Seattle Now & Then: Broadway and Roy and The Deluxe

jrsherrard

7 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

**THEN: Looking south on 10th Avenue E. to the freshly re-paved intersection where Broadway splits into itself and 10th Avenue North in 1932.**

**NOW: The trolley tracks on Broadway and 10th Avenue North were removed in the early 1940s, and the gas stations at the intersection with Roy more recently.**

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 10^th Avenue North.)

**An ambitious ad from either Harrah or Heaven run in The Times on Sept. 9, 1926.**

**On the home front during the First World Ware the Harrah Bro. agree with fourteen other prospering “food dealers” to six restrictions.**

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.”

**From April 14, 1911 and in The Times.**

**The Harrah’s make it to their Silver Anniversary two years into the Great Depression. [Click-Cllick to enlarge for reading!]**

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.

A Deluxe adver. from 1978 – about. Note the Grant Wood are in the advertisement where t he farmer has been traded for the Deluxe chef, which we also share in the photo that follows. It too dates from the ’70s, my last years on the Hill. I first lived near the Deluxe in 1964, nearby on Summit Avenue.

**The Deluxe on September 12, 2006 with Victoria B. and friend.**

**Victoria, again, twenty-seven years earlier in the Harvard Exit Theatre, standing at the doorway between the lobby and the “living room.”**

**A page from the Century Club’s 1937 tax card. courtesy Seattle Washington**
**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,

**Posing at the front steps in the mid-70s, Jim Osteen and Art Berstain, the creator-owners of the Harvard Exit conversion of the Women’s Century Club.**

My Broadway home in 1976-77 posing for CHAOS (Capitol Hill Arts On Show) promotion on the roof reached from our kitchen window. Our apartment at the southeast corner of Broadway and Republican had been passed along or down for many years from one Cornish student or instructor to another. It can be seen in the photo that follows, which was taken in the 1930s during the widening of Broadway.

**The roof on which we posed two photos above was behind the Piggly-Wiggly Market sign on the right.**

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.