This late morning of Sunday August 21, 2011, I visited Woodland Park Avenue – a “speedway” the neighbors call it because its greater width encourages racing – and repeated “portraits” of a few homes, apartments and stores built on the street and included now among the historical tax inventory records of structures (taxable ones) photographed in 1937 or possibly 1938.   Almost certainly all of the structures then in place on Woodland Park Ave. were included in the late 1930’s survey of every taxable structure in King County.  The project was supported by the Works Progress Administration, which, like most of the “Great Depression’s make-work alphabet soup administrations,” produced more than a payroll for out-of-work citizens.  Many locals now have these late 1930s records of their homes hanging in their homes.

Woodland Park Ave. was improved early in the 1890s to bring the new trolley line north from 34th Street to the southern shore of Lake Union and from there in a counter-clockwise direction following an old logging railroad built just above the lake’s original shoreline.  All the structures along Woodland Park Ave. were distinguished and serenaded by the clattering trolleys that ran by them.   The neighborhood between 34th and about 40th and to the sides of Woodland Park Avenue was known as Edgewater.  (If you wish to make here a key word search you will find other images of its business district at 36th.)  Now this strip is variously claimed by Fremont and Wallingford.  The names “Freford” and Wallmont” are sometime used in compromise.  However, the northern border of this uncertain land grows even more contentious in the blocks north of 45th Street, that is, in Greenford or Wallgreen or Fregreen or Greenmont – depending.

(Should you wish to order a photographic print of any King County property extant in 1937-8 – like your home – contact archivist Greg Lange at the Washington State Archive, the Bellevue Community College branch.  The number is 425-564-3942.  Have a legal description of the property your are interested in: the tax number or the description of  its by the Addition Name, the Block Number within the Addition, and the Lot Number with that Block.)

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While snapping (below) 3626 Woodland Pk. Ave. I met someone who lives therein.  She told me that the great-grandchild of the builder had visited and told her that grandpa had been a stone mason by trade.  It sort of figures.

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This comparison is peculiarly deflating – a Greek temple, or a least a small town bank, divested of its columns and pride.

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Returning next to 36th Street for an earlier look at the Edgewater business district repeated below it with another photo taken this morning.

A circa 1897 map in which the Edgewater district is emphasized.  Note that no Wallingford as yet appears, although its oldest part, Latona, does.  Note also that the University District is still referred to as Brooklyn.  Finally, and far-left, the Ross Neighborhood is still remembered.