Published in The Seattle Times on-line on August 29, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 1, 2024

First ‘Paddle to Seattle’ gave distinction to 1989 state centennial

By Jean Sherrard

When Emmett Oliver, an elder of the Quinault tribe, reviewed plans drawn up for the 1989 state centennial celebrations, something was missing. The state’s rich maritime history would span sailing ships to mosquito-fleet classics. But no mention of canoes.

For thousands of years, canoes plied the lakes, rivers and oceans, carrying fishers, trappers, traders and warriors, besides reflecting the craftsmanship and artistry of their creators.

Oliver’s own background had given him unique insights into the crosscurrents of heritage and tradition. Educated in both Indian and non-native schools, he had joined the Coast Guard during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of commander.

Washington’s director of Indian education since 1971, Oliver was a passionate advocate for engaging and empowering tribal communities, so much of whose culture, language and traditions had been stripped away. Following his appointment to the state Centennial Commission by Gov. John Spellman, Oliver seized a rich opportunity to amplify that mission, which he presented to native councils across the region.

Commemorating a century of statehood, he said, would provide the ideal setting to mark a much longer Indigenous history. And what better symbol than his proposed Canoe Project, featuring a fleet of newly carved, ocean-worthy canoes to demonstrate the ongoing vitality of Coast Salish culture?

Dozens of long, traditional canoes, paddling in convoy across ancestral waters, hadn’t been seen since the state’s founding. With good reason. No new canoes had been carved in half a century. For Oliver, however, relearning traditional skills was not a bug but a feature that would connect tribes to their seafaring past.

It would provide “a chance for apprentice carvers to learn from masters,” he argued. What’s more, the wisdom of tribal elders would be vital, providing “techniques of carving, pulling, the spirituality involved with canoes, and [teaching] the paddling songs which used to ring out across the water.”

Logistic hurdles remained.

To acquire enough ancient red cedar logs of sufficient size, Oliver secured permission from the U.S. Forest Service to harvest two trees for each participating tribe under the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act. An unanticipated wrinkle: extra-long transport vehicles had to be contracted to deliver the massive logs.

On July 18, 1989, the dream came true. The “Paddle to Seattle,” the first of many canoe journeys to come, arrived at Golden Gardens Park, the traditional land of the Duwamish.

On a Coast Guard “follow” boat, Oliver oversaw the celebration, joyfully marked by tribes from across the northwest and beyond. And for the first time in 100 years, a flotilla of long canoes skimmed across the Salish Sea.

WEB EXTRAS

For a fascinating lecture about the history of the Canoe Journey by Marylin Oliver-Bard, presented during a recent cruise on the Virginia V, please click on her photo below.

For more photos of this summer’s Paddle to Puyallup.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 22, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 25, 2024

Forty-two years ago, Jack Mackie took dancing to the street

By Clay Eals

For Jack Mackie, life is better when we’re dancing. It’s “a cultural imperative.” He’s no professional hoofer. Grinning, he insists, “I’m just a bad shower dancer.”

But get the wiry artist along Broadway on Capitol Hill and ask him to follow its eight sets of embedded bronze dance steps, and the 78-year-old doesn’t hesitate to cut a concrete rug. Doesn’t matter if it’s the waltz, tango, lindy, mambo, rhumba or foxtrot weave. He can’t resist.

That’s because he’s the one who conceived and installed the sidewalk steps 42 years ago, back when he remembers Broadway as a plain, four-lane arterial, devoid of street trees and needing a boost.

Bolstered by the city’s 1% for arts program started in 1973 and a move to bury Broadway’s electrical cables, Mackie first proposed the project to the Seattle Arts Commission in January 1979. “Hopefully, the dance steps will be a catalyst,” he said. “A pedestrian could find someone on Broadway and dance on the sidewalk.”

“Yeah, and get arrested for insanity,” spouted dissenting commissioner Norm Hoagy, who favored spending money on music.

That wasn’t the only flak. When the project neared installation, KING-TV reporter Greg Palmer interviewed Mackie onsite, where they encountered pickets with “No Dance Steps” signs. Art McDonald of rival KOMO-TV went further, opining against the installation. “He was saying,” Mackie recalls, “that someone’s going to get knocked over, someone’s going to get hurt.”

Of course, no reports surfaced about such injuries. In fact, the steps seem to have generated only affection — evident when KING-TV’s local comedy show “Almost Live!” made them a key part of a circa 1990 “Speed Walker” sketch. Chasing a Dick’s Drive-In burger bandit, Bill Nye as the title character could not stride north on Broadway without pausing to gyrate to Mackie’s golden mambo.

