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Seattle Now & Then: East Olive Way, Sept. 21, 1938

jrsherrard

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: The busy apartment house development on Capitol Hill in the early 20th Century included the Belvedere Vista Apartment, on the left of this 1938 look northeast on East Olive Way. Filling its flatiron block, the Belvedere Vista is also bordered by E. Olive Place and Melrose Ave. East. While the Belvedere Vista does not appear on the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, it is listed in the 1915 Polk City Directory.
NOW: Seventy-eight years later many of the structures from 1938 survive in Jean Sherrard’s repeat from late winter of 2017.
Later – May 10, 1940 – and a block west on a part of Olive Way that is now the I-5 Freeway overpass,  This is,, perhaps obviously, another Foster and Kleiser billlboard photo.
Olive Way on its ascent to and joining with John Street, August 13, 1942. The view looks southwest thru the block between Howell Street and Bellevue Avenue. CLICK TO ENLARGE
The intersection of Broadway – another “way” and with the Broadway Theatre on the right – looking west on John Street. In the first proposal for the Olive way this two block extension east from Harvard Avenue was planned as an underpass meant to avoid the inevitable jams at Broadway – this intersection.

Without shadows or a sidewalk clock we cannot tell the time of day in our feat ured photo at the top, but we do know the date.  It is printed on the negative: September 21, 1938.  We may easily imagine what the drivers and passengers in these vehicles feel as they percuss across the red brick paving of East Olive Way as it intersects with Melrose Avenue on the west slope of Capitol Hill.  Seattle’s first ‘ways’ – Broadway, Yesler Way, Denny Way – were distinguished for acting as borders between the city’s large sections: i.e., northeast, north, northwest and so on.  The sections also eased the sorting and delivery of mail.  ‘Way’ was later used for roads requiring more eccentric work, such as for cutting a diagonal through a neighborhood. (I’ve counted about 25 of them north of Denny Way.) The diagonals Olive Way and Bothell Way were both supported by ordinances in 1920, followed by bulldozers

A Times report from September 3, 1920 treating on new “ways.” [CLICK to ENLARGE]

A TIMES report from March 23, 1922. CLICK-click to ENLARGE

in 1922-23.  The Olive cut was first proposed in 1907 by what the press –The Times included – identified as a few “real estate boomers.”  The speculators were stopped by a neighborhood protest of over one-hundred “prominent men and women (living in) the Harvard Avenue and Broadway districts.”

From The Times for February 6, 1907
CLICK-CLICK TO ENLARGE – from February 16, 1907

The later slicing for Olive Way began at Bellevue Avenue, where we see it make its turn to the left at the center of the featured photograph, below the Edwards Coffee billboard.  From there, it swoops through five blocks to where it joins with a widened John Street at Harvard Avenue.  The original 1920 proposal to speed the traffic with an arterial underpass beneath both Harvard Avenue and Broadway was dropped.  And so was a new name proposed.  

CLICK CLICK to ENLARGE –  This detail from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map shows that some later hand has drawn in the proposed Olive Way extension Joining Olive Way with East John Street.  

Originating in Belltown, Olive Street was first named for Olive Julia Bell (1846-1921), daughter of pioneers Sarah and William Bell.  President Warren G. Harding’s death, which followed soon after his 1923 visit to Seattle, inspired a variety of panegyric proposals, including one to City Council for a name change of Olive Way to Harding Way.  The sentiment was, however, denied when the local forces of heritage beat it back.  One City Councilman rationalized the defeat by observing that Olive Way was not really long enough for a president.  

From The Times, October 5, 1923
A clip from The Seattle Times for October 26, 1923.

By reading The Seattle Times archives for September 21, 1938, we can also speculate about what many – probably most – drivers and passengers would be thinking before the day was out.  This was the day when Czechoslovakia accepted the British-French plan of a compromise capitulation (aka the Munich Agreement) for restraining the Czech’s maniacal neighbor, Adolf Hitler, from inciting greater chaos. The Germans were allowed to annex much of the Sudetenland, the Czech borderlands with Germany inhabited primarily by ethnic German speakers. A summary of this World War II kindling began on the front page of this issue of the Wednesday afternoon Times. (We will remind you that The Times archive can be accessed with a library card, computer, and some help from a Seattle Public Library librarian.)

From The Times, September 23, 1938.   CLICK TO ENLARGE

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  SURELY Jean, with Ron’s relevant neighborhood and thematic past blog features  first introduced with a full-page clipping from The Seattle Times for January 6, 1907, which puts Olive Way within the border of  what some North End Optimists professed was fast developing into “The Heart of Greater Seattle” in – or by – 1910.   (You may have a chance of also reading the presentations prophetic rationale if you click this scan and then click it again.)

 

 

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