With Bill White happily camped in his new Lima flat w. Kel, we now have a second Skype recorded reading of Helix, this one for June 14, 1968. Herein plans are made for the first Sky River Rock Festival – although not named so as yet – Robert Kennedy is shot dead, Lorenzo Milam reveals his esoteric review of KRAB Radio since giving up its management, and Walt Crowley reviews his favorite movie, 2001. And much more.
THEN: Foster and Kleiser, the outdoor advertising monopoly, in 920 claimed that it did more than 90 percent of billboards in the Northwest. Here two years earlier, at the northeast corner of Seneca St. and Third Avenue, it poses some of its most ornate work like posh picture frames on a fireplace mantle.NOW: Since 1920-21 the corner has been held by substantial elegance of the Telephone Building.
In the winter of 1920 Foster and Kleiser trumpeted the great success of their outdoor advertising business – aka billboards – by offering preferred stock in their company at $100 a share. Soon after, they ran a three column ad on the Times “finance and markets” page strengthening their offering with a capitalized boast: “The Power of Art Has Produced This Great Business.”
The Power and the Pride of building a near monopoly. This appeared in The Times for March 10, 1920.
The printed slogan was framed in a pen and ink rendering of one the wonderfully pretentious billboard frames Foster and Kleiser had raised on a favorite few of the many local corners and rooftops for which they had leaseholds for their billboards. They adorned this double-lot at the northeast corner of Third Ave. and Seneca Street four times with the “power of art.”
Same power, same art, but a different as yet unidentified corner. Far right a glimpse of the tower of Gethsemane Lutheran Church at the corner of 9th and Stewart is a clue, although I do not have the answer.
The years that billboards cloaked the clutter of this corner at 3rd and Seneca were few. Their life of advertising began after the ca. 1907 destruction of the big home that Dexter Horton, Seattle’s first banker, built here in the 1870s. (See below for a brief feature on that home.) The art-deco mounts were removed for the construction of the brick pile the telephone company started lifting here in 1920. This sturdy survivor was engineered to hold the company’s heavy equipment. For the foundation the builders also prudently wrapped in concrete the Great Northern Railroad tunnel that runs directly beneath the northeast corner of their skyscraper.
Another detail from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, this one showing the neighborhood. The block defined by Seneca and University Streets and Third and Fourth Avenues is right of center and towards the top. The block is crossed by two broken lines, the larger one represents/follows the 1905 railroad tunnel. The birdseye view, which is four photos down, was recorded from the Hotel Savoy, which can be found in this Baist detail to the left and so west of our subject's block.
Only one of the structures recorded in this 1918 look east across Third Avenue survives: the then four-year old Y.W.C.A. building at the southeast corner of 5th Avenue and Seneca. The Y’s ornate upper floors hold the horizon. They are topped by a wire fence raised high for games on the roof.
Groundbreaking for the new YWCA at the southeast corner of 5th and Seneca.Up on the roof in 1923 for the Girl Reserve Conference. The roof and dome of 4th Church Christ Scientist at 8th and Seneca appears upper-right. (Courtesy, Y.W.C.A.)Playtime on the roof with the towers of Central School (at 6th and Madison) on the left and Providence Hospital at 5th and Madison just breaking the horizon on the right and above the watchful playground proctors. (Courtesy, Y.W.C.A.)
Back on Third, Foster and Kleiser’s peacocky billboards were also security against a recurring public resentment for outdoor advertising that was led by local improvement clubs. The boards were variously described as “blots on beauty,” “commercialism gone mad,” and “glaring and unsightly structures that lift their flaming fronts and tell their own story of aggressive insolence.”
The once very popular hereabouts Society Chocolates that are embraced above by corner's far left billboard.Far right, a birdseye look at the same corner, about the same time. The new Y.W.C.A. appears upper right, and the Pantages Theatre far left. (Click twice to study enlarged)
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Surely Jean, as is our way. First here’s Walter F. Foster, in a cartoon ca. 1909. Perhaps he was the art director at the time and almost surely had a good hand – and head – for figures. We will follow his portrait with three other examples of his firm’s upscale billboards set on Central Business District corners.
More grandeur, here at the northwest corner of Pine and Third Avenue. Four big boards embraced by their plaster-cast votaries in an otherwise vacant lot mid-block on Second Ave. just north of the St. Regis Hotel, at the northwest corner of Second and Stewart. Set in City Hall Park to service "food programs" during the First World War. (We included this earlier in the blog, along with its feature as part of a narrative about briefly squatting protestors during the Great Depression.)
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And yet m0re to share Jean.
First three related features that appeared in by-gone Pacifics, and perhaps even here in some other context. These will be followed by fifteen examples of Fowler and Kleister research/sales photos showing a few of their big boards on local arterials.
The Dexter Horton Home at the northeast corner of Third and Seneca with the Territorial University behind it and one block east at Seneca and what would be Fourth Avenue had it been carried through the original U.W. campus - which is was not. The telephone building that eventually replaced it.
CAROLINE & DEXTER HORTON’S BIG HOME
(First appeared in Pacific, May 23, 2004.)
Sometime in the 1870s, Dexter Horton moved with his second wife, Caroline Parsons, (his first wife had died) into their new home at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Seneca Street. From their back porch they could look up at the classical cupola of Territorial University’s main building less than a block away. Except for the low fence that enclosed the campus, the landscape was continuous because Fourth Avenue was then still undeveloped between Seneca and Union streets.
Horton arrived in Seattle in 1853 with little more than the clothes he wore. Like many others, he eventually worked in Henry Yesler’s sawmill. His first wife, Hannah, worked for Yesler as well, managing the cookhouse attached to the mill. With their combined incomes, the couple opened a general store near the mill and even ventured to San Francisco to try their hand in the brokerage business. When they returned to Seattle in 1869 or ’70 (sources disagree), they brought with them a big steel safe and the official papers to start Seattle’s first bank.
The popular story that Horton’s first safe was secured with the trust his customers had with him – that is that it had no back on it – was discounted much later by his daughter, Caroline, who told off Seattle Times reporter Margaret Pitcairn Strachan: “You don’t think my father was that stupid do you?” The daughter speculated that the backless safe was one of her father’s jokes, since he was well known “for telling stories and laughing heartily at them.”
For all its loft and ornament, the banker’s distinguished home was the scene of a constant battle to stay warm in the colder months. Three fireplaces were the entire source of heat. The home’s many high windows admitted drafts at all hours. But when Dexter Horton died in 1904, a few months short of 80, he was still living here.
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The TERRITORIAL UNIVERSITY from the HORTON HOME
(First appears in Pacific, Dec. 13, 1992)
This view of the old Territorial University was photographed from the back of the Horton home at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Seneca Street. (Horton was the founder of Seafirst Bank.) The university’s main classical building stood one block east at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Seneca Street, or would have, for Fourth then stopped at Seneca and would stay so until its regrade through the campus in 1907. The university’s south wall, far right, was about 80 feet north of Seneca.
The campus is only about 35 years old here. If the view was recorded in the fall of 1895 or after, it is no longer the home of the university, which that year moved into Denny Hall on its new campus north of Lake Union. After that, the old campus and its main building were used for a variety of meetings and assemblies and for a time served as home of the Seattle Public Library.
The main building measured 50 feet by 80 feet and was constructed in a hurry during the summer of 1861. Clearing of the ten-acre campus from gigantic first-growth forest began on March 1 and the school opened Nov. 4. Only one of its students, Clarence Bagley, was of college age. Rebecca Horton was one of the other 29 scholars – all of them taught by Asa Mercer, 22, who was faculty, principal and janitor.
The details of the campus’s construction are included in a Dec. 4 report to the Territorial Legislature by Daniel Bagley, Clarence’s father. Yesler’s mill provided the rough lumber, and the finished pieces came from Port Madison or Seabeck on Hood Canal. The stone for the foundations was quarried near Port Orchard and the sand was extracted from a bank nearby the site at Third Avenue and Marion Street. The bricks were hauled in from Whatcom (Bellingham), and all the glass, hardware and other finished items were imported from Victoria. The capitols above the fluted columns were carved by AP. DeLin, who had learned his woodworking as a craftsman for Chickering Piano Works.
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Elks Lodge at the southwest corner of Spring Street and Fourth Avenue. A glimpse of the Lodge's north facade on Spring Street can be found in the primary subject, far above. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
ELKS LODGE – Southwest Corner of 4th Ave. and Spring Street.
(First appeared in Pacific, August 27, 1995 on the eve of Elk’s then Grand Exalted Ruler, Edward J. Mahan, for the dedication of the Lodge’s then nearly new Lower Queen Anne quarters.)
Seattle Elks took three days in 1914 to dedicate their lodge at the southwest comer of Fourth and Spring. There was plenty to do – the basement and sub-basement had a Turkish bath, bowling alleys and a big swimming pool. The Lodge Room on the top floor had a pipe organ and also was used for social events. Three floors were reserved for members’ living quarters and, aside from rented shops on the street, the rest of this nine-story landmark was used for lodge activities.
The Seattle lodge was the third largest in the order and, when counted with the Ballard Elks, made Seattle the only community outside of-New York with two lodges. Within two years of taking possession of their new lodge, membership swelled to more than 2,000, four times the number that met 10 years earlier in temporary quarters on the top floors of the Alaska Building.
The Elks welcome a parade of Tillikums (many of them Elks) at the lodge during one of the earliest Potlatch Celebrations - either 1911 or 1912. The Lincoln Hotel is far left. (Courtesy, Michael Maslan)
Seattle Lodge 92 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was instituted in 1888 with eight members. (Its records were destroyed in the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889. The Frye Opera House, the Lodge’s home, was one of the first structures consumed.
The lodge sold its Fourth Avenue quarters in 1958. Nine years later, in preparation for the building’s razing for the construction of the Seafirst Bank tower, bank publicist Jim Faber staged one of great conceptual-arts moments in Seattle history. In monumental block-cartoon letters he wrote “POW” on the brick south wall of the old lodge, a target for the wrecker’s ball.
Not able at the moment to uncover my photo of Jim Fabor's POW on the south facade of the doomed Elks Lodge, I attach instead a portrait of Jim posing for me at the Indian Salmon House, during one of our lunches there in the 1980s. And also and perhaps for titillation we included Lawton Gowey's 11th hour look at the west facade of the Elks Lodge hours before the work of knocking it down commenced. The pop art was on the here hidden south facade - on the right. Please Imagine it until we can find it and offer it as an addendum..Again from his office in the Seattle Light Building, Lawton Gowey took this record of the Elks' half-destruction on July 5, 1966. The two towers are at work battering the Elks away.
Since leaving Fourth and Spring the Seattle Elks have had two homes: first on the west shore of Lake Union and now in lower Queen Anne. Lodge members have been meeting at Queen Anne Avenue and Thomas Street for a year and half, but withheld the dedication until tomorrow’s visit [in 1995] of Grand Exalted Ruler Edward J. Mahan. ~
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A FOSTER & KLEISER SAMPLER
The fifteen subjects that follow are pulled from two collections of hundreds of mostly Seattle street scenes that included within them one billboard or more. The great majority of these scenes photographed by – or for – the Foster and Kleister firm, are not portraits of billboards, but of the settings in which they are placed. The negatives were used to show the firm’s clients the many opportunities open to them for advertising to the sides of our arterials. In this line, many of the 5×7 negatives included in the collections have been retouched – the boards have been wiped clean of any adverts on them not by erasing the emulsion from the negative but rather by covering it most often with an opague watercolor. Fortunately it can be removed – carefully. The collections also have a minority of negatives that are straight on depictions of billboards with fresh signage on them – fresh, no doubt, as proof of work for the firm’s clients.
Alaskan Way aka Railroad Ave. looking South from Yesler Way, Sept. 29, 1939.I confess that preparing and polishing these negatives has been a delightful routine for me. They are hard to leave along, for when handling them I am often stirred by uncanny feelings of my youth – full bore nostalgia. The subjects date from about 1928 to 1942. Remembering that the two collections came to us coincidentally, we have hopes that there are third and fourth parts left to be revealed.
40th Street looking east from 11th Ave. N.E. March 14, 1940.
The typed negatives were routinely captioned by the firm with strips of paper taped to their bottoms. The directions in these captions require careful interpretation for they are not about the photographer’s prospect, but about the position of what the firm considers the primary billboard of interest in the photograph. An example: “Aurora, wl, 220 ft s of Howe.” This means that the billboard of interest is on the west line – or side – of Aurora 220 feet south of Howe Street. That may as far a two blocks from the photographer. We have tried to extend the captions with explicit mention of the photographer’s prospect of point of view.
