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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 29, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 3, 2024

History with a heart: Postcard detective identifies long-gone home

By Clay Eals

Often we shrug: “Here today, gone tomorrow.” For Adam Alsobrook, the phrase transforms wistfully into “Here yesterday, gone today.”

In off-hours, the architectural historian and resident of Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood often dons a figurative fedora to become a specialized detective after my “Now & Then” heart.

Alsobrook, 45, dives into what collectors call Real Photo Postcards (RPPCs), an early 20th-century phenomenon triggered by a then-new Kodak camera that let hobbyists and roving photographers print images on postcard stock for mailing.

Often unlabeled, the cards were produced in tiny runs, depicting subjects without commercial appeal. Today they flood eBay (2,700 “Seattle” listings alone, for example), but many are quite rare.

These missives also bore handwritten messages with fleeting details that some sleuths find maddeningly incomplete in suggesting what the images portrayed. Missing info, however, only stirs Alsobrook’s juices of research, training and intuition.

Case in point: our main “Then” postcard. An unknown person mailed it from Seattle on Sept. 13, 1907, to Mrs. F.F. Adams of Leverett, Mass.

Alsobrook scoured reference books, databases and other online resources, to no avail. But with expert-level acumen in residential historical design, he combed Sanborn fire-insurance maps to glean hints of the house’s locale.

He started with Capitol Hill and Queen Anne, then circled to First Hill, cracking the case by finding a mapped footprint at the northwest corner of University Street and Summit Avenue that matched the image.

This corresponded with a March 2, 1902, Seattle Times blurb about architect W.D. Kimball designing “an extensive double residence” for attorney Winfield R. Smith at that corner. Six days later, an architectural rendering appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

By about 1909, it had become a Catholic home for “working girls,” a euphemism for unwed mothers, and, by the late 1920s, a maternity hospital. It was razed in 1928, making way for Maynard Hospital. Today, it’s a multi-floor retirement community.

Alsobrook has investigated many other RPPCs, including those whose subjects still stand, such as a 1909 image of a Ravenna home at 5643 Brooklyn Ave. N.E. But the 1907 card of the long-gone University/Summit building may be the only photographic record of its existence.

His pie-in-the-sky hope is that historical residential photo-documentation will become as routine as today’s DNA-aided ancestry research. Why is such visual insight important?

To Alsobrook, it reflects our country’s culture. Relentlessly “nomadic,” Americans nevertheless deeply value their ever-changing built environment, he says, and making public its history can be uplifting.

For evidence, he needs only to flip over the 1907 card to its three-word inscription, fertile with rooted affection: “Our Seattle Home.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Adam Alsobrook for his invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video for this installment yet. But …

You also will find 4 links, 1 video, 1 additional photo and, in chronological order, 2 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

• Adam Alsobrook’s blog
• Real Photo Postcard site 1
• Real Photo Postcard site 2
• Real Photo Postcard site 3