(click to enlarge photos)

At some moment in the walkabout of life it occurs to more than a few of us to look back to where we came from. This interest in personal history will sometimes be an entrance also to community history and more. But it typically starts with genealogy; finding out about one’s parents and their parents and so on and on. As almost anyone who has taken this hide-and-seek path will confirm, saddling our basic human urges for chasing the fox or the facts can be a most exhilarating ride.

Thankfully for this search we can get some practiced and typically kind help from genealogists, and The Seattle Public Library, the Seattle Genealogical Society, and the Fiske Genealogical Library all have them. For many of us the face on the left of both our “now and then” is a familiar one. For forty years Darlene Hamilton was The Seattle Public Library’s genealogy librarian.

In the contemporary scene Hamilton poses with her successor John LaMont in the genealogy section of the History Department in the still new Koolhaus-designed central library. In the older view, and at her predecessor’s request, Hamilton has joined Carol Lind in the “genealogy alcove” of the central library’s Bindon and Wright designed building (1960), which held to the same block facing Fourth Ave. between Madison and Spring Streets.  When Lind started with the library in 1949 it was still housed in the classically styled stone pile built with funds from the Carnegie Foundation more than a century ago, and also on the same block. Carol Lind retired in 1971.

John LaMont notes that many of the requests made at the central library’s history desk are genealogical. And the electronic tools that LaMont and Mahina Oshie, a second genealogy librarian added this year, have in 2011 are what Carol Lind, perhaps, could have scarcely imagined a mere half-century ago. But LaMont notes, “There are many things that remain the same in terms of assisting people with their research. We suggest they look at family sources, learn about doing research, fill out a family chart, and we make recommendations on where to look based on what they know already.”

WEB EXTRAS

Happy New Year! Anything to add, Paul?

Thanks Jean and the same in return.  Yes we will take a break from partying (which we started at your place for dinner with the most succulent turkey any of the about fifteen persons squeezed into your dining room can remember having ever been served before and all because you soaked the bird for hours in some salty solution and then stuffed it also with exotic spices and mushrooms) and put up some old Seattle Public Library photos.  We may have inserted one or more of these earlier, but this is new “context” so we will not be prevented.  Still the readers are reminded to use the search window for finding out more about any subject that comes up.  We have been putting up enough features by now that you might well find something – or you may also come upon the same thing, in which case please be happy with the new surrounds.

We’ll start with a something from SPL genealogist John LaMont and add now our thanks that he took our invitation to write about his personal history as subject and as research.  And we asked John to help illustrate it, so we have a few pictures of the SPL’s genealogist growing up and into his expertise.  John did not title his offering, but we have.   So first an “invitation” from John – and thanks to him too.

AN INVITATION to THE NINTH FLOOR

By JOHN LAMONT

With genealogy and family history, everything fits together in a timeline and events are marked by when and where they occurred. But it’s typically not until we’re looking back that we can see the patterns and connections, causes and effects, and points where our personal histories intersect with others. When I began working as a genealogy librarian at The Seattle Public Library [SPL], my path intersected with that of Darlene Hamilton, the senior genealogy librarian, for seven years.

In 1966 after graduating from library school in Minnesota, Darlene landed a librarian job in Bellingham, hopped on a Great Northern train, and headed out west.  While working in Bellingham, Darlene made several genealogy research trips to SPL and at about the same time, my folks moved from Missouri to Minnesota and then to Montana, which is where I come in.  A few years later in 1971, Darlene was hired by SPL and started her career as a genealogy librarian—a career that spanned 40 years and included the Bicentennial, Alex Haley’s Roots, the public releases of the 1900, 1910, 1920, & 1930 U.S. Census, and helping countless people research their family’s history.

Meanwhile, my folks moved to Northern Virginia when I was a toddler, and it would only take me 17 years to become interested in genealogy, another 6 to learn of Darlene (I moved to Seattle in 1993, discovered the large genealogy collection at SPL and microfilm available at the National Archives Regional Branch and truly became hooked), and another 10 beyond that before I landed a job working with Darlene at SPL in 2004.

For me the draw is mostly about research and discovery, and being able to piece together the lives of ancestors based on information they left behind.  My dad’s family has lived in Washington since the 1880s, and my aunts’ and cousins’ homes in Chewelah are treasure troves of photographs, diaries, family bibles, etc.  Putting those pieces together with other genealogical sources such as censuses, land records, probates, wills, vital records, military records, court records, passenger lists, newspapers, and the like, you can learn quite a bit.  And with much of this information now available online via free web sites or subscription databases, you can make substantial progress in one sitting.  In other cases, even with access to all these records at your fingertips, there are certain roadblocks to progress.  Some of these you may find were put up by your ancestors.

There are two family secrets that I discovered when researching my family history.  The first I discovered early on and it was that my great-grandfather Clarence LaMont had been married twice, first to Laura Rusk who died in 1907 at age 24 and secondly in 1909 to my great-grandmother Nellie Rusk, Laura’s younger sister.  There were two clues: A photo of Nellie standing next to her sister’s grave in Spokane – the stone simply reads Laura with no last name; and an obituary of Laura and Nellie’s mother from December 1906 listing one of the survivor’s as Mrs. LaMont of Harrison, Idaho.   Adding these to the Washington Death Index, a newspaper obituary from Spokane, and the funeral home records, I had my smoking gun. Although someone marrying a deceased spouse’s siblings was not in itself a scandal—then or now—the fact that no one in my family had known about it made it quite interesting.

The second secret, which I just discovered a couple of years ago, is also related to Clarence.  After years of searching for his roots with no success, I was left with a handful of family facts – youngest of four, born January 13, 1879 in Patoka or Vandalia, IL, mother died when he was two, shuffled around from one Uncle to the next until he was 12 or 13, headed out west to make his fortune as a cook, two sisters, one named Ida married a man named Ritter and had son Cliff, a brother, and so on. I knew his parents’ names, based on a Social Security application, to be William Henry LaMont and Elizabeth Andrews. But Clarence never appears in the Census until 1910 and his earliest known whereabouts were in 1906 — Harrison, Idaho.  Turns out Clarence was born and raised as Thomas H. Sharp, and changed his name when heading out west.  I was able to connect with distant cousins and we compared our pictures of Clarence and Thomas and found him to be one in the same.  As to why Clarence changed his identity, that is another, as-yet-unsolved, mystery. And so the fun continues.

If you need help with your genealogy, drop us a line via the Ask-A-Librarian service at www.spl.org, come by during our genealogy desk hours, or make a one-on-one appointment. Mahina Oshie, our newest genealogy librarian, and I are happy to help you with your research.

You’ll find us at the 9th floor reference desk at the Central Library during the following times:

• –Tuesday through Saturday:  11 a.m. – noon; & 1 – 3 p.m.
• –Sunday: 1- 3 p.m.

Appointments are available Tuesday through Saturday at 3 p.m. & 4 p.m.

======

Next we will run on with a few photographs.   Most of the first selections show the library block seen from near 4th Ave. and Madison Street, looking to the north and east.   The sequence begins  with a look at the block when the McNaught mansion still held it, circa 1902.

Above and below, construction on the modern library, ca. 1959

TO ALL the dear visitors of this blog, Jean and Berangere and I wish, hope and imagine – we’re concentrating – a fine coming 2012 for you and all that matters, which includes us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click photos to enlarge – sometimes TWICE!)

Although named for Jackson Street, the city’s second most ambitious regrade (First, was the razing of Denny Hill.) extended blocks south of what is still the neighborhood’s principal thruway: Jackson Street.   Nearly six miles of streets and about fifty-six city blocks were involved – twenty-nine of them excavated and twenty-seven filled in a “balance” of eroding and collecting.

This look into the reducing work of what the press liked to call “giants” – the cannons blasting salt water sucked from Elliott Bay – was taken from the south side of Weller Street, one of the early targets of the regraders.  The historical photographer looks northwest from near the southeast corner of Eight Avenue and Weller Street.  The canons seen here are moving east – the blast at the bottom – and north – the shooter nearer the scene’s center.  They are carving their way to lower grades at 12th Ave and Jackson Streets, respectively.  Ultimately, with 85 feet cut from the ridge at 12th Avenue the grade of Jackson Street was reduced from fifteen percent to five. The Weller Street statistics are similar.

The June 7, 1908 Post-Intelligencer described two “giants working on Eight Ave in the rear of the Catholic school property.”  The school is Holy Names Academy, originally a formidable landmark with a high central spire that opened on the east side of 7th Avenue, mid-block between Jackson and King streets, in 1884. On June 8, ‘08 the school’s newest graduates, eleven of them, drew a large audience of parents and alums for their baccalaureate.  Everyone understood that within a few days the water canons would be turned directly at their campus and memories.

The same issue of the P-I revealed that school administrators had not yet decided what to do with what the paper agreed was “one of the most valuable buildings in the district.”   Three alternatives were described and all involved moving the school to a new lot.  However, it was an easier backup that was picked.   The building was razed, and parts of it salvaged, or so it would seem from the neatness of it’s dismantling as recorded here.

