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Here we look northwest across the intersection of 9^th Avenue N. and Republican Street to the first of two gasholders, or gas storage tanks, that were quickly built in succession on this south Lake Union block.  Most likely some of PacificNW’s readers will remember them, for the tanks were still around in the 1950s, until replaced by the Seattle Gas Company’s modern building, which was popularly known as the “Blue Flame Building” after the illuminated sign that crowned it.   It, too, is now gone, replaced by a new construction in what we might call “Allentown” for its primary developer Paul Allen, or perhaps “Amazopolis” for the made-over neighborhood’s primary tenant.  

The featured photo of the gas tank on top (and above) was copied from an album of views, most of which concerned the big changes made for the Seattle Gas Company between 1906 and 1908.  Most of the snapshots feature the destruction of the company’s first plant, built in 1873 at Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street, and the building of its gas works, now Gas Works Park in ‘Lower Wallingford.’  The album was loaned to me for copying by Michael Maslan, one of

Seattle’s busiest sellers of historical photographs and other ephemera.  Michael has been sharing his often rare and exquisite ‘stock and stuff’ with me since the mid-1970s, and many of the images that have appeared in this column over the past thirty-three years came to me through Michael. 

The featured print at the top is dated May 4, 1907.  On that Saturday, The Times variously reported that railroad cars of Florida Tomatoes and Bananas had arrived, and that a “heavy shipment of strawberries (had) reached the city this morning.”  Preparing, perhaps, its readers for Sunday church, on its front page, The Times explained that two clergyman with “differing schools of theology,” the Unitarian Rev. W.D. Simonds and the Baptist Rev. J. M. Dean, agreed that “men are most iniquitous,” not women.  One week later, on May 11, the renamed Seattle Lighting Company ran one of its illustrated advertisements advising, “Cook With Gas and avoid worry and trouble.  It is cheaper, healthier and cleaner than any other fuel in use.”  This promotion was repeated on the storage tanks with large hanging signs also reading, “Cook with Gas.”

It is clear from the photo album that the charming building to the right (in the featured photo and two below it) was built with the storage tank, and somehow served it.  The oversized shed – or barn – on the left may be the livery stable for the company’s horses, which by 1907 were beginning to lose their horsepowers to internal combustion.  A Times classified for June 30 hints at this dislocation. “Four combination ladies’ or gents’ single foot saddle or driving horses for sale at Seattle Lighting Co.’s stable, Ninth North and Republican.  These horses all trot in harness.”  (The barn on the left may also be part of the Denny family farm.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?   Yup.  Ron Edge has pulled forth a half-dozen or some former features that touch either the neighborhood or the subject.   Please remember that these links are often stuffed with other links, and some of those may also be so stuffed.

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I imagine that many Pacific NW readers will remember this parking lot filled with municipal buses.  It was not so long ago. However, few are likely to recall the earlier and regular overnight visits here of the city’s orange trolleys, scores of them packed side-by-side on parallel tracks. 

This North Seattle Storage Yard was built in 1906 by the Seattle Electric Company, the transportation “octopus” that by then had consolidated most of the city’s independent trolley lines and also kept on building new ones while Seattle grew like an adolescent. The brick car barn, upper-left, was added in 1907 for trolley repairs.  By 1910 the expanding system had yards and barns in Fremont, Georgetown and at 14^th Ave. and Jefferson St.

As the original print reveals at its base, the subject lookling west over the parking yard was photographed on Dec. 11, 1936.  The “N.E. Corner,” captioned bottom-right, is at Sixth Ave. N. and Mercer St., which is on the right.  The Auditorium Apartments, the dark four-story brick construction at the northwest corner of Fifth and Mercer, is partially hidden behind the power pole on the far right.  This apartment house, with two exceptions, is the only notable building (from this prospect) that has survived from the “then” into Jean Sherrard’s “now.”  The two exceptions are the Civic Auditorium and its linked neighbor, the Ice Arena. And in 1936, from this point of view, the Civic Auditorium seems to be named the Ice Arena. 

 

However, the sign to the left of the stubby power pole in the featured photo at the top, is not posted on the Civic Auditorium, but rather stands on the roof of the auditorium’s attached neighbor to its east, the Ice Arena. 

The 1927 auditorium has gone through two elaborate make-overs: first as the Opera House for the 1962 Century 21 Worlds Fair and again in 2003 as McCaw Hall.

