(click to enlarge photos)

At 5 o-clock on the afternoon of July 4, 1913, Miss Helen McEwan, the daughter of a proud and watching VIP, christened the bow of the H-3, then the Navy’s “new under water fighting machine.”  The Times sensitive reporter saw it “slide gracefully into the waters of Elliot Bay.”

In the next day’s Times a hopeful editor added, “May the new vessel sink as successfully as she floats!”  And the H-3 did both sink and swim but not always in order. For instance, in Dec. 1916 with three other navy vessels examining coastwise harbors, the H-3 – in a fog – ran on a sand spit at Humboldt Bay in Northern California.  A year earlier in Southern California waters while “forging ahead” of another navy flotilla this time heading up the coast from San Diego for an Independence Day celebration in San Francisco, the H-3 ran on the rocks at Point Sur.  First saved by a high tide and then patched at the navy year in Vallejo, on leaving the navy yard the sub managed to first graze the cruiser Cleveland and then run afoul of a dike at the Vallejo lighthouse.  In 1930 the H-3 was, perhaps, mercifully decommissioned.

Two more vessels half hide here behind the H-3. Built in Ballard in 1902, the four-mast schooner Willis A Holden is held for overhaul in one of the Seattle Construction and Drydock Company’s three floating dry-docks after a punishing 63-day sail north from Iquique Chile.

Half hidden behind the flags on the sub and with its stern nearly touching the schooner, we may glimpse the sporty steam tug, the Tempest.   Perhaps she waits to nudge the submarine if needed. As described in the McCurdy Maritime History of the Pacific Northwest, the tug’s productive last years in warmer waters were a gift of the Great Depression and a bottle of spirits.  With the 65-foot-long tug in debt and under guard, its captain “provided a bottle for the Tempest’s watchman.”  Then slipping the tug “quietly from her moorings and out to sea” she was seen “heading south down the coast under a full head of steam.”  The Tempest reached San Blas, Mexico safely and ended her days as a shrimp trawler.”

Reviewing the these maritime stories, Ron Edge, who provided the historical photograph, is of the opinion that the lives of vessels may sometimes be of greater interest than our own.  In the “now” caption, Jean Sherrard describes the contemporary task required to record his repeat.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Acting under the inhibitions of the little time left now before “nighty-bears” I will plop into the feature a few related features, and then with what is left add an addendum later in the week.

First the two tips that Ron Edge sent us on what he figured was the target for your “now” or “repeat” of the 1913 sub shot.  One is an early 20th Century Sanborn real estate map and the other a detail pulled from a recent Google-earth shot from space.  In both instances Ron has circled the environs with a red circle.

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NEXT, and in order, we will illustrate a few activities that have held the waterfront at or near the Sub’s launch site, and starting with a subject that looks east ca. 1885 to the ridge that before the Jackson Street Regrade (1907-09) and the Dearborn Cut (1909-1912) ran between First and Beacon Hills.  The closest railroad trestles crossing the tideflats are constructions of the 1880s.  The The knoll above the red arrow  near the horizon right-of-center was removed in the early part of 20th Century for fill for the laying of tracks free of worm-endangered wooden trestles like those showing here.  Dearborn Street crossed the knoll.

MORITZ THOMSEN’S CENTENNIAL MILL

[Click TWICE to enlarge for reading]

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MORAN’S SHIPYARD

 

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HOOVERVILLE IGNITION

HOOVERVILLE BURN – 1940

(First appeared in Pacific,  Feb. 23, 1997)

            First in the fall of 1940 at “Hooverville” and other shack communities spread along the beaches and tideflats of Elliott Bay were a squatter’s Armageddon.  The residents got a posted warning.  The mostly single men who lived in these well-packed, rent-free communities were told the day of the coming conflagration, so there was time for a few to arrange for the shacks to be carefully trucked away to other sites not market for wartime manufacturing.

            This was very different from the old Hooverville ritual of farewell – a kind of potlatch.  When a resident found a job (a rare event), he was expected to ceremoniously give his house, bed and stove to others still out of work.  In 1939 this gift-giving became a commonplace; the war in Europe had begun to create jobs here, and among the residents of Hooverville were many skill hands.

            Squatters’ shacks had been common in Seattle since at least the economic Panic of 1893.  Miles of waterfront were dappled with minimal houses constructed mostly of whatever building materials the tides or junk heaps of nearby industries offered.  For the most part, these free-landers were not bothered by officials or their more conventional neighbors.  Swelling during the 1930s to communities of more than 1,000 residents, these self-policing enclaves were an obvious and creative solution to some of the worst effects of the Great Depression.

            Hooverville was the biggest of them all.  It sprawled along the waterfront west of East Marginal Way, roughly between Dearborn Street and Royal Brougham Way.  The scene of prodigious shipbuilding during World War 1, the site had been increasingly neglected and then abandoned after the war.  In 1997 when this feature was first published these acres were crowed with Port of Seattle containers.  Since then the size of this service has diminished.  Among the visions of what might become of this container field are residential uses: condos – perhaps stacked something like containers beside the bay and near to downtown.   

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SUBMARINES IN NEED OF HELP

Berangere and Jean, perhaps one of another of our readers will give us some help in identifying the submarines below.  They were plucked from our archive.

Naval sub No. 268, above, lying along the water end of the Naval Armory at the south end of Lake Union. The Armory, you know, was recently converted into a new home for  the Museum of History and Industry.  In the mid-1960s I lived for a time in one of the homes in the rows of house boats that held to the shore.  My architect friend Bob lived at the far (western) end of one row of those floating homes along Fairview Ave. and at the very southern end of the house boat community.  His then was the last (most westerly) floating home on the last (most southerly) dock which was still more than half a mile northwest of the armory.   One morning he was awakened by a sturdy bump at his bedroom window.  Sitting up in bed Bob discovered the cause.  The submarine normally tied to the end of the armory had broken loose in that night’s storm and drifted across the lake in the dark in order to, it seemed, firmly but gently nudge Bob awake.  Bob said that it was “startling but not upsetting.”  So Bob went back to sleep expecting that once the navy determined that its missing submarine was not resting on the bottom would easily find it in the morning at his bedroom window, waiting there for a tow back to the armory.

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We will ad more subs, this time with rhymes, later in the week.