THEN: The row house at the southwest corner of 6th Avenue and Pine Street in its last months, ca. 1922-23. (Museum of History and Industry)NOW: Architect James E. Blackwell’s terra-cotta clad Shafer Building, 1923, survives as the second structure built on the corner.An early footprint for our row shows far right at the corner of 6th and Pine in this detail from the 1893s Sanborn Real Estate map.Another Sanborn map with a detail at the lower-right of what it has characterized as “Tenements.” This is from 1904-5. Note the stuffed block to the north, across Pine Street. It is the home of the local trolley company, the Seattle Electric Company. Westlake Ave. does not as yet cut through the neighborhood on the left, but soon will in 1906-7. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)Here, circa 1909, we can find both the featured Row, far right, and the Electric Company plant filling most of the mid-ground subject. Westlake Ave. is here cut through the neighborhood at the bottom. Capitol Hill is on the east horizon, with Broadway High School at the center. The car barns on the right at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Pine Street have not yet been remodeled for the Westlake Market, which can be found in the photo that follows this one. [A fuller treatment of this photograph gets its own Edge Link down below.]Both the Row House (right of center) and the trolley barns (those converted to the Westlake Market (below center) to the north across Pine Street can be found in this glimpse east from the New Washington Hotel at Second and Stewart.The 1912 Baist shows our Row, the six year old Westlake Ave. cut, and the trolley yard and barns converted into the Westlake Market.Looking down from the Frederick and Nelson roof (or upper floor) to the clapboard row at the southwest corner of 6th Avenue and Pine Street. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)
This waning clapboard row house with two corner towers, six bays, and twelve tenements (on the top two of its three floors) was built at the southwest corner of 6th and Pine sometime soon after the city’s great fire of 1889. It was similar to another row with towers and bays built at Third and Union (printed directly below), known since 1906 as the Post Office corner. Both were savvy responses to a
The Plummer Building, lower-right, at its last corner, the southwest one at Pine and 3rd Avenue where its row may be compared to the one we are featuring at the top. The Plummer was moved from the southeast corner of 3rd and Union to make room for the Federal Post Office, which appears here two blocks south on Third at its, again, corner with Union Street. The owners were proud of their part in the building of the new federal building, named their clapboard the Federal as well. (Several more rows are featured in the links below.)“As seen from” the northeast corner of 5th and Pine with the Frederick & Nelson south facade on the left. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)
Seattle that was clearly booming north from its original center around Pioneer Square. Through its 30 years in operation, the Pine Street row house’s tenants represented a typical American mix of small businesses, including some clairvoyants and quacks.
A Seattle Times classified from March 19, 1913. The neighbor seems to be a popular one among the paranormal sellers.
Between March 1913 and May 1915, Times’ classifieds for “Spiritual Mediums” included Madame Frank, Mrs. Maywood, Prof. Quinlin, Mrs. Barnard, and Madame Delardo offering clairvoyant readings (of palms and-or cards) for typically 25 cents a session. The wide balcony that ran the length of the row above its storefronts might now seem to developers as a squandering of space, but was surely enjoyed by the upstairs tenants for many uses – spiritual included – we may imagine. (Immediately below we will print again – without cropping – the featured photo so that you may more easily follow the details named in the following paragraph.)
While the city designated five addresses here, from 525 at Sixth Avenue on the left to 515 at the alley on the right, there are more than five storefronts. Most likely our featured photo was one of the last portraits taken of that strip of shops, which begins on the left with the W.W. Pope & Co. and its selection of “sun-proof” paints, wall papers, picture framing and, noted with a sign taped to the plate glass, “we sell glass.” Continuing west along the sidewalk are shops for Hood River Apple Cider, Bowler Hat Co., a magazine and smoke shop counter open to the sidewalk, Knox Bros. Jewelers with the sidewalk clock, Lyon Optical Co., and a shoe repair store.
A revealing classified in the Seattle Times for March 13, 1923. Thanks to Rob and Ron for sharing it. (Their full names are in the body of the text below, by comparison a formality that takes more space here than there.)
Returning to Knox Bros., we learn the year of the row’s demise with research help from local historians Ron Edge and Rob Ketcherside. On March 13, 1923, the jewelers ran the above classified in this newspaper that reads, “THE building comes down. Great reductions in wrist watches from $12.75 to $2.25 . . . 519 Pine St., opposite Fredericks.” Like every business in this neighborhood, the Knox Bros. knew that their readers would have no trouble finding them since the grand department store, Frederick and Nelson, had made its move to Pine Street in 1918. In March, 1924, a year after their announced sale, we learn from an article in the Times about a Ketchikan fire that “The Knox Brothers, former Seattle Jewelers, who came here to open a new store, reported six trunks of jewelry burned in the hotel.”