Third Ave. looking south through Virginia Street, Dec. 11, 1936.Third Avenue looking south thru Cherry Street, Nov. 1, 1936. Second Ave. looking north thru Broad Street, March 14, 1940.Fifth Ave. looking north into Denny, April 18, 1939.Fifth Ave. looking north from Olive Street, 1939.Seventh Ave, Denny Way & Battery Street, Dec. 30, 1936.12th Ave. looking south to Alder, March 14, 1940.15th Ave. S. looking north thru Beacon, Sept. 16, 1937.15th Ave. NW looking north thru 64th Street, Nov. 12, 1936.Aurora looking north to Valley, August 26, 1940.California Ave. looking north to Alaska, Sept 23, 1941.Westlake looking north thru Pine, (no date)Broadway Ave. looking south thru John Street, 1933.
With Bill White now comfortably set in his New World neighborhood in Lima, Peru and the helpful SKYPE, we can put up the next issue of HELIX, the one probably from June 7, 1968. (The issue was not dated, but surely we are correct or no more than one days off.) Now we will week-in-week-out put these tabloids up – in their proper order – and have a good time both reading them and reflecting on them together. Please notice how the new and drier climate – plus the medicines applied by his doctor Kel – have cleared the stuff in William’s head and he is sounding fine. (SKYPE is, however, kinder to Peru than to Puget Sound. While Bill’s voice resounds, the Skype filters also amplify from our Seattle end that ssscar of recording, the hissing S. We hope to dampen it with our next offering – in a week or so. If not we will live with it. Repeated thanks to Ron Edge for processing all this and adding his art – the coloring of Jacque’s logos – as well.)
THEN: The ca. 1935 view looks northwest towards West Seattle from the Ishii family farm. The west pier of the 14th Ave S. bascule bridge over the Duwamish Waterway to South Park can be found between what Nancy Ishii identifies as the farm house topped by a giant cedar stump, center, and the barn, far left. Posing, R-L, are Nancy’s grandfather Tadaichi Ishii, her aunts, Sally (Ishii) Tsuboi and Michi (Ishii) Hirata, her father, Nobi Ishii; grandmother, Hatsumi Ishii; uncle, Masao Ishii; and Hatsumi’s dapper older son, Seichi Takeuchi. (Courtesy of the Wing Luke Museum)NOW: Under construction, the new bridge to South Park tops more Ishii’s collected for Jean’s “repeat.” They are, standing in back: Brian Ishii, Miyoko Ishii, Masao Ishii, Linda Ishii, Hajime Hirata, Michi Hirata (in printed blouse), Marji Mar (in rear), Cathy Skinner, Sally Tsuboi; and front row: Kelly Liu, Nancy Ishii Martos, Joanne Ishii-Chan, Nobi Ishii, Natalie Chan
Nancy Ishii (bottom row second from the left in Jean’s “now”) figures that this portrait of her family’s farm beside the Duwamish River dates from 1934 or ’35. Appearing in both the “now” and “then” are one uncle, Masao, two aunts, Michi and Sally, and her father, Nobi Ishii. In cap and tie, the about twelve-year-old Nobi stands at the center of the group of seven in the “then.” About seventy-two years later he gets to sit – again at the center – in Jean’s repeat. (We position them all in the captions.)
What seems like magic is what does NOT appear in either subject – the sprawling 1,776,000 square feet of Boeing Plant 2, nor any sign of the nearly 7000 B-17 bombers that were built there. The Flying Fortress factory’s first 60,000 feet were covered in 1936, a year or so after the Japanese American farmers were posed standing in their carrot patch by Henry Miyake of the International District’s Takano Studio. Recently, the Wing Luke Museum called on the community to help identify the subjects in their Miyake collection, and many startling discoveries, like this one, followed.
Nancy, a friend, called for some help in “refining” the location of the farm. With the help of aerial photographs (see below), the Duwamish Waterway bridge to South Park – seen in both subjects – and some fine tuning from Boeing historian Michael Lombardi, Boeing site server, Mike Prittie and Boeing communicator, Kathleen Spicer, we managed to confidently return some of the extended Ishii family to their farm for Jean’s repeat. Imagine, if you will, Michael, Mike, Kathleen and I, all huddled behind Jean and his camera on the asphalt tarmac that was once Boeing Plant 2, near its southwest corner, and in the Ishii carrot patch.
The Ishii’s rented their acres from Joe Desimone, the South Park Neapolitan immigrant farmer who was also the Pike Place Public Market’s benevolent landlord. In 1940 with the Boeing factory sprawling towards the farm, Desimone helped the family keep their planted rows beside the Duwamish River, although relocated about one mile upstream. However, their kindly landlord could not, we know, keep them farming after the shock of Pearl Harbor.
The fate of the Ishii family and their farm during World War Two and after is an often distressing story, but still one with many happy moments and helpful lessons. If you like, you may follow more of this on dorpatsherrardlomont, the blog noted each week at the bottom of this feature. This week both Nancy Ishii and I will elaborate. Just as likely, we will add an addendum later following more gathering of family photos.
The other - west - side of the farm also reveals its vestige of what was once part of a different Duwamish habitat - the stump. Nancy Ishii also thanks the stump, which was "big enough to crawl into," for helping us locate the farm in other photographs. She notes, "The building on the right is where they washed the produce and bunched the onions." That's the family's Model T Ford - it is sometime in the 1930s.
BLOG EXTRAS
Below, a few more photos of the Ishii family at Boeing field; the first being a portrait of the Ishii elders who appeared in the original THEN:
Ishiis who appeared in the original 'THEN' photo (L-R): Masao Ishii, Nobi Ishii, Michi (Ishii) Hirata, and Sally (Ishii) TsuboiA detail of the 'Then' photo. Masao, his mother Hatsumi Ishii, Nobi, Michi and Sally
Ishiis gatherConsidering the evidenceMemoriesPaul with NobiNancy & Paul
Hey Paul, I hear that you and Nancy have a lot to add – tell me it’s so!
Jean, I think so – ultimately. While I’m adding a few related features from nearly ancient Pacifics, Nancy is also pulling and scanning a few photos of her dad mostly from the 40s and 50s. They will be the last items I’ll add to this blog, although they will be placed here when we get them.
Nancy's grandparents, Hatsumi and Tadaichi Ishii posing in front of the original "I-90 Lake Washington Floating Bridge" soon after its was built in 1940.The handsome young Nobi was drafted into the army while his family was still incarcerated. Here is the buck private at Fort Snelling, in Minnesota.Nancy Ishii writes, "My parents' Kimi and Nobi Ishii were married in the 1950's. My mother was an accomplished seamstress, and sewed her own wedding dress. She grew up in the International District on South Jackson Street behind her family's flower shop. Look for her in the Cherry Land Florist story that follows."In 1949, Nobi opened H & I Auto Repair at 1209 E Fir in Seattle. I still remember the sweet smell of auto paint and Bondo dust, whenever I'd visit him at work. There was a constant stream of customers and friends to chat with and visit when he worked there. He retired in 1987.As a boy, Nobi first learned car repair from Mr. Kobayashi - whenever he came to visit and fix their garden truck.
Nancy suggests that we also show some of the research photos that we arranged in our earliest attempts to place the farm. She knew that it was somewhere south of – but near – Boeing Plant #2, the one at the east side of the bridge over the Duwamish River to South Park. Since the farm came first, the plant was a surprise to the family. As noted above, it was “near” indeed, for the B17 factory eventually took over their garden, farm house, and barn. Here then are a few of the photos that helped us fine-tune the farm.
The first and very helpful clue was in the selected farm photo itself. The bridge to South Park appears in the gap between the farm house, on the right, and the barn, far left. This we noted. Although a small part of the farm portrait, the bridge was in good focus and so we could "read" how its piers were sitting. The red arrow leading to the bridge in the farm photo approximates the line of the red arrow drawn onto the satellite aerial above it grabbed from Good Earth. Picking from the horde of airways photographs I gathered for the writing of the big book Building Washington (which can be found and read on this blog) I easily found an early aerial of Boeing's Plant No.2, along side the river, the bridge and what was almost certainly the Ishii farm - and one other. I called Nancy and risked that victory was nearly ours.A detail from the same aerial with the farm marked in red - and more. The "X" is near the spot where the photographer stood and the dotted approximates - within a few feet - what was his line-of-sight to the farm house. Next we returned to space and marked our estimate of where the farm stood in how ever many years ago the current Google Earth snapshot was made of the site. At this point we began courting Boeing and they, as noted on top, first helped fine-tune our conclusions, and then led us ultimately to the vast and empty reaches of blacktop that replaced the plant and are, it seems, waiting for some industrious inspiration. Looking north and down river over a factory that has expanded and covers the old farm. Here the factory - the first part of it nearest the bridge - has also been covered with the by now famous faux neighborhood made of burlap lawns, squat houses and parked cars the size of family refrigerators. We may wonder if such camouflage would have been more alluring than distracting to a hostile bomber approaching low over West SeattleWhere the erzats landscape falls over the western facade of the Flying Fortress factory and into the Duwamish River. Looking east the scene was photographed from the South Park side.Boeing's "Our Town."Meanwhile - and below - the 5000 B-17.
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(Remembering now that this was composed in 1992.) Six of the surviving seven of Tameno Habu Kobata’s children revisited the site of the family’s flower shop, now spanned by the Interstate 5 freeway. They are, below and from the left, Kimi Ishii, Louise Sakuma, Mary Shinbo, Rose Harrell, Jack Nabu and John Habu. Two of the Tameno’s 22 grandchildren are also included – Linda Ishii, far left, and Nancy Ishii, kneeling. Nancy Ishii is responsible for researching the family history.
CHERRY LAND FLORISTS
(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 2, 1992)
In the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, Cherry Land Florists grew from a small grocery store into one of the largest retail flower shops in the International District. These views were photographed in 1941.
Ten years earlier Tameno Kobata, her husband John, and their eight children – six from her first and deceased husband, Teiji Habu – moved into the storefront at 905 Jackson St. The flowers, which at first were kept behind the fruits and vegetables, eventually took over, and the Kobatas’ little food store became their Cherry Land.
The business was mostly the mother’s doing – the father helped support the enterprise by working a second job as a waiter at the Seattle Tennis Club. The family lived in cramped and often chaotic quarters behind a partition in the rear of the store. A barrel with water heated on a wood stove by fuel scrounged from the neighborhood was the family bath, and the living quarters’ few beds were shared with privacy provided only by blankets hung for partitions.
The oldest girls, Kako and Mary, soon became skilled flower arrangers, and the younger children helped de-thorn roses, fold corsage boxes and prepare ferns for wreaths – after they had completed their homework.
In the sidewalk scene (on top) Tameno Habu Kobata and her second son, John Habu, pose between the flower boxes. John, who left home in 1935 at the age of 14 to make his own way in Chicago, returned “amazed” in 1940 to find his family’s flower shop flourishing. Within a year, with his help knocking away walls, Cherry Land expanded to the entire building.
After Pearl Harbor, the business instantly withered. The fear and hysteria of the early days of World War II brought internment for the Habu-Kobata family and 125,000 other Japanese Americans.
At war’s end most of the family was back in Seattle. When their industrious mother, Tameno, died unexpectedly in 1948, sons John and Jack returned to Seattle for her funeral and stayed. In the years after her death Tameno’s many children started a variety of local businesses, including three flower shops – among them a Cherry Land Two.
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Above: The Japanese Buddhist Temple on the north side of Main Street east of 10th Ave. The “now” scene below was scanned from the clipping used in Pacific when the feature was first published in 1992. Like many other “now” scenes not shown with these repeats, it is somewhere nearby in “stacks of decades” but not near enough to be easily found. The temple site, like much of this Profanity Hill neighborhood was developed into Yesler Terrace in 1940. Although now 20-years past I remember well the anticipation of the children as they waited for me to shoot the picture. Although Jean Sherrard was not there in 1992, he was many years earlier a resident of Yesler Terrace when he was a tot. Many doctors-in-training, like Jean’s dad Don, moved with their families into Yesler Terrace during, at least, part of medical school. For teaching purposes it was close to King County(now Harborview) Hospital.
JAPANESE BUDDHIST TEMPLE on MAIN STREET
(First appeared in Pacific, July 12, 1992)
When the Japanese Buddhists dedicated their first Seattle temple in 1908, the congregation was seven years old and yet there were nearly 500 members. Meeting at first in a rented house on Main Street, east of Sixth Avenue, the congregation built their temple four blocks east, on Main just east of Tenth.