Each dance site, roughly 12 square feet, features shoeprints, arrows and “L” and “R” letters to guide the feet of would-be light-fantastic trippers. The instructions, Mackie insists, are accurate, gleaned from an Arthur Murray studio. Two of the eight combinations, which Mackie playfully labeled “bus stop” and “obeebo,” are entirely his own inventions.

For the inlays, Mackie got help from renowned bronze artist Chuck Greening, whose expertise ensured the steps would show little wear over the decades. Mackie also is proud that the inlaid concrete has never cracked.

Formerly of Capitol Hill, Mackie lives in Edmonds. Visiting Broadway today, he likes to hang back and observe. “Ninety-nine percent of the people walk by,” he says, “but then sometimes somebody will come, and  there they go, dancing down them damn steps again.”

Will you?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Gene Gentry McMahon and especially Jack Mackie 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 a video interview of Mackie, 12 additional photos and 3 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.

Below are a dozen photos of the mambo installation, taken in 1982 by Charles Adler (courtesy Jack Mackie)

Published in The Seattle Times on-line on August 15, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on August 18, 2024

Lake Washington buoyed a 19th-century ferry-tale romance

By Jean Sherrard

When Capt. John L. Anderson went a-courtin’ at the age of 24, he had a sure advantage. His sleek Lake Washington steam ferry, the Quickstep, gave the ambitious young boat owner a leg up when it came to romance, suggests Matthew McCauley, marine historian and diver.

Born in 1868 near Goteborg, Sweden, 14-year-old Anderson enlisted as cabin boy on his uncle’s freighter. In a 1990 article in ‘The Sea Chest’ – a journal of northwest maritime history – his nephew Capt. Robert Matson relates what happened next. After six years as a deckhand, Anderson arrived in Quebec, finding work on the cross-Canadian rails. In 1888, at the age of 20, Anderson registered at the Yesler Hotel in Seattle.

It wasn’t long before he joined the crew of the 78-foot CC Calkins, a Lake Washington passenger steamboat commissioned by real-estate speculator Charles C. Calkins. His luxurious, 24-room Calkins Hotel on Mercer Island, built long before today’s connecting bridges, drew eager visitors from Seattle but was accessible only by water.

Anderson, with his years of ocean-going experience, quickly advanced. By 1890, after acquiring his master’s license, he was appointed captain of the new vessel, which offered regular passage to and from the mostly forested eastern shores of the lake.

A milestone for the 23-year-old immigrant came when visiting President Benjamin Harrison toured Lake Washington in 1891. Anderson welcomed him to the Leschi docks with bouquets of roses — and music. The CC Calkins fired up its onboard calliope for renditions of “Yankee Doodle” and “Home Sweet Home.”

Soon the young Swede trimmed his sails and invested wages in buying and refurbishing another lake steamer, the Winifred. Within hours of its relaunch, however, after a successful moonlight cruise and dance at popular Leschi Pavilion, the boat burned to the waterline. His insurance paid off handsomely.

To replace it, Anderson snapped up the aptly named 80-foot Quickstep, built in Astoria in 1877, and founded the Anderson Steamboat Co., transporting customers to ferry landings around the lake.

On its shipshape decks love blossomed. The dapper mariner caught the eye of passenger Emilie Madsen, whose Danish family had arrived in the booming lakeside coal town of Newcastle in 1887. Her regular ferry rides from Newcastle Landing to Seattle to give piano lessons provided the pair with trysting opportunities. Cabin boy Hugh Martin took the helm, discreetly averting his gaze while the couple “went behind the stack or in the stern … and held hands.”

In April 1895, they married, which must have broken the hearts of hundreds of lonely bachelor miners.

The first in a long flotilla of family boats, the Quickstep itself burned in 1898, but not before stoking flames of Anderson ardor.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 degree video version of this column, click here!

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times on-line on August 8, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on August 11, 2024

Only forest remains where once stood a lofty, coal-train trestle

By Jean Sherrard

Hellish roads, we understand, often are paved with good intentions.

When column founder Paul Dorpat emailed me a list of “Easy Dozen” column topics nearly a decade ago, featuring this week’s spectacular “Then” photo, he certainly meant well. It would be child’s play to repeat, he insisted.

Taking up Dorpat’s challenge, we enlisted the aid of the Newcastle Historical Society. Turns out the path to the May Creek trestle was one less taken.

