Archive for the 'Seattle Now and Then' Category

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: One hundred and seventy-seven feet long, and twenty-nine feet wide, the Emma Hayward had a hold seven feet deep. It rests here on the Seattle Waterfront ca. 1885 at the foot of Main Street. (Courtesy Michael Maslan)

NOW: After Seattle’s “Great Fire of 1889” consumed all the waterfront south of University Street, this part of it south of Yesler Way was reconfigured with larger docks and warehouses including Pier 48, which covered the waterway at Main Street. With the recent razing of Pier 48 the site has added more sprawling paving.

Launched in Portland in 1871, the slender sternwheeler Emma Hayward gave her first eleven years on the lower Columbia River dashing between Portland and Astoria.  She was, the McCurdy Marine history claims, the favorite passenger boat on that packet.

Anticipating the 1883 completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s transcontinental to Puget Sound, the sternwheeler’s owner, the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, sent her across the Columbia Bar en route to her new Puget Sound service.  She reached Seattle on Oct. 24, 1882, and soon after began her daily round trips between Seattle and Olympia, with the most important stop at Tacoma for connecting passengers with the Puget Sound terminus there of the Northern Pacific.

Here she rests in the slip between Seattle’s Ocean dock on the right, for the larger ocean-going vessels, and its City Dock on the left, for the Puget Sound “mosquito fleet” of buzzing smaller steamers.  Most of the latter were home ported in Seattle in spite of Tacoma’s alluring railroad.

These Oregon Improvement Co. docks were added to the waterfront in 1882-83.  Taking notice of the dainty tower on the Ocean Dock, here to the far right, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for Dec. 9, 1883, included it in its list of then recent waterfront improvements. “Not the least of these is the placing of the fog bell above the Ocean Dock warehouse.  The neat little cupola erected for this bell enhances the fine appearance of the building considerably.

The Emma Hayward returned to the Columbia in 1891 where she was repaired a year later to serve as a river towboat until 1900 when – quoting McCurdy once more – she was abandoned.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly Jean.   Anyone who is especially keen on this subject of waterfront history might like to browse our Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront.  It can be found with its own cover (for clicking) here on the far right.  Next we will include a few waterfront features from past printings in Pacific-plus.   But first we will begin with another recording of the Emma Haywood, this time after the 1889 fire destroyed most of the waterfront, and now bobbinh between the post-fire Pier A and the much larger side-wheeler, the T.J. Potter.

Looking north from the King Street wharf. LaRoche has dated this June 6, 1891, the second anniversary of Seattle's "great fire." The Emma Haywood bobs at the center. Note the as yet unopened Denny Hotel on the horizon. It straddled 3rd Ave. between Stewart and Virginian Streets on the southern summit of Denny Hill.

The North Pacific, on the left, and the T.J. Potter, again looking north from the King Street wharf.

NORTH PACIFIC & The T.J. POTTER

(First appeared in Pacific, April 23, 1989)

If Puget Sound organized a maritime hall of fame, the sidewheelers North Pacific and T.J. Potter would be promptly included. They won most of their races and made their fortunes. In today’s historical photo they are moored beside the Oregon Improvement Company’s “B” dock at the foot of Main/Jackson Street.

The North Pacific resting in Elliott Bay.

The smaller North Pacific was built in San Francisco in 1871 to battle the steamer Olympia for supremacy on Puget Sound. Beating the Olympia by three minutes in a mightily wagered and still famous race from Victoria to Port Townsend, the North Pacific effectively kicked its competitor off the Sound – but only after Olympia’s owners received an $18,OOO-a-year subsidy to stay away. For 32 years, the North Pacific worked Puget Sound until striking a rock in a summer fog off Marrowstone Point and sinking in the deep waters of Admiralty Inlet.

T.J.Potter underway - most likely on the Columbia River.

The lush sidewheeler T.J. Potter arrived on Puget Sound in 1890, and during her short time here was probably the classiest and fastest ship on these waters. But it had competition. In her first race from Tacoma with the Ballard-built Bailey Gatzert, the T.J. Potter reached Seattle first but only after the Gatzert blew the nozzle from her

Stack.  Soon after, on April 27, 1891, the Bailey Gatzert returned the favor, and after victory, flaunted it with a whistle-tooting trip around Elliott Bay. Two months later, the T.J. Potter set a record on the Tacoma run of 82&1/2 minutes.

T.J. Potter at Ilwaco near the mouth of the Columbia River.

The 230-foot T.J. Potter was built on the Columbia River in 1888. Designed for the relatively smooth waters of the Columbia, she was also good on Puget Sound when it was calm. But when the waves kicked up, the rocking Potter’s sidewheels would alternately flap in the air and dig into the saltwater, and her passengers – sometimes even her crew – would get seasick. Consequently, the Potter was sent back to the river, where she worked the Portland-Ilwaco and Astoria runs with distinction until being abandoned on the beach near Astoria 10 1921, where the remnants of her stout timbers rest still (Or at least did in 1989.)

A different photo studio, Boyd and Braas, but still the early-1890s, and also recorded from the King Street Coal Wharf - its outer end. The sidewheeler here is the Olympia, and the steel-hulled steamer on the left, the Queen of the Pacific and the Walla Walla.

A Similar point-of-view by Frank Shaw on Nov 9, 1968, and during late construction of the Seafirst tower.

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KING STREET TRESTLE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 29, 2005)

Between 1877 and 1903 the King Street coal wharf was probably the most popular prospect from which to study the city. Fortunately, a few photographers took the opportunity to record panoramas stitched from several shots. This view is the most southerly of four photographs that probably date from the spring or early summer of 1882. The photographer was the prolific “anonymous.”

The scene looks east toward the block between Jackson Street on the far left and King Street on the right. King was then still a railroad trestle built above the tides, and all the structures that appear on the right side of this view – the railroad shops and a lumber mill – are also set above the tideflats. The white hotel on the far left with the wrapping porch, shutters and shade trees is the Felker House, the first Seattle structure built of finished lumber.

Two of what we may kindly call the hotel’s “urban legends” survive its destruction in the “Great Fire” of 1889: First, that it was the town’s original whorehouse. Second, that its overseer – Mary Ann Conklin, aka “Mother Damnable” – turned to solid stone sometime between her death in 1873 and difficult resurrection in 1884 when her body was hauled to a second grave. Believe it or not, her features were intact.

Two more semi-solid points – both about the “native land” shown here: First, it is still a quarter-century before the ridge on the horizon would be lowered 90 feet with the Jackson Street regrade. Second, the tide is out and the small bluff above the beach is the same on which the Duwamish tribe built its longhouse. There, the Indians looked out on the bay probably for centuries before Captain Felker substituted whitewashed clapboard for cedar slabs.

A montage of scenes photographed by LaRoche in the early 1890s, with the exception of the Chief Seattle portrait, which he copied from the Sammis photo of 1864 or '65. Princess Angeline - the Chief's daughter - is at the center. At the bottom is another example of a waterfront panorama taken from the King Street dock.

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(Courtesy Seattle Public Library)

The S.S. DAKOTA

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 15, 1989)

If the present Washington Street Public Boat Landing were plopped down into this week’s historical scene, the ornate shelter would straddle the Crawford & Harrington Wharf just beyond the pile of stacked planks – about halfway between the shore and the shed at the end of the pier. This view was copied from the best of the few surviving prints of what is one of the city’s photographic classics. On a different and inferior print, photographer Theodore Peiser has inscribed his name and this caption, “Crawford & Harrington and Yesler’s Wharves with S.S. Dakota 1881.” (The absence of Peiser’s signature and caption on this clearer print suggests that he might have later added his mark to a scene left behind by another photographer, for which he had a poorer copy -a common practice among pioneer photographers.)

One year earlier when the side-wheeler Dakota was awarded the mail contract between San Francisco and Victoria, it added Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia to a West Coast packet it’d been running since 1875. Here the side-wheeler pauses at the end of Yesler’s Wharf which, until the fire of 1889 destroyed it and every other dock south of Union Street, was the principal pier on the waterfront.

Just right of center arid also tied to Yesler’s Wharf is a smaller side-wheeler, the J.B. Libby. The Libby was launched at Utsaladdy on Camano Island in 1862, and in its quarter-century of working Puget Sound, became the best known small steamer on these waterways. In November 1889 while en route from Roche Harbor to Port Townsend carrying 500 barrels of lime, the Libby lost its rudder in a storm and caught fire. It carried seven crew and seven passengers, the latter escaping on the steamer’s lifeboat and the former on rafts. All survived.

At the outer end of the Crawford & Harrington Wharf sits the pier shed for the Talbot Coal Yard, named for a San Francisco capitalist who bankrolled early mining of the Renton coal fields.  The greatest coal exporter from this waterfront was the Oregon Improvement Company’s big coal wharf and bunkers at the foot of King Street.  The company’s coal exports then to San Francisco were many times greater than its imports to Puget Sound.  Especially from 1878 to 1881 the OIC’s greatest import was ballast that it would dump in the bay before loading up on coal.  These contributions constructed our “Ballast Island” off of Washington and Main Streets.

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Recorded at the end of Yesler’s Wharf in 1875 by an unnamed photographer,  this is one of the earliest photographs of any part of Seattle.  It may also be the last surviving record of the side-wheeler Pacific, on the left. Now the historic site of Yesler’s Wharf is part of the staging grounds for Washington State Ferries.  (Historical Photo courtesy Puget Sound Maritime Society.)

FATED VESSELS at YESLER WHARF – 1875

(First appeared in Pacific, May 15, 2005)

On what is perhaps the earliest (and only) surviving print of this maritime scene an inked caption is scribble along the right border.  It reads, “Steamships Salvador [middle] and Pacific [left] and bark Harvest Home [right] at Yesler Wharf in 1875.” The bible on the subject, “Lewis and Dryden’s marine History of the Pacific Northwest” (published in 1895) describes 1875 as “The Disastrous Year.”  And of all the ill-fated vessels of that year the Pacific’s ending was by far the worst .

Here the side-wheeler leans against the outer end of a Yesler Wharf that had been lengthened considerably in the preceding year with a dogleg.  Perhaps this is her last visit. The Pacific was then involved in a rate war and the passengers who boarded her considered themselves extremely lucky to be paying a fraction of the normal thirty dollar fair to San Francisco.

After steaming from Victoria at 9:30 A. M. November 4th, and rounding Tatoosh at about 4:00 P.M. the Pacific then met stiff winds and hard going but would have easily survived the weather except that when fifteen miles off-shore she improbably collided around 10:00 P.M. with the collier Orpheus that was headed north to Nanaimo for coal. Of the about 240 passengers on the Pacific only one survived by clinging to some wreckage.  It is still a grim regional record.

Seven years later the Harvest Home was wrecked about eight miles north of Cape Disappointment but with different results.  With its chronometer broken the barkentine went aground, to quote again from Lewis and Dryden, “in thick weather . . . and the first intimation the man on watch had of danger was when he heard a rooster crowing in an adjoining barnyard . . . When day dawned all hands walked ashore without dampening their feet.”  The wreck was for years after a Long Beach attraction.