The title for the property and the charter for the church were signed by two trusted Caucasian citizens because racist federal laws then prohibited citizenship and ownership of real property by Asian immigrants. This discrimination was compounded by the Alien Exclusion Act of 1924, which barred Japanese immigration to this country. The congregation continued to grow, however, with the families that were its members.
Women of the temple post in traditional dress in front of the temple. (like most of the photographs used in this feature, this one comes courtesy of the Temple.)
The temple was included in the old Profanity Hill neighborhood that was ultimately condemned to enable the construction of Yesler Terrace. The congregation then again built on Main Street – further east. In its last years, the wood-frame temple was regularly vandalized by patriots who mistook a Buddhist symbol over the temple’s front porch for the Nazi swastika. (You can find the ancient design in the top photo used for this feature. It is above the Temple front door.)
Traditional theatre.Slapstick, screwball, and/or melodrama
The congregation dedicated its present temple at 1427 S. Main on Oct. 4, 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor came two months later. Within hours, the congregation’s leaders were detained and the church plunged into turmoil. With the infamous Executive Order 9066, the temple was shut down as the West Coast Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese ancestry were interned. During the war, the temple basement was used for storage of the interns’ belongings; after the war, the church helped to resettle its members.
One temple event well-known to the greater community is the ·Bon Odori Festival. Printed directly above, the night scene of the costumed celebrants in front of the temple is from the 1932 Bon Odori, the first held at the temple. Since 1955 the community event has been included in Seafair. The public is invited to this year’s [1992] Bon Odori at the temple next weekend, July 18 and 19.
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COLLINS PLAYGROUND – 1909
(First appeared in Pacific, May 31, 1992)
The American playground movement reached Seattle in 1907 with the development of a three-acre site between Washington and Main streets and 14th and 16th avenues. It was named Collins Playground, after John Collins, a former city mayor who died in 1903.
The site was chosen because of its surrounding rainbow of races, nationalities, and religions. Progressives of the time believed supervised play in well-appointed playgrounds would encourage creative and peaceful recreation among the races and sexes. The movement’s advocates were assertive about providing girls equal opportunities for physical culture.
The sloping Collins site was divided into three terraces. The lower level was dedicated to field athletics such as baseball, and the upper to basketball, tennis, handball and gymnastics. The middle level was reserved for younger children, and had a wading pool, swings, teeter-totters and sand boxes .
For nine days in the month of August 1909, Collins Playground was made a deposit station for the Seattle Public Library. Of the 465 books involved, 1,409 loans were made and the librarian, Gertrude Andrus, made sure that the children read them. She also read stories to a total of 340 children – in the sandbox. This, most likely, is Andrus with her back to the camera. The experiment was a success and the service continued.
In 1976 the Seattle Buddhist Church, which since 1941 has been directly across Main Street from this sandbox, purchased the playground and developed its middle level into Wisteria Plaza. The elegantly landscaped terrace features an arching bridge above a rock garden and, shown here at the sandbox site, a Tsurigane Doh or, roughly translated, a bell pergola. [If I am not able to readably find my negative for this repeat from 1992, I will, again, scan the Pacific clipping and insert it.]
If memory serves this is a meeting of the Japanese-American Citizen's League before the backdrop of the Collins Playground Field house in the 1930s..
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With the construction of Interstate 5, Maynard Avenue north of Main Street was abandoned. Kobe Terrace Park, named for Seattle’s Japanese sister city, and the Danny Woo Community Garden have since been developed on the site. In the contemporary photo (copied, again, from the Times clipping), the athletic 82-year-old Lulu Kashiwagi has climbed upon the park’s gazebo or observation tower, which looks down the center of Maynard Street into the International District.
JAPANESE BAPTISTS
(First appeared in Pacific, May 24, 1992)
The Wing Luke Museum, 25 years old this year [1992], has mounted its most ambitious exhibit ever. Named for the decree that interned 120,000 mostly West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, Executive Order 9066 is an eloquent survey of a century of Japanese settlement on Puget Sound.
The view printed here of the Japanese Baptist Sunday School appears near the beginning of the museum’s fluently ordered space. Most of these children are Nisei (second-generation Japanese), U.S. citizens born here to immigrants. Many, perhaps most, of them will have had their own families when they were forced into internment 32 years after this scene was photographed.
This is the Sunday school class of 1910, or so speculates Lulu Kashiwagi, historian for the Japanese Baptist Church. Lulu’s mother, Misa Sakura, sits at far left. The baby propped on her lap is most likely Lulu – born that year. Lulu’s older sister Ruth is behind her, held in the arms of a family friend, Mrs. Mimbu. Three of Lulu’s brothers are also in the scene.
Seattle’s Japanese Baptists trace their origins to a night school conducted by their first pastor, Fukumatsu Okazaki, in the community’s first Japanese lodging house, and then in the basement of its first restaurant. This industry soon developed into a Japanese YMCA and in 1899 incorporated as a church. The Rev. Okazaki is pictured here, top center, holding the “J” card.
Churches were the most effective hosts for Japanese workers fresh off the boats. They helped the understandably anxious sojourners find lodging, steered them to suitable employment, conducted English-language classes and offered both the warmth and security of a caring group for immigrants who had left their traditionally strong family support behind them.
Here the Baptist’s Sunday School is posed on Maynard Street. The tower of the King County Courthouse on First Hill tops the Scene. In 1908 the Baptists were forced from their sanctuary at Jackson and Maynard Avenue by the Jackson Street regrade. Within two years they” moved into a second home, again off Maynard at 661 Washington St. This part of the International District is still predominantly Japanese.
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Looking north on Railroad Ave. (Alaskan Way) towards the Marion Street Overpass on March 30, 1942.A repeat from 1999. Colman Dock is on the left. And here - also - Nancy Ishii returns, appearing at the scene's center in the white T-Shirt.
EVACUATION – MARCH 30, 1942
(First appeared in Pacific Sept. 5, 1999)
On Dec. 10, 1942 the Associated Press released a story headlined “Arrows of Fires Point to Seattle.” Later reports, either buried or not printed, noted that white farmers clearing land near Port Angeles started the fires. The result of this and other hysterical news stories following the bombing of Pearl Harbor was an incendiary to the imaginations of West Coast locals, many of whom fully expected Japanese planes to appear suddenly over Duwamish Head.
The bombs were dropped instead on the families of Japanese Americans, both aliens living here (Issei), often for decades, and their children born into American citizenship (Nisei). In “Seattle Transformed,” Richard Berner’s recently published history of Seattle in the 1940s, the author’s unadorned telling of these routinely tragic stories reveals their exceptionally personal dimension. Berner also details the “administrative” side of this moral collapse: the general abdication of democratic courage by public leaders in the name of “military necessity.”
Because of their proximity to the Bremerton Naval Yard, the 54 Japanese-American families farming on Bainbridge Island were the first local group uprooted. Here on March 30, 1942, their guarded line is led across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) to the train waiting to carry them to the arid isolation of Manzanar, Calif. (Camp Minidoka in southern Idaho – the eventual destination for the majority of the interned families from the Seattle area – was not yet ready.) Of course, neither the Italian nor German populations living along the Atlantic seaboard were evacuated en masse to whatever deserts might have been prepared for them in Ohio or Indiana.
[Now settling into his Limarkian Adventures, Bill – our Party in Peru – will share some of what he finds in Lima, Peru and its surrounds – beginning below with MATSURI. We will attached all the photographs he sent except the fireworks. Those you may imagine. Bill may well write a song about the adventure, and sing it too.]
Japanese Cultural Week in Lima usually occupies the last week of October, but this year things got pushed back a few days, enabling this new arrival to the city to attend “Matsuri,” the traditional festival that closed the week on November 10th. The festival is a cornucopia of food, dance, music, and fireworks to celebrate the contributions the Japanese have made to Peruvian culture.
Although the first Japanese appeared in Peru as early as the 17th century, the epic immigration of Japanese to this new world did not begin for another two hundred years. By the end of the second world war, when another wave of immigrants arrived, five generations of Japanese-Peruvians had already established their presence here. Their influence can be seen throughout the country in the food, art, music, and architecture.
This is the 40th year that Japanese Cultural Week has been celebrated in Lima. Its closing festival, Matsuri, sponsored by the AELU (Asociation Estado le Union), is a Peruvian version of what is in Japan a traditional religious ceremony. Here in Lima, it is an opportunity for everyone to share in Japanese customs, from traditional dance and martial arts to the contemporary fun of manga and cosplay. There are J-Pop concerts and saki tastings, graffiti exhibits and a fashion show of traditional clothing.
Peru is home to over 50,000 descendants of Japanese immigrants. Matsuri is the perfect occasion to become familiar with some of them.
For this “Fair and Festival” installment we repeat a Pacific feature we printed earlier in , but now additions to help you, dear reader, find the spot more easily with aerial photographs and other points of view. The Eaton Apartments were set at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Thomas Street and so kitty-korner from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, once it lost its parish on 6th and Bell in 1928 to the last of the Denny Regrades. The long sky-lighted pavilion built there for Century -21 was named, for the fair, the Domestic Commerce and Industry Building (aka Hall of Industry.) It faced the Plaza of States (aka Flag Plaza). After the fair the building got a new and sensible name: The Flag Plaza Pavilion. It was home in 1978 for King Tut’s first lucrative visit to Seattle. The Eaton Apartments covered about one-third of the Flag Plaza footprint – the most westerly third. We will point it out again below in a 1928 aerial photograph and also in Frank Shaw’s colored slide of the apartment’s back or north facade during its last months before being razed for the fair.
Above: Looking kitty-corner across Thomas Street and Second Ave. North to the Eaton Apartments, ca. 1940. It is a rare recordings of Seattle Center acres before their make-over for the 1962 Century 21. Below: Jean Sherrard visited the intersection during the recent playing of the Folklife festival 2012, and “captured” folk-jazz artist Erik Apoe, with his guitar, leaving the festival after his performance. Bottom: During the 2012 Bumbershoot Jean returned to the corner which included then – for the duration of Bumbershoot – one of the escape gates from the ticketed festival. With his press credentials hanging from this next (although this year they were merely stuck to his shirt) Jean could easily come and go.
THE EATON APARTMENTS
(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 8, 2010)
I know nothing about the provenance of this photograph, except that it showed up as a thoughtful anonymous gift on my front porch among a small bundle of negatives. Still with the help of a tax card, a few city directories, and a scattering of other sources we can make some notes.
With his or her back to Sacred Heart Catholic Church, an unknown photographer looked northeast through the intersection of Second Avenue North and Thomas Street. The Eaton Apartment House across the way was built in 1909 – in time perhaps for the city’s first world’s fair. It held 19 of everything: tubs, sinks, basins, through its 52 plastered rooms. In the 1938 tax assessment it is described as in “fair condition” with a “future life” of about 13 years. In fact, it held the corner for a full half century until it was leveled to build Seattle’s second worlds fair.
The Eaton and its nearby neighbor, the Warren Avenue School, were two of the larger structures razed for Century 21. However, the neighborhood’s biggest – the Civic Auditorium, Ice Arena, and the 146th Field Artillery Armory – were given makeovers and saved for the fair. Built in 1939, the old Armory shows on the far right. Although not so easy to find it is also in the “now” having served in its 71 years first as the Armory, then the ’62 fair’s Food Circus, and long since the Center House.
This is part of David and Louisa Denny’s pioneer land claim, which Salish history explains served for centuries as a favorite place to snag low-flying ducks and hold potlatches. The oldest user of the Eaton Apt site was even more ancient. The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) brought King Tut, or at least parts of his tomb, to the Flag Pavilion in 1978. It was about then that Andy Warhol also showed up to party with SAM in the old pavilion, which in 2002 was replaced and greatly improved with the Fisher Pavilion.
Readers who have old photographs of this neighborhood from before the 1962 fair (they are rare) or of the fair itself might like to share them with historylink. That non-profit encyclopedia of regional history is preparing a book on the fair, one that will resemble, we expect, its impressive publication on the recent Alaska Yukon Pacific Centennial. As with the AYP book, the now hard-at-work authors are Paula Becker and Alan Stein. You can reach them by phone at 206-447-8140 or on line at Admin@historylink.org.
