Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: South Alaskan Way, 1939

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Between 1919 and 1929 this open section of Railroad Avenue (South Alaskan Way) was interrupted with a viaduct for electric trollies carrying workers to the shipyards on Harbor Island. In 1953 an Alaskan Way viaduct returned again, a concrete elevated, which, again, hid Elliott Bay from the Pioneer Square Historic District. Now the waterfront is about to be freed again from its largest polluting obstruction. (Courtesy, Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard)
NOW: While trying to hide his early evening shadow behind the red traffic cone on the left, Jean waited for a car to come along. His point is well taken. The northbound traffic behind the cones is recently opened again for moving vehicles to Colman Dock for ferry loading.

The unnamed photographer of this week’s snapshot had a target – the two billboards standing center-left.  With about seven hundred other 5×7 inch negatives, this exquisite record is preserved in a collection of subjects made for Foster and Kleiser, once the west coast’s biggest billboard company. The collection includes billboards raised to rented roofs, built on leased lots, and attached to buildings with sides sturdy enough to support them.  Of course most of these well-watched and exposed sites stand beside busy arterials.  The handwritten caption for this negative, not printed here, locates the two billboards, one for “Best Bet’s Buick,” and the other for Coca Cola, as standing on South Alaskan Way, “75 feet s. of Washington.”

The viaduct for trucks and motorcars that we are about to lose for fresher air was preceded by a trestle for trolleys. It ran from the foot Washington Street to Spokane Street where it turned west  for West Seattle.  Here we see if from its curve at the foot of Washington Street.  (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)

The featured company evidence (aka billboard) was recorded on the sunny afternoon of September 26, 1939, when South Alaskan Way was one of the favored arterials for avoiding the Central Business District.  By 1939 most of Alaskan Way (aka Railroad Avenue) had been filled behind a seawall and paved with bricks or blacktop.

The well-windowed buildings along the east side of Alaskan Way have made it difficult for billboards to cover the buildings constructed there in the decade after the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  The 30-plus block conflagration destroyed the waterfront as far north as University Street and so all of this neighborhood included.  Here the fire claimed the City Dock and Ocean Dock, both of them built in the early 1880 when Seattle first took hold of its status as Washington Territory’s metropolis.  The Great Fire also took the King Street Trestle (1878) that served the coal colliers from San Francisco, which preferred Seattle’s coal to California’s, and it

While most of the billboard collection shows them in their wide-angle environs, some of the negatives were direct records of the framed boards.

consumed Yesler’s Wharf which had been the pioneer pivot for Seattle commerce and its diverse fleet of small “Mosquito Fleet” steamers.   The Coastwise dock on the far right was one of the two

Alaskan Way Viaduct under construction looking north from near Washington Street on Nov. 5, 1951. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)
Looking south from near Washington Street. (by Lawton Gowey)

long finger piers built near the foot of Yesler Way that flaunted Seattle’s prosperity following the Yukon Gold Rush in the late 1890s,  The city first outfitted the “argonaut” panhandlers with the stuff needed get the gold and then on their return happily helped them get rid of it.

We expect – and hope – that Pacific readers will remember that with this weekly feature we have already made good use of the billboard collection. I confess, that it is unlike me to purchase anything, largely because there are many free resources, but also because I rarely make anything.  This collection, however, was worth it. The cost was $700 or about a dollar a negative.  Like this one on Alaskan Way, most date from the Great Depression, the 1930s.  With a few exceptions that were shot in Everett and Bellingham, all were recorded to the sides of Seattle’s busy streets.  You may expect more.

Before the viaduct was opened to motorcars in the Spring of 1953, the Department of Transportation invited photographers and others to hike the length of it. This was photographed either by Lawton Gowey or Robert Bradley. On this subject their slides were mixed. The photographers (and more)  were friends in the Seattle Camera Club.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Yes Jean as is our usual stunt we will pile on past scans from The Sunday Times “now and then” feature that appears usually on the back cover of its weekly ‘zine,  PacificNW.   This week the pile reaches 66 aka SIXTY-SIX features.  (That  is – so far – 66 out of about 1800.)  And just now!  With a phone call from Paris sent by Jean we have learned that he took a video of the historic hail storm that he and his students just ducked in Paris on one of its unseasonably hot days last week.   We will continue to encourage him to include it on the blog as our first striking weather review.

