It was Ron Edge, a friend and collector and guide for our sometimes feature here of “Edge Clippings,” who gently pulled this week’s subject from a short stack of historical prints and asked, “Do you know where this is?” I did and my heart leaped because of it.  The sheds were easily referenced to two other surviving glimpses into parts of the Belltown Ravine. (See below for one of them.) Ron’s third view is the most recent and the most direct.

The ravine was unique for there were only two breaks in the embankment or bluff that once rose abruptly from the beach to varying heights for the mile between Columbia and Broad Streets.  A small ravine near Seneca Street was used for a tribal graveyard. This much larger ravine between Bell and Blanchard Streets cut nearly three blocks into the northwest slope of Denny Hill before reaching grade near Bell, between First and Second Avenues.

The sheds, some of them built for squatting, were removed when the Great Northern cut into the bank to dig its tunnel beneath the business district.  The ravine was filled by fits between the 1880s and 1920s and then forgotten.  I found its topography on a map when asked to figure out the source of human bones that were found in what I soon determined to be landfill brought from another place.  Since the lost ravine had no name, I took the “explorer’s right” and named it the “Belltown Ravine” for the neighborhood it penetrates.

It was another old friend, the yachtsman, wit and author Scott Rohrer who’s heart also leapt when first shown this photograph.  But Scott’s stir was more for the 32’ sloop Evelyn May here held steady in her cradle at the mouth to the ravine.  Scott identifies Seattle Yacht Club Commodore C.D. Stimson as the one who ordered the Evelyn May and naval architect Leigh Coolidge as the sloop’s designer.  In an essay he wrote on this subject for the Binnacle, fittingly the Yacht club’s periodical, Scott notes, “We have no record of her builder who may have made his home in this little pocket and worked for a larger yard.”  And the maritime historian adds, “She won a number of races, some in heavy weather.”

In the gaggle of vessels hugging the sides of the Pike Street pier it is the 1200-ton wooden steamship Santa Ana that shows a full profile.  She may be backing out of the slip between the Pike Street and Schwabacher’s piers.  However, there is a chop on Elliot bay and the black smoke from her stack may be pushed east by a breeze off of Elliott Bay. Perhaps the Santa Ana is coming home from Alaska to her Northwestern Steamship Company (the name is written on the pier) terminus.

The Pike Pier is a triumph of preservation for us, as are the other “Gold Rush Piers” that still line up behind the photographer of this scene – and so behind Jean too.  Both the “now and then” were snapped from the water end of Pier 57, the old Milwaukee Railroad pier.  All of the old piers follow the angle into the bay prescribed for them in 1897, although all were built in the early 20^th Century.  The wealth got from warehousing and wharf rates during the gold rush of the late 1890s allowed the dock owners to build these conforming and bigger piers after the greatest excitement of the rush settled down – although some gold fever continued with the rush to Nome during their construction.

The Pike Pier was planned in 1903 and completed a year later by Ainsworth and Dunn.  They also rented space to both the steamship line and the Mt. Vernon farmer Willis Wilbur Robinson, whose name is writ large along all sides of the Pike Pier.  Robinson stuffed Skagit River sternwheelers with hay for delivery to the Pike Pier, until railroads did the hauling cheaper.  About 1911 Robinson’s block letters were replaced by ones for a steamship agent named Dodwell.

Ainsworth and Dunn sold fish primarily.  They started the move of fish merchants to the north end of the central waterfront in the mid 1890s.  Before their lead most fish commerce was handled south of Yesler’s Wharf.  In 1916 Dodwell was replaced by Pacific Net and Twine Company, and from then until after World War Two, Pike Pier was home for fishermen and the professionals who serve and represent them.

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Frank Shaw recorded his look up the old Pike Street Hill Climb less than two months before Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman grabbed a shovel to break ground here for the grand stairway that Jean Sherrard shows us with his “now.” So it is not so long ago that Uhlman shoveled (Jan. 17, 1977) and Shaw snapped (Nov. 22, 1976). Shaw almost always dated his negatives, and the roving photographer returned many times to this scene to track with his Hasselblad how this public work advanced.

The oldest built hill climb here was a trestle, down and up, which coal cars were winched between the Pike Street Coal Wharf and a narrow-gauged railroad that was run to the south end of Lake Union.

There the cars took on coal from scows that were alternately hauled and floated there from mines on the east side of Lake Washington. It was a difficult route, but it paid very well. In 1878 the entire operation was smartly replaced by a new railroad that ran around the south end of Lake Washington and thereby directly between the coal fields of Newcastle and a new coal wharf at the foot of King Street.

