(click to enlarge)

FIREBOAT DUWAMISH & The INLAND FLYER

The fireboat Duwamish is warming up at the end of Fire Station No. 5’s short pier. Built in 1909 at Richmond Beach for the Seattle Fire Department, it was 113 feet long and weighed a relatively heavy 309 tons. This photo probably was taken a year later.

The smoke escaping the fireboat’s twin stacks partly obscures the tower of the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, on the left. The Grand Trunk Pacific was Canada’s second transcontinental railroad. After reaching its terminus Prince Rupert in 1910, it took up the steamship business as well, running a coastal feeder service from Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver to Prince Rupert.

In its time, the Grand Trunk pier was the largest wood structure of its kind on the West Coast; but its time was brief. On July 29, 1914, it was gutted by the second-largest fire in the city’s history. (The largest was the Great Fire of 1889.) Its location next door to the fire station did not save it, although the fireboats Duwamish and Snoqualmie did help contain the fire.

To the right of the Duwamish, moored at Pier 3, is the Puget Sound steamer Inland Flyer. After 11 years of running on what was called the “Navy Yard Route” to Port Orchard, Inland Flyer was sold to a Capt. R.G. Reeve, who changed its name to Mohawk. This little 106-foot wooden steamer was only 7 feet shorter than the fireboat, but at 151 tons, it was less than half the weight. In 1916, Captain Reeve stripped it of its engine and converted it into a fish barge at Neah Bay.

Pier 3 – long since renumbered Pier 54 – was constructed in 1900.  For 72 years, first as an aquarium and then as a cafe, it has been the platform for the late Ivar Haglund’s prescriptions in the “culture of clams” on how to “keep clam.” Although Ivar just missed seeing his remodeled Acres of Clams reopen, he did help choose the scores of historical waterfront photographs that now cover the restaurant’s walls. One of Ivar’s favorites was an enlargement of the historical photo discussed here. It is one of a collection of Seattle images uncovered in northern Idaho. One of Ivar’s last philanthropic acts was to help purchase the collection for the University of Washington Library’s Special Collections.

ELEGANT ENDS (above)

Prolific cityscape photographer O.T. Frasch recorded this trinity of venerable ship sterns for a postcard.  The view looks toward the city from either the end of Colman Dock or near to it.

The white terra-cotta skin of the Empire Building at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street is the dominant structure in the backdrop. Just to its right, the twin towers of Saint James Cathedral peek above the black stack of the steamer Flyer.

Next to the streamlined ferry the Kalakala, the Flyer is probably the most celebrated vessel to have regularly plied the waters of Puget Sound, and not nearly as abused as the poor Kalakala.  She consumed 24 cords of wood a day in her four round trips between Seattle and Tacoma. In 1918, after more than a quarter-century on the Sound and nearly 2 million miles, she was rebuilt as the Washington for the Puget Sound Navigation Company.

The City of Seattle – blowing steam to  the right of the Flyer – was the first ferry on the Sound, beginning her service on New Year’s Eve, 1888. A tool of the West Seattle Land and Improvement Co., it moved prospective buyers between this slip and the company’s real estate above its ferry dock on West Seattle’s Harbor Avenue. The fare was five cents, and the two-mile run took about 8 minutes.

The ferry City of Seattle was a fixture on Elliott Bay through the 1890s and until 1907, the year of West Seattle’s incorporation into Seattle when the new trolley along Spokane Street as well as a bigger ferry, the West Seattle, took over. Eventually sold to a ferry company on San Francisco Bay, City of Seattle is now a houseboat for an artist living off-shore of Sausalito, California.

The Tourist, far right, was the first vessel to regularly carry cars on Puget Sound. Beginning in 1915, it carried six autos at a time between Seattle and Bremerton.

CIRCA 1886 LANDMARKS (above)

Several artful landmarks formed Seattle’s early skyline above. The effect presented the city’s new urban confidence of the mid-l880s to those arriving at the largest city in Washington Territory by Elliott Bay, and most did.

The most formidable structure in this view, center-left, is the mansard roof line of the Frye Opera House. When it was completed in 1885, George Frye’s opera house was the grandest stage north of San Francisco. It was modeled after the Bay City’s famed Baldwin Theater, and dominated the northeast corner of First Avenue and Marion Street.

Kitty-corner from the opera house and above a grocery store, the YMCA’s functional quarters are marked by what appears to be a banner. They moved into this spot in 1882 and out of it in October 1886. That information helps us date this scene at sometime in 1885 or ’86.

Across the street from the Y, with its own high-minded sign, is the Golden Rule Bazaar. Just above the bazaar and behind the opera house is the ornate Stetson Post Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street. When the Post building was built in 1882 it was the most fashionable address in Seattle.

The mansion with tower and cupola to the right of the Stetson Post is the Stacy Mansion at Third Avenue and Marion Street. This lavish pile of Second Empire architecture lasted much longer than anything else in this scene. In the 1920s, having escaped the fire of 1889, it was pivoted 90 degrees to face Marion Street and became Maison Blanc, one of Seattle’s legendary restaurants. Unfortunately, it was injured in a lesser fire in 1960 and razed soon after.

For all its landmarks, what really sets this scene apart are the two sailboats in profile in front of Budlong’s Boathouse. They were rentals from the popular boathouse. In 1886 the Puget Sound Yacht Club was established here.

The Great Fire in 1889, which started near the corner of First and Madison in the far left of this scene, destroyed Frye’s Opera House and practically everything else showing west of Second Avenue.  The boathouse, however, survived because it could be floated from harm’s way.

POTLATCH “PORTLAND” LANDING – 1912 (above)

Across the bottom of the negative for this waterfront scene, the photographer has written, “Arrival of Sourdoughs on the Portland.” The allusion is to that legendary moment when the first ensemble of gold rushers returned from the Klondike not only with news of the big strike but with the dust itself – $700,000 of it.

This, however, is not that spontaneous moment, but a staged re-enactment of it, 15 years later to the day, for the Golden Potlatch of 1912, Seattle’s second running of its first summer festival. This waterfront assemblage of hacks and motorcars is awaiting what The Seattle Times described later that day as “a triumph of symbolism” – the Potlatch’s peculiar mix of Native American and gold rush motifs.  It is just after noon on July 17.

For this ritual arrival, the Portland is” carrying the Potlatch’s big chief or Hyas Tyee, dressed, the Post-Intelligencer reported, in his “barbaric headdress and gorgeous blanket,” leading his hybrid court of shamans (medicine men in togas) and “flannel-shirted high-booted sourdoughs” sweating under the weight of their obese gold pokes.

The photographer sights north from near Marion Street and is most likely perched atop a boxcar, a favorite prospect for watching waterfront events when Alaskan Way was still Railroad Avenue. This scene does not wait for the chief and his ersatz band of natives and miners but catches instead the waiting crowd – or part of it. The local pulp’s boast of 100,000 witnesses was, perhaps, not so inflated when we remember that the obstructing Alaskan Way Viaduct was not yet intruding on the view of the many thousands who leaned from the windows and crowded the roofs of the buildings in the business district.

Once on shore, the chief relaxed his “haughty mien and stony gaze” with a most happy decree. “All is as it should be. There is no thought but to find joy, to give and receive happiness and that is Potlatch.”

The BLACK BOX (above)

From Elliott Bay and looking up Madison Street – as we do here – it is still possible to see the “Big Black Box” that on its own in 1968 lifted the first shaft for a new Seattle super-skyline.  From most other prospects the thicket of often-taller skyscrapers that have given Seattle its own version of the modern and generally typical cityscape has long since obscured what was originally the headquarters for Seattle First National Bank, R.I.P.

Lawton Gowey photographed the older view of it from a ferry on March 1, 1970.  The long-time accountant for the Seattle Water Department was good about recording the dates for the many thousands of pictures he took of his hometown and lifetime study.

A sense of the untoward size of the “Big Ugly” – another unkind name for it – can be easily had by comparing it to the Seattle Tower, the gracefully stepped dark scraper on the left.  In the “now” it is more than hidden behind the 770 foot Washington Mutual Tower (1988).  After its lift to 318 feet above 3rd and University in 1928 this Art Deco landmark was the second highest structure in Seattle – following the 1914 Smith Tower.  The 1961 lifting of the “splendid” 600-plus foot tall Space Needle moved both down a notch, and inspired the now old joke that we happily repeat.  Soon after the SeaFirst tower reached its routine shape in 1968 it was described to visitors as “the box the Space Needle came in.”  And at 630 feet it was just big and square enough.

Many of Seattle’s nostalgic old timers (50 years old or older) consider the SeaFirst Tower as the beginning of the end for their cherished “old Seattle.”  For the more resentful among them the Central Business District is now congested with oversized boxes that have obscured the articulated charms of smaller and older landmarks like the Smith and Seattle Towers.  Some find solace in the waterfront where a few of the railroad finger piers survive – like Ivar’s Pier 54 seen on the far left in both views.

