(click to enlarge photos)


This coming Thursday August 17th, John Stamets’ 1986 panorama looking east on Pike Street from the Pike Place Market, printed here, will be exhibited in the Market from 6:30-8:30 PM near where Jean Sherrard took his contemporary parallel earlier this summer. A mere thirty-one years separate John’s and Jean’s subjects where Pike Street elbows north into Pike Place. We have chosen this subject in part to honor our brilliant old friend whose civic record of photographic achievements was well chosen and utterly unique. John Stamets died suddenly on the weekend of June 7-8 2014, near his office and basement laboratory in the University of Washington’s Gould Hall where he had been teaching architectural photography for many years.
The featured photo at the top – looking east from the market’s philanthropic pig – appears on page sixty-five of John’s 1987 book “Portrait Of A Market.” Although now out of print, you may find a used copy with a little web exploring. All of the book’s seventy-three subjects are pans recorded with his Widelux camera, and each takes its own page. This leaves room for the often evocative captions authored by Steve Dunnington, whom the book’s publisher, Cathy Hillenbrand of The Real Comet Press, explains is a “journalist and co-owner of the Pike Place Market newsstand.” Thirty years ago or so,


you may have bought a publication from him here at the southwest corner of what remains one of Seattle’s most cherished landmarks: the intersection of First Avenue and Pike Street. On the Thursday afternoon of August 17, both Dunnington and Hillenbrand will be on hand to share in what is also the Market’s 110th Anniversary Celebration.
I first met John Stamets in the 1970s on Capitol Hill, we then both rented apartments on 13th Avenue. John, a Yale graduate, was then the progressive tabloid Seattle Sun’s last editor and also its last photographer. Among his many projects that followed were an elaborate colored survey of “Flesh Avenue,” the name sometimes used for First Avenue south of the Market before its gentrification, a masterful collection of portraits of his riders when he was driving a cab, and the oversized record of the business district through its changes in the 1980s and after. John was also famous for his serendipitous knack for recording the unannounced 1987 collapse of the new construction on the Husky Stadium (he was biking by) and the fall of the Hammering Man at the somewhat new Seattle Art Museum’s entrance in 1991.

This coming Thursday’s unique tour begins at 6:30 pm in in the Market Arcade. (Here is a link, www.pikeplacemarket.org/stametsexhibit hashtag: #StametsExhibit.) Each of the twenty featured subjects will be attended and interpreted by a member of the sponsoring organizations, including Friends of the Market, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority, and the King Conservation District. Later this year, the selected Stamets Market panoramas will be put on permanent exhibit in the Market Commons, part of the new addition on the west side of Western Avenue.

WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? Yup Jean and more of the similar, although Ron Edge’s excavations from recent blog contributions (about the market and such) will need to wait on his rising to, we hope, a wet Sunday the 13th. Meanwhile here follows some old features from the neighborhood. (Thanks for your stirring Meridian Street block party this Sat. the 12th.. Did you have time to also take some snaps of that joyful congregating of North Green Lake familiars and visiting friends Berangere, our fellow blogger, and her family?)
[Ron is awake, while I am off again to nighty-bears. The champion of that aka good-night, Bill Burden, is also in town this weekend for visits with Berangere and her family, and tasting Jean’s roasted duck at the Sherrard’s welcoming banquet on the elegant roof of their garage on Friday last. So here follows, and just in time, Ron’s links to recent posts.]
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