Seattle Now & Then: The Church on the Corner (of Boren & Pine)

jrsherrard

8 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: In 1938, the likely year of this tax photo, the First Swedish Methodist Church at the north east corner of Boren Avenue and Pine Street was one of several Protestant congregations in the greater Cascade Neighborhood that were built around Scandenavian immigrant communities. (Courtesy Stan Unger)

**NOW: Of the ten overpasses between downtown and the First Hill-Capitol Hill area this is the only site where two streets, Boren and Pine, intersect directly above the I-5 freeway.**

On May 6, 1961, the Central Church of Christ was awarded $61,500 for their sanctuary and its lot at the northeast corner of Boren Avenue and Pine Street. The jury’s award was $11,000 more than the $50,000 offered by the state’s highway department and $6,500 less than the church’s lawyers requested.

**The Swedish Methodist’s frame church at the northeast corner of Boren Avenue and Pine Street survives in this pre-freeway aerial of the neighborhood. It appears right-of-center near the top.**

Earlier, on October 20, 1960, another jury had awarded $67,500 for the three lots on the northwest corner of the same intersection. The decision was only a little more than half of the $112,000 that owner Roy De Grief’s appraisers claimed they were worth. A review of a few of the hundreds of other properties litigated for their involuntary conversions from home, business or institutional real estate into pavement and freeway landscape reveals that divergent evaluations between what was requested and what was given were commonplace during the construction of the Seattle Freeway, as it was first named.

**A Seattle Times clipping from Nov. 6, 1952**

The Church of Christ moved into the church with the truncated tower on the corner of Boren and Pine late in 1952. Its members could not have known than that in eight years they would lose their sanctuary when the entire intersection was bought out by the state’s highway department for what the courts agreed was a public works necessity: a north-south Seattle freeway. It was the Seattle Swedish Methodists – aka Calvary Methodist – who built the church

in 1905. Their long-serving pastor, Francis Ahnlund, was born in Norland, Sweden, in 1880, and immigrated to America in 1901. He answered the church’s call in 1919, moving from San Francisco to the Seattle congregation and preaching on this corner until 1951 when his health forced him to retire after 32 years of service. That longevity was a record for the Methodist-Protestant denomination. A year later Ahnlund died at home.

As was the practice of many congregations built by and around immigrant communities, Ahnlund regularly led services in both English and the language of the ‘old country,’ which the older parishioners understandably found both more comforting and inspiring. The two were often split between the morning and vesper services.

**Seattle Times clipping from October 9, 1937**

Francis and Elizabeth Ahnlund cultivated a family of both faith and finesse. They had three daughters, two of whom, Sylvia and Norma, were adept organists who helped keep Calvary a “singing church.” Perhaps as something of a tribute to their father, two of the daughters also married preachers.

**Times Obituary for Francis Ahnlund, March 12, 1952**

The Church on the corner was built in 1905-06 at a cost of $12,000, seated more than 500 persons, and was originally topped by a steeple that extended high above the box tower. By the likely year of this tax photo, 1938, the steeple was gone. It was, of course, not removed by the earthquake of November 12, 1939. The early 1960s cutting of the Freeway here was deep. The difference in elevation between the sidewalk shown in the “now” and the freeway pavement below it is fifty feet. The original street grade was somewhere in between the bridge and the ditch.