THEN: In 1975, white-faced Artis the Spoonman spoon-feeds a crowd with his percussive legerdemain. He remembers several faces in the crowd, including the scowling woman at right, as regulars in “the commons.” The decrepit Corner Market Building in the background soon was restored. In the early 1990s, Artis was famously featured in Seattle-based Soundgarden’s breakout hit “Spoonman.” (Frank Shaw)NOW1: Accordion Cat, a performer in the Market for 13 years, treats passersby to a plaintive rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” where the Artis the Spoonman once played. Accordion Cat’s cat-head mask is worn not just for Halloween but all year round. (Jean Sherrard)NOW2: Jonny Hahn, a familiar Market presence who has played his piano on a Pike Place corner for 35 years, has a plea: Lower cell phones and hear the music. (Jean Sherrard)
(Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 28, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Oct. 31, 2021)
Buskers bolster the Market soundtrack, but for how long?
By Jean Sherrard
Some sights peel back your eyelids and jet right into the brain, never to be forgotten.
In my mid-teens, I acted in a 1973 production of “Hamlet” at the tiny Stage One Theater in Post Alley, just north of today’s Gum Wall. Post-rehearsal, as I climbed narrow concrete steps up to Pike Place Market, a busker dressed all in white and sporting a mime’s makeup danced and lunged through a cheering crowd.
Armed with a set of spoons, he battered them against every available surface — from his knees, teeth and cheeks to pillars, sidewalks and banisters — scooping rhythmic staccatos out of thin air. He was Artis the Spoonman, and I was spellbound.
“I’d been playing spoons since I was 10,” recalls Artis, now living in Port Townsend, “and always wanted to be a performer.” Moving to Seattle from Santa Cruz, he frequented Fremont taverns, playing jukebox duets for tips, and soon established a fanbase.
Next stop: Pike Place Market, not yet a tourist haven but a place where locals gathered to shop and stroll.
“Aside from street fairs, the Market was one of the only venues for buskers in the early 1970s,” Artis says. “We had a busking community, share and share alike, performing in the commons for the people.”
Pianist Jonny Hahn, originally from Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, still shares that sensibility. Busking since 1986, he embodies the Market’s soundtrack.
“I play a combination of lengthy improvisational instrumental pieces and songs with lefty political lyrics,” he says. “The Market has been my home because of the artistic freedom quotient.”
Wrestling his 64-key acoustic piano onto a Pike Place corner every day, he bears bittersweet witness to a particular strain of social evolution.
“It started with smartphones,” he says. “People’s attention spans were diminished by orders of magnitude. Constant texting and Googling and taking photos completely altered public space.”
Dealing a further blow was Covid. In March 2020, Market busking was prohibited. Hahn relocated, playing his piano beneath the old Green Lake Aqua Theater until the Market reopened to performers last June 25.
Public response to his return moved Hahn deeply: “It was just heart energy spilling over. People just kept saying how glad they were to have me back. The music was something they really, really missed.”
However, few other performers have returned to a place once considered a busker’s paradise. Will they come back? Hahn is wary of predictions.
“I don’t have any idea what will happen next month or next year,” he says, “but I am committed to the Pike Place Market.”
WEB EXTRAS
Click through to our 360 degree video, featuring Accordion Cat playing a soulful cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Plus a couple more photos of Artis the Spoonman in an earlier Market, along with 1983 video footage of Artis at the Winnipeg Folk Festival:
Another photo of Artis the Spoonman, taken on the same day in 1975. (Frank Shaw)Artis playing with longtime partner Jim Page in 1992.VIDEO (0:25): Click the photo to see Artis shredding the stage while Steve Goodman (right) looks on at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. This link is to the entire 57-minute “Festival of Friends” video from Twin Cities PBS, and you can find the Artis footage at time code 47:03-47:28.
THEN1: Taken in 1940 as the city’s street railway network neared its collapse, this north-facing view illustrates the intertwining of Seattle streetcars and cable cars. The Route 11/East Cherry streetcar (left) heads north on Broadway at James Street, while cable-car #11 lays over in front of its car barn and powerhouse, built in 1891. Transferring from the former to the latter let riders reach downtown’s south end. (Courtesy Pacific Northwest Railroad Archive, WWASMR-11-005)NOW: Author Mike Bergman stands at the same vantage while a golden City of Seattle streetcar heads north along its First Hill route. The Wallingford resident’s new book, “Seattle’s Streetcar Era: An Illustrated History 1884-1941,” will be available after Dec. 1, 2021. The book’s launch event will take place 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021, at Highline Heritage Museum, 819 SW 152nd St., Burien. Proof of vaccination and masks are required. For more info, visit WSUPress.WSU.edu. (Jean Sherrard)
Published in the Seattle Times online on Oct. 21, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 24, 2021
From Blanchard to Bergman, Seattle’s transit saga keeps moving
By Clay Eals
While leading historical tours in West Seattle’s shopping hub, which in 1907 was named The Junction for its streetcar intersection, I often assert that transportation fuels our very existence. It guides where we reside, work and play. To live, we’ve gotta move.
