(click to enlarge photos)

Motorman D.E. Stiles, Conductor P.J. Donnelly, and about 20 passengers were outbound on a Madison Street trolley on the Friday afternoon of Jan 9, 1920, when it jumped its slippery tracks while “dropping” about 40 feet through the steep block between 18th and 19th Avenues.   Feeling the car leap forward, Stiles told the police that he applied the breaks but to no effect.  Standing at the back platform conductor Donnelly would up with a sprained back.  He speculated that he had been thrown against the metal railing there, but added that “I simply can’t remember anything about it.”

After the streetcar sailed across Madison it jumped the curb and smashed into the front door of Youngs Grocery at the street’s northeast corner with 19th Avenue. Residents of the several apartments above the grocery were described in the next day’s Seattle Times as “severely shaken by the impact.”  (It is not a “reach” to imagine that some of them have here joined the small crowd in the street to inspect the damage.) As a precaution, passenger Minnie Aldrich, collapsed in shock from the excitement, was taken to the hospital but like Conductor Donnelly she was soon released and taken home, although not by trolley.  After being counter-punched in a few places by Young’s Grocery, the abused streetcar was again put to its tracks and drove home to the car barn under its own power.

In spite of its potential for mayhem, the municipal trolley wreck of Jan. 9, 1920 was a mere incident, unlike the tragic derailment on the Green Lake line five days earlier when seventy passengers were injured and one killed.   Naturally, the wreck on Madison was felt citywide as a foreboding aftershock to the Green Lake accident.   It was also more evidence that the streetcar system that the city had recently purchased from its private builder at an imprudent price was even more dilapidated than thought.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yeseree Jean.  As you know the above subject came to us from the blog’s own Ron Edge.  First we’ll put up some more photographs and related clippings that come from Ron and have to do with this incident on Madison Street and another that was considerably more tragic on the Green Lake Line.   After that we will return to Madison Street and, for the most part, share more trolley related features from the past.  A few will stray afield to other routes.

The Seattle Times report on the Madison Street crash.  (Click to enlarge, for it is very readable.)

That day Webster and Stevens also covered – or illustrated – a reported safe busting, which like the trolley wreck appears in the afternoon paper.

 

DERAILED AT TWELFTH & MADISON, 1900

At 2:15 P.M., Sunday, May 13, 1900, a photographer named Franks photographed this derailed cable car on Madison Street at 12th Avenue. Sundays were the cable line’s busiest days, carrying working men and women and their families to Madison Park on weekend retreats. In midsummer cars would come along about every two minutes. The crowd here is a collection of stalled passengers and curious neighbors.

Given the number of westbound cable cars stacked up behind the derailment, it is likely that many other passengers got tired of waiting and decided to simply hoof it home. Since the trip to the end of the line at Elliott Bay was only a little over a mile, many of these passengers were almost home.    Ww

The first cable car to run the nearly 20,000 feet between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington did it in December 1890. Two cables, like two arms, extended east and west from the powerhouse midway on the line at 22nd and Madison. To make the switch from cable to cable, the cars simply coasted the few feet between them. Their average speed was about 11 miles an hour, so the three-mile-plus trip from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington took less than 20 minutes. Given the pebbles, debris or, here the seasonal mud dirtying the rails, cars jumping their tracks were exceptions but not extraordinary.

THE POWERHOUSE

The competition for early transit franchises in Seattle was fought between two technologies: cable and electric. Although underground cables did not clutter the cityscape with overhead wires, the cables were harder to bend, so the best cable lines ran in a straight line or nearly so, like the Madison Street Cable Railway.

Nearly 40,000 feet of cable pulled the line’s stock 3&1/2 miles between its western roundtable on the waterfront and its eastern terminus at Madison Park. Aside from the 14-percent turn at the powerhouse this arrangement amounted to two straight and unconnected lines: the town section and the lake section. The former moved at 10 mph, while the latter went through the woods to Lake Washington at 12 mph. When a cable car reached the powerhouse at 22nd Avenue, the grip was released and the car coasted the few feet through the gap to the second line, where the gripman again took hold and the car jerked slightly forward.

The powerhouse was the cable company’s best chance for building a showpiece headquarters. Here Victorian ornaments are playfully ordered across a mounting false front. This symmetrical facade includes fan windows that admit some light onto the dominant artifice hidden within – the giant wheels that turned the cables under the strain of two 250-horsepower steam engines.

In 1911 a new powerhouse outfitted with electric motors was built one block west of Broadway. While the original powerhouse is long gone, the second survives, converted for the classrooms and studios of Seattle University’s Department of Art. The lake section of the line was eventually abandoned in favor of electricity. But both cable and electric railways were ultimately trampled together under rubber. In the spring of 1940 the cable below Madison Street quit pulling its cars up First Hill from the waterfront. Buses followed.

MUYBRIDGE IN SEATTLE

While revealing in its several parts this early 1890s look east up Madison Street from the trolley line’s terminal turntable is also a puzzle.  A friend found this image in the Kingston Museum at Kingston on the Thames, England.  It is attributed to Kingston’s most famous son, Eadweard Muybridge.   The photographer-inventor returned to his hometown in 1895 after more than forty years of mostly taking photographs in the American West and performing some of the earliest experiments in motions pictures.

The puzzle is this.  As far as I have been able to determine none of Muybridge’s biographers have ever put him in Seattle.  The famous photographer was on Puget Sound in 1871 taking photographs for the U.S. Lighthouse service but that is at least 20 years before this lanternslide was recorded.

The best chance for having Muybridge here in time to take this photograph would be in the spring of 1893 when he left the West Coast for the last time.  He was heading to Chicago to show his rudimentary “animal locomotion” pictures in his own “Zoopraxographical Hall” at the 1893 World Columbia Expedition in.  But the Expo opened in May and this presents another problem for this scene includes a street broadside advertising an event for July 18.  Perhaps the Englishman was late in getting to Chicago.

Another curiosity of this image is this; it is the only identified Seattle scene of any sort included with the Muybridge bequest of his life’s work to his hometown museum.  The caption  “Washington, Seattle, Madison Street Terraces” does have a Muybridge fit.  San Francisco was the photographer’s west coast home base, so the Madison street cable line would have interested him, especially this part of it climbing to First Hill.  Locals claimed that this was the second steepest incline in the trolley industry.  Of course, the steepest trolley ride of all was in San Francisco.

The Madison Street Cable Railway began sending cars to Madison Park on the west shore of Lake Washington in 1890 from its turntable directly west of Western Avenue.  Although the Madison railway was always a paying line it was closed down in 1940.  Both views look east on Madison Street and across Western Avenue.   (Muybridge photo courtesy Kingston Museum, Kingston on the Thames. The Haynes photo, directly below, courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library.)

The McGILVRA FIEFDOM

Judge John J. McGilvra, the pioneer who laid out the line of Madison Street, wanted to get to his homestead on Lake Washington the quickest way possible. So after climbing First Hill and crossing Broadway, Madison Street continues on its own way cutting through the city grid.

As it turned out, McGilvra’s short-cut also negotiated the city’s ups and downs in an oblique and easier manner. Beginning in 1890, these gradual grades helped considerably in the construction of a cable railway the entire length of Madison from salt water to fresh. In the early 1890s passengers enroute to the excitements of McGilvra’s many lakefront attractions, after first passing through still largely forested acres, dropped into the scene recorded here: grounds cleared for the playful enterprises of leisure.

The Madison Park Pavilion, left of center, and the ball park, far left, were the cable company’s two largest enclosed venues. But the beach itself was an equal attraction with floating bandstands and stages for musicals, farces and melodramas in which the villains might end up in the lake. McGilvra’s fiefdom – he would only lease lots, not sell them – and the railway’s end-of-the-line attractions also featured dance floors, bath houses, canoe rentals, restaurants, promenades, a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and a dock from which the “Mosquito Fleet” steamed to all habitable points on Lake Washington.

MADISON INCLINE

The city’s announcement in the summer of 1938 that Seattle’s three cable railways (on Yesler, James and Madison Streets) would be abandoned inspired considerable citizen resistance.  Led by attorney Ben A. Maslan the protestors organized the Seattle Downtown Association.  They managed, however, only to postpone the end.  The city’s entire cable service was retired in 1940 and so was the fleet.  After 51 years of clutching the cables beneath Madison Street car number 42 was scrapped.

The above view of the climbing cable car looks west on Madison from mid-block between 4th and 5th Avenues.  The old Carnegie Library (1906-1957) is on the right.  It seems a rail fan named Whinihan (the name is printed on the back of the original print) took the photograph as a tribute to the doomed cable car and line.  The second historical view looks west from Fifth Ave.   (Both come by way of Lawton Gowey.)