Panoramic photographs from the 1890s of Denny Hill show what appear to be steps near the top of this incline. Otherwise, buildings obscure the view. In 1911-13 a steep pedestrian trestle was built over the dangerous Railroad Avenue, and the trestle continued on high above these steps to connect the Pike Street Pier directly with the then 6-year-old Pike Place Public Market. The trestle was lost to the Alaskan Way Viaduct in the early 1950s, but not the steps below it.

Shaw’s photograph may make some readers downright nostalgic for the old public market and its rough surrounds.

WEB EXTRAS

Looking into the Market from the north on a recent evening:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few more variations on Pike Street Hill Climb aka Hillclimb.

And once again, here’s the photo taken in the video (click to enlarge):

(click – and click again – to enlarge photo)

I rode with Jean to his high – second floor balcony – assignment, and can witness to the skill he showed in moving the crowd into a shape most fitting.  The event itself involved a sequence of about eight speakers – preservationists and/or politicians.  Clay Eals was the Master of Ceremonies and he wore his big blue Australian (I think) hat.  (You can find Clay about four persons over from the far right end of the “This Place Matters” sign.  He is in a white T-shirt.)  The sun came out just before Jean started to work.  Every speaker Clay introduced was told that they should keep their remarks to 30 seconds, which means, I think, two minutes, but never more than that.   Our recent mayor, West Seattle’s Greg Nickels was there and with a fine beard too.   He kept his remarks to two minutes, which was in the spirit of 30 seconds.   Greg is in red just up and left from the left end of the “This Place Matters” sign.  The message was also a chanting motif of the event, with each speaker repeating the line while leading the crowd in a chorus of  “THIS PLACE MATTERS.”  At one moment in this chanting I looked too longingly towards the closed chicken dinner house, the  Homestead, and imagined – or heard – in an interval of “This Place Matters” one sounding of “Chicken Platters” while remembering the many poultry feasts we enjoyed during the founding and funding of The Log House Museum.   Someone counted 196 faces in that chorus.  Someone else added three Waldos.  So it was a crowd of two hundred then.

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Long ago when first I studied this look northwest across First Hill I was startled by its revelations of the hill’s topography. The hill does not, or did not, as we imagine steadily climb from the waterfront to the east. For instance, here Cherry Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues — the white picket fence that runs across the scene’s center marks the north side of that block — keeps a fairly flat grade and then, where it intersects with Sixth Avenue, defies all our modern expectations and dips to the east.

James Street, on the left, climbs First Hill between Fifth and Sixth on an exposed-timber trestle. To the lower (north) side of that bridge there was about a four-block pause between James and Columbia, Fifth and Seventh, in the steady climbing we expect of First Hill. Now in these blocks the flat Seattle Freeway repeats this feature ironically.

There are enough clues here to pull an approximate date for this unsigned cityscape, which looks northwest from near Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street. It is most likely sometime during the winter of 1887-88. The best clue is the Gothic spire atop the Methodist Episcopal Church (until recently First United Methodist) far left of center. There is still construction scaffolding on the sanctuary, which was completed at the corner of Marion and Third Avenue in 1889. On the far right horizon is the Central School (it burned down in 1888) and to this side of it the McNaught big home, recently featured in this column, at its original grade on the corner of Marion and Sixth.

This panorama is strewed with other pioneer landmarks, including the Western House at the southeast corner of Sixth and James. It is the large L-shaped box below the scene’s center.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul? – And don’t forget that we’ve got an appointment this afternoon in West Seattle.  At 1:30, we’ll be taking a photo of a crowd in front of the Homestead Restaurant, as mentioned in last week’s column.

Paul replies: I’ll begin by adding my voice to your voice, Jean.  Yes I’ll be at Alki Point to be photographed by you, because, you know I riding over there with you.   And I do have something to add as well to the above story.  This is easy.  May the reader go back to May 1 of this year (nine pages back) and find the now-then feature about the McNaught mansion at 6th and Marion.  It includes other images that relate to this week’s point about the odd topographic ways of First Hill in its ascension from 5th to 8th through a section holding (or whatever) Jefferson through Marion Streets.   One of the pictures supporting that story is the same one that was used for the primary photograph this week.  So the reader gets two captions for one.

On the side and also in closing, I will say I am most startled by finding that “back then” when the flowers of May were asked to wait a while longer by the showers of April, we had only reached Our Daily Sykes #18, and here we are into the seventies.  Horace would be proud of us Jean.