THEN: Harlan Thomas, architect for the Rhodes Building, is remembered with his surviving local landmarks including the Sorrento Hotel, with its own grand entrance, the Chelsea Hotel, the Corner Market Building, Harborview Hospital and the Chamber of Commerce building. Thomas we also head of the U.W.’s Department of Architecture from 1926 to 1940. (Museum of History and Industry)NOW: Now the high-rise Century Square fills the northwest corner of Pike St. and Fourth Avenue.
Surely among those who take time to shape their opinions on architecture this façade of the Rhodes Store will excite some and alienate others. For the latter, the building’s five-floor front may be too congested with ornaments. I like them and have felt an enduring affection –- for a long as I’ve had a copy of the photograph — for the playful front of this 10 Cent Store. From 1924 to 1931 it faced east from the west side of Fourth Avenue where it sat two lots north of Pike Street. The store was named for four Rhodes brothers: Albert, Henry, William and Charles, mid-western farmers who moved to Puget Sound around 1890 to quickly become sibling-entrepreneurs in both Tacoma and Seattle. By 1900 they were flaunted as Seattle’s “leading tea and coffee house,” a success which should feature the Rhodes family in any history of Seattle’s preferred tastes.
The brothers’ first little Seattle storefront at 1325 Second Avenue, took a small part of the block-big Arcade Building. William was the manager of its bargain department although he was quick to explain, “We brothers have always worked together, pulled together financially and in business managements. Of course, we all look upon (up to) the big store Seattle knows as ‘Albert’s Store.’” The oldest brother Albert and his wife Harriet managed the “big store” which with its organ in the lobby will certainly still be remembered by many locals. The big department store was built in the late 1920s with an enlargement of the Arcade Buildings’ north half, the part facing Union Street, between First and Second Avenue
Earlier while dreaming of dimes, and preparing to open the family’s economy bazaar, William promised “We will even sell a good brand of tea and coffee for ten cents a pound on our opening day.” The door on Second Avenue first opened to the store’s10 cent assortment of dry goods, notions, furnishings, confectionary, china, glasses, kitchen needs and thousands of knickknacks on the morning of June 6, 1903. Twenty-one years later the second Rhodes 10 Cent Store, pictured here, opened on the fifteenth of December, 1924. The Times liked it, reporting “The building presents some new ideas in the design of Seattle retail establishments . . . The exterior of the building is of Italian Renaissance Style, and is faced in glazed terra cotta. One of the most striking features is the 24-foot arch recessed above the Fourth Avenue entrance, for scenic displays.”
The fair-weather mural framed here is one of only two photographs I’ve found of this ironically sumptuous 10 Cent store. The other appears in this newspaper and shows the arch fitted not with a beach scene but a Christmas tree. The Rhodes brothers second 10-cent store was short-lived perhaps from a combination of changing retail tastes, the sudden slam of the Great Depression in 1929 and an offer the brothers could not refuse. In the late fall of 1931 the Seattle Gas Company signed a one million dollar twenty year lease to turn this ornate show box into the Gasco Building. The ensuing remodel stripped the Rhodes building of its ornamental pleasures (for some) to become the gas company’s center for billing and exhibiting modern appliances. It first opened to the public in the spring of 1932. The official housewarming party started at noon with KOL radio’s Kiddies’ Hour and the then “well-known Negro entertainers, the Deacon Jones Quartet.”
We hope you are planning to attend the launch for Paul and Jean’s new book, Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred. It starts at 1 p.m. this Sunday, Oct. 28, 2018 (Paul’s 80th birthday!), at the Seattle Central Library auditorium, and it’s free. Enjoy an illustrated talk by Paul and Jean who will be signing copies of the book for purchasers. Get there early to snag a seat. The auditorium doors open at noon.
This week’s media coverage
We are so fortunate to have received great media coverage in advance of the launch, and you can see and hear it all by visiting our media page. It includes:
A stellar 8-1/2-minute video segment by Nancy Guppy on her “Art Zone” program for The Seattle Channel, complete with pre-birthday cake and song.
Video and audio of a 55-minute radio interview of Jean and Paul by former Seattle City Council members Jean Godden and Sue Donaldson on their program “The Bridge,” KMGP 101.1 FM.
