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Fair and Festival – No. 23: Return to the Eaton Apartments

Published on November 13, 2012 in Fair and Festival. 0 Comments

For this “Fair and Festival” installment we repeat a Pacific feature we printed earlier in , but now additions to help you, dear reader, find the spot more easily with aerial photographs and other points of view. The Eaton Apartments were set at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Thomas Street and so kitty-korner from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, once it lost its parish on 6th and Bell in 1928 to the last of the Denny Regrades. The long sky-lighted pavilion built there for Century -21 was named, for the fair, the Domestic Commerce and Industry Building (aka Hall of Industry.) It faced the Plaza of States (aka Flag Plaza). After the fair the building got a new and sensible name: The Flag Plaza Pavilion. It was home in 1978 for King Tut’s first lucrative visit to Seattle. The Eaton Apartments covered about one-third of the Flag Plaza footprint – the most westerly third. We will point it out again below in a 1928 aerial photograph and also in Frank Shaw’s colored slide of the apartment’s back or north facade during its last months before being razed for the fair.

Above: Looking kitty-corner across Thomas Street and Second Ave. North to the Eaton Apartments, ca. 1940. It is a rare recordings of Seattle Center acres before their make-over for the 1962 Century 21. Below: Jean Sherrard visited the intersection during the recent playing of the Folklife festival 2012, and “captured” folk-jazz artist Erik Apoe, with his guitar, leaving the festival after his performance. Bottom: During the 2012 Bumbershoot Jean returned to the corner which included then – for the duration of Bumbershoot – one of the escape gates from the ticketed festival. With his press credentials hanging from this next (although this year they were merely stuck to his shirt) Jean could easily come and go.

THE EATON APARTMENTS

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 8, 2010)

I know nothing about the provenance of this photograph, except that it showed up as a thoughtful anonymous gift on my front porch among a small bundle of negatives. Still with the help of a tax card, a few city directories, and a scattering of other sources we can make some notes.

With his or her back to Sacred Heart Catholic Church, an unknown photographer looked northeast through the intersection of Second Avenue North and Thomas Street. The Eaton Apartment House across the way was built in 1909 – in time perhaps for the city’s first world’s fair. It held 19 of everything: tubs, sinks, basins, through its 52 plastered rooms. In the 1938 tax assessment it is described as in “fair condition” with a “future life” of about 13 years. In fact, it held the corner for a full half century until it was leveled to build Seattle’s second worlds fair.

The Eaton and its nearby neighbor, the Warren Avenue School, were two of the larger structures razed for Century 21. However, the neighborhood’s biggest – the Civic Auditorium, Ice Arena, and the 146th Field Artillery Armory – were given makeovers and saved for the fair. Built in 1939, the old Armory shows on the far right. Although not so easy to find it is also in the “now” having served in its 71 years first as the Armory, then the ’62 fair’s Food Circus, and long since the Center House.

This is part of David and Louisa Denny’s pioneer land claim, which Salish history explains served for centuries as a favorite place to snag low-flying ducks and hold potlatches. The oldest user of the Eaton Apt site was even more ancient. The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) brought King Tut, or at least parts of his tomb, to the Flag Pavilion in 1978. It was about then that Andy Warhol also showed up to party with SAM in the old pavilion, which in 2002 was replaced and greatly improved with the Fisher Pavilion.

Readers who have old photographs of this neighborhood from before the 1962 fair (they are rare) or of the fair itself might like to share them with historylink. That non-profit encyclopedia of regional history is preparing a book on the fair, one that will resemble, we expect, its impressive publication on the recent Alaska Yukon Pacific Centennial. As with the AYP book, the now hard-at-work authors are Paula Becker and Alan Stein. You can reach them by phone at 206-447-8140 or on line at Admin@historylink.org.

This Pierson Photo looks northeast over the future fair grounds late in July, 1928. It was printed with caption in the Seattle Times on the 29th of July, with the header for the caption reading "Look, Seattle, at Your Own Civic Center From Air!" The aerial is, obviously, filled with attractions. Our Eaton Apartments site at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Thomas Street, is easily found centered at the bottom of the aerial. One block north of Thomas is Harrison street, and where it meets Second Ave is the spot where the Coliseum's (aka Keyarena) western anchor or primary strut or beam (or what?) is anchored. Below we will visit the corner, again before the '62 fair.

Here thirty-two years later is another aerial that was printed in The Seattle Times on July 13, 1960 - or near it - and photographed by Times photographer Paul Thomas. This one also looks northwest towards Lake Union, and shows the clearing the center well underway for C-21. The Times has helpfully attached identifying numbers, which we will now list. (1) Cleared of the Warren Avenue School and being prepared for the "state-financed Century 21 Coliseum." (2) Civic Auditorium from 1928; (3) Ice Arena (1928); (4) High School Memorial Stadium (ca. 1948); (5) National Guard Armory (soon to be renamed the Food Circus); (6) Nile Temple (kept for the fair and used then as the exclusive Club 21 where VIP's could relax and refresh while escaping the populace horde.) (7) Part of the future site of what the paper names "the five-unit federal Hall of Science" and we know as the Pacific Science Center. Just below and right of the circles "No.5" is the corner of the here razed Eaton Apartments.

Frank Shaw's pre-fair coverage of the neighborhood shows here the back side of the Eaton - its north facade. The view looks south and a little east from the north line of Harrison Street, a few feet west of Second Ave. Shaw's photo was, of course, photographed sometime before Thomas 1960 aerial above it. Since 1961 standing here and taking the same aim as Shaw would show that west support for the Keyarena. (Which is more likely the Key Arena.) The next view - one from the Space Needle - in 1962 - marks the spot with a red arrow.

The red arrow marks the spot - or near it - where Frank Shaw shot the photo that is placed above this one.

