[This Clipping has now returned – but not yet Warren posing with the repeat.  Here, at least, is the text, and surprisingly it named the man holding the bundle of newspapers in the pix above.]

THE SEATTLE-EVERETT INTERURBAN

When the Seattle-Everett Interurban stopped running 50  years ago (Correction: it has now been 70 years, nearly.) it wasn’t with a whimper.  Car No. 53 pulled into the Seattle depot on the evening of Feb. 20, 1939, loaded with passengers feeling peeved over the trolley line’s demise.

The Interurban ran on its own tracks south of Everett until it reached Seattle’s Northwest 85th Street where it crossed onto city tracks for its final run to the terminal here at Eighth and Steward.  When the city started to pull up its trolley lines in 1939, the Interurban – its patronage increasingly depleted by new auto owners – had little choice but to call it quits.

Now on the golden anniversary (in 1989) of that forced retirement, the 30 years of the Seattle-Interurban’s service are recalled by Northwest rail enthusiast Warren Wing in his book, “To Seattle by Trolley.”  In the contemporary photo (yet to be uncovered for this printing)  Wing poses, book in hand, beside a Greyhound bound for Bellingham.  The North Coast Line’s Interurban also reached Bellingham, although a bus was required between Everett and Mount Vernon, where the passengers transferred again to rail for the last leg to Bellingham some of it over a thrilling trestle below Chuckanut Drive.  (We have n0w put up a pix of that “thrilling trestle” and you will find it “above” under “Chuckanut Drive & The Everett Interurban Trestle Below It.”)

Wing stands a few steps from the spot where in the historical scene dispatcher Delisle Manning prepares to hand over a bundle of Seattle Post-Intelligencers to Car No. 53’s motorman.  Behind Manning, the North Coast Line’s Limited Seattle is cooling after a five-hour run form Portland on old Highway 99.  Both scenes were photographed at what in 1939 was called the Central Stage Terminal and since the 40s the Greyhound Depot.  The terminal was built in 1927.

TWO ADDS FOR COLMAN DOCK & THE FERRY FLEET

[With the illustrations above and below you should  generally click you mouse TWICE  – 2-times – on them to best enlarge the image to a size most easily read.]

When the photo postcard purveyor M. L. Oakes selected this houseboat for his 667th subject in 1907 (or possibly 1908) there were many more floating homes on Seattle’s waterways than the tightly regulated 400 or so that now survive mostly on Lake Union. This charmer is one of a small community that was moored below the University of Washington on Lake Washington’s Union Bay, then still nine feet higher than Lake Union.  Nearby was the student body boathouse with a dance hall and canoes to use.

This happy shoreline of youth soon became a neverland when Lake Washington was lowered those 9 feet in 1916 and this floating retreat and many others around the lake had to either hope the new beach they were dropped to was as accommodating as the old one or find new moorage.  At Madison Park some of the houseboats – a larger community of them than this – were pulled ashore and survive today as small homes.

I do not know what became of this floating home, but I can imagine it being towed through the then new Montlake Cut and delivered to a new moorage in the large Lake Union community of houseboats.  Perhaps some Pacific reader lives in it now or another reader will find it uncannily familiar and let the rest of us know of it with a letter to the editor.

It is now 10 years since the Times wine expert (since 1967) and Pacific Northwest contributor Tom Stockley and his wife Peggy died in a plane crash.  They had been floating homers.  In 1995 Tom wrote . . .

“Moving onto a houseboat was something of an experiment for my wife, Peggy, and I. We had a year’s lease on a vivid blue Lake Union floating home (with an option to buy), rented our land home and accepted the fact that possessions had to be pared down by half.  Spring was in the air as we carried our belongings down the long dock. Greenery was popping up from window boxes, the ducks and geese were already into their mating rituals and it didn’t take long to notice that the water made reflective ripples on the ceiling. Wow.  About two weeks later, as we sat dangling our feet in the water, Peggy turned to me and said, ‘Do you think you could live here for long?’ ‘Only the rest of my life,’ I laughed, but I wasn’t kidding.”

Jean – of this blog – was off in Europe when this feature first appeared in Pacific Northwest Mag.  Consequently he has no chance here to ask “Anything to add Paul?”   But I do – have things to add.   They are what I could more easily find of the many features – relevant to Union Bay or houseboats –  I have pulled together over the last 28 years of doing now-then in the big pulp Times. A few will be pulled from features that were part of the books “Seattle Now and Then,Vol 1” and “Seattle Now and Then Vol. 2.”  Those will be obvious.  They are lifted directly as designed from the books with the help of Ron Edge – of our “Edge Clippings.”   Some wonderfully apt stories will be missing, but their time will come.  Indeed, perhaps for the 30th anniversary of this feature in January 2012 we may have all 1500 or so features up, and all of them with “extras” and some with many.

UNION BAY’S ALASKA YUKON PACIFIC EXCURSION FLEET

Before the nine-foot lowering of Lake Washington in 1916 for the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, the west shore of Union Bay and its U.W. boat house, was a popular recreation center for students. (Courtesy Pemco Webster and Stevens Collection, Museum of History and Industry)

This splendid record of life on Union Bay before its bottom was exposed with the 1916 lowering of the Lake for the ship canal was probably photographed from the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way, now the Burke Gilman Recreational Trail.

The boat house in the foreground was built by the school’s associated students in 1906.  It included a dance hall, dresser rooms, lockers, canoe racks and quarters for the keeper and his family.  For the ten years it was moored here the ASUW Boat House was easily one of the most popular campus destinations.  “Canoeing wooing” was then still a commonplace of Seattle dating and courtship.

The occasion for the unusual congestion of Lake Washington “Mosquito Fleet” steamers shown here probably has to do the commuting of visitors to the summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition on the University of Washington campus.  There are five lake steamers in the scene, but only four are readily seen.  And, if I have identified them correctly, they are, naming them counter-clockwise from the boat house, the Wildwood, the Fortuna, the Cyrene and the Triton.  All but the Wildwood belong to Capt. John L. Anderson who until his death in 1940 ran steamers and ferries on the lake for fifty years.

During the fair Capt. Anderson and his competitors ran 15 minutes commutes between the fair’s landings on Union Bay and Leschi, Madrona, and Madison Park.  An estimated 1,500,000 passengers were handled for these quick hops and for the longer excursion around Mercer Island.