Raw video footage of a five-minute interview on Q13-TV by morning anchor Bill Wixey.
And a 10-page cover story in last Sunday’s Pacific NW magazine of The Seattle Times, featuring many photos and the book’s introduction.
And beyond …
Eric Johnson of KOMO-TV plans to air an “Eric’s Heroes” segment on the book at 6 p.m. next Wednesday, Oct. 31. This will be posted our media page soon after it airs.
22 — count ’em, 22 — events!
If you can’t make this Sunday’s big launch, we have scheduled 22 additional book events in November and December throughout Seattle and King County. Check out our events page.
Thanks to everyone who has helped make this such a successful launch and tribute to the public historian who has popularized Seattle history via more than 1,800 columns over 37 years, Paul Dorpat!
Much of this Sunday’s Seattle Times Pacific magazine is devoted to our new book. You may notice our pre-order button just to the right, upon which all readers are welcome to click! Or our many events, to which all are, of course, invited! Also, check out our many illustrious blurbers, who seem to like us very much!
Paul and Jean discuss Seattle’s past, present, and future at the old MOHAI (Photo: Berangere Lomont)
To celebrate its upcoming launch – next Sunday, October 28th, which is also Paul’s 80th birthday! – we’re reprinting our senior editor Clay Eals’ lovely introduction and, as always, click to enlarge photos:
Photo by Berangere Lomont
The Seattle Now & Then story:
from simple pleasures to the truth
By Clay Eals
The late Seattle newspaper pundit and historian Emmett Watson once said it is fitting for a flourishing city to have a “sense of itself.”
“I’m not even sure what I mean,” he wrote in 1984, “but it has something to do with a feeling for its past, a curiosity about its origins, a pride in its present.”
Emmett’s sage advisory resounds today amid our city’s tangle of construction cranes, pricey digs and teeming tech jobs — a veritable frenzy of future-focused development.
So, what is Seattle’s “sense of itself”? People of all stripes likely would agree that it derives from the city’s unique lay of the land — the lyrical, physical contours that created a natural stage for urban beauty and demanded ingenuity for the shaping of a prosperous port.
A 2018 view from Smith Tower
In the bustling “now” days of our city, hordes of newcomers may give these enduring qualities only fleeting thought. But longtimers, with visions of “then” dancing through their experience, have a more deep-seated grasp.
They summon formative years when the post-World War II maxim was the glory of growth. A prominent case in point: the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair — drawing nearly 10 million to a gleaming Jetsons view of the future — trumpeted the trend. “Take a way-ahead look at tomorrow, just as if you were there,” crooned its catchy theme song.
“We Come In Peace”
But it didn’t take long, as baby boomers reached their 30s and 40s, for a generation clamoring for peace, equality and the environment to reach back in time to embrace and protect local icons and characteristics targeted by the business bulldozer.
Evidence in the 1970s and 1980s was undeniable. Seattle voters saved the Pike Place Market. The city council crafted a tough landmarks law. Grassroots heritage groups sprouted like spawning salmon. The past was becoming palpable.
Enter Paul Dorpat.
Paul after a public shave at his 40th birthday party in 1978
Today he is known as the indefatigable purveyor of what has become, over the past nearly 37 years, a beloved citywide optical institution entitled “Seattle Now and Then.”
Back in 1966, however, the 28-year-old was a newcomer to our city. Raised in Spokane by a father who commanded a preacher’s pulpit and a mother who devoted herself to public service, Paul was anything but resolute about his future.
Paul, 37, poses with his father, the Rev. Theodore E. Dorpat, in about 1975Paul’s mother, Cherry Dorpat
He had considered the cloth while bouncing around Northwest colleges, but once here he applied his insistent conscience to the counterculture, founding the Helix underground newspaper near the University of Washington and launching the (pre-Woodstock) Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair in rural Sultan.
Paul, 30, talks with Seattle author Tom Robbins in 1968 at the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair in Sultan
A freelancer throughout the 1970s, he was gravitating toward a life of painting and film when, as he puts it, a “serendipitous spin” gave him an immersive entrée into local history. As is typical in the tracing of Paul’s trajectory, this biographical juncture owed to the bidding and support of a friend.
