(Please Click to Enlarge) This most of us know from its strange hoodoos and for me also a visit as a child with the family on a long trip from Spokane to Texas. Using Google Earth I lucked out and soon found the proper blue dot to click from hundreds of them. (Much to enjoy.) It brought up another photograph taken like this one by Horace Sykes from a prospect called Sunrise Point, at just under 8000 feet. This is high country in south Utah. You can easily get higher driving the roads west of Bryce and reaching plateau elevations of 10,500 feet and discovering other natural spectacles although at that height hoodoos no longer gather together as they do here like members of several antiphonal choirs in a Queen's chapel. Probably this is also a very good sunset point. Jean has mentioned that here Horace Sykes seems to have had some special performance contract with the clouds, as he does so often.
The Horace Sykes below was most likely photographed during the same trip as the Bryce Canyon view from Sunrise Point printed above. There are hoodoo pinnacles in the second view but they are lower in the frame and perhaps this second scene was also taken from a slightly higher elevation and closer to the clouds – even above them. The elevation is somewhere near 8000 feet and perhaps a little over it. This we note in order to compare this Western scene with another – the one printed below it. It is a view of the Brothers in the Olympic Range photographed by Sykes from the east side of Hood Canal somewhere between, I believe, Oak Head and Tsukutsko Point on the Toandos Penninsula. The “lesson” here is in elevation. The Brothers’ summit is a few feet under 7000 feet, and so a good 1000 feet lower than the position Sykes comfortably took from an as yet unidentified point or prospect and most likely from a spot not too distance from his car. Or we may imagine in the bottom photo Sykes in his post-war Chevrolet reaching for the clouds above The Brothers.
Another scene from Bryce by Sykes.The Brothers over Hood Canal. One (or two) of the highest in the Olympics, the Brothers rise quickly to almost 7,000 feet from the west shore of Hood Canal. The Bryce Canyon recordings, also by Sykes, were taken from prospects with elevations of around 8,000 feet, and a few miles to the east of a Utah plateau that reaches elevations of 10,000 feet and more.
An understanding of what created the Dry Falls in the Grand Coulee Canyon was first revealed about 13000 years after the event. And it was not yet known when tourists first started to visit the site in the early 20th Century. The 1890 completion of the Northern Pacific branch line between Spokane and Coulee City made visits to both the Dry Falls and Soap Lake possible for persons willing to trek or take a wagon the last few miles to those destinations from the rail head. The opening of the trans-state highway over Stevens Pass in 1925 substantially increased the volume of puzzled visitors. Many by them brought cameras and the fenced prospect constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the Great Depression has been the platform from which most of the snapshots have been made depicting the effects the late ice age’s great floods as ice dams broke releasing walls of water sometimes 1,000 feet high. Believe it or not.
Now we will nudge Jean to put up at least one more historic shot of the Dry Falls – the one (or perhaps two) we used in our book “Washington Then and Now” – and examples of his own repeats in 2006. (Readers may want to visit our website to see more of Jean’s state-wide repeats pulled from the book.)
(click to enlarge photos)
Horace Sykes wide-angle look at Dry Falls ca. 1950.
Jean writes: the following photos are from two visits to Dry Falls. I’ll begin with the Then & Now photos we featured in our book. A couple from Seattle graciously posed for me to help repeat the original. The boy in the red shirt darted into the photo at the last second, giving it a little impromptu oomph.
Two poplars but where? Horace Sykes does not tell us. To me one looks Okanogan and the other Palouse, or vice versa. Are they poplars? My best evidence is based only on “family resemblance.” Anyone in our family would have called these stately trees poplars.
A Horace Sykes poplar somewhere.A Sykes poplar somewhere else.Here Mike is a detail of the ridge lines for mountains far beyond the long and winding road in Horace Sykes landscape. As you can tell Sykes had a built-in pictorialist soft filter in his camera, that is his lens was not the best. Those ridges look sort of typical - except to someone who has been living with or near them, I think. Paul
Perhaps somewhere in eastern Washington, Horace Sykes has pulled over and parked to take this Kodachrome slide after leaving a scablands community. The stiff sunlit stubble tops a light snow. Someone will know this place - but probably not this media. (Click to Enlarge - Perhaps Twice.)
This, among other things, is, I believe, Mt. Baker from the somewhere south at sunset. Someone who knows the hills and lower mountains between Arlington and the Canadian border may recognize one or another of those several ridges. Again, like most of Horace Sykes’ slides this one is neither dated nor named. “]This Syke's view of Mt. Baker we know. It is from the top of Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island, looking east. Lummi Island rises above the mist hanging over Rosario Strait. The south end of the Island rises with a ridge, but the rest of Lummi is low. Somewhere in that mist I lived in a fisherman's cabin in the winter-spring of 1970-71 working then on a script for "Sky River Rock Fire" a documentary - mostly - of the northwest music festivals held hereabouts in the late 1960s and early '70s. Once the Ivar bio "keep Clam" is completed I hope to get on with the editing of this project that will then be 43-years old. A record for me. From my cabin I looked to Mt. Constitution above the reef netters on the strait. It is impressive way to catch salmon but requires hours of patience - like some film productions.
THEN: A Seattle Street and Sewer Department photographer recorded this scene in front of the nearly new City-County Building in 1918. The view looks west from 4th Avenue along a Jefferson Street vacated in this block except for the municipal trolley tracks. (Photo courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: Jean Sherrard has adjusted his view a little to the north or right in order to see around the vehicle parked on the Jefferson service street.
The top selection is but one of several photographs recorded by an official municipal photographer on January 27, 1918. (Others are printed below.) The event was the ceremonial journey of two municipal streets cars (the second one is hidden), Seattle Mayor Hi Gill, the City Council, the Police Band and how ever many citizens they could carry for a round-trip run along the city’s new public trolley line that used the then new Ballard Bridge. The trip and the celebrating began here at the original front door to the City-County building.
The Ballard Booster Club tended to the official ceremony in Ballard. There shoulder-to-shoulder a crowd of “over 1000,” The Times estimated, filled Market Street “for speech-making and jollification over the completion of the line.” An elevated platform was built into the street for some shouted lessons in municipal ownership of utilities. (This scene is depicted below.)
The perennial and often populist councilman Oliver Erickson, from the council’s committee on public utilities, gave the longest speech. It began, “We are here to dedicate this car line not to the use of private interests to exploit you, but to dedicate it to the common good.” Mayor Gill also reminded the crowd and reporters, “Now it is up to you to patronize the line.”
