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(Published in the Seattle Times online on May 27, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 30, 2021 )

Up, up and away in our AYP Balloon

By Jean Sherrard

To mark this week’s return to the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held on the University of Washington campus, we must give credit where credit is due — to French ingenuity. From coq au vin to kitesurfing, movie cameras to motorcycles, France has perennially delighted the world with marriages of innovation.

The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, had launched the first piloted aeronautical ascent in 1783 (to this day, hot air balloons in France are called montgolfières). Meanwhile, Louis Daguerre, creator of the daguerreotype photographic process, had captured the earliest cityscape portraits in 1838.

In 1858, an inspired Paris photographer, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (known by the sobriquet “Nadar”), wedded the two technologies. Leveraging unwieldy equipment into a hot-air balloon basket, he singlehandedly invented aerial photography. Fifty-one years later, this came in handy at Seattle’s first world’s fair.

Our A-Y-P aerial, though not high-tech for its time, offered breathtaking spectacle, showing off the exposition’s Beaux Arts structures (merci again, France) that partially encircle Geyser Basin. Looking northwest, this view features the imposing, domed U.S. Government Building, while the ornate, curved structures on both sides of the basin focused on mining and agriculture.

The UW’s Drumheller Fountain (aka Frosh Pond, where first-year students once were dunked in ritual initiation) later was constructed on the watery footprint of the 1909 basin. But few other A-Y-P artifacts endured. Meant to be as ephemeral as a stage set or a wedding cake, the A-Y-P’s gleaming “white city” soon gave way to the more permanent and austere structures of Collegiate Gothic architecture.

A wider version of this panorama appeared Sept. 19, 1909, in The Seattle Times, filling the front page below a banner headline, “Remarkable View of Exposition Taken from Captive Balloon.” A subhead explained, “After Many Futile Attempts Camera Artists Succeed in Getting Fine Bird’s-Eye View of Exposition Grounds.”

At first, the weather had refused to cooperate, ruining hundreds of negatives. But finally, the Times reported, “the haze which has been hanging over the grounds for the last month lifted, and atmospheric conditions for aeronautical photographs were ideal.”

The balloon’s cramped basket accommodated no more than two photographers outfitted with bulky cameras (sans tripod) and must have supplied equal parts claustro- and acrophobia. Augmenting that anxious mix, “the great gas bag,” the Times said, “pulled heavily on the retaining wire and shifted about in the wind.”

A single exposure turned out “particularly fine.” Snapped just 30 minutes before rains resumed, the photo was “as distinct as if it had been taken from the ground.” Despite the difficulties, proclaimed one photographer, “we are more than satisfied with the result.”

WEB EXTRAS

To see our 360 degree video featuring Geyser Basin/Drumheller Fountain — and hear Jean narrate the column, click right here.

 

 

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on May 20, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 23, 2021)

In today’s online world, will you ever again ‘Meet me at the fair’?

By Clay Eals

Betcha can’t name the last world’s fair held in North America. Thirty-five years ago, it was Expo ’86 in Vancouver, B.C.

Today, as technology brings nearly every aspect of the planet to our fingertips, eyeballs and eardrums, the appeal of another in-person, all-in-one extravaganza on this continent seems elusive.

Even so, we in Seattle revere our pair of world’s fairs past. They assembled multitudes in real time and concrete space and left enduring legacies and ambience.

The six-month 1962 fair drew nearly 10 million and gave us the well-used Seattle Center. Touchstones included the Space Needle, International Fountain, Pacific Science Center and now-named Climate Pledge Arena (I’ll always call it the Coliseum).

Less known today was the direct predecessor, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. It yielded the spectacular University of Washington promenade known as Rainier Vista while fostering a steadfast locus of learning. In four-and-a-half months, 3.7 million AYPE visitors encountered an endless array of cultural and commercial offerings, both high and low of brow.

This and other fairs constituted “the internet of the early 20th century,” contends Magnolia’s Dan Kerlee, a leading AYPE researcher. “You could come to the A-Y-P and ‘click on’ most anything you wanted.”

Among myriad examples is the dominant hall in our “Then” photo. Promoting “the greatest timber belt in the world,” the Chehalis County Building faced southeast near the UW’s northeast corner.

Above the columns of this temporary structure, a 3D frieze of a log trailer, locomotive, mill and other figures depicted what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called the “pretty legend of travels of the tree from the forest to the building,” along with the pursuits of livestock, dairy and farming.

