(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.