The police band performed in Ballard, but first here at the City-County building facing City Hall Park. After arriving around 2:30 and playing its first tune, the band and the chosen dignitaries boarded the two trolley cars followed by the queue until stuffed. When the doors were closed many who wanted to take the joyful ride were disappointed. The cars left city hall at 2:40 and arrived in Ballard at 3:15. The long and then still wooden southern approach to the 15th Avenue bascule bridge was lined with citizens enthusiastically cheering the cars as they rolled by to the bridge’s majestic steel and concrete center where they stopped and the band stepped out to play again.
WEB EXTRAS
Jean offers an unobstructed wider view of the same location…
Now without UPS
Anything to add, Paul? Jean there are a handful of past “now-thens” that would join this one nicely. But first I must find them, and will as time allows through the week – perhaps not all.
BALLARD CELEBRATES
Both the THEN (above) and the NOW (below), respectively from 1918 and 2007, look northeast through Ballard’s irregular intersection of Market Street, Leary Way, and 22nd Ave. N.E. By 1918 the east-west thoroughfare of Market Street was taking the place of the narrower and near-by Ballard Avenue as the neighborhood’s principal commercial strip.
Above are two good reasons to celebrate in the middle of Ballard’s Market Street. First we’ll give a terse review of the older view recorded by a city photographer on the Sunday afternoon of January 27, 1918.
A crowd of mostly suited males fills the street to listen to Seattle Mayor Hiram Gill compliment them on their “emancipation” from a company that had until this day run with poor service a trolley monopoly. Accompanied by the city council and the Police Dept. Band, the Mayor rode the 25 minutes from City Hall to Ballard aboard Seattle’s own new trolley, along its new tracks and over its brand new Ballard bascule bridge.
The low platform erected in the middle of Market St. put the Mayor and his entourage in a populist position only a few feet above the crowd. Marked at its corners by American flags the platform appears very near the center of the scene. Behind the speaker of the moment, who has too much hair to be Gill, is the ornate street façade of the Majestic Theatre. Built in 1914 it has with a few name changes became a new and enlarged multiplex in 2000 and been in operation ever since.
On the far right of both views is the 1904 Carnegie Library, which the city sold in the mid-1960s to new owners who have preserved the landmark’s classical revival style.
The modern moment of Market Street’s surrender to pedestrians is, of course, from this year’s (2007) Seafood Festival, Ballard’s growing summer street fair and piscine party.
MUNICIPAL TROLLEY POSING ON THE BALLARD BRIDGE
As its destination sign indicates, car No. 108 was “special.” At 2:30 on the Sunday afternoon of January 27, 1918 “to the music of the Police Department band tooting in competition with the cheers of 200 people,” it began the fledgling Seattle Municipal Railways’ inaugural run to Ballard. The Seattle Star reported, “Four cent street car service from the heart of Seattle to Ballard! It’s a reality today, folks . . . in up-to-date cars operated by smiling crews – – – and financed by the plain people of Seattle who put up the money and bought the bonds.”
On board, besides the police band and the Star reporter, were Mayor Hi Gill, the city council, and an entourage of bureaucrats including the street department’s photographer. The parade of leading streetcar and many trailing motorcars stopped once on the 25-minute inaugural ride to Ballard, and once again on the return trip to City Hall.
Both were scheduled interruptions for the official photographer to record Seattle’s (and so also Ballard’s) new city-owned streetcar on its then brand-new Ballard Bridge. The historical scene is from the second stop – on the ride back home. Many of what the Star reporter counted as the “dozens of autos and hundreds of men and women which were waiting for the car when it [first] passed over the bridge” are still there to admire it on its return crossing. Car No.108’s motorman Dettler and its conductor Johnston pose at the front window, but neither of them is smiling. Or, it seems, is anyone else.
Moments earlier the serious political purpose of all this was explained to a crowd of over 1,000 at a celebration staged by the Ballard Booster Club on Ballard’s’ Market Street. (Again, the photo shown above.) Mayor Gill exclaimed, “This occasion marks your emancipation from the financial interests that have fought municipal ownership and operation of cars.” The City’s Corporation Council added that it was also “A warning! If utility corporations won’t live up to their obligations, the people will own and operate all utilities.”
Within the year, Seattle did acquire, at an inflated price, the rest of the city’s privately owned and mostly dilapidated trolley lines. Today, of course Metro’s common carriers are still running over Ballard’s bridge as part of a transit system which in 1984 was the first pubic bus system to receive the American Pubic Transit Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. (This last feature first appeared in The Times in 1984 – an early one.)
MUNICIPAL TRANSFORMER ON ALOHA STREET
Once again David Jeffers, man about town, has grabbed a "now" snap of this northeast corner of Dexter and Aloha - and he did it today, at "four his afternoon." (Of April 26, 2010) Dave if and when I come upon the "now" I did for this long ago I'll add it to yours, although it will show the old transformer building when it was still around and used as a warehouse, I think. After visiting the site this afternoon, David reflects, "It's quite a different neighborhood now." It is, I think. an eddy or splash sent out from Allentown nearby at the south end of Lake Union.
(ABOVE: On Aloha Street between Dexter and 8th Avenues, the nearly completed city’s transformer sub-station is readied to supply electricity to the “A Division” – Seattle’s first municipal streetcar line. – Courtesy, Lawton Gowey & the Municipal Archive)
Most likely City Architect Daniel R. Huntington designed this sub-station at the southwest corner of Lake Union for Seattle’s first municipal railroad. In many features – the concrete, the ornamental tile, the roofline, and the windows — it looks like a small variation on Huntington’s Lake Union Steam Plant at the southeast corner of the lake. The original negative is dated March 17, 1914.
The date suggests that some of the workmen making final touches to this little bastion of public works may be feeling the pressure of their lame duck mayor, George F. Gotterill. In the last week of his mayoralty this champion of public works “insisted,” the Times reported, on taking the first run on the new four-mile line that reached from downtown to Dexter Avenue (the photographer’s back is to Dexter) and beyond to Ballard at Salmon Bay. Although the double tracks had been in place since City Engineer A.H. Dimmock drove the last “golden spike” the preceding October 10, this transformer sub-station was not completed nor were the wires yet in place for Cotterill’s politic ride. “The car” a satiric Seattle Times reporter put it, “may have to be helped along by the hands and shoulders of street railway employees . . .”
Fortunately, for everyone but Cotterill and the Cincinnati company that manufactured the rolling stock, it was reported on the day after this photograph was taken that the new cars couldn’t handle the curves in the new line because their wheels were built four inches too close to the framework.
