(click to enlarge photos)


Calculating the rate posted on the roof of this “office” shed at 725 University Street, any motorist leaving their car in this lot for longer than half a day would pay thirty cents, not fifteen. Seventy-nine years later this seems comical – and very fair. The subject was recorded on January 24, 1938, not quite a decade after the 1929 economic crash that briefly shook the order of things before strapping it in the Great Depression.


Like last week’s photo this one (at the top) was also rescued a half-century ago from a tax accessor’s waste basket. 1938 was an especially busy year for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographers. While these researcher-recorders were busy making a photographic inventory of every taxable structure in King County, they discovered that many were not listed. The result was two communities: the supportive one in daylight mixed with an untaxed black one. The shed? We do not know on which side of that ragged line it sits.


The earliest of the aerial surveys recorded for mapping Seattle dates from 1929. Kept in the City Archive, it shows that this block, bordered by Seneca and University streets and Eighth (climbing First HIll behind the shed) and Seventh Avenues, was mostly crowded with small structures built to the north and west sides of one large one: the Exeter House, which still fills the quarter-block at the northwest corner of Seneca Street and Eighth Avenue. (In this week’s featured photo, the Exeter is just off frame to the right.) The 1936, and 1946 aerials both show the block filled with cars, the Exeter and this shed. Counting the cars we can figure that the three parked here are joined with about 250 others. Together they – the parked cars, the shed and the Exeter – fill the block.

With its last residential listing in The Times, 725 University Street was still a boarding house and not this parking lot office. The news, printed on October 13, 1936, tells how George L. Swanson, and A.T. Entwisle, a resident at 725, on hearing the screams of a “Miss Collins, walking at Eight Ave. and Seneca Street” responded by tackling a purse-snatcher named Bisbee. The heroes held him there for the Police. The pathetic young Bisbee explained that he did it “because he was broke.”

At the time, depressed Seattle was also broke, or nearly. In the year of Bisbee’s felony, the Seattle City Council, accompanied over five years by three mayors and dozens of parking meter salesmen, began its earnest debate on parking meters. With meters the council hoped to inhibit double-parking while counting the nickels and dimes pouring into the city’s general fund. One meter machine salesman offered contributions to Councilman Hugh De Lacy to help erase the debt left by his most recent campaign. An ardent clean government socialist, DeLacy reported the proposed perk,

On November 8, 1941 The Times announced that the City had set December 15 as a deadline for completion of the parking meter installation. The writer waggishly added “Having heard much about parking meters in the abstract, we look forward to seeing them in concrete.”
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, les mecs?
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There’s a 31 story building here now? Wow! Hard to believe; isn’t that almost as high as the Columbia Tower?
Long story, but my family owned the parking lot. The city took a section of it for the freeway ramp and then the rest of the parking lot in 1971 for surprise – a parking garage.