Seattle Now & Then: Hanson Avenue, 1913

jrsherrard

7 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: First named Hanson Avenue, for Hans Hanson, an Alki Point settler, 63rd Ave. SW extends about a third of a mile across the Point. In 1908 an electric trolley line first crossed the Point on 63rd. The tracks can be found here in the graded dirt street. This view looks north. (Courtesy: Walt Baker Williams)

**NOW: Jean Sherrard recorded his “repeat” in the late summer of 2015.**

In spite of its soft focus, I delight in this week’s historical subject. It is rare: a nearly pioneer look into the heart of the Alki Point neighborhood early in its development. Photos of the Point’s early beach life are nearly commonplace, but not off the waterfront shots like this one of its interior along what was then still called Hanson Avenue.

The featured print at the top and the few more above this writing were copied from a cord-bound album of by now mostly scruffy photos originally gathered to promote and revive Rose Lodge in 1913. That was a dozen often struggling years after Benjamin and Julia Baker opened the lodge and its pleasure grounds on the Puget

Sound waterfront south of the Point. Among the dozen or so photographs included in the album, the featured one declines to promote the Lodge’s advantages or pose its recreating tenants and fifty neatly-framed tents. (The next print below includes some of those tents and playful guests.) Rather, the photographer turns her or his left shoulder away from the resort to look north-northeast on what was then, six years after West Seattle’s incorporation into Seattle and its conformity of street names, 63^rd Ave. SW. Of course, some of the locals continued long after to call it by its original name, Hanson Avenue.

**Rose lodge and a few of its housekeeping tents seen from the beach.**

Norwegian immigrants Anna and Hans Hanson, with their brother-in-law Knud Olson, and their families, purchased Alki Point from Seattle Pioneer Doc Maynard in 1869. The extended family farm, here in the featured photo at the top off camera to the left, kept producing into the 1930s, while rentals on the Point property helped its members through the Great Depression. This Hanson-Olson “Alki-Aristocracy” included the Clam Digger, future restaurateur Ivar Haglund, whose mother Daisy was the Hanson’s youngest child, the only one born (in 1870) on the Point.

The intersection of Olson and Hanson seen here near the center of an Alki Point detail lifted from the 1908 Baist Real Estate Map. The two yellow footprints to the right of the circle “15”, bottom-left, mark – inadequately – the primary structures at Rose Lodge. Johan Haglund and his son Ivar’s first addition to the point is marked (& marketed) in blue, right-of-center. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Daisy’s uncle Knud Olson had his own namesake street that intersected Hanson Avenue where now Admiral Way does the same with 63^{rd SW}. That intersection is a few lots north of the large white-box-of-a-home that stands above the center of this streetscape. It was for many years the family home of Asa and Irene Schutt. Irene

**The Schutt home sits on lot 5 of the A.A. Smith addition to Alki Point. Lena Smith was Ivar’s aunt and helped raise him after his mother’s early death. CLICK TO ENLARGE**

was an activist in the Alki Women’s Improvement Club and club meetings were often held in her home at 3226 63^{rd SW}. The home, now painted green, survives. Across the street from the Schutt’s home were still undeveloped acres that a pair of Los Angeles showmen proposed in 1927 to develop into a twelve-acre amusement park. Its neighbors were mostly not amused and the necessary rezone failed.

The Seattle Times 1927 coverage of the Point’s ambivalence toward the proposed amusement park notes that both Ivar Haglund and Rose Lodge developer Benjamin Baker were in favor of the park. (They were, after all, both entertainers too.) Their names are noted at the bottom of the left column. The most spirited opponent was Rev. A.O. Kuhn, pastor of the Alki Congregational Church, which was a beach rock’s throw from Rose Lodge, and still is. Kuhn did some “profiling” when he remarked “We all know the kind of people that an amusement park draws.”

This featured photo and the others from the album were first shared with me in 1997 by Walter Baker Williams at the Southwest Seattle Historical Society’s then recently opened Log House Museum. We met in the courtyard paved with bricks named for and contributed by donors, Williams included. In the 1960s, the Harvard educated attorney was a member of the state senate. He was what was then called a “moderate Republican.” For a middle name, his parents handed him Baker, the name of his grandparents. Again, it was the Bakers that had opened Rose Lodge, and quite possibly grandpa Benjamin Baker who took this week’s featured historical photograph.

Electrical Storms? above and financial struggles below.

It seems that by 1918 Baker was ready to sell lots while still renting furnished tents. The struggles of running a still remote and somewhat rugged attraction may have vanquished electrical storms but not familial ones. The Bakers got a divorce. The above clip is from August 4, 1918. The one below from Sept 25, 1918.

THE WILLIAM and/or KENNETH MORRIS Rose Lodge Month of May Example for 1928 & 1929

**NEARLY THE END: A Times clip from June 12, 1932. Not just another clean and reasonable large room near the beach. But single too.**

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, les mecs? Yes Jean, yes yes. Ron begins this week with some Alki Beach wear and then with a few more West Seattle features. Following those we will tie some clippings to the tail of this week’s blog.