Notice what these palms contribute to this Wallingford box.

While preparing the audio – below – first Bill White showed – coming down the steps – and then Jean Sherrard – calling on the phone.  Both had intimate memories of one of the subjects included in this  Vol. 1 No.6, and so I interview them.  The subject is the Last Exit on Brooklyn, a popular cafe that opened in 1967 on Brooklyn Ave. two doors south of 40th Street on the east side.  The result of these interviews is a longish (relative to the first five & 1/2 iterations) but invigorated commentary, which begins with what is by now my typical approach to this extemporaneous blabbering – beginning at the front cover and reading along as long as I last – followed by the two interviews: Bill first and Jean second.  This has also given me an idea – this idea.  To do more interviews on future subjects that are revealed in these issues and to post those too.  This is also a lot of fun for me and an extraction from my bunker of writing – even for those interviews I might do by phone.

Paul’s Comments & Interviews:

(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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A brief (sort of)  audio commentary is attached directly below.  The disciplined listener might want to illustrate the “sound track” by opening the pdf to the paper itself – first – giving HELIX time to materialize before punching the audio button.

Paul’s Commentary

François Hollande was elected french President yesterday on May 6th with 51,7%.  He is the first socialist to win since 1981.

A huge crowd gathered at Place de la Bastille to celebrate the victory. It reminded me of the Mondial Soccer 1998 World Cup. People were so happy,  friendly and filled with hope.  François Hollande arrived  at Place de la Bastille around midnight and declared “I am  the president of Youth of France.” At the end of his humanist speech, all the people began to sing the french hymn : la Marseillaise, it had been a very long time that I had neither heard it nor sang it!

François Hollande a été élu Président hier le 6 mai à 51,7%, il est le premier socialiste a gagner depuis 1981. Une  immence foule était rassemblée Place de la Bastille pour célébrer la victoire. Cela me rappelait le Mondial en 1998, les gens étaient si heureux, proches  et plein d’espoir. François Hollande est arrivé Place de la Bastille vers minuit et à déclaré aussi  qu’il était le président des Jeunes. A la fin de son discours humaniste, tous les gens ont commencé à chanté la Marseillaise, il y avait bien longtemps que je ne l’avait entendue ni même chantée !

THEN: On the hot and quiet Sunday afternoon of June 4, 1961 Frank Shaw stepped onto the short pedestrian bridge that once extended from the Normandie Apartments, here far right, over the lower intersection of 9th and University. The intersection was divided in half - a high part and a low part - because this was one of the very few precipitous parts of First Hill. (Historical photo by Frank Shaw)

NOW: Jean used his long pole to reach an elevation approaching that of the lost bridge. His “repeat” is also wider in order to include more of Freeway Park and the Horizon House’s North Tower on the far right. The Exeter, the Tudor-Gothic hotel-apartments on the left of Shaw’s view, can also be glimpsed just above the park trees in Jean’s repeat.

An active member of the Mountaineers, the photographer Frank Shaw also liked to hike Seattle with his Hasselblad camera, especially in pursuit of cityscapes and public art.  Building the Seattle Freeway was one of the subjects he followed, and at the center of this elevated look west from University Street and 9th Ave. into the Central Business District he has recorded a surreal swath of cleared lots prepared for digging the I-5 ditch.

A closer look at what Plymouth Church faced - a parking lot to the east - before the freeway construction. University Street is on the right.

Looking south from the Washington Athletic Club sometimes soon after its completion in 1930. Sixth Avenue is on the right, with Plymouth Congregational Church at the center with the neighborhood that surrounded it not yet interrupted by parking lots. (Courtesy Ron Edge.)

Almost certainly Shaw followed the freeway news, which this June of 1961 was enlivened by protests against the freeway’s design. They were led by the First Hill Improvement Club and Century 21 architect Paul Thiry.  Shaw recorded this on Sunday June 4, 1961, one day before the club’s Monday protest march thru these same blocks.  With practically every public official against them, the club’s proposal to cap or lid the ditch with a green parkway was doomed.  In a city then ambitiously building a world’s fair, the political and technical tasks required to study the lid proposal were described as annoying by those charged to do them.

The April 11, 1961 Seattle Times coverage of the proposed covered freeway plan.

Once the ditch was dedicated in 1967 the artful urge to cap it was revived with some of the same public officials in line to, perhaps, atone.  The results were Freeway Park dedicated on July 4, 1976, and seen, in part, in the “now.”  The sprawling Washington State Convention Center followed in the eighties.

