(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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