(click to enlarge photos)


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180 DEGREE VARIATION
Here gain is Werner Lenggenhager on Melrose Place North, but this time looking in the opposite direction to the north and in the summer with the Place now dry and looking like it has been so for a while. We do not known which of the two Werner shot first. We used this one a few years back in our book Washington Then and Now, and the summer comparison also appeared in Pacific, but before they added color to our pages – and many others – in the magazine.
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Again, for this Sunday “repeat” (at the top) Jean respects the historical prospect of the featured photograph and returns to it – barely. To really repeat the prospect of the featured photographer, Werner Lenggenhager, would require a hovering drone or the guiding and guarding of a phalanx of the Washington State Patrol Troopers accompanying Jean north of Denny Way to the narrow green belt of shrubbery between the Seattle Freeway’s lower south bound lane and its higher north bound lane.

What Jean did instead was take to the closest prudent prospect: a position above interstate-5 on the Denny Way overpass. From there, looking south, his “now” reveals an electric cityscape of high-rises and cumulous clouds standing above the north-bound late-morning traffic. It is an eye-popping contrast. Within a few seconds of an I-5 driver heading north under Denny Way they will pass by Lenggenhager’s “alley-scape” position in the mid 1950s. It is about a block and a half north of Denny Way. (We found it with the help of aerial photographs.) The sensitive perambulator was then exploring what he knew was the doomed block-wide strip between Eastlake and Melrose Avenues, then recently condemned for cutting the Seattle Freeway.



The Austrian Werner Lenggenhager moved to Seattle in 1939 and was soon working at Boeing. He lived on nearby Olive Street just up the hill. As already not above, this is not the first time we have followed Lenggenhager to this alley. On July 28, 2001 “now and then” featured him looking north at it in the summer when the mud had turned to dust. Next Spring (2018) when Jean and I hope to publish a book featuring an idealized “best of” collection of one hundred picks from the by now nearly 1800 “now and thens” printed in Pacific since the feature started early in 1982, we will want to include one or the other (mud or dust) of Lenggenhager’s nostalgic preludes to the Seattle Freeway.

Werner Lenggenhager retired from Boeing in 1966, giving him more time to explore both Seattle and Washington State with his camera. Parts of the many thousands of prints that make up his oeuvre are kept in public collections, including those at the University of Washington Library, the Museum of History and Industry and the Seattle Public Library.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, boys? Yes Jean more faithfully ours and the readers’ Edge Links that will click us about the neighborhood and beyond, followed by a few more from more ancient features. For those you’d best click-and-enlarge to read them – sometimes twice.
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CLICK CLICK the ABOVE to Read Read
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Sunday, June 18, 2017. I was pleasantly shocked this morning to see the muddied Melrose Place alley and old house that was my home growing up in Seattle. The address: 150 Melrose Place N. We lived in the home when the photo was taken in the 1950s. As a student, both in high school (Queen Anne) and the UW, I had to pick my way through that mud on my way home. Thank you and Warren Lenggenhager for the work. Roland Lund, Tacoma, formerly of the Tacoma News Tribune
This may be splitting hairs, but the temporary “Denny” bridge over the I-5 cut is at Yale, I believe. Did it connect to Olive on the east? The angle doesn’t look right for it to connect to Yale on both ends.
The west base of the budding Denny overpass can be seen on the left of the picture.