This Pierson Photo looks northeast over the future fair grounds late in July, 1928. It was printed with caption in the Seattle Times on the 29th of July, with the header for the caption reading "Look, Seattle, at Your Own Civic Center From Air!" The aerial is, obviously, filled with attractions. Our Eaton Apartments site at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Thomas Street, is easily found centered at the bottom of the aerial. One block north of Thomas is Harrison street, and where it meets Second Ave is the spot where the Coliseum's (aka Keyarena) western anchor or primary strut or beam (or what?) is anchored. Below we will visit the corner, again before the '62 fair.Here thirty-two years later is another aerial that was printed in The Seattle Times on July 13, 1960 - or near it - and photographed by Times photographer Paul Thomas. This one also looks northwest towards Lake Union, and shows the clearing the center well underway for C-21. The Times has helpfully attached identifying numbers, which we will now list. (1) Cleared of the Warren Avenue School and being prepared for the "state-financed Century 21 Coliseum." (2) Civic Auditorium from 1928; (3) Ice Arena (1928); (4) High School Memorial Stadium (ca. 1948); (5) National Guard Armory (soon to be renamed the Food Circus); (6) Nile Temple (kept for the fair and used then as the exclusive Club 21 where VIP's could relax and refresh while escaping the populace horde.) (7) Part of the future site of what the paper names "the five-unit federal Hall of Science" and we know as the Pacific Science Center. Just below and right of the circles "No.5" is the corner of the here razed Eaton Apartments. Frank Shaw's pre-fair coverage of the neighborhood shows here the back side of the Eaton - its north facade. The view looks south and a little east from the north line of Harrison Street, a few feet west of Second Ave. Shaw's photo was, of course, photographed sometime before Thomas 1960 aerial above it. Since 1961 standing here and taking the same aim as Shaw would show that west support for the Keyarena. (Which is more likely the Key Arena.) The next view - one from the Space Needle - in 1962 - marks the spot with a red arrow.The red arrow marks the spot - or near it - where Frank Shaw shot the photo that is placed above this one.That western beam, strut, support, noted here. Photographers have climbed it for the prospect of astronaut John Glenn during his morning visit to the fair. The view looks west somewhat in line with Harrison Avenue, which would put out-of-frame the International Fountain on the right and the Plaza of States (with the state flags) on the left. This is another Times shot - one by their long-time photographer Vic Condiotty. I met Vic in 1982, my first year contributing the weekly "now-and-then" to the paper.
We will wrap No. 23 with another Frank Shaw photo. This one, we figure, looks north and a little east from what would become the Pacific Science Center. The Catholics, at the southeast corner of Second and Thomas, are here right-of-center, which is also often the position of its clerics if not always the parishioners. Far-right, is the yellow strut, beam, girder, stanchion, transverse on the east quadrant of the Coliseum and here under construction. It appears above where the Eaton Apartments would be standing – if they still were. Queen Anne Hill is on the horizon.
This sixth installment of William White’s move 7 thousand miles south from Seattle to Lima concludes the series. Bill, however, will continue on as “Our Man in Lima” somewhat like Berangere is “Our Woman in Paris” except that she is also included in our name: dorpatsherrardlomont. Bill will, at his pace, send us more travel writing, but pretty much sticking to Peru. Hopefully, He’ll make it up to the Andes. Kel, we know, has a car and is an excellent driver. Meanwhile, we will be looking for other correspondents in far-flung places.
And here is a pretty view of the street where we live, taken from the window of our apartment:
Here is crumbling vista seen from the parking lot of the municipal building. Most street parking is officiated by attendants running up and down the streets issuing tickets to people while they park, and then catching them upon their return to collect whatever fees have been incurred. There are no parking meters; everything is done on a person to person basis, resulting in the occasional arguments over charges. At one point, we were charged for simply pulling into a parking space, then deciding not to stay there, It took some doing for Kel to win her argument with the fee collector, who hadn’t even written us a ticket yet, but ran out in the street at us as she say us pulling out.
In the markets, free agents hawking bags of asparagus compete with the established vendors for a sale. Sometimes they offer a better deal, but often their sudden appearance can lead to an impulse buy that is not the wisest purchase one could make. Shopping in Lima is a process of looking around for the best goods at the best prices before deciding on what to buy. Among the stalls of fruits of vegetables of variable quality and expense, the foods necessary to making a delicious dinner are waiting to be chosen by the cautious buyer.
And this is what an expertly prepared Peruvian meal might look like:
Even prettier is the person who prepared it. For those who have not met her yet, here is Kel, dressed for work at the clinic, after having enjoyed a breakfast of fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is my job to prepare for her when she awakens each morning.
[In this fifth installment of the serial sharing Bill White’s great journey into a new world he has at last reached what Peru’s conqueror, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, titled in 1535 the “City of Kings”. Now WILLIAM WHITE, a conquistador of the heart, makes his first claims on it nearly 500 years later.]
We arrive at the port of Callao, entrance way to Lima, on schedule at 10am Friday morning, November 2. There has been so much trouble and misinformation regarding the means and methods through which Kel will pick me up. The front desk is manned by a different crew every time I have had cause to do business there, and each time my story has to be explained anew, how I am disembarking at Lima, rather than continuing to Santiago, which is the final port on the cruise. Kel is told by the Holland America agent in Lima that she requires an email from the ship that includes her name, make of car, and license number, in order for her to enter the port. It turns out, however, that this is a cargo port, and no one at all is allowed to walk on the pier, and that a shuttle will take me to the gate, on the other side of which there is a waiting room where Kel will be sequestered until my arrival. So, after three days of fruitless effort, the solution turns out to be this simple. However, there are more serious complications to come.
I am moved quickly through the customs inspection and am looking for the person who issues the visas, but there is no such person to be found, and we leave without getting my passport stamped. Or so I thought. As we discover, upon visiting the immigration department to sort things out, the stamping of the passport and issuing of the visa has already been accomplished without my participation, and I have been given only a thirty days visitor permit. This will result in nothing more than having to pay a fine at a later date, but is maddening as I emphasized repeatedly to the cruise people that I planned to stay on in Lima to apply for residency. For the most part, the company runs their business very efficiently, but any abberation from the norm, such as my jumping ship to remain in Lima, does not compute in their system. No matter how many times I have told my story and to how many people it has been told, there is perhaps no way to record the information in a prominent way that would have led to my passport having been stamped in any other but the routine manner. I had been led to believe, by all I had read on the internet, that visas are not issued in advance in Peru. Instead, there is supposed to be someone there to interview you on your intentions, who then determines how long of a visa you require. I imagine that most people coming to the country do so by aeroplane rather than cruise ship, and that this must be the airport procedure, but there is no need to have such an official hanging about at the port when a cruise ship comes in.
At least there are no problems with Kel picking me up, and we begin our drive to Lima. Callao is a pretty run down area, and Kel warns me to keep the camera hidden to avoid attracting the attention of thieves, who would break into the car when we are stopped at a red light to get any valuables that we might be carrying. Eventually we enter a nicer area, where lovely houses such as the one pictured below are plentiful, and the architecture in general is varied and eye-catching.
After about 45 minutes of driving in Lima traffic, which is accomplished as much through the listening of horns as the movement of vehicles, we arrive to our pretty little street. In Lima, there is no simple way to predict the actions of the cars around you, but if a collision is imminent, someone will sound a horn, which is a way of saying, “I have no plan to stop, so get out of my way.” Kel is an excellent driver, and avoids several threatening situations as we have moved through the vehicular chaos of these streets.
Pictured below is a sight almost unknown in Lima, an empty street! For the most part, the city is constantly awash in the movement of life. Unlike the cities up North, people here are not governed by the regulations of stop and go, but dart about as they please. I recently saw a group of elderly ladies squeezing through the bucking cars at a lively intersection. Unlike Seattle, you will never see a group of people standing in the rain on a deserted corner, with nary a car in sight, waiting for the streetlight to change to green. Most intersections here don’t have lights anyway, which is the cause of so much intrepid aggression. Although most streets have clearly marked lanes, drivers seldom confine themselves to their boundaries.
THEN: Third from the right, Grace Loudon McAdams steadies her brother Max’s motorcycle for his recording of this fashionably snug line-up. Grace and her friends pose on a Third Avenue sidewalk about one-half block south of Washington Street, ca.1919. NOW: About 90 years later, and following the close of the exhibit “Feast” at the Grover Thurston Gallery, the show’s artists – holding examples of their art – pose with friends on the same sidewalk. They are, left to right, Howard Lev, Nancy Harriss, Karel Bauer, Julie Paschkis, Joe Max Emminger, Dan Miles, Mimi Miles, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, and Margaret Bovingdon.
For this week’s especially convivial “repeat” Jean Sherrard and I persuaded our friends, artists Joe Max Emminger and Julie Paschkis, to walk a block. In what Jean described then as the “pearl-like light” of that late September Sunday, the married couple, with a few friends, stand side-by-side on 3rd Ave. S. holding examples of their art taken moments earlier from the walls of the nearby Grover Thurston Gallery. Julie and Joe had just concluded their joint show at the gallery with a potluck. Appropriately, the month-long exhibit was named “Feast.”
Same day, same sidewalk, and some of the same women and named - including Grace, third from the right.
About 93 years earlier Grace Loudon McAdams posed with a few happy friends on the same 3rd Ave sidewalk mid-block between Washington and Main Streets. The storefronts are the same. Her older brother Max took the photo, and Grace, third from the right, steadies Max’s cycle with her hand on its seat. While that ca.1919 day was equally sunny it was surely not as warm as our recent Indian summer – although the motorcycle is an Indian.
Still that day and curb and Indian but here Max poses his sister on her own while looking north on 3rd Ave south from between Main (behind him) and Washington Streets.
I first met Grace about thirty years ago. She shared with me her brother’s albums, and the sportsman Max took lots of revealing photographs. His camera recorded some of the best snapshots of his hometown’s sporting life: park visits, horse racing, circus parades, beach-life, back stage vaudeville and the semi-pro baseball team he managed. (If you care to visit, we have posted more of Max’s subjects on our blog, dorpatsherrardlomont.)
Some time later, Grace, on the right, and her best friend Elliott with their children.
Returning to our friends on the sidewalk. Everyone attending the Feast’s last day potluck choose their own piece of “Salty Dough Sculpture” hung from one of the gallery’s walls. Two examples can be found in Jean’s “repeat.” Jean and I also picked our pieces of artful hardtack for we have long been delighted by the imaginative adventures shared in both Joe’s and Julie’s art. You can read about the show and see all the work – including the wall of “salty dough” – and even get a recipe for making the bread pieces on the show’s own blog.
Artist Margaret Bovingdon stands before what it left of Salty Dough Wall. It is at the end of the show, moments before we adjourned with Jean to take the "repeat" shot above on the Third Ave. S. sidewalk. Margaret appears there, far right.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul?
Yes, again, Jean. But may your first find some snaps of Joe and Julie’s show, or in that line of any show of theirs you have in your art horde (or mine). Then I’ll pick up with three or four additional features from the neighborhood or to the “theme.”
Jean here again. I’ll add in a few thumbnails from several of Julie and Joe’s previous gallery shows starting in 2006.
Julie in 2006Lev with PaprikashPaul in Julie's lionJean with salmonJoe, Dorpat, Dempsters Joe and friendJoe's show from above Nuclear JoeA processional to the 'Now' photo site, led by JuliePaul compares Loudon's original to the current location
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On the same sidewalk - on the east side of Third Ave. S. between Main and Washington Streets - some of the clerical staff of Stewart and Holmes poses both with and without their flu masks. The first floors of the City-County Building appear two blocks north on 3rd. After I showed them the flu photos during the summer of 198, these two traveling men agreed to pose with their bedrolls near were Grace and her friends stood with the Indian for Max Loudon 63 years earlier.
THE FLU – 1918
(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 18, 1984)
During the last month of World War I, Seattle was under siege by a global force more deadly than bombers and tanks. The city was in the grip of la Grippe, or Spanish Flu. The 1918 global pandemic took twice as many lives as the Great War.
In Seattle, a young man at the University of Washington’s naval training station was the first to die. That was Wednesday, Oct. 2. By Saturday, Oct. 5 the alarming rise of disease and death prompted the city’s sometimes hysterical mayor, Ole Hanson, to react. According to a daily newspaper, the mayor “placed in effect the most drastic regulations to which the city has ever been subjected . . . the city forbids every form of public assemblage.”
On Saturday night the dance halls were closed, the theaters dark. On Sunday morning, church services were suspended and on Monday the school bells were silent. The front page of the Monday Post-Intelligencer announced, “Gloomy Sunday is Result of the Influenza Ban.” The law against assembling had had its ironic reversals. “There were aimless, peevish crowds that strolled up and down Second and Third avenues Sunday afternoon, sat in hotel lobbies and collected in doorways and on street comers. They talked about the war . . . but mostly they lambasted the mayor.”
A tent city somewhere in Seattle for the quarantine of the coughing.