Seattle Times clip from June 2, 1922.
Directly behind the row house on Pine Street, Grunbaum Bros. Furniture Co. ceremonially opened its lavish new quarters in the Decatur Building on June 2, 1922, with twos days of music and tours but no sales. The company continued to prosper with its policy of “easy terms,” signed at the top of the building’s north façade. Within a few months the sign would be lost behind the row’s replacement, the Shafer Building. It and the Decatur are among Seattle’s many surviving terra-cotta clad landmarks from the 1920s.
The Seattle Times generous coverage of work-in-progress on Grunbaums, March 5, 1922. The subject looks northwest along 6th Avenue from near Pike Street. The Times has bundled advertisements for a few of the local suppliers for the new building and its first tenant – including Bittman, the architect – in a montage at the bottom. [CLICK CLICK to ENLARGE]The Times full-page coverage of the Grunbaum Bros. new home in the Decatur Building, May 28, 1922. {CLICK CLICK CLICK to Enlarge]
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, guys? More links to the neighborhood around Pine Street – more than 20 of them. And near the bottom we will insert the 1909 AYP parade photo taken at the corner of 5th and Pine. By then it may have also shown in the links attached to the features above it. Remembering, again and again, repetition is the mother of both itself and memory. Another repeater below is the feature about the Lutherans moving from their pioneer northeast corner of 4th and Pine to a new neighborhood. And so on and on Jean.
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CLIPPINGS, MOSTLY, FROM PAST FEATURES, FOLLOW
[DOUBLE CLICK THESE TO READ THEM – at least on my mac it takes two clicks.]
First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 11, 1990.
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First appeared in Pacific, August 25, 2002.
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First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 12, 1993
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Capt. Jackson’s home first appeared in Pacific on July 17, 1988.
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First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 8, 1992.
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First appeared in Pacific, Sept 1, 1985. (Golly, 30 years ago!)
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Looking south on 5th Avenue thru Pine Street with Frederick and Nelson on the left. This feature appeared in Pacific on Jan 9, 1983, so the crowd of pedestrians seen here are mostly Christmas shoppers searching for cheer during the closing weeks of 1982. It takes about a month for the Times to process the features I deliver to them.Later, but through the same intersection.
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The Shafer Building, the terra-cotta replacement for our featured row house, rises here center-right ten stories above the southwest corner of 6th and Pine. Westlake crosses the bottom of the subject or scene. Frederick Nelson at its first five-story height is on the left. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry.)
BELOW: TWO VIEWS OF THE SHAFER’S CROWN FROM THE ROOF OF FREDERICK AND NELSON.
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Photographer Frank Shaw’s look east on Pine over the monorail station on Westlake to the Shafer’s eight floors of terra-cotta skin on the far left. March 17, 1962.
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Included as the 20th feature in Seattle Now and Then, Volume One, 1984.
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A recent MOHAI scan by Ron Edge. The Shafer Building ascends from the bottom border.
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A Shafer Bldg top-floor tenant’s advertisement from The Seattle Times for July 3, 1928 offers for a mere dollar an early sparkle for the fireworks of the next day.
Lecture: Keep Clam and Carry On: The Ivar Haglund Story Thursday, September 24, 2015 7:00 p.m.
$5 suggested donation
Join us as historian Paul Dorpat tells the story of businessman, folksinger, showman and unique character who over a highly successful career as restaurateur and entertainer became a Puget Sound legend. Paul Dorpat has been writing the Now & Then column for Pacific NW magazine for more than three decades.
THEN: The address written on the photograph is incorrect. This is 717 E. Washington Street and not 723 Yesler Way. We, too, were surprised. (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: We have decided to treat Jean’s repeat as ‘representative.’ It looks south across Yesler Way, or one block north of the “then” on Washington. Much of the old Yesler Terrace, including our two sites, is in the upheaval of its grand remodel.
At its core, this two-story box shows off some of the architectural style covered with the term Italianate, and surely this humble Italian could look quite spiffy with some fresh paint, perhaps of several colors in the ‘painted lady’ way. The low-pitch hip roof extends with wide eaves supported by large brackets. The windows are longish, and the bay that climbs nearly the entire front façade is, appropriate to the style, rectangular.
This photograph includes within its borders two captions. The short one, “43,” is either stapled to the side of the impressively thick power pole standing right-of-center, or it is supported by its own narrow pole temporarily stuck into the unkempt parking strip. The longer caption, written directly on the original negative, records some clerical necessities for this Seattle Housing Authority property. For our interests, most important are the date, the eighth of January, 1940, and the address, 723 Yesler. Except this is not
Compare this Google Earth detail to Jean’s “repeat” of the claimed location, 723 Yesler Way, or near it. The Google record was photographed sometime before the block’s recent razing.Another Google detail, this time looking northwest over 8th Avenue and through – or nearly – the location of the former 717 Washington Street “Italian.”