Most likely Frank Shaw read his Sunday Times that June morning.  Front page was news of Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s enchantment “like a smitten schoolboy when the ice thaws along the Volga in the springtime” with Jacqueline Kennedy at a Vienna banquet.  There was also news of “freedom riders” in the Jackson Miss. Jail, the decision to also name Century 21 as the Seattle World’s Fair, and arguments over Castro’s proposal to exchange 500 American tractors for 1,200 Cubans captured in that April’s failed invasion of the biggest island in the Caribbean.

More June 4, 1961 Seattle Times coverage on Jacqueline and Nikita's affair.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

A few more features past from the neighborhood, and other to some sides of University Street Jean, and beginning with a repeat of the feature we put up in 2009, which looks back up the steep University Street clime from eighth Avenue.

FIRST HILL EXCEPTIONS

(First appeared in this blog on Aug. 15,2009)

There were only two precipitous places along the west side of what the pioneers soon learned to call First Hill where an imprudent trailblazer might have fallen to injury or worse.  These steep exceptions would be obvious once the forest was reduced to stumps.  But when the old growth was intact it was best to stay on native paths or stray with caution, especially to two future prospects on 9th Avenue – the one near Jefferson St. and the other here on University Street.

Exploring the hillside behind Jefferson Terrace at 8th one can still intimate the cliff, which Seattle Housing’s largest and probably also highest low-income facility nestles.  Eighth Ave. stops just south of James Street at that high-rise, because the cliff behind it never would allow the avenue to continue south.

The other steep exception was here on University Street where it climbed – or tried to climb – east up First Hill between 8th and 9th Avenues.  The goal is half made. On University, 9th  has two levels and only pedestrians – like the gent here descending the steps – could and can still climb between them.  All others had to approach the lower of the two intersections from below.  They could throttle their motorcar into the photographer’s point-of-view west up University from 8th Avenue, or they could make another steep climb from the north, up from Hubble Place.

The bridge is another exception.  It reached from the upper intersection of 9th and University to the top floor of the Normandie Apartments, whose south façade we see here covered in Ivy.  Thanks to Jacqueline Williams and Diana James for a helpful peek into their work-in-progress “Shared Walls: Seattle Apartments 1900-1939.”  We learn that when it was built a century ago James Schack, the Normandie’s architect, included the bridge as a convenience to the big apartment’s residents who rented 84 units, and all of them with disappearing beds.

For another view of the same location prior to Freeway Park, check out this post at Vintage Seattle.

The view looks northwest from the upper level of the “intersection” of University Street and 9th Avenue, ca. 1912, to the Normandie Apartments when the ivy that covers the south facade (on the left) has reached the band between the first and second floors, went counted up from 9th Avenue. In the principal photograph used above, that south wall is covered with that creeper, and probably the east wall too. Here we may note the planters on the roof and on the far left the canvas shelter open for studying the skyline in any weather without high winds.

Another early view and from a position near that taken by the photograph directly above. This one, however, looks northwest to the intersection of 8th Avenue and University Street, bottom-left, where one of the city's solid waste wagons is beginning to climb University Street to the east - it seems.

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Plymouth dressed in green for Lawton Gowey's recording from Aug. 5, 1964.

Plymouth's contribution to the small park at the northwest corner of Pike and Boren. The view looks to the northwest, and was recorded for the 1997 feature below.

PLYMOUTH COLUMNS

(First appears in Pacific, Nov. 2, 1997)

One of our more curious local landmarks is the arrangement of four fluted columns and their surrounding screen of trees that look over Interstate 5 from a triangular patch of park at the northwest corner of Boren Avenue and Pike Street. This week’s “repeat” has followed these now-headless shafts from their original location near the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Seneca Street, where they were formerly united for 44 years with their classical capitals above the grand front door to Plymouth Congregational Church.

The mother church of local Congregationalists had its cornerstone laid at this location in July 1911 (the next feature below), and 10 months later opened all 136 doors of its new sanctuary to the admiring community. The architecture was sober and demure and, except for the classical portico and belfry, showed little ornament. As explained in “The Congregational Washington,” it was a “plain, chaste example of classic architecture . . . peculiarly characteristic of New England.” As noted by Mildred Tanner Andrews in “Seeking To Serve,” her history of Plymouth, plans for this church were influenced by the “practical reformist and democratic positions of many of its members.”   The architect was John Graham Sr.