Wielding machetes and loppers, we bushwacked along the overgrown rail bed traversing the steep southern shoulder of May Valley between Renton and Newcastle east of I-405. We clambered

over decades of refuse — from ancient washing machines to rusted motorcycles and automobiles — tossed from above into the ravine, muscling toward the former trestle site.

A dizzying 150 feet below flowed May Creek, a Lake Washington tributary wandering a steep canyon floor that was scooped out 10,000 years ago by the receding Vashon Glacier.

Directly east lay vast coal deposits first mined in 1863. Transport from Newcastle took days, employing tramways, wagons and barges loaded and unloaded up to 11 times before reaching Elliott Bay coal bunkers. Most mining profits were devoured by the cost of portage.

But by the late 1870s, steam clouds of change filled the air.

Extending the audaciously named Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad (which never ran beyond King County) would let coal be loaded directly onto train cars from the Newcastle coal face, slicing transport to mere hours.

Gullies were filled, hills leveled and 18 narrow gauge timber trestles constructed. Spanning May Creek Valley was a trestle126 feet tall and 1,070 feet long. At the time, it was hailed the largest in the territory.

The venture soon paid off.

During its first year, exports of Newcastle coal substantially increased, enough to make the 21-mile-long S&WW the country’s most profitable railroad.

By 1897, a New York firm, the Pacific Coast Co, assumed ownership, replacing 20-year-old narrow gauge with more robust standard-gauge tracks.

Contemporary observers, however, still noted the unnerving sway of the trestle beneath coal-laden cars. It would “shake the nerves of the stoutest hearts when they see what is expected to uphold a train in motion,” reported one anxious journalist.

In 1937, the rickety trestle was dismantled, having outlived the shuttered coal mines by nearly a decade. Today the once-ubiquitous rails are absent from Newcastle. But not the ghosts of hard labor.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 surround-sound video version of this column, please click here!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 4, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 1, 2024

Will a proposed apartment high-rise block out a Seattle treasure?

By Clay Eals

We all can think of hidden treasures that shouldn’t be.

One of them is in downtown Philadelphia. Until 1987, anyone wanting to build taller than the hat on the William Penn statue atop City Hall was forbidden to do so under a “gentleman’s agreement.” The pact collapsed, and today, from many streetside vantages, towers obscure the city’s founder.

A similar situation looms next door to a Seattle jewel. We speak of one of several gateways to Seattle Center, next to the elegant Pacific Science Center, a legacy building of the 1962 World’s Fair.

The northeast corner of busy Denny Way and the side street of Second Avenue North wasn’t always notable. In the early 20th century, the uphill site was largely empty. In 1946, a commonplace two-floor structure with a dental clinic took shape. Remodeled in 1955, it housed insurance, CPA and other offices until 1998.

That’s when the Science Center built a partly underground three-floor, 130-spot parking garage on the L-shaped lot wedged between the center and the intersection. Still visible from the streets were the center’s exterior walls, whose curves mirror the graceful lines of its signature arches.

Over time, lush trees on Denny gradually obscured the walls, but the corner remains a low-rise pedestrian sanctuary compared to its developed surroundings. And a few hundred feet up Second Avenue, low-level topiary allows the center’s western wall to stay visible and welcoming.

Watchdogs of Seattle aesthetics and history are spotlighting a project that would change all that. The financially troubled Science Center sold the L-shaped garage in 2019 for $13.9 million to an investor group tied to the Space Needle and Climate Pledge Arena. The group proposes to use the site’s 85-foot height limit to construct an eight-floor, 151-unit apartment building.

At a June 26, 2024, city design-review meeting, project designer Allison Orr called the building “a really positive addition to the neighborhood,” which she labeled “the cultural heart of Seattle.”

But firm public opposition arose in a dozen comments, including from Historic Seattle and Friends of Yamasaki, named for renowned Science Center architect Minoru Yamasaki. The latter group said the building would intrude on the Science Center’s design, block views of its facades and dominate the corner. In short, it would be “much too large.”

The design panel voted 3-1 to send the project to its next stage of city review. The dissenter, Seattle artist Norie Sato, said the plan portends a “massive presence [that is] missing any articulation that brings delicacy.”

The dispute may boil down to this: Without an alluring pathway, how do we find the treasure?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Heather of the Seattle Room of Seattle Public Library for her 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 4 additional photos and a report on the proposed high-rise that were helpful in the preparation of this column. Three other items:

• At this link, you also can download a pdf of two Puget Sound Business Journal articles on this site and project.
• At this link, you can follow the city review process for the project.
• At this link, you can watch the 94-minute city design-review meeting from June 26, 2024.