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BALLAST ISLAND by Arthur Warner

(First appeared in Pacific, April 24, 1983)

On Jan. 5,1865, the Territorial Legislature granted Seattle incorporation, and the small town of about 300 responded by quickly electing a board of trustees. The new council answered its citizens’ urge for municipal order by giving them 12 laws. The first, of course, was for taxation. There followed ordinances for promoting the public peace by prohibiting drunks, restraining swine  (the 4-legged kind) and setting a speed limit against reckless horse racing on the city’s stumpy streets.

The fifth ordinance was titled, “The Removal of Indians,” and read in part: “Be it ordained that no Indian or Indians shall be permitted to reside or locate their residence on any street, highway, lane or alley or any vacant lot in the town of Seattle.” For the Indians’ hospitality and help in teaching the settlers the ancient techniques of nurturing the abundant life on Puget Sound they were given reservations, smallpox, firewater, blankets, a kind of Christian education for their segregated young and the ” security” of the white man’s laws. In Seattle of 1865, this included that ordinance to keep them out of town.

Actually, the citizens both wanted the natives out of town and in it, and often both at the same time. For many years a kind of solution for this ambivalence was a rocky man-made peninsula called Ballast Island. At the foot of Washington Street the natives would set up camp in their canvas and mat-covered dugout canoes and sell clams and curios. From there they would venture into town to sell baskets and other artifacts on street comers, and meet employers offering odd jobs. (The locals ambivalence towards and treatment of the natives may be compared to the contemporary treatment of Mexicans.)

A detail from the city's 1884 birdseye shows the "captive" condition of Ballast Island set behind the pier, bottom-right. Compare this to the 1888 real estate footprint of the same site that follows.

A waterfront footprint at the foot or feet of Washington and Main Streets in 1888. This, of course, was all flattened by the '89 fire, excepting Ballast Island.

A post-fire 1893 footprint of the same neighborhood with the surviving ballast.

Ironically, Ballast Island was made from the hills of Australia, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and, in largest bulk, San Francisco. Ballast was the stabilizing deadweight of rocks and rubble that the many-masted ships would carry here and simply dump into the bay. They then would fill their empty holds with coal or lumber.

Sometime in the late1870s the captains were persuaded to unload ballast in one place: alongside the short wharf at the foot of Washington Street. The site was good, for it was between the city’s two busiest piers: Yesler’s wharf (1853) and the Oregon Improvement Co’s King Street coal bunkers (1877).  The site was also bad – at least it was so decreed by the Seattle City Council on May 7, 1880, as revealed in the accompanying clipping from the Intelligencer.  By then, however, the ballast at the foot of Madison was formidable enough to be serve as the foundation for the island, and most likely the dumping was eventually resumed for the purpose not of giving refuge and accommodations to visiting Indians, but rather to give more secure foundations to the network of wharfs that would be built there in the early 1880s.

(click TWICE to enlarge – and thanks to Ron Edge for the “Edge Clipping”)

Our look into of Ballast Island was photographed by Arthur Warner sometime in the early 1890s. After the 1889 fire destroyed the entire waterfront south of Union Street, property owners usually rebuilt, three and . four times grander than before the destruction.

The Oregon Improvement Co. filled the waterfront between its coal docks off King Street and Yesler’s wharf with two large pier sheds it designated simply as A and .B. The area between these sheds and the business district along First Avenue was neither entirely filled with ballast and rubble nor was it in every place covered with piers. Thus until the mid-1890s it still was possible for native dugouts to make their way between the Oregon piers and up under the overhead quay to Ballast Island.

Another June 6, 1891 recording by LaRoche from the King Street Wharf. In the foreground is the waterfront neighborhood whose footprint of 1893 was include above. A glimpse of Ballast Island can be found above the stern of the Sehome, the larger side-wheeler resting in the slip between Piers A and B. I have not as yet identified the side-wheeler seen in part far right on the outside of Pier B. Central School is the largest building on the horizon. It set in the block between Madison and Marion Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues - now part of the Seattle Freeway trench.

During the winter of 1891 the Oregon Improvement Co., seeking to improve itself, pressured local officials to remove the “some 40 clam-selling, garbage-raking remnants of a great people” who then were living on the island. But the eviction was only temporary, and especially ineffective every fall when the island was the jumping-off spot for natives from as far north as Upper British Columbia who gathered to pick hops in the White and Snoqualmie River Valleys.

In 1895, the Oregon Improvement Co. went bankrupt. By then the native encampment had moved south toward Utah Avenue and Massachusetts Street.  The ambiguous area between the waterfront and the wharves was increasingly filled in not with ballast but the city’s construction waste and Railroad Avenue was planked over all these contributions to Ballast Island.

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Dugouts at the foot of Washington Street.

DUGOUT FLEET at the FOOT of WASHINGTON STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, May 20 1984)

Today is Waterfront Day in Seattle. (To clarify: on May 20, 1984) At Pier #55, the Virginia V will toot its steam whistle at one o’clock to begin the festivities, including rowboat races, a parade of working boats off shore and a casual procession of waterfront walkers on shore. Many of the vessels in the slips between piers will be open for tours. And on the Virginia V, the last of Seattle’s century old Mosquito Fleet, there will be a photography exhibit of maritime Seattle.

Today’s historical photo is one included in the show. The view is east from the foot of Washington Street to a scene from the early 1890s. But the occasion is not known. Why should the wooden quay on the right be topped with a row of gawkers?  It seems to big a line for that popular post-pioneer pastime of Indian watching.

Below them are a dozen dugout canoes. Behind’ them, and out of the picture to the other side of the pile trestle, is Ballast Island, then a frequent camping ground for natives on their way to hop picking in the fall or canoe races in the summer.

Only on the left are the races mixing. Judging from the postures (the natives are sitting) and the costumes (the suits are standing) it is possible that some bartering for curios or clams is transpiring there.

My hunch is that this scene is somewhere on the beach below Denny Way - before the regrading - or north from there, although I have not been able to confirm it - as yet. This speculation makes the horizon line part of Queen Anne Hill.

Another Elliott Bay waterfront, again with the most likely part of it that is north of Denny Way.

Another unidentified camp.

By the 1890s, the Indians were mass-producing the items of their ritual culture – masks, totems, baskets – for sale to the white man. The Indians themselves often preferred the manufactured products of the white man’s world, with one notable exception – the ·dugouts. Myron Eels, a missionary/anthropologist, explained the enduring success of the cedar canoes.  “The canoe is light, and one person often travels as fast in one with one paddle, as the white man does with two oars. He looks forward and sees where he is going . . . True we think the boat is safer, but the Indian, accustomed to his canoe from infancy, meets with far less accidents than the white man.”

Work on a dugout on some Alaska waterfront.

Today at 2 p.m., folks will be racing – backwards – in rowboats with two oars here at the foot of Washington Street. There may be some accidents.

Races off the Belltown waterfront. The highrise left-of-center is the New Washington Hotel at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Stewart Street - since renamed the Josephinum.

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While the contemporary “repeat” photograph was recorded from within feet of where the historical photographer’s site, it pivots about 45 degrees to the left (or north).  The change was made to show both the historical plaque for Ballast Island and beyond it the Pergola at the foot of Washington Street in the “now.”  The “then” scene shows part of “Ballast Island”, a pile of rubble built for the most part during the early 1880s from the contributions of ships’ ballast.  (Historical PHOTO courtesy: Lawton Gowey)

BALLAST ISLAND (again)

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 16 2005)

The historical view looks to the northeast from a timber trestle that following the “Great Fire of 1889”was built into the bay along the south margin of Washington Street.  The site is identified by the line of minimal white posts in upper left corner of the photograph.  They are supports for the short-lived Harrington and Smith warehouse that was constructed to the west of the railroad track (upper-right) that linked this south end of the central waterfront with the Yesler’s wharf (one pier to the north) and beyond it the great swath of tracks and piers along Railroad Avenue that was then under construction following the fire.  The Great Fire had destroyed everything on the waterfront south of University Street to the waterline.  Everything, of course, except Ballast Island.

The neighborhood in 1893 looking north from the then recently elevated King Street trestle. Note the white pillars or posts of the Harrington and Smith warehouse - identified above - on the north side of Washington Street. A glimpse of Ballast Island evident this side of the warehouse and to the other side of the little steamer Mabel, which rests in the hidden slip to the other side of the sheds that are prominent near the center of the scene.

There are conflicting stories of the “island’s” origins.  By one telling captains were ordered to unload here the broken rocks and bricks they carried to give stability to otherwise empty ships.  By another friendlier account pioneer wharf owners John Webster and Robert Knipe asked that the ballast be dropped to the side of their Washington Street pier to protect the piles from wood-eating worms. Whichever, a modern core sample taken near the plaque would bring up a cosmopolitan mix of rubble from San Francisco, Hawaii Islands, Australia and many other far-flung ports.

Another post-89' fire Ballast Island scene near the boot of Main Street.

The “foreign land” of Ballast Island, of course, is most famous as the strange terra infirma on which the region’s displaced indigene camped during hop-picking time in September.  This “foreign-native” irony seems to have been totally missed by the “Indian-watchers” of the time.  They crowded the perimeter of the imported dirt pile in the early 1890s for close-up looks (like this one) of the “exotic” Indians who came prepared to skillfully barter to the locals the baskets and other curious with which they loaded extra dugouts to the brim.

Some of the construction work in this scene can be found in the subject directly above it.

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Pre-'89 fire Langston Stables on the south side of Washington Street mid-block between Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) and the waterfront. (Courtesy, MOHAI)

The Langston’s Livery Stable was a busy waterfront enterprise through most of the 1880s, Seattle’s first booming decade.  After it was destroyed during the Seattle fire of 1889, the St. Charles Hotel, seen in the “now,” was quickly erected in its place facing Washington Street, and was one of the first “fireproof” brick buildings built after the “Great Fire.”

LANGSTON’S LIVERY

(First published in Pacific, July 9, 2006)

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.”

The Langston Livery appears far left in this birdseye prospect, probably taken from the top floor or roof of the Occidental Hotel on Mill Street (Yesler Way). Note how Ballast Island is here nestled within the trestles and warehouses of the Oregon Improvement Co. This scene may also be compared to the first one on top - the one showing the Emma Haywood resting in that slip at the top. Here we also see the King Street Coal Wharf (top-left), from which so many photographers took panoramic views of the city.

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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WINDJAMMERS

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 13, 2005)

Frank LaRoche was born in Philadelphia in 1853, the year that Henry Yesler got the first steam sawmill on Puget Sound operating at the foot of Mill Street (Yesler Way) in Seattle.  Thirty-seven years later LaRoche made this record of Yesler’s Wharf when the city was still rebuilding from its “Great Fire” of 1889.

Even before the fire Yesler moved his mill to Union Bay on Lake Washington.  The wharf was too valuable a commercial space to be wasted on processing logs.  The corralled timber floating here in the foreground may be logs picked for piles in the rebuilding of the waterfront.   Or this may be merely the log pond for the Stetson and Post mill that was then just off the tideflats south of King Street.

LaRoche had worked as a professional since his late teens, taking assignments from railroads and publishers (Harpers’s Bros sent him to Australia) opening studios in Salt Lake and Des Moines and teaching photography in New Orleans.  As might be expected after he arrived on Puget Sound in 1889 his work hereabouts is some of the best extant.  The University of Washington Northwest Collection has about 400 Puget Sound examples but he shot many more including several thousand as he followed the Alaska gold rush of the late 1890s.