WEB EXTRAS

Hey Paul, happy holidays! Anything to add?

Some few things more about Weller Street, different points-of-view on Holy Names, a jump to the academy’s new home on Capitol Hill, followed by three of for Christmas related features concluding with a seasonal sampler.

=====

HOLY NAMES on CAPITOL HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 14, 2007)

A century of greening on the Holy Names Academy campus has half-draped the full figure of this Capitol Hill landmark by architects Breitung & Buchinger.  If the landscape were stripped away we would discover a Baroque Revival plant that has changed very little since the “real photo postcard” photographer Otto Frasch recorded it almost certainly in 1908. The big exception is the tower at the north end of the school, on the left. While a 1965 earthquake did not collapse the tower, it did weaken the structure so much it had to be removed.

The Sisters of Holy Names arrived in Seattle in 1880 and opened their school for girls in a home downtown. In 1884 the school moved to its own stately structure on Seventh Avenue near Jackson Street and remained there until the Jackson Street Regrade (1907-1909) made kindling of the school. Construction on this third campus began in 1906, the cornerstone was laid in 1907, and in the fall of 1908 the school was dedicated. Of the 282 students then attending, 127 of them boarded there. Many came from Alaska, some from “off the farm,” others from distant rural communities, and a few from nearby and yet still-hard-to-reach areas such as Mercer Island.

In 1908 Holy Names served all 12 grades plus a “Normal School” for training teachers. By 1930 the Normal School was closed. The grade school was shut down in 1963, and by 1967, the school also quit boarding students.

Classes may already have begun when Frasch took this photo, but certainly the structure’s north wing (the one closest to the photographer) with the chapel was not finished, and wouldn’t be until 1925. The chapel was included in restoration that began in 1990.

=====

SEATTLE HARDWARE CHRISTMAS

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec.25, 2005)

Considering the mix of reflections and fancy stuff in this elegant window, the reader may miss the “Merry Christmas” that is written with fur sprigs. The letters are attached to a wide, white ribbon that arches from two posts of presents. In the center is a third pile of gifts, including dolls and a cluster of oil lanterns just below the banner bearing the company name, Seattle Hardware Co.

Once a stalwart of home improvements, Seattle Hardware tempted shoppers through these plate-glass windows at First Avenue and Marion Street beginning in 1890 when the Colman Building was new. Like the clapboard structure John Colman lost here to the Great Fire of 1889, this brick replacement was kept at two stories until it proved itself. Eventually, with both Seattle Hardware and the popular grocer Louch and Augustine (predecessor to Augustine and Kyer) at street level, this was one of the busiest sidewalks in town.

When Colman was preparing to add four more floors to his building, Seattle Hardware moved to its own brick pile at King Street and First Avenue South in the fall of 1905. The elegant post-fire neighborhood you see reflected in these windows, of course, stayed put. The Burke Building at Second and Marion, and the Stevens Hotel – seen here back-to-back on the right – were razed in the early 1970s to make way for the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building.

In the century since the hardware building grew to six floors, this storefront has been home to a parade of purveyors beginning with Wells Fargo. More recently Bartell Drugs and B. Dalton Books held the corner, and now Starbucks. In the “now” photograph [from 2005], a man holds a sign that reads, “Disabled. Will Work. Navy Vet 78/82 Thanks.”

=====

WARREN WING R.I.P.

Earlier this now failing year an old and fine friend Warren Wing died.  Warren was an extraordinary rail fan who both collected and shared his evidences of railroads, trolleys, with a good measure of “Mosquito Fleet” steamers as well.   He was a pleasure to be with, and a fine story teller.   During part of WW2 Warren worked as a chef – aka cook – on an army train that moved around the states carrying soldiers from one camp to another.  After the war he kept moving, working as a postman here in Seattle.  While walking his route in the Green Lake neighborhood Warren happened upon a “customer” playing with a model train in his basement.  It was not the beginning of Warren’s interest in rolling stock but it quickened it.  He started collecting negatives and then published several books from the images in his own collection.   Sometimes we lectured together.  It was a delight.  Three times I featured Warren and examples of his work, while helping spread the word about one of his books.   The last time was in 1998: a copy of his Christmas card that year.  The Pacific clip that came from it is printed next and below it is another Seattle Christmas car, one from 1935.  That too I learned of from the helpful Mr. Wing.   Finally, at the bottom of this, is another look at Warren from an earlier feature, that one on the border of Georgetown.  He was a good and sharing friend.

=====

CHRISTMAS at the BROWN HOME on DEXTER AVENUE

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 23, 1984.)

When the wife of a pioneer clergyman was asked what she did on her first Christmas Day in Seattle, she replied, “Why it came on a Monday, so I did the wash.”

The first Christmases in Seattle were subdued celebrations that only momentarily interrupted the normal regimen of survival. And there was not much call for gathering around Christmas trees since the trees surrounded the pioneer settlement.  Once the forest had been safely pruned away, however, the settlers began embracing the symbol of Christmas time. The first big community Christmas tree was set up in Yesler’s Hall on Pioneer Square in 1864. It was like a family affair, with almost the entire community (nearly 300 persons) attending the party. People sang carols and retold yuletide stories, and Santa Claus was there with a sack full of presents.

As the town grew, the Christmas celebrations multiplied and moved to the churches. Then Christmas was the most ecumenical day of the year as townspeople paraded from church to church, enjoying the decorations, fellowship and potluck dinners.

By the turn of the century, Seattle had grown too big for citywide ceremonies, and a tree in every home became the tradition. They were decorated with strings of popcorn, ornaments of colored cardboard and tinfoil and covered with candles. Homes were filled with the region’s own vast assortment of yuletide trappings, including mistletoe, and native holly.

The historical Christmas subjects include here are from 1900 or near it. The first scene, above, shows a brother and sister sitting by a tree decorated with cut-out paper figures, tinsel stars and strings of cranberries. It is lit by candles and topped by an angel. With one hand, the daughter presses a toy’ trumpet to her lips and, with the other, hangs on to a stuffed black sheep. Beside her is a tower of blocks decorated with sentimental scenes from childhood. Behind the tree is a painting of Snoqualmie Falls, and on the far left of the photograph are the folded hands of the children’s mother resting on her knees.

Most likely, the photo of the Siblings was taken by George Brown, their father.  Brown was a plumber by trade and also played the clarinet in Wagner’s Band. These are a few of many Brown negatives discovered by Bill Greer, which we have for now a quarter century of use shared with many.

The Brown children have grown some between the top photo, of three, and the bottom one.  The “now” that follows is not of the Brown kids grown up on Dexter Ave., but of Anne and George Luther MacClaren in 1952, who lived on Latona Street, near Green Lake.  Anne especially was an enthused photographer, although her focus was, as here, often on the soft side.

====

[An excerpt from “Keep Clam,” a work-in-progress – still.]

. . .  As The Seattle Star’s Jamie Jamison recalled the Santa episode, “That first Christmas he had Patsy, he dressed her up in a pinafore, put a baby’s lace cap on her head, placed her in a baby buggy and wheeled her up to Seattle’s leading department store (Frederick and Nelson) to see Santa.” It was, of course, Ivar who alerted the press and whom we may thank for the surviving photographs of the performance.  Much later he would bluster, “Of course, a lot of people thought I was nuts, but the newspapers and news wire services gobbled up the story and soon Patsy and I were celebrities of a sort, and customers started flocking down to the waterfront to see the only baby seal in the world who had visited with Santa Claus.”  On his way the “aquarist” wheeled Patsy through the Pike Place Market repeating in reverse the path of reverie he frequently took as a college student on his way to the waterfront after school as he dreamed of one day working on the docks.

===#===

 

(click to enlarge photos)

I first enjoyed this vessel’s profile in an old clipping long ago. Pioneer Sophie Frye Bass recounted, that the “handsome Lake Union steamer” Latona so pleased Seattle developer James Moore (of the theatre) that he named his new addition on the northeast “corner” of the lake also for the Roman goddess – and the boat.

Recently Carolyn Marr, MOHAI’s librarian, surprised me with the original print.  It is about the size of a cel phone.  Fortunately there is a hand-written caption on the flip side of the photo’s card stock, which is signed by the pioneer dentist-developer E.K. Kilbourne.  Librarian Marr assured me that it was his hand that wrote it all.   Kilbourne describes how (in late 1888) he bought the Latona on Elliott Bay from James Colman (of the dock) and brought it first up the Duwamish and Black Rivers to Lake Washington, and then carefully thru “David Denny’s ditch” (the Montlake log canal) towed it to Lake Union.  Like Moore, Kilbourne had his own addition on the north shore of the lake, and the Latona was splendid for carrying buyers and commuters the length of the lake.