Except for the Fortuna that is seen coming towards shore behind the Wildwood’s stack, all these vessels are empty.  Perhaps, then in this morning scene, the Triton, farthest left beneath Laurelhurst, is returning to Leschi empty to take on more fair goers.  The smaller Cyrene, at the scene’s center, is waiting for her chance to load up for an excursion, and the Wildwood has just left off passengers walking here towards shore along the north (left) apron of the boat house.  Perhaps.

Union Bay is now dedicated to student parking and recreation. Much of these park and play acres was reclaimed from bottom land by the Montlake Dump.  The dump closed in 1964.

(The photo below comes from the Municipal Archive.)

HUSKY STADIUM

A mix of student and alumni enthusiasm that bordered on happy hysteria campaigned for Husky Stadium in the joyful return to spectator sports following World War One.

The site was first aligned by University astronomers to set the axis of the stadium so that the sun would not shine in the eyes of the players – although almost everyone expected it to rain.  Using the same sluicing methods employed to hose gold from the hills behind Nome, Alaska and Denny Hill into Elliott Bay the stadium took only a little more than six months to complete.  The work was finished 12 hours before the inaugural game against Dartmouth College on Nov. 27, 1920.

The Tacoma photographer Chapin Bowen recorded this sweeping impression of that dark day when the University eleven lost to Dartmouth 28 to 7.   The place, of course, was packed and many of the 30,000 seats were warmed by bodies that had earlier paid for the right to sit in them by subscribing into the building fund.  The campaign copy read “Buy a Seat and Build the Stadium.”   Name plaques were also offered for fifty and one hundred dollars.

Since that first lost the Huskies have won about 75 percent of their games here, and the seats have multiplied to 75,000.   In 1968 the grass was replaced by Astro-Turf – a first for a major college.  Visiting teams then both stepped onto ersatz grass and into strange shoes.  The school had to stock an extra 200 fitting pairs for their opponents.

For those who are counting, first in 1923 and thirteen times since the Huskies have made it from here into the Rose Bowl.  Perhaps most impressively the schools’ athletic department claims that Husky Stadium is consistently voted “the most scenic football structure in the nation.”   That probably means more the view from the stadium than of it.

The historical photographer Chapin Bowen carried a heavy tripod and cumbersome panoramic camera to record the inaugural game at Husky Stadium, above.   Jean Sherrard, the contemporary photographer, carried a digital camera small enough to fit in his shirt pocket – and no tripod. The steady Sherrard took four photographs of the Sept 28, 2002 UW-Idaho game, left at half-time and spliced them together on his computer before the home team hung on in the second half to win 41 to 27.  [A mural-size printing of this Husky Stadium then-now can be seen on the north was of the Whale Maker Room in Ivar’s Salmon House on the north shore of Lake Union.  Exhibited there are many other historical photos of the neighborhoods nearby and the lake too. ]

(Given that some of the stories featured below have been lifted from my three Seattle Now and Then books they will include some repetitions of facts and points.  The stories were all written “alone” for the weekly feature with often years between them and so not intended for a book’s continuous narrative or design, although not adverse to it either as long as such a note as this explains the clumsy redundancies that crop up like too many tomatos.)

PLEASE CLICK YOUR MOUSE twice OVER THESE STORIES.  They will then appear big enough to read with comfort.

RUSTIC BRIDGE TO UNION BAY

When the University of Washington moved north in 1895 from downtown, the new site was commonly referred to as the Interlaken Campus. Views such as the one above confirm the name.  Most likely this scene was photo­graphed during or soon after the makeover of the campus for the 1909 Alaska­ Yukon Pacific Exposition. The unnamed photographer looks southeast across Union Bay. Madison Park is right of center, and Webster Point, the southern extremity of Laurelhurst, shows on the left just above the stairway that descends from the pedestrian trestle. Between them we look across Lake Washington to an eastside waterfront softly filtered by a morning haze that hangs over the lake on what is otherwise a bright winter day. This is Medina — or will be. In 1909 no palatial beach homes or bunkers attract our modern flotilla of gawkers.

Lake Washington is here at its old level be­fore it was slowly dropped 9 feet in 1916 for the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. At the old lake level the unnamed island right of center was still separated from Foster Island, behind the screen of trees on the far right. Now joined, they can be explored on the Arboretum Waterfront Self-Guided Trail.

We might have wished that the photographer had shown more of the trestle. It was most like­ly constructed for access to the shore, groomed as a picturesque retreat for visitors to the expo­sition. Its construction of both peeled and un­hewed logs repeats one of AYP’S lesser ar­chitectural themes — the rustic one. The trestle spans the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern, the railroad that opened the hinterland of King County in the late 1880s. It first reached this point beside Union Bay in the fall of 1887.

(WHAT FOLLOW is from the book SEATTLE NOW & THEN VOLUME 3.  Remember to CLICK TWICE to see them at a size that is comfortable to read.  Within weeks we will have the entire book – along with Volumes One and Two – up to search and read on dorpatsherrardlomont.)

The above is an example of a “clip” cut from the Pacific Northwest Mag. for – my handwritten scrawl has it – Feb. 18, 2001. (Note that the ASUM BOATHOUSE appears on the left of the above view, just right of the couple on the bench and obscured by a haze holding over the bay.) The features that follow were lifted from Seattle Now and Then Vol. Three.

THE FLOODING OF MONTLAKE CUT for the SHIP CANAL

“Roaring like a cataract, hundreds of tons of water from Lake Union, unharnessed by a cut in the cofferdam, plunged through the crumbling barrier of earth into the portage channel at 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon marking the formal opening of the eastern end of the Lake Washington canal .  .  .   A cheer went up from the several hundred persons who had gathered to witness the breaking down of the barriers that have separated Seattle’s two great lakes for unnumbered years.”  So reads The Seattle Times for Saturday, August 26, 1916.

The crowd had hoped for dynamite but got laborers with picks and shovels instead.  A shallow trench was all that was needed to release the waters for the cofferdam’s erosion. The moment recorded here is also described by the Times.  “A score or more of spectators had assembled on a large breakwater just inside the cut and were compelled to scamper to safer ground when the water reached the volume of a torrent.”