The sanctuary ca. 1963 during the construction of the IBM building, here behind it.

March 21, 1966, the chancel exposed. Photo by Lawton Gowey.

Robert Bradley's record of the pillars to be saved.

Demolition began the first week of March 1966. By the 20th, all that remained were the columns, and on the 29th, these were pushed and pulled down by a tractor and crane. Meanwhile, the congregation worshiped nearby at the 5th Avenue Theatre.

The four stone columns were reconstituted largely by local builder and art collector John Hauberg, influenced, perhaps, by the example of his wife, art activist Anne Gould Hauberg, and the then relatively new enthusiasm for preservation.

Plymouth’s pillars – each of their seven four-ton segments in place – were dedicated at their new location on Oct. 24, 1967. Thirty years later, their austere formation has been considerably softened by the park’s trees.

At the column’s “new” site overlooking Interstate 5, the common misconception endures that these classical pillars were saved not from Plymouth Church but from the University of  Washington’s first building on the original campus in downtown Seattle.

The Territorial University's main hall stripped of its columns, the only substantial part of the U.W.'s first home for the state's own higher education that was saved and moved to the new Interlake campus.

The Columns on campus, 1993.

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Above: Mark Matthews, the pastor for First Presbyterian Church, welcomes the parishioners of Plymouth Congregational Church to the neighborhood during the 1911 cornerstone laying ceremonies.  Both views look from University Street south to the block between 5th and 6th Avenues; also the contemporary repeat has been adjusted to show both the street and a portion of the neighboring IBM Building on the far right. (Historical view courtesy of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

PLYMOUTH CORNERSTONE

(First appeared in Pacific, Spring of 2005)

Here on the Sunday afternoon of July 30, 1911 at the southwest corner of University Street and Sixth Avenue the members of Plymouth Congregational Church are laying the cornerstone for their third sanctuary.  A mere three blocks from their second home at the northeast corner of Third and University, Plymouth picked up after Alexander Pantages, the great theatre impresario, made them an offer that the congregation could not refuse.

In a passage from the 1937 parish history “The Path We Came By” this scene is described. “The shabby old frame tenements of the neighborhood, gray with dust from regrade steam shovels, must have looked down in amazement at the crowd gathered there that Sunday afternoon, women in silks and enormous beflowered hats, men in their sober best.”  From the scene’s evidence, bottom-center, we may add one barefoot boy with his pants rolled up.

While the surrounding tenements were really not so old they were certainly dusty for the lots and streets of this Denny Knoll (not hill) neighborhood were still being scraped and reshaped with regrades.  Less than ten months following this ceremony the completed church was dedicated on Sunday May 12,1912.  On Monday an open house featured “music, refreshments and athletics” and also “130 doors – all open.”

Fifty years later Plymouth’s interim senior minister, Dr. Vere Loper, described another dusty scene.  “Wrecking equipment has leveled off buildings by the wholesale around us.  The new freeway under construction is tearing up the earth in front of us, and the half bock behind us is being cleared for the beautiful IBM Building.” Plymouth’s answer was to stay put and rebuild.  Opened in 1967, the new sanctuary was white and gleaming like its neighbor the IBM tower and seemed like a set with it, in part, because the same architectural firm, NBBJ, was involved in the design of both.

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RAILROAD AVE., 1908: LOOKING EAST to UNIVERSITY STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 28,1982)

With his back against Elliott Bay the photographer shoots across the entire width of Railroad Avenue. The view looks east to the ramp that extended University Street from First Ave. to what was then still the extended timber quay of the waterfront.  A seawall with a fill behind it was still several years in the future in this scene from 1908.  This is one of about 60,000 subjects in the Asahel Curtis collection preserved, but

rarely seen, in the photo archives of the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. The subject is oddly empty of the carriages, wagons, cautiously crossing pedestrians and plethora of boxcars that ordinarily congested Railroad Avenue.

While his older brother Edward was roaming the west and photographically chronicling the vestiges of native America, Asahel, “the Curtis brother with the hard-to-pronounce first name,” after a gold rush reconnoitering to Alaska, kept closer to his many favored subjects hereabouts, including the Cascades.

Born in Minnesota in 1874 but reared in Port Orchard, Asahel moved to Seattle in his late teens. His photographic career ‘began in 1894, and after a few years of his wanderings first about Alaska and the Yukon and then testing his ambitions in San Francisco, tie returned to Seattle and, by the century’s turn, was owner of one of the city’s largest commercial studios.

