(click to enlarge photos)

In “Seattle Transformed,” the last of his three-volume history of Seattle in the 20^th Century, Richard C. Berner, gives his scholarly summary of the housing crises that greeted “the freshly discharged veterans” of World War Two. The retired University of Washington Archivist explains that Seattle’s dire straits in 1945 were built (or rather not built) upon the war’s own shortages.  Many of the thousands who had earlier come to Seattle to build ships and bombers had great difficulties finding affordable beds.

In spite of those discomforts, at war’s end most of these “visitors” wanted to stay in Seattle or in the charmed land that surrounds it.  Of the 5,352 families questioned by the Seattle Housing Authority, 4,841 answered that they wanted to make this their permanent home.  However, the need for constructing affordable housing got little help with peace. When the War Production Board lifted restrictions on construction materials, developers quickly purchased the released bounty, directing it for the more lucrative construction of commercial structures and upscale housing, of which these uniform huts at Union Bay Village are not examples.

For every patriotic reason imaginable – including Apple pies in the war surplus ovens – married veterans in pursuit of an education also needed to be sheltered.  Here in 1946 the solution for a least a few of them and their families came  – to not avoid the pun – as fallout from Hanford and Richland where these nifty quarters were first constructed for those who built the first atom bombs without knowing what it was they were doing.

The lucky vets at Union Bay Village knew what they were doing.  However, even with their $90 monthly GI-Bill, and cheap rents, they still needed extra part time work to raise their families.  At night they studied – here in the “Ravenna lowlands” near the north shore of Lake Washington’s Union Bay until 1981 when the Village was razed for another designed community – Laurel Village – with spiffier quarters but also still with controlled rents, late night study and insistent children.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Sure Jean, and again more from the neighborhood.  But first I will register my pleasure and admiration for the song, singing and playing by Pineola that you contributed to the blog one insertion before this.  We will hope that readers who have missed it will go visit it, perhaps first.  They [you] will find it below – at the bottom – the next post in space although the penultimate one in time.  [I honestly learned the meaning of “penultimate” while taking a course in classic Greek at Concordia Academy in Portland Oregon, 1958.]

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TOWN of YESLER

[First appeared in Pacific March 24 1996]

            In “A History of Laurelhurst,” author Christine Barrett included the above photograph of the mill town Henry Yesler founded on Lake Washington’s Union Bay in 1888.  Most likely Yesler’s cousin J.D. Lowman, who was by then largely in charge of the Seattle pioneer’s business affairs, was responsible for naming the new town site after his older relative and benefactor. 

            Most of the Lake Washington shoreline was then still sided by old-growth timber.  The building of a mill town on Union Bay was made easier the preceding fall by the completion of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad from the Seattle waterfront as far as the bay, and soon the new railroad continued north to Bothell and from there east into the Cascade foothills and eventually north to the Canadian border at Blaine.  The SLSSE carried logs to the mill and milled timber from it. The railroad, of course, also helped build both the mill and its town.

            This and practically all surviving early photographs of the area north of the then future Lake Washington Ship Canal were taken by a photographer who signed his negatives “Conn.”  He also taught school in a north end that was still mostly undeveloped.  This view dates from the early 1890s.  Conn sights his camera to the northwest, along the tracks that led from the SLSC mainline to the mill.  On the right, the earliest homes and businesses of the town of Yesler are grouped between Northeast 41^st and Northwest 45^th Streets to the sides of 36^th Ave. Northeast, its principal avenue – its “Main Street.”  The line of white smoke behind the settlement is probably drawn by a locomotive heading north on the SLSE line – now the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail. 

            Yesler’s first mill on Union Bay was destroyed by fire in 1895.  In 1916 this old wharf was exposed when Lake Washington was lowered nine feet for the opening of the Ship Canal.  A second mill, which produced shingles, burned down in the early 1920s.   The neighborhood, of course, survived, transforming from a mill town into a well kept addition of often modest homes, many of them homes for persons connected with the University of Washington.

 

 

YESLER SCHOOL

[First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 2, 1997]

            Fire stations, churches and schools were common photographic subjects when cameras were still relatively rare.  Schools especially, since photograpahers, first itinerant and later resident, could hope to make as many prints from their negatives as the number of students posing in them.  It was, however, a hope rarely fulfilled unless, of course, the school’s administration was somehow involved in the negotiations.

            Here are the two photographs of the old Yesler School with which I am familiar. There are probably others secreted or forgotten in albums and attics.  This too appears in Christine Barrett’s book, “A History of Laurelhurst.” 

            Yesler School opened in the early 1890s to serve, of course, the families connected with old Henry Yesler’s nearly new company town on the north shore of Lake Washington’s Union Bay.  The site of Yesler’s downtown mill, the first spine in Seattle’s economic backbone (or heart in its thorax), was by then much too valuable for mere log cutting.  In 1888 Yesler moved his saws to this north shore of Union Bay, under the coaxing of his nephew and business manage, J.D. Lowman.  Getting to the mill town was made downright easy a year earlier with the laying of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway, again, now the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail.

            The Yesler School did not close until 1918.  By then the mill town students –most of them from working families – probably sat side-by-side with those from a nearby neighborhood its promoters promised would be “the chief aristocratic section of the city.”  They called that 100-acres enclave of designer wealth Laurelhurst.

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UNIVERSITY VILLAGE

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FOLLOWS three Village-related photographs taken by photographer Doyal Cudjel for promotion of what the sign says: a Homecoming Express every ten minutes between Greek Row and University Village.  Cudjel has dated his snapshots, Oct. 7, 1959… (We suspect that these subjects are also cheerleaders.) Note the sign on the front of the bus in the last of the three shots.  It promotes KVI’S “New HI-FI”

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