Seattle Now & Then: The Wallingford Historic Home Fair

jrsherrard

8 years ago

(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 6^th,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/