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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 25, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Feb. 28, 2021 )

There’s nothing metaphysical about the fate of this once sacred space
By Jean Sherrard

Those with an ecclesiastical bent — or, thanks to Pete Seeger and the Byrds, a rock ’n’ roll penchant — know that for everything there is a season.

These structures understand it viscerally: Seattle’s Town Hall, the Rainier Arts Center in Columbia City and two each called “The Sanctuary,” an event venue in West Seattle’s Admiral District and a luxury townhome complex on Capitol Hill. Designed without overtly religious symbols, these repurposed community gems were built as in the early 20th century by Christian Scientists.

Founded by Boston-based Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the Christian Science movement emerged in 1879 with a mere 26 followers. Eddy’s metaphysical teachings ignited the fastest growing religion of its time, eventually garnering nearly 270,000 members. Burgeoning congregations enthusiastically erected mostly Classical Revival style churches nationwide, including Seattle.

“With the appearance of the edifice for First Church (on Capitol Hill in 1906), Christian Science became more visible on the city skyline,” recounts church historian Cindy Peyser Safronoff, in her 2020 book “Dedication: Building the Seattle Branches of Mary Baker Eddy’s Church.”

Naturally, local mainline denominations grew wary of the competition. The Rev. Mark A. Matthews, influential pastor of Seattle’s 10,000-strong First Presbyterian Church, lobbed an early slam, labeling Eddy’s teachings “blasphemous, immoral, licentious and murderous.” Despite denunciations, however, Christian Science growth and construction flourished across the city.

Within a hundred years of its founding, Christian Science joined many other churches in turn-turn-turning to a fallow period. Dwindling congregations scarcely could afford upkeep of their “sacred spaces” while land values soared.

Case in point: the former Third Church of Christ, Scientist, shown in this week’s “Then” photo. Designed by Portland architect George Foote Dunham and completed in 1922, it was sold in 2006, the congregation trusting that the new owner – celebrity-attracting megachurch Churchome (then City Church) – would keep the structure intact.

But it is up for sale again, this time with a recently granted demolition permit, raising preservationists’ ire. “Replacing this elegant contributor to the historic Olmsted boulevard would be criminal,” says Larry Kreisman, former Historic Seattle program director. “It’s a perfect candidate for adaptive reuse as a lecture and concert hall or as a community center.”

More such spaces soon may be lost. Churches and other institutions in similar straits, suggests Kreisman, should partner with preservation organizations. “The solution,” he says purposefully, “is creative thinking, brainstorming and a willingness to explore alternative paths.”

Because there’s also a season for preservation.

WEB EXTRAS

Our narrated 360 video will arrive tomorrow! In the meantime, enjoy these interiors, courtesy of Larry Kreisman.

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 18, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Feb. 21, 2021)

Inside and out, a stately, cross-topped edifice nurtures acts of love

By Clay Eals

We at “Now & Then” heartily proclaim that Valentine’s Day is worth not just 24 hours’ attention but rather a season — nay, a full year. So while the holiday fell last Sunday, we still can celebrate that our “Then” photo, taken 87 years ago on Feb. 14, represents the largess of love.

Most obvious is its esteem for jobless Americans during the Great Depression. Nineteen men are shown paving the road to the City of Seattle’s 44-acre Firland Sanatorium, west of Highway 99 in today’s Shoreline. The labor was funded by the federal Emergency Relief Administration (ERA), a New Deal relief program.

Also potent is the devotion inherent in the sanatorium, whose stately 1913 Administration Building was topped by the two-barred Cross of Lorraine, longtime logo for the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, later the American Lung Association.

In our coronavirus era, the word “sanatorium” seems obscure, but before the mid-20th-century discovery and distribution of antibiotics to combat TB, it denoted an institution for isolated treatment of the notoriously contagious and deadly lung infection.

In Firland’s heyday, those admitted for one of its 250 openings endured 24-hour bed rest, nonstop fresh air and other strict regimens and surgeries for months or years. Patients who beat the disease emerged deeply grateful for a new chapter of life.

Its most famous survivor, author of the multi-million-selling farm chronicle “The Egg and I” and four Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books, was Seattle’s beloved Betty MacDonald. In 1938-39, amid her own New Deal administrative employment, she spent nine months at Firland. A decade later, she wrote a second memoir echoing the title of her first: “The Plague and I.”

While etching droll portraits of fellow patients and staff, the thankful MacDonald also rendered the darkness of her experience. Life there, she wrote irreverently, would “make dying seem like a lot of fun.” A paean to public health, “Plague” became her favorite of four books she penned for adults. Ovarian cancer claimed her in 1958 at age 50.

Today, the Administration Building bears a single-barred cross under the private auspices of CRISTA (first called King’s Garden), which since 1949 has housed and cared for seniors and served students among its ministries based at the now-56-acre campus.  Of its own volition, CRISTA has preserved the edifice lovingly.

At its door in early days, a prescient plaque placed a heart on the building’s figurative sleeve: “Generosity and a liberal spirit make men to be humane and genial, open-hearted, frank and sincere, earnest to do good, easy and contented and well-wishers of mankind.”

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photo, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Below are three more book covers, a movie poster, five additional photos and, in chronological order, 14 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archives (available via Seattle Public Library) and other online newspaper sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Special thanks to Rex Holappa, Paula Becker and Vicki Stiles for their assistance with this column!

