(click photos to enlarge)

By the summer of 1943 it became clear that German chances for a 1,000-year reign were dismal. Increasingly, war news encouraged thoughts of what might follow an Allied victory. For its part, the Greyhound Bus Lines began making plans for a postwar Helicopter Bus Line that would use the roofs of company bus terminals to also land helicopters. In Seattle it was soon after the war that Greyhound started paying the tax fees for the Central Terminal at Eighth Avenue and Stewart Street — with its big roof.

Those who have sometimes traveled cheap into the hinterlands associate the city’s central bus terminal with Greyhound — the buses, not the ‘copters that never flew. I answered the Greyhound call here to board for Spokane or Portland or most often Bellingham many times from the late 1950s into the early ’80s.

When this station opened in 1928, it was home for a new fleet of buzzing buses, and the Puget Sound Traction Light & Power company’s Seattle-Everett interurban rail line as well. The new, brick-clad, three-story station with a tiled roof was, in part, the company’s expression of confidence in the future of its interurban. For 11 years more, this was a bus-rail depot, and a glimpse can be had of an Everett Interurban car on the far right of this depot scene. They stopped running in 1939.

The Central Terminal got a remodel in 1947 (for Greyhound) and another in 1962, probably to complement the “forward look” of that year’s Century 21 world’s fair. Most of the textured bricks were hidden beneath a smooth, tiled surface, and more space was given to gaudy signs, increasingly plastic ones.

BLOG EXTRAS

I snapped a couple of shots in and around the terminal, Paul, but time has not been kind to this place. Bus stations, train stations, airports – in their ideal forms they should represent arrival and departure, joy and sorrow in equal measure.  The interior here looks more like an enormous rest room, a constipated limbo of shit-brown floor tiles, fluorescent lights, and barbed wire benches.  Here’s the photo:

Tell me it wasn’t always so, Paul.  Are there gorgeous coves and domes hidden behind those ceiling panels?  Terra cotta gargoyles and cupids lurking above?  Or was it always thus?   Jean lets imagine a high center waiting room ringed with murals on the history of wheeled transportation on all four walls with wonderfully cut windows shaping the ceiling to shed light on them.  The top two floors in this fancy would feature a mix of offices and arts-crafts retailers and teachers with windows to the streets and balconies to the terminal waiting room.  The pipe-in music would play traveling songs by Woody Guthrie and Schubert.  But it was not so.  The last time I used the terminal it had, I think, brightly colored plastic bucket seats.  They were not designed for sleeping like the long wooded pews in the railroad depot.  There was a sign on the wall, I remember, that advised, “Persons waiting for buses will kindly limit their reading to True Crime.”  That said Jean, I still think your were a little hard on the floor.

What follows are a few wheel-related subjects – local ones for the most part.  First a look at another intersection that had a busy time once with transportation – the Seattle terminal for its interurban to Tacoma.

In the scene above that is an early look at a Yesler Cable Railway Car and not a Seattle-Tacoma Interurban car.

NOW-THEN CAPTIONS TOGETHER: After the Seattle National Bank Building at the southeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way became the depot for the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban railway in 1903 it became popularly known as the Interurban Building. It is the name that is now preferred, although it has also been called both the Pacific block and the Smith Tower Annex.

THE SCARLET CORNER

Not yet 30 the English-born architect John Parkinson moved to Seattle with fateful good timing. He arrived in January 1889, a little less than a half-year before the business district was kindling for the “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889. In the post-fire reconstruction Parkinson’s talent for design was soon patronized and his surviving Seattle National Bank Building displays, to quote the modern expert Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, “a remarkable level of coherence and repose in contrast to the agitated work of so many of his contemporaries.”

The most striking feature of this Romanesque landmark is either the Lyon over the bank’s corner front door or the building’s color: a coherent red from sidewalk to cornice. At its base Parkinson used red sandstone shipped from Colorado rather than the commonplace gray stone quarried in the Northwest and used by most of the bank’s neighbors.

