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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 27, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 30, 2024

Requiem for a corner: From hotel to government to ‘reimagining’

By Clay Eals

The sentiment may sound achingly familiar:

“The wrecking ball is fast changing the face of downtown Seattle. For many of us, it sounds a sometimes sad requiem. Familiar old landmarks are being razed to make way for banks, office buildings and parking garages. Pedestrian barricades and fenced-off sidewalks surround entire blocks in much of the downtown area. At the moment, demolition seems to be the city’s No. 1 industry.”

But the words are not from today. They’re nearly 56 years old, from the typewriter of The Seattle Times’ longtime “Faces of the City” columnist John J. Reddin on Oct. 16, 1968.

The impetus for this installment was the recent demolition of the 160-room, eight-story brick Holland Hotel, at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Jefferson Street. The hillside hotel opened with just six floors in 1910, across Fourth from what six years later became King County’s third (and current) courthouse.

The Seattle Times on March 27, 1910, deemed the Holland “the most up-to-date commercial hotel on the Pacific Coast.” Ads prominently noted its “fireproof” construction, a sure reference to the Great Seattle Fire 21 years earlier. Rates began at $1/day. “Elevator service. … Phones in every room. Pleasant lobby.”

Reddin’s latter-day affection for the hotel stemmed from its street-level Tulip Room, a gathering spot for city and county employees, attorneys, police officers and journalists. “More than just a cocktail lounge,” he wrote, the bar was “a neighborhood institution [that] seemingly attracted more than its share of lawyers and others skilled in the art of freewheeling debate.”

Replacing the Holland Hotel in 1971 was today’s still-standing King County Administration Building. The nine-floor structure has long been praised — and sometimes reviled — for its hexagonal, honeycomb pattern of walls and windows. Some think it the ugliest building in Seattle.

“I can understand those who find this hulking modernist mass to be overpowering and maybe even authoritarian,” writes architectural blogger Paige Claassen. “That being said, I must admit I still find this blocky edifice pretty compelling.”

Nearly empty, it’s been closed to the public since March 2020. Its last occupants will move out by summer’s end, as King County Executive Dow Constantine has deemed the building obsolete. It and seven neighboring structures in his 2023 Civic Campus Plan are set for “reimagining” as a combined commercial, residential and governmental core, possibly including a Sound Transit station.

Transformation is in the wind, so we return to Reddin’s 1968 meditation:

“Not in the memory of modern man has there been so much change in the city’s skyline. But that’s progress. Inexorable. Or so they say.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bob Carney and Paige Claassen for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals’ 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.

Below, you also will find 17 additional images and 24 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.

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Published in The Seattle Times on-line on June 20, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 23, 2024

We sign in with a sweet discovery, revealed by a local sleuth

By Jean Sherrard

To paraphrase a classic advertising slogan, when Ron Edge speaks, local historians listen.

A collector of historical photographs and ephemera, Edge is referenced in reverential tones usually reserved for celebrities or minor deities. Longtime “Now & Then” readers may have encountered his contributions without knowing it.

Which is why, when the Lake Forest Park resident told me that he’d found visual proof of something I’d been seeking, the hairs on my neck stood up.

He forwarded his scan of a photo bought several years ago. Small and hand cropped, it was credited to itinerant photographer Hiram Hoyt. The photo, from 1875, captured a familiar scene: the heart of thriving Seattle looking north up Commercial Street — today’s First Avenue south of Yesler.

The proverbial three little pigs might have sniffed out a cautionary note: buildings made of sticks don’t last long. But these wooden shop fronts lining the unpaved street represented a lively downtown core.

They included iron and tin mongers, realty offices, clothing shops, jewelers, and drug and grocery stores. Henry Yesler’s Pavilion, two blocks north at the corner of Front Street and Cherry, a popular venue for concerts, theatrical events and dances, can be seen just left of center.

Directly above stands the squarish white Central School, partially blocking the graceful outline of the Territorial University (today’s University of Washington) hovering at the corner of Fourth and University.

Further study reveals two coal gas streetlights, installed a year earlier by newly formed Seattle Gas Light Company. Canvas sunshades hung from the west-facing shops. Long shadows suggest a balmy summer’s afternoon.

“Proof of your favorite confectioner,” Edge announced with typical

cryptic brevity. I zoomed in, and a rectangular, one-word sign atop a roof near the center of the image swam into hazy focus: “CANDY.”

Two years ago, I wrote about the Puget Sound Candy Manufactory, Seattle’s first candy shop. Frustratingly, no photo of the business could be found. Edge’s intriguing tidbit, however, provides definite proof.

Proprietor Andrew Piper (1828-1904), who emigrated to America from Bavaria at age 19, arrived in Seattle in 1873 to a robust welcome. His shop’s unique confections and his personal charisma ensured popular success, catering to Seattleites’ sugary appetite.

Each winter, with Lake Union frozen several feet deep, the industrious confectioner carved out and stored huge ice blocks of ice, whipping up ice cream for delighted customers on hot summer days.

Today, thanks to Edge’s keen eye and detailed knowledge of regional history, “Now & Then” once again can fill in a missing puzzle piece and offer us all a satisfying sweet.

WEB EXTRAS

First off, let’s revisit our Andrew Piper column from a couple years ago, featuring a “then” photo of the candy maker with his son Walter on Front Street (First Ave).

And here’s the column Ron worked on with Paul Dorpat and me, finding the precise location of the cabin of Princess Angeline (Kikisoblu) below today’s Pike Place Market.