College buddy Dick Moultrie was seeking to reopen the Merchants Café, reputed to be Seattle’s oldest bar, in downtown’s oldest and most fabled district, Pioneer Square. He asked Paul to investigate the backstory of the business. Unwittingly, a die was cast.
Paul found himself diving into classic Seattle history tomes by Murray Morgan, Bill Speidel and others. Soon, projects that pointed to the past and piqued his native intelligence and inquisitiveness began to spiral.
Paul poses with Seattle’s Murray Morgan, author of Skid Road, mid-80s
While assisting the groundwork of a sculptor, Paul became intrigued by the lowered hills of the Belltown district north of downtown, and he prepared a detailed article for the alternative weekly Seattle Sun on the city’s massive, early 20th-century regrades.
After learning of the thesis of a UW graduate student in architecture who was digging into Seattle projects that were never pulled off, Paul assembled a “Then, Now and Maybe” exhibit of photos and visionary sketches for a June 1980 event called CityFair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.
The true turning point, however, came in fall 1981. Drawing from his budding collection of old images, Paul produced for the Mayor’s Small Business Task Force a sepia-toned booklet that displayed photographic collages of Seattle’s past. The charmingly titled publication, 294 Glimpses of Historic Seattle, sold for a clever $2.94, one penny per “glimpse.”
The response in that pre-internet era was phenomenal. Spotlighted in a column by the Seattle Times’ Erik Lacitis, the initial printing of 3,000 copies sold out in a flash. Eventually, 40,000 were snapped up, with proceeds going to charity.
It was the tangible beginning of an endearing pattern for Paul: He was simultaneously fueling and riding the wave of local interest in heritage.
There was no secret to his strategy. It was the photos — the city’s visual “sense of itself” coming alive.
“Each of these images is in some way quite precious, precious because of what it tells about the city,” Paul told Erik in 1981. “When I show this little book … to people who’ve never experienced the pictorial history of Seattle, … they are completely amazed. There is a sense of wonder that creeps across their faces. It spurs their imaginations, and they smile. … There are always new discoveries. Sometimes you see values that have been lost. But, happily, you see examples of things improved. It makes you respect the human effort that went into this city.”
With Erik’s help, Paul pitched a continuation of this concept to the Seattle Times. The paper’s Sunday magazine editor, Kathy Andrisevic, agreed, and the inaugural “Seattle Now and Then” appeared on Jan. 17, 1982.
A screenshot of Paul’s first column – updated for the book
That first weekly column showcased a formula that persevered through more than 1,800 installments and continues to this day:
Find a long-ago, well-composed “then” photo taken in the Seattle area.
Juxtapose it with a “now” image taken from an angle close to the original — a venerable art form known as repeat photography.
Add a brief, well-researched essay telling a story about the visual pair.
A key word in this recipe, a journalistic one, is “story.” In Paul’s lexicography, the story invariably centers on the common man and everyday life — and, not insignificantly, is leavened with gentle humor and layered with irony.
Presentation of the weekly feature has waxed and waned over the decades. Several dozen times, the magazine deferred the column for other priorities. In early years, “Seattle Now and Then” covered a generous two full pages but later shrank to one page and occasionally to two-thirds of a page. Thankfully, in recent years it has rebounded to a full page, sometimes more,. It consistently graces the magazine’s inside back cover, and all of the “nows” appear in brilliant color.
Through all the variations, the heartening constant is that those reading the 300,000 copies of the Sunday Seattle Times count “Seattle Now and Then” among its most popular features.
The column also maintains a fortified online presence transcending the Seattle Timessite to Paul’s own blog, pauldorpat.com, which allows magnified views of the “nows,” “thens” and countless other related images.
The launch of the blog 10 years ago also marked the full bloom of Paul’s partnership with Seattle teacher, actor and photographer Jean Sherrard, who has taken nearly all of Paul’s recent “now” photos and is the “now” photographer (and editor and production manager) for this commemorative tome.
