(click to enlarge photos)

This past spring, Jean Sherrard and I attended the memorial service for Virginia Lee Slate Eals, mother of our friend, the writer Clay Eals. The oldest of three sons, Clay was the principal eulogist, and his memories of his mother were stirring.

The memorial was held at Park West Care Center, where Virginia spent the last six years of a buoyant life that began 87 years earlier, only seven West Seattle blocks away. The big room was filled with flowers, family, friends and photographs. The candid sidewalk snapshot shown here was among them.

From the 1930s into the 1950s, coming upon sidewalk photographers with the pitch of a candid portrait for a low price was commonplace. Virginia Slate had four of them in her album, all taken in her prime, before and during World War II. Clay explains, “She had many jobs downtown, and several of them were copy-girl type positions, delivering printed material from one place to another, so it’s no surprise that person-on-the-street photographers snapped her multiple times.”

With the then-popular Manning’s coffee house and the Colonial Theatre marquee behind her, both the place and time are easy to identify. The view looks north on the west side of Fourth Avenue between Pike and Pine streets in 1945, the year the films “Castle of Crime” and “Hotel Berlin,” on the marquees, upper-left, were making their American runs.

In 1970, Virginia went back to work, in part to help pay for her sons’ education. Clay notes that her job with the Bellevue Traffic Violations Bureau “was both tough and enlightening.” In a letter to Clay during her 18 years there, Virginia reflected, “It’s amazing how many people are repeaters on traffic violations. I’ve been cussed at and told off, which I was expecting, and also lied to. You can never tell by just looking at people what they are like. … I saw a part of life I’ve not been exposed to before, and it’s fascinating and depressing. It makes you appreciate good friends and family all the more.”

WEB EXTRAS

Hey Paul, this time round, I just know you’ve got a treasure trove to share with us – but let’s begin with Clay’s extraordinary and moving eulogy for his mom Virginia. What’s more, we’ve illustrated it with a sampler of family photographs supplied by Clay.

And now, on to your mini-survey of street photography now and then from around the planet. And of course I’ll prompt this outpouring with my usual query:

Anything to add, Paul?

YES Jean.

First something more about Clay Eals and 4th Avenue north of Pike.   This part of 4th first – here in 1947 with the old Colonial.

On October 18, 2009 we put up on this blog a look at this from about the same year – about.  It was – do you remember Jean? – a night shots with all the lovely neon aglow and you repeating it in the evening too.  I came with you.   That now-then also featured an excerpt from film reviewer Bill White’s work-in-progress, “Cinema Penitentiary.”  If might be something to visit again for those who know how to use the search machinery.   Ask to see anything with “Colonial.”

Next, Clay also figured in another 2009 insertion – the one for June 5th.  This was an article putting the Portola Theatre in its proper place – a long move from West Seattle to Queen Anne Hill.  Ask to see anything with “Portola” or ask for “Eals.”   He comes up in some other stories although he is not identified.  He hides more than lurks.  You can also – you know Jean because you put him there – find him in the “now” repeat shot for this candid photo of his mother in this – and back to it – block.

Now as time allows (bedtime) I’ll lay in three stories that include street candor, followed by examples of another photographer’s (Victor Lydgman) candid shots on Pike Street (mostly) from the early 1960s, and a samples of my own Broadway Bus Stop project of 1976-77.  (About this last I have an uncanny feeling that I showed a lot of these earlier on this blog but I could only find one, and so I will go ahead with it.)  I might mix in some other grace notes if they make themselves heard before another nights “nightybears,” which  you know is our mutual friend Bill Burden’s (of the button on our front page) customary salutation for metabolic closure, that is, which is his “good night.”

MILLER’S CANDOR

The Seattle News-Letter, a turn-of-the-century weekly, published candid photographs of locals on the city’s sidewalks to accompany a gossipy front-page column, “Stories of the Streets and of the Town.”  The couple “posing” here was photographed for the series, although it seems that this shot never made it to print.  Perhaps the photographer could not pry any stories from them.

