(click to enlarge photos)

Long ago, years before The Times first encouraged me in late 1981 to submit these “now and then” features to Pacific, I came upon this street scene while gently thumbing through a stack of vintage Seattle photographs.  I was stirred by the unnamed photographer’s composition.  Was it the church on the left, or the classy Schoenfeld Standard Furniture billboard beside it that was first intended for recording until, that is, four motorcars reached the intersection and put a lock on it. Did the photographer then sacrifice the church’s steeple and dip her or his camera to record the roofs of the two parked cars and the Detroit square dance that has formed in the intersection of Olive Way and Terry Avenue?

Perhaps this is less a dance than a tableau of vehicles pausing for something or someone to unclog the jam they have created.  The man in the dark overcoat at the photo’s center is standing very near the right front fender of the small coupe that is clearly prevented from continuing east on Terry by the classy sedan on the left.  We suspect that the latter is waiting to turn north – and left – on to Terry. Meanwhile another sedan at the far right, heading west on Olive Way, waits for the coupe to get out of the way.  The man in the overcoat may believe that he has the right-of-way.  We know the drivers’ rights.  Note the two stop signs: the one, bottom-right and the other standing across the intersection in the narrow parking strip.  Clearly, the right to cross here belongs to the vehicles, the sedan on the left and the sedan entering the intersection far right, on Olive Way

 

FOR COMPARISON, ABOVE AND BELOW – TWO LOOKS EAST ON OLIVE STREET FROM THE ELEVATED PROSPECTS OF DENNY HOTEL on top of Denny Hill (FIRST) AND THE NEW WASHINGTON HOTEL, built as Second Avenue and Stewart Street following the regrade.  With a careful search the south facade and steeple of the Reformed Presbyterian can be found in the second photo (below) but not in the older look (above) east on Olive.    Olive begins at the recently regraded bottom of the photo below where it separates from Stewart Street at Fourth Avenue.  Again, Gethsemane Lutheran with its shining white facade can be spied  five blocks east on Stewart Street at Ninth Avenue. The Volunteer Park standpipe breaks the Capitol Hill horizon on the left.

Both the man in the overcoat and the driver in the coupe (with his elbow hanging out of his rolled-down window) have, it seems, their eyes on the driver of the big sedan.  Perhaps the two pedestrians crossing Terry Street, on the left, are walking briskly to escape any developing collision.  Everyone involved might have been comforted by what is written on the door of the coupe, which, although hard to decipher in this printing, reads “Seattle Health Dept.”

When I first saw this packed subject, I knew that I could easily return to the intersection with my own camera because of a clue on the horizon at the top-center: the Gethsemane Lutheran steeple on the southeast corner on Boren Street and Ninth Avenue. For decades it was across Ninth from the bus depot.

By the 1920s this was a neighborhood of churches, some new, and others decamped from their original and fiscally more valuable pioneer locations, in what became the central business district. The Reformed Presbyterians dedicated their church on Olive Street in 1894. They had also purchased the corner lot at Terry Avenue and probably collected rent from the billboard company.  The church was later lifted and fitted with a basement for a kitchen and Bible School classes.  Eventually most of the neighborhood churches either closed or relocated to more distant residential neighborhoods where the land was, again, cheaper.  The Reformed Presbyterians, also known as the Church of the Covenanters, moved in the 1940s to the Ravenna neighborhood, where they to continue to worship.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, bubba?  Jean this bubba-blog business is by now routine.  How many years have we been at it?  Only you carry the keys to these mysteries.  So we start again with a few Edge Links – 25 if them – pulled from past blogs by Ron Edge for the Horatian instruction of our readers, and follow it with a few more distant (in time of publishing) features scanned from clips.  We proceed, we keep hinting, hoping that some happy reader will help us scan the rest – about 1200 of them – perhaps  for a break from your surfing or injurious habit.   By now we know that for many of you these added layers and  metalayers within them are becoming increasingly familiar to the attentive readers we imagine among you – bless you.   Finally, please search for the Gethsemane Lutheran Church steeple repeated in the first three of Ron’s links.  It also appears in the featured photo at the top.

========

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

 

=====

=====

=====

BELOW: Later – note the Washington State license plate from 1938, the nativity year for one of us.

=====