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Seattle Now & Then: Two Founders on Main Street

jrsherrard

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Posing for a Post-Intelligencer photographer, Martin Johanson pauses from his daily chores of keeping the Millionair Club he founded fit and clean ca. 1925. (Courtesy, The Museum of History Industry, the Post-Intelligencer Collection.)
NOW: Holding a surviving copy of the original Real Change newspaper from 1995, its founder, Tim Harris poses on Main Street a few feet from the newspaper’s office.

While pursuing his “repeat” for this week’s feature, Jean Sherrard discovered what he described as a “coincidence of good works” on this pioneer corner.  Its location can be figured and so found twice in the older photo, which dates from the mid-1920s.  First, the address is scribbled on the wall, top-center, with chalk or perhaps whitewash.  It reads “98 Main St.”  The second clue is the rusticated block of granite that sits on the sidewalk, bottom-left.  It has been part of the footprint of the New England Hotel since 1890, when its frame hostelry was rebuilt with brick, concrete, and stone following the incineration of thirty-plus city blocks, including this one, during Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.

The Pre-1889 Fire New England Hotel at the northwest corner of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.), first printed in the Pacific Mag. for May 11, 1986.   CLICK TO ENLARGE

In the featured “repeat” on top, the two men posing above the building’s sidewalk well are both smiling.  They are, first, Martin Johanson, holding the broom in the “then,” and about ninety-two years later the also friendly Tim Harris, who has unfolded the first issue of Real Change, the newspaper he founded. The paper’s web page describes itself as a “weekly progressive street newspaper written by a pro staff and sold by self-employed vendors, many of whom are homeless.  The paper provides them with an alternative to panhandling.”  When first printed as a monthly in 1994, Harris described it as published by the “Real Change Homeless Empowerment Project.” (We both strongly suspect that many PacificNW readers have patronized Real Change, and hope so.)

Martin Johanson, the man with the sweeper’s broom, was also a founder, and the Millionair Club that he first opened on this corner in 1921 continues to find work – and much else – for the unemployed who seek its services.  The Club has long since moved north into Belltown, and so up and away from the basement of the New England Hotel.  If you use the Club and/or support it with a donation

From The Seattle Times for March 4, 1923.
Clip from The Times for March 31, 1924.
From The Times for April 19, 1926.
From The Times for February 25, 1927.
The The Times fro April 24, 1928.

or, perhaps, a bid at one of its auctions, you are a member.  You can figure some of its services on the signage held above the well.  Reading from the top “Free Supper here each Sunday 6;00 p.m. This Place Open From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Daily, 8 a.m. to 7p.m. on Sunday.”  The Club’s basement also served as a performance space for speakers, readers, and performers.  Nearby at 112 Main Street the Club also ran a restaurant with a nutritious menu that was both cheap and/or free to those with tickets gained from working.  The Club’s first quarters were also fitted with beds.

By using the internet there are, as one might expect for two such well-known and respected services, many sources to learn more about the work of these zestful contributors to our local culture.  With both you would do well to begin with their own web-pages, https://www.millionairclub.org for the Millionair Club and www.realchangenews.org/ for the magazine or tabloid with what it describes as a “compact format.”  Real Change is admirably forthright with its statistics.  Its weekly circulation is about 16,000.  I know from experience, having edited hereabouts a weekly tabloid a half-century ago, that what is printed on the cover can make a surprising difference in how many copies are sold on the street.

Some good intentions from a Times clip published on November 12, 1967.

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The post-fire New England Hotel’s turn during the Pioneer Square Historic District restoration. This Times clip from December 15, 1974.  CLICK TO ENLARGE.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Certainly Jean, starting first with another offering of Real Change  followed by a variety of past features pulled by Ron and I from our stock of scanned examples.  (And now Jean we will ALSO plead – please – once again – for some dear reader to help us in this.  We ask help in scanning the remaining weekly features. As you know well Jean we are disastrously non-profit and so must plead aka beg.  But we have all the clips from The Times  collected and in proper order, about 1800 of them since Seattle Now and Then started appearing in Pacific on a rainy mid-winter morning in 1982.  We have the scanner too to deliver for use with the clips.  One (or two) boxes will hold it all.  So please have a little mercy for your dutiful history hacks and help us complete this opera.   So far we have roughly 500 of the about 1800 features scanned.  Please help fulfill this blog with the growing sum of its abiding features.  The clips, scanner and grateful instructions are standing by.  

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BACK ON THE CORNER

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THE ILLUSTRATED IVAR

IVAR AND JIM

IVAR crowned ‘KING OF THE WATERFRONT” by his friend JIM FABER in 1984.
Jim Faber on his own in the Salmon House, 1987. Ivar passed two years earlier. Jim and I often met for lunch to plan the interior for the new Acres of Clams. Ivar started it and we “finished” it. Recently it was remodeled once more. Some of what Jim and I arranged for the 1985 remodel were used with the latest changes, which are quite splendid. In 1999 (or perhaps ’98) I returned to writing a biography of Ivar. It was inevitably titled  “Keep Clam.” But now the name has changed.  It is THE ILLUSTRATED IVAR. I’ll be ashamed if I don’t complete it by next summer – if I survive as a cogent octogenarian.. Paul D.

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1967 – 1977 – 2017  The Golden Anniversary for the founding of HELIX

ODD FELLOWS Hall on Capitol Hill, site of many benefit concerts in the 1970s including a 10th anniversary celebration of the 1967 founding of HELIX, the weekly tabloid hinted about near the end of this week’s feature.

Odd Fellows Fountain

HELIX Originals above and below – 25th Anniversary at BLUE MOON TAVERN by Jeff Jaisun

The LAST ISSUE art mostly by Larry Heald one of the three Heald brothers who helped with Helix thru its three years .
The collective poster made for the 10th Anniversary dance in the Odd Fellows Ballroom on Capitol Hill. It was packed. We projected a light show of footage from past Rock-Jazz festivals, mostly from SKY RIVER ROCK FIRE – all three of them in 1968, 69 and 70.
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