THEN: Looking north-northeast from a low knoll at the southwest corner of Seneca Street and Seventh Avenue, circa 1916. By 1925, a commercial automobile garage filled the vacant lot in the foreground. [Courtesy, Ron Edge]NOW: With the historical prospect long lost, first to a garage and then to the Interstate 5, Jean Sherrard took his repeat from near the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Spring Street. Moving left to right from the center, crowding the right horizon are the Tudor-Gothic styled Exeter House, the nearly completed Cielo Apartments, and the terra-cotta-tile clad Town Hall, all rising from their respective corners at Eight Avenue and Seneca Street.
We may puzzle over why the unnamed photographer of this wide look through a First Hill intersection chose also to feature the trash and weeds in the foreground. As revealed in Jean’s repeat, this intersection at Seventh Avenue and Seneca Street became a small part of the concrete ditch cut for the Seattle Freeway. In the early 1960s, here at Seneca Street, Interstate 5 construction through the central business district turned due north and continued along the green-belted side of Capitol Hill.
An aerial of the future freeway route through the Central Business District, including the planned freeway’s curve to the northeast north of Spring Street. The curve that will cut through the southeast corner of Seneca and 7th Avenue was marked here near the center perhaps before the cutting began. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)A portion of the Central Business District, circa 1972
Although the freeway took this entire intersection, it needed only a slice of its southeast corner, the part shown here on the right of the “then” with the small grocery. “Homemade Bread” is signed below the corner window, and directly above it, “Sanitary Grocery” is printed on the window. In the commercial listings of the 1918 Polk’s City Directory, it was but one of more than 750 small grocery stores that the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism had scattered through Seattle.
Often referred to as “mom and pop stores” – in part because it usually took a family to run one – the First Hill neighbors of this grocery located at 1122 7th Avenue would likely have found Katherine and Jewett Riley behind the counter. Jewett, at least, was an old hand at mercantile, having helped his brother Silvanus run a store at the Leschi Landing soon after the Yesler Cable line was completed to Lake Washington in 1888. In 1918 Katherine and Jewett conveniently lived in unit 104 of the Touraine Apartments at 711 Seneca. Directly behind the grocery, the Touraine is four stories tall.
Van Siclen Apartments facing 8th Avenue between Seneca and University Streets.Above: LaterJudkins 1887 panorama looking north from the Central School tower on the south side of Madison Street between Marion and Madison shows Seventh Avenue ,on the right, heading north towards its intersections with Spring and Seneca Streets. The little home on lots north of the northeast corner of Seneca and Seventh can be found in both Jjudkins pan and in the feature photograph at the top. CLICK TO ENLARGE – by all means.
The oldest subject here is the comely little home to the left of the big box of a boarding house at the intersection’s northeast corner. It dates from the mid-1880s. To the right of the boarding house, the concrete Van Siclen Apartments (1911), with rooftop pergola and ornate row of arched windows, faces Eighth Avenue between Seneca and University Streets. It is a block so steep that the paved Eighth cannot be seen from this prospect. In the vacant corner lot to the south (right) of the Van Siclen, the Alfaretta Apartments at 802 Seneca was built in 1918.
Jean’s 2012 portrait of the Alfaretta’s deconstruction, with the surviving Exeter House beyond it on the west side of Eighth Avenue.
The Van Siclen (later renamed the Jensonia) and the Alfaretta missed reaching their centennials. Both were razed in anticipation of the rising of the 323-unit Cielo Apartments at the northeast corner of Eighth and Seneca. As a work-in-progress, the Cielo can be readily found in Jean’s repeat, rising above the Exeter House (1928) and Town Hall (completed in 1924 as the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist).
Freeway Park waders in the summer of 1976. Photo by Frank Shaw.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul and Ron? Surely, starting and perhaps ending with the dozen links below. They are, again and again, well stacked with relevance – sometimes repeating it. For instance, beginning with the first link below. You can find, surely, the Christian Scientists on the left – now TOWN HALL – but also the rear of the of the Van Siclen apartments on the far right. Until only a few years ago they faced 8th Avenue mid-block between Seneca and University Street. The view to the bay over the retail district was wonderful until the Freeway overpass blocked it in the 1960s. Somewhere in the links below the fuller Van Siclen story is told.