The professional has numbered this view1080, and thankfully also dated it December 1890.  Here the LaRoche oeuvre included many of what were then our “obligatory” subjects like Chief Seattle’s daughter Princess Angeline and Mt. Rainier from several prospects.  But he also left us cityscapes of every sort – buildings, parks, streets, mills, trolleys and scenes along the waterfront like this one.

After he moved to Arlington a popular trick was cramming Snohomish County lumberjacks together atop huge cedar stumps for company portraits.   LaRoche continue to act the pro until the mid-1920s and lived until 1936.

Perhaps some member in good standing with the Puget Sound Maritime Historic Society can come up with the names of those windjammers.

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Steamer CITY OF SEATTLE

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 2, 1986)

During the thick of the Alaska gold rush, Seattle controlled more than 90 percent of shipping to and from the territory. In 1890, there were 40 steamships commuting, the fastest of which was the ship shown here, the City of Seattle. It was 244 feet long, and plush. Built in Philadelphia in 1890, it sailed through the Strait of Magellan to Puget Sound in time for its most prestigious moment. On May 6,1891, leading an armada of the Puget Sound “Mosquito fleet” of small steamers, the City of Seattle carried President Benjamin Harrison from Tacoma to Seattle.

The City of Seattle, with Pres. Harrison aboard, reaches Yesler Wharf (left-of-center) with a flotilla of Puget Sound steamers following and tooting.

The steamer was so well-appointed that when the crash of 1893 hit, she was too expensive to run and was laid up until the gold rush of 1897 got the economy under way again. In 1900 the fast and reliable City of Seattle returned from Alaska with real booty -three tons of gold, two tons more than the steamer Portland’s sensational 1897 haul that – at least in mind of a hysterical public – started the gold rush.

A first class passenger enjoys the elevated view of Alaska from the top deck.

The steamer lost its crown for speed in 1902 when it raced the steamer Dolphin the 800 miles from Vancouver, B.C., to Skagway. The two were often abreast and seldom out of sight of each other. In the end the Dolphin won by a half-mile.

The City of Seattle pausing for a stretch at a small Alaskan port in 1919.

Seattle’s namesake worked Northwestern waters until 1921, when it returned to the East coast, this time through the Panama Canal, for a new career of hauling passengers for the Miami Steamship Co. In 1937, it was sold for scrap. But the steamer is still in fine form in the accompanying photo, which was taken about 1897. The City of Seattle leans slightly to her port side loading or unloading in a slip alongside old Pier near the foot of Washington Street.

Happy Passenger types aboard the City of Seattle.

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Then Caption:  The Victoria pulls away from the slip between Pier 2 (51) and Colman Dock sometime in the early teens.  (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)  Now Caption: The modern Colman Dock from the 1960s is without tower – except for the advertising spire near the sidewalk – and the open water slip along its south side has long since been covered for vehicular access to the Washington State Ferries.

The VENERABLE VICTORIA

(First published in Pacific, March 18, 2007)

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.

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BALLAST – Yet Again

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 25, 1992)

Identifying the landmarks – including a few churches – in this 1880 view of Seattle requires a print considerably larger than that provided here. (Originally, that is, in the relatively small Pacific printing from 1992.) So, like the print, we are reduced to making some generalities regarding the scene’s features.

First, this record is but one section of a five-part panorama of the city. It was recorded from the railroad coal wharf that, beginning in 1878, extended into the bay from the foot of King Street. The panorama extended north from Beacon Hill along the waterfront to Queen Anne Hill.

This is the third section of that wide-angle cityscape and extends from Washington Street on the right to Columbia Street on the far left. On the far right, Jefferson Street climbs First Hill. To the left of Jefferson, the fruit trees in Henry and Sarah Yesler’s orchard darken the block between Third and Fourth avenues and Jefferson and James streets, since 1914 the site of the King County courthouse. The Yeslers’ orchard also silhouettes the white facade and tower of Trinity Episcopal Church at Third and Jefferson.

Pioneer Square (or Place), in the scene’s center, is as-yet undistinguished by the three-story brick-and-cast-iron landmarks that in 1883 began to surmount this cityscape.

Asserting a kind of independence from the scene is the pile of rubble in the foreground. This, I believe, is the beginning of Ballast Island, (or nearly) the mound of imported earth that was dropped here by coal colliers visiting the King Street bunkers for coal in exchange for the ballast rubble contributed here between Washington and Main streets.  The ballast was need to steady the otherwise mostly empty ships as they sailed north from San Francisco – mostly – to pick up Seattle’s coal, and/or sometimes lumber too. This “foreign” pile developed into a favorite camping ground for Native Americans – as already noted twice earlier or above.

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Like Smith Cove’s own slim version of the Colossus of Rhodes, a yellow brick chimney – the remains of a glass factory - stood for about forty years at the “gate” to the mud flats of Interbay. (Courtesy Florence Drummond)

NOW: Most likely the chimney was destroyed in the early 1940s when “Finntown” and all else near it was removed by the navy for its Smith Cove supply base. The Admiral’s House, seen here perched on the graded bluff, was built in 1944. Jean Sherrard has kept his “repeat” wide enough to include the west end of the Garfield Street Bridge, better known as the Magnolia Bridge.

PIONEER GLASS at SMITH COVE

Long ago a Californian named Florence Drummond, once a “child of Finntown”, sent a friend a handful of small captioned snapshots of that “Mud Bay” community on the shores of Smith Cove, and her friend shared them with me. Many of its floating homes, and beach cottages were concentrated below the Magnolia and Queen Anne bluffs that marked, respectively, the west and east openings to what were once the tideflats of Interbay.

This 1922 Drummond print is also the most intimate record I’ve seen of the glass works impressive landmark chimney, which here rises high above the squatting neighborhood clinging with it close to the then still exposed cliff at the southeast corner of Magnolia. The wood frame factory once attached to the tower is gone, unless it hung around reconstituted in these salvaged quarters.

The glass works had a fitful history.  Researcher Ron Edge found perhaps its earliest footprint on an 1899 U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey map, where for the benefit of surveyors and navigators is it captioned “yellow chimney.” Edge notes, “At least we know its color.”

The 1899 NOAA map shared by Ron Edge. The sand bar steaming from the Magnolia point can be found in several Smith Cove maps including the one that follows directly below: the 1894 "real roads" map, which Ron expresses a special affection for, as do I.

McKee's "Real Roads" map shuns real estate boasting and include only what he found on the ground. Here there is as yet not glass factory. The map does include that sand bar, the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern spur to the point and a sample of the land around, reacing from Salmon Bay, top center, to Fremont top right, and Mercer Street on the bottom. "Boulevard" was then the name for the neighborhood build around Dravus Street.

Here the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern spur is shown concluding at the railroad's coal bunkers, which probably did not amount to as much as the map suggests. There is as yet no glass factory. Later the factory's builders no doubt chose the site not only for the sand they believe was suitable for making glass but also for the railroad spur that made building the plant much easier and also promised to be ready to help deliver their dreamed of bottles and such.

This early-to-mid 1890s map shows a delicate rendering of the sand spit, no glass factory, no coal bunkers, but does show the S.L.S.E. spur.

While concentrating on real estate this 1899 Polk Map includes the by now Seattle and International spur and marks the glass factory - identified on the full map with a legend - as No. 16. Thanks to Ron Edge for all of them.

The works may have had more names – including Northwest, Puget Sound, and Pioneer – than glassware.  Whatever the moniker, the factory rarely appeared in the press, except for litigation among a string of owners, and one sizeable 1903 story in which Seattle’s then super-developer James Moore (of the theatre) trumpeted his plans to get it going with new equipment.  It seems that the works were one of Moore’s few fizzels, but still the yellow chimney survived as a helpful marker.

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Trouble at the Glass Factory. A clip from the Seattle Times.

In her letter Florence Drummond makes note of a Finnish necessity: the sauna or steam bath.  John Reddin, the Seattle Times humorist from the 50s and 60s, remembered several of them in Finntown, frequented mostly by Finnish bachelors, whom he described as thereby “neat and clean.”  He also lists “boisterous speakeasies” and “bootleg joints all around the Smith Cove area . . .That’s where the action was.”  By a curious contrast, included among Drummonds snapshots is one of her posing grandmother, another of a line-up of no less than thirty-one children attending five-year-old Wanda Corbett’s birthday party on a Finntown boardwalk, and a helpfully captioned snap of courting Elma Jakkaneu and Charles Ivana on a Mud Bay footbridge.  She explains, “later they married.”

PAGE ONE of Drummond's letter

WEB EXTRAS

I’ve included a few other glimpses of Smith Cove – from further south, looking towards the yacht club, and through the chain link fence of the Port of Seattle storage yard.

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly Jean.  We will start by continuing with some other examples of Florence Drummond’s snapshots in Finn Town’s 1920s. A string of 10 related features will follow concluding with another look into Finn Town – the part of it on the Queen Anne side of Smith Cove.

This is an example of how Jean and I sometimes communicate in searching for the proper prospect for his "repeats." It is a combination of our subject - the glass factory - and in this example a space shot captured from Google Earth, and a detail from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map which we feature in toto on this site.

1912 Baist

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This detail pulled from the A. Curtis Smith Cove "classic" discussed below shows - and fairly clearly - the glass factory at the point, but no smoke is rolling from its landmark chimney like the white puffings trailing a Great Northern Railway passenger train heading south to its waterfront Seattle terminus.

Having momentarily lost the black-&-white original for the A. Curtis subject we substitute this colored postcard.

The "now" I found - sort of. The print is not marked for a date, and I have visited that Kinnear Park prospect more than twice. I will speculate and propose a mid-1990s date for this, which would make it latter-day for me.

SMITH COVE & HILL’S TOO

(First appeared in Pacific 4-17-1983)

Photograph number 6577 is one of the some 30,000 negatives included in the Asahel Curtis collection at the Washington State Museum and/or Historical Society in Tacoma. Asahel was the younger brother of the celebrated Edward Curtis whose romantic posed photographs of American natives will currently cost you a pretty sum. However, number 6577 cost me only a little more than four dollars (in the early 1980s) paid to the Washington Historical Society, and it is easily one of the most popular images in the history of local photography.

Asahel’s photograph, actually, has its own variety of staged romance. Besides its pleasing composition, this scene resonates with a local industrial drama, which was staged here on Smith’s Cove in 1905, the year the younger Curtis recorded this view from Queen Anne Hill. In the foreground is the Oriental Limited rushing its passengers from St. Paul and all points west over the last few miles of trestle into Seattle. In a few months it will be trailing its white ribbon of steam under Seattle while passing through the Great Northern’s new tunnel. And soon it will exhale its last transcontinental gasps alongside the new King Street Station, which in 1905 was still under construction.

Another detail from the Asahel Curtis subject.

Beyond are the Great Northern docks and between them the largest steamers in the world, the railroad’s Minnesota and Dakota. They are being prepared for their trans-Pacific routine of delivering raw cotton to the orient and returning with raw silk.