This view looks west towards the north end of Capitol Hill and above that some of the Wallingford Neighorhood.   The concrete lined Montlake Cut is behind the photographer including the temporary gates at its eastern end.  There from the following Monday August 28th forward into October the waters of Lake Washington were slowly released lowering the big lake nine feet to the level of Lake Union.

The work of dredging the two ends of the cut progressed speedily and on May 9, 1917 the navigable channel between Lake Union and Lake Washington was opened.  The formal dedication of the entire Lake Washington Ship Canal followed two months later on Independence Day.

The federal land survey reached the Seattle area in the 1850s.  This map from that survey shows the first more-or-less accurate  shoreline of Portage Bay and the Montalke Isthmus that separates it from Union Bay.  Note that Fosters Island, lower right, already has its name.  The lower of two Indian trails across the isthmus runs roughly along the path of the future log canal.  The longer trail above it cuts through the future University of Washington Campus, reaching Union Bay near the athletic department’s offices just north of Hec Ed Pavilion.  A bit of the future Laurelhurst neighborhood shows upper right.  The width of the map is a little more than 2 miles.

(click to enlarge photos)

Sixty-three safes were counted in the ruins south of Yesler Way after the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889; 63 plus one.

The Dexter Horton Bank, Seattle’s first bank, at the northwest corner of Commercial Street (First Avenue South) and Washington Street, was still standing, although without a roof and stripped of its lacquered appointments such as tellers cages, furniture and window casements. But in the back was the vault, the bank’s own safe, seen here over the shoulder of a guard standing at the missing front door. There the valuables survived, and the room and its locks were kept working and guarded for a few weeks after the fire.

Dexter Horton arrived in Seattle penniless but fortunate: He came early in 1853. By working hard in Yesler’s sawmill, and saving his pay, Horton managed to start a store and then, in 1870, a real bank at this corner with a real safe, one he brought back from an extended visit to San Francisco to study banking. Five years later, in 1875, he replaced his timber quarters with this brick and stone creation, one of the first in Seattle.

Before he was a banker, Horton got a reputation for honesty by taking care of working men’s savings as they were off exploring. He secreted their wealth about his store in crannies and most famously at the bottom of a barrel filled with coffee beans.

A few days after the 1889 fire, The Seattle Times suggested that it had, “perhaps, been more beneficial to that portion of the city around Washington Street so long inhabited by prostitutes . . . It may be well to notify the painted element here now that cribs will no longer be tolerated.” In this case, the paper was, of course, half wrong. Both the prostitutes and the bankers returned.

WEB EXTRAS

Not many extra photos on my end this time, Paul.  Just this one, as per your request, with a slightly wider angle, revealing the ‘For Lease’ sign on the second floor:

What about you? Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, and no.  As you know, and now the reader will too, you have at your place the opera of the nearly 1500 now-thens done over the past 29 years as you study them to make choices for the Repeat Photography book we intend to do in concert with a show/exhibit on the same subject at MOHAI.  It opens next April and my! we have lots to do.  You will need to take more than a hundred “nows” (repeats) for the book and exhibit, as well as some more “nows” for new stories in Pacific Magazine through the coming year.   But first you must winnow the horde of now-then stories for the few you prefer, and since you have them all – the clippings – I don’t.   And this returns us to Dexter Horton.  There are three or four apt early stories – from the 1980s – for which I have not digital files Jean (as you know), just the clippings.  So, for the moment, those relevant additional features will not be added.  Instead we might have one story – a more recent one – and a few photographs with captions.

[CLICK to ENLARGE]

THE DEXTER HORTON HOME

Sometime in the 1870s, Dexter Horton moved with his second wife, Caroline Parsons, (his first wife had died) into their new home at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Seneca Street. From their back porch they could look up at the classical cupola of Territorial University’s main building less than a block away. Except for the low fence that enclosed the campus, the landscape was continuous because Fourth Avenue was then still undeveloped between Seneca and Union streets.

Horton arrived in Seattle in 1853 with little more than the clothes he wore. Like most others, he eventually worked in Henry Yesler’s sawmill. His first wife, Hannah, worked for Yesler as well, managing the cookhouse attached to the mill. With their combined incomes, the couple opened a general store near the mill and even ventured to San Francisco to try their hand in the brokerage business. When they returned to Seattle in 1869 or ’70 (sources disagree), they brought with them a big steel safe and the official papers to start Seattle’s first bank.

The popular story that Horton’s first safe had no back was discounted much later by his daughter, Caroline, who told off Seattle Times reporter Margaret Pitcairn Strachan: “You don’t think my father was that stupid do you?” The daughter speculated that the backless safe was one of her father’s jokes, since he was well known “for telling stories and laughing heartily at them.”

For all its loft and ornament, the banker’s distinguished home was the scene of a constant battle to stay warm in the colder months. Three fireplaces were the entire source of heat. The home’s many high windows admitted drafts at all hours.

But when Dexter Horton died in 1904, a few months short of 80, he was still living here.

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THE LATIMERS OF FIRST HILL

[This feature first appeared in Pacific in 2006.]

There are certainly two artifacts that have survived the 99 years since the historical view was recorded of the Latimer family – or part of it  – posing in the family car and in front of the family home on First Hill.

We are confident that the scene was recorded in 1907 because a slightly wider version of the same photograph shows construction scaffolding still attached to the north side of St. James Cathedral’s south tower, far right.  The Cathedral is the most obvious survivor.  By the time of the church’s dedication on Dec. 22, 1907 the scaffolding was removed.              The second artifact is the stonewall that once restrained the Latimer lawn and now separates the Blood Bank parking lot from the sidewalks that meet at the southwest corner of Terry and Columbia.

In the “now” Margaret Latimer Callahan stands about two feet into Terry Street and near where her banker father Norval sits behind the wheel in the family Locomobile.   Born on July 22, 1906, Margaret is the youngest of Norval and Margaret Latimer’s children.

For a while, Margaret, it was thought, might be a third visible link between the then and now — although certainly no artifact.  The evidentiary question is this.  Who is sitting on papa Norval’s lap?  Is it his only daughter or his youngest son Vernon?  After polling about – yes – 100 discerning friends and Latimer descendents the great consensus is that this is Vernon under the white bonnet.   And Margaret agrees.  “I was probably inside with a nurse while three of my brothers posed with my parents.”

