Seattle Now & Then: Lake Union Logs

jrsherrard

6 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

**THEN: Looking north on Lake Union from some unidentified off-shore prospect near where Galer Street reached the Westlake Trestle. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)**

**NOW: Logs have long since been replaced with marinas, house boats, and small maritime-based businesses along Westlake Avenue North.**

Surely the subjects here are the logs, although their likely destination, the Western Mill at the south end of lake Union, is also visible. A water tower, two stacks, and a few long factory sheds are bunched there. Scattered about to all sides are the mill workers’ generally small homes in the community that was started in 1882 by David Denny and his partners.

**Above: The Western Mill photographed by LaRouche looking east over Westlake. Below: My “repeat” of it about a dozen years ago taken from the second floor of the McKay Ford retailer.**

The silhouette of the hotel named for his brother Arthur Denny (last week’s feature) rises on the horizon far right of the featured photo at the top, where it is considerably dimmed by the industrial haze contributed by a city rebuilding after its Great Fire of June 6, 1889. The greatest teeming of timber for remaking the city were these logs temporarily parked below Queen Anne Hill.

**Paving Weslake on landfill regraded along the base of Queen Anne Hill.**

Westlake on August 14, 1933 looking north towards a billboard set near Crockett Street. *(Do you remember what beer made Milwaukee famous? CLICK FOR YOUR ANSWER)*

**Also looking north on Westlake to a Foster and Kleiser billboard near Crockett Street, six years later on September 29, 1939.**

The featured print at the top is part of a small collection contributed a few years back to the Museum of History and Industry. The selection is distinguished by panoramas and other subjects wide enough to reveal a variety of landmarks. The fifteen prints of this collection also expose the elaborate changes in the cityscape that quickly followed the fire. The economic crash of 1893 slowed the growth, but beginning in 1897 inhibitions were effectively scattered by the Yukon Gold Rush.

**Houseboat mailboxes on Westlake, 1970s**

**A few of the 1889 Seattle Great Fire ruins printed by John P. Soule, the probable photographer of the week’s featured photo of the logs off Westlake.**

The year here is most likely 1890 or 1891. By photo-historian Ron Edge’s studied speculation, the photographer may well have been John P. Soule. One of the small collection’s three-part panoramas of the Seattle waterfront was taken from the King Street wharf, which, with its coal bunkers, was then one the largest structures in Seattle. Ron identified the same pan from the same spot recorded with only a few changes among the vessels. It was, it seems, also recorded on the same day and this time, signed by Soule, who is best known for his many photographs of the ruins left by the Great Fire. (CLICK WHAT FOLLOWS TO ENLARGE IT!!!)

For the photographer, my first hunch was Frank LaRoche, another skilled local with a proven lens and a penchant for recording panoramas. In 1890 LaRoche was hired by a tireless young developer named Luther Griffith to assemble an album of prints showing off his two-mile-long trestle to Fremont. Not by coincidence, Fremont was the name of the Kansas township where Griffith was born. The LaRoch album also features a few new landmarks, like the rebuilt central waterfront and Arthur Denny’s hotel.

The photograph above of stringing trolley wire above Luther Griffith’s Westlake Avenue Trestle was taken by LaRoche and is copied from the album the photographer made of the project for the developer. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

**Approaching the penultimate turn on Westlake’s approach to the Fremont Bridge, and before the completion of the Aurorea (aka George Washington) Bridge ).**

The last turn on Westlake befor crossing the Fremont Bridge. This “high bridge” was built in 1911-12, and served until the 1915-17 construction of the Fremont Bascule Bridge. Fremont and Phinney Ridge are on the far north side of the bridge.

The Stone Way bridge was built in 1911 to help handle north-end traffic during the construction of a new Fremont Bridge. This view looks north over both the Westlake Trestle and the Stone Way Bridge. It was dismantled in 1917 after the opening of the Fremont Bascule Bridge.

**Construction on the north pier of the Fremont Bascule Bridge.**

The trestle to Fremont was built wide enough to handle promenading pedestrians, wagons, and most importantly, electric trolleys. After they began running here in the fall of 1890, the trolleys pretty much put a stop to the “mosquito fleet” of small steamers that had delivered settlers and their goods to the growing neighborhoods on the north shore of the lake. These included, west-to-east, Fremont, Ross, Edgewater, Latona (not yet Wallingford), Brooklyn (not yet the University District), Ravenna and Yesler. The northeast corner of Lake Union – and so Portage Bay as well – got its own trolley service along the east side of Lake Union in 1891. Some of this east side line was built on piles, and some on land. Railroad ties were easier to lay beside the kinder grades of the future Eastlake and Fairview Avenues.