That western beam, strut, support, noted here. Photographers have climbed it for the prospect of astronaut John Glenn during his morning visit to the fair. The view looks west somewhat in line with Harrison Avenue, which would put out-of-frame the International Fountain on the right and the Plaza of States (with the state flags) on the left. This is another Times shot - one by their long-time photographer Vic Condiotty. I met Vic in 1982, my first year contributing the weekly "now-and-then" to the paper.

We will wrap No. 23 with another Frank Shaw photo. This one, we figure, looks north and a little east from what would become the Pacific Science Center. The Catholics, at the southeast corner of Second and Thomas, are here right-of-center, which is also often the position of its clerics if not always the parishioners. Far-right, is the yellow strut, beam, girder, stanchion, transverse on the east quadrant of the Coliseum and here under construction. It appears above where the Eaton Apartments would be standing – if they still were. Queen Anne Hill is on the horizon.

Seattle Now & Then: The Federal Courthouse

Published on September 29, 2012 in Seattle Now and Then. 0 Comments

(click to enlarge photos)

The future Federal Courthouse site packed with ice in 1937. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

THEN: Show here in late 1939, across the intersection of Spring Street and 5th Avenue, the building site chosen for the Federal Courthouse, was surrounded for the most part by hotels, apartments, schools, churches, and, to the west across 5th Avenue, the lush landscape of the Carnegie-built Seattle Public Library, here lower-right. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

NOW: Jean Sherrard set his “repeat” wider in order to better show the courthouse’s position in the neighborhood.

For its April 22, 1940 edition, the Seattle Times perambulating wit responsible for this paper’s once popular feature “Strolling Around the Town” visited the work on Seattle’s new Federal Courthouse. The writer described the workmen pouring concrete for the “elevator’s penthouse twelve stores above the street.” There they “paused, mopped their brows and surveyed the flag they had hoisted on a temporary pole.” It was the informal “topping off” of the U.S. Justice Department’s modern addition to Seattle.

Like the Smith Tower, which it otherwise does not resemble, the Fed’s modern box glows in proper light. It too is covered for the most part with terra cotta tiles with a reflecting color that the contractor N.P. Severin – of Chicago – described as light peach-bloom. The austere structure’s few ornaments and color choices were, of course, its architect’s, Louis A. Simon, who like the $3 million that paid for this our first modern box, came to us from the other Washington.

Naturally, local architects and contractors could have used such a federal plum during the depression. Soon after the federal funding was announced in the summer of 1936, James A. Wood, Seattle Times Associate Editor, lamented that once again, it seemed, the city would miss the opportunity to build a needed civic center around the new courthouse. Instead, the fed’s purchased the Standard Station and its sprawling parking lot across 5th Ave. from the Carnegie Library, which a half-century earlier was the first site for Providence Hospital.

Pulled from The Seattle Times for Sept. 37, 1937.

Groundbreaking news in the Times for June 17, 1939.

From The Seattle Times, Jan. 14, 1940

The work went fast, beginning with the groundbreaking in the summer of 1939 when Federal Judge John C. Bowen, shovel in hand, decided to “start the dirt flying.” By late October of 1940, the F.B.I. and many other federal enforcers were ready to move in. City Light was soon shamed into clearing the block of its weathered utility poles, which were described as “a ‘disgrace’ to the sightlines of the new building.” The imperial fuss over the earnest new courthouse was also “expressed” on the front lawn. The Times Stroller returned in the summer of 1941 and described what is still seventy years later an inviting green expanse as “stuffed with red-white-and-blue shields upon which appeared the words: ‘U.S. PROPERTY KEEP OFF THE GRASS’.”

August 7, 1941, from the Times.

Almost complete the Federal Courthouse poses still surrounded by the city's offensive poles. (The link directly below will open the Times page that uses the above photo and much more.)

Times Aug 17, 1940 p14

The courthouse front lawn looking north to the Olympic Hotel on March 13, 1963. Another photo by Lawton Gowey.

Lawton Gowey photographed this from the 8th floor of the City Light Building (on Third Ave.) on June 7, 1960. He recorded two of Seattle's then best examples of modern architecture, the relatively new Seattle Public Library on 4th Ave. with the Federal Courthouse behind it on 5th. There is as yet no SeaFirst tower to get in the way of Lawton's vision from his office at City Light.

After its 1967/8 construction, Lawton Gowey look east into the curtain of the SeaFirst Tower. Here he has visited a friend's office on the 33rd floor of the tower, and from there looks down - and east - to the courthouse and a front lawn only mildly tinted by the summer of 1981. Lawton dates his slide that year on July 15.

WEB EXTRAS

The top of the parking garage offered several unique perspectives of the city – here’s a few taken on the fly:

Anything to add, Paul?

Surely Jean, although only a few from the site. By introduction a slide I took on May 19, 1997 of the plaque set at the front stairs to the courthouse. It commemorates Providence Hospital, the former occupant of this block borders by 5th and 6th Avenues, and Madison and Spring Streets.

THE BUILDERS HOSPITAL

(First appeared in Pacific, August 24, 1986)

This wonderfully detailed historical view (above) looks southwest from the old metropolitan campus of the University of Washington. The photographer (probably Charles Morford) carried his camera to the cupola (most likely) of the Territorial University building for an elevated sighting of his primary subject, Providence Hospital.

The scene is relatively easy to date. The hospital’s central tower on Fifth Avenue and its south wing at Madison Street (here on the right) were completed in 1887. Central School, behind the hospital, left-center, burned to the ground in April, 1888. Since the leaves on some of these trees and bushes seem to be just beyond budding, and there is no wind-stacked mulch of autumn collecting in the gutter along Seneca Street below, we can say, almost confidently, that this scene was shot in the early spring of 1888. It may have been but a few days before that unnaturally hot bright April night when men armed with brooms and pails of water darted across the Providence roof dowsing and sweeping aside the embers falling from the flaming school and sky.