Margaret also notes that her father is truly a poser behind the wheel, for he was never a driver.   Sitting next to him is Gus the family’s chauffeur with whom he has traded seats for the moment.

The clever reader has already concluded that Margaret Latimer Callahan will be celebrating her centennial in a few days.   Happy 100^th Margaret.

=-=-

LANGSTON’S LIVERY STABLE – DEXTER HORTON NEIGHBOR in the 1880s.

LANGSTON’S LIVERY

Helen and John Langston moved to Seattle from Kent in 1882 and soon opened their namesake livery stables on the waterfront at Washington Street.  Like all else in the neighborhood it was, of course, destroyed in the city’s Great Fire of 1889.   Sometime in the few years it served those who wished to park or rent a horse or buggy downtown a photographer recorded this portrait of a busy Langston’s Livery from the back of the roof of the Dexter Horton Bank at the northwest corner of Washington and Commercial Street (First Ave. S.).

In Helen’s 1937 obituary we learn from her daughter Nellie that Helen was “known for her pen and ink sketches of horses and other animals and scenic views.”  Perhaps the livery stable sign, far right, showing the dashing horse with buggy and rider is also her work.  It was Helen who saved the family’s business records from the fire and was for this heroic effort, again as recalled by her daughters, “severely burned before she left the livery stable.”  After the fire the couple quickly put up the St. Charles hotel, seen in the “now.”

Helen married the 38-year-old John in 1870, the same year he began providing ferry service across the White River at Kent and three years after he is credited with opening also in Kent “the first store in King County outside Seattle.”  During these pre-livery years in the valley the Langstons also managed to carve a model farm out of the “deep forest.”  Before they sold it in 1882 their farm was known county-wide for dairy products produced by its “75 excellent milch cows.”

After the fire the Langston’s soon opened another Livery Stable uptown beside their home at 8th and Union.  In the 1903 collection of biographies titled “Representative Citizens of Seattle and King County” John Langston is described both as “now living practically retired” and also busy “in the operation of his magnificent funeral coach, which is one of the finest in the northwest and which is drawn by a team of the best horses.” Three local undertakers kept him busy.  For the moment we may wonder – only – if when he died in 1910 the then 68-year-old pioneer took his last ride in his own coach.

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A CLIPPING OF ANOTHER FIRE NEAR PIONEER SQUARE

[And when we find the real photos that illustrate this story, we will plug them into it.]

(click photos to enlarge)

By the summer of 1943 it became clear that German chances for a 1,000-year reign were dismal. Increasingly, war news encouraged thoughts of what might follow an Allied victory. For its part, the Greyhound Bus Lines began making plans for a postwar Helicopter Bus Line that would use the roofs of company bus terminals to also land helicopters. In Seattle it was soon after the war that Greyhound started paying the tax fees for the Central Terminal at Eighth Avenue and Stewart Street — with its big roof.

Those who have sometimes traveled cheap into the hinterlands associate the city’s central bus terminal with Greyhound — the buses, not the ‘copters that never flew. I answered the Greyhound call here to board for Spokane or Portland or most often Bellingham many times from the late 1950s into the early ’80s.

When this station opened in 1928, it was home for a new fleet of buzzing buses, and the Puget Sound Traction Light & Power company’s Seattle-Everett interurban rail line as well. The new, brick-clad, three-story station with a tiled roof was, in part, the company’s expression of confidence in the future of its interurban. For 11 years more, this was a bus-rail depot, and a glimpse can be had of an Everett Interurban car on the far right of this depot scene. They stopped running in 1939.

The Central Terminal got a remodel in 1947 (for Greyhound) and another in 1962, probably to complement the “forward look” of that year’s Century 21 world’s fair. Most of the textured bricks were hidden beneath a smooth, tiled surface, and more space was given to gaudy signs, increasingly plastic ones.

BLOG EXTRAS

I snapped a couple of shots in and around the terminal, Paul, but time has not been kind to this place. Bus stations, train stations, airports – in their ideal forms they should represent arrival and departure, joy and sorrow in equal measure.  The interior here looks more like an enormous rest room, a constipated limbo of shit-brown floor tiles, fluorescent lights, and barbed wire benches.  Here’s the photo:

Tell me it wasn’t always so, Paul.  Are there gorgeous coves and domes hidden behind those ceiling panels?  Terra cotta gargoyles and cupids lurking above?  Or was it always thus?   Jean lets imagine a high center waiting room ringed with murals on the history of wheeled transportation on all four walls with wonderfully cut windows shaping the ceiling to shed light on them.  The top two floors in this fancy would feature a mix of offices and arts-crafts retailers and teachers with windows to the streets and balconies to the terminal waiting room.  The pipe-in music would play traveling songs by Woody Guthrie and Schubert.  But it was not so.  The last time I used the terminal it had, I think, brightly colored plastic bucket seats.  They were not designed for sleeping like the long wooded pews in the railroad depot.  There was a sign on the wall, I remember, that advised, “Persons waiting for buses will kindly limit their reading to True Crime.”  That said Jean, I still think your were a little hard on the floor.

What follows are a few wheel-related subjects – local ones for the most part.  First a look at another intersection that had a busy time once with transportation – the Seattle terminal for its interurban to Tacoma.

In the scene above that is an early look at a Yesler Cable Railway Car and not a Seattle-Tacoma Interurban car.

NOW-THEN CAPTIONS TOGETHER: After the Seattle National Bank Building at the southeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way became the depot for the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban railway in 1903 it became popularly known as the Interurban Building. It is the name that is now preferred, although it has also been called both the Pacific block and the Smith Tower Annex.

THE SCARLET CORNER

Not yet 30 the English-born architect John Parkinson moved to Seattle with fateful good timing. He arrived in January 1889, a little less than a half-year before the business district was kindling for the “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889. In the post-fire reconstruction Parkinson’s talent for design was soon patronized and his surviving Seattle National Bank Building displays, to quote the modern expert Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, “a remarkable level of coherence and repose in contrast to the agitated work of so many of his contemporaries.”

The most striking feature of this Romanesque landmark is either the Lyon over the bank’s corner front door or the building’s color: a coherent red from sidewalk to cornice. At its base Parkinson used red sandstone shipped from Colorado rather than the commonplace gray stone quarried in the Northwest and used by most of the bank’s neighbors.