Arthur Denny, the city’s founder-surveyor, named Madison Street in 1853 for James Madison, but he did it for poetics (and fraternity) more than politics.  In deciding to name his streets as a sequence of alliterative pairs (Jefferson & James, Cherry & Columbia and so on) Denny needed another M-moniker to partner with the street he named for his brother Marion.  The fourth president was an obvious choice.

Lincoln-appointed federal attorney John McGilvra improved the three plus miles of Madison Street between the central waterfront and Lake Washington in order to reach his home beside the lake.  Madison Street (more than Yesler) then became the principle first leg to the hinterlands both across the lake and to the northern destinations like Bothell and even Laurelhurst.  The lake’s first steamers picked up and delivered their passengers at McGilvra’s dock.

Although faded the allure of Seattle’s old cable lines has not vanished and serious proposals to reintroduce them are periodically put forward. If the cable cars were to return to Madison they would serve a street in which nothing of the old street has survived west of Sixth Avenue since this they last ran there in 1940.

THE MYSTERIOUS MADISON STREET TRESTLE

Many years ago a friend of a friend asked if I had a photograph of the Madison Street trestle that once crossed the Madison valley roughly between Empire Way and the Lake Washington Blvd. I neither had the photo nor any inkling of the trestle. Silently – and foolishly – I concluded that his youthful memory of the big bridge was a childish exaggeration. Yet here it is, long and wide, and if we could walk into this scene and look over the railings (that ripple from settling) we would see that it was quite high as well.

The photograph is not dated. The Madison Park Apartments, on the right, were built in 1914, and this scene may have been recorded when they were nearly new. This is one of four photographs that trolley expert Lawton Gowey shared with me not long after I was asked about and mystified by the trestle. All four photos look east in line with the bridge and roughly from the same location, a few yards east of 29th Avenue. In one of the three not printed here the railing is gone, the power poles on the left no longer peek up from below but have been reset much higher in fresh fill along the north side of the bridge.

In his history of Washington Park, Don Sherwood, the now deceased Park Department historian, writes that in 1905 the trestle replaced the rough corduroy road that once crossed the valley and the stream that ran through it. Sherwood also estimated that the “the trestle was replaced with a fill about 1915.” The encyclopedic Ernie Dornfeld, Information Manager for the city, suggests a sensible alternative: the fill was a long project.

When driving on Madison east of 29th we are probably still crossing the trestle – or over most of it. Once the long effort of filling between and to the sides of the bridge timbers reached the roadway the deck could be removed and the fill packed and paved. Since the cable cars on Madison could not be stopped for long this final alteration – and it only – must have been done quickly.

The Madison Park Apartments on the right were built originally at the western end of the Madison Street trestle that crossed the Madison Valley east of 29th Avenue. (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

THE BRIDGE & The BRICKS

One of the helpful traits of many an official photograph is that it may, like this one, have a caption inscribed directly on the negative.  Although not printed here, the description for this scene begins with its number, 394, and continues, “Brick Culls 30 Ave. (N. of Madison St.)  2-28-12.”

My first reading of this caption was immediately accompanied by one of those “eureka” experiences that are the liquor of research — I swooned.  There on the horizon was my first unobstructed full sighting of the Madison Street trestle.  It was built originally to take the cable car across Madison Valley and the stream that once meandered north through it to Union Bay.  However, the ‘brick culls” in the scene (and in its caption) remained such a puzzle that I kept the picture back waiting for another revelation.  Obviously, I have stopped waiting but these bricks remain a puzzle.  I hope some reader will come forward with instructions – or even speculations.

One munificent source on Washington Park history is Don Sherwood.  Don and my research paths often crossed decades ago when he was the Parks Department employee let loose to follow his bliss by preparing handwritten histories of every park in Seattle.  Typed transcriptions of these histories (with facsimile reproductions of Sherwood’s accurately sketched maps) can now be visited on the net at www.cityofseattle.net/parks/history/sherwood.htm.

You are encouraged to visit the site and read Sherwood’s detailed history of Washington Park.  You will learn about the filling and grading of the ravine to this side of Madison Street for the creation of the athletic field evident in the “now” photograph.   You will also learn much else including the location of the 350,000 cobblestones taken from Madison Street and buried in the park.  However, you will discover nothing about bricks.

MADISON PARK PAVILION

Like Leschi Park Madison Park was developed as an attraction at the end of a cable railway line.  Both featured exotic landscapes, waterside promenades, gazebos, greenhouses, refreshment stands, garden-lined paths, bandstands, and boat rentals, even lodging.  Leschi’s early novelty was its zoo.  Madison Park’s was the baseball diamond.  (The roof of the bleachers can be seen on the far left of the historical scene.)

Both parks featured monumental-sized pavilions with towers on top and great ballrooms within. The theatre-sized room in this landmark could also seat 1400 for melodramas, minstrel shows, musicals, farce, vaudeville and legitimate theatre.   For many years members of the ever-dwindling mass of the Pioneer Association chose the Madison Park Pavilion for their annual meetings and posed for group portraits on the front steps.

Here the grand eastern face of the pavilion looks out at Lake Washington.  The pleasurable variety of its lines with gables, towers, porticos and the symmetrically placed and exposed stairways to its high central tower surely got the attention of those approaching it from the Lake.  (For many years beginning about 1880 Madison Park was the busiest port on Lake Washington.)

However, most visitors came from the city and the real crush was on the weekends for ballgames, dances, band concerts (most often with Dad Wagner’s Band), theatre, and moonlit serenading on the lake — ideally with a mandolin and receptive ingénue looking for pointers on how to navigate a rented canoe.

The Pavilion stood for a quarter century until destroyed by fire on March 25, 1914.

TWIN T-P’s 70th

[The feature that follows were first published in 2007 and made note then of its 70th birthday.  We did not know then that it was also the last cake that this survivor would eat.   While the story strays from the general subject of trolleys it does depend on transportation and like the Madison Park Pavilion, just above, has towers.  But then the Twin T-P’s were nearly all towers – two of them. ]

In the spring of 1937 the shining steel towers of the Twin T-Ps were lifted above Aurora Avenue.  They were strategically set across this speedway section of Highway 99 from the east shore of Green Lake. The Teepee, of course, is a form etched in the imagination of every American child and so this fanciful architectural corn (or maize) could be expected to lure a few matured kids called motorists off the highway.

Once inside the shiny example of Native American housing – the pointed and portable type used by the plains Indians – visitors were suddenly transported to the Northwest coast, for the decorations were done not on plains motifs but rather on designs like those we associate with totem poles, long houses, masks and spirit boxes.

Let’s imagine that almost everyone has eaten some of the regular American food at the T-Ps.  I did once and ran into my old friends Walt Crowley and Marie McGaffrey who live nearby.  If memory serves, they were enjoying prime rib.  Walt would later write twice about the Twin T-P’s for historylink.org, the web site of state history he directs.  The first essay (#2890) is a good summary of the exceptional story of this symmetrical piece of nutritious kitsch.  Walt’s second essay (#3719) is a lament following the July 31, 2001 early morning bulldozing of the landmark.   (So, if you use the computer do it now – please.)

ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION

Across NW 54th Street from the long parking lot at Ballard’s Chittenden Locks sits one of Seattle’s roadside attractions, the Totem House.  Built in 1939 to sell souvenirs the sturdy cedar structure was called by its owner-builders the Haida House Curio Shop.  Like Ivar’s Salmon House thirty years later, although much smaller, its shape and parts – the vertical poles, planks, and artifacts – were arranged in admiring imitation of North Coast Indian architecture.  Here the flap in the roof opening is up and open, a sensitive tribute to the aboriginal model. (Venting a central fire pit was necessary for a Haida longhouse, but probably not so for the Haida Curio Shop.)

The building permit for 3058 NW 54th Street reveals that the plans were submitted on March 31, 1939 and the final inspection followed only four months later, on the last day of July.  This speedy construction allowed the owners to lure lock’s visitors still in the quick of the ’39 tourist season.

While the building permit describes the building’s owner James L. Houston as also its designer, the artist-entrepreneur’s children are quite certain that Houston’s father-in-law, the jeweler Del Thomas, was behind this enterprise.  And it was also Thomas who took this photograph of the landmark shop soon after it was completed and before the necessary signs were added.

For its quick construction and the carving of its centerpiece, the totem pole at the front door, Huston family history for their curio shop has it that James Houston worked side-by-side with a native carver-builder named Jimmie John.  An art student at both Cornish and the U of W, the blue-eyed Irishman Houston, born in 1908, was a talented watercolorist and jeweler who had a long life in the production of carvings done with the materials and refined styles of North Coast tribes.