 

On this Friday night of Oct. 11, 1936, the Ice Arena was booked for the first night of two with the Nile Temple Shriners Ice Carnival, which mixed “the pick of Seattle’s skating talent,” which included Shriners in their “vivid costumes, freak acts and comedy performances,” sharing the ice with “some of the finest exhibition skaters in the world.”  This was also the season when the Ice Arena’s offerings switched from the faked, if often bruising, melodrama of professional wresting to ice, with the city’s well-outfitted amateur skaters and a professional hockey club.  Devoted Seattle sports fans will know that the professionals then were also called the Seattle Seahawks. 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Aside from what is inserted in the text “proper” above, Ron and I have chosen a few more features either from the neighborhood or the subject and attached them below.

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THREE MORE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN THE 1930s

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WATERFALL AND WATERFOWL

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This, I believe, is only the second occasion in which Jean Sherrard, the “repeater-photographer” in this partnership for nearly a decade, has managed to include himself in his “now.”  Standing on the roof at the northwest corner of the ten-story Cambridge Apartments, he appears bottom-right with his head and shoulders sticking out from the building’s shadow, near its pinnacle.  It is not a good likeness. While both Jean and his shadow are broad-shouldered, Jean is over 6 feet 5 inches tall.  [The Golden Rule feature has been placed at the top of those collected by Ron Edge below.]

The historical photo at the top was most likely taken in 1923, the year the Cambridge started letting its convenient studio apartments to renters who often worked nearby in what was then already identified as Seattle’s new retail section. Dating the photo is helped by the dark-roofed Dreamland Pavilion, on the far left, at the northeast corner of Union St. and Seventh Ave.  Dreamland was razed for the Eagle’s Lodge, which opened in 1925. 

Bottom-right in the featured photo is another big new roof, with the raised architecture of either a fly loft (above a stage) or a grand hall. Like the Cambridge, Evergreen Lodge No. 2 of the Ancient Order of United Workmen opened its new hall at 1409 Ninth Ave. in 1923.

The Cambridge is nestled at the southeast corner of Union Street and 9^th Ave., with its back to one of the two steepest grades on First Hill.  (The other is near 9^th and Jefferson.)  Most tenants enjoyed splendid views towards the Olympic Mountains and Lake Union.  These prospects were partially obstructed in the 1960s with the construction of the I-5 Freeway.  They were then lost in the 1980s with the unwanted embrace of the Washington State Convention Center, which, with its neighbor, Freeway Park, was built on top of the Freeway.  Still, the sprawling concrete center deserves some credit.  It dampens the noise of the Freeway, and through mitigation, the Center also helped the city purchase the Cambridge in 1987 for conversion into low-income housing.

When Jean first stepped onto the roof, led by Chong Han, the apartment’s live-in manager, he was instantly enchanted.  It is from this prospect that the terraced architecture of the Convention Center’s south façade, a mingling of greenery and green glass, can be both enjoyed and admired.  Jean tells me that he and Chong shared visions of roof gardens atop both the Cambridge and the Convention Center.

Almost floating above the Center is Jean’s second subject, Seattle’s spreading skyline, heading north for Lake Union down the “Westlake Funnel.” On the subject of our current “high-rise habit,” PacificNW readers may wish to return to Lawrence W. Cheek’s thoughtful feature “Higher Seattle.” Cheek’s revealing cover article for this magazine was published on the 13^th of September, 2015.

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s our second video featuring Mistah Dorpat…

[Allow me to interrupt here Jean.  In the interview clip above, you make note of the OCS (Overall Cooperative Structure) lightshow-concerts-dances that I helped put on at the Eagles Auditorium in 1967.  Here’s the poster – a flyer decidedly economically printed – for the first of those concerts: a benefit for the Free University of Seattle.  As the poster “suggests” the concert date was January 14 and so still a few months short of the “Summer of Love” in 1967.  The dance was billed as “Feather Ecstacy,” a title which you can find in the poster, but rendered with a kind of rectilinear variation of psychedelic style lettering, it is hardly readable.  (The principle pen work seems to be a blending of St. Theresa of Avila with pillow fluff.  By the way, the drug Ecstasy was not then yet known.) This graphic was included in the recently published book titled “Split Fountain Hieroglyphics – Psychedelic Concert Posters From The Seattle Area, 1966 – 1969.”   I attended the book’s  happy introduction in Ballard earlier this fall, and was surprised to be given a copy because one of the quick covers I did for Helix was included.  Its a splendid book, wonderfully printed.   Now I confess that I am also responsible for this “little rough flyer” which is also in the book although probably not on its artistic merits but for its historic position.   I might have stayed mum on this for the poster is credited to another’s penpersonship.  However, in the interest of fact-checking I will now forsake that handy cover and take responsibility for the flyers rude qualities.  The police read it, and busted it – the concert – for what they claimed was a violation of the 1929 law against “shadow dancing.”  You can read about it in Helix, and since that issue is an early one, it is included among those we have so far posted on this blog.  Look for the  Helix button on the front page.]