This building would give the county (six years later renamed for Grays Harbor) worldwide recognition “in capital letters with indelible ink,” predicted its executive, H.D. Chapman. He signaled hopes for a harbor-based “metropolis” to export timber that he labeled “the finest on God’s footstool.”

Such AYPE zeal also pervaded three other expositions of the era: in Portland in 1905 and in San Francisco and San Diego in 1915. The book “Boosting a New West” (Washington State University Press, 2020) says the coastal fairs sought to outstrip the backwoods imagery of dime novels and “Wild West” shows to lure new settlers and investments.

Will we ever again see such a one-off, global smorgasbord?

An AYPE ad from the book whets my yearning for common physical ground:

You ought to see Seattle,
And the Fair she plans on giving;
’Twill put new notions in your head,
And make life worth the living.

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!

Special thanks to Dan Kerlee, as well as Caryn Lawton of Washington State University Press, for their assistance with this installment.

Below are a second “Now & Then” comparison, a map and five additional photos. Also, we present, 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.

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on May 13, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 16, 2021 )

To salute childhood memories of MOHAI, we go high

By Jean Sherrard

French novelist Marcel Proust famously described dunking madeleines — scallop-shaped cookies — in lime blossom tea, opening a sensory gateway to the lost world of childhood.

Our 69-year-old regional treasure, the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI, pronounced by locals as if inversely greeting one of the Three Stooges) also evokes such transport.

To jog my memory, I recently posted a question on social media: “What do you recall from school field trips to MOHAI?”

The result: hundreds of citations from adults once bused as students to MOHAI’s original Montlake building. The top 10:

• The fully furnished Victorian dollhouse.
• The 10-by-24-foot painted mural of the Great Seattle Fire.
• The actual glue pot that sparked the fire.
• The hydroplanes (specifically Slo-Mo-Shun IV).
• The diorama depicting the Denny Party’s arrival and Duwamish welcome at Alki.
• The stuffed gorilla Bobo, formerly of Woodland Park Zoo (and an Anacortes home).
• The 43-foot-long working periscope.
• Suspended by wires, Boeing’s unique B-1 wooden float plane, built in 1919.
• The original Rainier Beer neon “R.”
• Carved figureheads from wooden ships.

Honorable mentions included a 5-inch deck gun from the USS Colorado, a J.P. Patches exhibit and ex-President Warren G. Harding’s pajamas.

Pulling back from the intimacy of memory to vertiginous spectacle, our twin aerial photographs —separated by 72 years — afford us a north-facing, bird’s-eye view of present-day MOHAI and its surroundings.

Our 1949 “Then” image, from photo historian Ron Edge, features MOHAI’s current home, the Naval Reserve Armory on Lake Union’s south shore. Designed by Seattle architects William R. Grant and B. Marcus Priteca (best known for his majestic Art Deco movie palaces),* the Armory was dedicated on July 4, 1942, during the uncertain months following the U.S. entry into World War II.

Post-war, its campus aided recruiting, training and mustering. Sometimes it served as a community dance hall. Docked in its slips might be decommissioned minesweepers, destroyers and the occasional submarine — significantly the USS Puffer, survivor of a record 38 hours of depth-charging and a perennial tour magnet until 1960, when it was sold for scrap.

MOHAI moved to the former Armory in 2012 after its original Montlake building, which opened in 1952, was shuttered to accommodate the expanding State Route 520 floating bridge.

In our aerial repeat, snapped from 1,200 feet, the museum is blooming in morning light just north of booming South Lake Union. Amid MOHAI’s imaginative redesign and relocation, many of its beloved treasures remain in rotation, fostering continued recollections for Seattleites young and old.

To revisit (and maybe add) your own MOHAI memories, join us at PaulDorpat.com.

WEB EXTRAS

To see our spectacular 360 degree video of this week’s column, click here. It includes the now and then photos as well as video of our extraordinary aerial adventure (shot by Clay). Jean narrates.

*A gentle correction from friend of the column historian Larry Kreisman: “I have to correct your mention of Priteca’s movie palace architecture because, apart from the Hollywood Pantages, his theater designs are primarily Greco-Roman classical (Coliseum and most of his work for Pantages) or Renaissance Revival (Orpheum). The Admiral and others he did in the 30s and 40s we’re streamline moderne and we’re neighborhood movie houses, not palaces.”