The photographer was a young Walter P. Miller.  Pieces of his estate, including these negatives for the tabloid – about 100 of them – survived in their original wraps.  Roger Dudley Jr.s’ father worked for Walter Miller and in the mid-1930s bought out the business.  The 3-inch-square flexible negatives were part of the deal.  Roger Dudley Jr. took over his father’s studio 20 years later, and after a quarter-century more of commercial photography he retire and gave the negatives – these candid ones – to me.  Miller lightly penciled the names of most of his subjects on his negative holders.  This couple was one of the exceptions.

According to Lois Bark, costume curator for the Museum of History and Industry [in 1993 when this story first appeared in Pacific – on April 12] the woman is dressed conservatively but still modishly.  Her hat, held in place with a long pin, is most likely straw-trimmed with tulle (a fine net) and artificial flowers.  Her S-shaped figure is a creation of corsets, whale bones, petticoats, hip pads and hooks, and below all that maybe an S-shaped anatomy.  Her two-piece walking dress was certainly black, the common dress color of the time, and most likely wool.  It required help to get on and off and could not be cleaned, only brushed and spotted.

The man is distinguished by his gold chain.  His double-vested waistline is another projection of his affluence or, at least, self-importance.

The couple stands on the southeast corner of First Ave. and Union Street.  The pioneer Arthur and Mary Denny home is directly behind them and over their shoulders at the northeast corner is their son Orion Denny’s home.   In 1852 he became the first boy born to white settlers in the village of Seattle.  He died in 1916.

TWO MORE FROM MILLERS CANDID ONE HUNDRED

Walter Millers example of candid street photography are rare – for Seattle.  Perhaps for anywhere, for the practice of “catching” subjects that were not confused by their own movement was dependent on still subjects and/or fast equipment.

MORE CANDOR ON FOURTH AVENUE NEAR (OR AT) PIKE STREET

Although the date for this Fourth and Pike scene is recorded on neither the original negative nor its protective envelop, uncovering it was not difficult.  The newsstand at the center of this view includes copies of both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A 15-power magnifying glass reveals the date.  It is Monday, July 25, 1938.

The Post-Intelligencer, just above the dealer’s head, announced “A New Forest Fire Rages at Sol Duc.”  A week and a half of record heat had not only encouraged fires around Puget Sound, but also filled its beaches.

On this Monday, Seattle was even hotter with anticipation of a Tuesday-night fight.  Jack Dempsey’s photograph is on the front page of the P-I. The “Mighty Manassa Mauler” was in town to referee what those who sport so consider one of the great sporting events in the city’s history: the Freddie Steele-Al Hostak fight for the middleweight title.

About 30 yours after this photograph was recorded, hometown-tough Hostak, in front of 35,000 sweating fans at Civic Field (now the Seattle Center Stadium) made quick work of the champion Steele.  The P.I.’s purple-penned sports reporter, Royal Brougham, reported “Four times the twenty-two-year-old Seattle boy’s steel-tempered knuckles sent the champion reeling into the rosin.”  Hostak brought the belt to Seattle by a knockout in the first minute of the first round.

The day’s fevered condition was also encouraged at the Colonial Theatre (a half-block up Fourth) where, the Time’s reported, “an eternal triangle in the heart of the African jungle brings added thrills in Tarzan’s Revenge.”   The apeman’s affection for a young lady on safari with her father fires the resentment of her jealous fiancé.  We will not reveal the ending of this hot affair, although by Wednesday the 27^th, Seattle had cooled off.

[HERE we remind the reader that another visit to the Colonial was offered on this blog on Oct. 18, 2009 with an excerpt from film critic Bill White’s work-in-progress, “Cinema Penitentiary.”  It is illustrated with a neon-lighted night view of Fourth from this corner  in 1945.  Search for “Colonial.”]