THEN: 1934 was one of the worst years of the Great Depression. This look north on Third Avenue South through Main Street and the Second Avenue South Extension was recorded on Thursday, April 19th of that year. Business was generally dire, but especially here in this neighborhood south of Yesler Way where there were many storefront vacancies. (Courtesy Ron Edge)

THEN: Sitting on a small triangle at the odd northwest corner of Third Avenue and the Second Ave. S. Extension, the Fiesta Coffee Shop was photographed and captioned, along with all taxable structures in King County, by Works Progress Administration photographers during the lingering Great Depression of the late 1930s. (Courtesy, Washington State Archive’s Puget Sound Branch)

THEN: An Emergency Relief Administration wood pile took temporary quarters on the southeast corner of S. Alaska Street and 32nd Ave. S. in 1934. (Courtesy, Northwest Collection, University of Washington Libraries.)

THEN:In late 1855 the citizens of Seattle with help from the crew of the Navy sloop-of-war Decatur built a blockhouse on the knoll that was then still at the waterfront foot of Cherry Street. The sloop’s physician John Y. Taylor drew this earliest rendering of the log construction. (Courtesy, Yale University, Beinecke Library)

THEN: Between the now lost tower of the Pioneer Building, seen in part far left, and the Seattle Electric Steam Plant tower on the right, are arranged on First and Railroad Avenues the elaborate buzz of business beside and near Seattle’s Pioneer Square ca. 1904.

THEN: Frank Shaw’s pre-preservation visit to First Avenue South on February 26, 1961. He looks north from Main Street. (photo by Frank Shaw)

When compared to most city scenes relatively little has changed in his view west on Main Street from First Avenue South in the century-plus between them. (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

tHEN: An unidentified brass band poses at the intersection of Commercial Street (First Ave S.) and Main Street during the 1883 celebration for the completion of the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad.

THEN: This post-1889 waterfront block of sheds and ships was replaced in 1911 by the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, described at the time as “the largest wooden finger pier in North America.” The exception was Fire Station No. 5 on the left at the foot of Madison Street. A brick station replaced it in 1913. (Museum of History & Industry)

THEN: The S. S. Suveric makes a rare visit to Seattle in 1911. (Historical photo courtesy of Jim Westall)

THEN: The new sub H-3 takes her inaugural baptism at the Seattle Construction and Dry Dock Company’s ways on Independence Day, 1913. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

THEN: The driver, lower left, leads his team towards First Avenue up a planked incline on Madison Street. (Courtesy MOHAI)

THEN: Following the city’s Great Fire of 1889, a trestle was built on University Street, between Front Street (First Avenue) and Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way). By the time Lawton Gowey photographed what remained of the timber trestle in 1982, it had been shortened and would soon be razed for the Harbor Steps seen in Jean Sherrard’s repeat. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)

THEN: Seen here in 1887 through the intersection of Second Avenue and Yesler Way, the Occidental Hotel was then easily the most distinguished in Seattle. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: Depression-era protestors climb Columbia Street sidewalk along-aside Seattle architect Harlan Thomas’s elegant Seattle landmark that opened in 1925 as home to the by then already forty-three year old Seattle Chamber of Commerce. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: From boxcars and rooftops to the planks of Railroad Avenue, excitement builds for the ceremonial re-enactment of the S.S.Portland’s 1897 landing with its “ton of gold” on the Seattle waterfront, the city’s first Golden Potlatch Celebration. [Courtesy, Michael Maslan]

THEN: The original for this scene of a temporary upheaval on Mill Street (Yesler Way) was one of many historical prints given to the Museum of History and Industry many years ago by the Charles Thorndike estate. Thorndike was one of Seattle’s history buffs extraordinaire. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry.)

THEN:Ruins from the fire of July 26, 1879, looking west on Yesler’s dock from the waterfront. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: F. Jay Haynes recorded this ca. 1891 look up the Seattle waterfront and it’s railroad trestles most likely for a report to his employer, the Northern Pacific Railroad. (Courtesy, Murray Morgan)

THEN: This view looking east from First Avenue South on Jackson Street in 1904, is still four years short of the Jackson Street Regrade during which the distant horizon line near 9th Avenue was lowered by more than 70 feet. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: The Phoenix Hotel on Second Avenue, for the most part to the left of the darker power pole, and the Chin Gee Hee Building, behind it and facing Washington Street to the right, were both built quickly after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. (Courtesy: Museum of History and Industry.)

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