Unlike his brother Edward, whose steadfast urge to record the “noble savage” required the patronage of Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, Asahel paid his own way. Always the businessman and only incidentally the artist – with the exception of his cherished mountainscapes – Asahel would photograph most anything as long as it paid. Like this oddly sedate View of the normally hazardous Railroad Avenue. It was surely a job done for hire or on speculation for future sale, but for or to whom?

Asahel sitting at the cluttered table most likely in his own studio, and cutting cake for the happy fellows behind him. Note the vertically lodged negative holders in the protected shelves behind those celebrants on the right. Most of these negatives wound up in the keep of the Washington Historical Society (and Museum and Research Library) in Tacoma. (Courtesy Bob Monroe)

Perhaps It was the city that hired Asahel to take a photograph showing that waterfront conditions were not as filthy, congested and dangerous as the local press kept harping they were. A weekly, The Commonwealth, summarized these charges this way: “That name, ‘Railroad Avenue,’ is a grim and ghastly joke. Four counts, four charges of negligence have been established – negligence in the matter of policing, lighting, maintenance of sanitary conditions and the enforcement of municipal ordinances regulating the blockade of streets by railway cars.”  This picture is virtually clean of everything except for that lone boxcar, a few pedestrians, and that silhouetted figure at the left. That figure’s presence seems to suggest two contradicting readings of this photograph. Either the photographer did not care what moved in the way of his shot or this was the one brief instance that was free of the crowded intrusion of railroad cars and carriages that were coming in fast from all sides and would soon fill the photographic frame and so confirm popular opinions toward this boardwalk – that it was too congested to travel and too dangerous to cross.

Or was this rarely peaceful instance used to reveal the dangerously rough condition of the sea of planking over which boxcars and crowds would normally be jockeying for right-of-way? These boards were forever corning undone, stubbing the toes of commerce and revealing the rat-infested mess of refuse, driftwood and broken concrete below that put up a flimsy wall against a tide range of 16 feet. Here, in an unguarded stumble, one could run a splinter through the foot, and catch the plague to boot! (Or through it.) But it always was routinely claimed that the planking was only temporary – temporary in some places for a half a century.

Looking west down the University Street trestle ca. 1899 with the Snug Harbor Saloon on the right. (Courtesy, U.W. Libraries Special Collections.)

Perhaps it was the proprietor of the Snug Harbor Saloon who called on Curtis to photograph his cozy drinking establishment. The flags and bunting suggest, perhaps, that the grand opening is in progress and the beer and Polish sausages are cheap.  What remained of the Snug’s picturesque life on the waterfront was, however, brief. By 1910 the saloon had moved on up to First and Union, where it was not so snug with the harbor.

In 1911 the Port of Seattle was formed in part as a response to the mess on Railroad Avenue. But it was not until 1934 that an impervious seawall was constructed and that Railroad Avenue – now Alaskan Way – was given relief from the tides in this section north of Madison Street.  The older part, south of Madison, got its own and earlier seawall in the teens.

By 1934, Asahel Curtis was a celebrated 60-year-old, and he was still photographing this city and the “charmed land” that surrounded it. Ever the promoter of local development, he died in 1941 and left thousands of images which still are testimony to the making of this modem American city.

East on University Street from the Alaskan Way viaduct before it was opened to traffic in 1953. Photo by Horace Sykes.

Lawton Gowey's recording of the Cornerstone project looking south from the University Street Trestle on Sept 22, 1982. Lawton looks through the block that was filled with hotels - including the Arlington - in the 1890s. The excavation sat undeveloped for many years before Harbor Steps started to fill it.

Construction of Harbor Steps, photographed in the spring of 1994.

A circa 1980 before to the above construction scene's 1994 after. This stub of the viaduct had been long-lived.

Some changes including the building on the left and the symbol for Pi. The date may be guessed on the evidence of the cars and the price of parking.

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Looking south above and on Western from the University Street timber trestle to the waterfront. Asahel Curtis is, again, the photographer, and the picture is used courtesy of Clarence Brannman.

WESTERN AVE. South From the UNIVERSITY STREET TRESTLE

(First appeared in Pacific, April 28, 1996)

From above the center line of Western Avenue, this week’s historical scene looks south into the Commission District. The photograph was taken from the University Street timber trestle, which once spanned from First Avenue to Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way). Judging from its number, this view from the studio of Asahel Curtis was photographed near April Fools’ Day 1904, days before the planks were pulled up and the pilings below them buried in fill.