Jean and Paul pose in 2011 at the entrance to a Now and Then compilation of their work, the final exhibit of the Museum of History & Industry at its former location in Montlake. (photo: Berangere Lomont)
Jean’s formidable skills, imagination, artistry, tenacity and equipment (not to mention a tall frame) have let him create captivating present-tense pictures. But his greatest asset may be the dedication and joie de vivre that he brings to his friendship with Paul. Recognizing this, Paul altered the voice of many of his later columns from “I” to “we.”
Jean atop the Space Needle (photo: Berangere Lomont)
The dynamic of the Paul/Jean relationship is noteworthy yet typical. Though Paul jokes that his friends are few and “long suffering,” his basso-voiced personality is nothing if not mesmerizing and magnetic. This results in ties with many that reflect uncommon loyalty and affection.
Jean takes a “now” photo of native descendants Mary Lou Slaughter and Ken Workman in May 2018 atop Post Alley. (Clay Eals)
Such bonds contributed to the persistence and appeal of “Seattle Now and Then.” Paul’s resulting stature led him into myriad offshoots, including countless regional talks and installations, three book-length column compilations (1984, 1986 and 1989) and other publications both slim (on First Avenue and the University Bookstore) and behemoth (the public-works epic Building Washington, 1998, with his wife, Genny McCoy, and Washington Then and Now, 2007, with Jean). He also produced a panoramic, two-hour video tour of 90 years of city history (“Seattle Chronicle,” 1992) and a one-hour KCTS-9 documentary on the first 30 years of the Bumbershoot Festival (“Bumberchronicles,” 2001, with Catherine Wadley and Jean).
Paul with his Building Washington collaborator, Genny McCoy, in 2011 on their porch in the Wallingford neighborhood.
At the core of Paul’s persona, however, is “Seattle Now and Then.” The “best of” volume that you hold in your hands is a culmination — a subjective selection and updating of the most compelling and essential of the 1,800 columns. By definition, it celebrates Paul’s lifetime contribution to inspiring all of us to both enjoy and champion the history of our city.
The occasion of this anthology is also personally momentous. It salutes a prolific track record that has required of Paul considerable initiative and fortitude.
Yet today, well into his 80th year, he doesn’t see it all as profound. He describes himself as merely “a sentimental guy” who long ago stumbled upon a vehicle to provide the “simple pleasure” of allowing people to imagine a visit to the past.
“It’s like hide and seek,” he says. “That’s a really deep motive in all of us, to figure out how things are hidden, where things have changed, what things are revealed.”
Next to Pioneer Square’s Pergola in May 2018, Paul ponders downtown Seattle’s oldest neighborhood. (Photo: Clay Eals)
Of course, Paul is grateful for the popularity of “Seattle Now and Then” and the many doors it has opened for him. He also comprehends and revels in the societally therapeutic virtues of comparative history. How could he not?
“History is delightful,” he says. “It’s understanding. It’s actually the truth if you do it right, and the truth is progressive. It always is.” To that end, he cautions that elevating an old scene does not always make it more treasured than its more recent counterpart: “I don’t mind some things being knocked down.”
But lifting up the city’s heritage, Paul allows, is inherently altruistic. It also feeds his “pretty radical” personal politics, which he knows he can’t tout every week to a mainstream readership. “To some extent, I toe the line,” he says. “I don’t express what I really feel about the usury and avarice and stinginess of the 1 percent.”
Paul keeps other avocations in his sights, including his younger pursuits of painting and film editing. A hope he holds dear is to complete a mammoth online biography of the beloved Seattle folksinger, restaurateur and self-promoter Ivar Haglund.
His most substantial aim, however, is to secure the professional storage and cataloging of his enormous archive, so that citizens one day will be able to access everything in it, including all of the “Seattle Now and Then” columns, free of charge.
Underlying this archival quest is Paul’s yearning to inspire others throughout the region to likewise share their own local photos, films and ephemera — his version of vox populi (the voice of the people).
Through it all, “Seattle Now and Then” abides. Though Paul laments his flagging energy (“It doesn’t cook as quickly — my cuisine is always resting on simmer”), he has no plan to pull back from his weekly dispatch.
That’s fortunate for all of us navigating the seemingly relentless change of the city’s latest boomtown ethos, a time when each “now” threatens to become a “then.” We need Paul “now” for as long as humanly possible.
