(click to enlarge photos)
After Seattle’s summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, many of its VIP citizens, those who could “make things happen,” longed for more of its multifarious fun. For new excitement they got the “joyous week of July 17 through 22,” the Golden Potlatch of 1911. It was the first of several Potlatches produced sporadically by community impresarios up until World War II when public demonstrations became limited to fairwells and welcome-home celebrations for veterans.
Most likely this featured scene on top is from the first Potlatch’s Industrial Parade. Judging from the printed banner attached to the roof of the float at the scene’s center, this well-knit wagon carried a loom backed on both sides by women costumed with its knitted dry goods. Both the rug stretched for a roof and the rug on the floor are examples of this “industry on parade.” Surely it was very colorful,
more at least than the costumes worn by those watching here (in the featured photo at the top) as the southbound horse-powered parade takes a turn off Fourth Avenue to Olive Way. The seemingly idle electric trolley on the left of the featured photo with “express” written on its signboard is probably parked for the duration. It was here on Stewart Street that streetcars that used Fourth Avenue turned around by moving forward-backward-forward through a t-shaped terminus.
You will be correct to discern a vacant city block behind the rug float (in the fatured photo). It is shaped like a flatiron or triangle. The grade is a new creation of the then work-in-progress, the Denny Regrade, before which this was the steep southeast corner of this eponymous hill. In 1906 the intersection of Fourth and Stewart was still several stories higher. That year Westlake Avenue was cut through from Fourth and Pike to Denny Way making the intersections along Westlake considerably more imaginative. Here in 1911 Westlake barely touches the southeast corner of itself, Fifth
Avenue and Olive Way. In 1890, well before the regrade, St Mark’s Episcopal built it first sanctuary on the hillside triangle. When they relocated to a larger First Hill sanctuary in 1897, the abandoned church was first converted into a livery stable and then the “We Print Everything” Cooperative Printing Company. In 1916 the long vacant flatiron block was filled with the well-loved and still-standing Time’s Square Building, the terra-cotta confection that Jean Sherrard shows off in his repeat.
Finally, we turn right to the four-story apartment house on the south side of Olive Way. It was the Waverly and is now a studied object of interest for preservationist and historian Diana James. (The northwest corner of the Waverly appears in the first photo beyond this point. It is the southeast corner of Fourth Ave. and Olive Way, and so the origin of Olive Way at its west end.) What I know of these apartments – and many others – I learned directly from Diana. Jean and I have, in the past, featured a number of her discoveries, which PacificNW readers may also know from her book “Shared Walls”, a history of Seattle’s early apartments. Thankfully, her research continues.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, boyos? Surely Jean, and starting, again, with the appropriate or relevant features (usually from the neighborhood) grabbed from recent features, followed by older ones presented, with few exceptions, merely as clips scanned from older Sunday Times. So please click away.
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