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Seattle Now & Then: 2nd and Bell

jrsherrard

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Looking north on Second Avenue, ca. 1940
The same view in 2019
THEN #2: Looking south through the same intersection, ca 1902 – this photograph first appeared in ‘Seattle Now & Then’ in 1984, and is now featured in our just-published book

For this week’s “repeat” Jean and I are including for somewhat sentimental reasons a third visit to the same Belltown (or North Seattle) intersection of Second Avenue and Bell Street.  The oldest of these three looks south thru the intersection when the neighborhood was shaped by Denny Hill.

(BELOW:  As this feature first appeared as the 52nd Chapter of Seattle Now and Then, Volume One, first published in 1984.)

This is WAS the northwest “corner” of the hill since razed: Denny Hill. The difference in the elevations recorded here sometime in 1902 or 1903 and now was a mere one foot.  This part of the Denny Hill regrade along Second Avenue began in 1903.  It is a rare look into the neighborhood when it was still a hill.

A detail of the “North Seattle Neighborhood pulled from Seattle’s 1891 birdseye evocation.  The red arrow we inserted to-right points at the Wayne Row Apartments, southeast corner of Second Avenue and Bell Street.

John Hannawalt of Old Seattle Paperworks (still in the Pike Place Market) first showed it to me in the late 1970s. I was quickened. While I knew nothing about it I wanted it to be at least part of Denny Hill, the Seattle hill had been episodically removed between 1876 and 1931.  And it was. These two-plus blocks between Bell and Lenora streets were razed to their present elevations between 1903 and 1908.  With the photo in hand, finding the intersection came

The southeast corner of Second Ave. and Bell Street ca 1980.

quickly, largely because I liked the bowls of beans, rice and cheese served at Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, still here at the southeast corner of this intersection.  Of course Mama was not in the Webster and Stevens Studio photo ca. 1902, but it was on my diet in 1978.

The southeast corner of the intersection copped to help one find the street sign nailed to the power pole.

With the help of a jeweler’s hand-held magnifying glass I soon found the street name “Bell” on the telephone pole at the corner.  Standing above the corner, both in the photo and on my visits to Mama’s, were the three gables of the Wayne Apartments, a row built in 1890 and wonderfully still standing. I first published my “findings” in the Seattle Sun and it was on the evidence of that discovery that this newspaper first engaged me to write this feature in 1982.

A typical tax-card from the late 1930s, this one concentrating on the row-house that is still standing at the southeast corner of Bell and Second..   CLICK TO ENLARGE

The “then” in this week’s “repeat” pair probably dates from the late 1930s or even 1940, the year that, city-wide, many of the street cars were replaced with buses or trackless trollies.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Some visits with a few friends from the neighborhood – extended.

 

 

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