An earlier look at the same neighborhood recorded from the Territorial University's main building. Note that the hospital's central tower on 5th Avenue is not as yet in place.

But in the Spring of 1888, the sisters were less worried by physical fires than by Protestant ones. A century ago the religious temper was somewhat less ecumenical than it is now, and the quality of care given by the strange-to-Protestants, black-habited Sisters of Providence was chronically embattled by anti-Catholic resentment and rumors. When the Episcopalians opened Grace Hospital in 1886, the open competition for patients resulted in the area’s first health insurance plan. The Grace administrators offered, for five and ten dollars, yearly health bonds to the Catholic sisters’ “bread & butter” clients, the working class.

The Protestant's Grace Hospital was too costly to keep open.

The sisters responded with their own plan. After eight months the Sister Chronicler wrote, “Our tickets are doing well, even in the territory of our adversary . . . A good number of patients left his hospital dissatisfied, while ours leave happy. His hospital is luxuriously furnished with Turkish carpets, furniture with marble tops, and so forth. Ours is simply furnished, but our Sisters are so devoted that they aptly compensate for the lack of wealth.”

In 1893, the overextended Grace Hospital failed following the economic panic of that year. But Providence survived and kept enlarging. When the last addition along Madison Street was ready in 1901, Providence Hospital was the largest in the Northwest.

Looking northeast across Madison Street and 4th Avenue to the block-long Providence.

The sisters survived in a hospital of their own making. The restrained but satisfying symmetry of the completed plant was designed by artist-architect Mother Joseph, who was also the founder of the Sisters of Providence in the Northwest. Self-taught, she was known as “The Builder,” and was ultimately honored by the American Institute of Architects as the first architect in the Northwest.

The sisters arrived in Seattle in 1877, accepting a contract to care for the county’s poor house in Georgetown. The next year, they bought the John Moss residence at Fifth and Madison, and under Mother Joseph’s supervision, converted it into their first hospital. Seventy-five beds were added to those in the Moss home when the first wing (at Spring Street) of Mother Joseph’s structure was dedicated on Ground Hog Day, 1883.

After 28 years at Fifth Avenue and Madison Street, the sisters moved in 1911 to their present site at 17th Avenue and Jefferson Street. The central tower of that surviving hospital is a brick variation on Mother Joseph’s frame tower along Fifth Avenue and so may remind us of “the builder.”

The "new" Providence Hospital on Second Hill.

Recently, the hospital’s tower part of what is now called the 1910 Building was threatened when its original construction was found wanting by modem earthquake standards. [A reminder: this feature first appeared in 1986.] However, the tower escaped the wrecker’s ball (or imploder’s charge) when the neighborhood’s Squire Park Community Council successfully campaigned to save it. This preservationist’s success included a reciprocity. For its part Providence Hospital agreed to restore and reinforce the 1910 tower, and the council agreed to not stand in the way of the hospital’s plans to add a modem wing (construction began in 1989) to their old hospital.

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Both views, above and below, look west through the intersection of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue.

SIXTH & SPRING – 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, June 18, 2006)

When its last of several additions was attached along Madison Street in 1901, Providence Hospital became the largest hospital in the Pacific Northwest. Mother Joseph, “The Builder,” – as she was called – of this and many more structures for the Sisters of Providence, died the following year in Vancouver, Wash., where she first “answered the call” with her Bible in 1856.

This rear view of the hospital looks west across the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Spring Street, most likely in the spring of 1909 when the Dept. of Public Works was regrading Spring and Seneca streets east of Fourth Avenue. The cut here at Sixth, as revealed to the left of the steam shovel, is at least 20 feet.

Aside from its central tower facing Fifth Avenue, the part of the hospital most evident here is the first wing that was dedicated on Feb. 2, 1883. With architect Donald McKay, Mother Joseph designed a three-story frame hospital with a brick foundation, large basement, open porches and the first elevator in town. Mother Joseph also supervised the construction.

Despite the Protestant town’s general prejudice toward Catholics, the hospital was busy. Epidemics of many sorts and accidents at work were commonplace. The work day did not shrink from 12 hours to 10 until 1886.

In 1911, Providence moved to its new plant at 17th Avenue and East Jefferson Street. Two years later, Seattle’s progressive mayor George Cotterill temporarily converted this old Providence – then vacant – into the Hotel Liberty for homeless and unemployed men. However, as Richard Berner explains in his book, “Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, to Restoration,”* there were no sisters of any sort at the hotel. “Women were not allowed . . .and had to shift for themselves.”

(*Berner’s illustrated history can be studied on this blog.)

Two looks, above and below, north from the Smith Tower were photographed respectively, 1913/14 and ca. 1946. The first show Providence about the time that Mayor Cotterill used it to shelter homeless men. The second subject records the luminous aspect of the nearly new courthouse on the right.

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The "new" brick Central School at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Madison Street.

CENTRAL SCHOOL

(First appeared in Pacific June 17, 1990)

Among the distinct pleasures of doing this work are the discoveries shared by readers. One uncovered this view of Central School, among a handful of glass negatives forgotten but snugly preserved in a small wooden box.

When fire destroyed the city’s first high school, the Seattle School District took the opportunity to raise this heroic Gothic building in its place. Central School was built on the ledge of First Hill, where the pitch of Madison Street’s steepest part Relaxes for its less strenuous climb east of Interstate 5. Now part of the 1-5 ditch, it was once a commanding setting filling the block bounded by Marion and Madison streets and Sixth and Seventh avenues.

Central High was razed by a sensitive wrecker named Henry Bacon. “I’m far-from a new hand in this game, but this is the strangest job I’ve ever worked on,” Bacon said. Even the building’s interior walls were 2 feet thick, and all of Seattle-baked brick. The wrecker estimated that there were 2 million bricks.

Central School circa 1945 without its towers.