Before this coming Sunday’s feature is published we want to insert an addition to last week’s feature about the Galbraith and Bacon Wall Street Wharf and the Bark Montcalm that was tied to her south side most likely in early November, 1910 and not “circa 1912” as we speculated last Sunday. Here’s the feature photo, again.
Courtesy, Lawton Gowey
We received three letters responding to our uncertainties about which Montcalm this was and, as noted, the date it visited Seattle. Reader Kyle Stubbs was first to respond, and noted that “I am only aware of one Montcalm that was a barque-rigged sailing vessel. That is the Montcalm of 1902, 2,415 tons built at Nantes, France, which was used in around Cape Horn service by La Societe des Voiliers Nantais. The vessel was broken up in the Netherlands in 1924.”
The next letter came from Douglas Stewart, a seasoned cardiologist with the University Medical School and hospital, whom I first met last winter after I fell to the kitchen floor, tripped by my oxygen gasping heart’s tricks with consciousness, or loss of it. The good doctor is also an enthusiast for most things maritime, and even rows to work from his home, which like the hospital sits beside Portage Bay. He found that the original nitrate negative for this photograph is in the keep of the University Libraries Special Collections. In their terse cataloging of it a librarian concludes that this was the “decommissioned sailing ship Montcalm at dock, probably in Seattle ca. 1912.” The date is almost certainly wrong, and the “decommissioned” attribute is unclear or uncertain. Decommissioned when? The library’s data also describes this Montcalm as an “armored sailing corvette . . . originally built for the French Navy in 1865.” While a Google search for everything that is a Montcalm and floats will surface a French corvette with that heroic name dating from the 1860s, it is, again, almost certainly not this Montcalm. The first French corvettes of the 17th century were much smaller than this bark or barque and were built to carry cannons. They got bigger, surely, but not this big. and continued to be built for cannons not concrete and wheat like our Montcalm.
The Montcalm at the Wall Street Pier as illustrated in the Seattle Times for Nov. 2, 1910, and as mistakenly titled the Antwerp. The professional headline or title writer did not consult the reporter or caption writer, a common enough mistake in newspapers. Almost certainly the feature photo on top was recorded by the same photographer. (Courtesy, Seattle Public Library and The Seattle Times)
The third and last contributor to this quest for a proper caption is our old friend Stephen Lundgren, who for this sort of investigation into maritime history prefers the sobriquet Capt. Stefan Eddie. I confess to having used the Captain at times as a capable “World Authority on Everything,” resembling the Professor played by Sid Caesar on his TV show in the 50’s – the best part of that decade. Capt. Eddie also did what I should have done, which is consult the Seattle Public Libraries assess to the key-word search opening into The Seattle Times on-line archive between 1900 and 1984. Stephen found, for instance, the clipping above, which was almost certainly photographed by the same camera or camera person as the featured photo on top. From reading the Times reporting during the Montcalm’s few days stay in Seattle, the Captain concludes, “Took about an hour trolling the Times database and verifying the ship history facts. That it is rigged as a bark, with a steel hull, narrows the search. It’s at the Galbraith Dock probably between discharging the cement cargo in West Seattle and before loading outbound wheat at Smith Cove. The Galbraith Co. dealt in Cement. Question is what buildings were constructed with this Belgium-shipped concrete?” Capt. Stefan Eddie’s last question really goes too far. How could anyone be expected to follow the concrete from ship to foundations?
An early record of the West Seattle elevator. Why we wonder did the Montcalm unload its concrete here, an elevator for grain, when it was Galbraith and Bacon at Mill Street that was the dealer in concrete?
Finally, Captain Stephan Eddit added to his missive something more of his charming familiarity with the Montcalm subject. He explains, “Lars Myrlie Sr. tells me (in Norwegian) ‘I gots off that damm frenchie ship as soon as it gots to Seattle, it was a hell ship and I damm near gots my head stove in off the coast when the load shifted and knocked the other cargo loose cement in bulk, which meant our sure deaths if we gots a leak. Sure it was a steel ship but them damm rivets popped when a hard one hit, like a bullet they was and then came the squirt. My brother gots me off the Galbreath dock and over to Port Blakely and no more damn frenchies for me, Tusende Tak Gotts!”