CANDOR (OR FEVERED PRODUCE EXHIBITION) AT THE PIKE PLACE MARKET ca. 1907

FARMERS AND FAMILIES

(This was first published in Pacific on August 6, 2006.  The Pike Place Market and the city were preparing for the former’s100^th Anniversary.)

A century ago Seattle, although barely over fifty, was already a metropolis with a population surging towards 200,000.   Consequently, now our community’s centennials are multiplying.  This view of boxes, sacks and rows of wagons and customers is offered as an early marker for the coming100th birthday of one of Seattle’s greatest institutions, the Pike Place Public Market.

Both the “then” and “now” look east from the inside angle of this L-shaped landmark.  The contemporary view also looks over the rump of Rachel, (bottom-left) the Market’s famous brass piggy bank, which when empty is 200 pounds lighter than her namesake 750 pound Rachel, the 1985 winner of the Island County Fair.   Since she was introduced to the Market in 1986 Rachel has contributed about $8,000 a year to its supporting Market Foundation.  Most of this largess has been dropped through the slot in her back as small coins.  It has amounted to heavy heaps of them.

Next year – the Centennial Year – the Market Foundation, and the Friends of the Market, and many other vital players in the closely-packed universe that is the Market will be helping and coaxing us to celebrate what local architect Fred Bassetti famously describe in the mid-1960s as “An honest place in a phony time.”  And while it may be argued that the times have gotten even phonier the market has held onto much of its candor.

The historical view may well date from the Market’s first year, 1907.  If not, then the postcard photographer Otto Frasch recorded it soon after.   It is a scene revealing the original purpose of the Public Market:  “farmers and families” meeting directly and with no “middleman” between them.

Then and Now Captions together:  The Pike Place Market started out in the summer of 1907 as a city-supported place where farmers could sell their produce directly to homemakers.  Since then the Market culture has developed many more attractions including crafts, performers, restaurants, and the human delights that are only delivered by milling and moving crowds.

BELOW THE PIG ON PIKE PLACE

ONE BLOCK SOUTH OF THE PIG THE FIREMAN AND THE YOUNG WOMAN SITS THE BED

FOUR FROM JEAN AND FOUR FROM BERANGERE

This morning I suggested to both our Jean and our Berangere that they apply some candor to this and they have with the following examples pulled from their profound larders or happy hordes or profound multitudes.  Four for each – with Jean first.

FOUR FROM VICTOR LYDGMAN – CA. 1962

This quartet hangs around Pike Street too.

BROADWAY BUS STOP – 1976-77

For the two years I lived above Peter’s on Broadway in the grand-box apartment with two floors handed on from Cornish students and faculty to Cornish faculty and students through many years, I took the opportunity to photograph the bus stop across Broadway.  It was laid beside the east facade of Marketime, a big place with food and sundries.  The light was wonderfully mellow as it bounced off our side of Broadway in the afternoons.  In the mornings it slanted from the south – left – directly into the architecture of the bus stop shed and those who were protected by it.  I recorded a few thousand shots, both black and white and color.  The Friends of Rag also put on a fashion show at the bus stop for the project.  I asked many friends to sit for portraits with my zoom lens poking out below the open kitchen window on the second floor above the kindly Peter’s front door.  Peter, I think, was the first gay clothier in Seattle, and he was also one of the first oulets for the Helix weekly in the late 60s.  Here are a few examples taken from the thousands.  A few of these – or others – were exhibited on city buses at the time.  (Not all the buses.)

AT LAST MORE SIDEWALK CANDOR

TWO STREET SNAPS OF DELIA & LEWIS WHITTELSEY

Delia and Lewis, like may others, had a custom of doing much of their shopping downtown, and often the Pike Place Market was among their stops.  As with Clay Eals’ mother Virginia this frequency meant that they had more than one chance to purchase a candid snapshot of them having their ways on a downtown street.  Lewis Whittelsey “contribued” to his blog with his photography on another Sunday.  You can search for him.