Two months later the first municipal streetcar responded to the call “Let her Go” made by trolley Superintendent A. Flannigan at 5:35 AM on the Saturday of May 23. Long-time City Councilman Oliver T. Erickson, whom Pioneer PR-man C.T. Conover described as “the apostle of municipal ownership and high priest of the Order of Electric Company Haters,” had just bought the first tickets while his wife and daughters Elsie and Francis tried to “conceal yawns.” Erickson’s earlier attempts to promote funding for a ceremonial inaugural failed. By the enthused report of the Star – then Seattle’s third daily – the first ride was a happy one. “Nobody smiled. Everybody grinned broadly. Everybody talked at once. Nobody knew what anybody else was saying and nobody cared.”
CITIZEN CAR BAR ON 3RD AVENUE WEST
The Seattle Municipal Railway’s first dedicated car barn was built in 1914 on Third Ave. W. about mid-way between the campus of Seattle Pacific College and the construction then underway of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)
Beyond water, waste and power, the progressive urge to extend citizen franchise to transportation built this temple to trolleys – or car barn — on Third Avenue W., a short ways north of Nickerson Street.
By 1914 (notice the year on the shack far left, whitewashed probably by the graduating class of Seattle Pacific College) local riders were increasingly unhappy with the Seattle Electric Company as its system of street railways slipped in both service and maintenance. On the busiest lines the Jitney alternative featured free lance and unlicensed cabbies running in front of trolleys picking off passengers with the promise of cheaper fares.
Help from the City Council began in 1911 with a successful bond issue for the purchase of the then still independent trolley service into the Rainier Valley. When this plan failed, the city used the approved funds to construct its own track out Dexter Avenue in 1912. The four-mile line turned west at Nickerson and continued to the south end of the old Ballard Bridge. In his book “The Street Railway Era in Seattle” Leslie Blanchard quotes local skeptics as dubbing it “the line that began nowhere, ran nowhere, and ended nowhere.” Probably east and north side Queen Anne residents felt otherwise.
A dozen new arch-roofed double-truck cars that featured two trolley poles distinguished the new line. (Three pose in these portals.) The double system was designed to return the electric charge to the second wire rather than through the tracks to the water and gas mains often buried beneath them. By its electrolytic action the spent charge from single-poled trolleys could increase the corrosion of pipes and so also the coulombs of lawyers.
The need for the city’s own car barn was short-lived. With the 1919 citywide take-over of the Seattle Electric Company rails and rolling stock, the larger barn and service area in nearby Fremont made this plant expendable. For most of its “afterlife” the structure was used and enlarged by the Arcweld Manufacturing Company until 1973 when Seattle Pacific University first purchased and then radically overhauled it for the 1976 dedication of the Miller Science Learning Center.
TURNER HALL
(Above)Looking east from Third Avenue on Jefferson Street ca. 1905. (Below) In 1911 Seattle Mayor George Dilling succeeded with his plans to build a City Hall Park in the place of the then recently raze “Katzenjammer Kastle,” the old city hall named so because of its resemblance to the strange constructions in the popular comic strip of that name.
When Turner Hall first opened in 1886 it was the second over-sized structure built on what for nearly a century now has been a city green: City Hall Park. The new venue for variety sat at the southwest corner of Jefferson Street and Fourth Avenue with its ornamented façade facing Jefferson. We see it left- of-center in the historical picture above.
When it appeared Turner Hall was one of a handful of sizeable Seattle stages, until the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 consumed the others. During the rebuilding of the city it’s role as one of the few surviving stages became crucial for the local “entertainment industry” which by 1889 was. In his “A History of Variety-Vaudeville in Seattle”, Eugene Clinton Elliott lists a few of the acts that reached its stage. Dr. Norris’s Educated Dog Show appeared in 1889, and the following year Professor Gentry’s Equine and Canine Paradox kept the mysterious animals coming. Minstrel shows were also regulars, like McCabe and Young’s Colored Operative Minstrels, which in 1890 appeared at the hall in “The Flower Garden”. In 1897 the hall’s manager E.B. Friend tried a combination of vaudeville and legitimate theatre, but as one local critic noted, “Attempting to run a Music Hall without beer was like running a ship without sea.”
Turner Hall was somewhat hidden behind its greater neighbor, the County Court House (1882), which faced Third Avenue at its south east corner with Jefferson. Here, far right, we see only one undistinguished back corner of the government building. After the city purchased it in 1890 for a city hall it was popularly called the “Katzenjammer Kastle” as it increasingly resembled the haphazard architecture illustrated in the then popular pulp comic the “Katzenjammer Kids.” Trying to keep up with the then booming city, incongruous wings and nooks were attached as needed.
Like its civic neighbor, the theatre was razed for the development of City Hall Park. When the city suggested a name change to Oratory Park, the press objected on the grounds that free public speech might then be restricted to soap boxes in the park.
[The above two pictures look through the same block on Jefferson – between 3rd and 4th – that is the subject of the first photographer at the top – the one showing the municipal trolley preparing to make its first run to Ballard over the new Ballard Bridge. The view below puts this same block in the perspective of a photograph taken from an upper story to the northwest. Here the Katzenjammer Kastle is shown is much of its Korny glory. Behind it is Turner Hall. Momentarily straddling Jefferson Street in front of Turner Hall is a barn-size structure moved there from the Yesler Property north of Jefferson. The King County Courthouse looms on the horizon of First Hill. Yesler Way is on the far right.]
The rich farmland of the Palouse is covered with such deep silt loam that it may be a rare day when the Palouse River does not run at least mildly muddy. The top of two Horace Sykes recordings of these falling waters may be extraordinarily rich with silt even for the state ranger who watches over Palouse Falls. The other Sykes catches a rainbow, which is common in that corner of the state with the most sun and the spray generated by the lower falls. Depending upon water levels, it is an about 180 foot drop. Wet side Washingtonians may have memorized the 270 foot drop at Snoqualmie Falls. Greater differences between these east-west cataracts are the volume of water that is suddenly and for a few second exposed and the yearly number of visitors. The official Snoqualmie Falls website claims 1.5 million – believe it or not. Jean (our Sherrard) was among the somewhat fewer visitor to the Palouse Falls in 2006. We thought to include the plummeting Palouse in our book “Washington Then and Now” but the frugal publisher dropped a few pages and so for us stopped the river. Now we expect that Jean will let it flow and post his nows to Sykes thens. He has promised. The publisher did, however, keep Snoqualmie Falls in the book, most likely calculating the number of book buyers that were in its neighborhood. [Click TWICE to Enlarge]
Untypically Horace Sykes has dated this muddy spectacle - May 15, 1950.Here Sykes returned to form - he did not date this rainbow recording of Palouse Falls.
Jean responds:
Here, Paul, is the photo we never used. You’ll note the Falls on that day was mostly covered by shadow from the surrounding hills. I believe we reckoned that it would emerge seasonally from the darkness.