Discovering that the patch inscribed “Latona,” (again in Kilbourne’s hand) and pasted above the caption had a loose end, I, of course, lifted it.  Below it the letters “ene” are written on the photo card itself but in a different hand.  This fragment was “fulfilled” with a magnified look at the vessel itself.  This is not the Latona but the Cyrene, and “Cyrene” is signed on the bow.  The Cyrene was also built for Colman on the Seattle Waterfront and brought up the rivers to the big lake.  There it stayed and worked for many years running excursions and routine trips between Leschi and Madison Park.   Unlike the Latona, it never went on to Lake Union.

Marine historian Ron Burke reminds me that once again we are left with no known photograph of the Latona.  Burke also reminded me that old age and confusion might explain Kilbourne’s gaff.  He lived to be 103; Burke, as a child, met him.  Also, the lake steamers Cyrene, and Xanthus, were both built to nearly the same plans by the same shipwright, Mat Anderson, for James Colman, from whom, again, Kilbourne bought his Latona.    It may be that if and when we find one, a photo (or sketch) of the Latona will reveal that it looked very much like the Cyrene.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yup Jean, and again more subjects from the neighborhood.  First a couple of Seattle Times clips about the Cyrene, followed by some maps that include Portage Bay and often more.

=====

UNION BAY FLEET – 1909

This splendid record of life on Union Bay before its bottom was exposed with the 1916 lowering of the Lake for the ship canal was probably photographed from the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way, now the Burke Gilman Recreational Trail.  The boat house in the foreground was built by the school’s associated students in 1906.  It included a dance hall, dresser rooms, lockers, canoe racks and quarters for the keeper and his family.  For the ten years it was moored here the ASUW Boat House was easily one of the most popular campus destinations.  “Canoeing wooing” was then still a commonplace of Seattle dating and courtship.

The occasion for the unusual congestion of Lake Washington “Mosquito Fleet” steamers shown here probably has to do with the commuting of visitors to the summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition on the University of Washington campus.  There are five lake steamers in the scene, but only four are readily seen.  And, if I have identified them correctly, they are, naming them counter-clockwise from the boat house, the Wildwood, the Fortuna, the Cyrene and the Triton.  All but the Wildwood belong to Capt. John L. Anderson who until his death in 1940 ran steamers and ferries on the lake for fifty years.

During the fair Capt. Anderson and his competitors ran 15 minutes commutes between the fair’s landings on Union Bay and Leschi, Madrona, and Madison parks.  An estimated 1,500,000 passengers were handled for these quick hops and for the longer excursion around Mercer Island.

Except for the Fortuna that is seen coming towards shore behind the Wildwood’s stack, all these vessels are empty.  Perhaps, then in this morning scene, the Triton, farthest left beneath Laurelhurst, is returning to Leschi empty to take on more fair goers.  The smaller Cyrene, at the scene’s center, is waiting for her chance to load up for an excursion, and the Wildwood has just left off passengers walking here towards shore along the north (left) apron of the boathouse.  Perhaps.

Union Bay is now dedicated to student parking and recreation. Much of these park and play acres were reclaimed from bottom land by the Montlake Dump.  The dump closed in 1964.

(Historical photo from 1909 courtesy Pemco Webster and Stevens Collection, Museum of History and Industry. Dump photo courtesy of the Municipal Archive.)

======

ASUW BOATHOUSE on UNION BAY

(First appeared in Pacific, May 15, 1988)

Some of the hours they now give to motorcars and music television*, University students used to devote to canoeing. Early-century canoeing was such a popular diversion that in 1906 the University of Washington’s students built their own boathouse. This view of it looks to the northwest from a wetland peninsula that extended into Lake Washington’s Union Bay shallows. Comparing then and now maps of the bay we can be confident that the contemporary view (above)  was shot from very near the historical photographer’s wetland roost. Where now racquets are swung and cars parked, paddles were pulled and canoes glided. It’s a difference made from a nine foot (1916) lowering of Lake Washington and years of sanitary filling at the Montlake dump.

The Interlaken, a North End tabloid of the time, in its February 23, 1907, issue touted the Associated Students’ boat house as “an elegant structure … the best boat house on Lake Washington.” The article also details its functions. “The downstairs contains dresser rooms, locker rooms and a large canoe room where canoe racks are rented to students at a much lower rate than they can obtain elsewhere. The upstairs contains the best dancing floor for small parties in Seattle, also dressing rooms and rooms for keeper and family.”

The smaller boat house to this side of the ASUW’s is for the University crews. Built in 1900, again by students, it survived nine years before larger crew quarters were built on Lake Union’s Portage Bay. We may conclude, then, that this historical photograph was most likely shot sometime between 1907 and 1909. And already in the cold of February 1907, The Interlaken noted that “this boat house constitutes a center for University aquatics,” which, “during the spring will be the center of a great deal of the social life of the University.” The newspaper added that soon electric lights would be strung where before the boathouse had “been compelled to remain dark or be lit with candles and lanterns.” We may imagine the reflecting glow of those lanterns across Union Bay.

======

The ATLANTA & The HANGAR

Here the distinguished lake steamer Atlanta marks the waters of the Montlake Cut as she ploughs into Lake Washington and before the surviving landmark A.S.U.W. Shell House.  The Atlanta was the first ship built by Lake Legend Capt. John Anderson at the Lake Washington Shipyards after he purchased that fledgling marine ways at Houghton (now the site of Kirkland’s Carillon Point) in 1908.  At 90 feet and 87 tons the Atlanta joined the growing fleet of small and sleek steamers named for Greek deities; e.g. the Fortuna, Triton, Aquilo, Xanthus and Cyrene.

In his 52 years on these waterways following his arrival in Seattle in 1888, the Swedish immigrant Anderson rose from polishing deck brass to running Lake Washington transportation both in competition with and for King County.  His death in 1941 followed quickly after the 1940 opening of the Lacey Murrow Floating Bridge (AKA, the Mercer Island Bridge) the overture to the requiem of regularly floating transportation on Lake Washington.  Long before the bridge disrupted waterborne commuting it was the excursion trade that kept Anderson afloat.

The Atlanta was built to handle the rush of sightseers expected for the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition on the U.W. campus.  Anderson ran 12 excursion steamers on the big lake throughout the summer-long AYP.   It was however the 1916 opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal that regularly filled the Atlanta with sightseers enjoying – as the banner on the bow promotes – the “Daily Excursions (through) Sound-Canal-Lakes.” In 1935 Capt. Anderson replaced the Atlanta with the bigger Sightseer, a sturdy vessel that many Pacific readers will have boarded for it was kept in the Sound-Canal-Lake excursion service until 1962.

As revealed by Paul G. Spitzer, past Boeing historian, this scene’s landmark, the old student Shell House, was designed for neither canoes nor racing sculls but rather for seaplanes.  The Navy built it in 1918 while in control of most of the University’s waterfront during World War One.  The sloping walls and oversize hanger doors are enduring signs of its original purpose although, as Spitzer points out “in its eight-four years it has probably never housed an airplane.”

(Historical photo courtesy of Michael Maslan.)

=====

RETOUCHING LESCHI

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 22, 1985)

A few years back while thumbing through some photos at the Oregon Historical Society, I first discovered this “ideal” scene. This photograph has been made downright sweet by an artist’s creation of some cumulus clouds that resemble cotton candy.  At the bottom of the photo the retouch-artist continued his work enveloping the heads of two women in the fog that surrounds the picture’s caption, “1061 Boat Landing, Leschi Park …”  While on my visit, I made a copy of the artist-photographer’s work, laying it on a tilting table next to a window.  Using a steady tripod, I got a good negative.

The next time I stumbled upon this scene was in Wade Vaughn’s book Seattle­ Leschi Diary. Wade copied his view from a postcard. There are no confectionary clouds and the women have their heads. Instead, it is the postcard’s caption has been decapitated. Vaughn explains below his use of this view, that once a caption did exist, and that it dated the scene 1911.  It also added this stock postcardish description: “Leschi Park is a small picturesque Park bordering Lake Washington at Yesler Way, and is a favorite starting point for excursionists over the beautiful lake.” (Since writing this I have also “witnessed” a hand-colored version.)

Actually, the old Leschi was much more than picturesque. As the dappled light in this photo suggests, in its day Leschi was a resort of fair weather pleasures where the differences between indoors and out, sun and shade, and land and lake were creatively confused by long verandas, arboreal promenades, gazebos, bandstands, ornamental gables and arches.

The Leschi boathouse was a wonderful harbor built beneath eight gables and a decorated tower that covered, but did not hide, rows of wood canoes when they, not motorcars, were the principal means of transport for romance. Here you see only the boathouse sign, far right, on the dock which leads out to the covered canoes.

Nor do you see here the Leschi Pavilion, although the photo was taken from its veranda. (See is directly below.)   The pavilion was immense, extending far out over the water, to the right, and far into the park, to the left. The scene of many dances, romances, and stage shows, its single most famous attraction was the 1906 performance by the “divine” Sarah Bernhardt.