(click photos to enlarge)

Soon after the Medical Dental Building at 509 Olive Way was completed in 1925 a photographer climbed to the roof of the Wilson Business College, one long block north at 5th and Virginia, and recorded this view looking back at the grand new health center’s soaring irregularities. The new skyscraper was a brilliant standout for the business district’s north end.  Built on five-star Times Square corner of 5th, Olive, Stewart, and Westlake it gained the charms of asymmetry, a commitment that crowns the top with a small stepping tower.

That the Medical Dental Building it not easily mistaken for any other Seattle structure is because of its odd and soaring shape as much as for its gleaming tiles, which at the time were the preferred skin used in construction projects throughout the business district – if the tiles could be afforded. The new building continued the clean reflecting glow of the brilliant Frederick and Nelson Department Store (1918), seen here behind it at 5th and pine.  It also complimented the brilliance of architects Bebb and Gould’s home for The Seattle Times.  The Times Square Building is both cut like a piece of cake and decorated like one with a terra-cotta egg shell “frosting.”

Apart from these buoyant structures practically all else in this view is dark and made of wood and warm brick.  For instance, the top three stories of the Times home, showing here on the right, rise above the dark Hotel Rainbow. Although here only in its “teens,” the big wooden box with small towers and simple bays was a Victorian hangover constructed soon after the Denny Regrade had completed lowering Denny Hill west of 5th Avenue to its present grades in 1910-11.

The Rainbow sat at the northwest corner of 5th and Stewart and survived into the 1930s when it was replaced with a small service station.  That it is now a mere parking lot puzzles this writer about how such an important site can be so modestly employed.

We will conclude with a readers’ quiz followed by the answer.  What two distinguished landmarks – not surviving in either our “then” or “now” – filled the block showing here on the left or east side of 5th Ave.?  The answer: the Orpheum Theatre (1927-1967) and the Benjamin Franklin Hotel (1928-1967).  Remember them?

WEB EXTRAS

Jean writes: I occasionally find myself wandering Seattle rooftops when searching for ‘Then’ footprints. Here are a few alternate views from the Griffin building:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yup Jean, and as time allows and seems prudent I’ll go looking for past features that hang around the neighborhood.  Again, I am more likely to find the “then’s” than the “nows” for over nearly 25 pre-digital years I had a careless habit of not looking back at my own “now” negatives, and they are rather a jumble now, although they are safe in binders and with time they could all be put in order and dated.  But not now.  I will grab what we can before retiring.  Tomorrow – Sunday – I’ll find some more.  Meanwhile please forgive my typos and dyslexic flips.  I’ll hope to discover and correct or flip them tomorrow.  Now we will start with another story that is at the same intersection of 5th and Virginia although much earlier – ca. 1886.  But you know this, because you took the “now” for it recently.  We agree that these two views from Virginia south on 5th will be a pair to use in our show with Berangere at the Museum of History and Industry next April and thereafter for a few months.

THE WAGON ROAD TO QUEEN ANNE

In the mid-l880s there was no suburbia separating the city from the country. This week’s historical scene is evidence of that. It was photographed looking south across downtown Seattle’s northern border. The foreground is bucolic.

The view was photographed from the eastern slope of now-regraded Denny Hill.  The evidence for this claim is the shaft of light that streaks across the scene’s foreground and bathes the fence posts in a late-afternoon glow. That beam cuts through the hill in line with Virginia Street, which was a valley between the two humps of Denny Hill.

After a little homework, I determined that the boxy white building just right of the scene’s center and above the break in the fence sits on the north side of Pike Street in the second lot west of Fifth Avenue. The clear break running diagonally between the buildings across the scene’s center is Fifth Avenue. The view shows Fifth ending at the Territorial University’s greenbelt.

