Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: The Ave Trolley, ca. 1939

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: On University Way, ca 1939, when the 4300 block on The Ave was the busiest book block in Seattle. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
NOW: The Ave lost its rails in 1940 but kept its common carriers; this one is heading south to the Central Business District from the Maple Leaf neighborhood.

Heading south on The Ave (University Way N.E.), Seattle Municipal Railway car no. 511 was recorded mid-block between N.E. 43rd and N.E. 45th, very possibly by a rail fan, perhaps James Turner or Lawton Gowey.  Both started waiting for and/or chasing trains and trolleys with cameras before World War II.  They knew and admired each other and shared their well-wrought snapshots.  (Much later Lawton and I did the same.)

Friend Lawton Gowey’s ID card with the city’s Water Department. Lawton was a collector, sharer and student of Seattle history, he also played the organ and led the choir of his church on Queen Anne Hill.
By comparison, and for color, Lawton Gowey’s transparency (slide) of car No. 678 in West Seattle and on one of its last runs. Knowing Lawton, it may well have been its last. The car may be posing.

Running on route 15, car no. 511 is heading for Capitol Hill’s commercial arterial, Broadway, as seen printed on the reader board above the center window. The “double-ender” was one of twenty-five trolleys (500 – 524) manufactured in 1906 in St. Louis for use on the already roaring streets of this then (and now) booming city.  All were one inch longer than forty feet, and all were scrapped in either 1940 or 1941.

Heading north on a congested University Way, cars 261 and 267 were also built in St. Louis although they are three years newer than the car featured, they too were scrapped in the early 1940s. This was a long exposure. Note the parallel light streams on the south-bound lane. They were “written” by a car that was apparently parked in from of Nordstom Shoes. The trolleys here, and the car between them, are waiting.

The Varsity Theatre opened across the street from the University Book Store in 1940.  Perhaps the theatre is hidden behind the cars on the left, or, perhaps, is not there. We prefer to think this photograph was recorded a year earlier, sometime in 1939.  Note the American flags flapping above the southbound rails.  They could be in celebration for that year’s Independence Day, but not for the 1940 Fourth of July, by which time the Broadway trolley line had been abandoned. The tracks were soon pulled, and The Ave’s pavement then resembled the wartime rubble often printed in the city’s then three dailies: The Times, The P-I and The Star.

On the right of the featured photo at the top, the popular Lun Ting Café opened sometime in 1938.  It did not make it into that year’s Polk City Directory. The chop suey and chow mein provider appears here adorned with roof tiles. Roy Nielsen, the author of UniverCity, the Story of the University District, fondly reflects that Ray Chinn, the café’s manager and, like Nielsen, a long-time member of the neighborhood Rotary Club, “was very popular in the District.”  In 1970 when the University Book Store expanded into his café, the Rotarians held a mock wake in the café on its closing night.  They called it a “Chinese Smorgasbord Inside Picnic”.  Chinn reopened nearby on 12th Avenue as a Chinese drive-in.

The worn cover to my copy of Roy Nielsen’s 1986 book UNIVERCITY.  Roy was a University District Banker whom I first met not for a loan but when we were both doing research in the University’s Northwest Collection.  Once I accompanied Roy to a meeting of the University District’s Lions Club at speak in support of his attempt to get the club’s  support (not a loan) for the publishing of his book.   He got it. 

In 1925 the Associated Students’ University Book Store (UBS) moved to The Ave from its campus home in the basement of Meany Hall. The 1970 expansion was one of its many remodels.  In the featured photo,  ca. 1939, the Book Store is the gorilla on The Ave’s 4300 hundred block, which was then Seattle’s busiest book block.  Nestled near it were also the Washington Book Store, Dearle’s Book Store, and the Bookery and Lending Library. The UBS celebrated its centennial in 2000.  A year earlier, I had a fine time in the store’s employ writing and illustrating its centennial history.

First appeared in Pacific on January 22, 1995.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Sure Jean – lots more features.  As friend Gavin MacDougall works his and his scanner’s way through the opera of features we will have a growing horde of stories to share.

THEN: Pioneer Arthur Denny's son, Orion, took this photo of popularly named Lake Union John and his second wife, Madeline, sometime before the latter's death in 1906.