“I love Seattle,” he says. “It’s the multifarious topography, it’s all my friends I’ve made over the decades, it’s my knowledge of it — they’re the kinds of reasons we do all these things. This is my home.”
What better guide could we have to discover, and rediscover, Seattle’s “sense of itself”?
West Seattle journalist and author Clay Eals has been active with the Southwest Seattle Historical Society in West Seattle since its founding in the mid-1980s, when he was fortunate to begin his own collaborations and friendship with Paul Dorpat.
THEN: Looking east across Front Street (renamed First Avenue) at its northeast corner with Cherry Street, most likely in the early 1880s. (Courtesy: Wayne Pazina)NOW: Standing beside the First Avenue façade of the Scheuereman Building, Laurie Mycon Pazina and Wayne Pazina repeat the ca. 1884 pose of hardware store owners Frederick Wald and James Campbell.
Standing side-by-side in the “now” for Jean Sherrard’s Nikon “repeater” are Laurie and Wayne Pazina, a couple that has been married and working together for nearly forty years. Laurie and Wayne met on a blind date arranged and given vision by a friend with good judgment. Wayne Pazina is a graduate of the UW’s School of Dentistry, the class of 1977. The couple renders its dentistry in a North Seattle clinic.
As anyone who has needed a dentist will know or suspect the DDS profession is fraught with stress. Understandably dentists may be affected by the trembling nerves in the chair beside them. But Docter Pazina has developed a unique assuaging way that helps him settle himself while also soothing the patients’ anxious hand-wringing ways. He tells them stories. Not always, of course, but when it seems called for. By now some of his returning patients make requests.
The frequent subject in the Doctor’s repertoire is Northwest history, the early part of it that runs from 1853 the year that Washington Territory was founded to the declaration of Washington’s statehood in 1889. An avid reader of northwest history, Dr. Pazina also pulls many of his narratives from the territorial ephemera that he collects: the newspapers, correspondences, photographs and art. With the art, for instance, he has a collection of paintings by Mark Richard Meyers, a Californian whose skilled paintings of Puget Sound pioneer schooners and maritime events are collected world-wide. Meyers long ago moved to England to help build a replica of Francis Drake’s Golden Hinde and stayed. He married a consulting historian’s daughter and became president of the Royal Society of Marine Artists. Appropriately, Prince Philip has one of Meyers paintings while our dentist from King County has several. That in brief is one of Pazina’s shared stories.
This week’s territorial “then” is another. It was scanned by Ron Edge from the collection that Dr. Pazina has been assembling – and narrating – nearly as long as he has been tending to teeth. He explains that Seattle’s first hardware store had several owners before it was razed in the city’s Great Fire of 1889. Most likely this vested pair posing alt the front door were owners, but which ones? Pazina found his answer signed on the board propped on the sidewalk to the right of the front door. With magnification the
Sitting on the boardwalk, a revealing detail.
observant doctor discovered that the hardware store’s initials, “W & C” for the owners Wald and Campbell, were written there. Pazina concluded that the photo was most likely taken between 1880 and 1886, the years that Frederick Wald and James Campbell owned and ran the store together.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, blokes? The blokes, neither of whom either smokes or uses snuff, did poke about their stuff and found some things that are old and not sold and yet could have a price.
Then: Looking north from Pioneer Place (square) into the uptown of what was easily the largest town in Washington Territory. This is judged by the 3218 votes cast in the November election of 1884, about one fourth of them by the newly but temporarily enfranchised women.Tacoma, in spite of being then into its second year as the terminus for the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad, cast 1663 votes, which took third place behind Walla Walla’s 1950 registered votes.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)
=====
=====
A FEW OTHER HARDWARES
Early Seattle Hardware at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Pike Street.Show window for Seattle Hardware in the Colman Building at the southwest corner of First Avenue and Marion Street, with the post-fire landmarks at the facing corners reflecting in the plate glass window. (Can you identify the reflections. None are yet standing.)
=====
=====
=====
Woodlawn Hardware in East Green Lake.