While Ochsner has the bank completed in 1892, that might have been the year for finishing touches. This view may date from the spring of 1891 when the Pioneer Place (Square) neighborhood was decorated with fir trees – like those on the right — for the May 6 visit of Benjamin Harrison. (The President rode a Yesler Way Cable Car – like Car #13 on the left – out to Leschi, boarded the lake steamer “Kirkland” to Madison Park, and returned to town on the Madison Cable Railway.)

In this view a book and stationary store, Union Hardware, and the Wilcox Grocery all face Occidental Ave. The Queen City Business College is on the second floor, while the Washington Temperance Magazine, and several lawyers have offices upstairs.

After a stint as the first official architect for Seattle schools, Parkinson left for Los Angeles where he had more than considerable success. Through his L.A. career the young architect grew old and counted both the city’s famed coliseum and city hall among his accomplishments.

THE SEATTLE-TACOMA INTERURBAN

Inside the first class interurban 58 pillowed seats comforted riders who paid an extra quarter over the regular 60-cent fair. Although these parlor cars were the same dark green color as the rest of the Puget Sound Electric Railway’s rolling stock, they were obviously something special, complete with an enclosed view from the observation deck.

Using its corporate initials, the PSEF advertised a ride resplendent with “Pleasure, Safety, Economy and Reliability.” The electrically propelled trip was free of cinders and smoke, smooth and fast.  The trip included the thrill of “going like sixty.”

When the Interurban started service in 1902, the automobile was still a sporting novelty for the well-to-do. The practical and preferred way of getting to and from Tacoma was via the Mosquito Fleet steamers that buzzed about Puget Sound. The second choice was via rail. Heading either south or north, Interurban passengers could glimpse the mountain Tacoma passengers called “Tacoma” and Seattle riders called “Rainier.” The route passed, through hop fields, dairy farms, truck gardens, coal fields, orchards, forests, one tunnel and an Indian reservation. It took an hour and 40 minutes to cover the line’s 32.2 miles. Some stops like Burts, Fioraville and Mortimer are now as defunct as the rail itself. Others like Georgetown, Allentown, Renton, Kent and Auburn are still familiar.

Within the city limits the Interurban ran over municipal rails and attached its trolley poles to electric lines overhead. But as soon as it crossed the city limits, a motorman would lower his pole and hook up with the mysterious third rail, or contact rail, that ran parallel to the other two. This third rail was alive with electricity. School children were regularly warned not to touch it. Chickens, however, were sometimes encouraged to peck at grain strategically sprinkled along its side. Interurban electrocution was a new way of preparing a fowl for plucking.

The Interurban hit its heyday in 1919 when more than 3 million passengers used the line. But within nine years the line’s haul dropped to less than a million. By 1917 Highway 99 was passable and the Model-T was commonplace. Service along the third rail was threatened.

At 11:30 Sunday evening on Dec. 30, 1928, the last Interurban cars pulled out from Tacoma and Seattle. The Tacoma bound car left from the intersection of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way (shown above), for 26 years the location of the Interurban Depot.

JEFFERSON STREET CAR BARNS

Then and Now Captions together:  What is now the southeast corner of Seattle University – it’s Championship Field – was for many years a transportation center for the south end where first the Seattle Electric Company’s street trolleys were sheltered and later the Seattle Transit System’s trackless trolleys.  Both views look northwest from 14^th Avenue and E. Jefferson Street.   Historical photo courtesy Warren Wing

The TRACKLESS FLEET

Around noon on the 15^th of December 1940 when the winter sun cast long shadows over the Seattle Transit System’s new fleet of trackless trolleys the by then veteran commercial photographer Frank Jacobs took this and a second view of the Jefferson Street car barn and its new residents.   Here Jacob looks northwest from the corner of 14^th Avenue and Jefferson Street.  (The second view looks northeast over the fleet from 13^th Avenue.)

