Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: The Pink House on Alki, ca 1938

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: The Pink House at 2130 Alki Avenue is the tiny West Seattle landmark deemed to be the oldest surviving beach house on Alki Avenue S.W. that has not been radically modified.
NOW: Set about halfway between Duwamish Head and Alki Point the “small is beautiful” Pink House is most adventurously found by Seattle’s neighborhood explorers by approaching the west end of Massachusetts Street and dropping from there down Duwamish Head on the steep and narrow Bonair Place S.W. to the Alki waterfront. Take a right turn on to Alki Avenue S.W.. The Pink House is the fifth structure beyond the turn. It can be identified by its color.

Here is the “Pink House” beach landmark for which Alki Beach locals – especially those near the sand – feel protective.  In our “then” photo the Pink House is only nearly pink.   Our “then” is another “tax  photo” from the Depression-era’s WPA (Works Progress Administration) photographic inventory of every taxable structure in King County.  Many properties were exposed as tax-dodgers by the preliminary 1936 aerial survey of King County.

This dappled construction site could not escape attention in 1938, the date inscribed on the tax photo.  (The scribble, center-left, reads like May 6 “1936”, however, from other evidences, it is certainly 1938.)  The cottage is getting its conversion from a beachside Cash and Carry store into a wind-shakened residence.  In 1927 it was called “The People’s Grocery.” Somewhat mysteriously “GRO,” the first three letters of “grocery,” have been cut in half and separated for the home’s new six window exposure to the northwest on Alki Beach.  The sign’s shipboard remnants have been, it seems, salvaged by the carpenters for the new façade.  Clay Eals, West Seattle neighborhood activist wonders if the shuffled letters survive under the home’s namesake pink paint?  (Its pop name was vox populi – inevitable.)

King County tax card dated May 6, 1938.  CLICK to ENLARGE
PINK (perhaps) HOUSE in tax photo from Oct. 15, 1944.

Who painted it pink? Most likely Susan B. Griffin, a lead gardener at the University of Washington arboretum who lived in The Pink House at 2130 Alki Avenue for nearly 40 years.  Her niece Katy Griffin remembers that the master gardener “kept a beautifully maintained home and garden. It has been painted pink ever since I can remember. . . It was decorated with carefully chosen antiques, with beautiful glassware on the window sills that trembled every time the metro bus would go by. My aunt delighted in entertaining, and hosted many gatherings.” Griffen was also an exceptional landlord for her other properties in the Alki area and “treated her tenants like family…She kept a vegetable garden for all of her neighbors to plant and harvest.”  It was an inspiration for the community’s P-Patch Program.

Grace McAdams, far right, with two friends on Alki Beach in the Teens, running southwest from Luna Park, which was built in 1907 below Duwamish Head.

Luna Park below Duwamish Head by early 20th Century postcard photogerapher Otto Frasch.
Luna Park from Duwamish Heaad. The two summits of Queen Anne Hill hold the horizon..
LUNA PARK looking northwest towards Bainbridge Island.
Another Frasch postcard of Luna Park.
Luna Park and Duwamish Head from Elliott Bay.

The Pink House’s tax card (far above) dates its construction in 1909. According to West Seattle’s committed community of historians this waterfront bungalow was built for Granville and Henrietta Haller’s family, pioneers who in 1883 completed Seattle’s first and largest mansion, Castlemount, on First Hill’s summit near James Street and Broadway.  In ironic hindsight, the footprints for both Castlemount and what became the Pink house were chosen in part for their proximity to the sporting life (fishing and hunting) of Seattle’s pioneer “Indian-fighter” Granville and Henrietta Haller’s family.

Castlemount, the Haller Family home at James Street and Summit Avenue on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Thanks to West Seattle researchers Greg Lange, Clay Eals and Matt Vaughn for their help in following the history of the Pink House.  Vaughn the long-time proprietor of West Seattle’s Easy Street Records was also the Pink House owner for a dozen years until 2010.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellas?  For you and your’s we shall try.

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THEN: The Craftsman bungalow at 1910 47th Ave. S.W., shown in the 1920s with an unknown adult on the porch and two tykes below, is now 100 years old. The house beyond it at the southeast corner with Holgate Street was for many years clubhouse to the West Seattle Community Club, and so a favorite venue for discussing neighborhood politics and playing bridge. (COURTESY OF SOUTHWEST SEATTLE HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

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THEN: The Gatewood Craftsman Lodge was built on a road, in a neighborhood, and near a public school all named for the developer Carlisle Gatewood, who also lived in the neighborhood. The three women posing in the third floor’s open windows are the Clark sisters, Jean, Dorothy and Peggy, members of the family that moved into the home in the late 1930s.

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THEN: In 1852 many of Seattle’s first pioneers removed from Alki Point by dugout canoe for the deeper and safer harbor along the east shore of Elliott Bay (our central waterfront). About a half-century later any hope or expectation that the few survivors among these pioneers could readily visit Alki Beach and Point by land were fulfilled with the timber quays and bridges along Spokane Street. (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive)

THEN: The Seattle Times in its lengthy coverage of the then new Seattle Steel in the paper’s Magazine Section for Sept. 10, 1905 – the year this photograph was recorded – noted that “the plant itself is a series of strong, substantial, cavernous sheds, built for use, not for beauty.” (Courtesy, MOHAI, the Museum of History and Industry)

THEN: Looking southeast from above Alki Avenue, the Schmitz Park horizon is serrated by the oldest trees in the city. The five duplexes clustered on the right were built 1919-1921 by Ernest and Alberta Conklin. Ernest died in 1924, but Alberta continued to live there until well past 1932, the year this photograph was recorded. (Seattle Municipal Archives.)

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THEN: The S. S. Suveric makes a rare visit to Seattle in 1911. (Historical photo courtesy of Jim Westall)

THEN: The new sub H-3 takes her inaugural baptism at the Seattle Construction and Dry Dock Company’s ways on Independence Day, 1913. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

THEN: Part of the pond that here in 1946 filled much of the long block between Massachusetts and Holgate Streets and 8th Avenue S. and Airport Way. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

THEN: Sometime before her first move from this brewery courtyard in 1912, Lady Rainier was moved by a freeze to these sensational effects. She did not turn her fountain off. (Courtesy of Frank & Margaret Fickeisen)

THEN: The work of filling the tidelands south of King Street began in 1853 with the chips from Yesler’s sawmill. Here in the neighborhood of 9th Ave. S. (Airport Way) and Holgate Street, the tideland reclaiming and street regrading continue 70 years later in 1923. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)

THEN: Built in 1893, West Seattle School kept teaching until ruined by the region’s 1949 earthquake. (Courtesy Michael Maslan)

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