THE LOST CREEK AND RAVINE

Most likely this photograph from the Asahel Curtis studio was recorded late in 1909.   The number on the original negative falls near the end of the roughly 4556 studio numbers allotted that year.  For Curtis it was a record year for picture taking, probably because the summer-long Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was held in 1909 on a picturesque University of Washington campus made photogenic for it.

Every part of the greater University District was retouched for AYP including Cowen Park although obviously the hard surface paving on University Way did not make it as far north as the entrance to the park here at Ravenna Boulevard.   That Cowen Park was named for Charles Cowen, the wealthy English immigrant who gave it to the city in 1906, was part of the deal. Cowen also paid for both the rustic entrance shown here and when it wore out for the two stone columns and wing-wall seats that replaced it in the early 1920s.

The stone gate survives, and on it is written “Man Shall Not Live By Bread Alone.”  Looking here beyond the woman standing with the child and through the original rustic gate it is clear that neither shall man leave the land alone. On the north side of the gate the park land drops away into a ravine.   Since the early 1960s it has been a more-or-less level playfield made from one hundred thousand yards of “free fill” scooped away during the creation nearby of the 1-5 Freeway.  At the time, to quote from Don Sherwood’s hand-written history of Seattle parks, “Many residents and the Mountaineers Club were appalled.”

In 1909 the creek from Green Lake still splashed down the enchanting canyon through Cowen and Ravenna parks.  Had the Seattle Park Department followed the Olmsted Plan for Green Lake the creek would have been saved, for the lake would have been lowered only four feet.   Instead it was dropped seven feet and the primary source of the creek was turned off.   Green Lake Park’s gain was thereby Cowen and Ravenna Parks’ loss.  Also taken from the community was a meandering Ravenna Boulevard for before reaching the ravine the primeval creek wandered through what is now the wide and straightened path of the boulevard.

Jumping forward to the freeway fill in 1971, that August the Second Annual Frisbee for Peace Intergalactic Memorial Thermogleep U.F.O. Frisbee Festival was held on the settled playfield.  However, a proposal from the University District Center – the event sponsors — to make it an official Seafair event was rejected.

BUSES TO DIFFICULT DESTINATIONS

The official A.Curtis number (38871) for this image indicates that it was probably photographed late in 1919, or two years before Cornish moved from the Booth Building here at the southeast corner of Broadway Avenue and Pine Street north a few blocks on Capitol Hill to another Spanish-styled structure, the school’s then new home at Roy Street and Harvard Avenue.

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

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

WAITING FOR THE INTERURBAN

This1923 tableau of municipal workers refurbishing a portion of the “grand union” of trolley tracks at 34th Street and Fremont Avenue allows us to reflect on the histories of both transportation and art in Fremont, the playful neighborhood that signs itself “The Center of the Universe.”

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

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

The GRAND UNION

Barely hidden below the intersection of 34th St. and Fremont Avenue  – at the north end of the Fremont Bridge – rests an iron cross of intersecting rails appropriately called the Grand Union.  We see here the most western part of this steel matrix on June 29, 1923 at 6:30 in the morning.  This is number ten in a series of thirty photographs that record the steps of replacing the plank paving framing the rails with bricks.

The artful work of laying the original Grand Union was guided by plans drawn in 1916 by Seattle Electric Company.  It was timed of necessity with the building of Fremont’s bascule bridge that opened in 1917. Although this Fremont route was the major trolley feed to the north end the elaborate rail crossing at 34th would not have been needed except that it was also the way for trolleys to reach the Fremont Car Barn a few blocks west.  (In 1905 when the barn was completed, 34th St. was still called Ewing Street.)

The last photograph – number thirty – of this repaving dates from the third of March the following year.  Titled “Completed Layout” it looks west on 34th St. from the east side of the intersection and reveals a very spiffy Grand Union indeed.  It was then as much a piece of public art as a public work.   And as noted above this landmark survives below the veneer of blacktop that was first applied during the Second World War after locals complained about the slipper bricks on Fremont Avenue.   One day, perhaps, the Grand Union will be revealed again, but beneath a transparent street surface – one that is not slippery – that we can now but imagine.

MADRONA HUB

This is the hub of the Madrona Neighborhood, the intersection of Division and Carroll looking south on Carroll — if I have counted the blocks correctly in the1893 street name index by my desk.  If I have not bumbled then Division is now Union Street and Carroll is 34th Avenue.  With city ordinances in 1895 and 1901 many of the historical street names were discarded for the efficiency of numbers and so also their benumbing.  The name Carroll Street at least promises a good story.  Thirty-fourth merely follows 33rd and comes before 35th.  What can you do with that except find it?

The original names were probably given by George and Emma Randell who developed this Madrona Ridge in 1890 and built their home one block west at Drexel Avenue, or 35th now – I think.  They did well, especially after the Union Trunk Line trolley to Madrona Park reached this intersection by 1893.  The park first and then the neighborhood soon after got its name from the trees (arbutus) that were also residents.  Thereon the Randall barn became Randall School and stayed so until 1904 when one of the typical frame box schools designed by school architect James Stephen opened at 33rd Avenue (AKA Alvan) and Union and was also named Madrona.

If the tax records can be believed the frame structure that survives on the right of both views was constructed in 1907 and so is about to fulfill its own century.  The historical photo dates from ca. 1940 when the trolleys, like this car No. 376 on the No.11 Cherry Street Line, were traded for busses and, here also, trackless trolleys.  The 1938 Polk Directory (also by my desk) lists the same businesses that show in the photograph – the pharmacy on the corner, followed by a barber, a shoe renewer, a luncheonette and a fish market – all of them named Madrona, except the café.  Vernon and Anna Herrett who run the luncheonette, live upstairs, and Walter Cort, the cobbler, lives behind his store on 33rd..

Perhaps some reader will write and share the Carroll or Drexel or Alvan Stories.  One likely storyteller would be Junius Rochester who wrote “The Last Electric Trolley,” in part a history of Madrona.  But that lucky historian is often away conducting tours on Columbia River cruise ships and may not be reached.

SEEING SEATTLE

After the turn-of-the-century consolidation of Seattle’s previously diverse trolley lines the new and more efficient monopoly, the Seattle Electric Company, purchased four “special” cars from the John Stephenson Company of New Jersey.   At 46-feet-long, bumper-to-bumper, they were then the biggest of Seattle’s electric cars, and the trolley company’s special plans for them were clearly signed on their sides.  The four double-ender trolleys — numbered 362 to 365 — carried both visitors and locals on rail explorations of our then rapidly expanding metropolis.

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

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

The GREAT LATONA TRAIN WRECK

At 5pm on the Monday afternoon of Aug. 20, 1894 a west bound freight of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern entered the curve at Latona on the north shore of Lake Union.  Engineer Osborn looked up and saw several cattle jousting near the track. In an instant a cow was gored and fell directly in front of the train lifting the engine off the track.  Osborn cut the steam, threw the reverse lever and held on before he was thrown from the cab.  (He survived the ejection well enough to frantically run to Fremont to stop the northbound passenger train.)

Within seconds of the derailment the ten cars filled with tons of coal, logs and shingles telescoped, propelling the coal tender beyond the engine.  In the process it sheered the left side of the engine’s cab.  When two shingle weavers from a nearby Latona mill first reached the wreck they saw through the still swirling steam and dust the horrific sight of brakeman Frank Parrot’s decapitated body propped against the boiler with his head lying between his legs.  The mutilated fireman Thomas Black lay nearby.  Black had been anxious to complete the trip and pick up his pay check, for his wife was waiting at home penniless and alone with their two children.  She was also eight months pregnant.

To the side of the engine the shingle weavers laid the bodies of the two victims and covered them with green brush. Within an hour the coroner arrived aboard a special train that also carried railroad officials and a wrecking crew of 30 men.

The trail of grease left by the dragged cow was used later to determined the distance the engine bumped along the ties before it veered to the right and buried its nose in the small trees and bushes that lined the embankment.  The Press-Times reported on Tuesday that the trail ran “about 200 feet.”  The stack of the engine peeks above the upset boxcar, just left of center.

The assorted littered of shingles, coal, and railroad cars are scattered to the side of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Right of way. The photo dates most likely from the day following the “Great Latona Train Wreck” of August 20, 1894.  On the far left a crane has begun the clean up.  Boys from the neighborhood sit on the roof of the tiled boxcar at the center.   The house on the horizon survives at 3808 Eastern Avenue north.  Built in 1890 it is easily one of the oldest north end homes. The railroad right-of-way also survives, sans tracks, as the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail. (Historical photo courtesy of Roy Nielsen)

CASEY JONES SPECIAL

Life – the leisure part of it – is a relatively simple affair for rail fans.   Perhaps the one conflict that can add distress to this zest – and it cannot be avoided – is whether to be on a train or off it.  On December 1, 1956 super rail fan Lawton Gowey was one of the nearly 1300 rail enthusiasts joyfully crammed into the 13 cars behind Northern Pacific steam engine no. 1372 for the first Casey Jones Special to Snoqualmie.  The route followed the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way.