Some have remarked on the repeated cold winters which seemed to predominate in the Northwest during the latter half of the 19th century. Lake Union, in particular, froze to a depth of several feet, allowing Piper’s venture into ice cream.

Evidently, the Little Ice Age, which ended globally around 1850, was prolonged in the PNW by several decades, say local geologists.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 13, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 16, 2024

Her mid-century business on Capitol Hill was a store of its dime

By Clay Eals

Funny what we recall from our younger years.

Once when we visited my grandparents in West Seattle, my mom took me to N&N Variety in the Admiral Junction. Its seemingly endless counters held innumerable tiny treasures, including toy figures, and my fidgety fingers fished one into my pocket. Outside, my mom found out, of course. She admonished me to return the item and confess to what I trust was my only instance of childhood shoplifting.

But the incident didn’t dim my enthusiasm for the shop. In fact, we all, of a certain age, hold great affection for what were called dime stores or the five-and-dime.

The term took off in 1879 with Woolworth’s, whose successful venture in Lancaster, Pa., eventually spawned a slew of chain and single-owner shops selling sundries at paltry prices — from yarn, shoestrings, mugs and other housewares to pencils, ornaments, greeting cards and jigsaw puzzles. They stocked the proverbial “little bit of everything” and became fixtures in nearly every mid-century neighborhood and town.

On Seattle’s Capitol Hill, the storefront at 422 15th Ave. E. housed a “5-Cent to $1.00 Store” starting in 1941. Buying the business in 1955 were Jim and Beverly Berto of Bothell, who renamed it the Capitol Hill 10-Cent Store.

Jim soon returned to commercial fishing, ceding the business to Bev. “After a couple of years of helping little old ladies select hairnets and measuring out satin ribbon by the inch, he gave up and told me I could run it myself,” Bev told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The interview with Bev ran in April 1973, three months after Jim’s death, when the shop lost its lease for expansion of next-door supermarket property. Therein, Bev lamented the impending loss of her everyday impact.

“Many customers … think of a visit to the store as their afternoon’s entertainment,” she said. “They were all very distressed to find I was closing. One little lady snapped, ‘We wouldn’t have let them close you down if we had known. We could have signed a petition or something!’ ”

Today, Bev’s grandchildren fondly remember the store and its proprietor. “Everybody on Capitol Hill would come in there, from kids to seniors, and mostly mosey along and browse,” says Jim Berto of Whidbey Island.

“Grandma was a gentle, quiet person, and she liked people,” says family historian Bev Schmer of Bothell. “She was a perfectionist. She wanted to do it just right. She was very patriotic, very family. She was just a jewel.”

The headline for the P-I story incorporated irresistible wordplay: “Store Will Close For Last Dime.”

That’s a priceless pun worth stealing.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Jade D’Addario of the Seattle Room of Seattle Public Library, Jim Berto, Jimmy Berto and especially Bev Schmer for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals’ 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.

Below, you also will find 6 additional images and 8 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.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times on-line on June 6, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 9, 2024

Can cars and walkers coexist in the Pike Place Market’s ‘honest place’?

By Jean Sherrard

First, an admission

As a teen in the early 1970s, I fell hard for the rough-and-tumble Pike Place Market. I knew it had just been rescued from developers’ wrecking ball. But it was the unvarnished marketplace itself — a seeming chaos of intermingling vendors and customers — that repeatedly drew me to this multi-chambered heart of Seattle.

A “circus crowd” was how the wowed Seattle Times described the Market’s exuberant opening on Saturday, Aug. 17, 1907. With spirits undampened by rain, thousands of eager consumers, weary of overcharging for fresh produce by a syndicate of unscrupulous middlemen, flocked to Pike Place to buy directly from farmers.

By mid-morning, farmers’ wagons were stripped bare. Noted the Times, the public market’s “great success proved that … Seattle was not only willing but anxious to support such a venture.”

Surviving Prohibition, the Depression, two world wars and a viaduct bypass, the aging Market in the mid-1960s faced certain demolition. A federally funded urban-renewal plan envisioned high-rise office buildings and parking lots to replace what Seattle architect Fred Bassetti famously called “an honest place in a phony time.” Fellow architect Victor Steinbrueck and other passionate preservationists arose to protest the scheme.

In 1971, their years of work paid off when Seattle voters agreed, by a landslide, to pass an initiative creating a Market “preservation zone.”

Today, the “honest place” faces a new question. Post-pandemic crowds, bolstered by cruise ships, often transform busy Pike Place — the street that bisects the Market — into a frenzied three-ring circus. To ameliorate such pressure and potential dangers, the city is evaluating whether to close the Market to vehicle traffic and create a pedestrian-only “event street.”

Such a step would disrupt the Market’s “controlled spontaneity,” says John Turnbull, recently retired from the Pike Place Preservation and Development Authority, which has operated the Market for the past 50 years. He cites a unique character 117 years in the making.

“We’re unlike any other neighborhood in the city,” Turnbull says, “with a blurring of public and private space.” He says the traffic question goes beyond maintaining accessible loading zones. “We need fire lanes and emergency and handicap access for residents. Closing to traffic is not a workable scenario.”

The Market Foundation’s Nick Setten knows much is on the line, and he welcomes conversation on the topic. “The Market is a living place,” he says, “with a unique historical context. Whenever a decision of gravity is made here, the ripples expand exponentially.”

Preserving this “honest place” with rough edges and heart intact will be a hard-won road. And worth the journey.

WEB EXTRAS

For a 360 video featuring elements from this column, please visit us here.