But Ivar’s has grown too.  In 1970 Ivar Haglund employed about 260 for his then three restaurants including the “flagship” Acres of Clams here at Pier 54.  Now in its 68th year Ivar’s Inc serves in 63 locations.  (This first appears in Pacific early in 2005.)  This summer it will employ more than 1000 persons to handle the busy season’s share of an expected 7 million customers in 2006.  Every one of them – not considering tourists for the moment — will be an “Old Settler” with refined and yet unpretentious good taste – and so says Ivar’s CEO Bob Donegan.

(click to enlarge photos)

Seattle’s second fireboat, the Duwamish, is now a century old and although no longer chasing waterfront or waterborne fires she apparently could be with a 100-year tune up.  Instead its iron-clad 120 feet floats in her slip beside the lightship Swiftsure at the South Lake Union Park accepting visitors and hoping for enthused volunteers.

The Duwamish was built nearby in Richmond Beach, and her designer, the naval architect Eugene L. McAllaster, made her strong enough to ram and sink burning wooden vessels (if needs be) and flat enough (with a low draft) to chase fires bordering shallow tideflats.  And he equipped her to break records in shooting water at her targets – eventually 1.6 tons of it a second. However, it was a power used more often for water shows during city celebrations or spectacular welcomes for visiting ships or dignitaries when they were still arriving here by sea.

Launched on July 3, 1909, it was then polished, appointed and delivered to waterfront Station No. 5, here at the foot of Madison Street. Soon after the Duwamish took to her slip, the largest wooden dock on the Pacific Coast was built directly south of her.  The short-lived Grand Trunk Pacific dock is seen here sometime before July 30, 1914, when it was consumed in what was then the city’s most spectacular fire since the “great” one of 1889 razed the business district and most of the waterfront.  While the combined barrage from the water canons of the Duwamish and the Snoqualmie, her smaller sister vessel, could not save the Grand Trunk, they are credited with keeping its neighbors, including Fire Station No. 5, from igniting.

During World War 2, the Duwamish worked for the Coast Guard as a patrol boat.  After returning to her original service she was converted in 1949 to diesel-electric power and thereby became “the most powerful fireboat in the world.”  In 1986, one year after her retirement, the Duwamish was added to the list of Seattle Landmarks, and three years later she was made a National Historic Landmark as well.

WEB EXTRAS

The ‘Now’ photo was taken from the far end of the open air seating alongside Ivar’s. Here’s the Chief Seattle from the other direction, now a backdrop for the feeding of seagulls.

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, as time allows and before nightybears I’ll add a few past features and other things that gather around the slip to the south side of Pier 3/54.   I’ll start off with a compliment to your mother-child fish-bar dining photo above and then go forward with a feature on the Puget Sound steamer Alida, an early story as our “now-and-thens” go.  It appeared first in the Seattle Times Pacific Mag on August 12, 1984.

THE ALIDA

The scene above is the second oldest surviving photographic record of Seattle’s waterfront. The view was made from the end of Henry Yesler’s wharf, and looks across his mill pond to the sidewheeler Alida.  Above and behind the steamship’s paddle is the dirt intersection of Marion St. and Front St. (now First Ave). That puts the Alida in the parking lot now bordered by Post and Western avenues and Columbia and Marion streets – or just behind the Colman Building.

The occasion is either in the summer of 1870 or 1871. The steeple-topped Methodist Protestant Church on the left was built in 1864, as we see it here. In the summer of 1872 its’ builder and pastor, Rev. Daniel Bagley, added a second story with a mansard roof. Bagley was also the main force behind the construction of the University of Washington, the classic white structure with the dome-shaped cupola at the center horizon.

The photograph’s third tower, on the right, tops Seattle’s first public school. Central School was built in 1870 back away from the northwest comer of Third and Madison. If the bell in its bell tower were still calling classes, it would be clanging near the main banking lobby of  the Seafirst tower. (This was first printed in Pacific, Aug. 12,  1984. SeaFirst is by now long-gone.)

The Alida’s 115-foot keel was laid in Olympia in 1869. but its upper structure was completed in Seattle, in June of the following year, at Hammond’s boat yard near the foot of Columbia St., or just to the right of this scene. Perhaps, the occasion for this photograph is shortly after her inaugural launching.

The Alida first tested the water on June 29, 1870. Captain E. A. Starr invited Seattle’s establishment on the roundtrip trial run to Port Townsend. The July 4 edition of the Weekly Intelligencer reported that “During the passage down, the beautiful weather, the delightful scenery, the rapid and easy progress made, and last though not least, the excellent instrumental and vocal music which was furnished by the ladies, all contributed to the enjoyment of the occasion.” The steam to Port Townsend took four hours and eight minutes, and a little more on the return.

The Alida’s 20-year career on Puget Sound began with a few months of glory. She was the first steamship to successfully intrude on the monopoly which another sidewheeler, the Eliza Anderson, had on the Sound. What the Alida’s owners, the Starr brothers, won from the Alida’s triumph was shortlived. She was too slow and too light face the open waters of the straits.

In 1871 the Starr brothers introduced a second and stronger sidewheeler, the North Pacific. For ten years it controlled the Victoria run, while the Alida was restricted to steaming between Olympia and Port Townsend and way points, including Seattle.

The Alida came to her somewhat bizarre end in 1890. While anchored just offshore in Gig Harbor a brush fire swept down to her mooring and burned her to the water.

A year earlier the Seattle waterfront was also swept by fire. When it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1889, all of what is water in this historical scene was planked over and eventually filled in to the sea wall that is 500 feet out from First Ave.

THE FIREBOAT SNOQUALMIE

Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889 burned 130 acres of the central business district and left the city’s fire ‘ department red-faced. There wasn’t enough pressure to conjure a flood against the flames, and there wasn’t a hose strong or long enough to reach the fire with salt water pumped from Elliott Bay. When the smoke cleared the message was obvious.        The then mayor, the ship builder Robert Moran, told the enflamed citizens assembled in the armory at Union Street and Fourth Avenue that rebuilding a city should also include a fire department that could safeguard the new quarters.  Within a year the city had five new firehouses, an electric alarm system with 31 boxes and the first fireboat on the West Coast: the Snoqualmie.

The Snoqualmie was designed by William Cowles, a New York naval architect as a 91-foot, coal burning, tug-shaped ship that would do 11 knots and shoot 6,000 gallons of saltwater per minute.  The fireboat’s trial run was a celebrated affair. On deck for a closer look was T.J. Conway, assistant manager of the Pacific Insurance Association. He later announced to the press, “She did very well, splendidly in fact, and l shall feel justified in recommending a liberal reduction in insurance rates here.”

For the businessmen on the waterfront this we delightful news. More than 60 wharves and warehouses with frontage of more than two miles had been put up since the fire flattened everything there south of Union Street.

The Snoqualmie made its home in a slip next to Fire Station No.5 at the foot of Madison Street. For 37 years the fireboat wandered up and down the waterfront looking for small fires to put out or big ones to contain. The new fireboat was also used to rescue ships in Puget Sound and even salvage them, using its strong pumps to raise sunken vessels. ‘

The Snoqualmie fought its last fire on Elliott Bay in 1927, the year it gave up its slip to the new fireboat in town, the Alki. For the next 47 years the Snoqualmie helped lower insurance rates on Lake Union and then served as a small freighter between here and Alaska.

The last fire the Snoqualmie attended was its own. Only eight years ago (first published in 1984 that might mean 1976) it burned for 36 hours off shore of the fuel dock at Kodiak, Alaska.

THE NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD PIERS, 3(54) to 5(56)

In their basic shape, it is easy to compare the past and present of these three piers along the Seattle waterfront. (This would be especially true if we could find the “now” photographed for this story when it first appeared on May 25, 1986, now nearly a quarter-century ago. For the moment the reader is asked to imagine it, or to proceed to the “Keep Clam” waterfront trolley island and inspect it.  And, of course, don’t expect the trolley.)

Where they differ dramatically is in their uses. The historical photographer took his shot about 1902, soon after the Northern Pacific Railroad built the piers that were then numbered 3 through 5. (During World War II, in an official “act of war,” they were re-numbered 54 through 56).

The railroad’s first tenants at Pier 3 were James Galbraith and Cecil Bacon who had already been selling hay and feed on the waterfront in the 1890s, before their first step into the 20^th century and Pier 54. When the partners moved on to the new pier, they widened their commercial cast to include building materials.