Seven months later Gowey chose not to ride the train but chase it.   Here on June 29, 1957 he has beat Northern Pacific Engine No.1372 to the north side of Lake Union.  Perhaps steadying his camera in the open window of his car Gowey made a snopshot of the Special that with the smoke and steam escaping it we can almost hear.  In a moment more he was stepping on his own throttle heading for the next photo opportunity to  catch the train crossing the concrete trestle that still parallels N.E. Pacific Street about 100 yards east of the 15^th Avenue N.E., the western border of the main U.W. campus.   He made it in time.

For twelve years the regions rail fans were engaged with nearly 50 nostalgic rail excursions in every direction from Seattle that railroad’s lesser lines and spurs could carry them.  The promoter was a pianist named Carol Cornish who was 71 when she started them.   Actually, as her assistant Tom Baker notes in his Memories of  the Casey Jones Excursions “She took the name of Carol Cornish as a stage name.  Here actual name was Edna Baker.”

While no relation to Tom, Carol Cornish treated him as such.  Titling him her “Train Host” she encouraged the friendly and handsome Baker to walk from car to car smoozing his good will and broad smile with the passengers.  Baker and his kids also sold box lunches, and printed programs.  When the two Bakers worried if their cars would fill up they could count on Seattle Times columnist Byron Fish to write a story about their next heroic efforts to – quoting By Fish here – “take one last steam trip before all the locomotives and their water towers are junked.”

 

More often than not they need more cars.   As Tom Baker puts it, “Miss Cornish was a battler.  Many a time ticket sales would run into the hundreds.  The railroad would say that they did not have the cars.  It always ended up with the railroad giving in and getting the cars needed, even if they had to borrow some from the Great Northern.”  The last Casey Jones was to North Bend on June 9, 1968.  It was also the day that Carol Cornish died.

EAST MARGINAL WAY ELEVATED

The waterfront did get a belt railway of sorts in 1919 but one that was as poorly timed as the Seattle general strike.  During the war, the workers were so hard to deliver to the shipyards that Mayor Hanson ordered an elevated railroad built to carry them south from Pioneer Square to Spokane Street and from there out to Harbor Island.  It started street level at First South and Washington, and from there climbed the one block west to Railroad Avenue where it took a sharp curve south to be on its elevated way without impedance to another right turn on Spokane Street, this time west to Harbor Island and even West Seattle. 

The elevated trolley was also Mayor Hanson’s political response to the almost universal criticism of the Seattle Electric Company’s trolley service.  Hanson not only did the politic thing of ordering that the elevated be built, he also bought out the SEC, but at such an inflated price that in the 21 remaining years that trolleys were run on Seattle streets the debt could not be paid in full.  While Hanson’s new municipal rail system was an albatross, his new elevated was a white elephant.

The Sunday Times of August 17 prepared the citizens to prepare themselves for a ride to Fauntleroy or Alki – there was of course no need to consider shipyards – that would be from five to ten minutes faster than the current service down First Avenue South because the railroad crossings in the industrial district would be avoided.  Without fanfare, service started on the 4^th of September, one week after the mayor resigned.  Hanson claimed it was for reasons of health but more likely, as noted, he left to pursue his dreams of winning the Republican Party’s nomination for President.  Certainly Hanson was also fleeing the growing complaints over the “deal” he’d made to purchase the worn out trolley system. Streetcars were regularly breaking down and sometimes – like the Mayor – running away.

Although brand new, the elevated railway to West Seattle had a ride that swayed like a roller coaster.  It was scrapped in 1929 – in time for the Great Depression.  They had only ten years to remember, but the survivors of the dwindling set of West Seattle old timers still describe it as a white-knuckle thrill.  Two of the better-known members of this species – Emmett Watson and Ivar Haglund – now long gone remembered the ride well.  Typically, as West Seattle adolescents both were fascinated with how to get to Seattle and equally thrilled by the trolley ride across the Duwamish waterway.  In his book Digressions of a Native Son Watson recalls,  “The way you got to First Ave. from West Seattle was by thumb or street car, those rattling old orange things.  They clanked and swayed over an incredible old wooden trestle, high above Spokane Street, weaving and shaking until you had to close your eyes to keep from getting a headache.”  Similarly Ivar recollects,  “Some of my earliest memories are of taking the West Seattle ferry to Seattle, a ride that while thrilling was not so thrilling as that aboard the trolley.  It was our rollercoaster.  That thing would throw us from side to side as it stumbled along a trestle that was high, narrow and, most of the way, without guardrails.  It seemed like there was nothing between you and the ground but the roofs of the buildings below you.  It was marvelously scary.”

THE WRECK EPIDEMIC of 1919-1920.

After the private trolley system was made public in 1919 what Leslie Blanchard in his helpful history “The Street Railway Era in Seattle” calls a “wreck epidemic” followed.  Blanchard described the crash of January 5, 1920 as its “climax . . . one of the most appalling accidents in the history of public transportation in Seattle.”

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

The wreck was “appalling” because it was an accident made inevitable by the circumstances surrounding the sale of the system. The Seattle Electric Company sold the dilapidated line to a Seattle mayor, Ole Hanson, who purchased it at such an inflated price that no funds remained for repairs.  At the time Mayor Hanson was more interested in whatever bold moves might make him an attractive candidate for the American presidency.

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

 

THE WORST

One of the most common recollections of Seattle’s “old timers” – those exploring Seattle already before the Second World War – is the elevated trolley ride along the Spokane Street viaduct and its old bascule bridges to West Seattle. That the experience of riding the rumbling and swaying electric cars along the exposed wooden trestle could be more than thrilling is evidences in this view of the worst streetcar wreck in Seattle history.

At about 7:30 on the Friday morning of Jan. 8, 1937, with its air-brakes frozen open, car 671 inbound on the Fauntleroy line lost control as it descended 30th Avenue Southwest and flipped to its side where the track curved sharply onto Spokane ‘Street. Derailments on this old system were not that uncommon and even flips not unprecedented. The upended car 671 did not skid to a grinding stop, however, but collided suddenly with a concrete pillar.

The afternoon Seattle Times listed the dead – Lee Bow, a 50-year-old city fireman, and William Court, a 39-year-old-mechanic – and the 60 West Seattle commuters who were injured with breaks, bruises and lacerations. Of these one died the next day. The derailment might have been even more deadly. The pillar that injured some might have saved others when it· prevented the car from falling to the railroad tracks below, at the lowest level of this three-tier grade separation at the western end of Spokane Street.

This catastrophe became an anxious symbol for the entire municipally owned trolley system that was in physical, fiscal and political tatters. The coincidence of this tragedy with the campaign to tear up city-wide the system’s rails aroused the -hysterical rumor that this wreck and others were planned by those who favored gas engines and rubber tires over electric motors and trolley tracks.

The concrete construction above replaced the wooden trestles below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

These two blocks on Front Street (First Avenue) between Columbia and Mill (Yesler Way) were Seattle’s first show-strip of distinguished structures.  The view looks south on Front thru its intersection with Columbia. The subject was photographed sometime in 1887, perhaps only days before Toklas and Singerman, the city’s first department store, moved that year into its new home at the southwest corner, here right-of-center.

At the far end of this extended block, the tower of the Yesler-Leary Building (1883) tops what was known best then as Yesler’s Corner, after the pioneer who owned most of what we now call Pioneer Square.  This classy strip faced east across Front to a pioneer string of plain false-front clapboards that contrasted with the brick, tile and cast iron ornaments of the buildings shown here.

After the city’s “Great Fire” ignited at Front and Madison in the mid-afternoon of June 6, 1889 it was hoped that should the fire eventually reach these formidable landmarks that they would not allow themselves to be consumed.  The strip, however, proved almost as combustible as the wood firetraps on the east side of Front Street.  These handsome facades did, however, make the best ruins.

In his Chronological History of Seattle, Thomas Wickham Prosch, explains this strip as another sign of Seattle’s robust prosperity then.  He writes that the city’s boom began in 1886, and then “grew in volume and force in 1887, continued with unabated activity and vigor in 1888 . . . Every week at that time meant 150 more people in Seattle.” The reconstruction that followed the 1889 fire also swelled the immigration and spread the fire of ambition.