Yesler Way. Rather, this is E. Washington Street, the part of it that is now either directly under the outer northbound lane of Interstate-5, or in the grass lawn that borders it, one block south of Yesler Way. Whichever, its surrounds will for the next few months look much like the flattened neighborhood that Jean Sherrard recorded south across Yesler Way.
The rear or south facade of 717 Washington can be found in this detail of a panorama taken from the roof of the Marine Hospital on Beacon Hill. (Best to click this scene however many times it takes to enlarge it.) Our featured home on Washington is the half-shadowed gray box with a flatish (Italianate) roof just left of the center of the subject. There are a lot of cleared lots around it – except to the west – left. The home with the tower – mentioned soon in the text – near the northeast corner of 8th and Main, appears brilliantly to the right of center. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)Our featured home also appears in this detail pulled from Seattle’s 1891 birdseye view. It is mid-block near the bottom-left corner, west and left of the marked 8th Street (Later renamed 8th Avenue.) Again, the larger home with the tower near the northeast corner of 8th and Main is also there to be found.A grocery at the southwest corner of Yesler Way and 8th Avenue also dates Jan. 8, 1940, and is addressed as 725 Yesler. Sensibly, our featured 723 would be snug to the right of this 725, but , as we know, it is not.
Jean’s and my eleventh hour one-block correction (at our desks) was first abetted by the photograph’s third “caption,” the house number attached to the top of the dark front door: 717. A clue also canters from the foreground of this 1940 snapshot. There are no trolley tracks in the street. Cable cars first started climbing Mill Street, as Yesler Way was then named, in 1888. They made their final ascent here (or rather there) on Friday, August 9, 1940, six months and one day after the photographer for or from the Seattle Housing Authority made this record of 717 Washington Street, as well as many other doomed residences in the neighborhood. All, including some on Yesler Way, were tagged for destruction. We know the name neither of the prolific photographer nor of the confused scribe. Possibly they were one and the same.
The towered manse holding to the east side of 8th Avenue, one lot north of the corner and the much smaller box with the 800 Main address written on the negative. Note Harborview Hospital up the way. Again, this big home appears clearly on the far left of the featured photo at the top. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
A final clue for our correction is a gift from the turreted home on the far left (of the featured photo at the top), which I recognized from another photograph (the one just above). It stood one block north of Main Street near the northeast corner of 8th Avenue. It too was razed for Yesler Terrace, the first public housing developed in Washington State, and the first federally funded low-income housing built in the U.S. that was racially integrated. The first 150 of the old houses started coming down in the fall of 1940. One year later the first 200 families were moving in, 58 of these families into the two-room flats that rented for $9.75 a month. The Seattle Times of November 7, 1941, noted that the rent would stay the same as long as “papa doesn’t get too big a raise.” The annual income limit for such affordable smaller quarters was $525.
A clip from the Times from July 32, 1940.The caption for this Seattle Times snapshot from Oct. 7, 1940 reads, “Cr-r-r-a-a-ac-ck! Smash! And down went an old frame home at Seventh Avenue and Washington Street as wreckers razed the first of 143 old buildings to be demolished to make room for the Seattle Housing Authority project on Yesler Hill, where modern buildings will replace the dwellings which have grown shoddy and bleak since the days many years ago, when they housed Seattle pioneer families.” This, in fact, is a shoddy and bleak exaggeration. Many of the 143 structures were quite comely and sturdy too, if a little blistered. CLICK to ENLARGE YESLER TERRACE taking shape, Nov. 5, 1941. Note the Smith Tower far left.As public housing, the building of Yesler Terrace was controversial as was both its politics and management. The fact that it was also not segregated was both daring and progressive.Yesler Terrace Poster Children
WEB EXTRAS
Before I ask my eternal question, I’m going to add some snaps I took last week of the bus station demolition. How many of us climbed aboard a greyhound bus at 9th and Stewart, headed for distant places?
Anything to add, boys?My oh my how my heart is skipping like a youngster boarding the bus. How many cheap adventures, beginning in my teens, started off from this corner. Here Jean and Ron is a not so old interior from the 1970s.
Seattle’s Greyhound Depot at 8th and Stewart, ca. 1974. (dorpat) And, below, an earlier, and anonymous depot exhuberance..