The envelope protecting the glass negative for this view was dated 1902 – the year Central’s ascendancy as a high school was considerably diminished with the construction of Broadway High School on Capitol Hill. Central served as a primary school only until 1938; for a time, it was used as a vocational school, but after the 1949 earthquake the towers were dismantled and the big brick pile closed for good. Henry Bacon finished this work in 1953.

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In 1883 the largest school in Washington Territory opened on the south side of Madison Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. This wooden Central School survived only five years before it burned to the ground in 1888. A larger Brick Central School followed and the last parts of it survived until razed in the early 1960s for the pit that would become the Seattle Freeway.

OLD CENTRAL’S FACULTY in 1883

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 15, 2006)

Thanks to Gilbert Costello and his namesake collection at the Seattle Public Library this portrait of the Central School faculty not only survives but also is carefully annotated on its flip side. There at the center is the official stamp of the “photographic artist” Theo E. Peiser who arrived in Seattle, by most descriptions, in 1883, which is also the year that this view was most likely recorded. The hand-written notes explain that here are the “Old Central Teachers” at the “opening of Central.” Actually, this is the second “Old Central” and it is brand new.

The statuesque long coat on the left is Professor Edward Sturgis Ingraham, who arrived in Seattle in 1875 and ten days later became the head of the community’s schools. In 1883 he completed his first year as the first Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools and got married. The 31-year old professor (taught for the most part in the “school of experience”) and Myra Carr, 24, chose the eighth of April for their wedding because it was for both of them also their birthdays. One month later on the seventh of May Ingraham marched his students and faculty three blocks east up Madison Street from the really old Central School on 3rd Avenue to this new and then largest school in Washington Territory. Behind that front door are twelve classrooms and every one of them measures 28 by 35 feet.

Aside from Ingraham and the Janitor on the far right the scene shows ten teachers, but only eight are named: Pearce, Nichols, Penfield, Condon, Piper, Kenyon, Vroman, and Jones. This last, O.S. Jones is the “other man” on the right. (If he looks like a younger version of the man with the brooms it is because the janitor is his father.) In 1884 Jones would pose on different steps when he became the principal of the then new Denny School at 5th and Battery. Only bad health in 1913 stopped him from teaching.

Another of Ingraham at Central Schools steps, this time with some of his scholars divided by sex in an "A Class."

Follow another lift from the Seattle Public Libraries Costello scrapbook on the early history of Seattle Public Schools. First the pictures of five Central School teachers, followed by his description.

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Construction on the Seattle Freeway, Jan. 26, 1963, looking north from Jefferson Street. Photo by Frank Shaw.

Another Frank Shaw recording, looking north from near Jefferson on August 15, 1964. Included in the changes is the IBM Building, It rises in the later photo directly behind and above the Federal Courthouse.

Jean it is once more time for “nighty bears,” the silly but endearing expression for “good night” first taught by Bill Burden, my old housemate from 1978-79. A few weeks past Bill was in town and Jean you remember that we attended the party that Michael DeCourcey gave for Bill and his friends hereabouts at Michael’s new home near Granite Falls. Jean did you make any snapshots of it all?

Later this morning after breakfast – and a few hours sleep – I’ll go searching for some TDA protest photographs taken at the front door to the Federal Courthouse now long ago.

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TDA aka “THE DAY AFTER”

Among the many protests staged at or near the front door of the Federal Courthouse, the most frenzied one was on Feb. 17, 1970 for a demo named TDA for “The Day After.” Even without digital equipment it was well recorded by participants, media and surveyors for the local police and other authorities. The few shots below come from a collection of surveillance photos shot by a stringer for a local TV station. I purchased them in a garage sale many years ago. The bottom photo is from a different and unidentified protest at the courthouse. It is probably from an early assembly protesting the war in Vietnam. Walt Crowley, the figure in profile bottom right, looks to be still in high school. Walt was the primary founder of historylink.org, and his historylink description of the TDA protest can be reached by clicking the photo that includes him.

Well! There is Walt Crowley at the bottom-right corner of this early anti-war protest at the Fed. Courthouse. At the time, Walt was most likely still in high school. Click the picture and it will bring up Walt's historylink essay on TDA, for which a few pictures follows. Some of those other figures are also familiar to me, although I no longer remember their names.

TDA troopers at the damaged door to the Fed. Courthouse.

Earlier - protestors at the door. Jeff Dowd - one of the Seattle Seven - is center-right.

A detail of Jeff appearing as an avenging angel while facing the protestors at the Fed.Courthouse doors. Jeff would later "cool it" as "The Dude" - an L.A. model for living-in-ones-pajamas cool celebrated in the by now cult film the Big Lebowski.

Doing it in the road: 5th Avenue in front of the Fed. Courhouse. "Those times." It is probably not Feb. 17. Too balmy. Seeing the phalanx of uniforms up the block we suspect that many of those sitting here would soon be running. They are young - or were.

Seattle Now & Then: MOHAI’s Seattle Fire Mural

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: “Scientific muralist” Ruddy Zallinger works on his depiction of the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889 from a prospect that looks east on Yesler Way (Mill Street then) to its old pre-fire intersection with First Avenue (Front Street then). (Courtesy Ron Edge)

NOW: Jean Sherrard made a slight adjustment for his “repeat” of Zallinger’s art to better show the musical accompaniment to the Museum of History and Industry’s “last day” party last June 6, which was also the 123rd anniversary of Seattle’s Great Fire. MOHAI will open again later this year at its new Museum in its new old home - the reconfigured armory at the south end of Lake Union.

Imagine asking the famous – and stuffed – gorilla named Bobo what were the two most popular artifacts on show at what since early June of this year has been the old Museum of History and Industry in Montlake. Bobo – being a modest gorilla who thru many years kept a steady eye on the museum’s exhibits from his own glass case – would, I think, choose the “Founding of Seattle” diorama with its puppet pioneers and the Great Seattle Fire mural. I would agree with the western lowland primate.