While Ochsner has the bank completed in 1892, that might have been the year for finishing touches. This view may date from the spring of 1891 when the Pioneer Place (Square) neighborhood was decorated with fir trees – like those on the right — for the May 6 visit of Benjamin Harrison. (The President rode a Yesler Way Cable Car – like Car #13 on the left – out to Leschi, boarded the lake steamer “Kirkland” to Madison Park, and returned to town on the Madison Cable Railway.)

In this view a book and stationary store, Union Hardware, and the Wilcox Grocery all face Occidental Ave. The Queen City Business College is on the second floor, while the Washington Temperance Magazine, and several lawyers have offices upstairs.

After a stint as the first official architect for Seattle schools, Parkinson left for Los Angeles where he had more than considerable success. Through his L.A. career the young architect grew old and counted both the city’s famed coliseum and city hall among his accomplishments.

THE SEATTLE-TACOMA INTERURBAN

Inside the first class interurban 58 pillowed seats comforted riders who paid an extra quarter over the regular 60-cent fair. Although these parlor cars were the same dark green color as the rest of the Puget Sound Electric Railway’s rolling stock, they were obviously something special, complete with an enclosed view from the observation deck.

Using its corporate initials, the PSEF advertised a ride resplendent with “Pleasure, Safety, Economy and Reliability.” The electrically propelled trip was free of cinders and smoke, smooth and fast.  The trip included the thrill of “going like sixty.”

When the Interurban started service in 1902, the automobile was still a sporting novelty for the well-to-do. The practical and preferred way of getting to and from Tacoma was via the Mosquito Fleet steamers that buzzed about Puget Sound. The second choice was via rail. Heading either south or north, Interurban passengers could glimpse the mountain Tacoma passengers called “Tacoma” and Seattle riders called “Rainier.” The route passed, through hop fields, dairy farms, truck gardens, coal fields, orchards, forests, one tunnel and an Indian reservation. It took an hour and 40 minutes to cover the line’s 32.2 miles. Some stops like Burts, Fioraville and Mortimer are now as defunct as the rail itself. Others like Georgetown, Allentown, Renton, Kent and Auburn are still familiar.

Within the city limits the Interurban ran over municipal rails and attached its trolley poles to electric lines overhead. But as soon as it crossed the city limits, a motorman would lower his pole and hook up with the mysterious third rail, or contact rail, that ran parallel to the other two. This third rail was alive with electricity. School children were regularly warned not to touch it. Chickens, however, were sometimes encouraged to peck at grain strategically sprinkled along its side. Interurban electrocution was a new way of preparing a fowl for plucking.

The Interurban hit its heyday in 1919 when more than 3 million passengers used the line. But within nine years the line’s haul dropped to less than a million. By 1917 Highway 99 was passable and the Model-T was commonplace. Service along the third rail was threatened.

At 11:30 Sunday evening on Dec. 30, 1928, the last Interurban cars pulled out from Tacoma and Seattle. The Tacoma bound car left from the intersection of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way (shown above), for 26 years the location of the Interurban Depot.

JEFFERSON STREET CAR BARNS

Then and Now Captions together:  What is now the southeast corner of Seattle University – it’s Championship Field – was for many years a transportation center for the south end where first the Seattle Electric Company’s street trolleys were sheltered and later the Seattle Transit System’s trackless trolleys.  Both views look northwest from 14^th Avenue and E. Jefferson Street.   Historical photo courtesy Warren Wing

The TRACKLESS FLEET

Around noon on the 15^th of December 1940 when the winter sun cast long shadows over the Seattle Transit System’s new fleet of trackless trolleys the by then veteran commercial photographer Frank Jacobs took this and a second view of the Jefferson Street car barn and its new residents.   Here Jacob looks northwest from the corner of 14^th Avenue and Jefferson Street.  (The second view looks northeast over the fleet from 13^th Avenue.)

By a rough count – using the second photograph to look around the far corner of the barn – there are 114 carriers parked here outside for this fleet portrait.  That is about half of the 235 Westinghouse trackless trolleys that were purchased by the city with a loan from the federal government.  The first of them were delivered earlier in March of 1940, and only three years after Seattle voters by a large majority rejected them in favor of keeping the municipal railway’s old orange streetcars.   But the transportation milieu of the late 1930s was even more volatile than it is now and the forces of both rubber and internal combustion  – for the city also purchased a fleet of buses – won over rails and even sacrificed the cherished but impoverished cable cars.

When the Jefferson Car Barn was constructed in 1910 it was the last of the sprawling new garages built for the trolleys in the first and booming years of the 20^th Century.  The Seattle Electric Company also built barns in Fremont, lower Queen Anne, and Georgetown to augment its crowded facility at 6^th and Pine.  The Georgetown plant was also the company’s garage for repairing trolleys and, when it came time in 1940-41, also for scrapping them.

The finality of that conversion from tracks to rubber is written here in the yard of the car barn with black on black.  Fresh asphalt has erased the once intricate tracery of the yard’s many shining rails.

WAITING FOR THE INTERURBAN

(This one is about six years old, so don’t try to take the tour described below.)

This week’s historical scene, a 1923 tableau of municipal workers refurbishing a portion of the “grand union” of trolley tracks at 34th Street and Fremont Avenue, allows us to reflect on the histories of both transportation and art in Fremont, the playful neighborhood that signs itself “The Center of the Universe.”

First the transportation.  When a sawmill was built at the outflow of Lake Union in 1888 it was already possible to conveniently get to the new mill town from downtown Seattle aboard the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, which was laid along the north shore of the lake in 1887.  After a trolley above a Westlake trestle was added in 1890 the bridge at Fremont increasingly became the way to get north to the suburbs and remained so until the Aurora Bridge was opened in 1932.

Next the art.  According to Roger Wheeler, Fremont artist and historian, public art as a Fremont fixation began with the formation in the late 1970s of the Fremont Arts Council.  Appropriately its first installation has a transportation theme with some built-in Fremont fun.  The figures in sculptor Rich Beyer’s popular Waiting for the Interurban, will have to wait into eternity for they are pointed the wrong way – north.  The interurban to Everett never turned east on 34th Street and so would have missed them.