Jean's wider view of Palouse Falls from 2006This just dropped to my scanner from an envelope of negatives sent to me by Ardith Stark, daughter of the photographer Elmer Doty. She explains that "He always did photography." In part because he was also a professional and had gift stores that emphasized postcards and greeting cards. Elmer Arthur Doty came out of the small town of Latah, which is south of Spokane and north of the Palouse River. He would have felt at home here looking down at a Palouse Falls that looks pristine. It is, perhaps, a time that is both dry and undisturbed in the fields of the Palouse.
We found the location of Sykes first pictograph included below with a little browsing on Google Earth. At some point in our highly speculative “Sykes Kodachrome Period” – ca. 1945-53 – Horace Sykes visited this central Utah panel, an example of what the experts call a Barrier Canyon Style of rock art. The name for this site is Buckhorn Draw. It is a tributary to the San Rafael River if you wish to go exploring for it. It will not take long. We have called the top panel “How the West Was Won” – an obvious, we hope, reference to the graffiti that marks the easier to reach lower parts of the rock art. Take some time to read the contributions. Some are dated and proudly note the homes of the scribblers. I found on line another rendering of this Sykes panel, which is included below it. There much of the defacing has been retouched in a 1996 effort at restoration – but not all of it. The remaining pattern may be in same group. Can’t say for I’ve not found it as of yet. With its rock face it is certainly a joy forever, and perhaps it is also harder to reach. [Click twice – sometimes – to Enlarge]
"How the West Was Won" - our name for this rock art in Utah's Buckhorn Draw.Another - and later - view of it found on the web. This was snapped sometime after the 1996 restoration that removed much of the graffiti. You may wish to read John Ullman's comments on this practice of retouching history. Another Sykes and perhaps from the same Buckhorn Draw panorama. (See Brian's attached comment for the correct location of the art directly above. It is near MOAB, Utah. Brian also includes two other recording of it that show how much it has been vandalized since Horace Sykes took his shot of it ca. 1950.)
Driving through or along the edge of summer storms Horace Sykes caught many rainbows ordinarily from his car window or the side of the road. Typically we do not know where any of these were recorded, only that like most of the hundreds of his surviving Kodachrome slides, they were photographed somewhere in the American West in the 1940s and early 1950s. Here the rainbow with the pine tree seems to be reaching for paradise and we might too if we could find a way across the water. The one with the highway I’d chance as somewhere in Eastern Washington. The “psychedelic” one is pushed from an underexposed slide, again we do not know where. [Click – sometimes twice – to Enlarge]
[Click TWICE to Enlarge] Horace Sykes’ visits to the southwest are mostly inscrutable to me. Aside for one trip through the national parks of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and California with the family when I was thirteen I am not familiar with it. That trip and the magazine Arizona Highways, to which my dad had a subscription are my sources. At least some of Sykes’ southwest looks like it is out of that highly saturated and sunset-prone publication. And so and again we will be most pleased if someone recognizes these unidentified Horace Sykes landscapes or asks someone whom they think may have insight. Would that Horace had penciled the name places on the cardboard of his slides, and yet that would have surely spoiled most of the hide-and-seek of it all.
THEN: A winter of 1918 inspection of some captured scales on Terrace Street. The view looks east from near 4th Avenue. (Courtesy City Municipal Archives)NOW: The bus stop at the southeast corner of 4th and Terrace. King County’s nearly new Chinook Building is upper-left. (Now photo by Jean Sherrard)
The scales spilling on the sidewalk beside City Hall are in such disarray that we can’t believe that these were very nice machines. Rather, they are captured scoundrels who did not give an honest measure and proved what the city’s investigators reported sententiously as proof that “with certain trade practices custom does not make right.”
Two sturdy officers of the city’s Weights and Measure Division stand between the exposed scales and the department’s trucks. They may have just returned from one of the city’s open public markets where, the division’s annual report for 1917 explains, “the largest number of transactions in food stuffs occur.” The division was then also doing “war work” helping the Federal Food Administration search for “food hoarders.”
This view is dated January 1918. It looks east on Terrace Street towards what is ordinarily still called First Hill, although there have been other names for it as well including Yesler’s Hill, Pill Hill (somewhat later than 1918) and Profanity Hill. This last came from expressions heard especially on the southern slope of the hill. But the name also derived from what is just out of frame to the right and, if we could see it, looming high on the horizon, the old and long since destroyed King County Courthouse.
Litigants and lawyers could reach the grotesquely domed courthouse by either the James Street or Yesler Way cable cars or they could swear while climbing the long and steep Terrace Street stairway seen here ascending the hill upper-right from 5th Avenue east to beyond 7th Avenue. The lower block was a planked path for the most part, and the top half a steep and wide stairway.
Just left of the stairway stands the curiously named Pleasanton Hotel. It is set back a ways from the northeast corner of Terrace and Sixth, and now in the path of 1-5. To its left and also topping the horizon is the domed roofline of the Seattle-Tacoma Power Company at 7th & Jefferson. The frame building below it, nearby at the northwest corner of 5th and Terrace, is the ambitiously named Royal Hotel. A small part of the Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church’s steeple peeks out upper left.
Jean’s note: This weekend, I’m off in Portland narrating a show. I didn’t quite have time enough to put up the color version of this week’s now, but will when I return. Anything to add, Paul?
Yes Jean. First regarding you and your narration this evening of Chopin’s “Letters to Konstantja” to the accompaniment of his music with dance by the Agnieszka Laska Dancers on the stage of the World Trade Center Auditorium in Portland, “break a leg” while climbing it – or rather don’t, for you have been a bit accident prone lately, losing your pens and such. Here below is another weighted and found wanting picture from Lawton Gowey. It comes probably by way of the old Public Works Department and eventually will be returned to what is now the Municipal Archive. It is, I believe, another storeroom of transgressing scales, (STS). Some of those scattered on the sidewalk above may be here in this room two years later. As you know the original 8×10 inch negative to this image has great clarity and so on your instruction I searched it in detail with magnification but I found no thumbs. [Click to enlarge and search]
And in sympathy with the spatial relations seen in the storeroom above, a kind of mingling of boxes and balls, I have printed below something I created yesterday – by coincidence. I like many others who once used dark rooms for developing and printing, had a practice of exposing strips of photo paper to a negative before exposing an entire sheet of the expensive stuff to a full projection. While cleaning up a corner of my basement I came upon a box stuffed with these developed test strips, and I knew exactly what to do with the contents – scan them. I had kept them for possible use in collage but now with digital ease I have used them for this montage. The circles that appear on all the strips were made from an opaque ring that rested on each strip while it was being exposed in order to hide the paper the ring covered and so see an undeveloped white area when the strip was placed in the developer for slowly revealing the image and testing the exposure. Here I have made six different montages from these strips. I then joined them and then flip-flopped them four times to make this mandala-like montage. The original negatives all have something to do with Alki Beach history and not weights and measures. They have come, I think, from an exhibit I produced for SPUDS fish and chips years ago. The exhibit is a permanent one and on the large size too. [Click to Enlarge and explore the details for historical Alki locations. Or go have some fish and chips at SPUDS and study the exhibit.]