The mural is shown here with its artist, Ruddy Zallinger, in a press photo that was first published in this newspaper on Dec. 5, 1952. The then 34-year old Zallinger explained that he’d been working on the 10-by-24-foot mural for four months and hoped to complete it by Christmas. For rendering the pioneer buildings the “scientific muralist” studied old photographs kept by the Seattle Historical Society. For the flames he studied fires nearby at the Montlake landfill.

Raised in Seattle and taught at Cornish School, Zallinger was still fresh from winning a 1949 Pulitzer Prize for a much larger mural “The Age of Reptiles” that took five years to complete for the Peabody Museum of Natural History on the Yale University Campus, where Zalinger was also an instructor.

Zallinger’s Great Seattle Fire mural was dedicated on Feb. 15, 1953, the first anniversary of the museum’s opening. A band playing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” accompanied the unveiling. Those attending included at least fifty persons who were surviving eye-witnesses of the Great Fire of June 6, 1889, and some of their stories were told in a recorded program that followed the unveiling. For the occasion of the mural’s 50th anniversary rededication on Feb. 15, 2003, there were, of course, no first hand witnesses attending. Bobo, however, was there.

The Denny Party on Alki Beach diorama and the other "most popular" depiction of Seattle history at MOHAI.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Sure Jean, a few features that relate and a few corrections for, I think, two of those. (Perhaps just one.) The featured historical photo at the top, as the story goes, was printed in the Times in 1952. I “grabbed” that off the Seattle Public Library’s link to the complete Times from 1900 to 1984/5. On the right side, you may note that the reader is asked “Are you 39?” Most likely, quite a few of them were. Those among them who are still among us would now be 99. How old were you in 1952? I was 14, and have now 60 years later, really no sense about what it was like to be so much a young teen. Except that certainly, my bike – a spitfire with Balloon tires – was most important, and during the summer the swimming pool at Spokane’s Comstock Park was an addiction. There was at 14 not requirement yet to look for summer work.

On the left and gesturing is George Cotterill historically one of Seattle's most effective citizens - as engineer, mayor, state senator, author, and Port of Seattle Commissioner. He lived long. As a young engineer-surveyor he helped plot the route for the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway along the north shore of Lake Union in 1886-87. Here he is fit and performing for the camera and those with him 65 years later. He surely remembered the Great Fire - and probably wrote about it.

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The first mistake is another one of negligence; that is, after a lot of searching I could not find the negative for the “then” used in the April 12, 1998 Pacific feature, and printed, as a substitute, in facsimile directly below. We will spill the text alone at its footstep (below it) and then include two scenes from the MOHAI front porch, a place that was somewhat near to the historical photographers prospect. Following that we will enter the 1909 panorama of Union Bay thru to Wallingford taken from the AYP’s captive balloon, and we will also show the balloon.

This first appeared - like this - in the Pacific Mag. for April 12, 1998. A repeat of the text follows below.

UNION BAY LOG CORRAL

(First appeared in Pacific, April 12, 1998)

The scale of this picturesque lake scene can be figured just left of its center. There, riding a flat-topped scow, two Lilliputian lumberjacks are at work corralling logs into these ordered rows at the southwest shore of Lake Washington’s Union Bay. The canal connecting the big lake with Lake Union through the Montlake Isthmus is just out of this scene to the left.

More MOHAI staff celebrating near the museum's front door sometime in the 1990s, I believe.

When the cut was completed in 1884, there was still plenty of old-growth forest along Lake Union to feed David Denny’s Western Mill at the lake’s southern end. Nonetheless, the Chinese laborers who did the digging for Denny and others were preparing a way for the much greater virgin reserves beside the larger lake. Like the figures on the scow, the row of driven piles that run offshore, far right, may be hard to see in this printing, but they are the scene’s only fixed artifacts.

In a 1909 aerial panorama photographed from a balloon above the nearby University of Washington campus, the same piles appear, although in a considerably worn state. So we surmise that this record dates from some years earlier, perhaps a century ago or so. The aerial

photograph is a surer guide for determining that the historical view was taken from a spot now best described as near the front door of the Museum of History & Industry, which opened in 1952. Since Lake Washington was dropped 9 feet in 1916 for the opening of the ship canal about 600 feet north of the log canal, the site of the old log corral was exposed and later reclaimed for the museum’s parking lot. (On some machines, click the pan below TWICE for full magnification.)

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MONTLAKE’S LOG CANAL & PROPER ATTITUDE

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 4, 1988)

Looking east toward Laurelhurst or looking west toward Roanoke?

As I review past articles I have come across, so far, a few that are mistaken. The size of my errors vary considerably. For instance, this one is off by 180 degrees, better “was” for after first including a facsimile of the Sept 4, 1988 feature directly below (a full confession) we will make the corrections, beginning where “looking east,” as offered in 1988, is now changed to “looking west.” Here goes.

Appeared in Pacific Sept 4, 1988. Rick Caldwell, Mohai Librarian then, and Howard Giske, still Mohai's photographer, pose beside the library window.

In today’s historical scene, looking west toward the Laurelhurst peninsula, a log is about to pass through the guillotine gate at the Lake Union’s Portage Bay end of the original canal for logs – and sometimes small vessels – through the Montlake isthmus.

The first time (about 1975) I pulled this photograph from a stuffed file drawer in the Museum of History and Industry’s cramped library, I first thought it had been taken years earlier from nearly the exact place I was standing, but much later upon years of study and pointed reflection, I realized that I need to get out of library, which is – or now was – near the east Lake Washington end of the canal and proceed to the Department of Fisheries parking lot, which is near the Lake Union or west end of the log canal. As claimed then (in 1988) it was correct to note that the line or route of the old log canal passed just outside the library window. This narrow part of the Montlake Isthmus, was named Uniontown by John Pike, who for painting the then new Territorial University in 1861 was paid with this strategic land, which was also the natives’ regular portage route between the two lakes.