These street planks are five years old, about as long as they could be expected to survive the pounding of loaded wagons. In 1899 Western had been repaved when the rotting parts of the supporting piles were cut away and recapped.

The 1904 filling of Western represented the public-works commitment to solidify a waterfront that had been quickly rebuilt above the lapping tides after the Great Fire of 1889, which destroyed everything along the waterfront as far north as University Street. The row of makeshift tin shacks on the left was another post-fire commercial improvisation, meant to get the offshore neighborhood quickly back to work. Three horse stables separate the two-story hotel at the far (Seneca) end of the block from Compton Lumber Co. at this end. This last is still in business, although not at this corner. These shacks survived for five more years before they were removed, their tideland basements filled to grade and new brick warehouses eventually built in their place.

Looking back and north on Western - here on the left - from the roof of the steam plant south of Columbia Street ca. 1903. The Denny Hotel is evident on the Denny Hill horizon, on the right. The name was changed to Washington Hotel in 1903 for the visit of its first guest, Theo. Roosevelt that spring. The University Street trestle cuts through, right-left, near the center of the scene.

The contemporary photo steps back to show off Harbor Steps Park and its monumental staircase, which repeats with ornamental relish the funky old timber trestle along University Street. The park is part of the Harbor Steps project, a work in progress (in 1996), the 17-story residential-commercial building glimpsed here on the right takes the place of the old tin shacks and more.

The red brick Diller Hotel shows here left-of-center across First Avenue at the top of the steps.

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THE DILLER HOTEL

(First appeared in Pacific, March 20, 1994)

Edward Diller opened his hotel on the southeast comer of Front Street (First Avenue) and University on June 6,1890. As the first anniversary of Seattle’s “Great Fire” of 1889, the day was a celebration of renewal – and a good way to get attention.

Scores of new buildings were being built side by side above the ashes of the fire district, more than 30 blocks of the city’s business center. The demand for brick was so great after the fire that Puget Sound brick yards could not keep up with it. A number of local commercial buildings, including Diller’s, were built with brick imported from Japan.

Diller built his new hotel in front of the family home and later extended it to alley lots originally saved for the family. This is that full hotel as it was photographed about 1909. The differences between the two bricks is quite obvious if you stand below the hotel’s facade on University Street. These views look cater-cornered across First and University. .

With the 1897 beginning of the Klondike gold rush, the Diller Hotel got busy.  The following spring Diller was elected to the City Council. Especially in those years, First Avenue north of Yesler Way was crowded with hotels, mostly for men working on or near the waterfront or traveling to or from the gold fields. No block was as packed as this one, with seven hostelries between Seneca and University.

SAM, on the left, and the Diller on the right in April 1992 and with no Hammering Man.

The Diller is one of the last landmarks surviving from those energetic years. The hotel’s decorative cornice was judiciously removed after the area’s 1949 earthquake. Now (in 1994, that is) within the old hotel’s walls are Asian importers and galleries, professional fashion designers and photographers, a shop specializing in fine papers, the antique store on the comer and several artists in the upper floors. The building, which is still owned by the Diller family, stands directly across University Street from the new art museum.  [Perhaps someone who knows the Diller’s recent past will help us learn of it with a written comment.]

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South on First through its intersection with University Street. The Arlington Hotel - last known as the Bay Building - in on the right and part of the Diller, far left. Photo courtesy Lawton Gowey.

Lawton Gowey's early "now " from May 23, 1969. Four or five loans sharks on the left and one music store, Myers. I bought a used keyboard there long ago. Far right is the Diller hotel during its "white period." Far right is the Arlington Hotel by then long since known as the Bay Building.

MAIL CAR A

(First appeared in Pacific, May 1, 1997)

The centerpiece of this early-century look down First Avenue from University Street is the bright white trolley on the southbound tracks. That is Mail Car A, the first of the Seattle Electric Company’s 400-series freight cars, signed on its side, “United States Railway Post Office.”

Standing mail cars were commonplace at First and University; the city’s main post office was in the Arlington Hotel, far right, for a few years while the new Federal Building was completed at Third and Union. After sorting, the mail was distributed by the white cars to several branch post offices.

The Arlington, still with its tower, at the southwest corner of First Ave. and University Street. The work-in-progress on its concrete foundation in 1889 helped stop the northward movement of the city's "Great Fire of 1889."