WEB EXTRAS

This time, Paul, Berangere has something to add. While she was visiting us for our MOHAI opening, she accompanied me downtown when I took the photo for this article.  Here’s her shot of me and my ten foot pole:

Anything to add, Paul?  What a splendid profile of you and your big ten foot pole Jean.   Yes I have somethings to add, but again the question is how much may I load before I climb the padded stairs to nighty bears.   Most of it relates to FRONT STREET, the subject above – some before and some after the 1889 fire.  Again, there will be few “now” shots for I have never taken the time over the past nearly 30 years to properly file my own weekly negatives away.  I know how to find the historical shots ordinarily because they are “classed” under different collections.  Not so my own photographs of local “nows.”  This was a bad habit of mine Jean and don’t you get into it!  Some day I’ll  organize it all – hopefully.

We will start with a hand-colored version of an 1888 4th of July parade on Front Street and followed it directly with a proper mono-toned version not of the same photograph but of the same parade – with some story.

JULY 4, 1888 ON FRONT STREET

Parades of many sorts were commonplace in the pioneer city.  Streets were not so nervous, they were not overrun with motorcars.  If you wish to celebrated you election to city council or appointment to animal control, if you knew a band that march and play for it you were ordinarily welcome to arrange a parade down “main street,” which for Seattle was First Avenue, or Front Street north of Yesler Way and Commercial Street south of it.

This grand parade with all the bunting and flags is surely an Independence Day celebration. Just to this side of the only open sidewalk awning is the Lace House, a woman’s apparel shop with fancy work that opened in February of 1888. So this can only be July 4, 1888, for in another eleven months and two days everything here was consumed by the “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

The photographer looks north from the southeast corner of Cherry Street and Front Street. Front was named for a setting that is now long lost. When platted in 1853, First Avenue (Front) was the most westerly of the avenues, and on a windy day at high tide a pedestrian on its west side might be splattered. Now the waterfront has moved far to the west.

The fancy structures on the left are part of Seattle’s two unbroken blocks of pioneer splendor between Yesler Way and Columbia Street, its touch of San Francisco elegance. The corner structure at Columbia Street; right of center, with the grandest decorations was the Toklas and Singerman Department Store, built in 1887. Some hoped that the Great Fire might be stopped by its sturdy brick façade, but the flames were barely stalled before they burst the windows, chewed the mortar and razed all but the sturdiest of walls south of it – like the bank facade on the far left, which was left standing although the building was gutted like all the others.

 

THE ELEPHANT STORE

In this 1878 view up Front Street (First Ave.) only the Elephant store on the right – where, presumably, both the bargains and the selection were over-sized – is obviously a retail house. The others look like homes, but the street’s residential character is slightly deceptive. One of those clapboards is a foundry; another, a cigar store; another, a drugstore; and the roof on the lower left-hand comer tops a brewery.

The Elephant Store is at Front’s southeast corner with Columbia, and two blocks north at Madison Street, Moses Maddock’s drugstore is the dominant white structure just left of the photo’s center.  (The subject printed next was photographed from the balcony of the drugstore, and both it and this look in the opposite direction along Front Street were photographed by Peterson and Bros., which ran their commercial studio at the waterfront foot of Cherry Street.)  Beyond Maddock’s drugstore at Madison Street, Front St. was sided for the most by homes. The gabled Amos Brown home at Spring St. rises above the drugstore and right of the tall fir.  It and the Arthur & Mary Denny home at Union St., just left of the fir, were Seattle’s first grand homes. For the Dennys, city founders, it was their third residence when they moved there in 1865. Arthur lived in this fancy Victorian mansion with the jigsaw trim until 1899, the year of his death. By then the house was surrounded by tall hotels and department stores.

Beyond the Denny home Front St. jogs a little to the left and northwest beyond Pike St.   Pike was the northern end of the street’s 1876 improvement. Before that regrading, there was a hump at Cherry St. (the site of the photographer’s studio and perch), another rise at Marion and a ravine at Seneca deep enough to require a bridge.

Finally this scene includes a subject on the horizon that is bigger than either the street or an elephant.  It is Denny Hill.  Here the top of it reaches about 100 ft. above the present elevation of Third Ave. between Stewart and Virginia streets. This is one of the few early recordings of Denny Hill that survives, while the hill itself, of course, does not.

 

FRONT STREET PROMENADE FOR THE PIPERS

The captioned subject of this Peterson brothers photograph is its vacant street. The studio has inscribed it “Front St. Seattle W. T. [Washington Territory]” along its dirty diagonal line.  As the scene shows, the street’s name was appropriate. The Petersons took this shot in 1878 or 1879. Then, at high tide, Elliott Bay beat against the timber retaining wall that held Front St. high and dry above the waterfront. This is Seattle’s first major public works – the regrading of Front St. from a stump-strewn, ravine-ridden path to a filled-in, smoothed-out public work, with guardrail and a sidewalk promenade along the city’s front. The Petersons are showing it off.

The scene was shot from the balcony above Maddock’s drugstore at the N.E. corner of Front’s intersection with Madison St. The drugstore did not survive the Great Fire of 1889. I took the “now” shot from the second floor of a brick building which was raised there soon after the fire, and which, in 1986, was still after half-a-century the home of Warshall’s Sporting Goods.  (For the moment I cannot find my “now” shot from the early 1980s.  Typical.  I did not also look to using it again while I was then preoccupied with looking back.)

The ’89 fire started across Front St. at its southwest corner with Madison in the Pontius Building. The corner of its balcony is on the older photo’s far right. It and the Woodward Grain House, the building that dominates the photo’s center, were both built on pilings.  Between them is a glimpse of a section of Yesler’s wharf and mill.

The Woodward was the business home of Peter’s Furs, Cigars and Liquors. Peter was in the right line. The 1878 city directory claimed “five out of every six men in the territory use tobacco, and nine out of every ten men use intoxicating drinks.” However, another of the directory’s statistics suggests that these prevalent vices were still lonely ones, for “There are three bachelors to every bacheloress in the territory. ”

Posing in the photograph’s lower left-hand corner are A. W. Piper, his son Wallis, and their dog Jack. As the proprietor of the Puget Sound Candy Manufactory, Piper was very popular. The 1878 directory reviewed his confections as “warranted and strictly pure.” Both Piper’s confectionary and the Peterson’s studio were on Front St. near Cherry. They were, no doubt, friends.

For 30 years the Pipers lived in Seattle making candy and friends. When Piper died here in 1904, his Post Intelligencer obituary was an unusually good-natured one. The publisher-historian Thomas Prosch first of all remembered “Piper’s cream cakes. During the 1870s they were particularly noted. The people of those days to this time think nothing of the kind … has ever approached them in excellence.”

Piper was also an artist. Prosch recounted, “He could draw true to life, could mold in clay, cut stone . . . his Christmas display was noted for its originality, humor and beauty.”

In many ways the candy-maker was unconventional.  A religious Unitarian, he was also a socialist member of the Seattle City council, and an unsuccessful Populist candidate for Mayor.  He was, however, a successful practical joker.  Once, at a public dance, he mimicked Henry Yesler so convincingly that the real Yesler ran home to construct a sign, which read “This is the only original Yesler.”

Thomas Prosch concluded, “Everybody regarded him as a friend.”  A.W. Piper dies at the age of 76, survived by Mrs. Piper, their nine children and many friends.

 

[Somewhere within three feet of this desk is a black-white scan of this same Frye Opera House look into North Seattle and when found I’ll insert it here.]

NORTH SEATTLE

More than a few publishers and local historians have silently thanked Fred Dorsaz and/or Edward Schwerin for carrying their studio’s camera to the top floor of the nearly new Frye Opera House to record this local classic, a bird’s-eye into North Seattle. The scene looks over Madison Street, up Front Street (First Avenue), across the distant rooftops of Belltown and far beyond to the still hardly marked Magnolia Peninsula.

There was a touch of opportunism and pride in the partner’s climb and recording. The original photo card has “Souvenir Art Studio” printed across the bottom, and if you look hard, you can see their business name written again on the banner that stands out against the dark trees near the center of their photograph.

The Souvenir banner is strung over Front Street between the Pacific Drug Store building, bottom right, and the Kenyon Block, bottom left. The Souvenir Art Studio rented quarters in capitalist J. Gardner Kenyon’s” namesake commercial building. Taking clues from the few signs attached to its sides, so did the Globe Printing Co. (one of only four job printers listed in the 1885-’86 City Directory,) William P. Stanley’s books, stationary and wallpaper store, and Robert Abernethy’s “boots and shoes” store. Like its owner Kenyon, Abernethy, it seems, also conveniently lived in the Kenyon Block.

