(click to enlarge photos)
When the featured historical photo is enlarged there is a surprise waiting in this wetland dump. All the men, I count eighteen teamsters grouped with their trash wagons across the pond, are looking directly at the photographer, most likely James Lee. For many years Lee was the official photographer for the city’s Public
Works Department: our own municipal photographer. (Beginning in 1983, we have used many of Lee’s records in this weekly feature.) In the week’s featured photo, Lee – we are confidently assuming – looks northwest through the block bordered by Valley and Aloha Streets, and Eighth and Dexter Avenues. That solitary motorcar parked at the southeast corner of Dexter and Aloha (upper-left) may well be Lee’s.
James Lee had other shots to take this October 29, 1915, a Thursday with light rain. All had something to do with the city’s solid waste services. This week’s feature is a record of a civic dump and numbered, we assume by Lee, 3147. Two numbers back, 3145, is the by now often published close-up of a refuse wagon (like the ones grouped here across the water) picking up trash from residences on Capitol Hill’s Belmont Avenue. With 3141, Lee looks into this same littered pit, but from Dexter Avenue and near to what we have imagined is his car. Upon reflection, it seems that these three print numbers do not indicate the likely order of Lee’s snap-shooting that Thursday. Why? It would been wasted effort to expose a negative here at the southwest corner of Lake Union 3147, then climb the hill for an appointment with a dray on Belmont 3145, only to return again to the dump for 3141. Reverse the order and it is still slipshod. The photograph numbers were, we propose, given in the dark room without much clerical concern beyond the day’s date.
These years were a stressful time for garbage in booming Seattle. The city, which had only recently started collecting solid waste for delivery to its nine managed dumps, also built five garbage incinerators between 1907 and 1914. These “refuse destructors” were disappointing. Meanwhile, the tide-stirred dump named Puget Sound was ever inviting.
The concrete box in the Featured photograph, behind and to the right of the eight posing wagons, is the Municipal Transfer Station. It was built for Seattle’s first public-owned trollies, which started running in 1914 on Dexter Avenue between the business district and Ballard’s Salmon Bay. (We featured it with a now-then on April 23, 2000, and have attached it directly above.) The station, delicately designed with arched windows and an ornamental banding of colored tiles at the cornice, is probably the work of Daniel Huntington, then the City Architect. The transfer station bears a small resemblance to Huntington’s much larger Seattle City Light Steam Plant, near the southeast corner of Lake Union.
Moving up Queen Anne Hill in the featured photo at the top, note the steep grade separation to the left of the transfer station at the northwest corner of Aloha and Dexter. The first lines of residences beyond this cut and up the hill were short-lived. They were sacrificed for the Aurora Speed Way in the early 1930s. But on the horizon, left-of-center, stands the enduring outline of one of Seattle’s more majestic landmarks, the former Queen Anne High School.
Probably of greater interest to Seattle children on this Thursday were Van Camp’s Trained Pigs performances at the Grand Theatre. After dancing, boxing and drinking milk from nursing bottles, these trained baby pigs were “passed through the audience for the children to pet.” The Grand was packed for all the little pig shows on both Thursday and Friday.
The Browns lived on Dexter Avenue near Denny Park and so also near the swimming hole behind the Westlake Viaduct. Here they are, the entire family, cuddling at home. The father, William LeRoy Brown, was a clarinetist with the “Dad” Wagner Band and a plumber too. He was a resourceful photographer and we have use many of his negatives in this weekly feature over the past 35 years.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, guys? Plenty from the surrounds Jean. Many of them have been seen hear earlier, but we now have cheerful news of our intentions to scan the rest of the 1800-plus features produced with the now-and-then parade over the last 35 years. Gosh it would go forward with greater speed and merciful grace if we could find a volunteer or two among our readers to help with the scanning. And we have an extra scanner on loan from Ron Edge.
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A BRIEF RETURN TO DEXTER AVENUE
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WHILE MUCH OF THE ABOVE, the regrades, construction, swimming, was going on, everyone was also preoccupied with the First World War. Here is a parodic clip from The Times for October 28, 1915. Give note, for instance, to poor Texas and neglected Nevada.