The director for this industrial drama was James Jerome Hill, the Great Northern’s “empire builder.” Years before, Hill discovered that “one acre of Washington timber will furnish as many carloads of freight as 120 years of wheat from a Dakota farm.” So when the first Great Northern freight train rolled into Seattle in 1893, Hill was anxious to tum it right around and head east with carloads of lumber. This was a turn-around from the old notion that railroads to the West were built to carry people and cargo in that direction and then return east almost empty.

Another prospect on the Great Northern pier and its oversize Pacific steamers.

In 1905 J. J. Hill was moving his show onto the biggest stage. Acting like Atlas, Hill developed his double docks at Smith Cove to be the shoulders upon which the world would turn. Having moved the country around, Hill was here attempting to revolutionize international trade. For 300 years most trade with the orient had passed India and Africa. Now with the encouragement of Great Northern steam on both land and sea, the empire builder taught some of it to follow the shorter great circle route past Alaska. Here the perishable silk was unloaded from the jumbo steamers Minnesota and Dakota and sent rushing east on trains that had priority over all other service including mail, passenger, and that mainstay, lumber.

James Hill

In 1853 Dr. Henry A. Smith built a log cabin at his namesake cove. Smith’s arrival was less mighty than the Minnesota’s but he stayed longer. For 63 years, Smith was easily one of the most remarkable characters on Puget Sound. Most of that time he spent at Smith Cove. Today he is best remembered as an ethnologist and linguist who “composed” Chief Seattle’s prophetic treaty speech. But Smith was also a surgeon who successfully used hypnotism as anesthesia, a psychotherapist who encouraged dream analysis for solving personal problems, a poet who published in Sunset Magazine under the pen name Paul Garland, a botanist who grafted the area’s first fruit trees, and a  universally-loved gentleman farmer of whom one of his seven daughters, lone, wrote: “Papa had a passionate love for the beauties of nature, was kind to all the farm animals and they, in turn, seemed to understand and love him.”

Henry Smith

Henry Smith was King County’s first school superintendent and a very rare statesman who seemed to inspire absolutely no resentment. As a territorial legislator for several terms, he still “never sought office, never asked for a vote and was never defeated in an election.”

When the 22-year-old Smith first arrived at Smith Cove, the highest tides filled potholes for sun-warmed swimming farther north than today’s Galer Street. When he died here at his Interbay home in 1915 at the age of 85, it was from a chill caught while setting out tomato plants in his garden. At that time the tide flats of Smith Cove were being filled in by the cove’s new owner, the Port of Seattle. The consequences were the half-mile long piers 90 and 91 which were the longest earth-filled piers in the world. The lucrative silk trade, which J. J. Hill had originally channeled through Smith Cove, was severely torn in 1940 by a filament made from coal with characteristics of strength and elasticity called nylon.

Years later the Navy took Smith Cove from the Port of Seattle for a condemnation fee of 3 million dollars. The Port bought it back in the mid-1970s for about 15 million and added another four million in improvements, including Smith Cove Park. There in the spring of 1978 a plaque was placed honoring the remarkable Dr. Henry A. Smith.

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The DAKOTA and the OREGON

(First appeared in Pacific June 4, 2000)

This maritime scene is both delicate – afternoon light shapes the vessels and scatters upon the water – and monumental by reason of its largest subject, the steamship Dakota.

On the heels of its sister ship, the Minnesota, the Dakota was built in 1903 in Connecticut for the steamship arm of the Great Northern Railway and brought around the horn to its home port between the railroad’s long piers at Smith Cove in Elliott Bay. It began its first trip to Yokohama, Japan, in September 1905.

The steel-hulled cargo-passenger steamers were by far the largest vessels on the Pacific Ocean. Eleven decks high, they could hold the equivalent of 107 freight trains of 35 cars each. In fact, on its first voyage, the Dakota delivered more than one locomotive to Japan.

Clarence R. Langstaff, a carpenter and longtime resident of Magnolia, recorded this exquisite view in late 1905 or 1906. On the right is the 283-footsteel-hulled Oregon, oldest passenger vessel on the West Coast, built in Chester, Pa., in 1878.

Something beside this Smith Cove slip and the trail of smoke ties thes vessels. At midnight on Sept. 13,1906, while heading for Nome, Capt. Horace E. Soule ran the Oregon onto an uncharted rock near the entrance to Prince William Sound. On the clear afternoon of March 3 the next year, Capt. Emil Francke drove the Dakota onto a well-charted reef about 40 miles south Yokohama. Although the big ship was running at only 14 knots, its inertia was considerable, and the reef sliced through about a third of the Dakota’s 622 feet.

All the passengers were saved – but not the ships, most of their cargo and Francke’s job. While Soule was not held at fault, Francke lost his license and wound up working as a watchman on the San Francisco waterfront.

(Click to Enlarge)

Smith Cove Fill Quartet from the 1960s. Reading left-to-right top row first, the years are 1962, 1964, 1967, and 1969. (All photographed by Lawton Gowey)

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Ascending from Citizens Light & Power and beyond the Great Northern dock a glimpse may be had of the glass factory below the Magnolia bluff.

CITIZENS LIGHT & POWER CO.

(First appeared in Pacific, April 7, 1996)

The quality of life for the hill folk living along the sides and summit of Queen Anne Hill has periodically been threatened from below. The recent hubbub over unloading acres of foreign automobiles onto Interbay’s parking lots was preceded by more than a century of railroad racket climbing the western slope of the hill. The Great Northern laid its Seattle yard down below in 1903.

The peace, quiet and clean air were peculiarly threatened at the beginning of this century, when the Citizens Light and Power Company began to drive piles for a gas plant just offshore in Smith Cove. Since the manufacture of gas from burning coal was a notoriously foul process, the residents of Queen Anne Hill had a right to be wary. They also had the political clout to win.

The gas plant was eventually built – it appears in the “then” view – but only after the company installed the first downdraft smokeless boiler furnaces used on the West Coast. With this innovation the plant spewed neither smoke nor smell, and since its height didn’t intrude on Queen Anne’s view of the Olympics, the gas plant was a good neighbor. (Nearby, years later, the Port of Seattle’s much taller grain elevator did screen this view in spite of objections by Queen Anne residents.)

Looking north along the trolley trestle paralleling Elliott Avenue.

The plant’s innovations were cited by Citizens’ business rival, the Seattle Gas and Electric Company, in its attempt to stop its new competitors from laying pipe into the older company’s preserve: the Central Business District. The SGEC claimed that the new gas from Smith Cove was more lethal and thus responsible for the slew of gas suicides reported in the newspapers. In fact, investigators determined that the victims did not discriminate in their choice of gas and were taking it from both pipes.

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The Magnolia Bridge, brand new and still rising above the wreckage of the timber trestle is replaced. The Glass Factory chimney can be found. (Courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archive.)

MAGNOLIA BRIDGE aka GARFIELD

(First appeared in Pacific, March 24, 1991)

When it was completed in 1930, the. sweep of the Magnolia Bridge as it ascends west of Pier 91 was considered a modern engineering wonder: At nearly 4,000 feet, it was the largest of only three reinforced concrete spans built anywhere. .

The big bridge was first proposed six years earlier when the West Wheeler Street Bridge was set on fire by a spark from a Great Northern locomotive passing beneath it. At first, the Seattle city council refused to build a high ridge to the bluff, since, it reasoned, only 4,000 people lived west of Interbay and south of Ballard. The city chose a humbler alternative by extending the West Garfield Street Bridge with a timber trestle that reached Magnolia at an elevation just a few feet above high tide.

Recorded in 1929 - its last year - the Garfield Street bridge, seen here from Queen Anne Hill, headed west from 15th Ave. N.W. across the Smith Cove entrance to Interbay before turning abruptly north to reach upland Magnolia at a low elevation.

Looking northeast from Magnolia into the snarl of trestles that negotiated the threshold between Smith Cove and Interbay before the 1930 concrete span surmounted it. Bottom-right are vestiges of Finn Town, aka Finntown, aka Mudtown.

Dedication Day freedoms

Seattle Times clip from Oct. 20, 1925.

Magnolians, however, organized the Garfield Bridge Club and eventually persuaded the city to replace the trestle with the soaring trusses shown here. The strewn timbers of the temporary low bridge, cluttering the base of the new span, are also evident.

The topmost view of the bridge was photographed Dec. 22, 1930, two weeks after the high bridge was dedicated with band music, the usual speeches and a procession of motorists and pedestrians. Then the tidelands of Interbay still reached far north of Garfield Street, requiring the bridge to be built above piles driven 20 to 40 feet into the ground. Now the tide basin has been reclaimed and blacktopped as a parking lot – most often for Japanese imports.

[Note: The public works destroyer earthquake of a few years back damaged the Magnolia Bridge so that it was closed for repairs, and locals had to abide the long detour over the Dravus Street viaduct several blocks to the north.]

Looking over Finn Town to the Port of Seattle piers and beyond. This was recorded from the nearly-new Magnolia Bridge. The dark outline of the Glass Factory appears far-right, and part of the new bridge, far-left. Courtesy Ron Edge.

The new bridge seen from Queen Anne Hill. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)

Frank Shaw's Dec. 22, 1979 record of the Port of Seattle's parking for imports.

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In the Lowman family album of Victorian-era snapshots from which this subject was copied it is captioned "1887, Interbay."

The Interbay P-Patch a few years past.

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The Henry Smith home at Interbay

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Emily Inez Denny's painting of the Smith home and its setting on Interbay. Magnolia is on the right, Elliott Bay beyond, and the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad is heading north before he turns east for Lake Washington and reaching what is now the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail. Note the sand spit seen in the maps near the top. (Courtesy of MOHAI)

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Looking south toward Smith Cove from the long-since destroyed Wheeler Street trestle for motorcars, the old Garfield Street trestle can be faintly detected on the horizon.  Left of center is the sign of the Portland Cordage Company written on the west side of the long factory designed to make rope from hemp.  (Historical picture courtesy of John Cox) With neither bridge nor tower to lift him as high as the plank floor of the timber trestle that once ran in line with Wheeler Street, Jean Sherrard substituted a stepladder and a ten-foot extension pole held by him high above his 6’7” frame.  He nearly made it while looking directly into the sun.

INTERBAY RAILROAD

In “Magnolia, Making More Memories,” the second volume on Magnolia history published recently by that neighborhood’s historical society, Hal Will returns to the rich story of transportation along and across the Interbay valley that separates the hills of Magnolia from those of Queen Anne.  (Note the clay cliffs on the left.)   In the first volume, “Magnolia, Memories and Milestones” Will wrote about “Magnolia’s Wooden Trestles.”  Now in the second volume he goes after its “early railroad days.”

The first railroad here was the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern whose rails first crossed the soggy length of this valley in 1887 heading north on the bed that here supports a coupled string of tank cars.  The SLSER originated on the Seattle waterfront and hoped to continue as far as both Spokane and British Columbia.  Railroad history is well stocked with ironies, and here’s one. The SLSER was Seattle’s robust answer to the neglect of the Tacoma-oriented Northern Pacific Railroad. According to Will’s caption, “at the time of this photo, the track [with the posing train] was owned and used by Northern Pacific Railroad.” The Great Northern used the tracks on the right.