The opening of the new post office in 1908 – a short while after this photograph was made – was no doubt a relief to the seven hotels that crowded First Avenue between University and Seneca streets. The Diller Hotel, far left, is the only one that survives (in 1997, at least). Built in the first year after the “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889, in this view it is only the second-oldest building on the block. Construction on the Arlington Hotel began before the fire, and the brick work of its foundation is credited with stopping the fire’s northerly advance.

With the Arlington Hotel on the left - home then for the Fed. Post Office - looking west on the University Street Trestle from First Ave.

Among the Arlington’s other occupants were the city’s first tour service, “Seeing Seattle” (far right), and United Parcel Service, which in 1918 moved into the post office’s old sorting room.

Looking back - north - through the same block on First, this time with the photographers back to Seneca Street. The Diller hotel is on the right and across University Street is the Arcade Building, now the site of the Seattle Art Museum. The name and date of this parade are marked upon it.

My repeat from about 12 years ago. The feature essay that accompanied this has not reveal itself as yet, but will. plcd

Another parade on First into the first block south of University Street.

By the depressed ’30s, First Avenue had become a relatively low-rent strip for people on fixed or no income. The 1974 razing of the Arlington was seen by some as a kickoff for the avenue’s gentrification. Only now (1997), however, is that hole being topped with the 31 stories of Harbor Steps East. When completed, the entire Harbor Steps project will have added 750 new apartments (plus a 20-unit bed and breakfast) to the harbor side of First Avenue, a development that cannot help but swell the old avenue’s street life.

Lookout Below!

She who is dressed in leaves of two pieces –

Her’s is not a war-like race!

In spite of the being abused, we expect,

By invaders and compelled, at least,

To manufacture such “toys” against them.

But what has Buck added to “common”

When he describes as also “ordinary”

The blow-torch-like contraption

That she knows is a weapon but is afraid to use?

Buck, of course, is not afraid to test the thing

And stepping forward – but only after

The blond without a name stands back -

He presses the trigger and gets a blast

Of something he knows not what!

Is it a “whoosh” of flame, or smoke?

And what pop it shows at afar!!!

With such, Buck fears

He would not trust an army.

It is the sort of “strange toy”

That Scorchy Smith could have used

Five hundred years earlier

To make his escape – with the help

Moments before of Roya’s ruse –

Past the two armed men guarding

The plane – below in the last frame.

He shouts with a whisper “Look!”

To the unnamed blonde behind him.

This fourth issue is a maturing cache of our typical subjects, which did include, yes, war, drugs, sex and rock-and-roll.   Many of its parts are not signed – a frustration now – but within it appears new names that would become stalwarts of HELIX production, names we will recognize and thank, no doubt, down this 2&1/2 year line of putting up every issue and in order.   And I have found a few more negatives of that first Flower Potlatch Isness-In at Volunteer Park.  Once scanned I’ll attach them below.

An audio commentary is attached directly below.  The disciplined listener might want to illustrate the “sound track” by opening the pdf to the paper itself – first – giving HELIX time to materialize before punching the audio button.   The audio runs about ten minutes and then prudently adjourns until next week.

As noted above, we have scanned a few more scenes from the first Be-In at Volunteer Park, named, in part, the Potlatch Isness-In.

(Click to Enlarge – sometimes twice)

The grass on the big sloping lawn was just barely dry enough to sit on. Most people stood.

Buttons, beads, and God's-Eyes (she holds one in her hands) make us happy.

Several dancing snakes wound through the crowds.

Hoping, perhaps, for a jam.

A jam

Under the spread of the biggest tree on the lawn became - and perhaps already was - a traditonal spot for drum circles to jam.

Youth dress with care

Drum circle including beat with bongo and pipe.

Late that afternoon looking west toward the stage.

A band approaching the stage - most likely.

The Blues Interchange, on stage.

The Blues Interchange still on stage, and Gary Eagle and myself too (holding a flower) far left. I remember well that button-down sweater.

Back to the circle with an example of the hip mountain man style with strong chin - or rustic viking.

This big haired fellow was a mystery to me even then.

Holiday, and great day of workers’ demonstrations, it is also the tradition in France to offer lilies of the valley to wish happiness …

Here are some street photos five days before the second round of elections of the President of the French Republic.

Jour férié, et grand jour des manifestations des travailleurs,  c’est aussi la tradition en France d’offrir du muguet pour souhaiter du  bonheur…

Voici quelques images de rue cinq jours avant le 2^ème tour des élections du président de la République française.

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.

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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)