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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 10, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 13, 2025

Neighborhood views from the air school us in new perspective

By Clay Eals

Throughout our lives, we often yearn to be close-up. But sometimes the farther away we get, the more we learn and appreciate. I’m speaking of distance — not only in physical space, but also in time.

Consider today’s pair of photos looking northwest at the West Seattle hub of Admiral Way and California Avenue. Taken from high up, they grant us perspective we rarely glean on the ground. They reveal how neighborhood icons can endure and how radically the rest of it can change.

Recently I received the main “Then” above — an oversized, mounted print — from a Fall City friend. Cars and other elements date it between 1930 and 1932. The photographer is unknown, but the image’s purpose is clearly to showcase its centered subject, Lafayette Elementary School.

Built one-half block south of Admiral Way in 1893 before West Seattle became a city of its own (1902) and annexed to Seattle (1907), the schoolhouse was first called West Seattle Central, drawing students of all grades peninsula-wide. With a bell tower and spires, it took on the nickname of “The Castle.”

Growth prompted an eight-room addition in 1908, and after West Seattle High School opened nearby in 1917, it focused on lower grades. In 1918, it was renamed for French Gen. Lafayette, who aided the Continental Army in the early 1780s during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

An April 1949 earthquake, fortunately during spring vacation, reduced much of the edifice to rubble, so in 1950 a much flatter Lafayette opened on the same site, featuring nine rows of innovative brown “saw-toothed” rooftop skylights.

The school presides at the center of our “Now.” But both airborne views display much more that survives:

At upper right is the narrow 1919 Portola Theatre, predecessor of the expanded 1942 Admiral Theatre, today a beloved landmark moviehouse. At lower right is the 1929 former Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist, also a landmark and home of the newly opened Washington State Black Legacy Institute. And at bottom center is the northwest tip of 1911 Hiawatha Playfield, an Olmsted-designed landmark, with two lone tennis players on its courts in each photo.

What’s changed in nearly 100 years? Oh, my. Lot sizes are far smaller. Houses and commercial buildings are more plentiful, many of them much taller.

The comparisons are seemingly endless, which is why drone shots and Google Earth are popular successors to the airplane- or even balloon-based photos of yesteryear, says Ron Edge, an expert on local aerial photography.

“The interest has always been there,” he says. “People have just loved to see what their towns looked like from the air.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ron Edge for his invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s aerial video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, visit here.

Below, you will find 9 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

You also will find 107 photos from the Laidlaw aerial negatives in the Webster & Stevens Collections at the Museum of History & Industry, along with an index, courtesy of Ron Edge‘s scanning.

And here is a brief history of aerial photography!