It took the Montcalm 195 days to carry its 3,000 tons of concrete from Antwerp to Seattle. The ship was registered at 1,744 tons, so the concrete gave it lots of steadying ballast for the storms. However, there were no storms except the expected ones around Cape Stiff, the sailors’ name for Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Otherwise her crossing of the Atlantic was one of constant calms and so not of great speed.
Two months before “our” Montcalm visits Elliott Bay another French Montcalm called on us and stayed and partied long enough to qualify as a floating embassy.
THEN: A circa 1912 look at the Wall Street finger pier from the foot, not of Wall, but Battery Street. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)NOW: Galbraith and Bacon built their pier between Battery and Wall Streets. From this Battery side we see the Edgewater’s south façade. From the Wall Street side one looks directly to the front of the Edgewater, and prior to the hotel, the Galbraith and Bacon pier shed. Consequently, the pier is named for Wall Street.
The Galbraith Bacon dock, like most others built on the Seattle waterfront after 1900, was positioned at a slant off Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) for two sensible reasons. First, such a dock allowed railroad spurs an easier angle for reaching the aprons to the sides of the wharves. Second, at such a slant the end of a long dock was closer to shore and so did not require unnecessarily long piles to support it.
Having dealt feed on the waterfront since 1891, James Galbraith was the ‘old timer’ in this partnership. Cecil Bacon, a chemical engineer with some extra capital, arrived in Seattle in 1899. Deep pockets helped Bacon persuade Galbraith to make a bigger business with him by adding building materials, like lime and concrete, to the established partner’s hay and feed. In 1900, they were the first signature tenants in the Northern Pacific Railroad’s newly constructed finger pier No. 3 (now 54) at the foot of Madison Street. The partners prospered and soon added to their enterprise this pier at the foot of Wall Street.
An early record of Pier 3 (54 since 1944) and its first tenant Galbraith and Bacon. The photo was taken in 1900, some little while before the photographer, Aders Wilse, return to Norway and the call of his wife who left Seattle first for a visit back to the homeland and then decided to stay.. Wilse then obeyed she who must be. In time he became a Norwegian national treasure, and the photographer to its King and Queen and all their little princes and princesses.The Northern Pacific Docks (mostly) between Fire Station No. 5 at the foot of Madison Street and the Milwaukee Railroad’s Pier 6/57 near the foot of Union Street.
Although I like the featured photograph at the top for how it upsets our prepossession with the picturesque – I mean, of course, the askew yards on the sailing ship and its splotched starboard side – I neither know why the square-rigged Montcalm was tied to the Wall Street pier, nor which Montcalm it was. Many ships bear the name, and probably all were named for Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, who until he was hit with an English musket ball in the Battle of Quebec, was New France’s Commander-in-Chief during its French and Indian War with the British in the 1750s.
Not the Montcalm, but another tall ship holding the same slip to the south of the Wall Street Pier. Photo by Whitelsey.The Galbraith and Bacon Wall Street Pier seen from the bluff.Frank Shaw’s record of the Wall Street Pier while being cleared of the Galbraith & Bacon pier shed. Feb. 26, 1961.Shaw returned to take this snapshot of the completed Edgewater on a gray December 9, 1962.
For some clue on the Montcalm’s condition I turned to Scott Rohrer, an old friend who is also celebrated hereabouts for his sailing and understanding of maritime history. Scott tersely answered, “She’s steel and her crew is scaling and chipping her hull for primer and repainting after a long, apparently rough voyage.”
An early ideal Edgewater when it still had a chance of being named the Camelot.What became of Camelot, Lawton Gowey’s – or perhaps Bob Bradley’s – record of the Edgewater dated May 29, 1963.Either Jean or I recorded this repeat sometime in 2005, I think.