West Seattle Alki Beach Ca. 1910 Fragments Perhaps as a Buddhist "Well-Packed Region."
This place and point-of-view can be found with a dedicated search of Utah’s Zion National Park on Google Earth. The clue is that it was photographed from a highway bridge, but a highway that was, no doubt, much less “improved” in the 1940s when Horace Sykes made this recording than now. For this example of Syke's knack for the picturesque you must CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
Berangere sends us photos from this beautiful spring day along the Seine.
She writes:
Today was a marvelous day!
I had planned to fly to Nice because the trains are still on strike, but the Icelandic volcano erupted two days ago and since then a cloud of volcanic ashes paralyzes all the European air traffic .
Every flight was canceled. So it a free day of April in Paris !
(please click to enlarge images)
In the mood to smell flowers...In the mood to knit...In the mood to drink : Quai des Orfèvres In the mood for love
For some time now, Berangere, our Paris correspondent and the Lomont portion of DorpatSherrardLomont, has been photographing the interior of the great domes of Paris – the coupoles – masterpieces of French art and design.
We will share some of them here, beginning with the coupole of the Hôtel des Invalides.
BB writes:
Founded under Louis XIV , to accommodate the old soldiers of the King’s army, this Hôtel became very quickly a symbol of monarchical power, later to become a mausoleum with Napoleon’s tomb. After three centuries, the Hotel remains a military place (wounded soldiers still recover here) and many visitors visit this historical place…
The Coupole des Invalides
This coupole, painted by Charles de la Fosse (199.5 cms ) is dedicated to Saint Louis, kneeling and offering his sword in front of Christ in glory (a very good strategy for celebrating monarchy and religion together).
The coupole is not very well photographed because Napoleon’s tomb (lined with 7 coffins inside) is standing in the middle, so I asked if they were cleaning the tomb, and proposed to photograph from the ladder.
Even more familiar than yesterday’s Steptoe Butte, today’s Crater Lake is an exception to the Sykes “rule” of unidentified subjects. Of course, all of his landscapes are familiar to someone and this is one of the anticipated or hoped-for pleasures of showing them, that persons will come forward and locate the ones for which we are nearly clueless. This Crater Lake subject is also unique for Sykes in that it includes people. Most of his landscapes are without them. We would not mind it if someone could also name names for these few tourists. Their tableau is so perfect that we might wonder if they have been posed – but probably not. [Click to Enlarge]
A scene at Crater Lake, Oregon. By Horace Sykes ca. 1946.
Two of these Sykes’ Steptoes were taken from the top of the Butte, where the road that winds about the Butte reaches it. Horace Sykes visited Steptoe several times. Getting to the top was easier after the coiling road was completed in 1946 – if memory serves. Before that it was switchbacks all the way. In our book Washington Then and Now Jean and I include one of these Sykes shots from the top and also describe the part Cashup Davis played both below Steptoe were he and his large family serviced stage coaches and on top where he built a Hotel. It was a Quixotic labor for all water had to be carted to the top and there were not a lot of tourists in the Palouse in the 1890s. The shaped stones that show in both views from the top are remnants of the hotel’s foundation. It was also in the late 1940s that my dad drove me up that road. I was so thrilled that I still own a childish (or childlike) enthusiasm for Steptoe Butte. [Click the images to enlarge them.]
Foundation stones for Cashup Davis' hotel survive at the top of Steptoe Butte and here directly above the finder of Horace Sykes car. All these Skykes slides came my way through an old friend by now long passed away, Lawton Gowey.
The barn of this ruined farm seems to have held up so well that we might imagine restoring the grand old home – except that this is another unidentified Sykes view from the 1940s. But where? Such architecture in such a setting must be remembered by someone. [To enlarge click and then click again, if you like.]
In the Palouse, the Okanagon, the green fields of Idaho, the wheat fields of Oregon? Sykes kept it a secret.
We know that these are the wheat fields of the Palouse and that Steptoe Butte, its topographical oddity, rises above it all on the distant horizon. But what horizon? Given the profile of the Butte, and the helpful guide of Google Earth, we think it most likely that Horace Sykes took this surreal view of it from the east – in the direction of Idaho, or rather away from Idaho with that state behind his back. From the evidence of his collection Sykes visited the Palouse often and drove to the top of the Butte at least three times. We shall follow him there with an upcoming “Daily Sykes” but not tomorrow, not yet. [Click to enlarge and then click again.]
Under Berangere’s instruction I have been taking my daily French lessons on the chance that I might some day go ex-patriot. A late life in the French provinces is appealing, but also life in Paris for an old man might be exciting. So I study my French. Soon after we began these lessons both Jean – who is far ahead of me in this business of learning French – and Berangere encouraged me to post these lessons every day. I am not sure why, but I liked their recognition. They have either given up on that or thought the worse for it and I’ve not heard a thing from either of them about publishing these daily lessons on this blog for some time. Among the handicaps of growing old are losing one’s powers and loneliness. In partial relief from both I’ll now introduce today’s French Lesson in hopes that either Jean or Berangere will bring the matter up again, or that any of you will find it helpful and make some comment that is kind and encouraging. Today’s French Lesson includes some prudent advise for anyone considering the ball and chain. And it is illustrated to make the point better.
FRENCH LESSON for APRIL 13, 2010 (The French lesson is followed by its English translation. The point is, in part, that I get the translation correct. How have I done?)
Le caméraman-councelor: une tradition française. “Le mariage n’est pas quelque chose à prendre à la légère. Pour le moment, de prendre une pause dans la cérémonie. Pensez-y.”
The cameraperson-counselor: a French tradition. “Marriage is not something to enter into lightly. For the moment take a pause in the ceremony. Think about it.”