In his “King County History,” pioneer historian Clarence Bagley dates this view “about 1887.” Given the absence in this scene of important 1887 additions and the presence of structures not around in 1885, the likely date is 1886.

 

HUNTINGTON  – & Others – EARLY RECORDS of FRONT STREET

The Huntington Bros. Studio of Olympia would not allow hometown bluster to get in the way of marketing and flattery. On the flip side of this view up Front Street (First Avenue) from Cherry Street, the Huntington promoter has written a rather long paragraph on Seattle’s virtues, noting: “Seattle is the leading town of Washington Territory … Its principal exports are agriculture produce, lumber and coal . . . It also exports much fish, furniture, doors and windows, flour, etc. The town is conveniently, beautifully and healthfully situated, and gives promise of becoming a place of considerable importance . . . Its own people are very proud of Seattle, and think it inside of 10 years destined to be second on the Pacific Slope to San Francisco only.”

The added claim that Seattle’s population “numbers 3,500” suggests that the Huntington caption was written in 1881, when Seattle first overcame Walla Walla to become the largest town in Washington Territory. The photograph, however, was most likely recorded before June 20, 1879. On that day, J. Willis Sayer notes in his book, “This City of Ours,” “the last forest tree on the central waterfront, standing just north of Pike

Street, was cut down.” That tree, I’m claiming, stands nearly alone on the horizon, left of center.

A few of the identifiable businesses here are F.W. Wald’s hardware store, far right, next door to Hendrick’s plumbing. Across the street in the shade of the sidewalk porch is the Fountain Beer Hall. To Huntington and his potential customers, the noteworthy quality of this street is not that it is vacant, but that it is smooth. In 1876 the bumps of Front Street north of Yesler Way were cut away to fill its valleys. This historical scene was copied from an original Huntington Stereo view.   It may be compared to other studio’s recordings of Front Street also looking north through Cherry Street.

Looking south here through the same block only this time into Pioneer Square.

 

BOREN & BELL at SECOND & CHERRY

This pioneer snow is neither from Seattle’s still coldest winter of 1861-’62 nor from its still deepest snow, the “big snow” of 1880. The scene is too late for the former and too early for the latter. What is most curious about this look into what was then still Seattle’s first residential neighborhood is the scene’s “centerpiece,” the two-story box with four windows on its west facade. It sits at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street.

Judging from the remnants of the old forest on First Hill and from the other structures, most likely this view dates from the early to mid-1870s. Above the barn or large shed on the far left is the tower to Seattle’s first sanctuary, the so-called White Church at the southeast corner of Second and Columbia Street.

Significantly, the “centerpiece” box is a frame structure. Therefore it is not the log cabin that Carson Boren built at that corner in the spring of 1852. The local tradition that the Carson cabin was the first structure completed in Seattle is remembered with a plaque on the Hoge Building (that now fills the corner). However, according to Greg Lange, a historylink.org scholar of Seattle’s pioneer life, the Boren cabin was more likely the third house.  It was completed after Doc Maynard’s home on First Avenue South and William Bell’s first home in Belltown.

Actually, Bell is also better associated with this box if not with its predecessor, the log cabin. In 1855 Boren sold the corner to him. Lange concedes that the frame building, seen here, may have been part of the deal. However, he thinks it more likely that Bell, not Boren, built it sometime after 1858. By the late 1870s the black box at Second and Cherry was replaced with a more distinguished residence.

As for the snow, we don’t know.

Another snowscape looking east on Cherry from Front (First).  This one is also by Peterson & Bros and was recorded from the front door to their studio on the west side of Front.   This 1880 is still the deepest in the city’s history.  (See the Snow History buttoned on the front page if you like.)   In 1880 Seattle was a few more than 3000 citizens, a few less than Walla Walla.   Seattle would surpass Walla Walla in the next year and then become one of the country’s greatest examples of a boom town as it grew to roughly 40 thousand by 1890, more than 90s thousand by 1900, and to more than 200 thousand by 1910.  The photographs directly below also look up Cherry from First and date approximately, in this order, from 1892, and two from around 1913.  By then Cherry Street  was one of the city’s examples of an “urban canyon” with steel-frame high-rises to many sides.

 

1884 SNOW ON COLUMBIA STREET

Although the snow of 1884 did not make it into our local freezer of big snows, it lent its own perishable delights. Through the first week of February, the winter of 1883-84 had been peculiarly dry and pleasantly warm. The local paper predicted more of the same. Then on the 8th two inches of snow dropped on Seattle, and the temperature dove, sticking below freezing.

Lake Union froze over and a procession of skaters trekked the length of the boardwalk that followed the bed of an abandoned coal railroad (near the line now of Westlake Avenue) to the south end of the lake. It was safe to skate until the 15th, when the thermometer first rose above freezing. With the skates, sleds were then also surrendered, but only temporarily. In three days more the sky opened and again dropped the fun stuff you see here -18 inches of it.

The photographer, Theodore E. Peiser, was nearly as fresh to Seattle as this snow. In 1884 the oversized gear and glass-plate routines of photography were both rare and elaborate enough to gain attention. Here, everyone seems to be posing for Peiser. The commercial photographer set his tripod at the waterfront foot of Columbia Street with his back to Elliott Bay.

Peiser recorded some of the best views of Seattle in the 1880s. There might have been many more, but his “Art Studio” on Second Avenue between Marion and Columbia Streets was destroyed along with his equipment and negatives in the city’s “Big Fire of 1889.” The loss is especially grievous given the claim Peiser made on the flip side of one of his surviving prints: “The largest and finest assortment of views of Seattle and Sound towns, logging camps, etc., for sale by the copy or in large quantities, at reasonable prices.”

 

MACKINTOSH’S SAFE DEPOSIT BUILDING

The Safe Deposit Building was one of the Victorian jewels strung along the west side of Front Street (First Avenue) between Pioneer Place (Square) and Columbia Street in the mid-1880s. Angus MacKintosh’s Merchants Bank operated at the sidewalk level, and in the basement was what the trim Scotsman from Ontario advertised as “the best safe-deposit vaults on the West Coast.” The bank was also distinguished by its biggest customer: the U.S. government.

Arriving in Seattle in 1870, the 31-year-old MacKintosh was among a second wave of pioneers who came too late to take claims but early enough to buy land cheap. He soon married Elizabeth Peeples, who had arrived in 1866 as one of the adventurous “Mercer Girls.” Both Elizabeth and Angus were talented accountants – she as the first woman to act as enrolling clerk for the House of Representatives in Olympia and he as specialist in preparing abstracts.

Soon after MacKintosh formed his bank, he built this building to house it. The date 1884 is set in relief at the crown of the building. Five years later the bank and more than 30 downtown blocks were destroyed by the Great Fire of June 6, 1889. The day after the fire, MacKintosh’s claims about the security of his basement vaults were given a grand affirmation when, to quote a contemporary, the Rev. H.K. Hines, “they became the storeroom for all the banks of the city until order was brought out of the existing chaos.”            MacKintosh rebuilt his bank to seven stones above the same vaults.  A nation-wide economic panic that began in 1893 brought down the Merchants National Bank four years later. MacKintosh, nearly 60, tried to recoup by joining the Yukon gold rush. When that failed he fell into depression and then poor health, dying in 1904. “Lizzie” lived another 22 years, which was time enough to see their son Kenneth become a Superior Court judge.

CLEMMER’S DREAM

On September 3, 1932 Seattle’s “pioneer showman” James Q. Clemmer rolled up the sleeves of his tuxedo and mounted a soapbox outside the Fifth Avenue Theater, which he managed. Above him stretched a bright red banner reading “Jim Clemmer’s Campaign Headquarters.”

In that depression and election year, radio charisma propelled Franklin Roosevelt’s promises of “a new deal for every American” far ahead of Herbert Hoover’s monotone assurances that “prosperity is just around the corner.”  The showman Clemmer was running not for an office but in the Fox Theater’s coast-wide contest for the “most popular manager in the West.” Both FDR and JQC won. Jim Clemmer beat out 200 other west coast managers by hawking the most advance sale tickets to the Fifth Avenue’s coming show, Will Rogers’ new talkie, “Down to Earth.” Clemmer personally peddled these admissions to the multitude of happy customers he’d been entertaining, by then, through 24 years of pioneering film-playing in eight Seattle theaters.