The Wall Street pier, about the size of a football field, was replaced in the early 1960s with what the waterfront long wanted: a big hotel. First sketches of the Edgewater show it as the Camelot Inn. The Edgewater is perhaps best known for the visiting Beatles, of whom the now common fish tale is told that they followed the instructions written on the waterfront side of the hotel and fished from their window. We suspect that a trolling of the bottom might still catch some paint chips fallen a century ago from the worn sides of the Montcalm.
An early and passionate rendering of the planned Edgewater – or Camelot.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Certainly, and beginning again with Ron Edge’s selection of links to other features we have had swimming in the Pacific in the past. Ron has also put up the cover to our illustrated history of the waterfront. I suspect that if it is clicked then several chapter choices will appear. We remind the reader that this Waterfront History is always available in toto on this blog. And was also propose again that when in doubt or squinting that readers should click twice and sometimes thrice.
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THE WATERFRONT FIRE OF 1910 – at the FOOT OF WALL STREET
Looking west down Wall Street thru the popular ruins.
CLICK TO ENLARGE – A clip from the March 23, 2003 Pacific MagazineThe ruins looking northeast from the waterfront.The 1910 fire’s remains seen west over First Avenue.
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RAILROAD AVENUE LOOKING NORTH FROM WALL STREET
Merged from two negatives, Railroad Avenue looking north over Wall Street.Jean has a colored version of this repeat, and I shall encourage him to find it and following his discovery also erase this caption for the prospect is obvious.You should probably CLICK-TO-ENLARGE this insert.
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QUIZ – SELF-CONFIDENCE WILL BE REWARDED TO THE READER WHO CAN REVEAL FROM WHAT THE HISTORICAL PHOTO BELOW WAS RECORDED.
THEN: The Hotel York at the northwest corner of Pike Street and First Avenue supplied beds on the American Plan for travelers and rooms for traveling hucksters. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)NOW: In 1912, eight years after the Hotel York was razed, the Corner Market Building took its place as part of the Pike Place Public Market.
The building’s name, Palmer, is either chiseled or cast in stone above the front door. This top-heavy brick pile began its relatively brief life in 1890, with the Ripley Hotel its main tenant. The name of the hostelry was later changed to Hotel York, as we see it here. The ever-helpful UW Press book, Shaping Seattle Architecture, names the Palmer’s architects, but not the Palmer’s owner. Perhaps it was Alfred L. Palmer, who dealt in both real estate and law in the early 1890s, the year this ornate addition to the city’s landscape opened.
Three Hotels – of note – following the Great Fire of 1889, here in 1890. First on top of Denny Hill the Denny Hotel (later renamed the Washington) is under construction. Next, at the center of this detail from a pan taken from the King Street coal wharf stands the undecorated south and west facades of the Arlington Hotel. Look closely, its tower at the northeast corner of the building but at the southwest corner of First Ave. and University Street it under construction.. It was later removed. The Arlington’s foundation helped stop the northerly advance of the 1889 fire. Next, the Ripley Hotel under late construction at the far left – falling out of frame. Also note the dark box-shaped coal wharf at the foot of Madison Street, below-center. Its place is now part of Ivar’s Pier 54, which for another 200-plus days will be busy with remodeling the Acres of Clams, while the seawall (1934-36) is being rebuild at its front door.The Gilmore, aka Arlington, Hotel foundation work following the Great Fire of June 6, 1889, looking south-southwest from the Front Street (First Ave.) west sidewalk just south of University Street. As already noted, this foundation helped stop the fire’s advance north up the waterfront. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
Architects Arlen Towle and Frank Wilcox shared a brief partnership between 1889 and 1891. Perhaps they can be numbered among those opportunist professionals who hurried here after the Seattle business district burned to the ground on June 6, 1889. On its move north, the Great Fire was stopped short of University Street by the inflammable foundation of the under construction Arlington Hotel (the Bay Building). Only two blocks to the north, at the northwest corner of Pike Street and Front (First) Avenue, Palmer also got its start in 1889
Looking south from the roof (or upper floor) of the Ripley/York hotel. The Arlington Hotel and its tower at the southwest corner of First and University stands center-left. The University Street ramp to the waterfront runs left-right thru the center of the scene, crossing over Western Avenue, right of-center. Western Avenue runs on towards Union Street at the lower-right corner. The western wing of the Arthur and Mary Denny home at the southeast corner of First and Union is evident far-left. The dark mass of the coal wharf at the foot of Madison can be found right-of-center, and the longer and larger King Street coal wharf reaches into Elliott Bay, upper-right. Although the photograph is signed by Asahel Curtis, lower-right, he almost certainly did not record it, but rather copied it. It memory serves – and let Ron Edge correct me – I think Soule took this and a left-side panel that doubles it to the east.