Yup, and again with help from Ron Edge and all his links we’ll put up some relevant past features. Here’s also our bi-weekly reminder. There will be some repeats of these repeats. That is, a peculiarly or especially relevant feature may well appear linked to several features. Here we again appeal to mom – my mom, Ida Gerina Christiansen-Dorpat – and her homily. “Paul, remember that the mother of instruction is repeitition” (She may have said “all learning” rather an instruction.) I don’t remember, which is evidence that I did not follow her advice well enough to remember the wording, although I have often kept to the spirit.
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NEARBY
Japanese Buddhist temple on Main Street near 10th Avenue..First appeared in Pacific, July 12, 1992.
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WE CLOSE WITH A QUIZ – WHERE IS THIS? I do not remember, Although I stopped my car to snap it, the negatives to either side of this one do not help place it – sometime in the 70’s, it seems. I think it nifty.
THEN: From 1909 to the mid-late 1920s, the precipitous grade separation between the upper and lower parts of NE 40th Street west of 7th Ave. NE was faced with a timber wall. When the wall was removed, the higher part of NE 40th was shunted north, cutting into the lawns of the homes beside it. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)NOW: The chain fence seen on the far side of the intersection, at the scene’s center, was used recently to corral the 110 goats of the “Rent-a-Ruminant” shrub-eating service. Between jobs the goats make their home on Vashon Island. The Interstate-5 Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge was added to this scene in 1962. On the far left stands the rear red brick wall of the UW’s Benjamin Hall Interdisciplinary Research Building.Rented goats relaxing from their nutritious chewing along the grade separation on N.E. 40th Street. This labor took about eleven days, after which the goats returned to Vashon Island. Their fence, however, is still up at this writing. Neither during the goat-work nor the fence-work has it been possible for anyone to easily sleep in those bushes. And that, apparently, was part of the motivation by those who ordered the clearing and for the most part, we imagine, sleep comfortably at home in their own beds on sheets, some of them with floral designs.
This look west on NE 40th Street is not as sharp as desired, especially to reveal what the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map marks simply as the “wall” that separates the upper and lower grades of 40th in its atypical four block run between Latona and 7th Avenues NE. I’ll add great – the ‘Great Wall’ – the Great Wall of Latona. (Still this is sharper than two others of the “Wallingford Wall” lifted directly from the municipal archive, and attached below this first paragraph.) Except that “The Great Wall of Wallingford” is both appropriate and euphonic. About a century separates the historical photograph from Jean Sherrard’s repeat. Most likely the featured view, like the two immediately below, was also recorded on May 12, 1921.
Like the view printed above it, this was pulled directly from the Seattle Municipal Archives’ on-line photo collection. Exploring it can be very rewarding. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive.)Another distant glimpse of the “Wallingford Wall” on N.E. 40th Street, this time looking through Eastlake from the south end of both the Latona Bridge with the lifted spans, and the new University District Bridge, a work-in-progress out of frame to the right, ca. 1919.. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive.)
The earliest photo evidence I’ve seen of this ‘great wall’ is included in a 180-degree panorama that was recorded from a tethered balloon high above the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP), Seattle’s first world’s fair. The pan extends from Lake Washington’s Union Bay through all of Portage Bay and into the Latona and Wallingford neighborhoods. In the pan, the dark stained retaining wall on 40th that we use in our ‘then,’ appears to be whitewashed. It gleamed when new. The wall’s construction was part of the city’s both ambitious and anxious effort to prepare the “north end” of town for the upcoming Exposition.
Thanks to Ron Edge for merging these several shots looking over Portage Bay from a tethered balloon held above the AYPE’s Pay Streak carnival avenue in 1909. Far left is Lake Washington’s Union Bay. The north end of Capitol Hill reaches the Latona Bridge on the far right. The brilliance of the Wallingford Wall dividing 40th Street into upper and lower parts is far far right. The balloon can be found on the right of the pan attached below. The pan looks northeast across Portage Bay to the AYP fair grounds. CLICK CLICK TO ENLARGE.The AYP expo grounds on the U.W. campus seen across Portage Bay. The captured balloon appears far right. [Courtesy Monica Wooton] CLICK CLICK
During the summer of 1909 an estimated four million people crossed the Latona Bridge: most of the visitors rode the trolleys, which reached the Exposition through this intersection. Moving the multitudes from the bridge to the AYP held on the grounds of the University of Washington, the trolleys followed a new route that began with a one block run on 6th Avenue north from the bridge. The new tracks were aimed directly at the great timber wall and the Latona Knoll above it. Just before reaching the lower half of NE 40th Street, the cars first passed under the then new Northern Pacific railroad trestle and then made a right-turn east for the fairgrounds.