Copied from a Lowman Family album with snapshots from the late 1880s thru the 1890s, this is a better record of the east end of the Montlake log canal. That's Laurelhurst - then not yet so named, but more likely called Webster Point - across Union Bay. Billy, I think, is the one on the left.

With the 1916 construction of the Montlake Cut portion of the ship canal, the old log canal was filled in and given to other uses including, eventually, most of it became the strip of landscaping along the north margin of State Highway 520′s, approach to the Evergreen Point Bridge.

In the “now” repeat from August 1988, MOHAI’s librarian then, Rick Caldwell, stands behind the museum’s photographer, Howard Giske. They are posing in the museum’s library, which now in late 2012, is dropped from public use like the rest of the building because of the museum’s move to the south end of Lake Union) Again, while Rick and Howard are positioned close to the log canal they are not so close to the part of it shown above with the locks. Still remembering – I repeat – that I originally wrote this piece in 1988 when I was under the mistaken impression that they – the mechanical gates of the canal – were at its Union Bay, when in fact they were at the opposite Portage Bay end.

Another look across Union Bay from a site "somewhat" close to the one above - perhaps very close for both seem to suggest the architecture of, perhaps, an entrance to the log canal at this the east end. The town of Yesler - with Henry Yesler's last mill - can be glimpsed on the far shore. The mill site is now taken by the U.W.'s school of horticulture. Yesler was able to open a mill here after the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad reach the site with a spur in 1887-88. Henry's last mill on his wharf at the foot of Mill Street (Yesler Way) burned down, also in 1887. He did not rebuilt it there. The railroad surely took some of the activity - moving lumber - from the log canal.

Had I caught the mistake before the presses rolled, I might have moved Rick and Howard out of the library and walked with them over to that parking lot and shot to the west. But then their relevance would have somewhat dissipated, except to strengthen a confession of my mistaken first impression. But why would I wish to make a point of that if I corrected it in time – I ask?

Howard Giske relaxing with a trade tabloid near but now outside the windows to what was, until recently, the MOHAI library. I don't remember when I took this but it was probably at least twenty years past.

Surely I would still have liked to somehow feature these fellows – as fine representatives of the museum and stewards of local history. So I might have chosen a different photograph of the canal from the MOHAI collection, one at its east or Union Bay end. (Like those printed above or the stereo that follows with the next feature.) That alternative would have been relevant at least to Rick’s status then as the MOHAI librarian, and I might have asked Howard, the photographer, to take the new shoot of the chute and those locks. A copy of an original stereo and intimate record of those locks is in the MOHAI collection. The original – the stereo printed below with the next feature – was recorded by Frank Harwood about 1907.

The Hansen movers van for staging MOHAI's big move from Montlake to the south end of Lake Union. I took this last Spring (2012). It looks north towards Union Bay and the prospect is close to that used by the photographer of the second subject above this one, the one that shows the town of Yesler on the far shore.

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THE LOCKS in STEREO

(First appeared in Pacific, June 2, 2002)

This is the most intimate record of the locks on the old Montlake Log Canal that has ever been shared with me. It is one part of a stereo recorded by Frank Harwood around 1907. When properly spied through stereoscope optics, the floating logs in the foreground of the original actually seem to be wonderfully in the foreground. With this third dimension, the logger near the locks’ guillotine gate needs considerably more skill to ride his log.

Like the Indians before him, Harvey Pike first saw the importance of this isthmus as a low and short portage between Lake Union’s Portage Bay and Union Bay on Lake Washington. He was paid with this land for painting the original University of Washington building in 1861. Pike platted and named his prize Union City, and soon he also began excavating a ditch for moving logs. The big lake was then ordinarily around 9 feet higher than the small. (The opening of the ship canal in 1916 dropped the big lake to the altitude of the small one.) Predictably, Pike soon gave up this digging. Still, he kept an eye open for opportunities, and in 1871 transferred his deed to Californians with deeper pockets. They first laid a narrow-gauge railroad across the isthmus. Between 1872 and ’78, these rails carried cars filled with the black gold of Newcastle. In those years coal, not lumber, was Seattle’s principal export.

Looking west over Portage Bay to Roanoke and in line with the Highway 520. This prospect is somewhat close to the site of the log canal locks and chute.

Abandoned by the eastside miners for a more direct route around the south end of Lake Washington to the Seattle waterfront, the Montlake Isthmus was at last scored with a deep ditch for logs in 1883 by Chinese laborers. This guillotine lock was built near the Portage Bay end of the cut, within a frog jump of the University of Washington’s row of odd-shaped fish hatcheries set today beside Highway 520 and so also its parking lot.

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NEARBY MOHAI

(This first appeared in Pacific early 2005 with a repeat by MOHAI photographer Howard Giske. We used it again in 2011-12 for our Repeat Photography Exhibit at MOHAI, that second time with much of the MOHAI staff available and posing in Jean’s now. It is the staff that at this writing is probably laboring on the museum’s big move to their new home in the old but restored and remodeled Naval Armory at the south end of Lake Union, of which we will include two photos next – photos taken years before MOHAI had any inkling that it would take possession in 2012.)

The San Mateo still moored in the slip between Westlake Ave. and the Naval Armory. I snapped this sometime in the 1980s - I suspect.

This I recorded while helping Walt Crowley illustrated his National Trust Guide to Seattle landmarks in the mid-1990s. It was about then that the hardly used armory was beginning to be studied for new uses, and some of them concentrated on maritime heritage.

