Postcard “artist” Oakes turned his camera to the southeast and took a second look across the “lowlands” of upper Edgewater.   Here, again, Woodland Park Avenue clearly crosses the bottom of his frame, and the trolley tracks heading for Green Lake are there to see.  On the left men are working in the vacant lot at the southeast corner of Woodland Park Ave and 40th Street.  Beyond them are two homes facing Midvale Avenue and left and to the east of those homes is a patch of the graded scar of Stone Way, an avenue that was relatively slow to be developed through this lowland.  These two-plus blocks between Woodland Park Avenue and the hill east of Stone Way once shared their vale with a small creek.  Beyond the graded land is another large vacant lot or lots, the future home but now past home of Safeway at the southeast corner of Stone Way and 40th Avenue.  Cows are grazing there where now yawns a flooded construction pit.  For the other Oakes Edgewater scene above, Jean shares a contemporary pan that repeats both of Oakes’ shots.  Below are a roughly patched or merged sequence of snapshots taken this afternoon (11/7/09) of the old Safeway Block from near the northeast corner of 39th Street and Stone Way.  It seems that the developers here may have resumed digging their pit.  And below that patched pan is a ca. 1904 map of much of Seattle north of Lake Union.

The big north end neighborhood we now know as Wallingford is not recognized in his circa 1904 map.  Instead its streets are “divided” between Edgewater and Latona, both neighborhoods that are now remembered only by citizens with the wit to study recent history.  A red arrow has been drawn in the the still undeveloped acres to either side of Stone Way the line of which is indicated by a row of hand-fashioned red dots.  An isolated dot – the arrow points towards it – near the corner of Whitman Avenue and 40th Street indicates the prospect from which Oakes took his two Edgewater views a few years after this map was published.  The neighborhood of Brooklyn, far right, is long since known as the University District.  Ross, on the far left, is remembered with a playground on Third Ave. Northwest at 43rd Street, the home formerly of Ross School.

This is but one of several views that look north over Lake Union to the developing north end of Seattle in the 1890s.  “East Fremont” merging with Edgewater is the centerpiece on the far shore, and to the right of it is the scattering of structures associated with “Independent Edgewater”.  Note that the “lowland” along Stone Way is still hardly marked by structures.  The actual first plat (below) of Edgewater was for streets and lots to the east of the then future Stone Way.  On the far right is a portion of the future “Wallingford Peninsuala” or Gas Works Park.   The forest on the horizon is (about) north of 45th Street.

ANOTHER WEB EXTRA – LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL.

(This feature first appears in a slightly different version in the Seattle Times issue of Pacific Northwest Magazine for April 10, 2005.)

This little sketch of Lincoln High School history began by consulting Nile Thompson and Carolyn Marr’s “Building for Learning, Seattle Public School Histories, 1862-2000.” Within we learn that although Lincoln High closed its doors to Wallingford teens in 1981 the now more than century–old story of the school on Interlake Avenue is not over.

First in 1997 it was the students of Ballard who used a renovated Lincoln campus while a new Ballard High was built for them. Next followed the kids form Latona for their two-year stint during the renovation of their campus and following them the students of Bryant Elementary School were bussed to Lincoln while their building was renovated. Roosevelt High followed as that campus was also rebuilt. In a way, the Roosevelt students’ visit was a return of what that school took from Lincoln when it opened in 1922, capturing about half of the older school’s territory with it. Garfield was next in 2006 and in two 2006 “now” photos printed below a temporary sign for the Garfield High holds the corner. Garfield would stay for two years. Now since September of this year (2009) the students of the nearby Hamilton International Middle School are meeting at Lincoln and will use it through the school year as their Hamilton home is renovated.

Early in 1906, an anxious Seattle School board committee scouted the Wallingford site when there were still some scattered stump fields remaining from the original clear-cutting of the late 1880s and early 1890s. The 30-room “Little Red Brick Schoolhouse” was built with speed, and in the following September enrolled 900 students – many of them from Queen Anne. Two years later Queen Anne got its own high school, which it has also since lost. In spite of the Queen Anne drain Lincoln kept growing.

The view accompanying this little history that looks southeast through the intersection of North Allen Place and Interlake Avenue North dates probably from 1914, the year its new north wing was added. In 1930, a south wing followed, and in 1959 an east-side addition. That year Lincoln was the largest high school in Seattle with an enrollment of 2,800. But soon enrollments began a steady decline and 21 years later the home of the fighting Lynxes, would close for a rest until, as noted near the top, it would reopen again and again.