To boot, I’ll throw in a couple of shots of the Cambridge from different perspectives:

Anything to add, boys?  SURELY Jean, beginning with two apologies that less spring than stumble through old age.  You caught my mistaken anticipation for an upcoming feature that has already been “up” and that merely two weeks past.   It was and still survives on this blog as the feature that looks north from Union Street and Terry Avenue, and so just above the Cambridge Hotel.  It is one of the steepest grades on the ridge that joins Capitol and First Hills, and before the Jackson Street Regrade (1909) and the Dearborn Cut (1912) Beacon Hill too.   My second blunder – on  the video – describes the coming of both the Convention Center and Freeway Park in the 1980s.   The park dates from the 70s, and we will attach a feature below that celebrates – and records –  inauguration then.   Otherwise Ron and I have attached a lot of features, most of  them from the neighborhood.  Many will be familiar to readers to keep returning to us for both something new and some of the same old.  Now we start the links with that  feature notes in video, that of the Golden Rules Bazaar advertising card.  As you know Jean doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is also a good survival strategy.  Apropos survival, Jean how did you manage to lean down from the rooftop of the Cambridge to record your shot of its cornice printed her above this paragraph?

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What is most revealing about this street scene may be that stack of bricks on the left.  The anonymous photographer stood his or her camera near where now stands the Pioneer Square Pergola and looked southeast to the clapboard businesses on the south side of Mill Street (Yesler Way). Second Ave. (Occidental Street) is on the left and the surviving alley between Occidental and First Avenue South is on the right. 

The featured print at the top is not dated, but based, in part, on the small clue of those bricks piled in the street, I think it was recorded in 1883.  Construction began in 1883-84 on multi-story structures of brick, stone, and ornamental cast iron, replacing many of the false fronts on Front Street (First Ave.) and at Pioneer Place (then aka Yesler’s Corner) with elegant facades. The bricks piled in the street may be designated for the 1883 construction of the elaborately ornate Yesler-Leary Building at the northwest corner of Front and Mill Streets.  Or they might be waiting on the equally ornate Occidental Hotel, which was raised in 1883-4 on what was then and is still the pie-shaped block between James St. and Yesler Way. At that time bricks sold for $16.00 to $18.00 a thousand in Seattle. 

 

 

Most of these wooden structures were built in the 1870s and destroyed in the Great Fire of 1889.  One exception is the oldest box on the block, the one with the balcony, center-right.  (It is featured here five and six photos up.)  In 1865, when standing alone, this was home for Kellogg’s Drug Store at the sidewalk and E. M. Sammis’ photography studio upstairs.  Sammis was the first professional picture-taker to set up a temporary studio in Seattle.  He recorded the first portrait of Chief Seattle and another of the chief’s friend, Doc. David Maynard.) A painted outline of the external but removed stairway to the Sammis studio is easily recognized on the building’s west façade at the alley.  [Jean Sherrard points to this place in the attached video.]  Most likely the carpenter G.W. Kimball, whose sign slightly overlaps with the faux stairway, had his shop south down the alley.  The building’s two first floor tenants are named above the sidewalk. The Occidental Grocery sign hangs from the balcony railing and the Goodman Variety Store sign swings in the shadow of the balcony above the boarded sidewalk.  These neighbors compliment more than compete. 

The 1880 census counted 3,533 Seattle inhabitants, 55 fewer than Walla Walla, at the time the largest town in Washington Territory.  In his Chronological History of Seattle, 1850 to 1897, Pioneer historian Thomas Prosch noted that three years after the federal census of 1880, in matters of wealth, additions, transfer of real estate and public works, “Seattle and King County unmistakably took the lead among Washington towns and counties . . . Though the figures seem small in the light of later days, they were then simply immense.” Seattle’s population at the close of 1883 was about 7,500.