The Hotel York and much else is seen here, center-right, from the Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. The Arlington Hotel can also be found, but not the coal wharf at the foot of Madison. It has been replaced with Pier No. 3 (later renumber 54 in 1944), to the far south end of the many Northern Pacific finger piers that were built on the waterfront north of Madison Street in the first years of the 20th Century. So this is the Hotel York in its last years – or months. The Webster and Stevens early number 718 suggests that this was recorded in 1900 – or near it. [Click to Enlarge – maybe twice]The waterfront at the foot of Pike Street photographed from bay shows the Hotel York on the left horizon. This view dates from the 1890s before the Northern Pacific piers were constructed north of Madison. The Pike Street pier showing here was also soon replaced by the one that now nestles beside the waterfront aquarium. The Schwabacher Wharf, to the right-of-center, was the largest dock on the waterfront following the 1889 fire and was swarmed during the post-fire construction. It is also the dock where the gold rush steamer Portland docked with her “ton of gold” in 1897. The block of hotels on First Avenue between University and Seneca Streets shows its unadorned western facade, far-right. The Arlington anchors the block at its north end. [Click to Enlarge]
Second only to the hotel,the Empire Laundry was another of the Palmer’s commercial tenants. It is represented here by two horse-drawn delivery wagons and its sidewalk storefront, which is nestled between the entrance to the York Café at the corner and the door to the hotel, at far right. Inside the hotel lobby one could request a room on the American Plan, which included meals, most likely at the York Cafe, for between $1.00 and $1.50 a day. Many of the rooms – perhaps most – also provided what a classified ad for the York described as an “elegant view of the bay.”
Judging from the few city directories that I have here with me in this Wallingford basement, Thomas C. Hirsch – and not the York Hotel Cafe – controlled the corner door here in 1901. Hirsch, however, was not there in1903 (another of my directories).From a June 21, 1906 advertisement run in the Seattle Times. Dr. Sander’s Electric Belt promised potency for men in want of it, similar to the array of therapies and tools prescribed and used by some of the therapists who used the Hotel York for their consultations.
Judging from the ads, the York’s most sensational renters were health providers who promoted either magnetic healing or massage or both, as with the Chicagoan Miss LaRoy’s “magnetic scientific massage.” Most persistent were Professors Gill and Brunn. For several weeks in 1902, they provided a growing list of therapies, including osteo-manipulation, vibration, hypnotism, vital magnetism, a “new light cure,” and psychology for “bad habits.” Elsewhere in the hotel, Miss Mooreland, like Miss LaRoy, also from Chicago, provided sponge baths and massage, “a specialty.” The “well-known trance medium,” Mme. Pederson, shared “the secrets of your life” and advised “how to keep out of the pathway of despair.”
The hydrotherapy available at the Eureka Baths on territorial Seattle’s Commercial Street, was advertized here in 1877. Seattle’s Dr. Weed practiced hydrotherapy and was also our Mayor. Interbay Pioneer Henry Smith also practiced it. And honestly don’t you find that a hot bath sometimes seems to “cause thorough action of the different organs” in your body? (Courtesy, Ron Edge)
There was no cure, however, for the sudden tremors that came over, but, more importantly, under the adolescent hotel. In 1903 the Great Northern railroad began tunneling beneath the city, and from the tunnel’s north portal near Virginia Street, the boring soon shook the York’s foundations. The Hotel York was razed in November 1904, a few days after the cutting and digging from the tunnel’s two ends met at the center.