MOHAI photographer Howard Giske took the now photograph from a slightly different angle than the historical scene in order to escape the landscape that now borders the western end of the Highway 520 Evergreen Point Bridge. The Boeing B-1 still hangs from the ceiling although you cannot see it because the windows were covered in one of the changes the came with the building of the bridge. Historical photo of museum is by Art Forde and Fred Carter Photographers and courtesy of MOHAI.

Jean's repeat recorded for the MOHAI exhibit Repeat Photography, which we curated with Berangere Lomont, also of this blog.

When “little Victoria Watt” the great-great granddaughter of “city father” Arthur A. Denny cut the dedicatory ribbon on Feb. 15, 1952 the “Spirit of Seattle Memorial Building” looked much as it does in this older scene with a Boeing B-1 that seems to be flying through the windows. Actually (and appropriately) the B-1 is hanging from the ceiling of the museum’s southwest wing named for the Boeing executive Phillip Johnson. And the building is better known as the Museum of History and Industry, or MOHAI for short.

An aerial of the nearly new MOHAI at its MONTLAKE address before the intrusion of the freeway connection to the Evergreen Point Bridge and also before the museum's several additions. Here the original entrance on the south wall with a ramp to the front door is still intact.

The more historical photograph was probably recorded some time before Victoria did her snipping for the long ramp including the high wall behind the plane are peculiarly free of any of the many artifacts that the Seattle/King County Historical Society had been collecting for just such a home since it was first organized in 1911.

An early and faded color slide of the MOHAI entrance when new by the long active "real photo postcard" artist, Ellis. (Courtesy, John Cooper)

When it opened in 1952 the entrance was reached over the bridge shown on the right. Neither Paul Thiry, the architect, nor Guen Plestcheef the Society’s activist president (and also daughter of Emily Carkeek, the Society’s founder) would have known in ‘52 that in another eleven years the approach to the museum’s front door would be crossed by the west bound off-ramp of the Evergreen Point Bridge as it cut through the Montlake neighborhood. The main entrance, of course, was moved to the north side of the building and soon MOHAI also had a wings added for an auditorium and more (but still not enough) storage for its growing collection.

Looking east on the log canal to Union Bay. The photo was probably taken from a crude bridge that spanned the canal, which was some distance to the west of MOHAI's future footprint.

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Originally the driveway to the Redelsheimer home came directly from E. Denny Blaine Place, the better to use the mansion as a backdrop for posing new cars like this electric one. [Photo courtesy, Webster Stevens Collection, negative number, 83.10.10,652.1.] The ornamental fence between the mansion and the public sidewalk survives but the direct driveway to the big home has long since been replaced with a screen of trees.

MORE GISKE with NATURE IN THE BALANCE

(First appeared in Pacific, summer of 2007)

In the “now” photograph Howard Giske, the Museum of History and Industry’s Curator of Photography, poses “in the balance” between two Vespas driven to the historical site by Nicky Ducommun and Brad Stone, left and right, respectively. Putting Giske in the “now” was my idea. Adding the fuel-efficient scooters was his.

Both views were posed on the public parkway in front of the lavish Lake Washington waterfront home Seattle clothing scion Jules Redelsheimer built for his family in 1910. (It is directly across E. Denny Blaine Place from Denny Blaine Park.) Eight years later in 1918 The Seattle Times editorial photographers, the Webster Stevens firm, posed an electric car in the Redelsheimer’s original elegant driveway. Now it is a reminder that the current interest in battery-driven cars is a long-awaited revival.

Curator Giske included this photograph among the 100 subjects – photographs, paintings, maps, lithos, postcards – in his standing exhibit because it fits his theme, “Nature In the Balance.” His is a show of Northwest classics, although many of them may be new to those who have the wisdom to visit the museum before this exhibit closes on the ninth of September – not so long from now.

Among the paintings featured are works by Kenneth Callahan, Richard Bennett, Emily Inez Denny, and Guy Anderson. To quote MOHAI literature, the exhibit is about “the complex relationship between people and nature in Washington State during the past 150 years.” Among the photographers adding variations on this “Howard’s Theme” are historical ones, like Asahel Curtis, and Anders Wilse, and contemporary ones, like Fred Milkie Jr. and Josef Scaylea.

I have known Howard Giske since the 1960s and now explored his newest creation two times. So I have some confidence in recommending that readers plan a summer visit to the Museum of History and Industry and curator and friend Giske’s masterful “Nature in the Balance.”

Having no record of Howard's Nature in Balance we substitute this snapshot I took from the speaker's podium during Jean, Berangere, and my MOHAI opening last April 2011 of the exhibit Repeat Photography.

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The MONTLAKE ISTHMUS BEFORE the SHIP CANAL

(A version of this little history first appeared in Pacific Northwest Magazine for August 8, 1982, and so within the first year of my contributing this weekly feature.)

Perhaps, no strip of regional real estate has engineered more dreams of empire than the isthmus that used to separate Lake Union from Lake Washington. From the beginning of white settlement it inspired local boosters to imagine the cornucopia of raw materials that would come spilling out of Lake Washington right to the back door of Seattle, once the cut could be made through that little ribbon of land.

The line of the first cut can be faintly seen in in our two turn-of-the-century panoramas. The first one dates from about 1899 and the one following it from about 1903, and there has been some clearing and development between them. These were boom years all around.

Both views was recorded from near where the photographs were taken for the linked story about the freeway in 1964 when it was nearly new. The first cut diagonally passes through the isthmus at the center of the photograph. The Lake Washington side ingress is just right of the four small and two tall trees. Built in 1883 by Chinese labor under the pay of local promoters David Denny, Thomas Burke and others, it was designed for scooting logs from the big lake into the millpond on Portage Bay, and eventually on to the mills of Lake Union, David Denny’s Western Mill at the south end of the lake included.

The nearly new and largely vacant Evergreen Point Bridge connector on the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1964. Compare this to Jean's recent look east also from the Roanoke overpass. Jean moved father south on the bridge in order to avoid the the landscaping on the north margin of the freeway.