The three principal landmarks – with towers – on the horizon left to right are Coppins Watertower at 9^th and Columbia, Central School at 6^th and Madison, and the Territorial University at 4^th and Seneca. No structures survive from the old scene to the new. And Denny Hill and Denny Knoll have long since been graded away.   In place of the wagon ruts are monorail struts.  The level of the pre-regrade intersection is about 40 feet higher than Jean’s recent “now.”  So the wagon road was in places close to the level of the monorail.  Believe it or not.

FRANK SHAW – 2 TRANSPARENCIES LOOKING SO. on 5th TOWARD STEWART: 1962

TIMES SQUARE

The photograph above of Times Square includes three prominent Seattle fixtures.  One is moving, one is long gone and the third survives. The survivor, of course, is the Times Square Building, home of The Seattle Times from 1916 to 1931 at the irregular intersection of Westlake and Fifth avenues with Olive and Stewart streets. The moving subject is Car 51, one of the six Niles cars that the Pacific Northwest Traction Co. bought from Niles, Ohio, for the Seattle-Everett Interurban. Car 51 continued to serve until the Interurban’s last day, Feb. 20,1939. The missing landmark is the noble little structure in the foreground, built in 1917 for a bus stop and underground rest rooms. It has been replaced by a simple bus shelter.

Times Square borrowed its name from New York City’s Times Square and, like its East Coast namesake, was highlighted by a newspaper. The building, embellished with granite and terra cotta, is perhaps the city’s best memorial to the art of Carl Gould, Seattle’s most celebrated turn-of-the-century architect. He designed it in a Beaux Arts style and this flatiron confection is still widely admired.

A LITTER OF TRIANGLES

HOMES FOR THE SEATTLE TIMES

In “RAISE HELL and Sell Newspapers,” Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConagy’s 1996 history of Col. Alden J. Blethen marking the centennial of the founding of The Seattle Times, the 69-year-old editor-publisher is shown in shirtsleeves vigorously scooping the first shovel for the 1914 groundbreaking of his new Times Square plant.  As the authors explain, this was a momentary vigor, for Blethen’s health was in steep decline. Actual construction was put off until after his death in July 1915, and resumed by his sons as a monument to their father’s uncommon life.

The building of Times Square began in September 1915 and proceeded with such speed that one year later, on Sept. 25, 1916, The Times could devote an entire edition to its move north from Second Avenue and Union Street to its new terra cotta-tile palace at Fifth and Olive.

The architects, Carl F. Gould and Charles Herbert Bebb, created a monument as much to Renaissance Revival style as to the Colonel. The new partners repeated the division of labor employed so effectively by Bebb’s former Chicago employers, the famous “prophet of modern architecture,” Louis Sullivan, and his partner, Dankmar Adler. Here the practical Bebb, like Adler in Chicago, handled the business and engineering while the Harvard-educated aesthete Gould, like Sullivan, created the designs. Gould took the Gothic plans Bebb had drawn earlier with another partner and transformed them into this gleaming Beaux Arts landmark.

The rare view (at the top of this feature) of the full northern facade was photographed before much of it was hidden between its neighbors. The flatiron block was Blethen’s direct and proud allusion to the similarly styled New York Times Building, which also faced a Times Square in Gotham.

The newspaper continued to publish here until 1930, when it moved north again, this time to its current offices on Fairview Avenue North.

THE WESTLAKE BEAT

I confess to having featured this intersection four times – that I remember – in the now 28-year life of this feature. Here’s the fifth (first put up five years ago), and I wondered then what took me so long. There are so many delightful photographs taken from this five-star corner looking north on Westlake from Fourth Avenue and Pike Street, and we have shown a few already on this blog acting like a webpage. But this scene with the officer probably counts as a “classic” because it has been published a number of times and has not grown tired.