The north portal to the tunnel near the foot of Virgnia Street. The Hotel York’s northern facade appears – for the moment – at the upper-left corner.The footprint of the abandoned Hotel York appears lower-right in this detail from the 1904-5 Sanborn Real Estate Map. It is “vacant and dilapidated to be removed.” The stairs to the waterfront show bottom-right and upper right a few footprints of the sheds and shacks that held to the bluff.Top to Bottom: Sheds on the waterfront and above it on the bluff near the foot of Lenora Street. – Water cannons carving the cliff for construction of the tunnels north portal near the foot of Virginia Street, 1903. – Looking down the spur of narrow construction tracks from Railroad Avenue to the tunnel construction at the North Portal. The Hotel York and its mural for Owl Cigars can be found – easily., but for how long?
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Surely Jean. Here are a dozen – or so – links fastened by Ron Edge. There will be some repeats between them, but such, we know, is the exercise of learning.
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Lawton Cowey’s recording of the Corner Market Building on Oct. 25, 1974, and so before its restoration.As he was often inclined to do, Lawton returned to record the Corner Market Building after its restoration, here on April 21, 1976, about half-a-life ago for some.Through out community’s history, it’s story has been adopted by businesses to help promote their products and/or services. Here in 1947 is one of Metro Fed. Savings “Seattle Facts.” This one remembers the confrontation of the railroad tunnel and the hotel.
About two hours ago our friend and expat in Lima, Bill White, was honored on a stage at the Seattle Public Library. Or rather his e-book CINEMA PENITENTIARY was honored, he could not make it from Lima. CINEMA PENITENTIARY is one of three books selected by the Seattle Public Library to be included this year in its lending collection. We hope that some blog’s will remember that now a few years back we included an excerpt from CINEMA PENITENTIARY. Now, below, Ron Edge will return it to the front of this blog (before the week’s now and then comes forward this evening) that posting. It will be linked to five reports that Bill made while on his long journey to his New World by ship in the fall of 2012. We miss you still Bill and CONGRATULATION, of course. As agreed we should try to resume the posting of Helix issues later this fall. (Once we figure out our Skype tangles.) A WARNING: Bill is fond of re-writing so the chapter from CINEMA PENITENTIARY that we printed here two years ago, may have been polished or something since then. If so now you can compare them. Contact the library. It is a treat.
Click the festive photo from Bill to review all his post for his “Journey to a New World”
THEN: This detail from the prolific local photographer Asahel Curtis’s photograph of the Smith/Rininger home at the northwest corner of Columbia Street and Summit Avenue dates from the early twentieth century when motorcars, rolling or parked, were still very rare on the streets of Seattle, including these on First Hill. (Courtesy, Historic Seattle)NOW: Five Swedish Hospital nurses, from the twelfth floor oncology ward, gathered here in the hospital’s lobby for Jean Sherrard’s repeat.
In Jean Sherrard’s “now,” five nurses from Swedish Hospital’s oncology ward stand at or close to what was once the southeast corner of Columbia Street and Summit Avenue. This was also the prospect for Asahel Curtis’s “then,” recorded early in the twentieth century when this First Hill neighborhood was still known for its stately homes, big incomes and good manners.
With about 110 years between them, both Sherrard and Curtis are sighting to the northwest, and both their photographs are only the center thirds of wide panoramas. Sherrard’s shows Swedish Hospital’s lobby during a renovation. Curtis’s pan at its full width is merged from three negatives. It reaches from the northeast corner of Columbia and Summit, on the right, to far west down Columbia, on the left. (The full pans of both now hang in the lobby of Town Hall, the former Fourth Church of Christian Science, another First Hill institution on the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street.)
Asahel Curtis’ originalSherrard’s repeat
The big home, centered here at the northwest corner of the intersection, was built for the Seattle banker-industrialist, Charles J. Smith. He in turn sold it to the doctor-surgeon Edmund Rininger in 1905, about the time Curtis visited the corner, perhaps at Rininger’s request. With his wife Nellie and daughter Olive, Rininger moved into the house next door on Columbia, in order to set about building his Summit Avenue Hospital at the corner.