The early wharf was mostly known for being the home port for many of the vessels in the famous “Mosquito Fleet.”  The Kitsap Transportation company’s busiest packet was for the little steamers that plied Puget Sound waters carrying passengers to the Kitsap mainland and Bainbridge Island.

The next pier north, Pier 4(55), became port for ocean-going steamers that sailed to Antwerp, London, Mexico and San Francisco. But in 1902 the gilded romance of Alaska was the larger allure with the Alaska Commercial Company’s coast steamers named Portland, St. Paul and Bertha carrying gold seekers north to Nome.

The last pier, No. 5/56 was taken over by the English stenographer turned shipping magnate Frank Waterhouse and his steamship line, which was the first to regularly reach the European Mediterranean from Puget Sound by way of Hawaii, the Philippines, Australia and the Suez Canal. Trade with Russia through Vladivostok was also one of Waterhouse’s commercial coups until the 1917 revolution put a stop to it.

Today this section of the old working waterfront is mostly for playing. And one of the very first players was Ivar Haglund who in 1938 opened his little aquarium on Pier 3 and, of course, at the same spot opened his famous “Acres of Clams” during the buoyant clam-happy post-war summer of 1946.  In its abiding dedication to hoaxes, Ivar’s is presently celebrating it’s 100^th anniversary on the pier – 30 years early.

THE KITSAP

The Kitsap was both trim and dauntless. In 20 years of rate wars, races, collisions and switching routes, the steamer energetically participated in the wildlife of Puget Sound waterways. At 127&1/2 feet and 195 tons, the Kitsap was an average-sized steamer about 12 feet longer than the Virginia V, which most readers will be familiar with as the last survivor of Puget Sound’s “Mosquito Fleet.”

The Kitsap was built in Portland for the Kitsap Transportation Co., one of the two strong arms of Puget Sound navigation. For a quarter century, the KTC competed with the Puget Sound Navigation Company. Oddly, at the Kitsap’s 1906 launching, the presidents for both companies, KTC’s  W.L. Gazzam and PSNC’s Joshua Green, were on board. Four years later Gazzam and Green traded abusive language when the Kitsap was sent to compete with Green’s much plusher and larger but significantly slower Chippewa on the Bellingham run. Green complained to Gazzam that the fleet Kitsap represented a general threat to business because it taught patrons to expect speed.

Green also responded by scheduling a steamer on Gazzam’s Bainbridge Island route. This route war featured at least two bumps between vessels, safety hearings, suspended captains and ruinous effects on Green’s Seattle-Vancouver route. In the rate war that ensued, both companies lowered the fare to Bellingham to a quarter. Smart customers would take either cheap trip to Bellingham and catch the train from there to Canada.

In this ca.1911 view of the Kitsap, the banner strapped to her starboard side reads, “Bellingham-Anacortes-Seattle 25 Cents.”

On Dec 14, 1910, Green inadvertently got even when three days after the Kitsap punched and sank the launch Columbia, the PSNC’s Great Lakes steamer Indianapolis rammed the Kitsap about 400 yards off Pier 3, and sent it to the bottom of Elliott Bay. The Kitsap was raised and towed to West Seattle where it was patched up and ready to compete by the following May.

In its remaining 15 years of service, the Kitsap steamed a variety of courses – her owners acting like coaches looking for winning match-ups with the opposition. Its packets included Poulsbo and Port Blakely, and a longer round trip from Seattle through Harper, Colby, Port Madison and back to the company’s depot at Pier 3 – now, as most readers will know, Ivar’s Acres of Clams.

In the 1920s, cars became a factor. In 1925, 40 minutes were cut from the car ferry Washington’s run between downtown Seattle and Vashon Island when the then-new Fauntleroy ferry dock allowed it to make the crossing in 17 minutes.

The Washington’s old route from the foot of Marion Street was picked up by the Kitsap, by then renamed the Bremerton. (This, its last passenger-only route, is being considered for revival or was when this feature first appeared Sept. 10, 1989.)  A year later, in November 1926, the Kitsap-Bellingham caught fire while laid up at the Houghton shipyards on Lake Washington, and was destroyed along with two other vessels.

THE CAPITOL CITY

What makes this steamer shot instructive in the methods of transportation safety is its revelation of the passengers’ random arrangement at the stern-wheeler’s bow. Many of these passengers are probably sightseers out for a weekend excursion to the Capitol City’s regular ports of call, Tacoma and Olympia.

For sightseers and commuters, the Mosquito Fleet of small steamers was still the way to get around Puget Sound in the early part of this century. Most of the areas with the smaller ports had no rail connection and only very rough roads reaching them – if any. And although the Northern Pacific could get you to Olympia quicker than the Capitol City, the ride was neither as smooth nor as exhilarating.

There was at least one occasion when the Capitol City was in a greater hurry. Late October 1902, off Dash Point near Tacoma, a Canadian freighter struck the steamer and put a large hole in its port side.  It started to go down. The steamer’s engineer answered Capt. James Edward’s call for full steam ahead and dashed for shore, arriving out of steam but safely beached.

The glass negative for this rare view was discovered by a carpenter while remodeling a Capitol Hill home. The amateur photographer, Lewis Whittelsey, was a bookkeeper for the Seattle Water Department. His identity was traced through the coincidental discovery of two more sources of Whittelsey’s work. A friend, Harold Smith, belonged to the same church, Plymouth Congregational, as Whittelsey and had been given two albums of his photographs.  Another friend – and one often credited here – Lawton Gowey, a latter-day accountant at the city’s Water Department, was introduced to three more albums of Whittelsey’s work uncovered in City Hall years after his death in 1941.

The second look (below) at the Capitol City comes from MOHAI and its collection of glass negatives from the professional Webster and Steven Studio.

THE “WORLD’S FIRST AIR FERRY”

Verne Gorst got started transporting mail by dog team in Alaska, and he kept his memories of that adventure alive by staying a Sourdough Association member in good standing until his death in 1953.  After the dogs Gorst gave a half-century to hauling freight — including the U.S. Mail — and passengers by bus, truck and plane to various destinations between Los Angeles and the Aleutians.  Here he was, perhaps, best know for, he claimed, “the first air ferry in world” running hourly trips between Seattle and the “navy yard city” Bremerton.

Gorst’s June 14, 1929 advertisement in The Times announced that the new line’s eight-passenger closed-cabin Loening Amphibian would leave its berth at the foot of Madison Street the following morning at 9 A.M. for its first service.  If he kept to schedule than this view of the Loening at the foot of the old Gailbraith Dock, Pier 3 (now Ivars Acres of Clams Pier 54) and the line of sportily dressed witnesses on the Pier’s skirt above it have not come together for the inaugural ceremonies. The sun is nearly overhead so its closer to noontime.

Still this is surely a record of some moment in the first year of Gorst’s air taxi enterprise, for by its first anniversary the air ferry was operating not from this improvised float but from a covered hangar tied to the end of Pier 3 (54). (see below) That floating depot was, the Times reported, big enough to house “five planes, a passenger waiting room, two repair shops, a stock room and a five-room modern apartment.”

Even though his first year ran into the Great Depression Gorst could afford his floating depot for from June to June he had carried more than 25,000 passengers on 2,700 round trips across the Sound.  The one-way hops ran an average of 51 minutes less than the water ferries hour-long ride and if the winds were right the flight could be done in seven minutes.  The Navy Yard was then one of the region’s great tourist lures and, of course, most of those flying there had never flown before. Gorst assured them of the line’s safety with the comforting point that the amphibians could land anywhere along the route.

In 1929 the fare was $2.50 one way.  But in June of 1933, beginning his fifth year, Gorst dropped his round-trip depression-time charge to $1.50.  And in 1934 after a fall storm battered his Elliott Bay Depot he towed it to new quarters at the south end of Lake Union.  There Verne Gorst’s Bremerton taxi service petered out as the Great Depression dragged on.

[Time now to climb the steps to the comforts of slumber, but will continue with an addendum tomorrow including other features and subjects that relate to this busy spot on the waterfront.)

(click photos to enlarge)

When the bright voters of Seattle agreed to the $365 million “Bridging The Gap” levy in 2006 some of them would have known that the nearly 500 foot long west approach of the 45th Street Viaduct, which also marked the north border of the University of Washington Campus, was a gap in dire straits.  It was made of wood.  Twenty thousand vehicles gave it and the rest of this steep link between the University District and the neighborhoods to the east a daily pounding.

Construction on the viaduct began in 1938 and it opened Sept 28, of the following year.  In his “now” repeat Jean Sherrard chose a prospect several yards west of the historic photographer’s position in order to show the work-in-progress a few days before the viaduct was reopened on Sept. 10 last.  For this the city hosted a street party on the viaduct.  As every paper and street department spokesperson made sure to make note, the opening was in time for the Huskies game against Syracuse, which the Huskies won handily, no doubt in celebration of the department’s finishing on time.

