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Seattle Now & Then: ‘The Sunset Board Room’

jrsherrard

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Completed in 1900, the Graham mansion on First Hill at the southwest corner of 9th Avenue and Columbia Street is getting some roof repairs in this 1937 photo looking south across Columbia Street. It was razed in the 1966 for a parking lot by its last owner and neighbor, the Catholic archdiocese.
NOW: Posing here in the pink, Antonette and Robert Ruppin, long-time florists for the Bon Marche department store, are the oldest residents of the First Hill block that was once home for the Sunset Board Room (seen in the “then”) and the Capri Apartments at the northeast and southeast corners, respectively. The newlyweds left the Capri in the late 1950s but recently returned to the block to take occupancy on the 19th floor of Skyline, the new nonprofit that describes itself as “Seattle’s only Life Care retirement community.”

Two mildly eccentric signs can be found on this photograph of the southwest corner of 9th Avenue and Columbia Street on Seattle’s First Hill.  Hand-written on the grass, the more obvious sign is mistakenly captioned “727 – 9th Ave.”  The corner is held now by a roundabout to the front door of the nearly new Skyline Retirement Community at 725 9th Avenue. The “then” is another of the many thousands of tax photos taken during the Great Depression for the King County Assessor’s office by skilled photographers working for the federal Works Progress Administration. The WPA was one of the many  “alphabet soup” agencies created by President Roosevelt and his progressive cabinet to make both public works and work: works such this photographic inventory of every structure in the county, and work – with pay checks – for many including the photographers.  This archive is still used by county assessors and homeowners, as well as historians. 

We may always wonder if the humor of this sign was intended.

The second sign is harder to find.  It is nailed to the side of this mansion that somewhat resembles a Greek Temple.   The sign appears above the second floor porch near the iron ladder, which served as a fire escape.  Reading “The Sunset Board Room,” this second sign was, we expect, wrapped in wit by the Sunset’s manager, the progressive Emma A. Hausman.  Above her portrait that appeared in The Times for March 3, 1918, Hausman was described as “one of the most prominent club women in the city.” Also in 1918 she

From The Seattle Times for March 3, 1918.
The Seattle Times, June 30, 1918.
From The Times, May 15, 1921
Clip from The Times for February 22, 1935.
A Times clipping from March 3, 1935.

was chosen to direct the work of the local Democratic Club, and a year earlier she had been elected chairman of The Women’s Civic Improvement Club’s Auxiliary to the Seattle Red Cross.  The Sunset’s classified ads in The Times were often personalized with Hausman’s name, as for the second of June, 1917:  “Mrs. Hausman has one large room, suitable for man and wife, 2 business men or young ladies.  First class in every particular 721 9th Ave.”  Through its about sixty-six years on this corner the big home was listed at 721. 

A not matching and yet similar Greek Revival was built across Columbia Street, on its northwest corner with 9th Avenue, suggesting that the two big homes may have been developed together.

Actually, manager Hausman had many more rooms than one to rent in the Sunset. According to the 1937 tax record, this neo-classical mansion included twenty-seven rooms: seven on the first floor and eight on the second, all with nine-foot ceilings.  And there were seven more rooms in the attic and five more in the daylight basement. The Times reports that its first owners, the Archibald Blackburn Graham family, moved in on April 6, 1901.  The Seattle Times for December 22, 1900, counted the Graham’s new home among the “handsome new residences of substantial quality completed within the year.”  It cost $15,000, the same price that The Times publisher A. J. Blethen paid for his also manor-sized new home on Queen Anne Hill’s Highland Drive, also in 1900.

A Times listing of some of the grander new residences built in Seattle in 1900. The list includes the Graham home. It is fourth up from the bottom.