By a rough count – using the second photograph to look around the far corner of the barn – there are 114 carriers parked here outside for this fleet portrait.  That is about half of the 235 Westinghouse trackless trolleys that were purchased by the city with a loan from the federal government.  The first of them were delivered earlier in March of 1940, and only three years after Seattle voters by a large majority rejected them in favor of keeping the municipal railway’s old orange streetcars.   But the transportation milieu of the late 1930s was even more volatile than it is now and the forces of both rubber and internal combustion  – for the city also purchased a fleet of buses – won over rails and even sacrificed the cherished but impoverished cable cars.

When the Jefferson Car Barn was constructed in 1910 it was the last of the sprawling new garages built for the trolleys in the first and booming years of the 20^th Century.  The Seattle Electric Company also built barns in Fremont, lower Queen Anne, and Georgetown to augment its crowded facility at 6^th and Pine.  The Georgetown plant was also the company’s garage for repairing trolleys and, when it came time in 1940-41, also for scrapping them.

The finality of that conversion from tracks to rubber is written here in the yard of the car barn with black on black.  Fresh asphalt has erased the once intricate tracery of the yard’s many shining rails.

WAITING FOR THE INTERURBAN

(This one is about six years old, so don’t try to take the tour described below.)

This week’s historical scene, a 1923 tableau of municipal workers refurbishing a portion of the “grand union” of trolley tracks at 34th Street and Fremont Avenue, allows us to reflect on the histories of both transportation and art in Fremont, the playful neighborhood that signs itself “The Center of the Universe.”

First the transportation.  When a sawmill was built at the outflow of Lake Union in 1888 it was already possible to conveniently get to the new mill town from downtown Seattle aboard the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, which was laid along the north shore of the lake in 1887.  After a trolley above a Westlake trestle was added in 1890 the bridge at Fremont increasingly became the way to get north to the suburbs and remained so until the Aurora Bridge was opened in 1932.

Next the art.  According to Roger Wheeler, Fremont artist and historian, public art as a Fremont fixation began with the formation in the late 1970s of the Fremont Arts Council.  Appropriately its first installation has a transportation theme with some built-in Fremont fun.  The figures in sculptor Rich Beyer’s popular Waiting for the Interurban, will have to wait into eternity for they are pointed the wrong way – north.  The interurban to Everett never turned east on 34th Street and so would have missed them.

Confused or curious?  Readers have two opportunities for direct clarification.  First join Roger Wheeler for his annual guided art tour of Fremont this coming Thursday, July 26.  The tour starts at 7 PM from Beyer’s landmark sculpture.  Next, three weeks later on Thursday August 16, the Fremont Historical Society sponsors another neighborhood stroll.  This time tour leaders Heather McAuliffe and Erik Pihl begin their instructive Streetcar Walking Tour at 7 PM beside the old Fremont Car Barn at N. 34th Street and Phinney Avenue North.

SEEING SEATTLE

Not so long after the turn-of-the-century consolidation of Seattle’s previously diverse trolley lines the new and more efficient monopoly, the Seattle Electric Company, purchased four “special” cars from the John Stephenson Company of New Jersey.   At 46-feet-long, bumper-to-bumper, they were then the biggest of Seattle’s electric cars, and the trolley company’s special plans for them were clearly signed on their sides.  The four double-ender trolleys — numbered 362 to 365 — carried both visitors and locals on rail explorations of our then manicly expanding metropolis.

Since motorcars were still a rarity in 1903, aside from walking, there were few ready ways to sample Seattle that were not by rail.  From Pioneer Square the trolley lines reached to Lake Washington, Ballard, Green Lake, the University District, Rainier Valley, all destinations with attractions.   So for the purchase of a single ticket a customer could explore almost every corner of the city, including, beginning in 1907, West Seattle.  Since there was no competing cacophony of motorcars, to be heard by their passengers the conductor-tour-leaders had only to bark above the creaking of the long cars themselves as they rumbled along the rails.

By 1907 these “Special Seeing Seattle Cars” were not the only tour in town.  There were then enough paved streets and even boulevards in Seattle to allow open busses to go anywhere hard tires and spring seats could comfortably carry their customers.  These sightseers were also regularly photographed as a group and many among them would purchase a print of their adventure either for a memento or message.  The group portraits were ordinarily printed on postcard stock and of the many sold some carry handwritten flip-side expressions of the joys of seeing Seattle.

