Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: Savery Cherries

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: The southwest end of the University of Washington’s Savery Hall, still under construction, on the left, was completed in 1920, also a likely year for the photograph. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)
NOW: The dependable March blooming of the Quad’s Yoshino cherry trees, is compliments of the University’s Arboretum and the Washington State Department of Transportation. The trees were moved from the Arboretum and transplanted in the Quad during construction of the Evergreen Point Bridge and SR-520. Thereafter, as revealed by Jean’s repeat from his 21-foot pole, the Quad has become a favored setting for wedding photos.

When classes first began Sept. 4, 1895, on the University of Washington’s new Interlaken campus, the students were greeted by  the school bell, carried from the old campus to the new, but hanging in the Denny Hall belfry.  Denny Hall is out-of-frame up the paved path that runs through the columns to the right.  The bell soon became annoyingly familiar after sunrise when the bell ringer took, it seemed, cruel pleasures in waking not only students but also the citizens of Brooklyn. (Brooklyn was the University District’s first popular name.) If the weather were right, the bell could be heard in Renton.

The twenty-foot tall hand-carved columns were examples of the Greek Ionic order. Inevitably, perhaps, they also became iconic, and for some the University’s most representative symbol. Each weighing about one-thousand pounds, they were originally grouped along the façade of the school’s first structure on the original 1861 campus, near what is long since the northeast corner of Seneca

Here, in 1907, the first campus main hall has been pivoted 90 degrees clockwise from its original footprint near the northwest corner of Fourth Ave. and Seneca Street and moved north to face Union Street, while its fate was still not decided. The four columns have been kidnapped to the new campus. The view looks southeast from near Union Street and Fifth Avenue, before the latter was cut through the campus soon after this photo was recorded.

Street and Fourth Avenue.  When the classic quartet was detached and moved to the new campus, student preservation activists continued to hope that the entire building would follow them to be reunited in time for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition.  It was not to be.  Instead, selected remains of the University’s first home were carved into commemorative canes. The four surviving columns were consigned to this position in the then still future Quad. They were named, “Loyalty”, “Industry”, “Faith”, and “Efficiency.”  Neither Jean nor I know which is which.

The blooming Quad in the Spring of 1996 with members of the Volunteer Park Conservatory Orchestra  posing with David Mahler, their director, far left.

In 1915 the school’s Board of Regents embraced architect Carl F. Gould’s “Revised General Plan of the University of Washington,” which included the Quad and prescribed that the architectural style to be used in its several buildings should be Collegiate Gothic.  Commerce Hall, the brick and tile example on the right of the featured photo at the top, was completed in 1917.  Work on Philosophy Hall, on the left, was delayed by the material needs of the First World War, and completed late in the fall of 1920. By 1972 the names of both halls were changed to Savery, in honor of William Savery, the head of the University’s Department of Philosophy for more than forty years.

Icon inspects icon: history professor Edmund Meany in a Feb. 21, 1930 clipping from The Seattle Times.
Loyalty, Industry, Faith and  Efficiency get a cleaning, from a Seattle Times clipping for May 12m 1942,

The columns see from the rear of the Sylvan Theatre with Anderson Hall around the corner.
The Sylvan Theatre in late November, 1993.

With the completion of Commerce and Philosophy Halls, the quartet of columns was moved in 1921 to the Sylvan Theatre, which had been prepared for them. The Seattle Times noted that “It was the first time that the traditional pillars have been tampered with without some sort of ceremony.”  Since then the “ancient pillars” have witnessed a good share of pomp and circumstance during school’s graduation exercises.

“Postcard Artist Ellis”” colored record of the Quad before the Cherries.
The Quad with Cherry trees but not their blossoms in the 1960s during the “winter of our discontent” and a student demonstration in favor of “getting the war machine off campus.”
WEB EXTRAS

As per your request, Paul, I’ll toss in a few just for fun:  They make us better Jean.

Anything to add, blossoms?

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: Named for a lumberman, and still home for the UW’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, the upper floor’s high-ceilinged halls, including the Forest Club Room behind Anderson Hall’s grand Gothic windows, were described for us by the department’s gregarious telephone operator as “very popular and Harry Potterish.” (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)

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: 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: 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)

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

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)

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ANOTHER IONICICONIC – MOVED&SAVED

PLYMOUTH CONGREGATIONAL COLUMNS, March 21, 1966.

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MORE of MAHLER AND WAGNER

More of Mahler – and with Wagner – posing on campus in 1996.

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