We blush and offer thanks, Larry!

UPDATE:

For a comprehensive story on the trail by Judy Bentley, plus a newly completed map of the West Duwamish Greenbelt trail system, visit this Dec. 25, 2022, story by Judy on the West Seattle Blog.

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on May 6, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 9, 2021)

From up in the air, we get down to the Duwamish earth

By Clay Eals

It’s fitting, perhaps spiritual, that our first use of aerial photography for “Now & Then” showcases the wooded walkways above our city’s only river — a waterway named for the Native American tribe whose early chief is our city’s namesake.

An established public trail lets us walk this hillside and imagine the homeland of the Duwamish people, whose name means “the way in” and who once numbered 4,000 along the river and its tributaries. This, of course, was before Euro-American immigrants brought dominance and disease that decimated the tribe, even burning some members out of their shoreline dwellings.

You can find this path, called the West Duwamish Greenbelt Trail, along superimposed green lines in our “Then” and “Now” photos.

The older view, from 1920, provides a stunning glimpse of the eastern ridge of West Seattle, fronted by the Duwamish Waterway and precursors of West Marginal Way and the First Avenue South Bridge. At right swirls a U-shaped oxbow created by the river’s recent widening, deepening and straightening. Standing at center is Plant 1 of the fledgling Boeing Airplane Co. (sign on roof). Intruding at far right is the wing of an early biplane, from which the photo was taken rather courageously.

But our focus is on the trail, a new one in the expanded, soon-to-be-published second edition of “Hiking Washington’s History,” a color guidebook detailing 44 hikes statewide, with 12 added treks.

The route, accessed by two trail heads, snakes along a steep slope, which by 1920 had been logged for profit as well as operation of a streetcar line (faintly visible in our “Then” photo) that from 1912 to 1931 crossed the expanse, connecting bridges at Spokane Street to White Center and Burien.

Today, the trail traverses a 500-acre forest buffering two intensive forms of 20th-century development — housing above and industrial glut below. Over time, Seattle Parks acquired most of the greenbelt parcels. West Duwamish Greenbelt Trails volunteers and others regularly replant the land and maintain its path.

To create a matching “Now” image, Jean Sherrard and I literally got a helicopter view in late February, he making stills and I shooting video. Aloft, we quickly appreciated a 1970s city report that called the hillside a potential “gift of peace and quiet in our busy, noisy, polluted city.”

Also ringing true was the insight of guidebook co-author Judy Bentley:

“We hike historic trails for resonance: for connection to the people on the land before us and to a landscape relatively constant across centuries. We also hike out of curiosity: Who went this way before? Where were they going? Who made this trail and why?”

WEB EXTRAS

Because we were airborne, there is no 360 video for this week’s installment. But you can see Clay Eals‘ video of the “Now” prospect and above the trail, taken from the helicopter view, and hear him read the column aloud by visiting this video link:

Look below for 21 additional aerial photos by Jean Sherrard that showcase the West Duwamish Greenbelt Trail. In each one, can you spot the temporarily placed white bags that mark the trail route? You may have to click on each photo twice.

Also, look below for video by Matthew Clark of the helicopter from the ground, along with photos and maps provided by the West Duwamish Greenbelt Trails volunteers. We start off with a bonus photo from the same vantage, circa 1966-1967, courtesy of West Seattle’s Bob Carney.

Special thanks to Craig Rankin, Judy Bentley, Kait Heacock from University of Washington Press and, from Helicopters Northwest, Anna Siegel, for their assistance with this installment.

In addition, we salute the volunteers present on the trail during the Feb. 27, 2021, aerial photo shoot, some of whom laid white plastic bags on the trail to make the route visible from the air. They were Judy Bentley, Asa Clark, Christine Clark, Matthew Clark, Mackenzie Dolstad, Alec Duncan, Susan Elderkin, Shannon Harris, Trissa Hodapp, Angela Johnson, Billy Markham, Karen Nelson, Randy Nelson, Antoinette Palmer, Craig Rankin, Hagen Rankin, Leela Rankin, Hans Rikhof, Holly Rikhof, Sarah Ritums, Shawnti Rockwell, Ruth Anne Wallace, Tom Wallace, Paul West and Barbara Williams.