While the University District merchants of 1939 were happy with their new bridge to neighbors in the east, they were yet anxious that another bridge then still under construction, the Mercer Island floating bridge, would divert from their University Way, AKA “The Ave,” much of the traffic and business that came to it around the north end of Lake Washington. The greater surprises to U. District culture came in 1950 and 1956 when, respectively the shopping malls at Northgate and University Village opened.  Because of the latter the 45th St. Viaduct began siphoning perhaps more business off “the Ave” than to it.  Village parking was so easy and at least seemed free.

The location of 45th Street – and so also both its viaduct and campus border – is an accident of the Willamette Meridian: the marked stone near Portland from which Federal surveyors began charting Washington and Oregon in 1851. When with their solar compasses and Gunter chains the surveyors at last reached Seattle and its hinterlands in the mid-1850s, the future 45th Street became a major section line. And as topographical fate would have it, 45th also marked how far north Lake Washington’s Union Bay reached before it was lowered 9 feet in 1916 for the ship canal.  Once securely high and dry, 45th Street could be developed as an arterial for the three-plus miles from Stone Way to Laurelhurst. The viaduct completed that.

WEB EXTRAS

It was an early September evening, just a few days before the viaduct re-opened, that I paid the work site a visit.  Here are a few more shots using a longer lens:

Anything to add, Paul?  As the late hours allow – I’ll restrain myself to a few additions.

First we are all invited to a behind-the-scenes tour of the Seattle Municipal Archives and a workshop on basic research tools for using the Archives.  Both events are on Tuesday October 26 in celebration of Archives Month. There will be two tours, at 11 and 3; the workshop is at 1:30.  Please RSVP to archives@seattle.gov if you are interested!   We will note that the principal historical photos shown above and below were obtained through the Municipal Archive.  This visit is also a fine chance to see – if you have not as yet – the inside of the relatively new City Hall.

NEXT some more from the MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES on 45th Street Viaduct history interspersed with the city’s own history of the viaduct’s several public works between 1939 and now.

A HISTORY OF 45TH STREET VIADUCT CONSTRUCTION

Seattle’s topography has always been a challenge to transportation, especially along west to east routes. A concerted effort in the 1930s to ease automobile traffic led to a series of bridge projects including construction of the NE 45th St Viaduct that would provide a direct route from Sand Point Way and Laurelhurst to Highway 99. At that time, the land at the base was mostly farmland. The project was approved in 1935 by Ordinance 65629 with major community support from the University Commercial Club. Construction did not begin until 1938. (The street designation was E 45th Street until 1961 when the directional designation was changed to NE.)

The viaduct was funded with a combination of federal Public Works Administration (PWA) dollars ($103,550), state gasoline tax revenue ($200,000), and a small appropriation in 1939 from the City Street Fund ($8,000). Other PWA-funded projects in 1938 included the Montlake Boulevard pedestrian overcrossing, 24th Avenue Southwest paving, East Madison Street repaving, and the Ballard Bridge.

The project was completed in September 1939 with great fanfare. A celebration luncheon was held at the Edmond Meany Hotel on September 28, followed by a parade that included the Husky Marching Band. The procession made its way from the Meany to the dedication ceremonies where Mayor Langlie cut the ribbon in front of several thousand spectators.

In 1955, funds were approved to widen the viaduct from two to three lanes; construction took place in 1956-1957. The construction was estimated to cost $192,000 and the funds were approved as part of a $10 million traffic improvement bond issue approved by Seattle voters in 1954. Additional funds for this project were approved in 1956, increasing the appropriation from $218,000 to $248,000. A 1956 scale of wages shows that carpenters earned $2.80 per hour in that year. The additional funds in 1956 were for a bus stop and for approaches to University Village. During the construction, traffic was limited to one lane eastbound. Westbound traffic was asked to detour to Blakely Avenue and Ravenna Place. Once the construction was finished, two lanes were designated for westbound traffic and one for eastbound. By the mid-1950s, the farmland was gone, but a Carnation plant and Shell station could be seen on NE 45th.

During a 1972 Engineering Department survey of bridge needs, it became evident that the wooden trestles on the east end of the viaduct were compromised by a 1966 fire and needed to be replaced. After two public hearings, it was determined that there would be no big changes to the viaduct. Work began in January 1976. Federal funds were used to help fund the project, and additional funds were approved in 1976 for rail replacement. In 1976, carpenters earned $8.90 per hour. For various reasons, mostly related to the pilings used and the noise of the pile-driving machine, the work took longer than expected. Neighborhood groups and businesses, as well as the University of Washington, made their concerns about the delay known to the City. The viaduct was closed from January to October 17th, 1976.

In 1983, City funds were approved for deck rehabilitation on the viaduct. Adverse weather and an initial unavailability of specialized equipment needed for the project required the completion date to be postponed until the spring of 1984. A temporary asphalt overlay was installed to enable the viaduct to be used during the time construction was stopped and restarted.

After a fire in January 1996, the viaduct was briefly closed so an inspection could be made of the supports on the west end.

In 2010, the viaduct was closed again for several months for a major project to replace the west approach. Portions of the approach dated back to 1938 and needed to be replaced for safety reasons. The project was budgeted at $30 million and was expected to last about six months.

RAVENNA

(Click to Enlarge)

Soon after the Burke-Gilman Trail leaves the University of Washington campus it passes north below the ’45th Street viaduct, it begins a gentle but steady curving to the east between the Ravenna neighborhood on the north and University Village on the south.  Although this trail for cyclists and joggers can be vaguely seen in the center of the contemporary photograph (It is not so contemporary, for it dates from 1982), its curving original ‘line of use” is very evident in the historical panorama. Both views look northeast from Ravenna Avenue near Northeast 50th Street.

The Seattle Lake Shore & Easterb Railroad (SLSER) was begun in 1885 by Judge Thomas Burke and entrepreneur Daniel Gilman (hence the trail) and a few eastern capitalists (hence the rails). It was intended to go north around Lake Washington and east over Snoqualmie Pass to Spokane and a probable hook-up with the transcontinental railroads that paused there or promised to. By 1887 it got as far as Union Bay.

One of the SLSER’s most pleased passengers was the Rev. William W. Beck, who besides his spiritual offerings, advertised himself as a “wholesale dealer in gold, silver, iron, coal, timber, and granites.”  But it was with other of his enterprising interests, “parks and townsites,” that the energetic Presbyterian pastor was thinking in 1887 when he stepped off at the railroad’s Union Bay Station, the white structure just right of center.

William Beck bought 300 acres. He would clear much of it to stumps for his townsite, but sixty lush acres he would keep and protect as a park. Both were named Ravenna.  Beck’s lightly settled Ravenna town runs through the center of the old panorama. The southeastern end of his park is evident on the far left. The photograph was taken sometime in the mid 1890s. The park still had a virgin forest of giant cedars and firs, and would remain so until 1911 when Beck sold it to the city.

By Thanksgiving 1887 the railroad reached Bothell, 20 miles out. All along the line the road’s construction brought with it logging camps, mills, mines and towns. It fed mill workers and their families in the new towns of Ballard, Ross, Fremont, Edgemont, Latona, Brooklyn (now the University District) and a milltown on Union Bay named Yesler after the Seattle pioneer.  It is now-part of Laurelhurst.

In 1888 Gilman’s railroad reached the coal miles of Gilman (now Issaquah), and on July 4, 1889, the first of many packed and popular excursion trains left the Seattle waterfront for Snoqualmie Falls.

Preacher Beck had the right stuff: start a town by the railroad only a short ride from the city’s center, promote an industry like the flour mill on the right of our panorama, preserve a park for communing with nature and start a finishing school for Girls. The Seattle Female College is the churchy structure upper center in the panorama.

But the school closed in 1895, a lingering effect of the 1893 economic crash, the arrival that year of the University of Washington at its new campus nearby and the failure of Beck’s township to develop anything like Ballard, Fremont or Latona.  The Park, however, did well.

On April 1, 1902, .Leon Burley, 10, and his family left their farm near Fullerton, Nebraska, and headed west in a wagon. They reached Ravenna in the fall and rented the then vacant Female College for a temporary winter home. Now (in 1982 still) this Ravenna panorama is filled with loving memories for Leon Burley. He played in the abandoned flour mill, fished for suckers and trout in Ravenna Creek, which transects this view, delivered supplies by wheelbarrow to Roper’s Grocery on 24th Street, the storefront just left of the tree trunk, and with the Beck boys explored their parent’s park.

Burley also remembers attending, in 1912 or 13, a youth Christian Endeavor meeting at the old Female College and hearing his future fiancee, Marie Phillips and her friend Fay Bayley, sing in duet “Saved by Grace.” The meeting was interrupted by fire, and that night Beck’s old school burned down.  All were saved by getting out of there.