Like our first “Daily Sykes” from yesterday, this our second offering may be a scene along the lower Yakima River. We don’t know. When Horace Sykes arrived in Seattle in the late 1920s to his new job as a fire insurance adjuster he was already an accomplished and published photographer with a knack for experiment and a genius for the picturesque. A quarter-century ago I was given a large collection of his Kodachrome slides. They are landscapes from the 1940s for the most part, but with many orchids mixed in. Except for family photos people rarely appear as subjects. As Jean introduced yesterday, it is always a surprise to find any identification written on the cardboard of Sykes’ slides. Consequently, we ask again – and will every day – that if you have some understanding or even hunch for where Horace Sykes recorded a “daily Sykes” – this time a riverscape – please share it. And if you are near it, please repeat it with your own camera and share that with us all as well.
THEN: This Denny Regrade subject looks northwest across Blanchard Street towards Second Avenue in 1911. Posing for the unnamed photographer are both the “caste” in the float and some residents in windows of the Blanchard Apt. across the street. (Pix courtesy of Michael Maslan Vintage Posters, Photographs, Postcards & Ephemera.)NOW: For the “now” repeat Jean Sherrard had to step into Blanchard Street to get around parked trucks. (Jean Sherrard)
More than a quarter-century ago I copied this week’s parade scene from an album of 1911 Golden Potlatch subjects generously loaned to me by collector/dealer and friend Michael Maslan. The intended subject is quite peculiar – a sort of float with four bushes pruned like small trees decorating the corners, a comfortable ensemble of half-costumed characters, two teamsters, two teams and two signs.
The larger sign shows real wit. It reads, “Everett the Most Prosperous City in the Northwest” and then sites Seattle as if it were a suburb “33 miles south of Everett.” The sign draped to the horse reads “Washington State Reunion Everett, Aug. 20 & 21 Big Time.” It is, however, unclear even to the admired Northwest History Room of the Everett Public Library what parts of Washington were reunited in Everett that august of 1911. A review of the dozens of floats pictured in Maslan’s album reveals that this one is easily the most minimal, perhaps an intended contrast to its own boast of “big time.”
Most readers probably know that the setting here is part of the Denny Regrade, and not so long after it was scraped from Denny Hill. This block on Blanchard between Third Avenue (off-frame to the right) and 2nd Avenue (on the left) was one of the steepest on the hill and negotiated by steps only. Before the carving began the block climbed west to east 58 feet from 170feet (at 2nd) to 228 feet (at 3rd) above sea level. After the grading it climbed gently in the opposite direct, from east to west, and at a much lower elevation throughout. These regrade changes were made by blasting the hill with jets of eroding water.
Of the several hundred structures on the hill few were saved. However, the Blanchard Apartments shown here was one of two big buildings that were carefully lowered with the hill. A cheap three-story tenement (with three tubs and four toilets for 21 one-room apartments) it was lowered to a new brick first floor with two storefronts. Built in 1900 – only five years before it’s descension – it kept wearing out until it was razed in March of 1972. “Run down inside and out” is how the surviving tax card describes it.
JEAN we have a few additions. [Click to Enlarge – sometimes twice]
This photograph is close to my heart and habits for the last 28 years. About 1980 I wrote a feature in the old Seattle Sun about how exciting it was for me to discover that this was part of the old Denny Hill neighborhood. It looks south on Second through the intersection with Bell Street. That artical and my pleading - and Erik Lacitis' advocacy - got me into or onto Pacific for the weekly now-then feature that is now in its 28th year. The next attachment shows this view again as printed in Seattle Now and Then Volume One, 1984, along with another essay - one for Pacific. A small section of the Blanchard Apartments can be seen below the top-left corner and left of the power pole. Below that are the gabled apartments that still hold to that southeast corner of Bell and 2nd. It is best to click to enlarge the next attachment in order to read its text. (Photo Courtesy, Old Seattle Paperworks)
In the book Seattle Now and Then Volume One (1984) the above appears on two pages, side-by-side. Here I have stacked the pages to better your chances of reading the text from about 1983. Ron Edge (of our Edge Clippings) has recently scanned all the features included in Seattle Now and Then Vol. 1, so the entire book will soon be up on this site.”]The Blanchard Apartments are still in place, upper-left, although the Second Avenue Regrade (an early part of the Denny Hill Regrade) has been completed - between 1903 and 1906. In the distance are both the white Moore Theatre at Virginia and the New Washington Hotel at Stewart. The original photograph was recorded by the Webster Stevens studio and is used here courtesy of MOHAI.Here the Second Avenue regrade is still underway, and the old Washington Hotel (first named the Denny Hotel) is still in place on top of the southern summit of Denny Hill where it would have straddled Third Avenue - could Third have climbed the hill. The south facade of the Blanchard Apartments are apparent on the far left - in the sunlight. (Not the structure that is the farthest to the left. That one is on the west side of Second and closer to the photographer.) The structure bottom-left appears frequently in our recent posting (last week actually) showing Second Avenue south from Pine Street. This view was taken from Pike and Second.In this section of a 1908 panorama taken from Duwamish Head both the Moore Theatre and the New Washington Hotel are in place as the front "hump" of Denny Hill has been removed. On the left, however, we can make out the west facade of the Blanchard Apartments clinging above the cliff at Second and Blanchard. We can also detect some of the scaffolding for the Lenora Street flume that carried mud from the regrade out into the bay. A new flume was built off of Bell Street for the second and larger regrade south of Virginia Streeet. This year that razing of the hill's southern hump and so also the lowering of the Blanchard Apartments began. In the distant horizon is the Volunteer standpipe with its exterior brick facade in application (if I am reading it right). The complete panorama from which this section has been lifted appears on our web-page dedicated to some of the pages from our book Washington Then and Now. Google it. There are also pans from 1907, 1910 and 2006 for comparison. The regrading is underway south of Virginia Street - eroding the northern summit with water canons. I have embraced the opinion that this view was taken from the Blanchard Apartments before they were lowered. I have, however, not attempted to prove it. The old Broadway High School is evident on the horizon left of center. So the view looks east. This was photographed by the prolific postcard producer Frasch. This also has a chance (for future confirmation or rejection) of being photographed from the Blanchard Apartments. It is an earlier recording than that shown directly above. The Wesbster and Stevens studio's own caption that it is "3rd Ave. Looking South from Battery" is twice wrong. This is Second Avenue on the right. As noted here the grade change on Second Avenue at Bell Street before and after the regrade on Second amounted to very few feet. Battery is one block north of Bell. This, if I am correct about the Blanchard Apt. prospect, is one block south of Bell. On the right the top floors of the New Washington Hotel (with the flag) reach above the old grade. Lowering the Blanchard Apartments. I have temporarily lost a negative of the Blanchard resting on top of its "spike," the name for the mounds that were left temporarily by the regraders as their canons ordinarily attacked the hill from its streets. I'll put it up when I find it.This view and the one below it look from some