was an impressively huge construction pit.  The plans to build upon it were chilled by the recent economy.  See Jean’s snap of it above.

GREEN LAKE STATION

Thanks to the industry of M. L. Oaks we have a few score photographs of Seattle neighborhoods in the early 20th Century that might otherwise not have been “captured.”  Here with his back to Green Lake, Oaks recorded this view up Northeast 72nd Street and across E. Green Lake Drive North about 1909.

Also close to the photographer – but still like the lake behind him – is the primary stop for the Green Lake Electric Railway that by this time had been making settlement around the lake a great deal easier for twenty years.  Much like the University District, which for a number of its early years was referred to most often as “The University Station”, so this most vibrant of commercial neighborhoods beside the lake was known as “Green Lake Station.”

The number of businesses and services available just in this short block running one block east from NE 72nd Street to its intersection with Woodlawn Ave. N.E. is an impressive witness to the commercial vitality of this then booming neighborhood.  Included here on the right or south side of 72nd  – moving right to left – are Green Lake Hardware and Furniture, a dentist, a real estate office, an Ice Cream parlor that stocks candy and cigars as well, the Model Grocery Co. and the Hill Bros who established the first store in the East Green Lake Shopping District in 1901.   At the end of the block – still on this south side – is the Central Market.  Across 72nd on its north side are the neighborhood hotel, post office and a paint and wallpaper merchant

Completing this tour of 72nd, two blocks to the east the belfry of Green Lake Baptist rises above its southeast corner with 5th Avenue NE.  And to this side of the church, worshipers can complete their cleansing if they feel the need with a visit to the North Seattle Bath House.  But then so can the bankers.  Green Lake’s only brick structure at the time, the single story Green Lake State Bank, is set at the southeast corner of 72nn Street and Woodlawn Ave – at the scene’s center.

Now and Then caps together.  Nothing, it seems, survives on East Green Lake’s NE 72nd Street from the early 20th Century to now.   Both views look east from E. Green Lake Drive North. (Historical photo courtesy of John Cooper)

OTHER VIEWS of the EAST GREEN LAKE NEIGHBORHOOD by Lennard LaVanway recorded following the Second World War.

We will conclude – for now –  with a few of LaVanway’s subjects found at his estate sale about 25 years ago.   After holding on for a few years as a neighborhood commercial photographer (there are lots of baby shots in the collection) LaVanway landed a job at the University of Washington.

When we find them we will add more LaVanway subjects in a blogaddendum – and other Green Lake stories too, although probably not together.