Confused or curious?  Readers have two opportunities for direct clarification.  First join Roger Wheeler for his annual guided art tour of Fremont this coming Thursday, July 26.  The tour starts at 7 PM from Beyer’s landmark sculpture.  Next, three weeks later on Thursday August 16, the Fremont Historical Society sponsors another neighborhood stroll.  This time tour leaders Heather McAuliffe and Erik Pihl begin their instructive Streetcar Walking Tour at 7 PM beside the old Fremont Car Barn at N. 34th Street and Phinney Avenue North.

SEEING SEATTLE

Not so long after the turn-of-the-century consolidation of Seattle’s previously diverse trolley lines the new and more efficient monopoly, the Seattle Electric Company, purchased four “special” cars from the John Stephenson Company of New Jersey.   At 46-feet-long, bumper-to-bumper, they were then the biggest of Seattle’s electric cars, and the trolley company’s special plans for them were clearly signed on their sides.  The four double-ender trolleys — numbered 362 to 365 — carried both visitors and locals on rail explorations of our then manicly expanding metropolis.

Since motorcars were still a rarity in 1903, aside from walking, there were few ready ways to sample Seattle that were not by rail.  From Pioneer Square the trolley lines reached to Lake Washington, Ballard, Green Lake, the University District, Rainier Valley, all destinations with attractions.   So for the purchase of a single ticket a customer could explore almost every corner of the city, including, beginning in 1907, West Seattle.  Since there was no competing cacophony of motorcars, to be heard by their passengers the conductor-tour-leaders had only to bark above the creaking of the long cars themselves as they rumbled along the rails.

By 1907 these “Special Seeing Seattle Cars” were not the only tour in town.  There were then enough paved streets and even boulevards in Seattle to allow open busses to go anywhere hard tires and spring seats could comfortably carry their customers.  These sightseers were also regularly photographed as a group and many among them would purchase a print of their adventure either for a memento or message.  The group portraits were ordinarily printed on postcard stock and of the many sold some carry handwritten flip-side expressions of the joys of seeing Seattle.

THE ART OF BUSES (text for Pine Street scene printed directly above.)

While the subject here is evidently the two new White Motor Company (WMC) buses in the foreground we also catch above them, center left, a glimpse of Cornish School.  Below the eaves the sign “Cornish School of the Arts” is blazoned and to either side of it are printed in block letters the skills that one can expect to learn in its studios: “Art, Dancing Expression, Language.”  From its beginning in 1914 Cornish meant to teach all the arts and the whole artist.
The official Curtis number (38871) for this image indicates that it was probably photographed late in 1919, or two years before Cornish moved from the Booth Building here at the southeast corner of Broadway Avenue and Pine Street north a few blocks on Capitol Hill to another Spanish-styled structure, the school’s then new and still used home at Roy Street and Harvard Avenue.

When the city took public control of all the streetcars in the spring of 1919 they purchased a dangerously dilapidated system at a price so dear it precluded most improvements.  The few exceptions included these buses that were purchased to reach parts of the city that the old private trolley system did not service. These buses are signed for Magnolia where most of the developing neighborhoods were not reached by the street railway line that ran to the front gate of Fort Lawton.

Thomas White began making sewing machines in Massachusetts in 1859.  He was still around in 1901 when his company made its first steam-powered automobile in Cleveland. Gas powered trucks were added in 1910; buses followed.  Vancouver B.C. also purchased WMC buses to service the Grandview area to the east of that city.  The best-known and longest-lived White buses were the red ones used for narrated tours at Glacier National Park.  They were a park fixture (moving ones) until retired with “metal fatigue” in 1999 after 64 years of continuous service.

The WRECK EPIDEMIC of 1919-1920

(Above)  The Green Lake trolley failed to negotiate an odd curve  while on it way downtown on the early winter morning of January 5,1920.  The trolley came to rest wrapped around a telephone pole a few yards south of where the line on Woodland Park Avenue curved through its intersection with 39th Street.   (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey.)
After the private trolley system was made public in 1919 what Leslie Blanchard in his helpful history “The Street Railway Era in Seattle” calls a “wreck epidemic” followed.  Blanchard described the crash of January 5, 1920 as its “climax . . . one of the most appalling accidents in the history of public transportation in Seattle.”

Heading downtown early in the morning with a full load of workers and shoppers car 721 jumped the track where Woodland Park Avenue still curves through its intersection with 39th Street.  The speeding car fell from its tracks into a sturdy telephone pole (left of center) that opened the car roof like a can of cheap pop.  Of the more than seventy passengers injured seven were seriously so and one of these died the following day.  The wreck was “appalling” because it was an accident made inevitable by the circumstances surrounding the sale of the system.

The Seattle Electric Company sold the dilapidated line to a Seattle mayor, Ole Hanson, who purchased it at such an inflated price that no funds remained for repairs.  At the time Mayor Hanson was more interested in whatever bold moves might make him an attractive candidate for the American presidency.

The Seattle Times’ same day front-page story on the wreck leads off with an ironic listing of conflicting voices.  Councilman Oliver Erickson described the brakes and rails of the system as in “rotten condition.” Thomas Murphine, superintendent of public utilities, described them as “in perfect shape” but that the driver was “new and inexperienced.”  For his part Motorman M.R. Fullerton claimed that the brakes would not work and that “I used everything I had to try to stop the car before reaching the curve.”  Fortunately for Fullerton it was the bad brakes excuse that – unlike his car 721 – ultimately held sway.

THE BUS STOP @ BROADWAY & REPUBLICAN 1976-77

Here follow three of several thousand photographs I took from the kitchen of a “pad” atop Peters at the southeast corner of Broadway and Republican, on Capitol Hill.  Some of these were posted in the city’s buses.  The project was fun, easy, and relatively inexpensive.  I bought roll film, spooled it and did my own darkroom work.  For color I purchase 35mm motion picture negative film, spooled it, and then rejoined the rolls to be developed very inexpensively (for color) as motion picture film.

(click to enlarge photos)

When the brilliantly industrious Seattle pioneer James Colman started to build his namesake dock on the waterfront in the early 1880s, it was hindered by another namesake, Yesler’s Wharf.

Except for specialties like coal and lumber, there was not much need for more docks on the pioneer waterfront because Yesler’s was huge and made an elbow turn north, half-blocking access to Colman’s new endeavor.