surviving structure on the west side of Second Avenue to the northeast and so cut diagonally across both Second Avenue and Blanchard Street. Notice that the Blanchard Apartments are hear identified as the Cicero Apartments by the sign on the west facade just above the building's new concrete and brick foundation. The horizon includes much of the new (1909) Ballard High School on the left, and Denny School (1884), the tower above the Blanchard Apartments and left of the surviving spike. The big residence - probably a boarding house - just south (right) of the spike was skidded there from a location about one block to the east. Sacred Heart Parish is on the right horizon. Both Denny School and Sacred Heart survived there until the regrade picked up again in 1928 at the cliff it left to stand for 18 years along the east side of 5th Avenue. After the regrading reached it in 1911 they temporarily stopped. The work began again in 1928 they used steam shovels and conveyor belts - not water cannons and flumes. There are many small differences between this view and the one above it, which was taken from the same upper story window of a structure on the west side of Second Avenue and south of Blanchard Street. There is also one big difference. A subtraction. Can you find it?This view looking north from the Seaboard Bldg at the northeast corner of 4th and Pike offers a clue for answering the challenge given at the end of the caption for the view directly above. The multi-story Calhoun Hotel at the northeast corner of Virginia and 2nd (across Virginia from the Moore Theatre) is on the left. That is not the clue. Far right the regraders are giving shape to the cliff on the east side of 5th Avenue. The extended work of Denny School, with both its west and east wings in tact, shows at Fifth and Battery. And that is the clue - or give-away. Of course, the Blanchard Apartments also appear in this scene, left of center. One block of Third between Stewart and Virginia has been freshly paved. Sometime in the 1920s and with a narrow lens this view looking north on Third was recorded most likely from an upper story of the Securities Bldg at 3rd and Stewart. The large gabled boarding house right of center, at the northwest corner of 4th and Blanchard, appeared above in a circa 1910 scene resting in front of a "spike" or mound. The spike is gone here, but a remnant of the hill - a small spike survives here. It appears behind the Blanchard Apartments on the left. (Thanks to Ron Edge for producing these images.)
We here at DorpatSherrardLomont are pleased to announce the first installment of our newest feature ‘Our Daily Sykes’.
Photographer Horace Sykes (a member of the Seattle Photography Club) wandered the northwest for decades seeking the picturesque and the profound, snapping shots of flowers, snowstorms, mountains, valleys, and plains. Paul has a large collection of these marvels and has used a number of them in Seattle Now & Then – and several in his and Jean’s recent book Washington Then and Now. Sykes’ keen eye captured visual treasures during the 40s and 50s, but most of his photos are without annotation, which often leaves us guessing at location.
Hence, we propose a kind of collaboration with our readers. We will, as the title suggests, offer a daily Sykes photo; some will be well-known locations, others obscure or unfamiliar. If you know where a photo was taken, please let us know; and if the urge takes you, perhaps even attempt your own repeat.
Above is Jean’s beloved Yakima River Valley. There you can see Mt. Adams off in the distance and even through the summer haze some of Mt. Rainier on the far right horizon. But where this is in the valley, and how close to Sunnyside, Jean’s frequent destination, we do not know. We would ask any reader who does know and can identify the location of the bluff on the left to step forward.
THEN: Looking south from Pine Street down the wide Second Avenue in 1911, then Seattle’s growing retail strip and parade promenade. (courtesy of Jim Westall)
NOW: Very little survives in the near-century between the “then and now.” The Columbia Building, second from left, is still standing. The parking lot, far left, took the place of the Wilson Modern Business College Building in 1956. The tiled Venetian Renaissance-style Doyle Building, far right, replaced the Elk Hotel in 1919. Jean Sherrard took his repeat through a window of what is now the Nordstrom Rack.
This is the fourth “snapshot” we have plucked from an album of Seattle subjects recorded by Philip Hughett between 1909 and 1911. (Following this “now-then” will join to it a few more snaps of the neighborhood recorded by that pastor-salesman.)
In the 1911 Polk directory Hughett is listed as a salesman for Standard Furniture, which is wonderfully apt for this week’s subject. It looks south on Second Avenue from inside the Standard Furniture building on the corner with Pine Street.
Perhaps, Hughett took a snapshot break from selling sofas. And the most likely date is also 1911.
Although too small to read in this printing, the banner running across Second Avenue just beyond Pike Street — one block south of the photographer — reads “Golden Potlatch.” Between 1911 and 1913 the Golden Potlatch Days were Seattle’s first try at holding a multiday annual summer festival.
The amateur photographer was probably selling furniture here in 1910 as well, because Hughett was using the then-3-year-old Standard Furniture building for a high-rise prospect to record the big changes under way in Seattle’s new retail district and the nearby Denny Regrade. As late as 1903 this block on Second was considerably higher at Pine than at Pike. So everything here is nearly new, except the ornate frame building seen in part on the far right.
This view looks north on Second Ave. from Pike Street and shows the same ornate hotel at the southwest corner of 2nd and Pine. Beyond it 2nd Avenue still climbs Denny Hill, but not for long. By 1906 the present grade of 2nd was establsihed between Pike and Battery Streets and that hotel was lowered too. (Photo by Lewis Whittelsey, courtesy of Lawton Gowey)Looking down fm Denny Hill to Second Avenue and over a roughed-up Pine Street, Again, the Elk hotel is supported on their southwest corner. The depth of the cut on Pine Street is easily examined, right of center, with the mid-block scar between the Elk Bldg and the new Gateway Hotel (now The Gatewood) on the southeast corner of First and Pine, far right. Far left is the Eitel Bldg under construction at the northwest corner of 2n and Pike (1904-06). Likely date for this is 1905.
The Elk Hotel, its name in the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, was built before the regrade and had to be lowered two stories because of it.
In 1911 all of Seattle’s principal department stores, Frederick & Nelson, Stone-Fisher, The Bon Marche, London’s and MacDougall & Southwick were on Second Avenue north of Madison Street. It is a good indication of how commerce had moved north from “old town” around Pioneer Place during Seattle’s blusterous boom years.
Here follows – and so soon – several more photographs recorded by Hughett, perhaps all of them while he was in the employ of Standard Furniture at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street. We will try to exercise some restraint with the captions, rather than thumbnail every landmark included in Hughett’s recordings. All of these – unless otherwise noted – are used courtesy of Jim Westall. They were copied from a family album of prints, which Jim shared with us.
From nearly the same window, looking south on Second Avenue from its northwest corner with Pine Street and from an upper floor at Standard Furniture. Hughett's caption, that this is a scene of parading Odd Fellows for their day during the Seattle's summer-long Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYPE), suggests that the photographer was also selling couches here in 1909, the year of the AYP Expo. Although not taken from the same window as the view just shared above, this one is also most likely of the same AYPE parade for the Odd Fellows. Note that most of the awnings shading the building on the east side of Second Avenue - the block showing - hold their position between the two photographs. Most - not all.