Marie Phillips lived in the home which can be faintly seen halfway between the college and the left border of the photograph. It is still there, and is the home of Marie’s sister, Constance Palmerlee, who is writing a history of the Ravenna neighborhood.  (Or was in 1982)

Actually, those trees, that old house and much else in the contemporary view of the Ravenna neighborhood might have been filled with the R.H. Thomson Expressway had not Constance Palmerlee and many other activists in the Ravenna Community Association victoriously fight and beat the freeway.

RAVENNA PARK

(First appeared in Pacific Oct 9, 1988)

In 1888, the Rev. William Beck and his wife bought a wooded ravine just north of town. A creek flowed through it from Green Lake to Lake Washington. Beck fashioned the area into a retreat where the busy citizens of boomtown Seattle could escape for some communion with nature. Through its first 20 years, thousands paid a quarter to mingle “among the giant firs and beside the laughing brook.”

Some of Beck’s park artifice is evident here, for instance, the ground cover  has been moderately cleared.  Beck also added benches, a bandstand and fountains.

The man leaning against the red alder is surrounded by western hemlock, vine maple, bitter cherry, lady fern, Indian plum, Douglas fir -parts of the ravine’s wild ecology. Whatever trampling those early hordes might have given the ravine, it did not compare to the changes that came after the city bought Ravenna Park from Beck in 1910. The next year the city diverted the warm phosphorus water of Green Lake from the ravine into the North Trunk Sewer line. This left a smaller and cooler creek fed by Ravenna Park’s many small springs.

Now, 77 years later (in 1988), the ravine is more passive than when the ‘Becks charged admission. The Park Department’s economizing neglect has been benign. Nature and the ravine’s volunteer neighbors have conspired to make Ravenna Park an almost wild retreat. How long it will remain so is uncertain.  One of Metro’s alternative plans for separating the North End’s storm drainage from its sewers proposes burying a pipe the length of the Ravenna ravine. It would drain the runoff from the North End’s streets and parking lots into Union Bay. At the same time, the city’s parks department, in trying to clear the waters of Green Lake, wants to bury a second pipe in the ravine that would allow the exchange of water between Green Lake and Lake Washington. The proposal to lay the pipes is not popular with those who like the park the way it is: a wild retreat for urban hikes, botany classes, composers and courtiers. Many of these park users have formed the Save Ravenna Park committee.  (A good reporter would follow all this up 22 years later.  I haven’t.  Perhaps a reader can bring this history up to date.)

A REMINDER: RSVP the Archive and tell them you and yours are coming.

(click to enlarge photos)

This week’s “now and then” looks across 4th Avenue, east on Pine Street, ca. 1918.  A glimpse of the new Frederick and Nelson’s terra-cotta façade gleams at the northeast corner of Pine and 5th Avenue (left of the power pole).  I speculate with oft-humbled confidence that here Frederick and Nelson is still being furnished.  The neighborhood’s grand new retailer opened on Sept 3rd, 1918.  In 1950 four new floors were added to the then 60 year old department store’s first five.

With 4% promised from the sign on its roof, upper-left, the directly named Bank for Savings in Seattle is on the left.  Across Pine the north façade of the Hotel Georgian leaves no clue here that it is a flatiron building built in 1906 at the Hotel Plaza to fill the pie-shaped block created when Westlake was cut through from 4th and Pike to Denny Way.

David Jeffers, our frequent silent film era authority, instructs us on the Wilkes sign, right-of-center.  “This 3-floor structure at the southeast corner of Pine and Westlake opened in 1909 as a Vaudeville house named the Alhambra Theatre, and then jumped the cinema bandwagon in 1911.  The Floorwalker, starring Charlie Chaplin opened on Thursday, May 18 1916 for a three day run . . . The Alhambra included the annoying slogan in all its ads, ‘When it’s a good Chaplin comedy we buy it.’  Unfortunately, it is too late to inquire about the bad ones. In 1917 the theatre was renamed for Seattle’s well-known dramatic company, the Wilkes. It featured live theatre, stock and movies.”

Finally, Fred Cruger, our equally frequent motorcar authority, writes about the cars speeding west on Pine, “Well, I’d bet the one in the background is a Ford, the one closest I believe to be a REO (I was torn between REO and Overland), and the one on the right is a real mystery.  Maybe it’s a trick of the lighting that makes the radiator shell look unusually-shaped, but I don’t recognize it.  If I absolutely had to take a guess, I’d say ‘Metz’.”  Here’s a chance for some Pacific reader to surprise Fred.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

A few pictures and one story about dragons.  Most of the relevant stories written heretofore are napping on old floppy disks or waiting for a volunteer to revive them with a character recognition program.  Most of the pictures touch on Pine Street.  But touch only.  The stories must come later with other opportunities.  After they are awakened and/or are rescued. [Click to Enlarge – with the single exception of the pix that follows.  Click it and it will shrink.]

”]

DRAGON ON FIFTH AVENUE (First appeared Jan 9, 1983 in Pacific.)

In the Western World slaying a dragon is a crowning achievement for any hero, and champions have been rescuing damsels from the fiery embrace of these beasts and also carrying away treasures from their fierce protection for a very long time.

But in the East, the dragon is a different beast, a persistent sign of vital power, fertility and well being.  And a vegetarian. In our historical photo of the Chinese dragon dance, we see the lead bearer carrying a staff tipped with a symbolic fruit.  The dragon wants it, and will dance through many city blocks to get it.  Here it is on Fifth Avenue, with its tail still crossing Pine Street.  This is a long way from the International District where the great dragon is released on Chinese New Year to dance amid fireworks and the persistent beat of drums and cymbals through the streets south of Jackson.  It still is. (I think.  This first appeared in Pacific’s Jan 9, 1983 edition.)

The event pictured here is part of another celebration: the city’s 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition.  This may be China Day.   There is no crowd, and the question occurs, what is this herbivore doing on Fifth Avenue?  In 1909, Second Avenue and not Fifth was Seattle’s parade street.  Second was was not planked but bricked, and “canyoned” by skyscrapers like the still-standing Alaska Building, the by now razed Savoy Hotel and the New Washington Hotel (today’s Josephinum.)

We will ask what the man in the Caucasian costume at right is thinking.  Could he be confusing this happy procession of the Asian monster with a fire-breathing history of its European cousin?  Or could he be carrying beneath that derby another kind of demon – that old stereotype of the Chinese “coolie boy?”

The crude image of the opium-eating heathen, who worked more for less and then gambled it away, was the stock response to these Asian immigrants.  By 1909, it had resulted in more than half a century of terrible treatment.  First these “celestials” were used as cheap labor to mine the gold and coal, build the railroads and do domestic service.  Then when the work was scarce they were peculiarly taxed and prevented from owning property, gaining citizenship and sending for relatives and wives.  Often they were shipped or railroaded out of town – both Seattle and Tacoma in the mid-1880s – on the very rails they had helped lay.

Here, on Fifth Avenue, some of them are back.  Both their costumes and cutback hairlines are from the Ching Dynasty, which in 1909 was in its 265^th year.   It would have two years to go.  In 1911 demonstrators in the International District would replace the dynasty’s dragon flags with the new republic’s single white star floating on a field of blue and red.  This was a design inspired by the Stars and Strips.

The contemporary scene is changed in every detail but one. The Westlake Public Market behind the dragon’s head has been replaced by Frederick & Nelsons.  (In 1983, yes, but not now in 2010. No no now it is Nordstrom.)  Across Pine the Olympic Stables and behind it the Methodist Church have both and long ago also left this corner on 5^th Avenue to Jay Jacobs.  (But now Jay Jacobs has left it too for Gap.)  The survivor: the four-story brick building a half-block south on 5^th that is signed the Hotel Shirley in the historical view is now a southern extension of the Banana Republic – I believe.

The dragon still dances every Chinese New Year, but not on this part of Fifth Avenue.

THE DRAGONS of CHINATOWN

This dragon was captured by Frank Shaw in the International District, or Chinatown, depending.  The slides date from April 19, 1966.

(Click photos to enlarge)

Through forty years now of looking at old photos of where we live – widely conceived – this is surely one of the best finds – except that I did not find it.  Rather Margo Ritter sent me a copy thinking that I might be interested.  And how!

Still I will compliment my intuitions.  Margo advised me that this subject was somewhere on top of Queen Anne Hill, and on studying the photo I soon imagined that the topography worked best when looking northeast from near Queen Anne Avenue and Howe Street.  With sleuthing help from Kim Turner* of the Queen Anne Historical Society, and historians Ron Edge and Greg Lange, that, as it developed, is where we posed Margo with her two sisters for the repeat.  Margo is on the right, Rhonde Rouleau, in the middle and Dorretta Prussing, on the left.

