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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 30, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 3, 2023

Cautionary shadow lingers from deadly West Seattle slide in 1921

By Clay Eals

While it happened 102 years ago, this is a cautionary tale for the ages.

My mother grew up not far from what she and others called Fairmount Gulch, the steep-sided canyon whose narrow and secluded road slices its lush woods, connecting West Seattle’s blufftop Hiawatha Park with Harbor Avenue and the Elliott Bay shore far below.

“Gulch” might imply foreboding territory. That impression could have originated, in part, from a lethal stroke of nature about a year before my mom was born.

On Sunday, Dec. 11, 1921, what the Seattle Star immediately called “the greatest rainstorm ever recorded in Seattle” wreaked regional havoc, nowhere more dramatically than in the gulch.

Riding the Route #1 Alki streetcar, Northern Pacific brakeman Samuel C. Andrews was headed to his home partway up the gulch at 1910 Fairmount Avenue. Before leaving work, at 6:15 p.m. he had telephoned his wife, Mary, who said she was cooking hot biscuits for supper and urged him to hurry home.

Shortly after 6:30 p.m., as Andrews stepped off at nearby Novelty Flour Mill (today’s Salty’s on Alki restaurant), the hillside to his west shattered him. The Andrews’ rental home and retaining wall had just been crushed by a maelstrom of mud falling from land next to view homes 120 feet above on dead-end Brook Avenue. Their house in turn had smashed a neighbor’s home, wrecking both structures. Killed were Mary Andrews and her stepsons John, 7, and Tom, 5.

The unrelenting storm triggered a second slide at 9:30 the next morning, injuring and temporarily burying nine city rescuers and two journalists. A third slide at 1:30 p.m. brought down another house. Rains receded, but harrowing memories lingered.

Nathan May, a Stanford Law School student, grew up along Fairmount Avenue, which he labels a “special corner” of the city. He takes personally what he calls “the profound human tragedy” at the center of the slides and seeks opportunities to make those who walk or drive Fairmount aware of “what happened here.” The legal scholar also sees a deeper, darker context:

“We have this enormous privilege of living in a region of unparalleled natural beauty, but there’s a flip side, which is that some of the factors that lead to that beauty — the hilliness, the precipitation, the unique weather factors — can also lead to tragedies like the one in 1921.

“It seems important that we pay heed to that risk and to the very real possibility that we’ll continue to see things like this in the years ahead.”

Of course, in 1921 no one had heard of climate change.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Midori Okazaki at the Puget Sound Regional Branch of Washington State Archives, Heather of the Seattle Room of Seattle Public Library, Wendy Malloy at the Museum of History & Industry and especially Nathan May for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

You also will find an additional video and, in chronological order, 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

And see a trio of new (as of Jan. 15, 2024) additions at the bottom!