At first I imagined that this photo was recorded looking south from a water tower.  The truth I discovered in Hal Will’s essay on trestles noted above.  Here the unnamed photographer stood on the Wheeler Street timber trestle that ran the width of the valley, east-west from 15th Ave. west to Thorndyke Ave. West.  The trestles one big span crossed the tracks here.  Will gives this picture a ca. 1918 date.  The trestle was a total loss to fire in 1924.

A photographer from the city's public works department took this view on May 17, 1914 and labeled it for the Wheeler Street bridge that was planned for the Interbay tidelands that then still reached far north of Smith Cove. This view looks northeast from Magnolia.

An early 1920s aerial of the developing Port of Seattle facilities at Smith Cove also shows, at the top, the Wheeler Street trestle.

The Wheeler Street Bridge from the Magnolia side.

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Looking south on Elliott with West Mercer Place on the left and tidelands still on the right.

Jean and I used this subject in our - and Berangere's - "Repeat Photography" exhibit that is now entering its last month at MOHAI. We did not use this "now" but rather one that Jean took recently. This I have dated 1996 and I recorded it with my arm out the window of whatever car I was driving then. Jean, I think, actually got out of his car..

WEST MERCER PLACE

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 6, 1985)

It was a Wednesday afternoon late in the summer of 1921 when a photographer from the Seattle Engineering Department drove out to where West Mercer Place descends from Queen Anne Hill’s Kinnear Park to the waterfront and shot this week’s historical scene.

The Mercer Place opening to the waterfront was cut through in 1890 when Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman (remembered now in the Burke-Gilman Trail) started their ambitious service on the West Street and North End Electric Railway. It was built to move workers and settlers between downtown Seattle and their new manufacturing town, Ballard. It was one of the first interurban trolley lines in America.

The historical photograph looks south from where the timber trestle, called Water Street, turned with the municipal trolley lines for its climb to the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood. For more than 30 years the six-mile trolley line ran from downtown Seattle through Belltown and Lower Queen Anne, returned to the waterfront at this Mercer Place intersection and continued on to Ballard. For much of its two mile run between this Mercer Place intersection and Salmon Bay – part of it thru the Interbay wetland – the trolleys ran atop a low trestle from 20 to 60 feet off shore. For the entire distance between Interbay and Pike Street the waterfront was often home to squatters shacks and a scatter of sawmills and boat builders.  In places, like that seen here, the waterfront was separated from the city by a dense greenbelt.

The BURKE BLDG northwest corner of Marion St. and Second Ave.

The trolley cars were powered by electricity generated in the basement of Burke’s namesake building at Second Avenue and Marion Street (now the site of the Federal Building). But the power was insufficient, and as the cars approached Ballard, their speed would decrease steadily, the lights in the Burke Building would dim and its elevators would slow to a crawl. One account of this slow ride to Ballard claims that the passengers took to carrying guns for protection against muggers who would crash from the forest along Queen Anne Hill to jump aboard the poking trolley for a stickup.

A different kind of danger and speed characterized the one hilly part of this nickel trip to Ballard. At West Mercer Place, after a speedy descent, cars occasionally would jump the track at the curve onto Water Street and, at high tide, take a bath in the bay.

By 1940, the rails had been pulled up and trackless trolleys were gliding on pneumatic tires along a concrete paved Elliott Avenue and a long way from sand, sawmills and shacks. Now only the greenbelt remains.

Looking north (towards Ballard) along the Elliott Ave. trestle. The streetcar trestle is to the left, and Magnolia on the horizon. The glass works tower is there. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)

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Another tax photo from the WPA survey of the late 1930s of all taxable structures in King County. (Courtesy, Washington State Archive, Bellelvue Branch - for all of these.)

Jessica Dodge washing dishes in her studio home at the Full Circle Artists Coop in 1998.

FULL CIRCLE ARTISTS COOP

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 4, 1998)

You may recall writer David Berger’s feature “Site as Folk Art,” which appeared Dec. 7 in this magazine. As fate would have it, two days after we first followed Berger’s reconnoiter through the charmed land of the Full Circle Artists Coop, his subjects got their eviction notice.

The city of Seattle plans to route Elliott Avenue traffic destined for the proposed Immunex plant at Interbay up and over Elliott and the Burlington Northern railroad tracks that run between that thoroughfare and the Smith Cove piers. This overpass – called a “flyover” in the plans – would cut directly through the artists’ homes, studios and gardens now nestled against the Queen Anne Hill greenbelt.

Another Tax photo from the 1930s.

The cottage in the foreground (on the top) of this week’s comparison is the most northerly of the structures at the site. Its materials and houseboat design suggest it may have been dragged ashore during the reclamation of Smith Cove. The legal description defacing the older view was scrawled by a Works Progress Administration photographer during the WPA’s late-1930s inventory of every taxable structure in King County. “Little Finland” was then a popular name for this tidelands neighborhood. The larger structure on the right is still home to a sauna that for many pre-Full Circle years was a commercial operation.

Jessica Dodge - a friend of mine since the 1970s - in her studio when it was still in Finn Town.

The real splendor of this site – the folk art – is on the far, hidden side of this scene. Gardens for flowers , vegetables, sculpture and found objects meander between studios and greenbelt. This growing collage of plants and artifacts was included last spring in the Pacific Northwest Art Council’s Artist Garden Tour.

This site has also been reviewed favorably by a number of City Council members, nourishing a hope that at least part of this charmed land will be saved by turning the flyover into a “fly-nearby.”

Jessica with two other members of the Full Circle Artists Coop - one of them named Walt - when it was still below the Queen Anne Hill greenbelt.

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FOUNDRY on ELLIOTT

(First appeared in Pacific Jan 12, 1992)

The brick shell of the N & S Foundry is one of the few early-century constructions that survives on the waterfront at the base of Queen Anne Hill. The two-story brick construction that appears on the left of the “then” scene, although similar, is not the foundry but the N ‘& S Machine Works, built in 1902. The foundry was added in 1906 on the lot to the south, or to the right and behind the construction site for the wooden boat. That means this picture was made between 1902 and 1906.  (Remembering that this was all composed first 20 years ago, I now imagine that none of this survives, but would be pleased to learn otherwise.)

The Machine Works, left, and the Foundry side by side ca. 1910.

After 12 years of manufacturing bricks in New Zealand, the German immigrant Robert Niedergesaess moved to Seattle in 1887 to continue making bricks at his Seattle Brick and Tile Co. His three sons, Otto, Wilhelm and Wilson, soon moved up the industrial ladder to electrical engineering. With financial help from their father, they formed the Niedergesaess and Sons Electric Co.

The Niedergesaess boys took advantage of their waterfront site to build boats. There was, as yet, no off-shore landfill – Elliott Avenue -separating them from Elliott Bay. (The historical photographer is on the Niedergesaess dock with his back to the bay,)

The sons separated their business in the early 1920s, with Otto moving to New York to manufacture propellers, Wilhelm staying put with the dynamos, and Wilson moving two blocks south on Elliott to open the Wilson Machine Works, a business now run by Wilson’s grandson, Robert D. Wilson. (Much earlier, Wilson Robert John Niedergesaess, tired of pronouncing and spelling out his last name for the tongue-tied, dropped the Niedergesaess and swung his first name, Wilson, to last.)

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A last glimpse of the Glass Factory chimney and the saltwater flood into Interbay as seen from Queen Anne Hill circa 1914.

Smith Cove aerial Oct. 14, 1970 (Courtesy Port of Seattle)

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THEN: Construction work begins on the top three floors of the Hermosa Apartments, on the left, at the northeast corner of 4th Avenue and Cedar Street. The view looks over Denny Way to Tilikum Place and west on Cedar Street. (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives, negative 30409.)

NOW: In Jean Sherrard’s “repeat,” Seattle sculptor James Wren’s statue of Chief Seattle stands atop its pedestal. On this year’s Founders Day, Nov. 13, the statue and a few others will celebrate the centennial of its 1912 unveiling at the place named for the Chinook trade talk expression that translates “greetings.”

Diana James’ new history of Seattle apartment houses has a confident clarity that shares the author’s delight in her subject.  Her scholarly results also create a template for following the developing patterns of apartment house choices – for both builders and renters – that may be applied, we suspect, everywhere.

“Shared Walls,” the inspired title for James’ book, was the gift from her friend, the Capitol Hill historian, Jacqueline Williams, who like James lives on the hill, which is well appointed with landmark apartments.  (I too lived with shared walls for several years in the 1970s on the Summit Ave. trackless trolley line.)

As one of the American West’s greatest boomtowns, Seattle was soon in need of shared walls.  Not yet thirty years old in 1880, the federal census confirmed that the Queen City – its nickname then – was the largest community in the territory and still with only 3553 counted citizens.  Twenty years later, at the turn of the century when the enumeration had swelled to 80,871, James found the first listings for apartments in the city’s 1900 Polk Directory.  There were four of them.  Forty years more and the number reached about 1400, and nearly one-fifth of all Seattle households lived in them.

A nearly new Hermosa Apartments before both adding stories and Tilikum Place.

From these hundreds of apartments, the trained preservationist chose 100  – including the Hermosa Apartments shown here  - to explore both by records and on foot.  The choices are illustrated with a mix of archival photos and the author’s own.  Dated 1911, the historical photo shows the Hermosa beginning to add three stories.

Too prudently, perhaps, the McFarland Publisher chose to print only a few hundred copies of Shared Walls, which they were confident would appeal to libraries.  You have the choice of checking Seattle libraries for shared copies of Shared Walls or calling bookstores first.  Yes, it is an enduring delight to visit a bookstore.

WEB EXTRAS

Of course, I had to grab a shot of Chief Seattle, framed by naked branches on a late winter day.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few more Apartment Houses – following or heading a feature on Tilikum Place done a few years past – when I find it.

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ANHALT APARTMENTS – 750 Bellmont Ave.

(First appeared in Pacific March 3, 1991)

Beginning in 1926, Frederick William Anhalt spent three years building apartment buildings in Seattle – nearly 30 of them. A half-century later, many remain among Seattle’s most cherished architectural treasures.

The building at 750 Belmont Ave., shown here, was Anhalt’s first luxury apartment. How he chose its agreeable style is a story told in “Built by Anhalt,” a biography by Steve Lambert.

When a young bookseller, whom Anhalt had hired to search for books on beautiful apartments, returned instead with one on English castles, Anhalt recalled, “Well, I took one look at that book and I knew I’d found my style of building. I went through that book and picked a window I liked here, a door there, and something else over there.”

With 750 Belmont, Anhalt created a unity diverse enough to give its residents “the feeling that they were living in a house of their own.” Built on a triangular lot, the structure also showed Anhalt’s knack for using leftover building lots.

In 1929 Anhalt was planning a 150-unit luxury construction across the street from 750 Belmont when the October crash bankrupted him. It was a temporary reversal, and he was soon back constructing affordable Depression-era housing and manufacturing cedar siding .

After World War II, Anhalt went into the nursery business and prospered by raising more rhododendron varieties than anyone else west of the Mississippi. When he sold his property to the University of Washington, it made him a millionaire.