Dorretta is also a “repeat” from the “then” – although she and her sisters’ four or five year old grandmother is not easy to see.  Wearing the speck of a brilliant white skirt, right of center, is great-grandmother Julia Zauner, and sitting on the fence beside her in a white pinafore is her daughter Dorretta Reynolds.  Dorretta’s stepfather Sebastian Zauner, a sashmaker by trade, is with them, in black, and to the left of Julia.

Following Albert and Ed King (other specs in the photo) the Zauners were pathfinders to the top of Queen Anne Hill.  The grouping of these same homes can be found in the 1891 birdseye of Seattle.  There, like here, they are all alone at the end of the road to the summit of the hill.   This surely is the excitement of this photograph.  Here a mere 110 years ago is the first residential development near what would become the commercial heart of the unique “village” on top of Queen Anne Hill.

* A slide of Kim Turner leading a Mt. Pleasant Cemetery tour is included below with the feature on the I.W.W. graves there.

WEB EXTRAS

What a lovely story, full of serendipities. Anything to add to it, Paul?

Yes Jean much to add, and time to do it, at least until I lay me down to what we now call our “Nighty Bears” after the leadership of William Burden, known here for other thoughts with his own linked blog Will’s Convivium, for which he recently revealed he is about to write again.   Some of what follows you know from your trek through this balmy sodden Saturday taking a variety of “repeats’ or “nows” for other Queen Anne subjects.  Some of this will land here this evening.  Some through the week.  For the most part we will stick to the hill, up its sides and to the top like what is on top.   First a confession.  For all our prideful intuitions mentioned in the copy above, and for all the help we got from the local experts, we were told later by Margo (see above) that the photograph had a caption on the back of it – a revealing one.   Here it is, and you will note that it names names, gives a date, and even an address!  All our playful research was confirmed long ago by someone in the family scribbling on the back of the photograph.

There were at least three other photographs taken that day by an unnamed photographer.  They follow.

JOHN HAY SCHOOL:  The feature that follows  was first published in Pacific on August 14, 1988.  By now it features a few anachronisms.)

In 1905, U.S. diplomat and statesman John Hay died. In Seattle, Rueben Jones, secretary of the school board, suggested Seattle name its new school on Queen Anne Hill after Hay. His widow agreed and sent along a portrait of her husband. John Hay School opened in 1905, and for decades the portrait of the school’s namesake diplomat welcomed the grade school students of east Queen Anne. Now 83 years later, the twin-towered landmark whose back window’s looked across Bigelow Avenue North and down to Lake Union is closed, its fate uncertain. (This feature first appeared in Pacific on Aug.14, 1988.)

School closures on Queen Anne Hill have become a common thing of late, first West Queen Anne in 1981 followed soon after by Queen Anne High.  Now John Hay is closing – or rather moving. John Hay’s faculty and students are relocating five blocks south to Luther Field, across Galer Street from the old Queen Anne High, where a brand new John Hay is being built. This move is not the fault of the old timbered school, which apparent1y is still sturdy, but rather of its 1922 brick addition along Boston Street. The school board has determined that the brick plant might not withstand a serious earthquake. This is ironic because the addition was originally constructed as far north as possible on the school’s lot because, it was thought, the wooden structure’s years were numbered. Now it appears the brick addition may be dragging down the old flexible frame landmark with it.

However, there may be a brief reprise. The new John Hay, which is scheduled to open this fall (1988), may not be ready. Consequently, the old John Hay, which held its last open house for students and alumni this spring, may have to open again. When the students do at last take their five-block walk, the portrait of John Hay will lead them.

THE BAGLEY HOME Now leaving the top of the hill for its distinquished southern side and a look down and across at the first mansion there: the towering home of Alice and Clarence Bagley.  (First published in Pacific Mag, 9/27/1998)

Clarence and Alice Bagley were the first family to build a big home on the south slope of Queen Anne hill. This view looks over the rooftop of the Bagley mansion, and the tower where Clarence loved to study. The resi­dence was built in 1885 at the northeast comer of Second Avenue North and Aloha Street on a lot given them by Alice’s widowed father, Tom Mercer. Mercer School appears just beyond the home. Capitol Hill is on the horizon and the southern end of Lake Union is barely visible on the left.

Clarence Bagley is perhaps the name most important to the historiography of Seattle and King County. He was only 9 in 1852 when the Bagleys, Hortons, Mercers (including Alice) and Shoudys came west by wagons over the Oregon Trail. When his family moved on from Salem, Ore., to Seattle in 1860, they were the first settlers to arrive here in a wagon.  Clarence walked ahead of the horse. Already scholarly, he was about to begin a life of study on Puget Sound that more than a half-century later would yield six big volumes of history in our pioneer canon.

Bagley learned the skills of journalist and job printer until he settled in as a public works bureaucrat. In 1900, he was appointed secretary to the Seattle Board of Public Works. All the while he was collecting.  He did it so well that when The Seattle Times lost a large portion of its back issues in a 1913 fire, he helped replace them. The University of Washington’s Northwest Collection is also well stocked with Bagley’s clips and other revealing ephemera.

All the Bagley children – four daughters and one son – were married in the family mansion. They regularly returned with their own children, especially for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Alice died there May 10, 1926, and Clarence followed Feb. 26, 1932. He was 88. During most of the Depression the big house sat empty.  It was tom down in 1944.

MERCER SCHOOL (First published in Pacific Mag. Aug. 28, 1988.)

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In 1890, Seattle was a community in which most residents were newcomers.  Approaching 50,000 citizens, the city had grown ten fold in 10 years, and the shock that this immigrant flood had on public works and city services required some drastic solutions – especially in education. Four new schools were opened in Seattle in 1890:

T.T. Minor, named after a former mayor who died in a hunting accident the year before; Rainier, named after an English admiral who fought against the colonies in the War for Independence; Columbia, a name derived from the Italian explorer whose search for India led to discovery of a new continent; and Mercer School, shown here at the foot of Queen Anne Hill and named after Thomas Mercer, a respected elderly settler who lived nearby.

Perhaps the best indication of the community’s affection for Mercer was that after he sold the city the site for the school, they named it after him. Thomas Mercer was also an early director of the school district. Given his overall prominence, we might assume the man standing beside the cow in the foreground is Thomas Mercer himself: There is nothing about the figure that would contradict this speculation. (Included here – nearby – is a short feature on the Mercer home.)

Mercer School was packed its opening year with nine teachers and 456 students in seven grades in seven classrooms. At its peak the school enrolled 649 students. Relief came in 1902 when Warren School was opened at the present site-of the Seattle Coliseum and Mercer’s enrollment was almost halved to 361.  Mercer School closed in 1933, but occasionally was used after that as a training center for public school custodians. The building was razed and replaced with the Seattle Public Schools Administration Building in 1948.  More recently the northwest corner of 4^th and Valley has been filled with Merrill Gardens, another upscale retirement community.

QUEEN ANNE’S SOUTH FACE (First published  Nov. 26, 1989 in Pacific Mag.)

CLICK to ENLARGE and sometimes CLICK AGAIN

This mid-1890s view looking north from lower Queen Anne to the Queen Anne Hill horizon was copied from an old album in the Museum of History and Industry library. The scene was recorded from David and Louisa Denny’s home site, between Queen Anne Avenue on the left and the right-of-way for the as-yet ungraded First Avenue North on the right. Mercer Street is screened behind the Dennys’ fence, which transects the scene. The prominent duplex just right of center sits at the contemporary site of Easy Street Records, formerly the home of Tower Books.

Most evident is the swampy condition of the land at the foot of Queen Anne Hill. In the foreground the Dennys have done some clearing, grading and landscaping for a few fruit trees, but across Mercer Street the thicket between the duplex and Queen Anne Avenue is still dense and rooted in a bog. Now the hill’s clear-cut horizon has been replanted with a deciduous forest, which shades a neighborhood of generally low-profile homes and apartments.

BOBTAILS to LOWER QUEEN ANNE (This first appeared in the May 3, 1992 Seattle Times Pacific Magazine.)

This recording of Seattle horse trolley nears its lower Queen Anne terminus was shared with my by Lawton Gowey.  Lawton knew the history of Seattle transportation as well as anyone and his photo collection on the subject was most impressive.

Lawton was life-long Queen Anne resident and for years finance director for the Seattle Water Department.  He began his study of Seattle’s trolleys as a teenager. Gowey wrote on the back of the photo: “View apparently taken on what was later 1st Ave. West, between Mercer & Roy Streets. Shows a horse car still in service although overhead had been installed for electric operation.”

