Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: The Wallingford Historic Home Fair

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: The surviving home at 1306 N. 48th Street was constructed in 1911 by an Austrian immigrant named John Perko, who, with the help of his wife ran the Seattle Cabinet Works. The couple had two daughters. (Courtesy Renee and Jeff Lindstrom.)
THEN: In 2014 Renee and Jeff Lindstrom purchased the property, which has been reconfigured through the years into three units. Rhonda Bush, president of Historic Wallingford, notes that “the reconstruction of this home is a fine example of good stewardship in regards to a historic building, while teaching their daughters (posing here on the sidewalk) how to live simply in a small space, and providing affordable housing for others.”

Beginning with its first Sunday in the winter of 1982, this weekly feature has always been written in Wallingford – in the basement of a vintage Wallingford bungalow.  Surely there are bungalows on every Seattle hill, but hereabouts this often modest architecture with shingle sidings, broad gables, tapered porch posts, wide windows, exterior chimneys, sun porches and more are surely associated with the neighborhood that was – after clear cutting and the persuasion of stretching it some for real estate sales – first called Wallingford Hill.

A prize for the first reader who can identify the Wallingford location of this snapshot. Clue – I do not know the answer. Jean? Ron?     Most likely these bungalows survive.

Since Jean Sherrard took on the often enough joyful responsibility of repeating the historical photographs with his own artful “nows” for this feature, we have needed to identify our productive platform as “Greater Wallingford,” for Jean lives in what we will now risk calling “Upper Wallingford.”  PacificNW students of Seattle history should know that there is a long and vigorous struggle over the names and boundaries of several of our city’s – what shall we call them? – “parts.”  The Sherrard home where Jean and Karen raised their two tall boys, Ethan at 6’4” and Noel at 6’3”, the shorter and younger, who is now 30 years old – is only a brisk three minute walk from the northeast corner of Green Lake.

Noel and I long ago selling books on The Ave at a University District Street Fair.
The closed gas works, with Wallingford and Green Lake in the background, as they appeared before construction of the Gas Works Park in 1971.    Follow the light reflecting from  Green Lake as far to the right as it reaches and you will be close to Jean and Karen’s home.   This is our defense for claiming an “Upper Wallingford” status to his neighborhood.   In this  innocent regard we follow below the above aerial with a rabbit carried and protected by a Wallingford child about ten years ago. It was one of the thousands – yea – of neighborhood snaps I took during my Wallingford Walks between 2006 and 2010.
A Wallingford rabbit dated May 13, 2008.
At the southeast corner of Meridian and 44th Avenue another comely Wallingford box fitted here for a plantation

The generous Jean also understands that from its beginning Wallingford’s north border has always been shaky. It was named for John N. Wallingford, who, like Jean, also lived and plotted his productions at a home near the northeast corner of Green Lake.  And now, I confess that I feel quite at home beside the lake. Many of my earliest now-and-then features were outlined first in my head  while walking briskly around the lake.  In 1982 that took me about 45 minutes, the time now often needed to get out of bed.

Two shows of cherry blossoms at the southeast corner of 46th Street and Corliss Avenue.
Wallingford’s  Meridian Playfield through its seasons.  CLICK TO ENLARGE
Members of Sustainable Wallingford posing in the neighborhood’s pergola on August 9, 2008. Writing now ten years later we can confidently note that Wallingford  has been on the whole sustained.  Sustainable Wallingford may be thought of as prefiguring Historic Wallingford.

Today, and most likely forever, we can leave questions regarding Wallingford’s borders to the new core of enthused historiographers who have appropriately named themselves Historic Wallingford. And this coming Saturday morning, October 6th,  they will be calling out from their sun porches primarily to home-owners – and renters – to gather together at the Good Shepherd Center on Sunnyside Avenue from 9:30am to 4pm for Wallingford’s Historic Homes Fair.  The Fair features exhibitors with tips, experts sharing information about the styles of vintage residential architecture (there are more than bungalows in Wallingford), a showing of the film “Bungalow Heaven,” which is about an honored part of Pasadena, California, that may be uncannily compared to Wallingford, without the intrusion of film stars.  The Fair’s Historic Preservation Discussion starts at 10am.

For more information including the schedule contact: www.historicwallingford.org/events/homes-fair-2018/

before the Swanson family began fixing shoes at 2305 N. 45th St., Peanuts By Heck were to be had there. Thie is another tax photo from the 1930s. Below: I interrupted the shoe leather from the sidewalk on one of my Wallingford Walks. This one is dated September27, 2006.

The older montage dates from a Seattle Times feature on the neighborhood published on October 25, 1925. The repeat is not so recent. You might want to Google a date for the movie Singles.   You may remember that it featured Seattle’s Grunge scene. (click to enlarge)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mes frères?  JEAN – WATCH THE BOOKS, WATCH THE BOOKS.

4719 Thackeray Place NE. The 1938 WPA tax photo.

THEN: Looking west down Ewing Street (North 34th) in 1907 with the nearly new trolley tracks on the left and a drainage ditch on the right to protect both the tracks and the still barely graded street from flooding. (Courtesy, Michael Maslan)

THEN: The 1906-07 Gas Works at the north end of Lake Union went idle in 1956 when natural gas first reached Seattle by pipeline. In this photo, taken about fifteen years later, the Wallingford Peninsula is still home to the plant’s abandoned and “hanging gardens of metal.” (Courtesy: Rich Haag)

THEN: Samuel McKnight’s early 1890s panorama of Lake Union also looks north into most of Seattle’s seventeen square-mile annexation of 1891, when the city limits were pushed north from McGraw Street to 85th Street. Fremont, Edgewater, the future Wallingford, Latona, and Brooklyn (University District) were among the neighborhoods included. (Courtesy, Dan Kerlee)

guild-45

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.

41st-aurora-pedes-overpass-10-22-36mr

edgewater-nef-40-then-mr

foodland-from-school-then-mr

THEN: This look west from the West Woodland neighborhood toward Ballard comes by way of the Museum of History and Industry, with some help from both Ron Edge and West Woodland historian Susan Pierce.

THEN: Before it became a city park, Licton Springs was run as a health spa. The distant home, left-of-center, at the northeast corner of N. 97th Street and Densmore Avenue N., survives in Jean Sherrard’s repeat. It can be found on the left above the Y in the Licton Springs Park pathway. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archives)

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: 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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One thought on “Seattle Now & Then: The Wallingford Historic Home Fair”

  1. In 1967, my husband and I bought our first house at 4529 Bagley Ave. N, close to the Good Shepherd Center. We got to know the neighborhood: Fuji’s Ten-cent store,Tweedy and Pop Hardware, and Food Giant. One day, a neighbor’s roof was on fire. My husband ran down the block to help put out the fire. At that time, he had a beard and longish hair; the homeowner got angry, thinking was a hippie, and ordered him to leave her yard. After she found out he was a neighbor, she wrote an apology to the Wallingford paper.

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