It is only recently that I looked closely at the policeman, and I think I have figured out what he is doing. He is scratching his head. I suggest that the officer may be marveling at the great changes that had occurred in the three years before he was sent to help with traffic on the day this photo was taken. (I’m figuring that this is 1909 or near it.) Heading north for Fremont, trolley car No. 578 to the left of the officer, is only 2 years old, and so is the Hotel Plaza to the left of it. If the officer returns to this beat in a few years, he’ll probably know that there is a speakeasy running in the hotel basement.

Westlake Avenue was cut through the neighborhood in 1906 along what its planners described as “a low-lying valley, fairly level, with just enough pitch to give it satisfactory drainage.” The plan was to connect it with “a magnificent driveway around the lake.  Readers may remember that there have been many magnificent plans for this part of Westlake. Beginning in 1960 with the opening of the Westlake Summer Mall, which quickly changed to Seafair Mall, the blocks between Pike and Stewart streets were dreamed over for a quarter century as the best available site for developing a civic center for a central business district that somehow wound up without one.  One key to this dream was stopping the traffic on Pine Street between 4^th and 5^th Avenues, a dream accomplished but for only a while.  The big retailers didn’t like it, thinking that any inhibition on the motorcar would make it harder for citizens to reach them.

Two colored postcards looking over the Westlake, 4th, Pine Street triangle follow.  For may years grand lighted signs for railroads and coke were displayed at this odd corner.   You are asked to date the cards.  The last has got the name wrong.  Times Square is down the ways at 5th, Stewart, Westlake & Olive.

WAR BOND DRIVE at FREDERICK & NELSON DEPT STORE

DURING WORLD WAR II, the local effort and ingenuity applied to the sale of war bonds reached the monumental when for the nation’s Sixth War Loan Drive the “two largest flags on the Pacific Coast” were draped across the Pine Street and Fifth Avenue facades of the Frederick & Nelson department store. In addition to rolling Red Cross bandages and selling bonds and stamps at the main-floor Victory Post, more than 90 percent of Frederick & Nelson’s employees invested at least 10 percent of their income in war bonds. During the Fifth War Loan Drive this was added to management’s investment, pushing Frederick & Nelson’s total purchases past $1.5 million, a prize-winning performance worthy of the Treasury Department’s T-flag award.

Billboard-size murals promoting bonds were commonplace outside and inside the store. Facing the bank of main-floor elevators, the names of former employees who were off to the war were displayed on a plaque that read, “Staff members who served you here . . . now serve our country.” To the sides were military uniforms draped on store mannequins.

Frederick & Nelson also opened a branch in a white cottage at Boeing Plant No.2, where civilian staples (toilet articles, bras, street suits, work clothing) were available. This convenience also was another way of saving the gas and rubber required to shop downtown. The war revived the flow of cash around Seattle, where nearly 50,000 people were employed making airplanes and twice that number making ships. But necessities were commonly rationed and luxuries postponed. War bonds, the nation’s price administrator explained, were a good way not only to aid the forces abroad but also to help ease inflation on the home front by taking extra cash out of circulation.

ASSOCIATED POULTRY (Click Photos to Enlarge)

With its eccentric sawed-log shell, and the neon chicken perched on a big hanging sign that could be easily read by drivers coming in both directions on Victory Way, (AKA Bothell Way and Lake City Way), the Associated Poultry Company was an almost charming place to “buy direct,” as other sign boards declare, fryers and eggs cheap.

The eggs were gathered from the nesting boxes in the long log box to the rear and there the hens were also knifed, plucked, and trimmed before being brought out to the A-frame show room.  There the fryers were hung above a sawdust floor from steel racks screwed to a knotty pine ceiling.

The Associated Poultry was constructed in 1930 primarily, as another sings reads, to “supply the Coon Chicken Inn,” a road house with live music, and chicken dinners served from its own semi-log quarters nearby on Lake City Way.  It survived for twenty years on Associated Poultry’s fryers; a menu it claimed was homage to southern cooking.  Older readers may remember the front door to this chicken dinner house. One entered through the open mouth of a black face.  It was a grotesque but skilled caricature of a minstrel player more than a West African male.