This, of course, applied at the turn of the 20th century, when autos were new and owned by only a few. So to quickly cross town, Seattleites frequently rode the rails of a cable car or electric streetcar. Originally charted by 13 companies, the routes evolved into a grid that gave shape to downtown and outlying neighborhoods (dubbed “streetcar suburbs”).
THEN2: Streetcar historian Leslie Blanchard, about 39 years old, as shown in a Seattle Times story on Aug. 10, 1969. He died in November 2011. (Seattle Times online archive)
To document this, historian Leslie Blanchard, a longtime city engineer, assembled a landmark book, “The Street Railway Era in Seattle: A Chronicle of Six Decades,” published in 1968.
Enter Mike Bergman.
Growing up atop Queen Anne Hill, Bergman pestered trolley-bus drivers about how their vehicles worked. Clerking at the downtown library in 1968 while a senior at the old Queen Anne High School, he repeatedly observed Blanchard examining documents and even introduced himself to the researcher. The seeds of Bergman’s future were growing.
Fifty-three years later, he is a retired planner, with 16 years at Sound Transit and 20 years at King County Metro. Emulating Blanchard with countless study hours at the Pacific Northwest Railroad Archive in Burien, Bergman has produced his own large-format book, “Seattle’s Streetcar Era: An Illustrated History 1884-1941,” to be published by WSU Press.
The book’s launch event will take place 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021, at Highline Heritage Museum, 819 SW 152nd St., Burien. Proof of vaccination and masks are required.
Blanchard’s 1968 primer is long out of print. Surviving copies go for hundreds of dollars online. But Bergman’s book, with 130 crisply reproduced historical photos and 13 new maps, offers a fresh chance to, as he writes, “give the reader more of a feeling of being there.”
That feeling — in today’s city of 737,000 people, clogged with 461,000 cars — might be elusive. But Bergman’s book evokes the social and political trends of a time when citizens surmounted Seattle’s legendary hills aboard railcars, akin to San Francisco’s famed fleet but enclosed because of our chillier clime.
Highlights include the saga of the Queen Anne counterbalance, the ingenious, gravity-powered underground rig that propelled cars up and down the district’s 18%-grade hill. Its can-do ethic reflected the era.
Bergman also charts the city’s bumpy takeover of the streetcar network in 1919, when yearly trips peaked at 133 million, as well as the system’s demise and conversion to rubber-tired buses by World War II.
Then, as now, civic debate over public transportation was rife. But as Bergman notes, today’s multi-jurisdictional light-rail web is steadily expanding while shaping a Seattle that just keeps moving.
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 also are (1) a video interview of Mike Bergman, (2) a photo of his book cover and Leslie Blanchard‘s, (3) a 1925 Seattle streetcar map courtesy of Ron Edge , (4) video of a 2017 Bergman presentation and (5), in chronological order, 15 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and other online newspaper sources that document Leslie Blanchard’s pace-setting streetcar research. Of these clippings, six are earlier “Now & Then” columns by Paul Dorpat, our column’s founder.
VIDEO (12:48): Click this photo to see a video interview of author Mike Bergman. (Clay Eals)The covers of streetcar books by Leslie Blanchard (lrft) and Mike Bergman.1925 map of the Seattle Municipal Street Railway. (Courtesy Ron Edge)VIDEO (56:30): Click photo to see Mike Bergman present, for the Southwest Seattle Historical Society on May 21, 2017, “Streetcar Suburbs: History of the Highland Park & Lake Burien Railway.” (Klem Daniels)Sept. 5, 1965, Seattle Times, page 95.June 22, 1969, Seattle Times, page 166.Aug. 10, 1969, Seattle Times, page 34.Sept. 17, 1972, Seattle Times, page 17.Dec. 31, 1972, Seattle Times, page 18.April 21, 1974, Seattle Times, page 130.Feb. 1, 1987, Seattle Times, page 23.Aug. 2, 1987, Seattle Times, page 124.Aug. 12, 1990, Seattle Times, page 182.Oct. 13, 1997, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, page 14.Aug. 1, 1999, Seattle Times, page 199.Dec. 20, 2000, Seattle Times, page 208.Sept. 28, 2003, Seattle Times, page 211.Oct. 31, 2004, Seattle Times, page 212.Dec. 12, 2007, Seattle Post-Intelligencers, page 12.