Frank Osgood’s Seattle Street Railway began running up Second Avenue Sept.

23, 1884. By the end of the year the system included three miles of track, four cars and 20 horses. Because of Seattle’s steep grades, Osgood was forced to use teams of horses. By the end of the following year the company’s service was extended to Lower Queen Anne, where we “apparently” see it here.

On March 30, 1889, the Seattle Electric Railway began service on the old horse-drawn tramline. A few horse cars continued to operate until April 5. This indicates that this view was likely photographed on a sunny spring day in 1889.

ST. ANNE’S (First appeared in Pacific Mag on Nov. 26, 1995)

Click to Enlarge

The Spanish Mission that Queen Anne Catholics chose for their first parish atop the hill was an exotic landmark among the neighborhood’s clapboards. The rains that swept across the face of the hill soon penetrated its stucco skin. Even in this view, photographed within a few years of the church’s 1908 dedication, the weather’s marks are taking shape on the facade.

The dedication in 1923 of a school behind the church was an addition expected of most prospering parishes. Of course, the new school required a convent for the sisters who taught there. During the school’s construction there arrived from Limerick County what the church’s thumbnail history described as “the handsome Irish priest.” This event was especially fortunate for the new school, for it quickly became the young Father Thomas Quain’s primary interest. Marcelli Hickman, a St. Anne’s parishioner since the mid 1930s, remembers the persuasive Quain’s promotions.

Once the priest announced from his pulpit that he was about to descend to take up a collection for new baseball uniforms and did not want to hear any jingling, only rustling, as he passed the plate.

By the time of Father Quain’s arrival the church was practically a ruin. In 1926 it was rebuilt inside and out and the crumbling stucco was covered with shingles. The congregation grew so that in 1946 the parish converted the basement hall into a second chapel and two 11 o’clock morning Masses were run concurrently, upstairs and down.

When he died in 1959, Father Quain had been at St. Anne’s’ for 37 years. On Dec. 24, he was laid in state in the church’s chancel, surrounded by candles and hundreds of parishioners; many baptized, confirmed and married by this priest. Within four years the congregation moved into its new sanctuary across Lee Street, and the old parish site was cleared to expand the school playground.

THE WOBBLIES in MOUNT PLEASANT CEMETERY (First published in Pacific for June 22, 1997)

This portrait of Industrial Workers of The World members – Wobblies – is either of mourners or celebrants. John Looney, Felix Baran and Hugo Gerlot were among five IWW members killed aboard the “mosquito fleet” steamer Verona as it met a hail of bullets fired by members of the Everett Improvement Club in an event known since as “the Everett Massacre.”

We might expect this to be a scene at the interment of the three at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill after the Nov. 5, 1916, mayhem on the Everett waterfront. However, this may rather be a moment in the 1917 May Day parade when, after several thousand Wobblies and supporters marched from union headquarters in the Pioneer Square district north on Second Avenue and up Queen Anne Hill to the grave site, they marched back again to the county jail. Surrounding it they sang, with the IWW prisoners inside, the songs of Joe Hill, another Wobblies martyr.

Four days later all 74 accused “Verona men” were released after their acquittal in the deaths of two Everett “improvers” the previous fall.

Among the hundreds buried at Mount Pleasant are pioneers William and Sarah Bell, Mayor George Cotterill, Elisabeth Cooper~Levi, founder of the Jewish Benevolent Society; Bertha Pitts­Campbell, founder of the nation’s first black sorority; Sam Smith, longtime Seattle city councilman; and the unclaimed bodies from the 1910 Wellington train dis­aster on Stevens Pass.

The McClure Middle School students posing in the “now” photo beside the three IWW members’ single gravestone were taking part in the Queen Anne Historical Society’s May 8 (1997) tour of the cemetery, which included the reading by students of a poem by Filipino-American poet Carlos Bulosan, who is also buried there. Eighty years and seven days earlier, as part of that May Day parade, a portion of the ashes of another poet, Joe Hill, was also interred at Mount Pleasant while union members sang his songs.

CLICK TO ENLARGE the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map detail of the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery.

WEST QUEEN ANNE PRIMARY SCHOOL (First printed in Pacific, 6/5/1988)

It is gratifying that no distressing differences exist between this week’s “now” and “then” photos of West Queen Anne School. The survival of this Romanesque landmark is one of Seattle’s better preservation victories. (This appeared first in Pacific’s June 5, 1988 issue.  Since then the “now” negative has been filed in a keeping so safe I cannot find it, Jean’s more timely “now” – taken yesterday Oct. 9, 2010 – proves the preservation point just as well – or better.)

After construction in 1896, the school’s dark red brick made it more of a silhouette than a reflecting surface. This solidity was emphasized first in 1900, when the larger and contrasting light brick high school was built on Queen Anne’s eastern summit, and again in 1916 when West Queen Anne’s wide southern wing was added. The school’s southern wing is the one big difference in this comparison.

The older photo was shot sometime after 1902, when a four-room addition gave the structure its symmetrical appeal. Although the 1916 addition upsets this U-shaped balance, its design and brick and stone detailing are faithful to the original. It was a prudent addition, for by 1918 West Queen Anne enrolled 643 students. This was the height of the neighborhood’s fecundity. A slow decline in the birth rate followed, and enrollment steadily declined until, in 1981, the doors were closed for good. Happily, they were opened again in 1984 to 49 living units.

The conversion from classrooms to condominiums was the consequence of cooperation between the Seattle School District, the Historic Seattle Preservation and Development Authority and a private developing group known as West Queen Anne Associates.

(DOUBLE-CLICK all that follows to find the Old Scratches in the DETAILS)

The McGRAW STREET BRIDGE Under the 1916 SNOW (This first appeared in Pacific on March 11, 2001.)

Early in February 1916, Elizabeth Utke Jorgensen climbed the stairs to the second floor of her and her husband Carl’s home on Nob Hill Avenue and took this photograph of the McGraw Street Bridge. The timber trestle crossing the Third Avenue North ravine was a temporary link in the Queen Anne Boulevard that hill residents promoted and helped pay for during its construction between 1911 and this, the year of the “Big Snow” of 1916.

More than 60 feet deep, the ravine is a unique feature on the hill, and the Queen Anne Historical Society’s published history “Queen Anne Community on the Hill” includes a good description of both its ice-age geology and public-works history.

One of the first women to graduate from the University of Copenhagen, Elizabeth Utke immigrated in the early 1890s to the United States, where she found her degrees in logic and mathematics useless. Pursuing two of the few occupations open to her, she attended secretary school while earning her way as a seam­stress with a knack for “fancy work.” She married Carl Jorgensen, a Norwegian sea captain, and the couple toured the West Coast before winding up in Nome, Alaska, during the gold rush in the early 20th century.

In Alaska Elizabeth designed and built shallow draft landing craft that she and her husband operated in a prosperous lighterage (barge) business, moving miners and supplies between the ships they arrived on and the shallow shoreline of Nome. After returning to Seattle and constructing their home overlooking the ravine, the couple raised a family while Elizabeth continued to practice her skills in photography, sewing and watercolors. Margaret DeLacy has cherished examples -including this snow scene -of her grandmother’s work in all three media.

The contemporary photograph, (missing for the moment), was recorded from the rear window of the Queen Anne Hill home where 75 years earlier Elizabeth Jorgensen photographed a timber-trestle McGraw Street Bridge, above. The 1936 concrete arched bridge that replaced it is now barely visible (indeed) through the branches of the trees that more than fill the Third Avenue North ravine below the bridge.

NOTE: More Queen Anne Hill related features will appear as Queen Anne Addendums through the coming week. (We still have to uncover some of the imagery.)

We will say that there are three subjects here: the steel one, floating at the center, and to either side of it two dark structures, both made of wood: the Oriental Pier on the right and the Bell Street trestle on the left.

The date for this look north on the waterfront from the Virginia Street Pier is probably 1910.  That was the last year for the temporary Bell St. trestle, which was extended into the bay to carry thru a flume most of Denny Hill.  By aiming powerful water canons at the hill it was transformed into flowing mud and carried far off shore.

The almost two-block long Orient Pier was built parallel to Railroad Avenue because Elliott Bay was too deep here to sink piles for finger piers. It was replaced in the 1920s with the also wide-bodied Lenora Street pier, which in the 1990s gave way to the Bell Harbor Marina in the “now.”

The U.S. Army Transport Burnside was war-happy America’s first big booty from the Spanish American war.  Built in 1882 at Newcastle on the Tyne, it was sold in 1891 to a Spanish company that named it the Rita.  With its capture off the coast of Cuba in 1898 it was renamed the Burnside and outfitted by the army for laying cable communications, first in the Philippines and then Alaska.  For instance, in 1903 it strung underwater cable between Sitka and Juneau and the following year continued laying it to Seattle.  With a breath of 36.7 feet the Burnside was about one-third the width of the cruise ship taking its place and much more in the “now.”