What is in this (top) picture is Captain John Anderson’s landing for his lake excursion launches. Just beyond his depot, and poking its second story above the Anderson sign, is the Lake Washington Hotel and Restaurant. It was built in 1890, or less than two years after a development that turned “Fleaburg” (this spot’s popular name in the 1880s) into Leschi.

The Lake Washington Cable Railway’s formal opening was on September 28, 1888. It took 16 minutes for its open cars to run the three-plus roller ­coaster miles out Yesler Way from Pioneer Square – a fact that encouraged many businessmen to build homes on the hill behind the park. The cable railway’s powerhouse is half-hidden behind the trees on the (top) photo’s left. We can see the smokestacks.

In 1913, or only two years after this (top) scene was shot, the Leschi auto ferry began its 27 years of steaming between here and the east side of the lake. The July 2, 1940 opening of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge put a sudden end to that.  Only five weeks later on August 10, the last cable car to run out Yesler completed 52 years of a service many now wish was still running.

Actually, the end of this old Leschi scene was over many years earlier.  Directly below, I chose a symbolic 1925 when an oiled-gravel surface of Lakeside Ave. was cut down through the center of our historical photo.  After that it was perhaps less likely that any artist-photographer of this view would be inspired to add edible clouds.

=====

THE LOST RIVER

(First appeared in Pacific, March 10, 1985)

I first uncovered this romantic river scene in a Post-Intelligencer photo feature titled “Canoeing From Lake To Sound.” Originally published on Sunday, September 9, 1906, it featured 12 illustrations of a relaxed flotilla making its way down the old river route from Lake Washington to Puget Sound. The original story was confined to one page, and so the pictures were both small and grainy. Although I wished to see this scene more clearly – a common desire with old news photos – knew that my chances of ever finding an original print, or even negative, were very slim. Recently (now more than a quarter-century ago), those odds were suddenly “fattened” when a friend, John Hanawalt of the Old Seattle Paperworks in the Pike Place Market, showed me a stack of old photographs he had uncovered, and flipped to an original print of this Black River scene.       This is a truly lost place. The Black River used to run out of the southern end of Lake Washington en-route to its union with the Union River to form together the Duwamish River, which made its serpentine journey of a few miles, concluding in the Elliott Bay estuary of sand islands and tideflats. But before it coursed a mile south from Lake Washington, it was joined by the Cedar River at a confluence which was just a few yards north of what is now the Renton intersection of Rainier Ave. and Airport Way. The contemporary photograph shows the view north through that intersection.

The old Post Intelligencer’s caption for this photograph reads, “Black River, near Cedar River.” If the boaters were “near” to the south of the Cedar River, then they were close to the McDonald’s parking lot printed directly below. If, however, they were “near” to the north of that confluence, then they would be paddling in what is what is now the middle of the main runway of the Renton Airport.

In 1912 the Cedar River was diverted into Lake Washington and four years later the Black River dried up when its source, the lake, was dropped nine feet with the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. But before all that, this was the way “From Lake To Sound” and it was best done this way, in a canoe or shallow-bottomed rowboat.

And it took all day. As the text to the old photo feature explains, this group started after 11 a.m. and never made it. At 9 p.m., in the dark and exhausted, they stepped ashore at Georgetown, a few miles short of their goal, the Seattle waterfront. In 1906 the Duwamish River was not yet straightened into a waterway, and so ‘ still snaked its way through Georgetown, which it now misses by a mile.

Although the Black River is now lost for good, there is still satisfaction in having found this inviting photograph of it.  (And the two that follow.)

=====

1931 CREW ON LAKE UNION

(First appeared in Pacific, 6/21/1987)

Any life-long local over the age of 60 [a quarter-century ago] will know that this is Lake Union. It’s not the shrouded horizon of Queen Anne Hill that gives this scene away, but the three rows of vessels silhouetted by the light scattering through an afternoon haze. Each of these classes of vessels evokes its own well-remembered historical romance.

First are the laid-up sailing ships on the right, the five-and six-masted lumber schooners and barkentines that after the 1917 opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal regularly slipped into the fresh water Lake Union for a winter’s rest and cleansing. Sailing ships continued to use the lake far into the 1930s, although the 1932 completion of the Aurora Bridge limited passage to those whose masts could slip beneath the bridge’s steel trusses. Anchored side by side, these vessels inspired an annual poetics in the Seattle press. They were a “forest of masts,” “veterans of the seas,” “Seattle’s idle fleet of windjammers,” and towards the end, Seattle’s “warehouse of obsolete sailing ships awaiting refurbishing or destruction.” Usually the latter, they were burned for the little scrap metal they contained.

A second class of disposable ships that crowded the lake were the surplus wood freighters built on Puget Sound during and for the First World War, but never used. Tied side-to-side and bow-to-stem they were known locally as “Wilson’s Wood Row.”

In the foreground, forming this photograph’s third line of recollection, are the muscle-motivated, George Peacock-designed sculls from the University of Washington. The man in the hat standing, grading, and following in the powerboat is probably Coach Ulbrickson. This view is used courtesy of Jim Day, boat-builder and competitive sailor, whose father Herb Day, now deceased, is pulling in one of those crews. Annis Day, Jim’s mother, is confident that this scene was shot before the Aurora Bridge opened in 1932. Since the freshman Herb Day began his UW rowing in 1931, that must be the year of this view. And a very good year it was for the freshmen. Day’s crew started by beating the varsity crew, thereby winning the Seattle Times Trophy and ended it by winning the national championship in their class.

In 1932 Herb Day and a few other sophomores joined the varsity crew but, unfortunately, not the Olympics of that year, losing to the University of California in the trials.  However, in 1933 they rebounded, first defeating California by an “almost unbelievable 10-length margin” in the West Coast Regatta, and then Yale by eight feet, thereby winning the national championship. The returning champions were given a mid-day victory parade aboard flower-decorated floats through downtown.

On the last day of 1933, Ulbrickson lamented to the press, “We lose Polly Parrott, Herb Day and Herb Mjorud. They rowed in the waist of the shell. They were a combination a coach gets only once or twice in ten years.”  Ulbrickson’s second such combination came soon enough and included Herb Day’s brother James as part of the 1936 Varsity Crew that won the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

=====

1887 LAKE UNION REPOSE

This photograph – it seems as much a painting – of two women relaxing in a forest of cedars and firs was found in a nearly century-old album of grainy and often faded prints. Luckily, this scene is captioned, “West Side, Lake Union.” The album includes another Lake Union view, and that second record is also dated 1887. Both prints were exposed on photographic paper of the same size, texture and weight, we may almost assume that the scene of the two women was and other were photographed during the same visit to the lake, which in 1887 would have been an adventure.. These may be the earliest close-up records of the lake, which the Indians and settlers, using the Chinook trade-talk, called Tenas Chuck, or Little Water, to distinguish is from the Big Water: Lake Washington.

Lake Union may be said to have two west sides – the greater and the lesser. The lesser is the shore that runs to the northeast from Gasworks Park along the channel that leads to the University District bridge and Portage Bay. I think it unlikely that the caption writer was referring to this short west side.  It would normally be considered part of the lake’s north side. The longer west side of the Lake extends from its southern end north below Queen Anne Hill to the Fremont Bridge, where, before the ship canal widened and straightened it, a stream joined the lake to Salmon Bay on Puget Sound. It seems likely that the photographer recorded this scene of lakeside repose close to that outlet. There, like in the photograph, the distance across the lake narrows. Lake Union also narrows some at its southern end, but by 1887 the Western Lumber Mill had already been manufacturing there for four years. The mill is not in the picture.

If these deductions are correct, then the two women are posing beside an old cedar near the point where Westlake A venue North now begins its long approach to the Fremont Bridge. Across the water is a district near the present Stone Way North that developed its own community called Edgewater. If we are right in that description then we can also come closer to dating the scene. If it had been photographed in the fall of 1887, the wooden trestle of the Seattle Lake Shore and Easter Railroad would be visible across the lake on its northern shore. The trestle was constructed during the summer of that year. With the railroad came the platting and settlement of Fremont, but the trestle is not there and neither is Fremont. Also, judging from the leafless twigs and the women’s wraps, the photo was taken either early or late in the year, which in this instance means, given the rest of the evidence, early in the year.

One can also see from the photo that the north shore has been cleared some of its timber, which was most likely directed towards the lake in its felling and then floated to the Western Mill at the lake’s southern end. It was a typical practice of most pioneer lumbering to take the easier shoreline timber first. By 1890 most of the forest on the far side would be cleared. But even with the clear-cutting an occasional tree would be left standing because it was irregular and difficult to mill. So the leaning, rough and, perhaps, crooked old cedar may have survived for a few more years – a hope we hold also for the two women.