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HARDING’S LATE PARADE

(First appeared in Pacific, April 24, 1994)

In retrospect, Warren Harding’s late arrival in Seattle was ominous. The president’s naval transport, Henderson, returning from Harding’s visit to Alaska, rammed and nearly sank the destroyer Zeilin at the entrance to Puget Sound. The slowed Henderson came around West Point at 12:40 on the afternoon of July 27, 1923. Let off at the Port of Seattle’s Bell Street Terminal, the president’s motorcade took a right tum off Bell at First Avenue and promenaded south on First.

Here waving his bowler, Harding salutes the crowd a half-block south of Blanchard Street. Counting the crowds lining the motorcade, the students packed into’ Volunteer and Woodland parks to hear his brief patriotic homilies and the 40,000 enduring his nearly hour-long address about Alaska at the UW Stadium, Harding, 58, performed for more than 100,000 witnesses in his six hours here.

Yet Harding left Seattle sick. His train sped to San Francisco, where he died six days later of what his physician first diagnosed as poisoning from tainted crab and later as apoplexy (bleeding/stroke) of the brain .

In Seattle, the Harding motorcade was solemnly repeated with the same presidential vehicle, this second time empty. Proposals to rename Rainier to Mount Harding were dropped in favor of erecting a monumental speakers platform at Woodland Park. (The monument was later lost to the zoo’s African Savanna.)

Soon after Harding’s demise the rumored aspersions – including the Teapot Dome scandal – of his administration unfolded. Four years after his death, so did the confessions of Nan Britton. Her book on her long affair with Harding was convincing enough to inspire a national rumor that Harding had been poisoned not by crab but by a jealous Mrs. Harding, perhaps, it was rumored, in a sympathy twisted with apoplectic rage..

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In the roughly 93 years (dated back from 2006) that divide this now and then look up First Avenue north from Wall Street not much survives of the old “North Seattle” AKA Belltown.  The trees on the right of the contemporary view hide the New Pacific Apartments, a rare survivor. (Historical photo compliments of Seattle Municipal Archive.)

FIRST NORTH – Loose Bricks and Billboards

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 29, 2006)

For those among you who imagine that the bending bricklayer is the intended subject in this look north on First Avenue from Wall Street, bravo.   The chronically deteriorating condition of the special paving that bordered the trolley tracks at the center of Seattle’s arterials was an enduring sore point between the city and the Seattle Electric Company.  For their franchise the trolley company was obliged to maintain both the tracks and the paving.   So a photographer from Seattle Public Works recorded this photo — probably as damning evidence.

A second civic sore point is also exposed here – the billboards.  Protests against street advertising were part of the same early 20th Century liberal temper that pushed for parks, clean water (and milk), and beautiful streets.  A 1906 campaign against the many billboards in Belltown described them as “glaring and unsightly structures” that “lift their flaming fronts and tell their own story of aggressive insolence.”  A stacking of boards at 2nd and Cedar was described as “three tiers of commercialism gone mad.”

Here, on the right behind an example of City Light Director James Delmage Ross’s nearly new (and ornate) five-ball light standard is a two-tier board.  There is coffee “upstairs” and Fatima Cigarettes at the sidewalk.  At this time – about 1913 – Fatima smokers found wrapped in their packs in addition to the rewards of their sin tax sports cards of popular players and teams.

Among the products using the line of boards on the west side of First are Sunny Monday “Washday Soap”, Budweiser Beer and Adams Black Jack Chewing Gum.  By some accounts Black Jack was the first flavored gum.  (I once loved both it and the gift of a black tongue.)

Selz Chicago Shoes and Seattle’s own Burnside hats must be prospering for they are promoted with oversize murals on the first building north of Vince Street on the west side of First.  Although probably not discernible in this printing, Con Collier’s “Saloon and Family Liquor Store” is also promoted.  Perhaps the “family” part of Constant Collier’s sign is warranted because with his family he lives just above his liquor store.

Finally on the right at the northeast corner of Vine and First are the New Pacific Apartments.  Built in 1903 this neighborhood survivor is curiously marked in the 1912 real estate map as the Pacific Hospital.

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Then Caption.  “While the picture isn’t too clear” Fred Cruger, Granite Falls historian and vintage auto expert, gives his “best guess” that that is a “new Dodge coming around the corner . . . ca. 1915.”  The corner is where Warren Place, on the right, begins its one short block between First Avenue, which crosses the bottom of the photograph, and Denny Way. (Historical Photo courtesy Lawton Gowey) Now Caption:  The substantial apartment house behind the Dodge opened in March of 1910.  Built as the Raymond Apartments of brick and concrete is survives as the Daniel Apartments, an “icon” of this Belltown neighborhood.

A BELLTOWN APARTMENT

(First appeared in Pacific, July 29, 2007)

When it first opened its 37 two-room units to renters in 1910 the Raymond Apartments were touted as “the only apartment house in the cluster light district.”  The historical scene printed here includes an example of Seattle’s first ornamental street lights, the six-globe “cluster light standard” to the left of the pie-shaped Raymond’s arching front door at the corner of First Avenue and Warren Place.

The cluster lights were installed in 1909-10 and for its 1911 annual report City Light counted 1116 of them lighting 13.5 miles of the city’s busiest streets, most of them downtown.  If the new Raymond was the only apartment house on these same streets that distinction could not have lasted but a few weeks or even days.  It was this boom town’s boom time for apartment house construction.

Workers increasingly wanted their own baths, which meant for many a move from a lodging house into a private apartment.  The 1903 city directory for a Seattle of about 100,000 citizens lists only 8 apartment buildings, but more than 150 lodging houses.  Eight year later in a city of about 230,000 citizens, the 1911 directory lists over 300 apartment buildings and a mere 23 lodging houses.

Designed by the architects Thompson and Thompson, a father-son partnership, for the Monmouth Building Company, J.H. Raymond secretary, The Raymond Apartments were later sold and renamed for their new owner the William Daniels Apartments.  The name has held.  When the city’s Department of Planning and Development published its 2004 “Design Guidelines for the Belltown Urban Center Village” it listed the Daniels as one of the district’s 61 “Icon Buildings” and complimented it for its flatiron shape, and “unified design” featuring “active” and not “blank facades.”

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When it was brand new in 1910 the Ben Lomond Apartments looked down on Lake Union from the steep and clear-cut western side of Capitol Hill. A “second growth” urban landscape now often hides the apartment so the “now” view was photographed from the closest available opening. (Historical view courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

BEN LOMOND – A Fertile Prospect

(First appeared in Pacific April 11, 2004)

From its clinging prospect on the western slope of Capitol Hill the Ben Lomond Apartments look down on what its first residents may have comfortably called Lock Union for their new home was named after a 3,330 ft mountain in Scotland. While the name does not fit the five-story brick block’s architecture, which is more Mediterranean, it does resonate with the names of the nearby streets. For that matter it might have been named Ben Belmont or Ben Bellevue.

As built in 1910 the high west wall of the Ben Lomond faced Lakeview Ave (seen here at the bottom left corner). During the winter of 1961-62 the 1-5 Freeway replaced that eccentric street with an overpass and a ditch leaving the apartment house propped so precariously over the Interstate that a special cylinder retaining wall of concrete and steel was required to hold up the hill beneath it. (In the fall of 1962 a slide cracked several structures a short ways north of the Ben Lomond, so the special wall was extended.)

Slide precautions on the freeway near the Ben Lomond. Note the steam plant on the left.

The Ben Lomond was distinguished enough to get its own announcement in the real estate section of the Aug 22, 1909 edition of The Seattle Times. Architect Elmer Ellsworth Green’s rendering of the structure was headlined, “Ben Lomond Apartments to Be Built for Benefit of Families With Children.” A subhead explained, “None but couples with children may enter this $75,000 New Apartment House.” The attached story made the 21 apartments with “disappearing beds” sound like a play land. One of the residents, it was announced, would be a matron employed to care for the children who would be encouraged to play on the roof and enjoy its covered sun rooms.

There was, however, a eugenics hysteria attached to this utopia. Remembering Roosevelt’s famous remarks of 1903 regarding “racial suicide”, the “couples with children only” rule was code to encourage Anglo-Saxon protestants to have more children as an answer to the greater fertility of catholic immigrants from the warm and prolific bottom of Europe.

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Werner Lenggenhager, the Swiss-born photographer of this rare look to Capitol Hill along Melrose Place, moved to Seattle in 1939 and soon got a job at Boeing.  He continued his decades-long photographic quest of a great variety of subjects all over Washington State even after he retired from Boeing in 1966. With the construction of the Seattle Freeway in the 1960s practically everything in Lenggenhager’s 1959 photograph was erased.

A LOST PLACE

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 31, 2006)

In 1953 Byron Fish, one of my all-time favorite Seattle Times columnists, wrote a feature on Werner Lenggenhager, then still a Boeing employee who spent his weekends combining, as Fish summarized it, a “hobby of photography and an interest in history.”  Many Times readers will still remember “By Fish” and how he signed his contributions with a primitive cartoon of a smiling fish placed directly above the phrase “his mark.”  Fish’s angle was often about the extraordinary in the ordinary, and Lenggenhager fit that.

Through many years of long walks with his camera – he did not drive – Lenggenhager photographed landmarks, many of them doomed, but also “ordinary” scenes like this one.  That is Melrose Place cutting through the city grid on its climb from Howell Street, in the foreground, to both Melrose Avenue proper (on the far side of apartment buildings showing top-center) and further on to Olive Street.  Like Olive, Melrose Place allowed a motorist, or walker like Werner, to avoid the steeper grade of Denny Way while climbing Capitol Hill.

Of course, practically everything here was “terminal” when Lenggenhager recorded it in 1959.   Perhaps, the coming construction of the Seattle Freeway moved him to take this photograph as an act of, at least, pictorial preservation.  He might have also been going home or coming from it for the photographer lived at the corner of Belmont Avenue and E. Olive Street, or three short blocks beyond those apartments, top-center. (With the building of the freeway the assessor’s tax records – including the photographs – for these structures were foolishly purged.  Some readers, surely, will remember Melrose Place and/or have known Werner Lenggenhager.  If either, I would surely like to hear about it.)

In the roughly 40 years he was exploring with his camera Werner Lenggenhager gave prints to the University of Washington, the Museum of History and Industry and the Seattle Public Library.  This scene was copied from the library’s collection where it is but one of more than 23,000 examples of the Swiss immigrant’s contribution to our community’s memory.

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Above: Perry Apartments is nearly new in “postcard artist” M. L. Oakes look at them south on Boren to where it intersects with Madison Street. (Courtesy John Cooper) Below: In a humble irony, the southeast corner of Madison Street and Boren Avenue which was first developed as a lordly home site for Federal Judge Cornelius Hanford, his wife Clara and their eight children is since 2006 home for 50 units of affordable senior housing developed by the Cabrini Sisters.  The Perry/Cabini structure was torn down in 1996.  (now pix by Jean Sherrard)

PERRY APARTMENTS – BOREN & MADISON

(First appears in Pacific May 31, 2009)

While supervising the construction of the prestigious St. James Cathedral, architects Marbury Somervell and Joseph S. Cote, both new to Seattle, became inevitably known to new clients.  Their two largest “spin-off” commissions were for Providence Hospital and these Perry Apartments.  The Perry was built on the old Judge Hanford family home site while the Cathedral was still a work-in-progress two blocks away.  St. James was dedicated in 1907 and the ornate seven-story apartment was also completed that year for its “first life” at the southwest corner of Madison and Boren.