The Inn closed in the 1949, when America’s “Jim Crow” years of post-civil war race relations were on the eve of being rolled over with civil rights.  A G.I. Joe’s New Country Store moved into the building.  Associated poultry was torn down earlier in 1950-51, and replaced ten years later with a Shell station.

Artifacts from the “Coon Chicken” culture on Bothell Way are exhibited and interpreted at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia on the campus of Michigan’s Ferris State University. The museum’s candid mission is “to promote racial tolerance by helping people understand the historical and contemporary expressions of intolerance.”

(click photos to enlarge)

Waking fresh from the long night of repeal for daylight savings 2010 Jean awakened to a sky with promise, and when it fulfilled he set out to take more repeats or “nows” for our upcoming show next spring at the Museum of History and Industry.  He will return to put here our Highway #2 parts of Washington Then & Now later with Startup Addendum #2.  Meanwhile I’ll search my collections for Stevens Pass (and routes) related illustrations, most of them what is called by their dealers and consumers, “Real Photo Postcards.”  Depending upon how rare, some of these can be precious, indeed!   My scans are mostly taken from loaned prints or from internegatives I have made from loaned prints.  I learned early on to take nearly every precaution making my internegs – cleaned prints, polarized lights and lens, tech-pan high resolution 35mm black and white film.  Consequently, what you see will be quite close to what I saw when I recorded or scanned the original.   In some instances if the original was faded or cluttered with wear I have  attempted to fix it with a little “photoshop polish.”

Showing now a slew of odd pictures identified by location, we will “startup” at Everett and stop at Wenatchee.  Some of these will relate directly to what Jean will put up with the Startup Addendum #2.   We will keep the captions short – mostly  This is a sample only.

Marysville Old & New

Thanks to the popularity of “real photo postcards” we have faithful and often detailed historical views of most communities nation-wide.  The first years of the 20th century was the time of greatest enthusiasm for this sharing and collecting and the date 1913 is postmarked on the rear of this record of the old Marysville business district on First Avenue looking west from State Street.
The three-story Marysville Hotel on the right is impressively fronted with an open veranda.  If the three women standing at its second floor were not preoccupied for the moment with the unnamed “postcard artist” they might have looked a little ways south across First Avenue to the Marysville waterfront on Ebey Slough or two blocks west to the railroad tracks that first brought trains to town in 1889.
That was the old Marysville.  Walt Taubeneck’s mother recalled for him how when the Pacific Highway first entered Marysville in the 1920s from the east on Third Avenue, “First Avenue wasn’t cutting it.  It was built for boats and the railroads not automobiles.  One by one the businesses moved north.”
Taubeneck, an expert on the history of Snohomish County logging, is one of the stalwarts of the Marysville Historical Society.  His friend Arthur Duborko is another.  In 1922 the Duborko family was living temporarily in the Marysville Hotel when it burned down.  The seven-year-old Arthur was playing a quick game of marbles on the rug with a cousin before the two planned to take off for school.  After someone started yelling “fire upstairs!” the boys dropped their marbles and started throwing furniture out the window.  The quick thinking second grader went on to become Marysville’s mayor.
Marysville was founded in the 1870s as a trading post for the Tulalip Reservation.  Now its citizens regularly shop at the Tulalip Mall.  An alternative is the Marysville Mall, whose unadorned rear wall, seen here on the right of the “now” view, fronts First Avenue west of State Street.  (The above first appeared in The Seattle Times Pacific Mag in late Sept. 2005.)

(click to enlarge photos)

Five years ago when Jean and I were gathering images for our book “Washington Then and Now,” he headed out on Highway 2 for Stevens Pass carrying a handful of historical views of towns – like Sultan, Startup, Gold Bar and Skykomish – along the way.  He intended to repeat them for the book; this “now” of Startup is among them. We have been instructed by no less an authority than Snohomish County historian Louise Lindgren that “the blue paint on the steps to the century-old German Baptist church has faded but otherwise not much has changed since then.”