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
=====
Here is hardware man Campbell’s home at the southeast corner of James Street and Boren Avenue. The photograph was given to me in the early 1980s by Carrie Campbell Coe the girl sitting on the far right and, perhaps, recoiling from the family dog Lee Hung Chang. I visited with Lucy several times in her Washington Park home in the early 1980s. Below is a photo of this couple sitting for tea in her home.
THEN: Either starting or about to start at the Pike Place Market’s 1975 Soap-box derby. Photo by Frank ShawNOW: Hillside students in Jean’s video editing class pose here at the Pike Place Market.
Especially on weekends, Frank Shaw, a retired Boeing employee with a Hasselblad camera, would often be pulled from his Lower Queen Anne apartment to the attractions of Seattle’s waterfront and its neighbor the Pike Place Market. Other popular subjects for Shaw were high school soccer matches at Seattle Center, public art works-in-progress, and community festivals, both in Seattle and its suburbs.
Here on May 25th or 26th Shaw found a place along the crowded railing above the landmark block where Pike Alley reaches its intersection with First Avenue, Pike Street and Pike place. In 1975, Shaw was not yet attracted by the colorful lava-looking montage of posters and the Alley’s gum-splattered sides some of which Jean shows in his “now”. A weekend earlier Shaw recorded a bongo jam at the University District Street Fair. Mid-week he snapped the sternwheeler W.T. Preston Leaving Colman Dock, and Shaw also visited Westlake Mall where sculptor Rita Kepner was busy chipping away at her 3600 pound objet d’art commissioned by the city for its “The Artist in The City” program.
Having temporarily lost the UDistSt.Fair bongos I’ve substitute another mix of Shaw and drums wit this Pike Market jam.Meanwhile the leader, we presume, in another heat, The sign attached to the “box” names its sponsor the Duchess Tavern, we assume.
In the mid-1970s, Kepner and many fortunate others – myself included – were supported by the Seattle Arts Commission in the making of public art. I consider it one of the nicest things to ever happen to me. Much of the art survives delicately scattered about the city. Ultimately the art was funded by the Nixon Administration, in the year following Watergate and his 1974 resignation. Those of us who were funded continue to enjoy the irony of Nixon’s part in making the daily stresses of life easier for us. Now nearly a half-century later I can still confess that “Nixon was very very good to me.”
Unidentified contestant No. 69 after the race and perhaps injured. But never mind there’s a can of refreshing Rainier Beer resting beside him on the hood of the car he uses for support.
1975 was year – or one of them – for bell bottom pants. How many pairs can you count in the horse show of race spectators standing near the starting line? I figure about nine. One or more of them may have been purchased at Block’s Menswear, signed here “Block’s Bell Bottoms” on the north side of Pike Street mid-block between First and Second Avenues. I had three pairs which I bought not from Block but at the Wise Penny, the Junior League’s thrift store on Capitol Hill’s Broadway Avenue.
Market Mayor Billy King gets a grooming from artist Gertrude Pacific on Pike Place. (P. Dorpat sometime in the early 80s, perhaps)
On the authority of the artist/promoter Bill King, the Pike Place Market Mayor into the 1980s, the Markets soap box races began with perhaps two boxes in the 1970s, but it rapidly expanded. Billy got the idea for a derby from Doug Payson, an architect who lived near the market in the basement of the Bay Building. Next King carried the idea to the owners of the Market’s taverns – three of them. With their support began thus a bacchanalian affair but with good manners protected by the prudent friends of the market and also somewhat by a complicit police department. For his role as mayor master of ceremonies, Billy wore a tuxedo and a PA system. The race needed a caller at its single dangerous corner, a short block west of First Avenue. Distinguished in his tux, King stood on a chair at the corner describing the progress of the several races to their two collections of spectators, those east of the corner and those south of the corner, on the longer part between the corner and Union Street. (We share a map on the dorpatsherrardlomont blog.)
This Seattle Times clip from May 27, 1976 makes note of the upcoming “fifth annual Pike Place Market Street Fair, and the running again of the “annual soapbox derby.”
When I asked Bill King if he could identify either of the two racers about to let gravity have its way, or, for that matter, anyone in the crowd, he answered, “Nope, all the regulars were in the taverns!” Billy had been elected by the regulars sitting on Victrola Tavern stools.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? Features galore instructor Sherrard.