=====

FOREST FRIEND

We may expect that the sides of these two five-mast barkentines are painted some shade of forest green.  These and a third sister were raised together at Grays Harbor in 1919-1920.  Built for the offshore and coastal trade of the Forest Line, their names were Forest Pride, Forest Dream and Forest Friend.   The ship on the right is either the Pride or the Dream, for the other is surely the Friend; when magnified, the name appears on the starboard side.  Designed to carry lumber, they were 242 feet long and 44 feet wide.  In 1923- about the time this view of it was photographed – the Forest Friend was the first ocean vessel to reach the south end of Lake Washington when it loaded cargo at Taylor’s Mill near Renton.  This scene was photographed from the end of the Lake Union Cargo Co. dock where Westlake Ave. begins its last long section before reaching the Fremont Bridge (hidden here behind the barkentines); the Aurora Bridge is not yet in place.  When it was completed in 1932, ships as tall as these were not able to pass beneath it.

=====

MONONGAHELA’S ESCAPE

(First appeared in Pacific, July 15, 1992)

On March 25, 1931, after standing idle in Lake Union for three years, the Monongahela was towed to Eagle Harbor, its four masts slipping between the closing cantilevers of the Aurora Bridge. Built in Glasgow in 1892, it was named Balasore for the town beside the Bay of Bengal where British imperialism was introduced to India in the 17th century. The steel-hulled vessel was later sold to a German company and renamed the Dalbek. In 1914 the Dalbek was sent on a journey from which she did not return. Arriving on the Columbia River on Aug. 2, she was stranded there by the opening of World War I. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, she was seized for the U.S. Shipping Board, which ran her between San Francisco and Manila as the Monongahela.

When the Charles Nelson Company bought her in 1922, she was used at least once on the shipping firm’s intercoastal trade. It towed West Coast lumber to Florida and returned to San Francisco through the Panama Canal with sulfur from Galveston, Texas.

After ending a trip with lumber to Australia in 1928, the Monongahela was anchored in the southeast comer of Lake Union. It stayed there, in the early doldrums of the Great Depression, until it was forced out by the mounting obstruction of the Aurora Bridge. Eventually sold in bankruptcy to a Seattle company for $8,600, the Monongahela was towed from Eagle Harbor to Smith Cove. There it was converted to a barge and sold to the Kelly Logging Co. of Vancouver, B.C., where it survived for a few more years hauling logs before it was scrapped.

=====

UNION BAY ca. 1909

When the University of Washington moved north in 1895 from downtown, the new site was commonly referred to as the Interlaken Campus.   Views such as this confirm the name.   Most likely this scene was photographed during or soon after the makeover of the campus for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP).

With the campus to his or her back, the unnamed photographer looks southeast across Union Bay.  Madison Park is right-of-center, and Webster Point, the southern extremity of Laurelhurst, shows itself on the left just above the stairway that descends from the pedestrian trestle.   Between them we look across the main body of Lake Washington to an eastside waterfront softly filtered by a morning haze that hangs over the lake on what is otherwise a bright winter day.  This is Medina – or will be.  In 1909 there are as yet no palatial beach homes and/or bunkers to attract our modern flotilla of waterborne life-style hunters.

Lake Washington is here at its old level before it was slowly dropped nine feet between late August and mid-October 1916 for the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal.  At the old lake level the small unnamed island, right of center, was still separated from Foster Island, behind the screen of trees on the far right.  Now joined, they can be explored on the Arboretum Waterfront Self-guided Trail.

We might have wished that the photographer had shown more of the trestle.   It was mostly likely constructed for access to the shore groomed as a picturesque retreat for visitors to the AYP.   The construction of both peeled and unhewed logs repeats one of the Expo’s lesser architectural themes – the rustic one.  The trestle, of course, spans the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern – the railroad that opened up the hinterland of King County in the late 1880s.  It first reached this point beside Union Bay in the fall of 1887.

In 1916 Lake Washington was dropped nine feet and the campus waterfront on Union Bay has since been extended with fills and the construction of oversized sports facilities like the 1927 Hec Edmundson Pavilion and the 1920 Husky Stadium.  The timber trestle has also been replaced with a concrete one that passes over both the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way (now a portion of the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail) and Montlake Blvd. N.E.    (Historical pix. courtesy Michael Cirelli.)

=====

LOG CANAL & LOCKS at MONTLAKE

(First appeared in Pacific, June 2, 2002)

 

This is surely the most intimate record of the locks on the old Montlake Log Canal that has ever been shared with me.  It is one part of a stereo recorded by Frank Harwood around 1907. When properly spied through stereoscope optics, the floating logs in the foreground of the original actually seem to be wonderfully in the foreground. With this third dimension, the logger near the locks’ guillotine gate needs considerably more skill to ride his log.

Like the Indians before him, Harvey Pike first saw the importance of this isthmus as a low and short portage between Lake Union’s Portage Bay and Union Bay on Lake Washington. He was paid with this land for painting the original University of Washington building in 1861. Pike platted and named his prize Union City, and soon he also began excavating a ditch for moving logs. The big lake was then ordinarily around 9 feet higher than the small. Predictably, Pike soon gave up this digging. Still, he kept an eye open for opportunities, and in 1871 transferred his deed to Californians with deeper pockets. They laid a narrow-gauge railroad tracks across the isthmus. Between 1872 and ’78, these rails carried cars filled with the black gold of Newcastle.  In those years coal, not lumber, was Seattle’s principal export.   For pulling the coal cars across the isthmus the coal company employed the cattle of the Brownfield family, and their sons to guide them.  The Brownfields were the first farmers to homestead the future University District.

IN 1878, the coal company abandoned this Lake Union route for a more direct route around the south end of Lake Washington to the Seattle waterfront.  Next, the Montlake Isthmus was at last channeled for logs in 1883 by Chinese laborers. This guillotine lock was built near the Portage Bay end of the cut, within a frog jump of the University of Washington’s row of odd-shaped fish hatcheries set today beside Highway 520. (And when we can find our picture of the hatcheries we will put it up.)

=====

LATONA BOATHOUSE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 6, 1996)

This view is a one-of-a-kind record of the Latona waterfront, circa 1911, or at least that part of it east of the Latona Bridge, from which it was photographed.

This captioned commercial view was included in a packet of snapshots, postmarked 1911, which depicted a summer day of canoeing and courting – judging from the messages written on their flip side – on Lake Union, Portage Bay and through the old Montlake log canal. The speculation is that the couple’s canoe was rented from the Latona Boat House.

In 1911 Orick and Florence Huntosh were proprietors there. The listing from the city directory that year reads in part, “Fishing boats and tackle in season, storage and boats to let, Latona Station, 651 Northlake Ave, Phone No. 148.”

Other landmarks include the faded roof line of the University of Washington’s Parrington Hall (upper right), and the Cascade Coal Company’s bunkers and spur (upper left) off the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad (Burke-Gilman Trail) right-of-way. Cutting through most of the view, the black line of the city water department’s 32-inch wood-stave pipeline completes its bridging of Portage Bay and goes underground again at Seventh Avenue Northeast.   We will insert here another look at the pipeline and also from the Latona Bridge.

(click to enlarge photos)

Jean and I recently met Alice Stuart and Kurt Einar Armbruster on the University District’s “Ave.” in front where the Pamir House – featuring “variety coffees” and folk singing – might have been had it not been replaced by a parking lot more than forty years ago.

Two lots north of 41st Street, Alice led us from the sidewalk thru the parked cars to the eloquent spot where she sang and played her resonant Martin D-18 guitar one year short of a half-century earlier.  It was near the beginning of a remarkable singing career for the then 20-year old folk artist from Lake Chelan and blessed with a beautiful voice.  She still uses it regularly.  (This past year Stuart was on stage “gigging” an average of nearly three times a week – often with her band named Alice Stuart & The Formerlys.)

Alice Stuart is one of the many Seattle musicians that author-musician Kurt E. Armbruster splendidly treats in his new book “Before Seattle Rocked.” The index of this University of Washington Press publication runs 25 pages and covers most imaginable music-related subjects in our community’s past from Bach thru Be-bop to the Wang Doodle Orchestra. This author has a gift for interviewing his subjects.  Stuart expressed amazement at his elegant edit of what she thought of as her “rambling on” about her long career.

Armbruster’s first book, “Whistle Down the Valley” (1991) was built on interviews with railroad workers in the Green River valley.  His second book “The Orphan Road” took a difficult subject, Washington’s first railroads, and unraveled its tangles with wisdom and good wit.   The “Orphan” is easily one of our classics.  Now with “Before Seattle Rocked” Armbruster’s place is insured among those who chose important regional subjects that waited years for their devoted revelators.

Armbruster is a “proud member of Seattle Musicians’ Association, AFM Local 76-493.”  Among other instruments, Kurt plays the bass for music of many kinds including rock and pop.  The book’s dedication reads, “To Ed ‘Tuba Man’ McMichael (1955-2008), a working musician.”

WEB EXTRAS

A couple more shots of Alice Stuart and her guitar:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean.  Directly below Ron Edge has added a cluster of relevant extras with a link to a blog contribution that appeared here first on July 9, 1911.  (Just click on the photo of the WW2 war bonds rally at the corner of 45th and University Way.) It features several items touching on University District history, many of them also on “The Ave.”   Following the Edge link, I’ll insert a few other related features and photos from diverse sources.