NEARBY MISCELLANY

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WEB EXTRAS

Let’s begin with our spanking new feature – a video interview with Paul about this week’s column:

Anything to add, boys? YES! And in order or line with remarks on the above video (10-plus mins on a bench beneath the Pioneer Square – aka Pioneer Place – Pergola) Ron Edge and I will try to pack our EXTRAS with lots of past features from the oldest neighborhood.  Surely many will be familiar to our readers, and perhaps others not so.   The last link in line is mostly an exception to our Pioneer Place theme, but still it is current.  We’ll not name, but it is down there at the bottom.

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The easiest and so also, perhaps, the almost obvious subject here is Lake Union.  The earliest panorama of the lake was recorded in 1882 by the since famous Californian Carleton Watkins while visiting Puget Sound as an itinerate photographer.  He did his shooting from a platform that he built on the top of a nearly clear-cut Denny Hill. 

The pan by A.J. McDonald printed on top dates from about ten years later.  McDonald’s Seattle street address in the 1892-1893 Corbett City Directory was 514 9^th Avenue, on the southwest corner of First Hill. 

I struggled some in figuring out from what First Hill prospect McDonald took this wide view.  My early intimation was that it was from near the intersection of Terry Avenue and Union Street, and this was eventually confirmed by comparing the panorama with the impressive 1891 Birdseye view of Seattle.  All the homes standing in the foreground of McDonald’s subject are drawn, with considerable care given to their footprints and rooflines, into the Birdseye. I concluded that McDonald was indeed looking down a freshly graded Terry Avenue with Union Street near his back, if not at it, as was Jean Sherrard about a century and a quarter later. 

Another panorama (directly above), taken from Denny Hill looking east to First Hill a few months before McDonald made his, reveals something about the featured pan that is not easy to discover. In the pan at the top, Pike Street, at this point still more a widened path than a street, climbs left to right (west to east) between the three sizable homes center and left of center, and the still larger white home – probably an early tenement – on the right.  (It is the “T-shaped home” noted in the caption above.) We found its address, 1101 Pike Street, with help from the 1904 Sanborn real estate map. Just out-of-frame to the right was George and Louise Ward’s home,

which was built in 1882 at the then ungraded southwest corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue.  Wonderfully, it survives nearby at the northwest corner of Denny Way and Belmont Avenue, moved there about thirty years ago by attorneys – and preservationists – David A. Leen and Bradford Moore.  It is probably the second oldest structure in Seattle, after the Doc Maynard home in West Seattle.

The wide horizon of McDonald’s pan, above the north shore of Lake Union, extends from the then young mill town Fremont on the left, through Edgewater (a name rarely used today) to Latona (now part of Wallingford) on the far right.  Brooklyn, the preferred name for the University District in the 1890s, is hidden behind Capitol Hill. Pine Street runs left to right through the center of the pan.  It was the first graded street to reach Capitol Hill, and the 1891 Birdseye confirms it. Pike, however, was also soon extended to the Hill and became much the busier street with trolleys and commerce.

During his Seattle stay, McDonald recorded several other panoramas, including at least four from Queen Anne Hill, two from Denny Hill and two more from First Hill. I think it likely that by 1893 McDonald had returned to that other “city of hills,” San Francisco, where most of his surviving prints are found in scattered collections.

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul and Ron?   A few more past features clipped by Ron Edge and placed by Ron Too.  I wrote the text for the pan, first clip below, for what occasion or publication I no longer remember.  But one of the last points the text makes is a challenge to the reader to find in that pan the place where the future Roosevelt Theatre would be parked.  And so we included as the second “web extra” a feature done a few years ago on that the modern Roosevelt.  At the bottom of this group is a detail taken from the featured photo at top, which shows both the mansion and farm house of the Pontius Family in what is struggling to still be called the Cascade Neighborhood (if it can survive Amazopolis) after its grade school, which was a victim to the 1949 earthquake.   It follows the last of the Edge grab-links, which is also about the Pontius farm house, and appeared here not so long ago – sometime this past summer.

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THE PONTIUS HOMES  as REVEALED by MCDONALD

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The RETURN of the WARD HOME

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ANOTHER EARLY 1890S LOOK TO LAKE UNION

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TOMORROW we may proof read.  But now off to Nighty-Bears. Shhhhh.

(Lantern slide Courtesy of Bob Monroe.  “Nighty-Bears” courtesy of William “Bill” Burden”)