Sunday’s toll was four dead; Monday’s eight. On Tuesday 401 new cases were reported; on Wednesday that tally climbed to 424. The siege continued and citizens were ordered to wear masks. Newspapers reported on a possible connection between the war and the disease: “Mrs. A.B. Priest says that the pandemic is the result of a wicked suggestion sent out by the Kaiser’s psychologists . . . it is German propaganda in its most subtle form.” On Oct. 21, 30 deaths were reported. The toll had peaked, the grip loosened.
On Armistice Day, Nov. 11, the ban of public gatherings and the order to wear masks were lifted. “Seattle need be masked no longer,” the P-I reported and added that “the order has been more or less of a farce as far as the masks are concerned.” That afternoon and evening, Seattle was one parading public assemblage of unmasked revelers celebrating the double victory over death by war and death by disease. Mrs. A.B. Priest no doubt noted the connection and felt confirmed.
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Above: Neighbors pose on the front steps of photographer Lawrence Lindsley’s Wallingford home sometime in October 1918 when the city was “dark” and closed-down during the Spanish Flu’s Seattle visit. The masks were required although the law was rarely enforced. (Picture courtesy of Dan Eskenazi)
Below: Wallingford neighbor’s repeat the 1918 flu shot behind masks pulled from one of the group’s mask collection. Only one among the seven is neither hidden nor unnamed: the Chihuahua Sparky. Here Jean has handed the camera to me and taken one of the seven places on the porch. At the bottom, all is revealed.
LAGRIPPE in WALLINGFORD
(First appeared in Pacific during the spring of 2007)
Dan Eskenazi, Seattle photo collector and old friend of mine, first shared with me these masked ladies posing with masked cats on the unlikely chance that I might know the porch. Had the snapshot revealed a street number the choices would have been narrowed city-wide to a few hundred front steps. But Dan’s little 3×4 inch print does better. The names of the women are penciled on the back. The flipside caption reads, “Top row, Anna Kilgore, E. K. Barr, Ms Anna S. Shaw. Lower row, Penelope and Tommy, Mrs Shaw and Golly.”
So seven creatures including the cats Tommy and Golly and all of them wearing masks by order of the mayor. By the time the 1918 flu epidemic reached Seattle at the end of September la Grippe had caused more deaths world-wide than the First World War. When the rule about masks was lifted for good on Armistice Day, Nov. 11 the streets were quickly filled with bare-faced revelers. Still Dr. T. D. Tuttle, the state’s commissioner of health, warned that “people who have influenza are in the crowds that are celebrating victory. They will be in the street cars, in the theaters, in the stores.” Tuttle also confessed, “the order had been more or less a farce as far as the masks are concerned.” (This explains, perhaps, why there are so few mask photos extant.)
Returning to the snapshot’s penciled caption, four of the five women are listed in the 1918 city directory living at 108 E. 43rd Street, in Wallingford. Since that address is about 100 steps from my own I was soon face to face with Dan’s unidentified porch, except that it was one house west of 108. But this slight move presented an opportunity. It hints, at least, of the photographer.
104 E. 43rd Street was built in 1918, the year that the photographer Lawrence Denny Lindsley, the grandson of city founders David and Louisa Denny, moved in. Perhaps Lindsley took the snapshot of his neighbors sitting on his new front steps soon after he took possession with his bride Pearl. Married on September 20, 1918, tragedy soon followed. Both Pearl and their only child Abbie died in 1920. Lindsley married again in 1944 and continue to live at 104 into the 1970s. When he died in 1974, this son of the pioneers was in his 90s and still taking photographs.
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The two workers posing in the back of delivery van most likely worked either for Steward and Holmes Drug Co. or Grocetaria, a long time employer for Max Loudon, the photographer. As the text notes below, these were two of his favorite subjects, perhaps for the big hair. The truck they pose in is parked in the alley between Main and Washington Streets where it overlooks the train tracks that lead to and from the south portal of the railroad tunnel that runs between here and Virginia Street nearby the Pike Place Public Market. The part of the elevated alley that supported Max Loudon's subjects, circa 1919, was gone by the time I reach it - or tried to - in 1997. This scene looks north from Main Street.
THE BACHELOR LIFE
(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 19, 1997)
The bachelor life of Max Loudon is revealed in the albums he carefully filled with snapshots he took of his many adventures. Included are records of joyful events: the spontaneous November 1918 Armistice Day celebrations on the streets of downtown, the arrival of the circus to the lower Queen Anne fields (now Seattle Center), and skating on Green Lake during the long freeze of 1916.
A Grocetaria van converted into a joyous float for the spontenous Armistice Day Parade.
Born in Nebraska in 1881, Loudon dropped out of Omaha High School at the age of 15 and headed west to Seattle. Here his personable intelligence (aka charm) carried him through an assortment of vocational adventures including manager of a semi-professional baseball team, traveling superintendent for a grocery wholesaler in Montana, manager of the general store for a logging company in Yacolt, Wash., and a trip north to Nome, Alaska, seeking – what else? – gold. As revealed in his letters home, this last adventure soon turned hellishly cold when his steamer stuck in the ice for two weeks.
A few Yacolt sawyersMax Loudon's baseball team - perhaps
Here in Seattle, the young Loudon cut his commercial teeth working nine years for Schwabacher Bros. Wholesale Grocers. He became warehouse superintendent for the Grocetaria Stores, in charge of all departments. His salary – whopping for the time – was $150 a month. Enough, perhaps, to support his sporting life as an amateur boxer for the Seattle Athletic Club, an expert fencer, a medalist marksman and – at least from the evidence of his albums – a womanizer.
Another favorite subject and friend at Luna Park Trading shots
Loudon’s subjects here are two of a dozen or more Stewart and Holmes Drugstore employees he posed on the alley trestle that runs above the railroad tracks entering the southern end of the city’s railroad tunnel, below Fourth Avenue and Washington Street. Of all the distaff subjects gathered for his alley shoot, these were most preferred; he took several snapshots of both, together and separate. Loudon did not, unfortunately, identify either of them.
Trusting each other and the guardrail above the railroad tracks. The view looks east to 4th Avenue.
backstage alley
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The primary block treated above, that on Third Ave. S. between Washington and Main streets, takes the center of this look north across Main St. ca. 1913. (Courtesy, Municipal Archives)
5-CLUSTER STANDARDS
(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 9, 1994)
The most likely subject for this official photograph of the city’s Public Works Department is the street light. “Seattle’s cluster lighting system is one of the finest in existence,” the lighting department’s 1911 report said. “This design gives a beautiful effect of festoons of decorative lights along the sidewalks . . . The illumination, which is ample, is produced by using 50-watt tungsten lamps fed from a small transformer in the pole base.”
This pole transformer, a Seattle City Light innovation, was quickly adopted nationwide. It allowed use of low-voltage lamps that gave over 2,000 hours’ life. At the time of the 1911 report there were 1,631 poles lighting 25 miles of city streets; more than two-thirds were five-ball clusters like this one.
This view along Third Avenue South looks north across Main Street. The Seattle Fire Department’s headquarters is at the northwest corner, far left. The station’s third story was added in 1912, dating this photograph between that year and 1914, when construction began on the here not yet apparent City County building at Third and Jefferson. (You will find it in many of the posing shots on third, at and near the top.)
The slice of the five-story sign just beyond the fire station is painted on the brick south wall of Stewart and Holmes Drug Company’s manufacturing headquarters, advertising its products and services, which roamed well beyond drugs to laundry and cannery supplies.
One block north on Third, on the southeast corner of its intersection with Washington Street, is the Union Hotel. This four-story structure has been recently renovated by the Downtown Emergency Service Center.
In 1928 the Third Avenue sidewalk south of Main Street was replaced by the pavement of Second Avenue, which was extended then to connect with the train depots on Jackson Street. (An displace of those changes recorded from the Smith Tower follows below.) The regrade also destroyed the fire department’s headquarters, which that year moved to its present location one block west on Main Street.
TWO VIEWS LOOKING SOUTH FROM THE SMITH TOWER – SHOWING THE CHANGES MADE FOR THE SECOND AVENUE EXTENSION, 1928-29.
[NOTE: Both views include – by arrangement – far left a glimpse of our sidewalk on the east side of 3rd Ave. S. between Washington and Main streets. CLICK to ENLARGE!]
Dated March 14, 1928 soon after work on the Second Avenue Extension began. Not the razed corner at the southeast corner of the old intersection at Second Ave. S. and Washington Street. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)Dated June 11, 1929 with the Second Avenue Extension handling traffic.Looking back and north from the Great Northern Tower ca. 1929-30. Our block of primary interest appears here right-of-center. (Courtesy: Municipal Archive)For comparison another and earlier look north from the Great Northern tower, ca. 1906. The corner of 4th and Jackson Street is on the right. Third Ave. extends north up the center of the panorama. The railroad tunnel is nearly new - and the GN station too. Seattle Gas is completing its last year on the right to either side of Jackson Street between 4th and 5th Avenues. At this point they are building their new gas plant on the Wallingford peninsula on the north shore of Lake Union. Grace, now half-sitting on the Indian and holding it with both hands, poses with most of the same friends in the snapshot at the top, but this time with masks. Again, like most of the others, this one was by Max Loudon.
[For the introduction to Bill’s travel literature return to the first installment of this serial. Here – below – Bill is steaming down the northwest coast of South America, heading for Peru, Lima and Kel. He is looking at the moon.]
The weather so far this morning is overcast and humid. If things were a bit prettier outside, a walk along the beach would be an appealing prospect, but I am more interested in talking with Kel about our plan for her picking me up on Friday. Cars are not allowed to approach the ship, so she will have to park somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the port gates, and then walk 50 meters or so to meet me as I disembark. I am so excited to be seeing her after these six years that I cannot put my mind to doing much else except anticipate that moment when we first see each other.
It is after two in the afternoon and there is nobody on the beach, so I’ll stay in. There is a movie at three that I’ll watch at least the first part of just to keep my mind free of irritation. Also, we have been receiving warnings of gastrointestinal diseases breaking out so now I’m shying away from the food, especially the desserts, which the sick women paw over. I have already bumped into a couple of coughers, I sanitize my hands continually and try to keep my fingers out of my eyes nose and throat.
Having passed several pleasant hours putting together the Panama Canal movie, I looked forwards to our nightly trivia meet. We won a bottle of champagne by coming in first place. I really like those two couples with whom I play, and try to arrive early so that we have enough time to chat before the game. Last night, we remained chatting for an hour while drinking our prize champagne, Then I hot-tailed it to the computer to Skype with Kel, after which I wandered about listening to the tacky singers and comedians in the showrooms and bars. there is a really sickening guy who plays Broadway tunes on the piano, but last night the cast from Tonight’s showroom act was hanging out there, doing some stellar versions of neo-Broadway hits such as “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I also enjoy hearing two or three selections from the string quartet each evening. Tonight, however, there isn’t much at all going on. Perhaps they are spooking it up for Halloweenie-o. I go back to my stateroom to read, but couldn’t sit still long enough to read that Pablo Neruda biography, but did manage to scab through several chapters of Roger Ebert’s memoir. What a dope he is. Then I walked up to the Crow’s Nest, where I saw, for the very first time, the Peruvian moon, the moon Kel sees when she is seeing the moon, and all those years when we looked at the same moon together from such far away points, seven thousand miles between us. And tonight, I stood on the deck of the ship, looked up and saw the moon from the same angle asked has seen it since she first saw it, as a baby with her eyes to the sky.
I had Hummus and Eggplant with focaccia for a midnight snack, topped off with five desserts and coffee. Dinner wasn’t much but the snack was tremendous. I like it here at night, wandering the decks in search of tacky entertainment. Tonight I saw a show that was an embarrassment even by Vegas standards. Just appalling. The Susan Boyles of the world have replaced the Julie Andrews and the male singers have been permanently corrupted by the effeminate register in which jean Valjean’s part has been written. What has happened to the masculine baritones of Broadway? Then I pleasantly dozed listening to the adagio strings, awake enough to hear the music bust asleep enough to remain seated. Many of the solo acts who play the same sets in the same bars have become laughingly tedious. How do they stand it, especially when the rooms are bare? But I like it here at night, wandering the decks, especially when the sea is smooth and the boat stable.
We are off the coast of Peru now, and will be docking at 5:30am in Salaverry, and then I disembark at 9am the following morning in Lima.
What a journey this has been. I realize that never in my life have I gone on holiday, taken a vacation, or been anywhere in outside of the United States and Canada. As we passed through the Panama Canal, I could not really believe I was really there, in that place, and not just imagining it from the garret of the forsaken art house. Tonight I watched a Las Vegas-types show in the Showroom at Sea, a comedian/singer named ‘Doug Starks, who spent seven years portraying Sammy Davis Jr. in a tribute to the Rat Pack. I was thinking this may be the last time I will be in such a place for a long time, a showroom filled with international travelers, enjoying a Vegas show, something that incidentally I have never seen before. Sure, it was tacky, but there was an element of style to it as well, and I enjoyed the experience.