 

 

(Remember, if you wish, to CLICK to ENLARGE)

===

=======

=====

Above:  The University District’s “main street” 14th Avenue was renamed University Way by contest in 1918, or about nine years after this record of the street and its then principal intersection at 42nd Street was photographed.  (Courtesy Dan Kerlee)  Below:  A few of the structures in the historical view do survive in the “now’ although most of these have been “modernized” with new facades like the buildings on the far right at the southeast corner of University Way and 42nd Street.

“THE UNIVERSITY STATION”

Now often called simply “The Ave”, University Way was first platted in 1890 as Columbus Avenue.  Two years later an electric trolley was laid along its centerline to help sell lots in the new neighborhood (then still known as Brooklyn) but also to prepare for the daily delivery of students when the University of Washington fulfilled its plans to relocate there in 1895.

This postcard view looks north on the Ave to its intersection with 42nd Street, which the students soon learned to call “University Station” for the waiting shed built at its northeast corner, and also for the familiar bark of the trolley conductor.  “The Station”, for short, quickly become the center of neighborhood activity, and with the transfer of the old Latona Post Office to the northwest corner of the intersection in 1902, Columbus and 42nd had a second direct reason to be so called.

A dozen businesses crowded to all sides of the intersection in 1905.  Three more, including the district’s first bank, opened in 1906.  By then the Station was also the off-campus stage for fraternity initiation rites. Freshman were directed to sweep the street in front of any woman crossing it, and perform as sidewalk mimes acting out the business being done inside the storefronts.  Also in the summer of 1906 the intersection had its own musical accompaniment when the University Station Band played from a pavilion built beside it.

In preparation for the summer-long1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Expo (AYP) on the university campus, a second trolley track was added to Columbus, AKA 14th Avenue, and the street itself was paved with asphalt in the early fall of 1908.  During the AYP the Station’s commercial dominance was temporarily deflected one and two blocks south on 14th, closer to the Expo’s main gate on 40th Street.  And after the AYP the center of the district’s business life jumped north to 45th Street and 14th Avenue.  When the post office joined in this move, businesses near 42nd first complained but then pleaded for at least a sidewalk letterbox on the Station corner.

=====

AVE RIP UP

On the twelfth of May, 1940 gas-powered busses replaced the then 48-year-old trolley service to the University District.  Here two months later in July, we look north on the Ave through its intersection with 45^th Street. After the trolley tracks were removed the rough center of the street was exploited as a temporary parking strip while the curb lanes were reserved for moving traffic the busses included.  On August 11, trolleys returned to the Ave but they were maneuverable trackless ones.  In this scene their overhead wires are not yet installed.

The Ave got its cosmopolitan advantage in 1895 when the University arrived beside it.  In 1940 U.W. English Professor Frederick Padelford described University Way as “the silver chord” or “vital connecting link between the life of the campus and the life in the community . . . where town and gown mingle to their mutual advantage.”  And by Seattle standards life on the Ave has always been extraordinary.

In the nearly 63 years that separates then above from now (in 2003) all the same structures on the west side of University Way north of its main intersection at 45th Street have survived. (And continue to in 2011.)   However all the 56 listed tenants (including the apartments) on this west side of the street have changed and most of the uses have changed as well.  By example, gone from 1940 are G.O. Guy Drugs, Buster Brown Shoes, the Diamond 5 Cents and $1.00 Store, Brehm’s Delicatessen, VandeKamp’s Dutch Bakery, Mode O’Day Women’s shop, Mannings Coffee Shop and the Egyptian Theater. Gone but still remembered.

Above and Below: Two more July 1946 Parking Conditions survey snapshots taken from a U.Book Store upper floor.

NEXT: Looking south thru the same block from 45th.  First in 1908 when the 4300 block of 14th Avenue, (University Way) was still as much residential as commercial, followed by another Merry 20’s look south through the intersection with 45th Street.

=====

The Main Gate to the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP) on the University of Washington campus was sumptuously set looking west on 40^th Street from the east side of 15^th Avenue. E.  After the Exposition the entrance on 40^th was developed for driving onto the UW campus.   (Historical photo by A. Price)

AYP MAIN GATE

Here is where most visitors to the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition got their first inkling for what awaited them within in the way of edifying instruction or cheap thrills.  And these ordinarily conflicting emotions may have been enjoyed together when crossing the threshold beneath a gateway that could have been erected for Caesar’s return.

The photograph looks west across Puget Plaza and over the shoulders of sculptor Loredo Taft’s bronze statue of the American Caesar, George Washington, left-of-center. (Washington was later moved one block north and now looks west on Campus Parkway.) To the sides of the gate and through its three arches can be glimpsed the confusion of commercial signs and small shops on 15^th Avenue hoping to pick up a few dimes from the fair visitors.  Included are the AYP Laundry, a KODAK store, and a big billboard (far right) promoting Charles Cowen’s University Park Addition.  This is mildly ironic for Cowen was one the boomers for beautifying the University District in preparation for the exposition.

The bandstand on the far left is busy with musicians – perhaps AYP regular, Wagner’s Band.  AYP expert-enthusiast and bassoonist Dan Kerlee notes that the exposition campus was generally alive with music – live music.

The date may be Sept 18, for a banner stretched above 15^th Avenue on the far side of the gate has that date printed large at both its ends.  September18^th was Exhibitor’s Day with lots of prizes promised.

Early hysterical rumors that the fair was too expensive for families was answered with a Seattle Times editorial, which claimed that for two dollars a workingman could take a family of four under this gateway and still have fifty cents left “for ice cream, soda water, peanuts or whatever they may desire.”  For comparison the Times also noted “There are many men in Seattle and every other city who live on 20 cents a day – ten cents for trolley car fare and ten cents for lunch.”

=====

AYP TROLLEY STATION on BROOKLYN AVE. 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, March 28, 1999)

This symmetrical structure that, it seems, is still under construction was a temporary feature of the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition. The summer-long fair temporarily remade the University of Washington campus and also stirred the University District. This looks north along the centerline of Brooklyn Avenue from near what, since 1950 has been its intersection with Campus Parkway. The temporary trolley station was designed to handle the throngs expected to visit the fair.  This terminus was only three blocks from the main entrance to the fair at 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 40thStreet.

The full message of the signs emblazoned on the south walls of the waiting sheds is revealed in another photograph recorded on the same occasion. The sign on the left reads “TO CITY Via Eastlake Ave. & Broadway – Save Exact Change Ready, No Change Given At Turnstile.” The sign concludes “Get Change Here.”  “Here” is the little window showing at the far left. The sign on the right offers an alternate route to the city by way of Wallingford and Fremont avenues.

One landmark survives.  The church steeple rising at the middle of the “then” scene tops the University Methodist Sanctuary, at the southeast corner of Brooklyn and 42nd Street. Later the steeple was removed and replaced by a neon-lit cross, which the University Methodists used in advertising themselves as the “church of the revolving cross.” Eventually the congregation removed its cross, and moved to its present home nearby on 15th Avenue Northeast. The old church, however, has survived as a mixed commercial-spiritual property.

=====

SHOWBOAT THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 4, 1986)

The old Showboat Theater on the University of Washington campus was recently called “a distant derivation of a derivation of a derivation of the riverboat.”  That description was offered by Ellen Miller-Wolfe, coordinator of the local Landmarks Preservation Board [in 1986]. It may be that lack of architectural purity which will eventually doom the sagging Showboat. It is scheduled to be demolished soon.

When or if it bows out, the Showboat will leave a legacy of fine theater and personal stories. (It is said to be haunted by the ghost of its founder Glenn Hughes, a man once known on the English-speaking stage west of Broadway as “Mr. Theater. “)

The theater’s opening night, Sept. 22, 1938, was a banner-draped, lantern-lighted, elegant black-tie setting for the old farce, “Charlie’s Aunt.” One of the showboat’s best remembered offerings was the 1949 production of “Mrs. Carlyle, ” written by Hughes and starring Lillian Gish, the silent screen star and stage actress.

The theatrical variety and often professional quality performances that six nights a week moved upon the Showboat’s stage were a far cry from the fare of the old ”’mellerdrammers” that played the real showboats of the Mississippi River days. Chekhov, Thurber, Sophocles and, of course, Shakespeare all made it onto Seattle’s revolving proscenium stage. And some of its players were Frances Farmer, Robert Culp and Chet Huntley (who later switched careers to the theater of national news).

The original design for the Works Progress Administration-built “boat” came from another member of the UW’s drama faculty, John Ashby Conway, who envisioned it being occasionally tugged about Lakes Washington and Union for off-shore performances. Instead, for its nearly 50 years [by 1986] it has been in permanent port on Portage Bay, supported, for the sake of illusion, a short ways off shore on concrete piling.

[In 1the mid-1980s the destruction of the then unused but not sinking showboat was forestalled for a time by a group called SOS (Save Our Showboat).  Many of its members once acted on its stage and have left their sentimental shadows there.  As I recall it was long after an SOS denouement that, as if in the night, the Showboat was razed to below its waterline.]