THE ART OF BUSES (text for Pine Street scene printed directly above.)

While the subject here is evidently the two new White Motor Company (WMC) buses in the foreground we also catch above them, center left, a glimpse of Cornish School.  Below the eaves the sign “Cornish School of the Arts” is blazoned and to either side of it are printed in block letters the skills that one can expect to learn in its studios: “Art, Dancing Expression, Language.”  From its beginning in 1914 Cornish meant to teach all the arts and the whole artist.
The official Curtis number (38871) for this image indicates that it was probably photographed late in 1919, or two years before Cornish moved from the Booth Building here at the southeast corner of Broadway Avenue and Pine Street north a few blocks on Capitol Hill to another Spanish-styled structure, the school’s then new and still used home at Roy Street and Harvard Avenue.

When the city took public control of all the streetcars in the spring of 1919 they purchased a dangerously dilapidated system at a price so dear it precluded most improvements.  The few exceptions included these buses that were purchased to reach parts of the city that the old private trolley system did not service. These buses are signed for Magnolia where most of the developing neighborhoods were not reached by the street railway line that ran to the front gate of Fort Lawton.

Thomas White began making sewing machines in Massachusetts in 1859.  He was still around in 1901 when his company made its first steam-powered automobile in Cleveland. Gas powered trucks were added in 1910; buses followed.  Vancouver B.C. also purchased WMC buses to service the Grandview area to the east of that city.  The best-known and longest-lived White buses were the red ones used for narrated tours at Glacier National Park.  They were a park fixture (moving ones) until retired with “metal fatigue” in 1999 after 64 years of continuous service.

The WRECK EPIDEMIC of 1919-1920

(Above)  The Green Lake trolley failed to negotiate an odd curve  while on it way downtown on the early winter morning of January 5,1920.  The trolley came to rest wrapped around a telephone pole a few yards south of where the line on Woodland Park Avenue curved through its intersection with 39th Street.   (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey.)
After the private trolley system was made public in 1919 what Leslie Blanchard in his helpful history “The Street Railway Era in Seattle” calls a “wreck epidemic” followed.  Blanchard described the crash of January 5, 1920 as its “climax . . . one of the most appalling accidents in the history of public transportation in Seattle.”

Heading downtown early in the morning with a full load of workers and shoppers car 721 jumped the track where Woodland Park Avenue still curves through its intersection with 39th Street.  The speeding car fell from its tracks into a sturdy telephone pole (left of center) that opened the car roof like a can of cheap pop.  Of the more than seventy passengers injured seven were seriously so and one of these died the following day.  The wreck was “appalling” because it was an accident made inevitable by the circumstances surrounding the sale of the system.

The Seattle Electric Company sold the dilapidated line to a Seattle mayor, Ole Hanson, who purchased it at such an inflated price that no funds remained for repairs.  At the time Mayor Hanson was more interested in whatever bold moves might make him an attractive candidate for the American presidency.

The Seattle Times’ same day front-page story on the wreck leads off with an ironic listing of conflicting voices.  Councilman Oliver Erickson described the brakes and rails of the system as in “rotten condition.” Thomas Murphine, superintendent of public utilities, described them as “in perfect shape” but that the driver was “new and inexperienced.”  For his part Motorman M.R. Fullerton claimed that the brakes would not work and that “I used everything I had to try to stop the car before reaching the curve.”  Fortunately for Fullerton it was the bad brakes excuse that – unlike his car 721 – ultimately held sway.

THE BUS STOP @ BROADWAY & REPUBLICAN 1976-77

Here follow three of several thousand photographs I took from the kitchen of a “pad” atop Peters at the southeast corner of Broadway and Republican, on Capitol Hill.  Some of these were posted in the city’s buses.  The project was fun, easy, and relatively inexpensive.  I bought roll film, spooled it and did my own darkroom work.  For color I purchase 35mm motion picture negative film, spooled it, and then rejoined the rolls to be developed very inexpensively (for color) as motion picture film.