Earlier in the same room, I experienced an afternoon tea with ballroom dancing. This has been such a relaxing, pampered experience, having my stateroom cleaned to perfection twice a day, getting to know people from around the world, sleeping well at night, relieved of the worries and cares of life, but I can never fully appreciate these days because I am still apart from Kel, and would love nothing more than to be sharing these days with her, the way these couples, some of whom have been married for over fifty years, are enjoying sharing these days of theirs together. But to know that Kel and I will soon be one of these couples, making life and sharing life together, is the most profound joy I have known. And this life will begin 33 hours from now.
In these moments I think of my friends on the ship, and the sadness of leaving them. My trivia team won again tonight, and all expressed dismay at my imminent departure. They are such good, decent, intelligent people. And so much fun to be with. When I speak, they listen carefully and respond honestly and articulately. And when they look at me, their eyes are open, and I look back at them the same way, no false looks obscuring some hidden thought, everything open and sparkling. This morning Tony, a Chinese man living in Vancouver, came to my room and videotaped an interview with me that he wants to put on YouTube for the Chinese people who, he believes, will benefit from hearing what I have to say, or maybe just seeing is a person whose thoughts and expression are unfettered. He has read the excerpts from my Cinema penitentiary and wants to translate it into Chinese. Tomorrow I will give him the permission to do so, and strike some kind of a deal. Then there is Harvey, the Australian singer who was to have been in the talent show with me, but only the two of us applied to be in the show, causing its cancellation. There are other people I did not get to know well, such as the couple across the hall from me, the woman of whom was sick for a couple of days. It was so inspiring to see how the man cared so much for her, in fact the thing that touched me the most among these mostly older couples was the love they shared and the closeness between them. I will do everything in can to make Kel as happy as these men have made their wives, and even happier than that, because love is truly the greatest gift we creatures have received from this great, lonely cosmos in which we have come to life.
Last night was so rich in dreams that it seemed like I had slept many hours, but woke up after only two, then again after another two, so I was up looking at the tights of the Peruvian coast at 4:30, and went out at 6 after it became light enough to film>Now I am charging my camera so that it will transfer the material to computer where I can edit it. What a splendid morning, on the shores of Salaverry, the mountains rising from the desert, the pelicans on the rocks, the fresh overcast morning, I felt like kissing the ground.
And now we conclude the second part of this tale with “Pelicanos,” my first Peruvian movie:
Panama City Rising From the JungleThe Bridge of the Americas connecting the ContinentsPlundering the Sea at Manta, Equador
It is Tuesday morning, we are docked in Manta, Ecuador, and I don’t feel like going on a shopping trip here anymore than I did in the San Blas islands. Transiting the Panama Canal was the trip highlight, and I spent yesterday editing the footage I shot of it into a 5 1/2 minute movie that, I admit, looked better to me yesterday than it seems to me today. It’s not bad, though, and I shall probably look back at it with fondness, not only for remembering the thrill of the sights, but for the comical memory of all the mistakes made when I first attempted to shoot moving pictures with the Kodak camera given me by Paul.
To help orient what follows, bottom left, two "fairliners" (the name escapes me) avoid collision as the intersection of Thomas Street and Nob Hill Avenue. We life the view from a popular chapbook published at Fair time. It is filled with Worlds Fair subjects and titled "Worlds Fair Pictorial Panorama" (page 21). This looks east and a little south from the roof of the Food Circus (Center House) to the west leg of the Space Needle. It was from a few feet east of the foot of that leg that the fair and festivals repeating subjects published next were recorded. The Bell Telephone building, seen in part at the bottom-right corner, and the "General Electric Living Exhibit", at the center below, and the "Hydro-Electric Utilities Exhibit," standing like a starched collar on the far right, all make limited appearances in the Fair photo printed next.
(Click to Enlarge)
Sighting west from the foot of the Space Needle nearly three blocks to the tower for the Sacred Heart of Jesus sanctuary at the southwestern and off-campus corner of Thomas Street and Second Avenue. (The church tower is somewhat hidden behind the tree.) To the left of that distant tower sits a portion of the flamboyant roofline of the Christian Witness Pavilion (which we visited yesterday), the rear of Paul Horiuchi's Seattle Mural, at its northern end, and, far left, part of the nearby Hydro-electric Utilities Exhibit. Just left of the Space Needle's foot is part of the General Electric Living Exhibit, and to its left the south facade of the Bell Telephone Systems Exhibit, which resembles an oversize chassis or chamber for a self-inking rubber stamp. Also note the sign post pointing the way to several fair destinations. In Jean's Bumbershoot repeat the Center House (Food Circus) is no longer hidden behind Bell Telephones sprawling "systems exhibit." Note how the Space Needle with its remodel - by now a few years back - covered its ankles then with a skirt, above.
We continue now our postings of Bill White’s Caribbean reflections, as he steams south from Florida first to Panama and then onward to Peru to meet, at last, Kel, his fiancé.
The movie on the second night was “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” which I enjoyed but the ship was rocking so much that I started feeling a bit sick and left early, intending to watch the rest of it on television. Tomorrow they show “The Avengers,” which I will leave before the ending to Skype at midnight with Kel. We had such a nice long talk last night. Talking with and seeing my darling ponyo gives me something to look forward to all day, and the days are pretty dull, waking the decks, taking pictures of the same ocean. Yesterday I borrowed a couple books from the library; a biography of Pablo Neruda and a memoir from Roger Ebert. But even though there is a dullness about the journey there is also the undercurrent of excitement that prevents me from relaxing enough to concentrate on a book. Whatever I do, I am always looking for something else to do at the same time.
On the third day of the voyage, I am apprehensive about entering the shower, as yesterday I was unable to shut off the water and I had to call for help. The first person to arrive could not fix it. He thought the unit was loose and tightened it, but to no avail. The second to arrive simply shut it off and said there was nothing wrong with it. I had tried several times to turn the knob in the direction he showed me, but was not successful in any of those attempts. What will happen today when I try to turn off the water?
This is what happened during this morning’s abbreviated shower. I turned the water on carefully and maintained a low-pressure flow, turning it off altogether a few times while washing my hair and face. No problems. Then, for no apparent reason, the water pressure increased to its maximum and when I tried to turn the water off, it would not stop. So I got out of the shower, placed the shower hose in the sink so the water would not overflow from the shallow shower basin, and spent ten minutes or so aimlessly turning knobs back and forth. Then, for no apparent reason, the water turned off. I told one of the stewards that the situation with the water was erratic, and the shower needed to be inspected by a plumber to make sure the same disaster would not occur tomorrow. I don’t know if he understood a word I said. We shall see tomorrow.
I ran into one of the trivia team players today and we talked a bit about computers, as he had just come from a lecture on Windows 7. I told him I had been using an IMac and now was using the Toshiba laptop, and asked if he knew a good program for editing audio. He told me he used Audacity. This is the program I used to transfer my audio tapes to digital files, and I didn’t realize it was a garage-band style recording system, with editing functions as well as an importing function, so I will be able to both record the Skype interviews with Paul and edit them on it.
After we took second place in the trivia game, the ship experienced a severe roll that turned the upper deck pool into mini tsunami and shattered dishware throughout the ship. I barely noticed it, as I was taking a picture of a plant at the time, and were it not for the noise of breaking dishes might well have remained ignorant of the occurrence, for which the captain offered profuse apologies and feeble explanations. I only had a brief call with Kel before going to bed and falling asleep while listening to Donovan’s album, “Fairy Tale,” having discovered that the DVD player also plays CD’s.
I woke early to catch the sunrise, and became engaged in a prolonged conversation with an Australian couple, who informed me that their stateroom was right across from mine. The guy also had a Lumix Camera, a newer model than mine, and I checked out some of its functions, such as the macro zoom. Returning to the cabin, I received a call from Harvey, who wanted to come to my cabin and get in a little practice on the guitar. Harvey was a rock and roller from the early sixties who now played some country and national ballads, of which he demonstrated a few. They sounded much like our own frontier ballads such as Red River Valley and Home on the Range. We left the cabin to find that the ship had already arrived at the San Blas Islands, and I felt a real thrill at seeing land after a couple days on the high seas. I didn’t want to go ashore, however, because the stop was primarily to ferry passengers to a tourist bazaar where they could buy some of the products of the Cuna Indians. I had no interest in being shipped around as a source of income, preferring to stay on the boat photographing the Indians who had surrounded our ship in their canoes. Had I gone ashore, I would have been forced to pay a dollar to every Indian I photographed. I am beginning to notice that I am too often taking too many pictures of the exact same thing. I spent a long time circling each of the decks, taking pictures and soaking up the sun before returning to the cabin to doze through the most recent Twilight episode, which I had only seen once before and had such a vague memory of that I wondered at times if I had seen it at all.
In other trivial news, someone apparently came in and fixed the shower, as the water is now dispensed through a clockwise, rather than a counter-clockwise, turn, Still, I was apprehensive and kept it turned down low, switching it to off to soap myself and on to rinse, thus making sure everything continued to operate properly, with no water gathering for an overflow.
And now we lift anchor and leave the San Blas Islands, expecting to reach the Panama Canal at 5am and to enter it at 6:30. In the meantime, I look forward to talking with Kel, playing some trivia, possibly going to the German film, “The Harmonists,” and maybe checking out a comedian in the Showroom at Sea. There is a certain ennui, however, that overtakes one, trumping all plans and sending the poor soul to bed where even sleep drags by slowly.
The next attraction south of yesterday’s Christian Witness, the Safeco (or General Insurance) sponsored Official Information Center, was also squirreled into the southwest corner of the future Seattle Center. Jean needed only a short walk south on Second Avenue from the Christians to reach the former site of the open-aired booth with a roof spread low like a turkey’s wings protecting her chicks. It was another eccentric Century-21 roof, in this instance suggesting a Japanese temple. The open inside was staffed with a few female fair polymaths who could – it was expected – answer every questions asked. The place was torn down in 1981 after nearly 20 post-fair years of service as a picnic shelter. Behind it (to the west) behaving like an eccentric tent or a very large box kite was set the Seattle-First International Bank “building.” Design by the fair’s lead architect, Paul Thiry, the bank’s box was destroyed following the fair.
The site is now home for part of the Children’s Garden. Jean Sherrard’s two examples, below, of youthful vigor resting their feet after a day of hide-and-seek are Ron Edge and myself.
An early spring snow on March 3, brought out a Seattle Times photographer to record the chilled fair grounds about six weeks before the fair opened.This "aerial" from the Space Needle reminds us of the bright Salmon-pink coloring of the large Information booth. To the right of Safco is plopped the potato-pocket shape of the Nalley's Space Age Theatre. The Pacific Science Center is on the left, and much of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the upper-right corner.
We begin our postings now of Bill White’s descriptions of his trip to Lima Peru to meet, at last, Kel, his fiance of now six years. Those of us who know Bill might expect that his travel impressions would resemble those in George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” but we would be wrong. Bill spent most of his days “on the road” aboard a cruise ship he compares to a shopping mall sliding though two oceans like a glazed donut. So the heartfelt journey of reaching his intended took a while. Why did Bill chose not to fly but to travel by land and by sea? Perhaps it was, in part, in order to write about it all. And yet he has, for a while at least, given up putting fine lines to the train ride from Seattle to Florida, the first leg of his flight and his journey. The train windows were dirty but more important it was difficult to put aside his fixed idea about where he was going and whom he was going to soon see. But once on the Caribbean Bill started paying attention to his journey too, and most of what follows – in six excerpts – is his candid and sometimes sentimental descriptions of life on a cruise ship and his first days in Lima with Kel.
As Bill notes this elaborate relocation was most exceptional. Aside from a few years in Boston running a bookstore and a motion picture theatre and making art (of several sorts) he has been in Seattle working as a free-lance reviewer and writing novels. For the last few years Bill has been living in what we call “The Forsaken Art House” here in Wallingford. But now he has broken free. He has forsaken the forsaken for adventure first on the high seas and then with love in a far-away place. We wish him well – very well.
(We also note that once we have our Skype connections figured out Bill and I will return to the late 1960s and resume here our weekly readings and commentary of the remaining issues of the underground tabloid, Helix – in their proper order.)
