(click to enlarge photos)


Here is another Foster and Kleiser photo of a prominent business intersection in Seattle where the famous billboard company may have been planning, or merely hoping, for a giant-sized sign. Let us imagine it on the roof above the Harrah Brothers grocery at the scene’s center. (The grocery fills the space behind the three plate glass windows shown above the motorcar moving south on 10th Avenue North.)




The Harrah brothers opened their new store on August 25, 1931. The “then” photograph is dated 1932, so the comely light brick business block, designed by architect Earl W. Morrison for the southwest corner of Broadway and Roy Street, is about a year old. The Harrahs were not new on Broadway, having first settled on this North Broadway block about twenty years earlier. The brothers ran their first Seattle Times classified ad in June 1910, when they were looking for a “first-class bread baker.” A year later in an illustrated Times advertisement on April 14, 1911, the grocery’s new van was pictured. Below it the partners bragged in print that with their auto-delivery, “Harrah Bros. succeeded in supplying their patrons with Hot Cross Buns in time for breakfast this morning.”

![The Harrah's make it to their Silver Anniversary two years into the Great Depression. [Click-Cllick to enlarge for reading!]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/x-s-t-aug-24-1931-illus-fet-ure-on-harrah-bros-new-quareters-web.jpg?resize=474%2C649&ssl=1)
In 1934 this corner was disposed for a tavern by Washington State’s then new Liquor Control Board. With prohibition recently over, the Board fancied it for a bar, and somehow convinced Berlin Cleaners, which was then holding the corner next door to Harrahs, to relocate two blocks south at 619 Broadway North, where a popular baked bean merchant name McCullock was persuaded by the sturdy board to move to the nearby Haynes Candy Store on Olive Way. The confectionery had been swayed by the Liquor Board to move to a nearby and vacant storefront on E. Pine Street. Despite the Board’s Machiavellian efforts, by 1939 this southwest corner of Broadway and Roy had been temporarily reformed from alcohol to ice cream. However, in seven more years it reverted to spirits with the first of the De Luxe taverns.




Archive, the branch that is on the Bellevue Community College campus. (Click to Enlarge)
With “De” and “Luxe” joined, the Deluxe in Jean’s “now” opened in 1962 with Joe Rogel and Bernie Minsk the gregarious partners. Sixty-four years later, Rogel’s son Barry is the owner. Living nearby on Broadway while teaching film at the Cornish School in the 70s, I remember well both Joe and Bernie, and their hamburgers. In 1970, the humorist and Times restaurant reviewer John Hinterberger described how “about 200 people streamed out of the Harvard Exit,



turned right and many streamed into the Deluxe Tavern; adjacent buildings with a symbiotic relationship.” The still charmed and cosmopolitan neighborhood of Capitol Hill will, I figure, forever thank Joe, Bernie and Barry for their burly and buttered baked potatoes. [Long ago I drew for Joe and Bernie a bake potato adorned with butter and sour cream and imagined as a billboard on the roof of the tavern. When & if found I will attach, or introduce with an addendum.]
THE CORNER TAX CARD FROM THE LATE 1930s Followed by two other tax photos of this west side of the 600 block on Broadway.
BELOW: TWO of the MCKALE SERVICE STATION, ACROSS ROY STREET from the CORNER STOREFRONT – The FUTURE DELUXE.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, fellahs? Surely Jean, more Edge Links of the neighborhood.
Hello, I am writing a book on poet artist Clyde Sanborn who used to frequent the Deluxe back in early 1970s. He was also a dishwasher there for a while. Did you ever bump into Clyde?
Thank you for the photo. My Gramma lived on the third floor (no elevator) in the 50s https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/x-mckales-station-700-broadway-1937-tax-photo-web.jpg?ssl=1
I loved it there. Would sit on the radiator by the window and watch all the activity below, the antique store across the street and great memories of the apple pie or grilled cheese at the restaurant around the corner on Broadway. Walking to Volunteer Park. Walking all over downtown, Bartells, Pike Place Market, Woodland Park Zoo, Greenlake and the wading pool. Some Grammas had farms, mine had the adventures of city life. Perfection.
Why do the old streetcar line and underlying road shunt right from Broadway and to 10th on Roy? Is this related to the Aloha turnaround for the still existing bus turnaround from times immemorial?