This was recorded late in the life of the Latona Bridge, and looks south from the railroad overpass (Burke Gilman Trail now). The circa date is 1919. The photo is treated to its own feature with the Ron Edge links added below.Sometime in the 1980s I paused on the top part of the divided N.E. 40th Street to record this look south over the Burke Gilman Trail overpass and along 6th Avenue in line with the Lk Washington Ship Canal Bridge on 1-5. Note how barren or void of trees was the grade then dividing the upper and lower 40ths. There is little there for the goats.Looking east on the lower part of the divided N.E. 40th Street from Latona Ave. N.E. on Oct. 7, 2006 while on one of my then daily Wallingford walks.. . .and looking east on the upper part of N.E. 40th Street from Latona Ave. N.E., also on Oct. 7, 2006. [I was a mere 68 at the time and so still nimble enough to walk hours at a time.]
While the lower and upper halves of the NE 40th Street grade separation are glimpsed, respectively, to the left and right of the couple walking in front Jean Sherrard’s camera, (in his repeat for the featured photo at the top) the trestle and the trail are hidden behind the landscape and signs on the left. (A later – and yet early – “repeat” or return to the corner by a public works photographer is printed directly below. A steep grade has replaced the Wallingford Wall and the upper or northern part of 40th Street has been moved farther north with some new structures on it’s north side.)
Later the wall was removed and the top “half’ of N.E. 40th Street was pushed or regraded further to the north. The last time I looked – recently – the boxish apartment building at the northeast corner of Pasadena and 40th endured on the right. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
The importance of this arterial to the Expo grounds was accompanied during its construction by a flood of anxious speculations about the likelihood of its not getting done in time for the Expo’s June 1, 1909 opening day. The local press maintained its critical eye with skeptical reports. For instance, less than two months before the AYP’S opening The Seattle Times for April 11, reported, “The exposition management was promised a year and a half ago that Sixth Ave. NE would be pushed under the Northern Pacific tracks and Fortieth would be graded and paved six months before the AYPE opened . . . Even now the tunnel under the railroad tracks is incomplete; grading teams are working both on Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street and there is not a great prospect that the street will be opened for general traffic by June 1.”
The winter of 1909 was not always kind to the AYP’S preparations. (From a Seattle Times January, 1909 clipping.)A good sign that transportation to the Expo is shaping up well is expressed in these congratulations from the Tenth Ward Club published in The Times for May 21, 1909, less than a week before the fair opened.The joyful news of July 30, 1909 that the N.E. 40th Street “main” route to the AYP’s main gate was, at last, decoratively lighted. CLICK CLICK
In spite of the anxious doubts expressed by the press, the improved trolley service was ready for the June 1 opening of the AYP, although on this stretch it had required eleventh-hour-help of a chain gang from the city jail. The Times complimented the prisoners for their “able assistance.” By mid-July the Seattle City Council was sufficiently aglow with the fair’s success and the early evening light shows that outlined the many grand – if temporary – Beaux-Arts buildings, that they found an additional $300 to extent the string of carnival lights along NE 40th Street and so through this intersection.
POSTSCRIPT: The post-expo grandeur of this promenade from the Latona Bridge to the U.W. campus and Brooklyn and 14th Avenue (University Way) the “main streets” of Brooklyn (the University District), was short-lived. Neighborhood anxiety – especially among the businesses – came with the building of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1911. The bridge at Latona would clearly need to be enlarged for the canal, but if the pioneer bridge was moved as well, then the Latona community, the first addition developed near the northeast corner of Lake Union, would surely also lose its commercial influence, although not yet the sole abiding significance of its primary school. (That threat came much later with the school’s conversion to the John Sanford School, which it was carefully explained was renovated and enlarged on the “Latona Campus” in the 1990s.) On June 7, 1908, a year before the AYP, The Times noted that both the road on 24th Ave. N.E. over “the portage,” and a proposed bridge via 10th Ave. N.E., might replace the bridge at Latona. Both of the proposed bridges crossed the canal at higher elevations and so allowed for more vessels to pass below them without the bridges needing to open. And so it was. The bridge on 10th took the place of the bridge at Latona in 1919, although as late the 1922 the new bridge was sometimes identified as the Latona Bridge. The Montlake bascule over the canal followed in 1925, largely on the hustle of Husky promotions to make it easier for citizens to reach sporting events on campus.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? Lots of Edge Links Jean, directly below.
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First appeared in Pacific, Jan 6, 2002.
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First appeared in Pacific, November 21, 1993.
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First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 6, 1996.
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First appeared in Pacific, 12 – 29 – 1991.Same corner, different class.The original Latona school house sat near the center of the grounds. This view of the inset school house looks southeast from near the corner of N.E. 42nd Street. and 4th Avenue N.E.., as does the “repeat” below.September 6, 2006, looking southeast thru the then newly adorned campus.
