(click to enlarge photos)
There’s some arterial tension in this “then.” Is the open and yet covered pick-up van on Occidental Avenue pausing with a full stop or advancing toward Yesler Way? Is the driver trying to encourage the clutter of pedestrians to “move it” onto the Seattle Tacoma Interurban cars parked at their Seattle terminus?
This is nearly the center of Seattle’s skid road district. It was a manly neighborhood and here in the fetured photo at the top it seems that it is all men who are boarding the parked common carriers about to head for Tacoma or some suburban stop on the way.
Skid Road was originally named for the greased logs that were laid to shoot timber off First Hill to Seattle’s waterfront mills. There survives remarkably – or distressingly – little pioneer evidence on where Seattle’s first skid road was constructed. A convivial scholars’ debate endures between those choosing Washington Street and the more popular Mill Street, aka Yesler Way. Whichever, the sliding log delivery most likely came close to crossing over this part of Occidental, a popular name for European immigrants who immigrated west to America from somewhere between Moscow and
Galway. Originating at Yesler Way, Occidental Street ran south into the then not yet reclaimed tidelands beyond King Street. By the time this busy street scene was shot, the neighborhood was long free of its slippery salmon oil and log deliveries. (Again, we confess to not knowing the date for the featured snapshot from the circa 1920s,)
Many Asian merchants serviced the Skid Road district. Seattle’s first Chinatown was just around the corner, east on Washington Street. There were loan shops, barbers, oyster bars, and plenty of bar-bars where a free lunch might come with whatever drink one ordered – usually beer – and many of them. Here professional bar bands competed for audio space and “keep the faith” souls with parading ensembles of Salvation Army brass players and drummers. Adding to the percussion, the corner to the left rear (southwest) of the photographer was Seattle’s “Hyde Park” platform for protest, polemics and the occasional police riot.
Besides the Interurban cars, this cityscape is limited to two pioneer landmarks. The one that obviously survived on the right side of Jean Sherrard’s repeat, is the Interurban Building, the 1892 creation of the English-born architect John Parkinson who arrived fortuitously in Seattle six months before its Great Fire of June 6, 1889. This red brick and sandstone Romanesque landmark was built for the Seattle National Bank, but after the Interurban’s completion from Tacoma to Seattle in 1901-02 it became the ticket office and waiting room for the Puget Sound Interurban Railway.
The wide façade facing south to Occidental Ave. from across Yesler Way is, of course, the still-mourned Seattle Hotel. Like Parkinson’s bank it too was built soon after the city’s great fire of 1889. Seventy years later it was lost to the modern urges that preluded the Seattle Century 21 World’s Fair. By comparison the strikingly puny “Sinking Ship Garage”, that replaced, it survives.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, mes amis? Weee
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GOOD MORNING to RON EDGE
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