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(To be published in the Seattle Times PacificNW Magazine on Feb. 14, 2021)

Grounded in work, hope continues to flower at Volunteer Park
By Jean Sherrard

In the hothouse of our civic life, voices and temperatures keep rising. Resonating for many today is President Ronald Reagan’s  famous sentiment: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’ ”

However, the gardener watering orchids in our 1938 “Then” photo might have begged to differ.

That decade’s Great Depression, devastating the nation with a 25% unemployment rate, provided fertile ground for the landslide 1932 election victory of visionary new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. His New Deal programs sparked a revolution, providing millions of federally subsidized jobs for desperate Americans through the Works Project Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and other agencies.

“For Roosevelt,” says New Deal historian Brent McKee, “work relief was preferrable to cash relief. He believed that given the opportunity, most people would choose to work.”

As a result, the Pacific Northwest blossomed with sizeable infrastructure projects, from trails, roads and highways to dozens of schools, libraries, post offices and other public buildings. By itself, an acknowledged granddaddy of New Deal projects, the Grand Coulee Dam in Eastern Washington, ensured many thousands of construction jobs between 1933 and 1942.

But smaller efforts also eased joblessness. Innovative projects offered work to historians, artists and musicians, acknowledging their vital cultural contributions. And in 1938, with WPA sponsorship and a nod to the beauty and solace nurtured by nature, 10 unemployed women were hired by the Volunteer Park Conservatory on Capitol Hill as assistants to head gardener Jacob Umlauff.

“Among their jobs is the task of helping care for [10,000] orchids,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted. The women were “light of touch and long of patience … very handy around such delicate plants.”

After four seasons of intensive training, the program offered each worker “a certificate as a Gardener, with a specialty in orchid culture.” Such a vocation could not have taken root in more fertile grounds.

Modeled after the 1851 Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace in London, the Conservatory was a jewel in the crown provided by the Olmsted brothers-designed Volunteer Park.

The Seattle Times acclaimed the $50,000 glass-paned structure as “a thing of joy and beauty” and the finest greenhouse west of Chicago.

Still operated by Seattle Parks, the Conservatory has been closed since last April due to the pandemic. But workers keep up its vast orchid collection, donated in 1921 by philanthropist Anna Clise, also founder of Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. It remains one of the nation’s finest.

Thus, while our national debate rages on, inside the steamy glass of the tropical Conservatory, hope continues to flower.

WEB EXTRAS

We are blessed with a selection of extras this week. For our 360 video featuring the Conservatory, click right about here.

Next, more of historian Brent McKee’s generous contributions, scanned at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.  The following photos are all from the late 1930s and feature the WPA horticultural training program at the Conservatory.

Lou Daprile, Marketing Coordinator for Friends of the Conservatory, took the selection of lovely “now” photos below to accompany the column. Thanks, Lou!

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Jan. 28, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Jan. 31, 2021)

Confident commerce of a colorful corner beckons from 1969

By Clay Eals

As we envision a post-virus time when the heart of the city can feel colorful again, this red-bricked beauty with its kaleidoscopic signage serves as a talisman.

The scene, the southwest corner of Sixth & Pike, is specific to the day — Sept. 21, 1969, an overcast Sunday afternoon with no one on the streets. But the stillness masks a season that was anything but quiet.

Richard Nixon was president, Woodstock had drawn 350,000 rock fans, Sen. Edward Kennedy had driven off the Chappaquiddick bridge, Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, and the anti-war “Chicago Eight” trial was nigh. Locally, the first Boeing 747 had taken flight, the Seafirst Tower (peeking at top left) had opened, and the Seattle Pilots were finishing their lone baseball season.

Anchoring this modest corner with sparkling neon and a perpetually opening and closing ring box was Burt’s Credit Jewelers, “the Northwest’s only diamond cutters.” Latvian immigrant Max Bender started the store in 1926, operating it until its closure in 1975 after the family launched a Ballard outpost.

Next to Burt’s was the equally enduring Home of the Green Apple Pie. Opening on Union Street across from the post office in 1918 and arriving at Sixth & Pike in 1932, this restaurant and bar, founded by Myrtle and Floyd Smith, swelled with cheeky hype. For example, a Nov. 4, 1960, Seattle Post-Intelligencer ad claimed “15 Million Persons (They Could Swing This Election) Have Eaten the Pies Baked on the Premises.” In 1971, the eatery bragged of having served up (urp!) more than 4 million pies. By decade’s end, it had closed.

On the second floor percolated an early outlet for Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), before the outdoors giant expanded to Capitol Hill and later to its flagship along Interstate 5.

Minnesotan Dick Swenson recalls carrying a folding camp tool he had just invented, called the Sven-Saw, as he bounded up the long flight of stairs to REI while visiting the World’s Fair in 1962. Greeting him was REI’s first full-time employee, Jim Whittaker, one year from becoming the first American to scale Mount Everest. Whittaker eyed the saw and said, “Why don’t you send me six?” When Swenson got home, Whittaker had ordered another six. REI remains Sven-Saw’s best retailer.

No surprise, the building eventually gave way to a high-rise, half-block business complex, City Centre. From 1995 to 2004, the corner’s newly rounded façade housed a flashy branch of FAO Schwarz toys, accented by a 15-foot-tall waving bronzed teddy bear outside.

With its legacy of commercial ingenuity, this charmed corner stands ready for post-virus life.

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photo, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Below are two additional photos and, in chronological order, 39 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archives (available via Seattle Public Library) and other online newspaper sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Special thanks to Linnea Swenson Tellekson for her assistance with this column!