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Boomers news about both Latona and Brooklyn (future University District) from Dec. 1, 1890.A detail from the 1894 “Real Roads Map of Seattle” centered on Latona at the north shore of Lake Union. Note the railroad spur onto the future University of Washington Campus, which opened in 1895. The spur leads to the Denny Building. There is as yet no Brooklyn noted on this map, and University District is a name still ten years from being used – sometimes. The transition from Brooklyn to University District was given to University Station, using the trolley stop at University Way and 42nd Ave. as the oft-used synecdoche for the neighborhood of town and gown.Still no Wallingford in this map of North shore communities, ca. 1899, but Brooklyn has come up and both Edgewater and Ross as well, three neighborhood names now remembered by antiquarians only.Traffic on the Latona Bridge as reported in The Times for Nov. 20, 1913, six years before being replaced by the nearby University Bridge.The comparative use of north shore bridges (and others) excerpted with a clip from the Seattle Times for July 24,1932.A detail from the 1908 Baist Real Estate Map, Latona before the railroad overpass above 6th Ave. and the trolleys rerouting for the 1909 AYP.Detail from the 1929 aerial, with the Wallingford Wall replaced by the steep grade separation on N.E. 40th Street, left-of-center.A Latona detail from a recent Google Earth cityscape.
THEN: Looking southeast from above Alki Avenue, the Schmitz Park horizon is serrated by the oldest trees in the city. The five duplexes clustered on the right were built 1919-1921 by Ernest and Alberta Conklin. Ernest died in 1924, but Alberta continued to live there until well past 1932, the year this photograph was recorded. (Seattle Municipal Archives.)NOW: With no bucket truck or bathhouse roof to help him, Jean climbed a ladder and extended his ten-foot pole to get this repeat over the roof of the now 80-year-old Spud fish and chips on Alki Avenue.
True to the Seattle Public Works Department’s archival practices, the negative for this Alki Point subject is both numbered and dated. It is not of the revered Point itself, to the west and behind the photographer, but rather of the forested ridge to the east. The photographer looks toward a horizon of view lots, but even now much of this landscape has not been developed beyond the row of sizeable homes in the scene’s mid-ground. Such is the gift and “natural monument “ of Schmitz Park.
A part of Schmitz Park recorded by that most prolific of early 20th-century postcard artists, Otto Frasch. (Courtesy Mike Maslan)The Ferdinand Schmitz chosen by The Seattle Times editors to illustrate his obituary notice of August 23, 1942. Seventeen years later Emma’s passing was noted but not illustrated by The Times. She is, however, heard in the Seattle Times clip from January 1, 1949 that follows. Pulled from The Seattle Times for Jan. 29, 1949.
The park is named for Emma and Ferdinand Schmitz who gave this old growth slope with its own stream to the city. The couple rejected the proposal that the city purchase the land for fear that their “green cathedral” might be parceled up and sold. Today, the Seattle Park and Recreation Department describes the Schmitz gift as protecting the only old growth stand surviving in the city. Most likely the city’s arborist – and the naturalists among the park’s neighbors – can identify some of those trees on the horizon.
A steady but searching eye might find some of the same Schmitz treeline standing about thirty years earlier in this ca. 1912 look east over the at play Alki Beach to the West Seattle ridge. [Click to Enlarge]
With a little study we might name many of the surviving features in this “now and then.” For instance, surely many of those elegant homes beyond the playfield climbing the ridge towards Schmitz Park survive. I stay stumped, however, on naming the elevated prospect from where this subject was recorded. The likeliest choices were a public works bucket truck, or a truck-mounted ladder, or the by then 21-year old Alki Bathhouse (1911), which was directly across Alki Avenue. (Note the attached photos of the bathhouse below and the 1936 aerial too.) And what may we make of the pole that breaks through the bottom border of the featured scene? Seattle City Archivist Scott Cline found that this negative, No. 11058, is surrounded by a white-gloved handful of others. All are dated May 24, 1932, and all are labeled simply ‘Schmitz Park.” Quoting Cline, “Most are shots of what I presume is the old bridge on Admiral Way that crossed over the Schmitz Park Boulevard where it first entered the park’s ravine.” (Note first the 1936 aerial in which the new bridge on Admiral Way is under construction, and then the Bath House photos that may help you figure if a photographer from its roof could have managed the shot at the top of this feature.)