What the partners could not have known was that they were actually building two hospitals. The Perry was purchased in 1916/17 by Sister Frances Xavier Cabrini – not then yet a saint – and converted into the Columbus Sanatorium and later the Cabrini Hospital, and thereby became the Catholic contributor to the make-over of First Hill – or much of it – into Seattle’s preferred “Pill Hill.”

In this view the new Perry is still eight floors of distinguished flats for high-end renters who expect to be part of the more-or-less exclusive neighborhood.  Neighbors close enough to ask for a cup of sugar include many second generation Dennys, the Lowmans, Hallers, Minors, Dearborns, Burkes, Stimsons, Rankes, and many more of Seattle’s nabobs.

Most importantly class-wise were the Carkeeks.  In the mid 1880s the English couple, Morgan and Emily Carkeek, built their mansion directly across Boren Avenue from the future Perry when the neighborhood was still fresh stumps and a few paths winding between them.   The Carkeek home became the clubhouse for First Hill culture and no doubt a few Perry residents were welcomed to its card and masquerade parties.

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Above: The Gainsborough at 1017 Minor Avenue was one of large handful of distinguished apartment buildings built or planned in the late 1920s.  (Courtesy, Michael Maslan)  Below:  Well preserved the elegant Gainsborough continues to distinguish the First Hill neighborhood.  (photo by Jean Sherrard)

The GAINSBOROUGH

(First appeared in Pacific June 22,  2008)

Built for class the high-rise apartment at 1017 Minor Avenue on First Hill was named after the English King George III’s favorite painter, Thomas Gainsborough.  As a witness to the place’s status, Colin Radford, president of the Gainsborough Investment Co. that built it, was also the new apartments’ first live-in manager.  And the apartments were large, four to a floor, fifty in all including Radford’s (if I have counted correctly).  What the developer-manager could not see coming when his distinguished apartment house was being built and taking applications was the “Great Depression.”

The Gainsborough was completed in 1930 a few months after the economic crash of late 1929.   This timing was almost commonplace for the building boom of the late 1920s continued well into the early 1930s.   The quality of these apartments meant that the Gainsborough’s affluent residents were not going to wind up in any 1930s  “alternative housing” like the shacks of “Hooverville” although the “up and in” residents in the new apartment’s highest floors could probably see some of those improvised homes “down and out” on the tideflats south of King Street.

For comparison a look into Hooverville. The First Hill skyline is on the far right, its most apparent part the two towers of St. James Cathedral.

Through its first 78 years the Gainsborough has been home to members of Seattle families whom might well have lived earlier in one of the many mansions on First Hill.  Two examples. Ethel Hoge moved from Sunnycrest, her home in the Highlands, to the Gainsborough after her husband, the banker James Doster Hoge died in 1929.  Before their marriage in 1894 Ethel lived with her parents on the hill near Terry and Marion.  Ten years ago the philanthropist-activist Patsy Collins summoned Walt Crowley and I to the Gainsborough.  After explaining to her our hopes for historylink.org she gave us the seed money to launch the site that year.   Patsy was instrumental in preserving the Stimson-Green mansion, also on Minor Avenue, a home that her grandparents, the C.D. Stimsons, built in 1900.

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The CAMBRIDGE

(First appeared in Pacific, August 6, 1995)

Union Street is interrupted at the front door of The Cambridge, the first of the soaring brick apartment houses built along the steep bank of First Hill. When the 10-story Cambridge opened in 1923, its restrained brick facade dominated the northwest corner of the hill, and the majority of its more than 150 studio-apartments looked down on the city or Lake Union. The rear units shared a backyard grotto set between the apartment building and the greenbelt behind it. Residents still wake to bird songs.

The Cambridge is glimpsed in this look east on Union Street from Seventh Avenue. Off-camera to the right is the Eagles Auditorium, which survives. All else in this scene is now either filled with or blocked by the Convention Center.

First Hill seen from Denny Hill (before the regrade) with the dark green belt on the far left marking the steep acre where the Cambridge Apts. were constructed about 15 years later.

The Cambridge was a model of practical living, with a mix of modern space-savers (such as Murphy beds and breakfast nooks) and elegant touches (hardwood and tiled floors, a lavish lobby, full laundry, 24-hour switchboard). The Cambridge also had neighborhood identity. Three nearby businesses – a grocery, a garage and a cleaners -borrowed the name. Many of its residents walked to work downtown.

A tax photo ca. 1937 catches a glimpse, far-right, of the stairway to First Hill.

Looking west on Union and down its stairway from First Hill, most likely during the 1916 snow, and so seven years before the Cambridge was constructed in the copse at the bottom of the steps to the left.

Another look west from First Hill along Union Street before the Cambridge's construction.

In the early 1960s Interstate 5 cut off the Cambridge -and much else. Buffeted by. the roar of the freeway, the popular apartment was neglected but not dilapidated.

The Cambridge was saved indirectly by the institution that now threatens it. Part of the $2.3 million used by the City of Seattle for the apartment’s purchase in 1987 allowed for its recent renovation into affordable housing. The resources were drawn from mitigating funds paid by the Washington State Convention Center for its effects on the neighborhood. Built atop the freeway, the landscaped convention center also dampens its noise.

Now (in the Spring of 1995)  however, this big neighbor wants to expand to the north or east. If the former, it will build primarily on parking lots; if the latter, it will destroy four buildings – including the Cambridge – and nearly 400 apartments.  (It seems to have done the latter.)

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Above: Photographed when the building was new, the Hotel Pennington Apartments, facing Marion Street west of 4th Avenue, promoted itself as “a home away from home. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)  Below: Little has changed on the south side of Marion Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in the about 80 years between this “now and then.” (Remembering that this first appears in Pacific on Nov. 29, 2006 – not so long ago.)

LANDMARK ROW on MARION STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 29, 2006)

Set aside for the moment the looming skyscrapers and note how little has changed between this “then” and “now.”  For ambitious Seattle this is rare, especially outside the city’s designated historic districts, like Pioneer Square.

The centerpiece here is the Pacific hotel, facing Marion Street between the alley and east to 4th Avenue.  The work of architect W. R. B. Willcox, it was completed in 1916 – or may have been.  Both the county tax records and U.W. architect Norman J. Johnston’s chapter on Willcox in the UW Press’ ever revealing book “Shaping Seattle Architecture” give the 1916 date.

However, in the 1918 Polk City Directory a full-page advertisement (facing Page 2004) for the “Hotel Pennington Apartments” as it was then called, includes an etching of the same front façade seen here but with the terra cotta tile work of the right (south) half continued to the corner of 4th Avenue as one consistent presentation.  Was the less ornate half of mostly burlap bricks at the corner a late compromise for time and/or economy?  Or was the “half-truth” of the elegant etching too appealing to either correct or leave out of the advertisement?

The other surviving landmarks here include, far right, a corner of the Central Building (1907) and far left, the familiar Jacobean grace of the Rainier Club (1904) across 4th Avenue.   And above the club is the current celebrity among landmarks – or the dome of it: the First Methodist Church at 5th and Marion (1907) which now seems saved for its second century.

When the non-profit Plymouth group purchased the Pacific Hotel – its name since the 1930s – for low-income housing it took care to preserve the building’s heritage and in 1996 was awarded the state’s Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in Historic Rehabilitation.  Tom English, Plymouth’s facilities director, is fond of revealing that although hidden from Marion Street the hotel is U-shaped, and so embraces its own “beautifully landscaped courtyard and Kol-Pond.”  The 1918 advertisement also makes note of it as the hotel’s “spacious court garden.”

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: It was surely a bright idea to use Golden Rule, the name for the central moral maxim of humankind “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” as also the banner for one’s emporium of often bargain-priced housewares. (Courtesy Michael Maslan)

NOW: In the “mirror” of his repeat recording of what once was the 713 3rd Avenue address of the Imperial Studio, Jean Sherrard has without trying included himself.

For posing before the decorative backdrop in Rasmus Rothi’s Imperial Studio, why, we wonder, did this sturdy woman hang dolls low on her theatrical dress? We will call it our April’s Fool question for we have no bright answer on this first day of April.  What’s more with Jean Sherrard’s repeat we were at first fooled and confused – until he explained it.

“Shooting west, I stood with my back to the bus stop near the southwest corner of Third Ave. and Columbia Street.  While I was photographing the reflecting face on the Third Ave. side of the elegant Chamber of Commerce Building, a pedestrian crossed in front of me either mumbling to himself, I thought, or grumbling at me.  The photograph, however, reveals that while thoughtfully stooping to avoid interrupting my shoot he was talking on his cel.  Still I got the top of his head.”

Arriving from San Francisco in 1881, Julius and Louisa Bornstein, with help from sons and brothers, opened the Golden Rule Bazaar in 1882, and with good timing.  One year more and the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Tacoma, the first transcontinental to Puget Sound.  Both Tacoma and Seattle boomed, accompanied by an industrious symphony of dynamite, hammers, saws and cash registers.  The Bornstein’s registers were especially musical for their prices were often low.  They claimed to be the first store on the Pacific Coast to have 10, 15 & 25-cent counters.

Through its more than 20 years selling the essential stuff of home economics – like crockery, chambers, spectacles, nutmeg grinders, trunks, lamp chimneys, dollar watches, potato mashers, glassware, enamelware, and willow ware – the Golden Rule Bazaar prospered.  It should be noted, apropos the hanging dolls, they also sold toys.

WEB EXTRAS

Considering that the actual location of 713 3rd Ave. was one of two bays in the side of a building, I shot, as you know, Paul, two possible ‘Nows’.  The first was the mirrored window we chose to use. The second was the next bay south. Here it is:

Another interpretation. The closed door...

Anything to add, Paul?

We will not disappoint you Jean – yes we do!  But not so much this time,

In part it is because of the April Fool’s “theme” – we are habitually so wise, seemingly, that this foolishness does stump us some. “I thank the lord for my humility.” said Richard III.  The other part player in our paucity is Helix.  We spent most of the day putting up the “Helix Returns” feature – with lots of help from Ron Edge – which starting tomorrow, will follow Seattle Now and Then as surely as Monday follows Sunday West of the Mississippi and, for that matter, as surely as Sunday comes before Monday East of the Mississippi.  They are easy confused.

Now we will add three – only – more features that appeared first in Pacific, and the first of these is another on the Golden Rule, consequently, we do repeat some from the one to the other.  Then we will go across the street – First Ave. aka Front Street – to the Southwest corner with Marion Street and study Seattle Hardware’s window decorations for some Christmas in the 1890s.  We will also study the window, for the reflections are also revealing.  And then, but not finally, we will reprint a feature from the last time April Fools sat hard on a Sunday, with a story about that one who was so talented in making us feel – ordinarily – happily fooled by his hoaxes.  Ivar.  We have one.

After a few foolish interludes we will conclude with an art quiz, which is, in its “art is anything you can get away with” way, quite appropriate for April Fools, like you and I and the readers, Jean.  We will ask “How was this art made?”  It is a question about artistic technique – sort of.  We will wait first for readers to offer their conclusions on these aesthetics, and then next Sunday we will describe the technique in detail in case anyone would like to use it.

