(click to enlarge photos)


This public works photograph looks into a regrade trench marked on its sides by the claws of the two steam shovels shaping the pit. The teams with their wagons wait patiently to be rattled while being filled with Ice Age droppings. From another photo, also recorded on February 20, 1911, we know that at least two more wagons are here out-of-frame to the right. All are pointed north down the center of


Fifth Avenue at its new grade. Ultimately, of course, Fifth Avenue will be hard-paved – it is in the contract – but not for the comfort of horses. They prefer the mud. After a wagon’s turn comes up and it is filled, its team will turn left (west) down the freshly dug cut on Cherry Street to the paved avenues below, proceeding to make its assigned delivery, perhaps on the tideflats. The teams will try not to slip.

We can estimate the speed of this digging with a photograph published in The Seattle Times on March 30, 1911, “printed” above. It aims in the same angle as the featured photo from the west side of Fifth Avenue, but The Times photographer has moved on and followed the shovels’ work to the north side of Cherry Street. The stately home, near Columbia Street, seen in the featured photo at the top in the clear light just to the left of the shovel’s exhaust also appears in The Times published photo, where it is, however, set on blocks preparing for removal to some friendlier lot. The helpful Times caption also offers some context and statistics for this regrade. The Fifth Avenue Regrade reached from Washington Street to Madison Street and moved 190,00 cubic yards of earth at 49 cents a yard. (We may, again, sympathize with the horses.) The contracts for grading, sewerage, water mains, walks, lights and (to the horses potential distress) paving, came to $270,000.

Later in November, 1911, the work was stalled when the contractors Marks, Russell and Gallagher (their name is signed on each steam-shovel below the operator’s window) stopped digging until the city agreed to indemnify them from any further slides that might damage buildings along what was left of the Fifth Avenue Regrade. By then seven structures had been wrecked, most of them near Yesler Way. (The THIRD of the Edge Links that follow this little essay will open another feature that concentrates on the Fifth Avenue slides at Yesler that accompanied the regrading of Fifth Avenue nearer its start.)
Public works watching was a popular pastime during the early 20th-century regrading years. A line of regrade watchers seen in the featured photo on the right stand on or near Cherry Street. Soon, however, these spectators will have their platform upset when the shovels continue their clawing to the east (right) as far as Sixth Avenue where Cherry Street reaches a natural steppe, or plateau, that paused First Hill’s climbing for one block, as far as Seventh Avenue.


In this block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues the regraders exposed but did not upset the Kneeland House (aka the Leland Hotel), a red brick hostelry at 511 Cherry Street. It was three-stories high with thirty-six rooms and set on the south side of the street just west of the alley. The cutting on Cherry left the hotel about thirty feet higher, and with this difference came a tragedy. On the fifteenth of November, renter Ella Johnson, with her helper Nettie Herserma, when lowering furniture from the hotel into the new cut, the hotel’s railing gave way. The women were delivered to the Wayside Hospital in the Bonney Watson hearse, which doubled as an ambulance when not busy with “loved ones.” Struggling with a broken back, Johnson died, while Herserma recovered.
[from The Times for Sept. 21, 1912. ASK HEAVY DAMAGES – Judgment for $100,000 for the death of Mrs. Ella J. Johnston was asked in the superior court yesterday afternoon against George Nicholls, owner of a building at 511 Cherry Street, which Mrs. Johnston rented. On November 15 last a porch rail gave way beneath her weight and she was precipitated thirty feet to the ground, sustaining a broken back, from which injury she died later. James T. Lawler, administrator of the estate, brought one suit for $50,000, and the three minor children of Mrs. Johnston joined in another for a similar amount.]
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, mates? Many relevant links Jean – most either from the neighborhood or of other street regrades. Note, again, there is more on the Fifth Avenue regrade in the third of the twenty-seven “Edge Links” stacked immediately below.
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