The Admiral Way bridge is easily found right-of-center in this recent Google-Earth detail. The green Alki Playfield is upper right. It is “topped” by the lighter green of the tennis courts at the corner southwest corner of 59th Ave. SW and . Alki Primary School is directly below the play field. Schmitz Park, of course, is lower-right. [Click to Enlarge]CLICK AND CLICK TO ENLARGE! ! A comparison of the 1929 and 1936 aerials, left and right, show the work in progress on the new bridge on Admiral Way over the Schmitz Park Boulevard in the 1936 detail on the right. The dark roof of the bath house appears in the upper-left corner of the 1936 half of this diptych, which is printed alone below. [Courtesy Ron Edge and the Seattle Municipal Archive.]Even the beach shack that was home to the first SPUD cam be found in this detail from the 1936 aerial. It appears directly across Alki Avenue from the bath house that appears here right-of-center. The first SPUD does not appear in the featured photo at the top. SPUD opened in 1935. [Keep Clicking Please]The first SPUD home polished up from a 1937 King County tax photo. The home on the right and the treeline above it should look familiar. [Courtesy Washington State Archive][CLICK TO ENLARGE] In this detail from the 1912 Kroll’s map atlas, the yellow-tinted block, upper-right, is the block that appears in the foreground of the featured photo at the top. The Alki Bath House is footprinted across Alki Avenue from it. Might the small footprint below the bath house, the first south across Alki Ave. in the “yellow block,” be the future home of the first SPUD, only 23 years earlier? It is in the right spot – or nearly.=====
ALKI BATH HOUSE INTERLUDE
Beach and Bath House under storm.Alki Bath House looking northeast from the Alki Band Stand.Bath House (aka Pavilion) from the beach at a low tide. The day may be hot, but it is also windy. (Courtesy, North Idaho Historical Museum)From the Sound, the nearly new bath house with the familiar horizon. Note especially the tall pine on the left.
Looking northeast from the observation portico on the roof of the Bath House. The long dock and building, upper-right, was a short-lived whaling station. Luna Park is seen further to the right below Duwamish Head. Magnolia is on the left horizon and Queen Anne Hill (both humps of it) on the center-right horizon and behind the whalers. [CLICK CLICK]=====
Looking through the Schmitz Park arch south on Schmitz Park Boulevard (59th ave. S.W.) from its corner with S.W. Lander Street. This was used by Jean and I in a feature about three years ago, and Ron Edge has included it below among this week’s relevant links. [Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry]
On the left of the featured photo at the top stands the rustic post and lintel gatespanning 59th Ave. S.W.. The Alki Park tennis court is seen behind it. (We did a now-then feature on this gate two years ago or three. We’ll attached it below among the “Edge Links.”) The monumental gate was raised by the Schmitz family to mark the near-beach beginning of Schmitz Park Boulevard.” From this corner showing on the left, the boulevard extended to the Park proper between two rows of evenly-spaced street trees, until it was closed to traffic in 1949 after Alki Primary School took possession of the block-long part that ran in line with Stevens Street at the north end of the school and between it and the play field. The worn arch was condemned in 1953.
More help from Google Earth and from Photoshop’s red pen. [CLICK CLICK CLICK]
Albert and Ernest Conklin lived in the nearby home to the right of the arch. (It has been marked “19” in red on the accompanying diptych that compares the featured photo with a detail borrowed from Google Earth.) Beginning in 1906 the Conklins were active in West Seattle community affairs for many years. Ernest died at home in 1924, but Alberta lived on and is reported in The Seattle Times for Jan 24, 1942 as a member of “one of the busiest groups aiding the Red Cross.” It was composed of clubwomen in the Alki Point district who “sew and knit Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:30 until 4 o’clock and receive first-aid instruction Fridays from 1 until 3 o’clock in the Alki School portable. Interest in first-aid instruction has increased so greatly that additional classes for women and men are now being held Wednesday evenings in the Alki Fieldhouse. To break the tension of the day’s work, speakers discuss timely subjects, such as gardening and cookery. Travelogues also have added to the entertainment. Through Mrs. Alberta Conklin who had lived in the district for many years, the group has donated 100 knitted squares for afghans and $10 for the Red Cross war chest.”
The Akron over Seattle, photographed by Price of Price Photo on May 24, 1932, “our day.”
The subject’s date, May 24, 1932, suggests another admittedly speculative “why” for the timing of this shot and what may have been its pie in the sky hopes. On this Tuesday the navy’s grandest dirigible, the Akron, at that time the largest airship in the world, made a non-stop round-trip tour from California to Puget Sound. It entered Seattle over this ridge in the late morning. That afternoon it was top-of-the-front-page news in this newspaper: “AKRON SOARS OVER CITY.” The Times explained, “So huge is the bulk of the Akron
The Akron’s Tuesday arrival came too late for the same day edition, so The Times included it in the next day Wednesday paper. CLICK CLICK!!
that it cast a vast shadow on the streets as it passed. The sky was ideal for watchers. White fleecy clouds kept the sky from being too brilliant. Due to favorable winds she was more than an hour ahead of schedule.” Flying over the city’s business district, the Akron was greeted by a mighty noise of sirens and a great honking of horns. Here on Alki Point we don’t see the cigar-shaped airship, but we do note some of the fleecy clouds, and the shadows put this picture-taking in the morning.