Another detail pulled from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map. The intersection of Columbia Street and Summit Avenue is center-lower-right, or between the blocks 120, 131, 132 and 101. The Otis Hotel is at the northeast corner and the Rininger’s home west across Summit at its northwest corner with Columbia. Madison Street crosses through the upper-left corner.The Rininger home at the northwest corner of Columbia Street and Summit Ave. appears here right-of-center with its sun-lighted west facade. Across Summit is the Otis Hotel. A nearly new Providence Hospital is on the right horizon and the twin towers of Second Hill’s Immaculate Conception mark the center-horizon, directly above the Otis.. The photograph was taken from an upper floor of an apartment house at the northeast corner of Marion Street and Terry Avenue.
The surgeon’s plans were fatally upset on July 25, 1912,å when, while driving home from a house call in Kent, the forty-two year old Rininger, alone in his motorcar, collided with a Puget Sound Electric Railway train. With the death of her husband, Nellie Rininger sold the nearly completed hospital to the Swedish Hospital Association in the spring of 1913. As part of this fateful transfer, Nellie Rininger also gifted her late husband’s large medical library and his then new x-ray machine to Swedish Hospital.
A clipping from The Seattle Times for Feb. 16, 1913. CLICK TO ENLARGE
Both the china and linen monogramed SAH for Rininger’s Summit Avenue Hospital came with the sale. No doubt for reasons of economy the Swedish Hospital Association (SHA) decided to use both in spite of the reordering of the letters.
With help from the Seattle Public Library, clipped from the THE SEATTLE TIMES, April 15, 1968. CLICK TO ENLARGE
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean and again with help from Rod Edge. First, several links below, and all include features that relate to the neighborhood and sometimes just beyond it. Some will be found twice, perhaps even thrice. The most relevant feaure is probably the last one about the General Hospital. It first appeared here not so long ago. Also featured here is my “mea culpa” (I am guilty) confession concerning my flubs with the the Anderson mansion, and my humble correction.
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SOME OTHER HOSPITALS ON THE HILL
GRACE HOSPITAL on Summit Avenue between Union and Pike Streets. Seattle’s Protestant hospital could not compete with the Catholic’s Providence, and it closed to be replaced with Summit School, below.
A new Harborview from above.Virginia MasonBefore their was a Virginia Mason Hospital there was photographer Imogen Cunningham’s home and studio. (You can find this feature FULL-SIZED in the history books button, at the top. It is the 111th feature included in SEATTLE NOW THEN Vol. One. A 1950 aerial with Marion Street climbing First Hill far left. That makes Columbia Street the next thruway up the hill Columbia. Near the upper-left corner it reaches the early Swedish Hospital campus in 1950 on the Rininger corner with Summit Ave. Sixth Avenue runs along the bottom of the subject, between James Street on the right and Marion. A little more than a decade later the blocks between Sixth and Seventh were cleared for the Seattle Freeway, as it was then called. (Courtesy, Ron Edge) CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE
THEN: Faced, in part, with brick veneer and stucco, and opened in 191l, the Comet Apartments at 170 11th Avenue have made it nicely through their first century. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)NOW: Missing only a few architectural bands that once wrapped its sides, the now Star Apartments have gained a landscape that caresses the daylight basement windows.
By the estimable authority of Diana James, the Comet Apartments, this Sunday’s subject at the First Hill corner of Spruce Street and 11th Avenue, is a solid example of a building form she calls “Seattle-Centric.” In “Shared Walls,” her book history of our city’s apartment houses, James explains, “Driving or walking through Seattle neighborhoods that have concentrations of apartment buildings, one is struck by the repetition of a particular form, best described as rectangular or square in shape and featuring at least one bay on either side of a centrally located and recessed opening at each floor above the entrance. Variations on this theme exist in every Seattle neighborhood.”
The Comet Apartments are found above the center of this detail pulled – again – from the 1912 Baist Map. (Courtesy, again, Ron Edge) CLICK TO ENLARGE – PLEASE.