Archibald Graham was an arch-capitalist, described in pioneer historian Clarence Bagley’s “History of Seattle” (1916) as “a man of resourceful business ability who recognized the difficulties, the possibilities and the opportunities of a situation.”  Graham was a charmed opportunist, whose lucrative successes included, to name a

Graham’s Novelty Mill on Harbor Ave. in West Seattle.

few, flour milling (including the Novelty Mill in West Seattle), mining, lumber, and printing.  Graham also developed new neighborhoods in Seattle, the booming and beckoning West Coast city that the 39-year-old speculator moved to from West Virginia with his

Graham’s University Addition promoted with a Times classified for January 17, 1909.
A detail pulled from an early 20th-Century Baist Real Estate map showing the Graham University Addition  between E. 50th and 55th Streets. 
From The Times for April 6, 1901, the Grahams move in.
Making good use of the big home, Miss Juliette, the Graham daughter, gives a dance,

Times clip from Nov. 20, 1912.

growing family in 1891.  Jewelry was his last enterprise, and many jewels were found neatly packaged in his pockets after he fell one hundred feet to his death on May Day 1915, from the recently completed steel bridge over Ravenna Park.  The police found no “foul play.” No doubt hoping to deflect suicide speculations, Archibald’s puzzled friends noted to a Times reporter that he had left his home happy that morning and had “no financial troubles.” What made him leap, they concluded, was some combination of acute insomnia and recurring agoraphobia. One friend was quoted “It was the involuntary act of a man overcome by the influences of high places.”

The Times artful  approach to the causes behind Graham’s fall (or leap) attempting to write around the delicate specter of suicide. CLICK FILE TO ENLARGE
From May 3, 1915.
May 29, 1916, The Times

A year later Graham’s family moved from their First Hill mansion into the upscale Olympian Apartments at 1605 E. Madison. It is reported in The Seattle Times of July 30, 1916, “Mrs. Emma Hausman has taken Mrs. Graham’s residence on the corner of 9th and Columbia and will open … a first-class boarding house for particular people.” Emma Hausman and Jennie Graham knew each other from years of playing cards together.  And so it seems that the sale of the Graham mansion to Emma Hausman may have had a sisterly side to it.

The Seattle Times report on how Wobbly Propaganda winds up in the Graham big home in 1919, the year of “The Red Scare” and search warrants.   [CLICK TO ENLARGE for READING]
With Emma Hausman in charge, the big home at 721 Ninth Ave. became a retreat for progressive political interests including picnics.  A Seattle Times clip from June 13, 1920.
Civic Club holds annual luncheon at Emma Hausman’s big home. A Times clip from May 26, 1926
A Sunset Boarding classified from 1937.
A wrecking house sale at the Graham/Hausman home, promoted in a Times clip for Nov. 9, 1966.
One of Ravenna Park’s timber trestles.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Natch, beginning with 30-plus past features from the neighborhood gathered and placed by Ron Edge.  We call the Edge Links.

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SKYLINES

Seattle from West Seattle’s Hamilton Park, April 10, 1969.
Seattle skyline photographed and captioned by the Seattle Times photographer Roy Scully in 1977.
A ca. 1929 snap of the waterfront, the lower business District and the profanity hill part of First Hill. The twin towers of St. James on the upper-left will easily lead you to the Kitty-corner block now home to Skyline.
Looking south from Rich Berner’s 16th floor apartment at Skyline to Harborview on the upper-left and Trinity Episcopal Church, at the center. The white masking or guarding that is part of the sanctuary’s restoration makes it look, from this distance, something like a Hindu temple. The church’s tower with the steps in the scaffolding wrapping it, adds to this allusion.
The future Skyline block is upper-right in this 1893 Sanborn detail. The upper-right corner of that block is the future site for the Graham home.
Another 1937 tax photo, this time supported or in counterpoint with a Google-Earth detail, both looking northeast from 8th Avenue and Cherry Street through the future Skyline Block.
Looking northeast from a mid-line location on the Skyline Block and the west end of the parking lot that replaced the Graham mansion in the mid-1960s.
808 8th Avenue, another mutilated 1937 tax photo.
Looking down – from something – on the Skyline block. Note the northeast corner upper-left, the parking lots where once stood the mansion or subject of the day.
The skyline looking north from the smaller of the two Skyline towers.
Looking north on 9th Avenue from mid-block between Cherry and Columbia Streets to the Graham/Hausman’s bigger neighbor kitty-corner to the northeast across the Columbia Street and Ninth Avenue intersection. The cathedral was dedicated in 1907.
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