THEN: The first house for Delta Gamma at N.E. 4730 University Way. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: When it was built in 1902, this box home, with classic Ionic pillars at the porch, was set above the northwest corner of the freshly graded Brooklyn Avenue and 47th Street in the University District. (Courtesy, John Cooper)

THEN: First designated Columbus Street in the 1890 platting of the Brooklyn Addition, and next as 14th Avenue to conform with the Seattle grid, ‘The Ave,’ still its most popular moniker, was renamed University Way by contest in 1919. This trim bungalow at 3711 University Way sat a few lots north of Lake Union’s Portage Bay. (Courtesy, Washington State Archives, Puget Sound Regional Archive)

THEN: sliver of the U.W. campus building called the Applied Physics Laboratory appears on the far right of this 1940 look east towards the U.W. campus from the N.E. 40th Street off-ramp from the University Bridge. While very little other than the enlarged laboratory survives in the fore and mid-grounds, much on the horizon of campus buildings and apartments still stand. (Courtesy, Genevieve McCoy)

THEN: For the four-plus months of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the center of commerce and pedestrian energy on University Way moved two blocks south from University Station on Northeast 42nd Street to here, Northeast 40th Street, at left.

THEN: When the Oregon Cadets raised their tents on the Denny Hall lawn in 1909 they were almost venerable. Founded in 1873, the Cadets survive today as Oregon State University’s ROTC. Geneticist Linus C. Pauling, twice Nobel laureate, is surely the school’s most famous cadet corporal. (courtesy, University of Washington Libraries)

THEN: Above Lake Washington’s Union Bay the Hoo-Hoo Building on the left and the Bastion facsimile on the right, were both regional departures from the classical beau arts style, the 1909 AYPE’s architectural commonplace. Courtesy John Cooper

THEN: We suspect that this quiet exposure of the Washington State Building was photographed before the gates of the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition were first opened, and certainly before a bandstand gazebo was built in the grassy circle between it and the Forestry Building. (Courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections)

THEN: An estimated 50 percent of the materials used in the old Husky Union Building were recycled into its recent remodel. The new HUB seems to reach for the roof like its long-ago predecessor, the AYP’s landmark Forestry building. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)

Then Caption: Amateur photographer George Brown most likely took this view of Portland’s 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition from the north porch of the Washington State Building. Brown also played clarinet in Wagner’s popular concert and marching band, which was probably performing at the Expo. (pic courtesy of Bill Greer)

THEN: With great clouds overhead and a landscape 45 years shorter than now, one vehicle – a pickup heading east – gets this part of State Route 520 to itself on a weekday afternoon. (courtesy Lawton Gowey)

This rare glimpse of the rapid Ravenna Creek’s fall through Cowen Park was photographed not long before the stream that had had “topped off” Green Lake into Lake Washington’s Union Bay for thousands of years was shut off in 1911. (Photo courtesy of Jim Westall)

THEN: The Latona Bridge was constructed in 1891 along the future line of the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge. The photo was taken from the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway right-of-way, now the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail. The Northlake Apartment/Hotel on the right survived and struggled into the 1960s. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

THEN: The historical view looks directly south into the Latona addition’s business district on Sixth Ave. NE. from the Northern Pacific’s railroad bridge, now part of the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)

THEN: Long-time Wallingford resident Victor Lygdman looks south through the work-in-progress on the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge during the summer of 1959. Bottom-right are the remnants of the Latona business and industrial district, including the Wayland Mill and the Northlake Apartments, replaced now with Ivar’s Salmon House and its parking. (Photo by Victor Lygdman)

THEN: From 1909 to the mid-late 1920s, the precipitous grade separation between the upper and lower parts of NE 40th Street west of 7th Ave. NE was faced with a timber wall. When the wall was removed, the higher part of NE 40th was shunted north, cutting into the lawns of the homes beside it. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)

THEN: Chalk-written real estate notices to the sides of Seattle’s Aurora Speedway in 1937 prelude by several decades the profession’s book and computer listings and the expectation of some that an agent will now be driving a Mercedes. (Courtesy, Washington State Archives, Bellevue Community College branch.)

THEN: On March 25, 1946, or near it, Wide World Photos recorded here what they titled “University Vet Housing.” It would soon be named the Union Bay Village and house the families of returning veterans. The first 45 bungalows shown here rented for from $35 to $45 dollars a month. It would increase to a “teeming conglomerate of 500 rental units.” With housing for both married students and faculty. The view looks north over a street that no longer exists. The homes on the right horizon face the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail on N.E. Blakeley Street near N.E. 45th Place. (Courtesy Ron Edge)

THEN: The Gothic University of Washington Campus in 1946 beginning a seven-year crowding with prefabricated dormitories beside Frosh Pond. In the immediate background [on the right] is Guggenheim Hall. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

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