THEN 1: Eagle Falls’ lower basin, to the right of our posing gent, provides a popular picnicking spot and local swimming hole. (University of Washington LIbraries, Special Collections)NOW 1: An aspiring student filmmaker captured in mid-air vaults across “Hell’s Gate,” avoiding a plunge into the glacier fed Skykomish River. Today’s gap has widened by several feet due to railroad blasting. (Jean Sherrard)THEN 2: Al Faussett tried to shoot Eagle Falls, but his cigar-shaped craft overturned halfway down. A single spectator can be seen at upper right, perched on a cliff across the river. (University of Washington LIbraries, Special Collections)NOW 2: Young videographers find their footing across a much-reduced Eagle Falls. Today’s falls might not challenge Evel Knievel, but its dangers are still significant. Icy currents and a treacherous undertow have produced many injuries and several fatalities over the years. (Jean Sherrard)
Eagle Falls near Index: ‘An easy jump, but hell if you don’t make it’
By Jean Sherrard
Lee Pickett was surely the most prolific photographer to grace Snohomish County. His 1910 move from Seattle to the tiny mountain town of Index provided Pickett with opportunities aplenty to document the burgeoning highways and railroads and the booming logging and mining industries.
In the 1920s, he was appointed official photographer of the Great Northern Railroad. His stunning images recorded construction of eight-mile Cascade Tunnel (1929) — then the longest in the western hemisphere — and quickly cemented his reputation.
His more whimsical portraits reveal Pickett’s playful side. This pair of “then” photos, snapped a decade apart, feature Eagle Falls along the Skykomish River, three miles east of Index.
The first, from 1916, features boulders at the falls’ base, a perennial picnic spot and swimming hole for locals. The gent in jacket and fedora poses stiffly while, across the bottom of the negative, Pickett has written, in the reverse script mastered by period photographers: “Hell’s Gate at Eagle Falls. An easy jump — but — hell if you don’t make it.”
In our “now” photo at the same location, the boulders have shifted position, their top halves seemingly lopped away. These changes are due not to erosion or earthquakes but to explosives intended to reduce steep grades for adjacent Great Northern track beds.
During a recent visit, a members of a videography class from Hillside Student Community watch as 15-year old Will Maltz, trained in the urban gymnastic sport of parkour, leaps the gap between boulders.
Our second “then” photo features the upturned canoe of local lumberjack (and Pickett regular) Al Faussett. In 1926, Fox Pictures offered $1,500 to anyone who would row through nearby Sunset Falls. Faussett built a sturdy craft to survive the ordeal, but Fox reneged on its offer.
Undaunted, the newly minted daredevil persisted, reveling in his growing celebrity, but cashing in proved elusive. On Sept. 6, 1926, hundreds of onlookers crowded the Eagle Falls banks to watch Faussett risk life and limb. Most declined to pay for the privilege, and the drama of his descent fizzled when his canoe stuck partway down the run. A friend soon dislodged it with a long pole.
Faussett spent the next three years shooting Northwest waterfalls, breaking bones and suffering repeated concussions until retiring on his waterlogged laurels.
The photographer Pickett (1882-1959) ended his career in the late 1940s, health ravaged by decades of exposure to developing chemicals. Today, his Index home houses the Index Historical Society’s Pickett Museum.
WEB EXTRAS
More videographer from Hillside pose near the ‘easy jump’Debris left behind by the railroad
And for a 360 degree video view of Eagle Falls, along with Jean’s narration, head in this direction.
In a late breaking addition, photo historian Ron Edge sends along the following Pickett portraits.
Al Faussett, with his original craft, the Skykomish Queen
Click twice on the following panoramas to zoom in and explore. To create these spectacular images, Pickett used the Cirkut camera manufactured by the Rochester Panoramic Camera Company. Thanks, Ron, for these remarkable photos of a vanished landscape.
A panoramic view of Scenic, Washington, just west of Stevens Pass – now the starting point for a hike to some spectacular alpine lakes.Pickett’s panoramic view of Tye (initially Wellington), Washington. After the completion of the tunnel in 1929, Tye was abandoned and now must be listed among our state’s ghost towns.
The cover of the Oct. 10, 2021, PacificNW magazine of The Seattle Times (“Then” photo courtesy Marti Dell, “Now” photo by Perry Barber)
We are delighted that the editors of PacificNW magazine of The Seattle Times asked us to prepare a cover-story package for the magazine’s print edition of Sunday, Oct. 10, 2021, on the topic of vicarious vacations. Call it an epic “Now & Then.”
Here’s the introduction:
The places we visited when we were young stand stubbornly, often joyously, in our minds and hearts.
In this collection, we delve into these memories as illuminated by long-ago travel photos — many of them submitted by readers of our “Now & Then” column.
We also return to these sites, in images kindly contributed by professional and amateur photographers in places that we collectively cannot or choose not to revisit at present because of the coronavirus.
It’s a way of taking vacations without leaving home. Enjoy the trip!
And below are links to 12 fully illustrated vignettes, including video interviews, preceded by the Backstory. Special thanks to the friends and others we called upon to snap “Now” photos out of the goodness of their hearts. We hope you enjoy it all.
