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Seattle Now & Then: The Last of Denny Hill, Part 2

jrsherrard

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN 1: Recorded on April 14, 1928, about sixth months before the Denny Hill Regrade No. 2 began, the last of the scarred Denny Hill rises to the right of Fifth Avenue. Denny School (1884) tops the hill at the northeast corner of Battery Street and Fifth Avenue. On the horizon, at center, Queen Anne Hill is topped by its namesake high school, and on the right of the panorama, the distant Wallingford neighborhood rises from the north shore of Lake Union. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archives)  DOUBLE-CLICK TO ENLARGE
THEN 2: The pre-Regrade No.2 brick business buildings on Fifth Avenue survived the cutting, which otherwise turned the last of Denny Hill into undeveloped land that resembled a sprawling parking lot. The photo was taken on September 22, 1931. Like the 1928 panorama and Jean Sherrard’s late 2016 repeat, the “after” shot was taken from the roof of Hotel Andra, formerly the Claremont Hotel (1926), at the northeast corner of Virginia Street and 4th Avenue. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archives)
A modern crop roughly matching the borders of the two ‘Thens’
NOW: Jean Sherrard’s repeat unfolds a lifting of the neighborhood with high-rises that far reverse the 110 feet of glacial dirt cut and dumped in Elliott Bay during the combined Denny Regrades.

I came upon this week’s revealing pair of historical photos in the mid-1970’s during my initial visit to the Seattle Engineering Department’s photo-lab at City Hall. Both were given curt captions at their bottom-left corners, identifying this public work as Denny Hill No.2 Regrade.  The diptych reveals with “before” and “after” panoramas the final humbling of Denny Hill between 1928 and 1931.  (Last week’s feature gave another point of view on that last regrade.) The digging for Denny Hill Regrade No. 1 began in 1903.  In 1911 the cutting paused for seventeen years before resuming in 1928 with Denny Hill Regrade No. 2.  By pulling a lever, Seattle Mayor Frank E. Edwards scooped the last electric shovelful in the forenoon of December 9, 1930.   Both the 1928 and 1931 pans include the south facade of the Windham Apartments at the northwest corner of Fifth Ave. and Blanchard Street.  With its 1925 brick facade intact, the Windham still serves but is now, from the Claremont’s roof,  for the most part hidden behind the chisel-shaped glass curtain at the southwest corner of Fifth and Blanchard.  

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Hotel Andra (nee Claremont) for hosting our trip to their rooftop. Also, big thanks to Brian Cunningham, Chief Engineer, for his assistance on high.

Chief Engineer Brian Cunningham on the roof

He related a Hotel Andra secret, which can only now be revealed! If you examine the photo below, note the twin architectural details high above the hotel’s Fourth Avenue entrance. The grenade-shaped protuberances at the top of each feature seem to be intact…but, no! The one on the right went missing at least a decade ago.

Twin architectural features (or are they?)

Brian discovered that a Nerf football, scribed to approximate the lines of the original, painted gray and glued into place would suffice, certainly from a distance. I think it looks pretty fine close up as well (click to enlarge to see for yourself).

Not concrete but Nerf!
Gull looking west

Finally, a shot of the Space Needle from the rooftop:

The only remaining view of the Needle from the old Claremont. For French film buffs, I dedicate this photo to the film Jacques Tati’s ‘Playtime’ (not ‘Holiday’)

Anything to add, lads?  

Yes Jean, but first thanks for the roof architecture atop the old Claremont.   I too love “Hulot’s Holiday” and saw it first at the Harvard Exit in the early 1970s.  But you have me puzzled how that trip from Paris for a holiday on the Normandy Coast (I assume) with a stay in a waterfront hotel filled with eccentric guests relates to your textured reflection of the Needle off Garth Vader’s glass skin.  Will you explicate, please?

Yes, Paul, my mistake – I meant to say ‘Playtime’ – the 1967 film which featured Monsieur Hulot wandering through glass and steel skyscrapers, unable to find the Eiffel Tower or the  Arch de Triomphe, except in the glass reflections. A marvel of the cinema (which, was unappreciated at the time, and bankrupted Hulot creator Jacques Tati).

Second, we hope our dear readers will key word our blog for “Denny Regrade” or any other key.  For instance, our Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront (found here under the “books bug”) has a thumbnail history of the Denny Regrade.

I snapped this look west through an upper-floor window in the Muni-Building (City Hall aka a Texas Hotel) sometime in the 1970s when I was editing through the nitrate negative collection in the Engineering Department’s photo laboratory. Some of it was cooking-bubbling and needed to be tossed.   All of its was illegal, but protected, so to speak, inside city hall and decades of neglect.
A comedic interruption of The Times serious news flow for March 15, 1930, about the time of this week’s regrade pans.
Can the still serving Windham Apts (1925) at the northwest corner of Fifth and Blanchard be glimpsed in any of Jean’s shots from the roof?

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MY FIRST INTIMATE GLIMPSE OF THE PRE-REGRADE DENNY HILL NEIGHBORHOOD.    The text here is copied from Seattle Now and Then Volume One, the Fifty-Second story.  An earlier version was first printed in The Seattle Sun.  It was that tabloid exposure that, I believe, persuaded The Seattle Times to take me on as a suffering free-lance contributor in the winter of 1981-82.  I discovered the historical photo, which looks south on Second Avenue from its intersection with Bell Street, in a stack of prints that John Hannawalt – still of the Seattle Paperworks in the Pike Place Market (lower level)-  purchased from Loomis Miller, the last keeper of the Webster and Stevens Studio.  It was an exciting moment for me.  I had by then plenty of exposure to regrade pictures, and distant portraits of Denny Hill long before the lowering began, but none of the intimate neighborhood.   They are still rare.   One of the best was featured recently  in “Too High and Too Steep”, David B. Williams historical study of the several natural upheavals that have come with making Seattle.  Our review of David’s well-illustrated study of the “reshaping of Seattle topography” is included here below illustrated with the Anson Burwell House at Denny Hill’s high point the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Blanchard Street.   You will find it below, second from the top with the Edge Clippings,

CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE FOR READING
You may recognize the three-gabled row house, on the left,  that survives at the southeast corner of Second and Bell. Note please the detail of the Blanchard Apartments above it, and find it again twice in the triptych printed below.
The Blanchard Apts appear here to the left of the power pole. Cutting on the east side of Second Ave. begins to take its temporary shape as a cliff.
We first published this in The Times sometime after the popularity of the movie with “Pond” in the title. It escapes me for the moment.
A minimal Potlatch parade floats poses on the south side of Blanchard across from the Blanchard Apartments after its lowering. The intersection with
Second Ave. is on the left. (Courtesy, Michael Maslan)
The Blanchard Apartments appear to be occupied during their lowering to the north side of Blanchard Street, between Second and Third Avenues.

 

Third Avenue, looking north from near Virginia Street. The Blanchard Apartments, left-of-center, may be approaching their regrade – or may not. What do you think?

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THE EDGE CLIPPINGS

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In the late 70’s, if memory serves . . .
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