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Golden Rule Bazaar at the southeast corner of Front St. (First Ave.) and Marion Street in the late 1880s and before it was destroyed in the city's "great fire" of June 6, 1889.

THE GOLDEN RULE BAZAAR

( First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 11, 1991)

One of Seattle’s first department stores, the Golden Rule Bazaar, was founded by a man who failed in the gold fields. Down and out in Comstock, Nev., Julius Bornstein chose Seattle over Portland and Walla Walla to begin again. He brought his family here in 1882, and within three years the Bornsteins had their own storefront on First Avenue, at Marion Street.  Eighty years later Julius and Louisa’s son, Sam, recited for Seattle Times writer Lucille McDonald some of the pioneer staples the Bornsteins sold here: “Lamp chimneys and wicks, dollar watches, chamber pots, spectacles, clothes hampers, market baskets, wooden potato smashers, . nutmeg grinders, luggage … telescopes and toys at Christmas.”

Sam Bornstein recalled a brisk business in baskets that his father purchased from the natives in exchange for cooking utensils. Sam also claimed that the Golden Rule Bazaar was the first store on the Pacific Coast to have counters devoted exclusively to cut-rate items priced at a nickel, a dime, 15 cents and a quarter.

The Golden Rule Bazaar - its sign - appears here just left of center. The Frye Opera House with its mansard roof is on the left, and below it, far left, is the dark rear facade of the Pontius row on Front's (First) west side south of Madison. It is there that the city's Great Fire of 1889 started. Top-center and on the horizon is Central School on the south side of Madison Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and now part of the I-5 freeway trench, or ditch, or drawn-out pit or concrete canyon. Columbia Street is on the right. A likely date is 1886.

Seattle’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 was made considerably less spectacular by the 12-year-old Sam. News of the fire reached his school soon after it started about one block north of the family business. Sam bolted, commandeered an idle wagon and two horses, and hauled away three truckloads of fireworks that his father had recently purchased for a Fourth of July promotion. The fireworks and a few blackened pieces of china were all the Bornsteins saved from the flames, which soon overran’ the entire business district. They did, however, hold their Independence Day sale in a tent.

The family’s business prospered again. During the gold rush Sam recalled that “the miners were nuts. They just took the stuff away from us. We didn’t have to do any selling.” By 1910 the firm of J. Bornstein and Sons was operating exclusively wholesale, a business that in 1927 was favorably sold to the Dohrman Hotel Supply Company.

This feature, Seattle Now and Then, is now in its thirty-first year. This is, I believe a poor second place to the record for free lance publishing longevity set by C.T. Conover for his feature "Just Cogitating." Conover kept at it and at it - he is best remembered as the promoter to named Washington the "Evergreen State," and near the end frequently repeated himself. Perhaps no one would tell him, or perhaps no one was paying attention. Here Conover treats on a subject the includes the Golden Rule. Click to Enlarge

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The reader may wonder – with the writer – if the molding just above the sidewalk in the ca. 1900 record of the Seattle Hardware storefront at 823 First Avenue is – in spite of the obvious changes here – the same as that in front of Starbucks – this Starbucks – in the Colman Building at the southwest corner of Marion Street and First Avenue. (History photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

MERRY CHRISTMAS

(First appears in Pacific for Christmas, 2005)

Considering the mix of reflections and fancy stuff emitting from this elegant window the reader may miss the “Merry Christmas” that is written with fur sprigs.  The letters are attached to a wide white ribbon that arches from two posts of presents, left and right.  And in the center is a third pile of gifts including a few dolls and a cluster of oil lanterns just below the banner bearing the company name, Seattle Hardware Co.

Once a stalwart of local home improvements Seattle Hardware tempted shoppers through these plate glass windows at First and Marion beginning in 1890 when the Colman Building was new.   Like the clapboard structure John Colman lost here to the “Great Fire” of 1889, he prudently kept his post-fire brick replacement at two stories until it proved itself.  Eventually with both Seattle Hardware and the popular grocer Louch and Augustine (predecessor to Augustine and Kyer) at the street level this was one of the busiest sidewalks in town.

When Colman was preparing to crown the success of his two floors by adding four more to his namesake building Seattle Hardware built and moved to its own brick pile at King Street and First Ave. South in the fall of 1905.  The elegant post-fire neighborhood you see reflected in Seattle Hardware’s big sidewalk windows, of course, stayed put.  The Burke Building at Second and Marion and the Stevens Hotel – seen here back-to-back on the right – were razed in the early 1970s for the lifting of the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building.  (The reader can get a correct reading of these reflections just below.  We have flipped the picture.)

In the century since Seattle Hardware moved out and the building grew to six floors this storefront has been home for a parade of purveyors beginning with Wells Fargo.  More recently Bartells Drugs, and Dalton Books held the corner and now Starbucks.  In the “now” photograph a second promoter stands near the door to the coffee magnet and holds a sign that reads, “Disabled. Will Work. Navy Vet 78/82 Thanks.”  This thankful modeling cost the photographer five dollars.  Merry Christmas.

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Photo by Ivar Haglund, Courtesy of Ivar's Inc.

THE MADRONA SEA MONSTER

(A smaller version of this appeared in Pacific the last time April Fools fell on a Sunday – surely within the last ten years.  This is a longer version – a rough draft for the part this story will play in “Keep Clam,” the book I am still writing about Ivar and Ivar’s.  I certainly do hope to finish it this year!)

It was a late February afternoon, 1947, and Ivar was still riding the tail of international excitement over the spilled syrup.  A gardener named Thomas (no first name given) saw it first.  While trimming a hedge beside the A.B. Barrie home above Madrona Beach, Thomas looked out over a placid Lake Washington and saw “the hump.”  Almost immediately his employer, Mrs. Barrie, saw it too, the “large crinkly-backed object” swimming south towards Leschi.  “It was about 100 feet long but I could only see the middle which was about 25 feet . . . I thought its tail and head were submerged.”  In the excitement both still reasonably assumed that the tale was probably forked and that the head resembled the face of a dragon.   The experience shook Mrs. Barrie’s gardener.  “He paled and left. I haven’t seen him since.”

The four-year-old Ivar already keeping an eye out over troubled waters.

What was needed to corroborate this first sighting of the Madrona Sea Monster was someone who could both get a picture of it and keep clam while doing it.  Enter the historic opportunist Ivar Haglund, the steady owner then of two aquariums, one on Pier 54 beside his nearly new Acres of Clam seafood café and the other in Vancouver B.C. beside Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park.

To speed the capture Ivar offered a $5000 reward.  “While the cost of building a tank for a hundred-foot long ferocious monster would be considerable I was willing to make the sacrifice.”   Next Ivar got the picture, or a picture, which he claimed, “clearly shows an uncommon creature,” but also hid its forked tail and ferocious face.  Ivar conceded that this first evidence of the Madrona Sea Monster might be interpreted as the rumps of several ducks swimming in a line.   “Still I took a picture anyway. Five minutes later the thing submerged and didn’t come up again.”

Other sightings soon followed including confirmation from another landmark restaurateur, Ray Lichtenberger of Ray’s Boathouse in Ballard.  Ray claimed to have seen it “heading out to sea.”  A.T. Goodman, assistant lockmaster, agreed that a clever monster could have made it through the Chittenden locks by hiding beneath a vessel.  Goodman also hinted that should the monster be caught in foreign waters it may be extradited to face charges on not paying for its flight through the locks at Ballard.  Another authority confirmed that “sea monsters can survive on salt water, fresh water, or bourbon and water.”

In a relaxed interval from chasing monsters, Ivar Haglund keeps clam with something bigger than a clam but smaller than a monster.

While Ivar felt the monster hysteria rising around him he kept his wits.  For instance, he instantly caught the failure of army barge skipper Sam Wiks’ report of seeing a snake-necked creature browsing on Kelp south of Dutch Harbor.  “Sea monsters are carnivorous! What was this one doing munching on kelp?”  Ivar was certain that they favored fresh tuna.”

With every failure to catch the monster Ivar’s confidence grew.   “Madrona will probably be caught soon.  It’s getting careless.”  Confident that Madrona was headed for Vancouver, he equipped every aquarium attendant there with gill nets and sliced Tuna.  The Vancouver Sun reported that Ivar had also parked purse seiners behind his aquarium “preparing to net Madrona, the Sea Monster, which he intends to place in the aquarium for the rest of eternity.  ‘Sea monsters never die’ Ivar explained.”

In early March the United Press reported that Madrona had been sited heading for the open ocean.  Dismayed that the monster might escape, Ivar exclaimed, “I’ve spent the past 24 hours scanning the waters of Puget Sound along with every fisherman I know.  All we’ve seen is debris.  I don’t know which I saw the most of  — flotsam or jetsam.”  In the end Haglund found consolation in philosophy.  “Who are we to say that from the boundless depths of the ocean all the mysteries have been uncovered and brought to the surface?”

Ron Edge contributes this rendering of a certain serpent heading west past the Ediz Hook lighthouse at Port Angeles as encouraging evidence that, as the United Press noted above, that when feeling chased other Puget Sound monsters have headed for the open ocean years before Ivar's Madronna Monster made his or her run. There may well be other examples.

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The oldest and best known bazaar on the waterfront - here at Colman Dock.

Ye Old Curiosity Shop founder Pop Stanley at the front door with one of his many admirers. (photo boy Link.)

A curio competitor on the Marion Street overpass.

And another - this time Ivar's own Trader Sravi (yes Ivar's spelled backward) at the front of Pier 54 in the early 1960, and designed, in part, to take advantage of Century 21 tourist trade.

Carrying our theme from the top, more ladies on strange foundations.

These dancers at Sunrise seem to have missed the mountain.

Another EDGE CLIPPING from Ron Edge, and good advice as well.

Here's a puzzle of motives. Was the figure cut from the group out of resentment or special admiration? Most likely the former, for both pictures here were taken from Stanwood native Mamie Staton's photo album. From the evidence of that album Mamie was a real player in Stanwood High Schools athletics. And there as a premonition in the juxtaposition we, alone, have wrought. Here she stands on the right with her own caption - not ours - "Missing Link." Mamie's standout quality was her height. She was tall and must have been a good rebounder, at least.

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A Blog Exclusive!!!

MORE EVIDENCE That DEMOCRATS HAVE MORE FUN – A WHITE HOUSE TOGA PARTY with Eleanor and Franklin.

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BLOG AESTHETICS – 4 PAINTINGS

It required three  years – or more – to complete these four paintings and several others, if they are completed.  But I like this quartet, and so will decide now  to let them go.   They are, again, part of a group that is distinguished by the technique I used to paint them.  The medium was, fortunately, not expensive or I would not have developed its techniques.   As noted above I’d like to “game” it, and ask readers – those who have got this far – to suggest what they imagine or know that the technique and media might be or are.  I’ll report on the reports next week, and then reveal all, which will either confirm what is offered from others or prove to be unique.   Frankly, it takes perhaps more than I have got to develop a new medium and/or technique, or are their new things under the sun that also continue into the dark and through it?

Edgar Allen Poe in Profile

Leda and the Swan

Still Life by my Window

Sunrise thru my Window