By another authority, King County tax records, organized in the late 1930s by the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Comet (its original name) was built in 1910 with twenty-eight apartments. Seven of these were fit with four rooms, and the rest with three. West and Wheeler, the Comet’s real estate agent, described it in The Seattle Times “Apt Unclassified” listings for March 4, 1912, as “an unusually attractive building.” We still agree.
The Comet/Star depression-era tax card. (Courtesy, Washington State Archive, Bellevue Community College Branch)
The Comet’s 1912 classified packed a terse list of its qualities, including “large light rooms,” “very reasonable rates (twenty to thirty dollars),” and the unnamed but “usually up-to-date apt. house conveniences.” The Comet was also in a “paved district” that was conveniently in “walking distance.” Surely these First Hill apartments were within a reasonable stroll of nearly every necessity. Pacific Grade School was three blocks north on 11th at Jefferson Street, and professional baseball, a mere two blocks away at the Seattle Athletic Field. (see below) If walking was not wanted, the Comet was surrounded by common carriers, including the trollies on Broadway and 12th Avenues and the cable cars on James Street and Yesler Way. For the mostly downhill three-quarters of a mile trip to Pioneer Square, a brisk step might get there almost as quickly as a ride on the famously rattling cable cars.
Near it last day, a Yesler Way Cable Car approaches Seventh Avenue on Yesler Way, now the eastern border of the 1-5 Freeway. The photograph was taken by a trolley and cable enthusiast in 1940. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
On November 21, 1938, the Comet – by then the Star, the name that stuck – was enrolled on the year’s list of victims of the nearly sixty apartments and homes visited in the night by the then best-known – as yet unnamed and uncaught – person in Seattle: a firebug. Of the four apartments – three on First Hill – ignited “by a pyromaniac” that early morning, the city’s fire Chief William Fitzgerald described the Star’s as “the most successful.” It was set in a dumb-waiter shaft, did $2,000 damage and “routed 100 persons from their beds at 3:30 in the morning.” Addressing the city – especially the residents of First Hill – the fire chief asked for “intelligent assistance” rather than “mass hysteria.” The fire chief may have also had Police Chief William Sears in mind, who earlier had let it out that he “feared a catastrophe if the firebug is not apprehended.”
(The fire bugs – two of them during the Great Depression – left an impressive paper trail in the local press. An industrious historian might consider telling this story while using the very handy and almost omnipresent tax photos of the victims, of which very few were burned to the ground.)
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Rob? Diana? Sure Jean. Rob has pulled a number of past blog features that “approach” this week’s subject on the southeast corner of First Hill. Again, because these links are often packed with other features they may also approach other corners or even hills. At the bottom we will add the Pacific Mag. clipping with the story about Dugdale Park (the first one) aka the Yesler Athletic Field at 12th and Yesler. These feature local baseball historian Dan Eskenazi and are used with his courtesy and with the repeat your Nikon Jean. Turning now to you dear reader, please explore these links. The first one features the pie-shaped Sprague Hotel in the original flat-iron block nestled between Spruce and Yesler, and then reformed as part of Yesler Terrace. You may wish to also key-word “Yesler Terrace” in the search box above. As you know Jean, Diana does not have a key to this inner sanctum, only to hearts and minds, your’s and mine.,
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Yesler Athletic Field, 12th and Yesler. (Courtesy, David Eskenazi)
David Eskenazi on the roof.
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MEANWHILE AND NEARBY – MORE BILLBOARD PORTRAITS FROM THE FOSTER-KLEISER COLLECTION
Looking south on 12th Avenue to the corner of Alder Street, on March 14, 1940.Twelfth Avenue looking south towards Main Street, Nov. 31, 1936Twelfth Ave. looking north thru Fir Street corner, 1939.Jackson Street looking west towards 12th Avenue – if I have “read” this correctly.
![THEN: Looking north-northeast from a low knoll at the southwest corner of Seneca Street and Seventh Avenue, circa 1916. By 1925, a commercial automobile garage filled the vacant lot in the foreground. [Courtesy, Ron Edge]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/seneca-7th-mr-then.jpg?ssl=1)