The first of these was Clemmer’s Dream. In 1907 the 26-year-old newlywed brought his wife over from Spokane to live in and manage a recent family acquisition, the Kenneth Hotel. The Kenneth was one of the first and also most pleasingly ornate stone structures put up after the fire of 1889. Its very narrow but tall seven-story facade sat at the First Avenue foot of Cherry Street. Within a year Jim Clemmer converted an abandoned bank lobby on the hotel’s first floor into his Dream Theater. It was one of Seattle’s first photoplay houses and its “most spacious and best equipped.” In our historical photograph we see the Dream’s marquee in one of its several incarnations. Clemmer was constantly making improvements, both outside and in, and the best of these was the organ. The Dream’s Wurlitzer was said to be the first organ installed in any motion picture theater anywhere. And both the organ and Clemmer were fortunate to have “Ollie on the Wurlitzer” Wallace improvising his dramatic accompaniment to sentimental films like the “one advertised above the Dream’s entrance, “A Brother’s Devotion.” Oliver G. Wallace was one of those Seattle phenomena that after a hometown nurturing went on to great things elsewhere. With Wallace it was to Hollywood and a career of writing scores for many of Walt Disney’s films including “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan.”

Another of Clemmer’s Dream Theater innovations was probably the first “talking” motion picture. This it did literally. In 1910 Clemmer put actors behind the Dream’s screen to mouth aloud the screen actors’ mute lines. Predictably, after a week of this often too-comic dissonance, the noble experiment was shut up as an artistic howler.

The Dream Theater’s fare was actually a 50-50 mix of one-reelers and vaudeville. Much of the latter was on-stage singing acts. The movie shorts included Italian dramas, French comedies, pastoral forest stories, and from an American producer named Bison, the first of the cowboy pictures. Bison advertised that he still “employed men who have had actual experience in Indian fighting.”

In 1912 Jim Clemmer sold the Dream and built the 1,200-seat Clemmer, “the nation’s first grand theater devoted exclusively to photoplays.” In the next 20 years he also managed the Winter Garden, Music Box, Blue Mouse, Music Hall, Paramount, and the Orpheum. When Clemmer and Roosevelt won by landslides in 1932, Clemmer was in his second term as manager of the lavish Fifth Avenue Theater. When he died in 1942, he was remembered by John Hamrick, the Fifth Avenue’s owner, as “the best theater manager I ever knew.”

 

1884 BIRDSEYE of FRONT STREET from the OCCIDENTAL HOTEL

After searching some “ancient sources,” I think it likely that this look up Front Street (First Avenue) was photographed in the late summer or fall of 1884. The scene includes a number of well-leafed trees packed between buildings, so this is not in winter. But why 1884?

The unnamed photographer stood on the top floor of the nearly new Occidental Hotel, one of the then-prospering city’s showpieces, and looked north to another, the Frye Opera House at the northeast corner of Front and Marion. Here, the reader must concentrate. The mansard roof line of the opera house and its dominating tower, shaped like an inverted basket with the hazed mass of Denny Hill behind it, can be located above and to the right of the center of the photograph.

The Frye opened in early December 1884, although the structure was not completed until 1885. Here, the rear half of the “largest theatre north of San Francisco” -that part to the right showing the seven large, vacant windows through three floors –I s still far from complete. .

More evidence for 1884 appears with the construction scene on Front Street, left of center, for the ornate Safe Deposit Building at the foot of Cherry Street. In his 1901 “Chronological History of Seattle,” Thomas Prosch notes that the first pressed bricks used in Seattle (7,000 of them) were brought from San Francisco in May of 1884 and used for the Safe Deposit Building.

By 1888 that entire west side of Front Street between Columbia Street and Yesler Way was filled with ornate brick buildings. It was Seattle’s elegant show strip. All of them, and practically everything else in this panorama, including the opera house, was kindling for the city’s Great Fire of 1889.   The pie-shaped Occidental Hotel – now the site of the “Sinking Ship Garage” facing Pioneer Square between James Street and Yesler Way – was also gutted.

 

YESLER-LEARY BUILDING

Completed in 1883, the Yesler-Leary Building was the proper symbol for its namesake owners, Henry Yesler and James Leary. Many of the 6,645 citizens counted in the Seattle census that year may have thought Yesler and Leary were, like their towering namesake landmark, made of bricks and cast iron. Yesler, the pioneer mill man, paid the most taxes, and Leary was described as “the president of everything.” The following year Leary would also be mayor of Seattle – the first to keep regular hours. Yesler had already been mayor and would be again in 1886.

William E. Boone, Seattle’s principal pre-1889 “Great Fire” architect, designed the Yesler-Leary Building. The cost of raising this Victorian ornament was, for the time, a whopping $100,000. This photograph was recorded sometime between late December 1883, when the planks evident on Mill Street (Yesler Way) were first laid, and September 1884, when the horse trolley first passed by on rails not yet part of this street scene.

The condition before planking is indicated in a Dec. 20, 1883, news story. “In attempting to cross Mill Street yesterday from the Post Office,” (the next structure on Mill Street to the left of the Yesler-Leary Building), “a woman came near drowning. She sank deeper than we care to describe, and only succeeded in saving herself, with dreadfully soiled skirts, after great difficulty.”

The utility poles seen here are nearly new. Telephone service began this year. Street numbering also began in 1883 possibly because 600 homes were added to Seattle. It was a booming year before it busted in the fall with another deep recession. The cosmopolitan tone of this growth is suggested by the appearance in ’83 of Die Puget Sound Post, the first locally published non-English newspaper.

 

“GREAT FIRE” OF JUNE 6, 1889

It takes a conspiring of coincidences to tum an ordinary fire into a great one. Mid-afternoon, June 6, 1889, Seattle was ready with a heat wave, a fanning wind from the north, its fire chief out of town, next to no water pressure, a clapboard business district, and an upset pot of boiling glue. By sunset Seattle had what has ever since been recalled as the Great Fire of 1889. Burning south through the night, it extinguished itself in the tideflats south of Pioneer Square – now the site of high salary sports. The next morning the exhausted citizens awoke to a smoldering landscape which, depending upon their disposition, inspired some to meditate on human folly and others to set up tents for business over warm ashes.

On the day of the fire most of the city’s photographers were too busy res?cuing their equipment from the flames to record them. So our photographic record of the Great Fire itself is not so great. But not so the ruins. On the morning of June 7, the photographers (those who still had cameras and film) got busy recording the conventional romance of ruins scattered through more than 30 picturesque if ruined city blocks.

(Note, above, the cleaned bricks at the southeast corner of Second Ave and Cherry, and above the bricks the still standing facade of the Merchant’s Bank, described above.)

Actually, there were not many distinguished ruins left in a firetrap business district made of wood. The best of the stood along the city’s incinerated “show-strip,” the buildings along the west side of Front Street (First Ave) between Yesler Way and Columbia Street, beginning with the Yesler-Leary building at Yesler Way. When it was built in 1883, it set the architectural example for masonry and decorative cast-iron that was soon after followed throughout the entire long block to Columbia Street.  When the fire crossed Yesler Way around dinnertime it had left a gutted Seattle show block behind it but had not completely subdued it.

The photographers had to shoot quickly. The picturesque ruins were soon razed. Within the first year 150 brick buildings were started and some completed that year as well. The city celebrated the first anniversary of its very own Great Fire by serving strawberry shortcake to all those who had helped to first fight the fire and then feed and shelter those made destitute by it. The strawberry shortcake tradition is continued in Pioneer Square’s annual Fire Festival, which also features craft booths, live music, and displays of fire-fighting equipment.

(Under construction, bottom-right, is the frame for one of the many tents pitched for commerce following the fire.  This one is set at the southwest corner of Second Ave. and Columbia Street.)

The 1889 Birdseye litho of Seattle was released weeks before many of its subjects were destroyed in the ’89 fire.  Here someone had given a broad-stroked border to the incinerated blocks.  Bottom left is a drawing of the extant Pioneer Building, which Henry Yesler was planning before the fire and then went on to build following it.)

 

FIRE STATION No. 1

The fancy brick façade of Seattle’s first dedicated engine house face Columbia Street from its south side mid-block between First and Second Avenues. It was built in 1883 to house the fire department’s Washington No. 1 – most likely the steam fire engine posed here with its crew and team.

Earlier, the department’s other engine, the smaller man-powered Washington No.2, was also housed here – in a bam. In the summer of 1882, when No.2 attempted to answer an alarm on the waterfront – sans horses – the weight of the rig dragged the men holding its pole down Columbia street and into the bay. Fortunately, both the firemen and the fire engine were pulled from the water with little injury.

By the time of the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889, the Seattle Fire Department had a half-dozen pieces of apparatus, but only one, No. 1 on Columbia Street, was horse-drawn. The ornate brick station that No. 1 left on the afternoon of June 6 to fight the Great Fire would not welcome it home. Of the 30-some city blocks destroyed that night, all those south of Spring Street and west of Second Avenue, were included.