We left Florida an hour ahead of schedule to outrun Hurricane Sandy. Indoor water sports were cancelled, and the eleven decks of the ship rolled a bit, causing passengers to rock on their heels in the stairwells, but the storm was headed north, and the m/s Veendam was going south, so we were spared the fate of a cruise ship that, unable to port in New York, left its passengers stranded in the Atlantic Ocean. Check-in at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale had been easy. When my baggage beeped, they waved it through anyway. It was probably the Swiss army knife Kel had given to me some years ago. Once in my stateroom, I was tricked into drinking a $2 can of coke, as six cans of soda and two of water had been placed on my table alongside an ice bucket, which caused me to assume they were complimentary. The other five sodas and the two waters are still sitting there, and I declined the steward’s offer to bring me more ice. It is odd that, although complimentary food is to be found throughout the ship, you are charged for the cokes placed in your room, but only, I presumed, if you drink them. Odder still is that certain concession areas will charge for items that are free in another area. An example of this is the Explorer’s Cafe, where coffee and pastries bear a price tag, while at the Lido Cafe the same pastries are pressed upon one at all hours of the night and day.
It is a simplification to say that a sea cruise is nothing but ten days of over-eating while looking at water. The television in the stateroom plays five different movies each day, and there is a DVD lending library of over 1,000 titles. On the first night of the cruise to Peru, I saw “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” but it was a crappy DVD projection. I left early, planning to watch the rest of it on the television the next day, and returned to my stateroom to watch my own DVD of Pasolini’s “Gospel According to Saint Matthew,” which put me to sleep almost immediately.
The ship is like a shopping mall in Las Vegas, tacky in an affectionate way. I have attended two lectures so far, both by fairly ignorant authorities. The person giving the history of the Panama Canal could answer few of the questions posed by the attendees, and drew a weak analogy between the fact that US ships have to pay a toll to traverse the canal, although the US built the things. His analogy was along the lines of everybody having to pay the same price for a bowl of oatmeal, whether or not they resided in an oat-growing state, while I thought a parallel between the tolls collected by some new highways might be more fitting. An introduction to Spanish was taught by a girl of Mexican descent who was raised in Connecticut, and her pronunciations were erratic and explanations of the roots of some of the words inaccurate, so I did not continue the course beyond that first day. Most of the food in the four restaurants is mediocre, the deserts being the exception. So far I have had banana crème pie, mango torte, and coconut cake. Lunch was a poor concoction of Chinese vegetables and rice, but the dinner of Chinese noodles and vegetables was palatable.
The second day of the trip began with an in-room breakfast that arrived a little after 8am and consisted of sliced banana, raisin bran cereal, a blueberry pudding, orange juice, and coffee. Since the coffee at Lido was stronger, I decided on the third day to skip the room service and head straight up to Deck 11 and get the better wake-up juice. Also, with the buffet set-up, one could have as little or as much of whatever one chooses at the moment. So I had a chocolate croissant, a blueberry muffin, and a banana, then came back to finally watch the ending of the Marigold Hotel movie, but paid little attention to it.
On the second day I also signed up for a talent show, and ran into Harvey from Australia at the Panama Canal lecture, who asked to borrow my guitar so that he could participate in the talent show as well. As it turned out, the two of us were the only ones who signed up, and the show was cancelled. Later that night, before the trivia game, I was invited to play couple of songs by the singer/guitarist Glenn, while he took a break. I did some rusty versions of In the Tomorrow and Love Minus Zero. I quite like the two couples who are my trivia team-mates. One is a retired Australian couple who both worked in the defense department, and the other an English couple who now live in Canada. We only got 10 out of 15 questions correct yesterday, with the winner scoring 12, but by the end of the cruise, had taken first place on four occasions.
In their golden celebration of Century 21 titled “The Future Remembered,” authors Paula Becker and Alan Stein give a touchstone history of the Christian Witness Pavilion (not to be confused with either the Christian Science Pavilion or the nearby Sermons From Science Pavilion.) “Two-thirds of the Christian Witness Pavilion was devoted to a children’s center, where children aged 3 to 7 got childcare mixed with evangelism. A 40-foot stained glass window [see here one the right] in the building’s facade was a major focal point, as was a 16-foot mosaic of 60,000 wooden blocks designed by Stanley Koth. [After the fair, Gethsemane Luther Church restored the blocks in their sanctuary’s narthex, while a Catholic church in St. Paul purchased the stain glass window.] The adult portion of the exhibit consisted of a small theater where visitors experienced a 10-minute sacred sound and light exhibition that employed a rocket launch countdown as metaphor for the journey through life.” By resembling, somewhat, one of the early satellites, the four-armed cross that topped the structure picked-up on the rocket metaphor. We learn as well from historylinkers Paula and Alan that 19 Protestant denominations and 14 Christian-centered agencies paid for this pavilion. The pavilion site is now part of the Center’s Children’s Garden but without the evangelism.
Looking south from the helipad on top of the Food Circus and over the shoulder, bottom-left, of the Bell Telephone Pavilion, to the Pacific Science Center and the Christian Witness Pavilion on the right.A Seattle Times photographer looks through the same block as the above subject taken from the roof of the Food Circus, but here from the "front steps" to the Pacific Science Center and looking north on Second Ave, not south. The by now familiar roof-lines of the Christian Witness Pavilion are on the left. This scene - and many others - were photographed by the newspaper for its April 21 "first day" coverage of the fair.
Perhaps the serendipitous promotion for the Christian Witness Pavilion was its best public relations. It’s hardwood substitute or variation on the Protestants favorite portrait of Jesus Christ, the one by the artist Solomon, arrived more than two months late. (Every Sunday-Schooler should remember it.)
The Solomon sub was lost twice by airlines but when it at last arrived in July it was met with rejoicing and press coverage at least in The Times.
Bill has arrived in Peru. Ron is back to scanning the issues and will have the next Helix in line and it is expected soon. First, however, we will put up a True Confession and or Sentimental Sea Shanty from Bill recalling his trip by cruise ship nearly straight south from Florida to Peru but with a necessary jog through the Panama canal. His letter will include a video of his passage through the canal and, we expect, more photographs of his trip by Sea. (The story of his train trip from Seattle to Florida may come later. Hope so, for I like traveling in trains and their tales too.) Meanwhile for the Helix routine to resume we must also wait while we figure out how to make Skype work between here and Lima. And that is the sum of it - until we put up Bill's Caribbean Shanty and soon.
This most recent record of the old Helix was record last Oct. 29, and may be compared to one below it from 2008, and then another from the 1970s. At the bottom the door is open, but to the first Helix office, which was in the University District on Roosevelt Way and a half-block north of 45th Street..
Below: While I recall the faces and beards of the two on the left at the Helix front door on Harvard Ave., I no longer remember their names. But to the right are Pat Churchill and Tim Harvey. Both contributed to the paper. Tim handled the UPS and LNS selections and edits and also did some of the best reporting for the paper, as well as drama reviews. In our recorded remarks Bill White and I have referred to Tim’s writing often enough. Rereading Tim I wish that I could indicated somehow my admiration. He may still be in Maine but I’ve not found him as yet. I remember that both Pat and Tim often had a cup of coffee in one hand and sometimes a smoke in the other. As did I and almost everybody in the smoke-filled office. But at that time we were eternal.
THEN: For most of the last century this quaint Inn nestled mid-block on the north side of University Street between Second and Third Avenues. (Courtesy, Washington State Archive.)NOW: Benaroya Hall, the Seattle Symphony’s home since 1998, was built downtown, rather than at Seattle Center, to help revive a moribund central business district.
Ten years before its speedy 1924 conversion into the Hollywood Tavern, this “English chateau restaurant and apartment hotel” opened in as the Northold Inn. Sitting before their $1.00 table d’hote (a set menu with a fixed price) dinners, the guests attending its 1914 opening New Years Eve party were serenaded by George Hagstrom’s orchestra, and fussed over by the Inn’s gregarious manager, C.S. Colegrove.
Lifted from The Seattle Times for August 8, 1914.Pulled from The Times for Sept. 13, 1914.First advert for the Northold Inn appeared in the Dec. 29, 1914 Seattle Times.
The Northold and its English teatime environment was Colegrove’s inspiration. He was also the manager of the Fraser-Paterson Department Store’s Tea Room. (It was next door, to the right, at the corner of University and Second Ave.) Judging by its own promotions, the new department store’s “refined luncheon resort” quickly became the favorite of Seattle women.” Encouraged by the popularity of his tearoom, and with the “mind of an idealist,” Colegrove built this deceptively big English ringer in an “early craftsman style” and then “flooded it with good cheer, the warmth of a massive fireplace, big black leather settees and deep carpets.” And more tea.
From The Times Sept. 25, 1924With an illustration of its sidewalk sign, the Oct. 13, 1924 announcement of the Hollywood's opening. From The Times.
The quick change of ‘24 from Northold to Hollywood was done with the founder Colegrove’s blessings. “It will be continued along exactly the same lines.” (Curiously, the tavern was but one part of a “greater Hollywood” that included Hollywood Farm, which claimed “one of the greatest herds of pure-bred Holstein cows in the country.”) The tavern’s advertised prices crashed with the Great Depression. A 1932 ad promises “Talk of the town full course dinners served every day – for 50 cents.” Neil McMillan, the tavern’s owner, died early in 1937, the year of our W.P.A. tax photo. A “for rent” sign is posted above the scrawl of the photograph’s tax information. Hollywood Tavern has gone dark.
A Metro Bus stopping near the front door to what was then the American Legion's 40 et 8 Club headquarters.
During WW2 the persevering landmark was mobilized first as a U.S.O. girls dormitory and then after the war as the American Legion’s 40 et 8 Club headquarters. As such it served the Legion for more years than it was an Inn and Tavern combined. In 1975 food service returned with a feudal plan. In an unwitting parody of founder C.S. Colegrove’s English tea-room, the new Mediaeval Inn resembled a feudal banqueting hall in which costumed “wenches” served mead (honey wine), Cornish game hens, potatoes and crusty bread while minstrels sang ballads and told bawdy jokes. The presiding Lord allowed customers to eat with a knife only, unless they sang for a fork.
Pulled from The Times of Feb. 7, 1975.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean, beside the few clips and adverts sprinkled about the main text above, a few neighborly subjects used in past Pacific features. First the Walker Building, which was on the same block as the Northold Inn, at Second Ave., its west end.
The streaked lights from the headlights of passing cars in the exquisite night shot of Benaroya Hall by photographer James Fred Housel seem to repeat the trolley tracks in the 1904 photograph of the Walker Building at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and University Street. (Historical photo courtesy of MUSEUM of HISTORY and INDUSTRY / Contemporary photo by James Fred Housel, Courtesy of Seattle Symphony Orchestra.)
MUSICAL CORNER
(Appears in Pacific in 2004)
When it was razed in the late 1980s the brick and stone Walker Building at the northeast corner of University Street and 2nd Avenue was nearly as old as the 20th Century. Named for Cyrus Walker, the famed lumberman, it was completed in 1903 so the construction noise most likely did not interrupted the first performance of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra which was late in the same year, the 29th of December. The performance space was itself new: Christiansen Hall in the then nearly new Arcade Building directly across Second Avenue.
The first Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO) was a 24-instrument ensemble led by the violinist/conductor Harry West. Probably most of the players also taught their instruments to enthused youth – and students were often excited to learn given the great importance then of live music. Most likely many of the players also performed in one or more of the theatre and restaurant orchestras that then stocked the energetic Seattle music scene. So there were certainly many good players among the first twenty-four under West and the SSO must of sounded quite fine its first night.
I don't know if this is the "first" Seattle Symphony, but it is what I have got and it is early. Note the harp is the only instrument handled by a woman - strange but typical.
It is one of those most common of ironies – those of place – that the orchestra would eventually wind up in Benaroya Hall, its first permanent home directly across Second Avenue , 95 years after West first raised his baton. This season, of course, the SSO celebrated its centennial at Benaroya Hall, but also at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, during its four-city East coast Centennial Tour this past spring.
Lawton Gowey took this Walker Building slide on Jan. 28, 1976. The removal of the building's cornace was probably a precaution following either the 1949 earthquake.
Readers who known their downtown will remember what a strange corner this was in the few years between the razing of the Walker and the raising of Benaroya. Plans for a 60-floor scraper as part of a proposed Marathon Block were abandoned because of the massive overbuilding of office space at the time. In its place a wide sward was planted, and near its green center a temporary entrance to the bus tunnel resembled an opening to a civil defense bunker. (Buried in my daily snaps are more than one recording of this – somewhere.)
Before the Walker - at the northeast corner of 2nd and University - there was this collection of commercial sheds and homes. Note the Plymouth Congregational sanctuary at the northeast corner of University with 3rd Avenue. Not seen here but revealed soon below is the Brooklyn Building across University Street at its southeast corner with Second Avenue.