Our two views continue east across that dividing land, part of today’s Montlake neighborhood, to Lake Washington’s Union Bay, which was then considerably larger than today and would stay so until the big lake was dropped 9 feet in 1916. Just beyond rises the Laurelhurst peninsula (largely cleared in the ca. 1903 photo), and in the distance, Kirkland can be seen across the lake.

Although this setting has its pastoral touches, the signs of development in the two turn-of-the-century panoramas above are almost everywhere. Not seen, but to the left of the photographs, is the town of Yesler. There, in the late 1880s, near the present site of the University’s horticulture center, pioneer Henry Yesler put up a namesake mill. Most of Laurelhurst was possibly first clear-cut by Yesler’s saws, then milled and finally shipped to market on the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad. (That railroad’s bed was later transformed into the Burke Gilman Recreational Path.) By 1887/88, Thomas Burke’s railroad had reached both Ravenna and Yesler at the north end of Union Bay.

The lakes were first joined by name only on July 4, 1854. Most of Seattle gathered then to celebrate Independence Day on Thomas Mercer’s claim near the southern end of a lake the Indians called “little water.” Mercer proposed that the “big water” to the east be named “Washington,” and that the little water on whose refreshing shores they were gathered be called “union.” Someday, Mercer proclaimed, it would surely be the connection for an even greater union between that big lake and Puget Sound. The locals agreed, and from that moment on there was a recurrent agitation to consummate that union.

The first person to actually try it was Harvey Pike. He followed his father John Henry Pike to town in 1861. The elder Pike was employed to help design and build the then new Territorial University at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Seneca Street. His son was given the job of painting the new school and his wage was a deed to part of this isthmus in present-day Montlake.

The territorial university at the northeast corner of Seneca Street and Fourth Avenue.

Harvey Pike actually tried to split his land in two with a simple pick, shovel and wheelbarrow. This, in the way of tools, was only a little more than Moses used to divide the Red Sea. But Harvey Pike had none of the divine aid, or in his case, federal subsidy, and so he had to give it up. The subsidy wouldn’t come in large amounts until 1910 when a Rivers and Harbors Act passed by Congress included $2,750,000 for the construction of locks down at Shilshole, so long as King County agree to finance and build the canal that would run from the locks to the “big lake,” and the county agreed consented.

The last development of the Montlake log canal before it was abandoned in 1916 for the ship canal about 600 feet to the north, was – it seems – its widening and the relocation of the locks from the west end of the canal to the east end at Union Bay. The above photo was taken in 1911 as were the first three below. The subject was the romantic adventure of taking a canoe through the cut. It was obviously a struggle.

This - it seems - look east from near the Portage Bay end of the canal, which is now cleared of its locks and chute. The high suspension bridge was also a late and short-lived addition.

This snap from the same semi-romantic adventure looks west into Portage Bay.

When the channel between the two lakes was opened in 1916 the greatest change was not the opening of the hinterland to the opportunity and exploitation of military and industrial steamers, but rather the lowering of the big lake and thereby exposing thousands of acres of fresh bottom-land. When the contemporary canal from salt water to fresh was completed in 1917 its Montlake Cut was a few hundred feet north of Harvey Pike’s strip of opportunity. And its primary traffic was, and still is, not ocean-going steamers but pleasure craft.

At two in the afternoon of August 25, 1916 the cofferdam, which separated the dry ditch of the then recently rendered Montlake cut, was broken and the waters of Portage Bay were released to hasten the work of both eroding the dam and filling the cut. Dredging followed here at the west end of the cut and then at the east end Lake Washington was slowly through a dam about 9 feet to the level of Lake Union. The lowering of the big lake through the temporary dam continued from Aug. 28 into October. The dam was then removed. The work was "polished" with some more dredging, this time at the east end.

An Opening Day on Union Bay. Photo by Robert Bradley courtesy of Lawton Gowey.

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PORTAGE BAY – POCOCK & FANTOME

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 17, 2000)

A mere half-century old – in 2000 – this exquisite view of University of Washington crews flying past photographer Josef Scaylea required patience on the part of the “Toscanini of the Camera,” as former Seattle Symphony Director Milton Katims called him. But what a shot!

“Luck is big factor,” Scaylea recalled. “The shells came through all bunched up. I would have settled for one or two but here was the whole fleet.” Like many locals, Scaylea was in love with the Fantome, the four-masted schooner yacht that for nearly 14 years was anchored in Lake Union’s Portage Bay. The shot he first imagined and eventually got put the Fantome and University of Washington crews together. The scene also includes a portion of what in 1950 was the nearly new University of Washington Medical School across the bay.

Fantome on Portage Bay in 1946. The landlocked Showboat Theatre is seen, far right, set on the University's waterfront near the foot of 15th Avenue.

Owned by AA. Guiness, the British malt-liquor manufacturer, the Fantome arrived in Puget Sound in 1939. It was laid up in Portage Bay first during World War II and then, until 1952, in litigation with King County after Guinness refused to pay personal property taxes on it. Eventually, Aristotle Onassis purchased it as a wedding gift for Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. When the Greek shipper was not invited to the wedding, he kept the ship and it ultimately wound up running luxury cruises in the Caribbean. It and its crew were lost last year (1998) to Hurricane Mitch.

A 1949 regatta on Portage Bay with the Fantome right-of-center. Photo by Lawton Gowey, Robert Bradley or Horace Sykes.

This and many other Scaylea photographs appear in a new book of memories by Stanley Richard Pocock, a local figure revered for his years of teaching rowing. Pocock’s “Way Enough! Recollections of a Life in Rowing” is a big book – almost as big as the shells he and his father, George Pocock, lovingly constructed in the old University of Washington shell house and later in their Lake Union shop.

The famous Pocock shells were sold worldwide and both they and their crews won many gold medals.