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

jrsherrard

8 years ago

(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. 43^rd and N.E. 45^th, 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 12^th 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.

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