Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: Does this make him an Oral Historian?

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(click to enlarge photos)

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: 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)
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: For the first twenty years of his more than 40 years selling tinware and other selected hardware, Zilba Mile's shop looked south across Yesler Way down First Ave. S, then known as Commercial Street.

THEN: The Moose float heads south on First Avenue at Columbia Street during the 1912 Potlatch parade of fraternal and secret societies. Behind them are Julius Redelsheimer's clothing store and the National Hotel, where daily room rates ran from 50 cents to a dollar.

THEN: The Terry-Denny Building, better known in its earlier years as Hotel Northern, was part of the grand new Pioneer Place (or Square) neighborhood built up in the early 1890s after the old one was reduced to ashes by Seattle's Great Fire of 1889.

THEN: With the clue of the ornate Pergola on the right, we may readily figure that we are in Pioneer Square looking south across Yesler Way.

THEN: A winter of 1918 inspection of some captured scales on Terrace Street. The view looks east from near 4th Avenue. (Courtesy City Municipal Archives)

THEN: Local candy-maker A.W. Piper was celebrated here for his crème cakes and wedding cakes and also his cartoons. This sketch is of the 1882 lynching from the Maple trees beside Henry and Sara Yesler’s home on James Street. Piper’s bakery was nearby (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

THEN: During the few years of the Klondike Gold Rush, the streets of Seattle’s business district were crowded with outfitters selling well-packed foods and gear to thousands of traveling men heading north to strike it rich – they imagined. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: In Lawton Gowey’s 1961 pairing, the Smith Tower (1914) was the tallest building in Seattle, and the Pioneer Square landmark Seattle Hotel (1890) had lost most of its top floor. (by Lawton Gowey)

THEN: Adding a sixth floor to its first five in 1903, the Hotel Butler entered a thirty-year run as “the place” for dancing in the Rose Room, dining at the Butler Grill, and celebrity-mixing in the lobby. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)

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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.)

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Woodlawn Hardware in East Green Lake.

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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. 

One thought on “Seattle Now & Then: Does this make him an Oral Historian?”

  1. Enjoyed this post very much. Wayne is my 1st cousin. I haven’t spoken to him in many years, so it was great to see what he, and Laurie, have been up to.

    Reply

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