Colman took Yesler to court, but Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889 did more to resolve the problem than any judge. It destroyed the waterfront south of Seneca Street, and Yesler’s wharf was rebuilt without the elbow. Colman rebuilt his dock, too, with an impressive facade on Railroad Avenue, which, however, hid two stubby piers behind it. The big change came in 1908 when, in part preparing for the coming summer volumes expected with the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Expo, Colman Dock was extended 705 feet into the bay and fitted with a handsome tower and domed waiting room.

Colman Dock quickly became the center of intra-Puget Sound transportation and remains so today.

The 1908 pier shed was replaced in 1937 with the Art Deco expression seen here. It complemented the Black Ball Line’s new streamlined flagship, the Kalakala. After the opening of the Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges, also in the mid-1930s, a flotilla of bargain-priced ferries came north to work on Puget Sound. All but one (I believe), the San Mateo, were given local names.

After 15 years of rate hikes, strikes and withdrawals of service, the Black Ball Line was sold to the state in 1951. Ten years later, the Deco dock was replaced with the towerless one still in use and expanding.

WEB EXTRAS

Walking a few steps north, I took another photo of the ferry line:

Anything to add, Paul?  YES Jean.  I have reached into the files and pulled out five previously published features – and they sometimes repeat each other because they all involve Colman Dock – and a few other related photos.

THE WATERFRONT WAIT

Most likely a motorcar historian who knows the models of most brands (as ancient even as the Stanley Steamer which is generally believed to be the first auto ferried across Puget Sound — in 1906) can quickly peg the year this photograph was recorded at Colman Dock.  With little interest in cars since high school I have only two “outside dates” to offer.  In 1937 a new Arts Deco ferry terminal replaced the 1908 vintage wharf shown on the right.  The older view also dimly reveals part of the west façade of The Exchange Building – at First Avenue and Marion Street – in its upper left corner.   It was completed in 1930.

When constructed in ‘08 with a landmark Romanesque tower at the water end, at 700-plus feet long Colman Dock was fitted to its sides with fourteen slips that could be raised and lowered with the tides.  It was by far the busiest “Mosquito Fleet” landing on Puget Sound.  Six of the dock’s births snuggled against its north side, directly where the cars are here parked in the early or mid 1930s.

This extended stage for parking was constructed in the mid-1920s when many of the sleek Puget Sound “Mosquito Fleet” passenger steamers were being humbled with conversion to ferries.  Their pointed bows were cut open and their slim decks fattened over sponsons for cars.  By 1923 the dock’s tenant, the Puget Sound Navigation Company – AKA the “Black Ball” line – figured that it had already handled 28,000 “machines” on the “Navy Yard Route” between Seattle and Bremerton.

In 1935 the streamlined “Kalakala” began landing here.  Built on the burned-out hull of a California ferry, the Black Ball flagship was soon followed by seventeen more Golden Gate ferries, moved to Puget Sound after the opening of the suspension bridges on San Francisco Bay made them obsolete there and cheap here as salvaged goods.  (The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, opened in late 1936, and the Golden Gate Bridge, the following summer.)

IRON INTO WOOD

I was recently reminded by Scott Morris who sometimes helps crew the Virginia V, the last of Puget Sound’s “Mosquito Fleet”, that the reason so many of the ports of call around the Sound were called “landings” is because bringing an unwieldy steamer along side them was a kind of “controlled crash.”

Here is evidence of an uncontrolled crash at Colman Dock on the night of April 25, 1912.  It ranks high on the waterfront’s list of remarkable blunders.  The culprit was not a small Puget Sound steamer but human communication aboard the Alameda, the Alaska Steamship Company’s ocean-going liner.   With the Alameda resting about 250 yards west southwest of the pier head Capt. John (Dynamite) O’Brien acting as port pilot gave a “full astern” order to Third Assistant Engineer Guy Van Winter who in turn relayed it verbally to Second Assistant Robert Bunton.  Bunton, who was at the throttle, either heard or understood the order as “full ahead” and quickly jerked the Alameda into action with these results.

Coming at it from an angle the iron-hulled ship crunched through the end of Colman Dock dropping its tower into the bay and exposing the passenger waiting room beneath the dock’s dome.  Slowed but not stalled the ship continued slicing, sinking the stern-wheel steamer Telegraph that was berthed on the north or opposite side of the pier.  The Alameda might have gone up the waterfront smashing into other piers but for the quick thinking of O’Brien.  When the ship surged forward the captain shouted for the anchors to be dropped and after 125 fathoms of chain were out, the starboard anchor caught and the next pier north – the Grant Trunk Pacific Dock, then the largest wooden pier on the coast – was momentarily saved.   It burned down two years later.

No one was killed although a few were injured and/or dumped into the bay.  The hardy Alameda was merely inconvenienced, continuing its scheduled run to Alaska only a few hours late.  When the Colman tower was found at sunrise floating in the bay the hands on its big clock read 10:23.

THE TELEGRAPH

This slender representative of the Puget Sound “Mosquito Fleet” was constructed in Everett in 1903 for the Seattle-Tacoma run.  The Telegraph was one of the last sternwheelers built beside these waters.  She drew only 8 feet of water, was 25.7 seven feet wide and 153.7 feet long – more than twice as long as the 72 foot Colman Dock tower seen here behind.   On the evening of April 25, 1912 the tower and the sternwheeler  shared the same fate.   This photograph was taken a few days or weeks earlier.

Here the clock in the tower reads 12 straight up.  The Telegraph is churning the bay with her paddles perhaps beginning its noon departure for Bremerton, its regular destination since 1910 when its Portland builder Capt. U.B. Scott sold her to the Puget Sound Navigation Company.  When the Colman Tower was fished from the bay after sunrise on April 26, 1912 the clock read 10:15.  It was the very minute of the collision the night before.

On the evening of the 25^th while Captain John “Dynamite” O’Brien was preparing to land his ocean-going steamer Alameda to the south side of the Alaska Steamship Company’s Pier 2, one wharf south of the Colman Dock, he was waved off to the north side.  Instructing his assistant Robert Bunton to go “full speed astern” Bunton went full speed ahead instead.  Like a hot knife through butter and with hardly a scratch to its steel hull the Alameda drove through the outer end of Colman dock.  Before it was stopped by its own anchor she dropped the tower into the bay and drove the Telegraph — parked then, as here, along the pier’s north side — as far as the Grand Pacific Dock before it sank the sternwheeler.