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Looking west on University Street through its intersection with Third Ave.
UNIVERSITY STREET – LOOKING WEST from 3rd AVE.
(First appeared in Pacific, June 2, 1991)
There’s nothing cosmetic about this cityscape. The·photographer has recorded a candid capture of what University·Street west from Third Avenue looked like at the turn of the century. Less regard is given the architecture. (The modest homes on the north side of the street – to the right – where the Northold Inn was later raised appear in the early – penultimate – look up University Street across Second Avenue.)
While not dominating the scene, the Hotel Brooklyn, on the left, may look familiar. It is one of the few uptown (that is, north of Pioneer Square) 19th-century brick piles that survive. The hotel was completed in 1889, the year of the city’s “Great Fire.”
The Brooklyn Building at the southeast corner of Second Ave. and University Street. Lawton Gowey snapped snapped the corner in the warmth of an afternoon sun on August 25, 1976.
Construction on the Arlington Hotel also began before the tower, and its foundation helped stop the northerly spread of the flames along the waterfront. The Arlington tower shows here just to the right of the Brooklyn and at the southwest corner of First Avenue and University Street, the site now for Harbor Steps.
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Above: Author-editor Hall Will photographed this parade scene looking south on Third Avenue from Union Street sometime between the Spring of 1947 and mid-1949 when the onset of polio forced him to put aside his photography. (Photo courtesy of Hal and Shirley Will) Below: The relatively recent construction of Benaroya Hall replaced a full block of mostly brick low and mid-rise commercial buildings, which in the early 20th century had taken the places of pioneer structures, including a few clapboard homes like the Charles Denny Home at the southwest corner of Third and Union, printer here at the bottom of this “now-then.”
HAL WILL’S PARADE
(Appeared in Pacific in 2008)
In February 1947, only a few months after Hal Will returned from his WW2 duty as a 20 year old army tug boat captain in the Philippines, he enrolled in the charter classes of the Northwest Institute of Photography. The new school’s labs and classrooms were in the University Building, seen here in the “then” at the northwest corner of 3rd Avenue and University Street, left of center.
Hal took this photograph of American Legion members parading on Third Avenue sometime after enrolling and before he was inflicted in 1949 at the age of 23 with a life-long crippling case of polio.
Will’s photograph is spread over two pages in the Magnolia Historical Society’s most recent production, “Magnolia, Making More Memories.” Hall is one of the about forty authors that were involved in the creation of this hefty nearly 400-page book. His essay “Early Railroad Days: Interbay” shines with both his wit and his own photographs. And his second contribution, “Bad Judgment in Cebu”, is a wise and droll recounting of his army life in the Philippines.
In the maritime and heritage communities Hal Will is famous hereabouts as the founder and editor of the Sea Chest, a well-wrought periodical associated with the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society. (The PSMHS was founded in 1948, or about the time Hal recorded this view with his 4×5 inch view camera.) In the week before this last Christmas and after a short illness the erudite 81-year-old died. Many others and I will miss his good wit, and frequent contributions to community history.
Fortunately, his fine writing – and he wrote a lot – can still be repeatedly enjoyed. And so can our memory of him.
About 44 years before Hal took his parade photo looking south on 3rd with his back to Union Street, a photogrpaher named Brown took this morning snap of the temporary booths set up in that block for the Elks Lodge's 1902 Seattle Fair and Carnival. Note the gate at the University Street end of the block. One paid to attend. The tower of Plymouth Church crowds the upper-left corner. Perhaps the parishioners had passes. Charles Denny's home at the southwest corner of Union and 3rd Ave. Architectural historian - and Lutheran minister - Dennis Andersen gave me a copy-negative of this subject while he was using it for his and Katheryn Hills Krafft's chapter on "Pattern Books, Plan Books, Periodicals" in "Shaping Seattle Architecture" the ever helpful book on our built history, edited by Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, and published by the University of Washington Press. Charles was one of the founding father's clan: a son of Arthur and Mary Denny, and his large home was but one and one-half blocks east of the the parents' home. The Charles Denny home also shows in the next photo, on the left.
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Looking through the same block on Third between Union and University Streets, but this time north towards Denny Hotel on top of Denny Hill. As noted, the Charles Denny home appears here as well on the left. (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.)
DENNY HILL & HOTEL From Near 3rd & UNIVERSITY
(First appeared in Pacific, April 28, 1985.)
Luther Griffith is one of Seattle’s rarely remembered capitalists. In the 1890s he was out to sell street railways. For promotion purposes, Griffith put together a photo album featuring the work of pioneer photographer Frank LaRoche, a name that’s easy to remember because he wrote it on his negatives. It’s not clear whether LaRoche recorded the photos on assignment for Griffith, or if the entrepreneur focused on the photographer’s work because it served his purpose so well. Griffith’s album shows off a Seattle that’s progressive, forward thinking and up to date.
The subject here is one example from the album. Taken in 1891, it flaunts one of early Seattle’s main urban symbols. There looming above the city in the distant half-haze is the elegant bulk of the Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. LaRoche must have set his tripod on the dirt of Third Avenue, one hundred yards of so south of Union Street, but he was safe. Compared to the modern race of internal combustion that is’ now Third, in 1891 it was a pleasantly relaxed but dusty grade where more than one horse and buggy (on the right) could casually park facing the wrong way on the two-way street.
The second tower in this scene (left of center) sits atop the brick Burke Block at the northwest corner of Third and Union. On the main floor the plumber and steam fitter A.F. Schlump did his business. Across Union is a mansion-sized home, a vestige of the old Single-family neighborhood. By 1891, this 1300 block of Third Avenue between University and Union streets was packed with diverse commerce. There was a dressmaker, a hairdresser, three rooming houses, a music teacher, a mustard manufacturer, a retail druggist, a wholesale confectioner, two tobacconists, a second-hand store, a restaurant, a sewing machine store and Mrs. Cox, who listed herself in the 1891 Polk Business Directory as simply, “artist.”
Also, at the Union Street end of this block was the Plummer Building, the two-story clapboard with the three gables on the photo’s right. This building housed more retailers plus a saloon and the Seattle Undertakers.
Ten years later, the progress on Third Avenue got so intense the Plummer Building was picked up and moved two blocks north to Pine Street to make way for the Federal Post Office. The post office is still on the Union Street side and pictured on the right of the “now” photo [when we once more bring it to light].
Beginning in 1906, Third Avenue’s forward-look started sighting through Denny Hill, which in the next four years would be nearly leveled as far east as 5th Avenue allowing the street to pass through the Denny Regrade with barely a rise. The grand hotel, LaRoche’s subject and Griffith’s symbol, was razed with the hill.
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The Mackintosh mansion at the southeast corner of Third Ave. and University Street, during the 1906-7 regrade.
MACKINTOSH MANSE: THIRD & UNIVERSITY – Southeast Corner
(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 24, 1988)
[As the first line hints, the below was first composed while Third Ave. was being tunneled for the transit.] The current commotion along and below Third Avenue is a mere inconvenience compared with the upheavals that accompanied the 1906-07 regrading on the downtown street. Imagine having to live next door to such disarray. That was the fate Angus and Lizzie Mackintosh, who built the mansion on the right at the southeast comer of Third Avenue and University Street. Not only did the work disrupt their view and domestic quietude, it left their home perched more than twenty feet higher than the regarded street.
Angus, a native of Ontario, and Lizzie, one of the pioneering “Mercer Girls” who came here in 1866 when the male-female ratio was 9-to-l, met while Lizzie was working as the first woman enrolling clerk in the state’s House of Representatives in Olympia. Working to promote lumber mills, railroads and banks, the couple had built enough of a nest egg to finance construction of the mansion in 1887.
The stately home had seven rooms downstairs, five upstairs and three quarters for servants under the roof. In 1907, soon after the regrade was completed, Bonney-Watson funeral directors, moved into the mansion. As a sign that death has no end, the mortician was the second-longest continuously operating business in Seattle. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was first until its own recent passing. In 1928 the Northern Life Tower (later renamed the Seattle Tower), which many still consider the most beautiful office building in Seattle, was erected at the site.
The Northern Life Tower under construction circa 1927 and photographed from the roof of the University Building at the northwest corner of 3rd and University.
Above: This Post-Intelligencer press photo, courtesy of MOHAI, is too soft to read all the posters held high in 1948 for this demonstration against the state legislature’s Canwell Committee. The legible ones, left-to-right, read that “Every Canwell Committee member for [the] Lien Law” – “Atom Bombs and military training will not build houses or lower prices!” – “Canwell . . . want more pension cuts!” . . . “The Canwell Committe is illegal, unconstitutional and UnAmerican!” . . . “Every Canwell Committee member voted for Pension Cuts!” The business of the Canwell Committee is briefly described in the “now and then” printed at the bottom. Below: Late summer Bumbershoots are often visited by “get out the vote” activists. Like the 1948 protestors above, these activists do their work beside the south facade of the Centerhouse, AKA Food Circus: the old Armory.
Above: At the 42nd Street entrance to the U.W. students protest the Canwell hearings of 1948. Photo courtesy Museum of History and Industry. Below: The University District’s Methodist Temple is seen in part on the right of both views. Readers may remember the parking lot across 15th Avenue in the “now” scene. It was created in the late 1960s from the wreckage of the old white frame Wesley House – seen in the “then” – which was a residence hall for coeds. The lot was recently developed for housing, with some retail and office space as well. With this the popular and by now venerated Allegro Coffee House in the alley lost both the morning sunlight and its view of the campus green. The Allegro, either the oldest espresso house in Seattle or nearly, opened on May 10, 1975.
REGISTER YOUR PROTEST
(First appeared in Pacific April 20, 2008)
When the University of Washington opened its first classes on the new “Interlake Campus” in 1895 none of the students lived on campus and few in Brooklyn, the name then of the university district. Most came from town by trolley and were let off at “University Station,” 42nd Street and University Way. To reach campus they walked a mere one block east to the incline pictured here, and for many years this was the most frequented way to enter and leave the campus. For pedestrians it may still be.
Since the lawn here is exposed for sightseeing into the ‘district and sunbaths in the afternoon it has seen a lot of leisure through the years. I remember it as “hippie hill” in the late 1960s. Here, however, we see a protest underway on July 15, 1948.
The students are comfortably listening to speeches broadcast from a flatbed truck that is parked on the 15th Ave. You can see the banner near the center of the “then,” and it reads, in part, “Register Your Protest, Hear and Now, the Canwell Committee.” Albert F. Canwell was the one-term state legislator from Spokane who proudly campaigned on two planks only: no new taxes and no communists.
The speakers this noon were Lyle Mercer, president of Students for Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party, Ted Astley, a veteran’s counselor at the UW and Al Ottenheimer of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, which was just off campus. The Canwell Hearings injured them all. The University fired Astley.
However, the real targets in this “red scare” theatre were on the UW Faculty. After Canwell’s “I will not tolerate questions” proceedings were over, three lost their professorships, scapegoats for the school’s board of trustees who were relieved that the number did not approach what another legislator proclaimed to be the total accounting of communists on the faculty. That was 150: the same as that estimated by The Times for the number of students who attended this barely on-campus protest.
By now one of Seattle’s most cherished landmarks, the Seattle Mural is Paul Horiuchi’s daring glass tile departure from the exquisite collages he constructed from soft and translucent materials like rice paper. While it is now called simply “The Seattle Mural” I imagine it as the Buddhist’s “well-packed region” that is everything – eventually. Follow any line through the mural and eventually – or ultimately – you will end up where you began, and then keep going. Have you sat in the grass for a concert there and wound up wondering through the mural?
(Click TWICE to ENLARGE)
During Bumbershoot 2012 the Seattle Mural was mostly covered by adverts, stage decorations, and large built out video screens like the one showing here at the center. Jean's view repeats Frank Shaw's detail below from the fair. These puff-ball erections that were part of the fair's appointments seem makeshift - or make-do - by now. Part of the Bell Telephone Pavilion shows on the left. It sprawled between the Food Circus (the Center House) and the Seattle Mural, and was one of the fair's clumsier designs. We will see a larger depiction of it later in this fair-festival project and elaborate there. Shaw's 1962 puffs two-up remind me of artist-friend Fred Bauer's capture of this small pruned tree, which holds its own against the ivy that once climbed the exterior wall of one of the structures that the Seattle Center inherited from Century 21. I remember it but by now can now longer claim with confidence, which it was. However, I'll venture this: it may have been the east facade of the Flag Plaza Pavilion directly across Third Ave. (or Boulevard East) from the southwest entrance to the Food Circus. Who knows?Catching Jean Capturing a Glimpse of Horiuchi