STRANGE ENCOUNTERS OF THE WATSON

On the morning of Sept. 29, 1915 the steam schooner Paraiso lost in fog tore an 18-foot long hole in the starboard side of the 253-foot long Admiral Watson along the south side of the Port of Seattle’s original Bell Street terminal.  The Watson’s master Capt. M.M. Jensen saved the ship from slipping into the unusually deep water there by quickly ordering its stern lines cast off and its bowlines winched to pull the ship closer to shore.  Jensen was the hero of the day that saw hundreds of locals catch trolleys and jitneys to visit the sunken Admiral – or at least the top of the steamship so recently refurbished that it was known at the “yacht of the Admiral Line.”

Launched in the east in 1901 the Watson was brought around in 1905 and worked the West Coast on various packets between Puget Sound and San Francisco and also to Alaska until it was sold to Japanese shipbreakers in 1934.  Except for this 1915 accident and a temporary stranding in 1910 on Waada Island off Neah Bay the Admiral Watson with its 135 first-class accommodations, six deluxe suites, and 150 beds in steerage was a very safe and serviceable passenger steamer.

Its greatest encounter was with the legendary “giant seagull” off Willapa Bay. The famous bird landed on the Watson’s wireless antenna when the ship was transmitting the latest ball scores.  Instantly electrocuted, the profound gull fell to the deck.  The sailors quickly measured its wingspan at “six feet three inches tip to tip” and the bird weighed 28 pounds.  For twenty years sailors had reported on the tinkling bell sound the giant made as it circled their ships, and the source for this mysterious music was revealed with the birds demise.  Attached to one of its legs was a silver band and to the band a swinging metal tag. (For those who wish to learn more, this story is told in detail on p. 156 of the McCurdy Marine History of the Pac. Northwest.)

Another view of the Watson above, not to be confused with Emmett Watson, below left, conversing with Murray Morgan, the “dean of Northwest historians,” at the re-opening of the Ivar’s Acres of Clams on Pier 54 “at the foot of Madison” in 1987 – I believe.  I snapped the bottom shot.

COSMOPOLITAN BEACH TOWN BELOW BELLTOWN

In the 1890s the waterfront from Pike Street north to Broad Street was developed into a community of shacks made from scrounged materials, including those deposited by the tides.  There was only one break in the bluff separating this squatter’s strip from their Denny Hill & Belltown neighbors above them.  The north entrance to this “Belltown ravine” shows on the far left of a scene recorded from the Great Northern RR trestle in 1898 or 99 by the Norwegian photographer, Anders Wilse.  North of Bell Street a lower bluff resumed and petered away by Broad Street.  Here the entrance to the ravine is crowded with the waterfront’s most ambitious grouping of shacks, appointed with their own seawall and flagpole.

A Post-Intelligencer reporter who visited this “strange beachcombers village” in 1891 noted, “you can hear a dozen languages and dialects.  Heavy-faced Indians, black-eyed Greeks, swarthy-Italians, red-haired Irishmen and Danes, Swedes and Norwegians with flaxen locks are mingled in this cosmopolitan settlement.  The men fish, do longshore jobs, pick up driftwood and lounge in the sun; while the women stand at their doors and gossip, and the children, too young to know social or race distinctions, dig holes in the cliff and the beach, make houses of pebbles and launch boats in the waves.”

Beginning in 1903, however, construction of the north approach to the Great Northern tunnel beneath the city uprooted this beach community, replacing it with more tracks and fill.  Soon the ravine was also filled with Denny Hill dirt that included at least one native skeleton that was discovered at this site during foundation work on the Port of Seattle’s World Trade Center.

FISH DOCKS

Following the extended commotion surrounding the gold rush of the late 1890s the Seattle waterfront settled into vocational routines that located much of the fish-processing north from and including the Pike Street.   South of the Pike Street dock as far as King Street the central waterfront was used generally for transportation and shipping of all sorts.  Not surprisingly many of the longer finger piers there – between piers 46 and 58 – were owned by railroads.

Both these “now & then” look north from the second floor of Pier 59 (at the foot of Pike Street).  In the early 20^th century scene Pier 62 – the Gaffney Dock – blocks the view beyond Pine Street.   The short pier of the San Juan Fish Company is on the far right and berthed beside it are the company halibut steamers the Grant, at the center of the photograph, and the San Juan.  The name was borrowed from the islands where James E. Davis, one of the company’s partners, was born in 1871, the first child born to any settler on Lopez Island it was claimed.

One of the venerable old plows on Puget Sound is on the left – the 154-ft. side-wheeler Geo. E. Starr.  When launched near the foot of Cherry Street in 1879 she was the largest vessel built on Puget Sound.  When she retired in 1911 the Starr was tied off shore to a buoy in Elliott Bay to store dynamite.

Following World War 2, Port Commissioner E. H. Savage described the central waterfront as “absolutely obsolete. It belongs to the Gold Rush period.”  As a corrective the Port proposed to build long piers paralleling the waterfront to berth freighters of lengths that would dwarf the Starr.  And in December 1945 the Port started in on this plan by buying up Piers 60 and 61, the home then of two fish companies called Whiz and Palace.  Savage explained, “This property is too expensive for birthing fishing craft.”

When the “container revolution” revised the Port’s post-war vision the old working central waterfront turned increasingly to play.  In 1975 Pier 60 was demolished for construction of the Seattle Aquarium.  In the 1980s the pier sheds on the Gaffney dock and its neighbor the Virginia Street pier were razed to make room eventually for summer concerts.  And in the 1990s a long quay was at last built.  North – not south — of Lenora Street it was designed primarily for tour ships.

ARMORY ON WESTERN

From this prospect on the bluff below its battlements the military lines and slotted towers of the old National Guard Armory on the slope of Denny Hill stood out like the bastion it was not.  The architectural style was strictly high military kitsch.  It stood on the west side of Western Avenue and filled most of the block between Virginia and Lenora Streets. Now (top-right) from directly below, the site is hidden behind the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the railroad’s retaining wall that leads to the RR Tunnel’s north portal.  Through the Armory’s 59 years the honeycomb of about 150 rooms within its 3-foot thick brick – about one million of them – walls saw more auto shows, conventions, athletics (in its own pool), and community services than it did military drills and standing guard in defense of Seattle.

Built just north of the Pike Place Market on Western Avenue the armory was dedicated on April 1, 1909 or two years after the market opened.  Hence, our 1908 view, bottom-left does not show it, while our 1910 view, bottom-middle, does.  A month later during an indoor Seattle Athletic Club meet an overcrowded gallery collapsed maiming many and killing a few.

The armory was outfitted with showers and free food services during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and during the ensuing Second World War it was used by both the Greater Seattle Defense Chest as a hospitality center for servicemen and by the Seattle General Depot as a warehouse.   Earlier, in 1939, most of the military uses were transferred to the then new steam lined armory that survives as the Seattle Center Centerhouse.

Following WW2 the state’s unemployment compensation offices were housed within these red walls.  In April 1947 a fire that began in the basement furnace room swept through the state offices postponing the payment of nearly 2000 checks to the unemployed and veterans.  With only two exits the building had already in 1927 been tagged as a firetrap, still it was repaired following the ’47 fire, but not following the larger fire of 1962 after which it was merely shored up.  In the January 7, ’62 blaze much of the west wall fell on the northbound lanes of the Alaskan Way Viaduct knocking holes in its deck and cracking its supports.

While asking to purchase the armory from the National Guard the Seattle City Council described its 1959 vision of the armory site that featured some combination of lookout park and garage but without the brick battlements.   Nine years later when demolition expert John McFarland began tearing it down local preservationists, including architects Victor Steinbreuck, Fred Bassetti and Laurie Olin, put a temporary stop to it.  The proposals that quickly followed featured either restoring what was left of the Armory for small shops or saving its “symbolic parts” including a surviving south wall turret for a lookout tower connected with the proposed park.  Revealing a preservationist stripe of his own the contractor McFarland offered to save the armory’s grand arched entrance at his own expense.   In this instance, however, the City Council turned a cold cheek to preservation from all quarters and instructed the wrecker to resume his wrecking.

(Principal historical photo, upper-left, used courtesy of Chris Jacobsen)

ABOVE:  Three looks south on Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way), before, during and after the mid 1930s construction of the seawall between Madison and Bay Streets.   The top “before” view dates from June 22, 1934.  The bottom “after” scene from 1936.   Note the Lenora Street Pier on the right, and the Virginia Street Dock, right-of-center.  The three were taken from the Lenora Street Viaduct or overpass.  (Courtesy Municipal Archive)