 

“HIDEOUS REMAINS”

[What follows first appeared in Pacific on June 6, 2004.] Exactly 115 years ago this morning on June 6, 1889, Seattle awoke to these ruins and 30-plus blocks more. The Occidental Hotel’s three-story monoliths – perhaps the grandest wreckage – held above the still-smoking district like illustrations for the purple prose of that morning’s Seattle Daily Press.

“The forked tongues of a pierce pitiless holocaust have licked up with greedy rapacity the business portion of Seattle . . . It was a catastrophe sudden and terrific. Besides the smoking tomb-like ruins of a few standing walls . . . people are left living to endure with sheer despair . . . blackness, gloom, bereavement, suffering, poverty, the hideous remains of a feast of fire.”

Predictably, the city’s photographers were soon making sidewalk sales of scenes like this one. If the best of these ruins had been allowed to stand, it would have become both romantic and revered, but it was not. The Occidental’s “towers” were blown up on the evening of the 8th. Most likely it was either on the 7th or 8th that this record of their silhouette was captured, for the district was still generally hot and smoldering on the sixth.

The fire started about 2:30 in the afternoon of June 5 at the southwest corner of Front Street (First Avenue) and Madison. It took a little less than four hours to reach and jump James Street and ignite the north wall of the hotel. In another dozen minutes the fire passed through the distinguished landmark and jumped Yesler Way to spread through the firetrap frame structures between Yesler and the tideflats that were then still south of King Street.

 

GOLDEN RULE BAZAAR

One of Seattle’s first department stores, the Golden Rule Bazaar, was founded by a man who failed in the gold fields.  Down and out in Comstock, Nev., Julius Bomstein chose Seattle over Portland and Walla Walla to begin again. He brought his family here in 1882, and within three years the Bomsteins had their own storefront on First Avenue, at Marion Street.

Eighty years later Julius and Louisa’s son, Sam, recited for Seattle Times writer Lucille McDonald some of the pioneer staples the Bomsteins sold here: “Lamp chimneys and wicks, dollar watches, chamber pots, spectacles, clothes hampers, market baskets, wooden potato smashers, .nutmeg grinders, luggage . . . telescopes and toys at Christmas.” Sam Bomstein recalled a brisk business in baskets that his father purchased from the natives in exchange for cooking utensils. Sam also claimed that the Golden Rule Bazaar was the first store on the Pacific Coast to have counters devoted exclusively to cut-rate items priced at a nickel, a dime, 15 cents and a quarter.

Seattle’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 was made considerably less spectacular by the 12-year-old Sam. News of the fire reached his school soon after it started about one block north of the family business. Sam bolted, commandeered an idle wagon and two horses, and hauled away three truckloads of fireworks that his father had recently purchased for a Fourth of July promotion. The fireworks and a few blackened pieces of china were all the Bomsteins saved from the flames, which soon consumed nearly the entire business district. They did, however, hold their Independence Day sale from a tent.

The family’s business prospered again. During the gold rush Sam recalled that “the miners were nuts. They just took the stuff away from us. We didn’t have to do any selling.” By 1910 the firm of J. Bomstein and Sons was operating exclusively wholesale, a business that in 1927 was favorably sold to the Dohrman Hotel Supply Company.

 

THE GOTTSTEIN BLOCK
In the dawn of urban renewal, in the mid-1950s, the then-dilapidated Pioneer Square area of Seattle was envisioned as a parking lot for the central business district. A number of distinguished buildings were razed for the comfort of motorists before preservationists mobilized to save what remained of this historic district. The Gottstein Block at the southeast comer of First Avenue and Columbia Street was one of the losses.
Soon after the Great Fire of June 6, 1889 destroyed its predecessor, plans for this brick block were announced by the Gottsteins, local wholesalers of liquor and cigars. The Frisch Brothers jewelers were in the pre-fire building and returned to its ornate replacement. Their sign spans the building’s main entrance at 720 First Ave. The somewhat swift change in the character of First Avenue is repeated in the changing of the Gottsteins’ tenants. Eventually, the Brunswick Hotel upstairs became the Right Hotel, a semi-dive for mostly single men working the waterfront or moving Through it. The Frisch Brothers fled with their diamonds, and the Flag Pool Parlor moved in.

Beginning in 1930 until its sacrifice to parking, the Gottstein was home for the Seattle Seamen’s Mission. With a nautical decor featuring paintings of sailing ships, a reading-room window with stained-glass fish, and a blinking lighthouse at the mission’s entrance, the Norwegian Lutherans offered free meals and free or cheap bunks, found jobs, made loans, kept and forwarded mail, and preached the gospel in “a service to all seamen.” In the beginning most of the Mission’s users were Scandinavians and so often also Lutherans. When the center moved from First Avenue to Dexter Avenue in 1957 more were Buddhists and Shintoists.

FRONT STREET FROM PIONEER SQUARE, 1891

In 1891 any Seattle resident of three years residency looking over the shoulder of photographer Frank LaRoche would have understood the wonders of his subject. Everything here (above) is new, including the portion of Front Street (First Avenue) in the foreground.

The streetcar at the center of the scene is not an electric trolley but a cable car. When it began its service in March 1889, the Front Street Cable Railway ran between Yesler Way in Pioneer Square and the line’s powerhouse near Second Avenue and Denny. Three months later the tracks south of Seneca Street were destroyed in Seattle’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

The Front Street that rose from the ashes was made 18 feet wider and turned through its last block between Cherry Street and Yesler Way to connect with Commercial Street, now First Avenue South. Cutting this little stretch of street through Henry Yesler’s corner – the pre-fire home of the Yesler-Leary Building – cost the city $150,000, about half of its entire post-fire bill for street condemnations. Talk about pioneer clout.

The Starr-Boyd building on the far left was another of the (by one reckoning) 51 Seattle buildings architect Elmer Fisher designed in the first year after the fire. After an earthquake in 1949, the top three floors were dismantled as a precaution. Seven years later the surviving ground floor was razed for the parking lot still in use.

 

SHOW STRIP SEATTLE ca. 1887

This is the best face of the pre-fire Seattle – the west side of Front Street (now First Avenue) between Columbia Street and Mill Street (now Yesler Way). The fire, of course, was that “great” one of June 6, 1889, which reduced this and about 30 other blocks to a few brick ruins rising above the ashes. These are all substantial buildings, built with brick and ornate caste iron in a showy style that delighted in details – the architectural trimmings of a community self-conscious of its successes. And this pre-fire Seattle was booming with an average of 150 new residents arriving each week.

The photographer – probably David Judkins – took this view of the elegant side of city life at eight minutes to three o’clock on the afternoon of a gray day during the winter of 1887-88. The time is indicated on the clock to the left, and the date speculated from the signs on the right.

C. C. Calkins, of the banner-advertised real estate firm Calkins, Moore & Wood, came to town in 1887 with $300 dollars in his pocket, plenty of promotional savvy in his head and luck in his hands. After borrowing, buying, and selling, he was left holding, within the year, $170,000 worth of real estate. Below the Calkins banner, the sign in the window reads, in part, “The Lace House will open about February 10th.” We can conclude that this February was in 1888 from the little vanity biography of its proprietor, J. A. Baillargeon, included in the Reverend H. K. Hines 1893 Illustrated History of Washington State. Baillargeon ‘s window sign promotes the motto for his shop of “Fancy goods and materials of every description” as “reliable goods, lowest prices.” The historian-parson Hines explains his low prices fell from his policy of only selling on a cash basis and thus “proving the old adage that a nimble penny is better than a slow shilling.”

For all its distinction, this was a difficult two blocks to show off photographically – the pre-fire street was narrow and its east side was lined with non-photogenic frontier clapboards that were a confession of the boom town’s still somewhat pimitive soul. Here the photographer shoots from one of those false-fronts, misses them, but still manages to half-hide the block’s distant crowning touch – the tower atop the Yesler Leary Building, obscured behind the long pole on the left.

The reason for this apparent sloppiness is in the street itself. Front is being paved in a public work meant to cover the dirt with a little class of its own – planks. Here the eastern half of the street has been planked, and just to the right of the long pole that hides the tower we can see the line of men at work beginning the planking on the elegant west side of Front Street. The photographer cut off the tower because he was primarily interested in the street.

We might wonder what would have become of this long block had not the Great Fire of ’89 nipped it in its distinguished youth. These structures were solid and might have made it well into the 20th century – perhaps as far as the early twenties when a higher but still ornate strip of terra cotta tiled landmarks could have taken their place. Such a successor would have had a better chance of surviving today – in place of the more Spartan parking garage that now dominates the western side of First south of Columbia Street.

The post-fire impression for a new Toklas and Singerman.