===

Meany Hall, for years the U.W.’s primary auditorium, was built for the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition held on campus in 1909.  After the regional earthquake of April 29, 1965 twisted its foundation and loosened its cornice the old hall was torn down.   It was replaced by a new Meany Hall with the 1968-69 makeover with red tiles (hence its nick name “Red Square”) replacing the green sward that once faced the old hall.

MEANY HALL

Meany Hall on the University of Washington campus was – and still is – named for a red headed history professor who arrived in Seattle as a tall and slender 15 year old.  Edmond Meany’s elaborate and legendary connections with the University begin ceremonially with his graduation from it in 1885.  Six years later as a member of the Washington State Legislature he was the primary political mover behind the University leaving its downtown site on Denny’s Knoll in 1895 for its new “Interlaken” campus.

In 1906when a committee of Seattle’s most prominent boomers visited the school with a request to make it over for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Exposition (AYP) it was the by then Professor Meany who welcomed and promoted them.   The campus was given over to the Expo in part to get some funds out of the ordinarily reluctant state legislature for new permanent buildings.  The largest of these was the auditorium seen here.  A mere five years after the AYP the school’s regents broke tradition and reluctantly renamed the auditorium for the still very alive Edmond Meany after the students refused to call it anything else.

The long front steps of Meany Hall were the school’s ceremonial stage.  Here class pictures were recorded and it was here also on an October night each year that the venerable “keeper of traditions” lighted only by torches led freshman in a ceremony that from the year 2003 may seem fabulous: the recitation of the Ephebie Oath.  With upraised hands the new students led by Meany dedicated the education they were about to receive from the people of the state to the service of the state and of society.

A 72-year-old Edmond Meany died quickly in this campus office from a stroke in 1935.  By then he also had a hotel and a mountain named for him.

====

TWO FAVORED RESTAURANTS on the AVE in their time.

The European Pastry Shop, nearly across the Ave. from the Pamir House, below in 1994 and above with a tax photo from 1955.   Many intense conversations have passed across its tables or been digested with its pastries.  (Top pix courtesy of Washington State Archives, Bellevue Branch.)

The LUN TING RESTAURANT, long a cherished destination on the Ave. and very near the University Book Store.   Both are tax photos with the dates scribbled on them.

Follows the storefront directly north of the Varsity Theatre, first in the late 1930s and then in 1996, showing a typical modernizing that followed for many of the original ornate facades on Ave addresses.

===

[Here we will return Victor Lygdman’s look east from the Freeway Bridge construction zone toward the University District and campus during the winter of 1961-62.  We do so that the reader (aka you) might search within for the back west facade of Mean Hall on campus.  This photograph, with a caption, appeared first on Friday last as part of the most recent posting for Seattle Confidential.  Best to CLICK THIS ONE TWICE!]

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Waiting on the front lawn of his studio at 817 Second Avenue, we imagine that pioneer photographer Theo. Peiser arranged with Andrew Charleston, Herman Norden and/or Martin Gunderson, all officers of the Lake Union Furniture Manufacturing Company, to pause and pose with their float here two lots south of Marion Street.   The San Franciscan Peiser reached Seattle in 1883 and soon set up his studio on Second. Most of his sign appears on the left.

In booming Seattle there was then plenty of work for a photographer with Peiser’s hustle.  Of his four local competitors David Judkins was also on Second and so close by that Peiser advised the readers of his full page advertisement in the 1887 Polk City Directory, “Be sure to read the sign before you enter, so as not to make any mistake and get into another gallery. Peiser’s is the only one with the title ‘Art Studio.’  Please bear this in mind.”  Peiser’s ad is so “arty” that is features a fourteen-verse poem extolling Seattle, its surrounds and his studio.  The last verse reads, “Eight hundred and seventeen, Second Street, Theo E. Peiser’s Art Studio neat.  His work, view and portrait, can’t be beat  – On the continent.”  (Click the poem directly below to enlarge it.)

Lake Union Furniture ran its own full-page ad in 1888, the first one in that year’s city directory.  As on their float, the partners promoted themselves as “a deserving home industry” with furniture “for furnishing the cottage as well as the palace.”  While the manufacturer’s plant was on the south shore of Lake Union, their primary saleroom was at Second and Yesler (Mill Street), which put it in the way of the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.   Peiser and all of his competitors’ studios were also consumed.  Before the fire he had proudly noted, “every negative was preserved.”  No longer; all his glass plates with local scenes and paid portraits were broken and scorched.  Distraught, he moved to Hood Canal.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yea Jean, a few things relating to Peiser and/or the neighborhood near Marion and 2nd.  I’ll put it up, but probably wait with corrections until Sunday morning – late.

PEISER’S ART STUDIO

(First appeared in Pacific, August 9, 1987)

When Theodore Peiser came to Seattle in 1883, the San Francisco native set up his studio one lot south of Marion Street on the west side of Second Avenue. But, like most other local photographers, Peiser did not always stay in town.   Peiser advertised “A large stock of Washington Territory views” on his street-facing facade of is rough studio building on Second Avenue.  The accompanying photo also shows his “Traveling Studio” – a tent – next “door” to the south. Apparently the photographer rolled up part of the tent roof, to use the sun as the light source for exposing contact prints when working in the “field” or even, as here, three lots south of Marion.

Typical of photographers of his day, Peiser liked to consider himself an artist. Photography was then still young and promoted itself as a kind of “painting with light.”  They were eager to borrow some of the romantic distinction residing in the fine arts.  It was a grab for the glamour that did not attach directly to the job of merely making images with the aid of optics and chemicals. In the smaller type between his main sign and the montage of selective views he fixed to the front of his studio, Peiser promised “First class work guaranteed in any weather.”

Peiser could handle the weather, but not Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889. Of the roughly 33 city blocks destroyed, his was included, and it nearly wiped him out. It was a loss for both Peiser and the photographic memory of Seattle, for what survives of his work from the 1880s is still one of the more significant records of the city’s growth in that explosive decade.  Here are a few examples, concluding with a self-portrait that recently surfaced through the good services of Dan Kerlee and Ron Edge.

It the exceedingly useful Seattle Times on-line archive that is wonderfully word-searchable (get out your library cards) for all subjects that appeared in the Times between 1900 and 1984, Peiser first appears with the first clip attached below, a snipped – and snippy – classified ad directed to a target in far off Seattle.  Peiser makes his post from San Francisco. We do not, however, learn if Peiser determined if Lewis Ericckson was an “honest man” after his return to Seattle.  If he was, would Ericckson then insist that Peiser run a second classified in The Times indicating that “Honestly Ericckson you are an honest man, and I never expected any other.”

Late in 1904 Peiser advertizes for a cheap room to rent and in that context also indicates a desire to sell his photography equipment.  Next in 1906 (below) he looks for a farm, still has his photo gear and still wants to sell it.  And he is addressed in the Eitel Building at the northwest corner of Second and Pike.  It is still there.

On the tenth of March, 1907 the Seattle Times reports on the photographer’s poor health.

Less than three weeks later The Times reports again on Peiser’s health, and this time his complaints as well.  Peiser is living in the East Green Lake neighborhood at this time.

Later that year, 1907, or the next Theo. Peiser does make it back to California.  Born in 1853, he dies in 1922 – 69 years and before antibiotics or asthma sprays.  Finally (for us), Peiser and his studio are remembered in 1922 with The Seattle Times then popular – and probably first – series on local historical photography, called . . .

=====

What follows first appeared in Pacific on January 24, 2004.  In the first photo above – at the top of this day’s blog – part of the south facade of the Stetson Post Building facing Marion Street appears in the upper-left corner.  That apartment house survived the 1889 fire and much else.  Here, below, we see it still holding its place at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Marion Street.  (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

One century – plus a year or two – separates these views looking north on Second Avenue through its intersection with Marion Street.

MARION STREET REMINDERS

(First appeared in Pacific, January 2004)

Only one feature survives between this “then and now” and it has been truncated. On the right of the contemporary view five of the original seven floors of the Marion Building have been lopped away at the southeast corner of Marion Street and Second Avenue. But while humbled on top, at the sidewalk the building now boasts a stone façade with monumental pillars. Somewhat early in its now more than century-long life the first floor was altered for a bank, the long since merged and folded National City Bank.

The Webster and Stevens negative number for this (two pixs above) look north up Second Avenue is 665. That’s an early number for the studio that was the principal supplier of photographs for The Seattle Times during the first quarter of the 20th Century.

Besides the red brick gloss of Second Avenue, the illustrative intention of the photograph may be to contrast the two showy structures that look at one another from the north corners with Marion Street. On the right is the Victorian clapboard Stetson-Post Building with the central tower. It was built in 1883, curiously only six years before the ornate brick and stone Burke Building on the left was raised above the ashes of the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.

