Seattle Now & Then: Savery Cherries

jrsherrard

8 years ago

(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.