It was Louise who also introduced us to this fine Lee Pickett photo, most likely taken in 1911.  It was Louise who help organized Pickett’s photographs and direct them into the University of Washington’s Northwest Collection, where many more examples of his Skykomish River valley work can be enjoyed on the library’s website.

In 1990 the Startup Baptists moved three miles down the highway to Sultan and sold their old sanctuary to arts and crafts professionals Toni Makinaw and Bill Schlicker, who then ran a gallery in the sanctuary while raising several children in the living quarters arranged in the rear.  I was introduced to Toni through the regional historian and publisher, Buddie Williams.  Williams has known the couple at least from the day they moved into the church twenty years past, and were then promptly sprayed with mace by a local sheriff who mistook them for invading foreigners, perhaps from Canada or Seattle.

Don Keck lives across 364th Ave. SE (on the left) from Toni and Bill.  A long-time Baptist and church member, Keck tells us that this sanctuary was built in 1903-4, and typically it was church members who held the saws and hammers.

The climb to Stevens Pass can be said to start up at Startup, but it was not named so for that reason.  Rather a local lumberman, George G. Startup, was given the honor.  The town was first platted as Wallace in 1894 but the federal postal authorities soon nixed the name.  Mail to Wallace, Idaho too often wound up in the valley of the Skykomish.  It might have been renamed Sparling, for it was Francis Sparling who first settled here.  The lonely bachelor soon got a wife.  Ohioan Eva Helmic answered his advertisement in Heart and Hand Magazine with an energetic yes.  My Startup advisor Buddie Williams says that Eva was escaping from a spouse intended for her by devout parents. Eva and Francis lived happily ever after.

WEB EXTRAS

Hey Paul, I’ve got a slew of Now and Then photos from Highway 2 starting in Everett and ending up in Wenatchee.  Shall I post them?

Hey Jean, I’d say yes but it is a getting late and we both know what a week you have had.  It is now a better time perhaps for you to retire knowing that another hour of rest will surely be given to you thru-the-night as we stop saving daylight.  Tomorrow you will be refreshed and ready to return to or repeat your tour across Stevens Past and along Highway #2 five years past for our book “Washington Then and Now,” the “slew” you refer to.

Meanwhile I’ll look through my things and pull out a few more photos along the Stevens Pass way, most of them real photo postcards by the likes of Pickett and Ellis.   I’ll be ready to interject them tomorrow following you like the truck with rock salt follows the plow.   The reader, then, is asked to visit the site again Sunday evening before their own “nightybears” to see what we have come up with.  And in preparation, I’ll now put up two photographs that prepare the way.

One is a state map from 1855 with markings that are sometimes accurate – taking into consideration the work of the earliest surveyors – and other times wildly off the mark.  This I’ll follow with a photograph of a van outfitted to install highway signs.  Putting up signs was then not so much the work of the state’s department of highways as of the Washington Chapter of the AAA or American Auto Association.  This “signage photo” comes with a challenge to the readers.  Where it is?  There surely are plenty of clues: all those signs pointing to Snohomish County communities and the number of highway miles required to get to them.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

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Readers who read comments will find Arthur Allen’s hunch (resting on evidence) that the above photo was taken at Cavalero Corner.  It is there that one can follow the sign both ways and get to Lake Stevens in about the same amount of time.  (It is a big lake, but I’d suggest taking the way to the left if you want to get around it’s north end while on our way to the Stillaquamish River with innertubes – our frequent intentions years ago.)  Below I have crudely merged three Google Earth street views to show – and Arthur will correct me if I am wrong – Cavalero Corner “today.”   The last time I approached it at the east end of the roughly 2&1/2 miles trestle across the flood plain from Interstate-5 there were no flyovers like those you see in the pan.  (Click to Enlarge the Pan Below.)