A California clip on the Akron’s safe and speedy return after the round-trip to Puget Sound. Notice that the Akron outsizes the Zeppelin.Also appearing in the Tuesday May 24, 1932 Times was this advertisement full of health claims for Luck Strike. It is the kind of glib lying we have become so used to, and even more so now thru e-mail. CLICK CLICK
WEB EXTRAS
(Off topic from Jean) As you know, Paul, in July I took a group of 18 students from Hillside Student Community School on a tour of London, Paris, and environs. This is my fifth trip with students over the past 15 years; and when we visit Versailles, it has become a school tradition to jump in the air in front of the palace. Here follows this year’s photo:
Hillside at Versailles!
Anything to add, fellahs? Yes Jean but first this. Why not put up your other Versailles Jumps, aka “Hillside at Versailles!”? Also, how do they do that without power tools?
Turning to Alki. Ron Edge will put up, again and again, several past features that relate to this week’s “repeat.” And we’ll stuff into the main text some of the research materials – clips and pics – that went into writing it. And we will place here a unique 1890 pencil sketch of Alki Beach and Point drawn from Duwamish Head. The last of Edge’s contributions will be familiar: last week’s feature, which was also, some of you may remember, an Alki Point subject. So first, here’s Ron.
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VARIATIONS ON THE SPUD
Yakima First Prize Potatoes courtesy of Michael MaslanFirst appeared in Pacific, Feb. 16, 2003.The ca. 1937 tax photo of the SPUD, again.Modern SPUD at night, ca. 1945.Post-Modern Spud, 1961,I took this for the Times now-then that is offered a few pics up. That was 2003, when we were also putting up on its walls an photo exhibit of Alki history. Below: the south wall in the upstairs dining room includes a long run on Alki Ave. featuring now and then from the tax photos of the late 1930s to the repeats I took in 2003.SPUD’S upstairs exhibit, 2003. All those repeats are on Alki Beach Ave. and in order too.
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Dated 1890, this sketch of Alki Point from the ridge is included in an unattributed sketchbook. Some of the pages were used on both sides for its pencil sketches with the consequences show here. The graphite was shared from one page with the page it faced.A detail of Alki Point from the 1912 Baist Real Estate map, and it is notable how much of it was still available for development in 1912. The “Halgund First Addition” to the left of the “27” printed far-right, was developed by Johan Haglund on property he and his son Ivar (Keep Clam) interited after the death of his wife and Ivar’s mother, Daisy Hanson Haglund in 1907. There is presently an exhibit of IVAR and his “works” up at the Nordic Heritage Museum. I’m schedule to do a lecture there on Ivar and the exhibit this month on the evening of the 22nd. Please come if you read captions.Alki Point, circa 1950. Courtesy The Seattle Times. …………………………………………………………………………
![Full-page coverage of the Grunbaum Bros. new home in the Decatur Building, May 28, 1922. {CLICK CLICK CLICK to Enlarge]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/x-st-may-28-1922-grunbaum-bros-move-to-new-home-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![The AYP expo grounds on the U.W. campus seen across Portage Bay. The captured balloon appears far right. [Courtesy Monica Wooton]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/x-ayp-pan-lking-ne-over-portage-bay-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![. . .and looking east on the upper part of N.E. 40th Street from Latona Ave. N.E., on Oct. 7, 2006. [I was a mere 68 at the time and so still nimble enough to walk for hours at a time.]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/x-40-ef-latona-upper-det-10_7_2006-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![A comparison of the 1929 and 1935 aerials, left and right, show the work in progress on the new bridge of Admiral Way over the Schmitz Park Boulevard in the 1936 detail on the right. The dark roof of the bath house appears in the upper-left corner of the 1936 half of t his diptych, which is printed along below. [Courtesy Ron Edge and the Seattle Municipal Archive.]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1-aerials-1929-36-schmidt-pk-details-grab-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![The first SPUD home polished up from a 1937 King County tax photo. The home on the right and the treeline above it should look familiar. [Courtesy Washington State Archive]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/spud-alki-2666-spud-c1937-then-2-16-2003-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![Looking through the Schmitz Park arch south on Schmitz Park Boulevard (s.w. 59th ave.) from its corner with S.W. Lander Street. This was used by Jean and I in a feature about three years ago, and Ron Edge has included it below among this week's relevant links. [Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/schmitz-park-arch-web.jpg?ssl=1)