Next we will leave Standard Furniture and go south on Second Avenue two blocks for more excitement.
Philip Hughett has shared the date for this look north on Second from University Street. This is July 4, 1910. A few of the buildings survive for this centennial repeat but not so many of the fashions. In 1910 it was still likely that a parade - like this one - would include lines of horse-drawn wagons carrying not VIPS - they would have by then taken to motorcars - but the regulars, those who pay their bank fees, shop for bargains and in a decent lifetime might get to ride in a parade. The banner strung across Second promotes the Sons of Norway's Grand Picnic. Just beyond and to the right of the banner is the Seattle Times building then still at the northeast corner of Second and Union. The paper's name is signed on the roof. On the same afternoon as the Independence Day parade a crowd gathered on Union Street - clogged it - beside The Times building to follow the wire reports on the James J.Jeffries vs. Jack Johnson "fight of the century" in Reno. Jeffries, a former world champion, came out of retirement, he said, "to demonstrate that the white man is king of them all." Rather than be knocked out by Johnson, Jeffries withdrew in the 15th round and Johnson held on as top heavyweight. The ambitions of the "great white hope" had flopped. By the following morning across these United States of America 25 blacks and 3 whites had died because of the riots that followed Jeffries' loss.
Next Philip Hughett returns to Standard Furniture and takes us to its roof for looks south, southeast, east, and north – witnesses to the condition of the Central Business District and the Denny Regrade a century ago.
The look south. Built quickly in 1911, the 18-story Hoge building at Second and Cherry is not evident. The nearly new Federal Post Office, on the left at the southeast corner of Third and Union, is. A look southeast to the First Hill horizon from the roof of Standard Furniture at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street. St. James Cathedral (1907) still has its dome and would keep it until 1916 when the Big (and wet) Snow of that year collapsed it to the floor of the sanctuary. The King County Courthouse and Jail, on the right horizon, lasted 40 years (from the time it was built) and handled a few hangings below its dome. Finally it too was judged and dropped - by dynamite - in 1931. Not so long ago we printed a cropped version of this for another now-then feature - one describing the fate of Seattle Electric's trolley car barns at 5th and Pine. The view looks east on Pine. The outline of the nearly new Volunteer standpipe appears on the left horizon. The car barns appear left of center behind the Westlake Market sign.The look north past the new New Washington Hotel, on the right, and over the Moore Theatre to a degraded (photographcially) Queen Anne Hill. In between work continues on the Denny Regrade. Sacred Heart Catholic Church appears lust left of the tall Hotel Washington Sign. It held to its campus at 6th and Blanchard until the Denny Regrade was revived in 1929 and that intersection and many others east of 5th Avenue (where this regrade stopped in 1911) and north of Denny Way were graded to new lower elevations. The church then moved to its present location contiguous to Seattle Center. Here the cliff that drops from the church to the east side of 5th Avenue was a Denny Regerade feature for nearly 20 years. One of the regrade's hydraulic cannons at work can be seen left-of-center near the intersection of 3rd and Bell. The New Washington Hotel at the northeast corner of Second and Stewart as seen from the northwest corner of Standard Furniture's roof. (The Hotel survives as the Josephinum Apartments.)No longer on the roof but still from an open window at Standard, Hughett gives a good recording of the new Haight Building at the southeast corner of Second and Pine. If the curious reader returns to the second photograph included in this sequence (not counting those in the repeated story above them) they will see the building site for the Haight, next door to the Wilson Business College. A likely year for this view is 1911. This concludes the Philip Hughett extras. A Webster and Stevens Studio (they did most of the Seattle Times early editorial photography) shot of Standard Furniture, its effect extended in the elegance of its new retail neighborhood. The view, of course, looks north on 2nd over its intersection with Pine Street.
Here's a rough look into the construction pit for Standard Furniture. Note that the Second Avenue regrade on the right is getting its polish. The old Washington Hotel (first named the Denny Hotel) atop the front or south summit of Denny Hill still stands, but not for long. It was destroyed in 1906 and by 1908 the south summit was removed and the New Washington Hotel and Moore Theatre filled the east side of Second between Steward and Virginia Streets.Seattle Day at AYP and at Standard Furntiure in 1909. (Courtesy MOHAI)After more than one make-over it is still the same building. But Jean! I can no longer remember - after five years - if you or I took this "now." Please advise.
Here we see – above – what The Seattle Times for Sept. 5, 1909 headlined the “Unique and Attractive ‘Seattle Day’ Decoration of Standard Furniture Company’s Store.” Follows the Times reporter’s often thrilled description of “the most unique and attractive store decoration ever seen in Seattle.” We quote.
“The idea typifies the ‘Spirit of Seattle’ with a full life-sized figure of Chief Seattle in his ‘glory paint and trappings’ in the foreground surrounded by a forest of real evergreen trees, his Indian tepee . . . and tripod from which actual red fire is produced.” Behind this “real Indian camp” is a “scenic background of Mount Rainier, over which appears to be the real rays of the shimmering moon. The entire effect is spectacular and realistic . . . Surrounding the immense glass canopy over the store’s entrance are eight large cast ivory figures representing ‘Seattle’ with outstretched arms, from which a magnificent series of hundreds of colored electric lights and floral festooning is hung.”
The following day, Sept 6, was “Seattle Day” at the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition (AYP) on the University of Washington campus. Above the front door of this furniture emporium is hung the slogan of the day, “We’ll be There!”
The Schoenfelds were often “there” for Seattle celebrations. During a long career of sales at Second and Pine they used the front door and Second Avenue side of their skyscraper for many dazzling effects. For instance, after “Seattle Day” the chief was replaced with what the Times reported on Oct. 3, as “an immense oil painting of President Taft (for his visit to AYP) surrounded with hundred of yards of national colored bunting mounted with an immense gold eagle and a large electric flag which when lighted gave a brilliant ‘wave effect’.”
Then and now Captions Together: Raised up in 1905-07 while Denny Hill was being cut down behind it the Schoenfeld’s family new company furniture store was a fine example of what architectural historian Rev. Dennis Andersen – minister to both landmarks and souls — describes as architect Augustus Warren Gould’s, “restrained sense of ornament, favoring instead to accent the splendor of site arrangement and visibility of the structure.” Much later the building was stripped of what ornament it had – including its terra-cotta tiling – in what must have been another of those fleeting anxieties about what is in or out of style.
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