(click to enlarge photos)


Set five-or-so blocks east of Puget Sound and 200 feet above it, Gatewood Elementary School is also only a half mile west of – and about 320 feet below – the highest point in Seattle. At 522 feet above the tides this elevated area is appropriately called Highpoint, and like the school below it, its two water towers face Myrtle Street.


In Jean Sherrard’s “now” Myrtle interrupts the northward extension of 44th Avenue SW, bottom-left. In the historical photo we can detect the rails and timber ties of the trolley line that spurred the building of both homes and families in this part of West Seattle. The streetcars began running south from The Junction at Alaska Street



and California Avenue in 1907. The tracks turned west on Myrtle and soon after passing the school turned south past the Kenney Home (treated in this column for June 19, 2016) to reach the nearby Fauntleroy neighborhood and its pier for ferry and mosquito fleet connections with all of Puget Sound, most importantly with Vashon Island.

In spite of the school’s name, no great gate was built to open for admission into these woods. Rather, the school is named for Carlisle Gatewood, a developer who platted two residential additions nearby: Gatewood Acres and Gatewood Gardens. (You can find them in the Baist Map detail printed above.) Liking, perhaps, the picturesque qualities of the name, the Seattle School Board kept it for its neighborhood school, which opened in 1910 on the campus’ original 1.67 acres. The first year’s attendance of 268 students indicates that the school was needed – perhaps desperately. While the 1922 addition by architect Floyd A. Naramore was later demolished, the original schoolhouse was saved and designated a city landmark in 1988.

Certainly, by many tastes, the Tudor-styled Gatewood School is beautiful. The architect Edgar Blair was 35 when he moved here in 1906. Three years later he succeeded the prolific James Stephen as the official Seattle school architect. Blair also kept busy. As we learn from the repeatedly helpful UW Press tome Shaping Seattle Architecture, he drew the plans for many other schools with which the reader may well be familiar. His more than 35 school designs (originals and additions) include three Seattle high schools, Franklin (1910-11, above), Ballard (since replaced) and West Seattle.

Gatewood is but one part of the undulating neighborhood that looks west across Puget Sound from the long and laid back western side of West Seattle. The five miles from Duwamish Head to Fauntleroy is worth an unplanned exploration. Across Puget Sound the string of Olympic Mountains summits with their sunsets are the benchmarks for what is also alluring about the western side of West Seattle. In 1924 the enduring gift of this panorama inspired a sentimental majority of the West Seattle Commercial Club to profess “We feel that the term West Seattle covering the west side is confusing.” In its place the business boosters proposed a new “blanket term to cover the entire west side.” The term, elegiac but short-lived, was “Olympic Hills.”
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, les mecs? Yes Jean more wallowing by Ron and I mostly in West Seattle or on the way to and from it. But something is new. When we select an appropriate feature that was first published in Pacific before we started our weekly printing of this blog, me will now feel free to mix it with any more recent blog feature with which it mixes well. For instance four inches below we have snuggled the first illustrated writing we did on Sea View Hall, not so long ago on January 23, 2000, hand-in-hand with our recent treatment of the same structure. We hope you will find that not too much it lifted from the old narrative into the new. We decided to do it twice because of our love for Clay Eals, our old friend who until recently was the executive director (or some such status-saturated power-title) for the West Seattle Historical Society. Start clicking.

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Thank you for profiling Gatewood Elementary. I grew up a few blocks from there. In 1959 I started kindergarten. Mrs.Storm’s class was in the daylight basement room to the right of the main entrance. I still have a vivid memory of a mother dragging her daughter down the sidewalk from California Avenue, crying and kicking on the first day of school. In those days there were portables on the north side, two or three. Mr. Stratton’s 6th grade was in the very northwest corner, and Mrs. Hyde’s 3rd grade was in a portable just south of it, I believe. On the east side was a small playground area where we congregated before school. Some bricks fell off that east face in the 1965 earthquake, which fortunately hit about a half hour before kids started showing up. The whole lower playground on the west was paved in those days. Around the corner on California there was a mom-and-pop grocery where the coffee shop Café Ladro is. The owner was a durable old Siberian named Leon. The candy counter was mobbed every day after school. The 50’s and 60’s were a great time to grow up, and the somewhat small-town feel of West Seattle in those days was a bonus. Having Lincoln Park as a nearby back yard was fantastic. Great memories.
I remember that all the playgrounds were paved and there was a girl side and a boys side, you could not intermingle on the playground. And I remember that the students were only allowed to use the drinking fountains in the basement; the drinking fountains on the upper floors were for teachers only. And I remember the day of the earthquake where the bricks fell from the building. And I definitely recall the front stairs as you enter the building and the woodsy smell of the interior. And the swinging door cloak rooms within the classrooms with all the hooks on the wall. I attended Gatewood Elementary from 1961 thru 1967 (Kindergarten thru 5th grade). Also pants on girls were not allowed, you had to wear a skirt or a dress everyday. My how things have changed!
Yes Marie you remember it exactly as I do. That old wood structure smell. I was in first grade in1965. I lived up over the top of Gatewood Hill and had just left for school. Mrs Kelly’s class. Wasn’t sure what had just occurred until another older student across the street yelled that it was an earthquake. I regret not ever getting back to walk that school before they remodeled it. Lots of great memories. The girls side and boys side of the playground and the “courts” used when it was raining. That was not so much fun. Mrs. Rosetti the playground teacher. She took her job very seriously. How about Pete the janitor. He was cool. What a job he had. I’m would think these people are no longer alive but they sure had an impact on my young life. A different time for sure.