Until it was replaced in the mid-1970s with a warehouse-sized box (with real central heating), St. Vincent De Paul’s Lake Union thrift shop was a mishmash of low-ceilinged cubbies and narrow passages open to the winds off the lake. But exploring regulars could find “anything they needed and more that they did not.”
Here is Werner Lenggenhager’s 1953 recording of its Grand Boulevard, a cluttered street that it still thrills me to remember.
There on the right in 1972 I purchased a cast-iron machine with mirrors that projected film onto a sturdy rear screen. That contraption let me convert film into hand-drawn animations frame-by-frame.
But my sport with old St. Vinnie’s is nothing compared to writer-historian and sleuth Stephen Lundgren’s. In the “now,” Lundgren poses, he has determined, on the spot where in the ’53 scene “a jeans-and-jacket-clad buckaroo saunters down the arcade, where two ex-sergeants chew the fat to the right, and in the back a swell in long coat and fedora considers which stall might hide boxes of moldy jazz records.”
A few years later that “swell” could have been Stephen, who holds a copy of a 1938 recording of “The Flat Foot Floogie.” He purchased it here in the early 1970s. It is but one of the several thousand 78-rpm “sides” that “picker” Lundgren has in his collection.
Lundgren is working on a “quintet of novels featuring ghosts, lovers, artists, spies, sex, murder, civic mischief and mayhem. St. Vinnie’s will be featured.” He and I make a timely recommendation: The next “Nearby History Class” led by historian Lorraine McConaghy begins Jan. 19 at the Museum of History & Industry. For more information or to register, call MOHAI, 206-324-1126.
Oh thank you for publishing this picture. I have such fond memories of this St Vinnies – right across the street from where my dad worked. I still have two things purchased there in the 60’s. Are there any more pictures available?????
We always called it Saint Vinnies By The Sea.
Yes, me too; looking for photographs of the Lake Union St Vincent’s.
My dad, manager of John Oster on 4th (by Seattle Center) would work overtime Saturdays then drop me off there; in the mid late 1960s.
It got so sellers recognized me! Once I bought a 1950s RCA console, lucky my dad let me keep it and it fit int trunk!
Craig Anderson
I too just loved this place as a kid in the ’50s, early ’60s. This photograph seems a bit more open than I remember – my childhood memories are of narrower, windier spots. Would go there with my dad. Seems like there were old codgers hanging out in a lot of the spaces. Similar to how I felt about the lower levels of the Pike Place Market back then, and great hole-in-the-wall junk shops my grandmother would take me to.
You entered the great area that you remember where the two men are standing at the back of the picture.
I have vivid memories of going to Saint Vinnys with my mother. It would have been in the late 50s. Peter Empt was in charge. He was always willing to donate something or money for a church related cause, and my mother never hesitated to ask him. I recall he had a piece of candy or small treat for me as well.
One could find such great baubles, as well as functional items in those dark cubbies.