Remarkably no one was killed.  And aside from a few scratches and brief dunkings no one was hurt.  Without tragedy this collision soon became a cartoon in the retelling.  An expensive cartoon.  After the owners of Telegraph instructed the owners of the Alameda to pay them $55,000 in damages a federal court made them settle for $25,000 on the grounds that sternwheelers were no longer popular.   Still the Telegraph was raised and repaired and the tower replaced.

THE VENERABLE VICTORIA

With “clues” from the tower, upper-right, and a scribbled negative number, lower-left, it is possible to, at least, compose a general description of this crowded scene.  The clock turret, here partially shrouded in the exhaust of the disembarking steamer S. S. Victoria, replaced the Colman Dock’s original tower in late 1912.  That spring the first tower was knocked into Elliott Bay by the steel-hulled steamship Alameda during a very bad landing.  The second clue, the number “30339” penned on the original negative by the Curtis and Miller studio, dates the scene – still roughly – from 1914 or 1915.

In 1908 the by then already venerable Victoria was put to work on the Alaska Steamship Company’s San Francisco-Seattle-Nome route.  Considering how packed are both the ship and the north apron of the Northern Pacific’s Pier 2 (at the foot of Yesler way) it is more likely that the Victoria is heading out for the golden shores of Nome rather than the Golden Gate.

The 360-foot-long Victoria was built in England as the Parthia in 1870 and made her maiden voyage that year to New York as the finest ship of the British Cunnard Line, for many years the dominant North Atlantic shipper. With compound engines she required half the coal of her sister ships, and with the gained room was the first Cunnard ship to have, among other niceties, bathrooms.  Eighty-six years later the Victoria (She was renamed with a 1892 overhaul, again in England.) was sold to Japanese shipbreakers and in 1956 her still sturdy hand-wrought iron hull was salvaged for scrap in Osaka, Japan.

Most likely a few Pacific readers will still remember the Victoria from the depression years of 1936 to 1939 when she was laid up in Lake Union unable to meet the cost of U.S. fire and safety regulations.  A least a few eastside readers will recall the steamer from the summer of 1952 and following.  On Aug. 23rd of that year the then oldest steamer in the U.S.A. was tied to the old shipyard dock at Houghton (Kirkland) on Lake Washington where she waited first for an ignoble 1955 conversion into a log-carrying barge, and briefly renamed the Straits, before taking the last of her many trans-Pacific trips.  That most fateful of journeys was her first trip under tow.

COLMAN DOCK, Ca. 1903

Here – three photos up –  is Railroad Avenue circa 1903.   With this extended  outer-part there are no tracks and so it is relatively safe for the few suited men shown here to be heading in every direction.  This new section for wagons and pedestrians was built after a tidelands replat reordered the waterfront in the late 1890s. Dock owners like the pioneer engineer and millwright James M. Colman were given the time they needed to conform their  property to the replat.   Because of the prosperity that came also in  the late 1890s with the Yukon-Alaskan gold rush, by the time this photograph was recorded practically the entire waterfront between King and Pike Streets was made over with new piers and a wider trestle.

The first floor businesses on Colman Dock begin on the left with what appears to be a produce stand beneath a striped awning that reads across its hem “parcels checked.”  Next door is the Sunde and Erland Sail Makers and Ship Chandlers, one of the long-lived residents of this dock.  The “electric contractor” Frank H. Folsom is next.  Besides dynamos Folsom offers poles and piles, tug boat services, and “monthly sailing vessels to all California Coast Points.” At the far end is the Loggers Supply Company and to this side of it the furrier Charles Wernecke.  In 1904 Ye Olde Curiosity Shop began its long hold on Wernecke’s storefront, decorating it with whale bones, totems and other Indian artifacts.

In 1903 the roughness of Railroad Avenue itself inspired a muckraking campaign by the upscale businessman’s “Commonwealth Magazine. ”  Quoting, in part, “Few know its dizzy danger . . . [which] has been doubled at night by the lack of light . . .    Strangers arriving in the city for the first time grope around in the darkness and splash into the pools of slimy water or slip through the muddy ditches, as they go up and down to avoid climbing over or under the freight cars  .   . and wonder if they have gotten off at some  small country town by mistake.”   Add the Commonwealth’s exploration into the rotting rubbish beneath this wide trestle (not included here)  and it makes for some retching reading.

FIREMAN SAVE THAT TOWER!

The destruction of the Grand Trunk Dock at the foot of Madison Street on July 30, 1914 was the most spectacular single fire in the history of the Seattle waterfront.  The “single” condition is important, for the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 consumed the entire waterfront south of University Street – about 15 blocks worth.  That inferno did not discriminate.  (Lest someone complain, I have not included the 1910 fire on Wall Street in this ranking because a stiff wind off Elliott Bay kept its impressive incineration to the east side of Railroad Avenue.)

On the far left – nearly out of the picture – is the 108-foot blazing skeleton of the Grand Trunk tower.  This view of its destruction is unique, for the unnamed photographer has turned to shoot what then may have seemed to be the imminent destruction of Colman Dock. And the fireboats Snoqualmie and Duwamish have joined the photographer to also shoot the dock that is not yet doomed. It seems two of their three visible streams are aimed at Colman Dock, one of them reaching the clock tower that is as yet merely smoldering.

When its namesake Canadian railroad completed the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock in 1910 it was the largest wooden finger pier on the West Coast.  Four years later its charred piles were recapped and topped with another long and ornate terminal of the same footprint but without the tower. (This somewhat less distinguished replacement survived until 1964 when it was cleared away for an expanded loading lot north of Colman Dock.)

With the fireboats help Colman Dock escaped its neighbor’s fate.  Badly scorched, the top of the tower was rebuilt and survived until this Spanish-style home of the Black Ball fleet was replaced in the mid-1930s with an art-deco terminal in the style of the fleet’s then new flagship, the Kalakala.

ABOVE: The Colman Dock with its second tower and in its last year before conversion to the Deco-Modern version.  The date: July 16, 1936.  It’s written  along the bottom.  On the far right is Pier 3 later renamed Pier 54. Since 1946 the home of Ivar’s Acres of Clams.  In between Pier 3 and Colman Dock is the Grand Trunk Pacific dock as rebuilt after the grander Canadian dock was razed by the fire of 1914.