When new, locals considered the Burke Block our best example of the latest design in business blocks. When old, the Burke Building was mourned by many as it was replaced in 1974 with the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building. In the 1880s Thomas Burke, its namesake, had been a resident in the Stetson Post Building that was saved from the fire by the generous width of Second Avenue and the vigorous reapplication of wet blankets to its steaming skin.

While it appears to be an antique, the Stetson-Post has only reached its mid-life here (Six photos up). On August 10, 1919 The Seattle Times noted its passing, describing it as “Second Avenue’s last pioneer landmark.” By then it was an outstanding anomaly on Seattle’s most modern street. Lined with skyscrapers like the Smith Tower (1914), the Hoge Building (1911) and the New Washington Hotel (1908) Second Avenue was our first “urban canyon.”

=======

AYPE WELCOME ARCH, 2^nd & MARION, 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, May 18, 1997)

Four days before the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition’s opening on June 1, 1909, on the University of Washington campus, locals were excited by a published sketch of a commemorative arch that Vancouver, B.C., planned to erect at Third and Marion. Seattle Mayor John Miller announced that he “regretted in view of Vancouver’s enterprise that Seattle had not seen fit to build an arch.”

City superintendent of buildings Francis W. Grant quickly plucked an arch design from architect W.M. Somervell for the mayor to wave at the City Council. One councilman, future Mayor Hiram Gill, declined; the 17 others agreed, including T.P. Revel, who appealed to the powerful political motive of shame – or its avoidance.  Revel noted that he did  “not favor the expenditure of funds for gilt and tinsel as a rule, but I will vote for this bill since it is apparent that Seattle must maintain its own reputation.” Grant lamented that the proposed $4,000 would put Seattle at a disadvantage in what he said should be a race with Vancouver to complete the monuments. The council raised the investment to $6,900 but declined to treat the building as a contest.

Seattle’s completed arch over Second Avenue at Marion was “unveiled” July 21, one day after state Superior Court Judge J.T. Ronald denied an injunction by local labor unions to stop construction on the grounds it was contracted without bids and built with non-union labor. Ronald, a former Seattle mayor, reasoned that the city could build whatever street ornaments it wanted so long as they were not as ephemeral as fireworks or flags.

What Seattle got was, at least, flag-like: a welcome banner strung between two 85-foot-tall columns. After dark the two braziers at the top emitted smoke-like steam illuminated by fire-red lights. These burning pots were copper green, and the columns were an old~ivory tint.

The enthusiastic mayor joyfully announced, “I’d like to see Seattle smothered in bunting.”

=======

DAD’S DAY

(First appeared in Pacific, June 15, 1986)

The banner being marched down the middle of Second Avenue in the parade scene above reads: “Every Dad That Don’t Tum Out Is a Coward.” And what might that dad be afraid of? Mom, of course!

So, on Thursday, July 17,1913, near the start of the Golden Potlatch, Seattle’s third annual summer festival, mayor and “dad”, George F. Cotterill pleaded with the city’s mothers through a mayoral proclamation “calling upon the bosses of the dads to give ‘them a holiday’,” and to encourage them to promenade on Saturday afternoon in the Dad’s Day Parade.

Some of the city’s mothers responded by putting down their rolling pins and handing their aprons and brooms to the dads: In the foreground of the photo are fathers dressed in kitchen drag and wearing signs that say “I’m a Dad.” This is just the start of the procession. Behind them are floats, which depicted “Dad doing the family washing, dad on ironing day, dad washing the dinner dishes, dad hooking up mother who was about to go out to a theater party . . . and dad in every other form of servitude, which the downtrodden declared had been suffered too long.” according to a Seattle Times article.

The dads’ floats were donated by dad-owned local businesses (It was the only 1913 Potlatch event that didn’t cost the city an extra cent.), with the omnipresent “Your Credit is Always Good” Standard Furniture float the best among them. Herbert ‘Schoenfeld, the founder of Standard Furniture [In 1896, at least, still the Schoenfeld Furniture in Tacoma], was the originator and chairman of Seattle’s first “Dad’s Day.”

But the dads didn’t entirely take over the summer event. Waving above this parades scenes, on the right, is the Potlatch Bug. The Potlatch name was taken from a Northwest native ritual during which fortunes were given away in exchange for prestige.  Ed Brotze was The Seattle Times artist who designed the Potlatch bug as a somewhat primitive amalgam of a totem-pole figure and a native mask. And the most popular Golden Potlatch costumes were not aprons and bonnets, but traditional dress of old sourdoughs and Indians – with variations.

========

PARADE of ALL NATIONS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 21, 1984)

William the Duke of Proclamations pronounced six of them (proclamations) for Seattle’s first summer festival, the 1911 Golden Potlatch. The first was: “Forget dull care and remember that this is the time for INNOCENT AMUSEMENT.”

Recently [in 1984], two albums stuffed with photographs of these amusements have surfaced from the other Seattle underground of lost or forgotten images. This view of the Afro-American float in the Potlatch’s Parade of All Nations is one of them. On July 21 , 1911, The Post Intelligencer’s review of this spectacle was headlined, “PARADE OF ALL NATIONS IS SEEN BY GREAT CROWDS . . . Cooler Day Brings Out Throng For Racial And Industrial Pageant.” The article below the headline listed the “races.”

“After the Japanese Lantern Float, the Cle Elum band led the Italian section. Prominent Italian citizens and their families rode in gaily-decorated automobiles. Then followed the Chinese in automobiles and after them an Afro-American float, which won much applause. The Indians followed . . . ”   Or Europeans dressed like them – it was not very difficult to tell them apart.

The Golden Potlatch was a local creation hybridized from Seattle’s enduring fixation with the 1897 Alaska Gold Rush (hence, the “97 Seattle” pennants on the float), and the white man’s fascination with the Indian’s ritual of gift-giving called the potlatch. In this spirit, another fair spokesperson, a Reverend Major, advised all citizens to give the gift of “good cheer because it tears down the walls built between us.” The clergyman advised that the Parade of All Nations would show how “Every citizen of Seattle is interested in every other citizen . . . We are a big family.”

Wisely, Seattle’s Black community arranged their float with girls – the human representatives with the best chance of escaping the grown-up anxieties of racial prejudice. Of course, the reality that awaited them at the end of the parade was the double discrimination held for both black and female. They could return to the love of their own families, but the “big family” would return to making it very hard for them to become anything other than housemaids, nursemaids, cooks, charwomen, or mothers.

Esther Mumford, in her excellent history, Seattle’s Black Victorians, notes that “Most of the women never realized their importance . . . Regardless of their marital status, they were at the bottom of society, often poor and ignorant, but it was from that position that women served to undergird the black community by maintaining its basic unit, the family.”

Racial discrimination in Seattle was more pernicious in 1911 than it is today. But it’s here, and there is still “bad cheer” to dispel if we are at last to respond to William the Duke’s sixth and final proclamation: “Apply the Golden Rule to the Golden Potlatch and you will do wrong to no man.” Or woman.

===========

KNIGHT TEMPLARS ARCH, 2^nd & MARION, 1925

(First appeared in Pacific, March 18, 1984)

The last week of July in 1925 was outstanding for Second Avenue. To hail a parade of 30,000 marching Knight Templars, Second Avenue wore hundreds of illuminated banners and wreaths, some 700 flaming torch globes and the smile of a welcome arch six stories high.

The Knight Templars, a masonic order modeled after Medieval Christian Crusaders, were attending their 36th triennial conclave. And since their principal symbol is the Christian cross, for this one summer week in 1925, Seattle, the host, was filled with crosses. The Knights’ committee, with help from a contracted General Electric Company, put a four-story illuminated and bejeweled cross atop, the then brand new Olympic Hotel, lined the streets with another 155 illuminated passion crosses and “crossed” the sky with 12 searchlights. The Grand Welcome Arch at Marion Street was topped at 95 feet with its own flood-lit cross. It was an sensational and for some enchanting light show.

But it was also Second Avenue’s last hurrah.

Second Avenue was distinguished from other downtown streets when Seattle’s first steel-girder skyscraper, the Alaska Building, was erected in 1904 at the southeast comer of Second and Cherry Street. The avenue was on its way to becoming the city’s center-stripe of grand-style urbanity, its main canyon of glass, terra cotta and granite. In 1908 the New Washington Hotel (now the Josephinum) was completed and stood as the northern pole for this 12-block belt of hotels, banks and department stores. After 1913, the 42-story Smith Tower was Second Avenue’s southern summit.

By 1926, the year following the Templar visit, Second Avenue’s reputation as a bustling strip was beginning to be ecliopsed by major development plans for higher avenues. Henry Broderick, the long-lived real estate hustler, prepared for the press a map locating the 37 downtown buildings that were either underway or projected for early construction that year. They represented an investment of $25 million – a Seattle record. Ten were slated for Third Avenue, four for Fifth Avenue and five on Sixth, and most were closer to Westlake and the new retail north end than to the pioneer south end and Yesler Way. Only one of the buildings was listed for Second Avenue.