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Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 26, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 28, 2025

For 36 wayward metal-art panels, let there be (city) light!

By Clay Eals

An exquisite set of 36 long-unseen city art treasures has come to light, at least most of it. A few panels are still missing. Was the set misplaced, lost, stolen? As with previous mysteries, we at “Now & Then” ask you, dear readers, to be detectives.

Ninety years ago, their owner, Seattle City Light, named the set “The Evolution of Lighting.” The silver-sheened panels trace an inspiring story, from ancient (“Primitive man’s first source of light, a forest fire caused by lightning”) to modern-day (“Edison’s First Incandescent Lamp, Perfected 1879”).

The wafer-thin panels are made of Britannia metal, a pewter alloy. Each 3-by-2-foot panel exemplifies a French relief art crafted by hammering the metal’s reverse side, a technique called repoussé (reh-poo-SAY), meaning “pushed back.”

The first 34 panels were designed by Albert E. Booth and hammered out by John W. Elliott, both Seattleites, in 1935 for the just-opened City Light building at 1015 Third Ave., encircling the lobby from above. Elliott — whose elaborate art adorns three-dozen prominent Northwest edifices — added two panels to update the exhibition for the expanded and remodeled City Light building in 1958. The aggregation was rearranged into a 27-by-8-foot wall, nine panels wide by four panels high.

The mystery? When City Light moved to the Seattle Municipal Tower at Sixth & Cherry in 1996, the panels were to follow.

“That never happened,” says Tom Parks, a 1979-2015 City Light employee who heads the Retired City Light Employees Association. “I think it was a task that fell through the cracks.” He says it’s possible they were filched, that someone thought, “They’re pretty cool, they’re old, and we can get some money for them.”

The evidence? In May, West Seattle antique dealer Mike Shaughnessy purchased four of the panels, each in a wooden frame, from a fellow “picker.” In August, after seeing a 1960 City Light booklet depicting all 36 panels, he doubled down, discovered 28 more and snapped them up. He is four shy of the whole set.

He envisions selling the set back to the city for the $12,000 he’s invested. But first he contemplates a downtown gallery display, including mockups of the missing panels, hoping to scare up the real ones.

Parks applauds the quest. “They were unique,” he says. “It was a key feature in the old lobby. It was the first thing that people noticed when they came in.”

How did the panels get into private hands? Where are the outliers? Shaughnessy’s trail has run dry. Our own inquiries and dives into local archives turn up nothing.

Clues, dear readers?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Gary Zarker, Tom Parks, Mike Wong, Jeanie Fisher of Seattle Municipal Archives, Laura Spess of University of Washington Special Collections and especially Mike Shaughnessy and Bradi Jones 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.

Here is other local coverage of this “history mystery”:

• West Seattle Blog, Sept. 27, 2025
• SPACE 101.5 FM, Sept. 28, 2025

Below, you will find Seattle City Light’s two booklets that display “The Evolution of Light” panels. The 1935 booklet shows 34 panels, and the 1960 booklet shows 36. Also there is the Jan. 30, 1996, program for the ceremony noting closure of the City Light building at 1015 Third Ave.

You also will find 3 additional photos and  8  historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

 

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 18, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 21, 2025

Kirkland historian brings web close-ups to Seattle’s silent-film era

By Clay Eals

When was the last time you saw a movie in a theater? Today, many stream movies from anywhere but theaters. No surprise, given society’s embrace of the convenience and selectivity of the internet.

So maybe it fits that a comprehensive new history of our region’s early movie exhibition is virtual, not physical.  The fledgling but voluminous website “Northwest Picture Show” supplies chronologies and anecdotes aiming to lure movie-maven Alices into a rewarding rabbit hole.

It’s the creation of Eric Flom, by day a benefits writer but at all other times a deep documenter of local theater lore. The 57-year-old Kirkland resident has devoured vintage trade magazines, newspapers and theater programs for the past 25 years.

With 236,000 words posted on his illustrated site (and 128,000 more coming this fall), Flom admits, “Brevity is not my strong suit.”

A fan of the pre-sound era, Flom isn’t averse to the limiting yet tangible medium of books to tell its stories. His 300-page tome “Silent Film Stars on the Stages of Seattle” (2009, McFarland) appraised our city’s turn-of-the-20th-century stage performances by scores of future celluloid luminaries, from Theda Bara to Buster Keaton.

But today the internet is Flom’s vehicle. Arguably his most significant narrative examines the Clemmer Theatre, which opened April 10, 1912, at 1414 Second Ave. downtown.

Capitalizing on widespread film fervor, James Q. Clemmer, the theater’s dream-big owner, became the first to construct an enduring palace in Seattle expressly designed for movies, not stage shows. The $100,000 project featured interior Roman columns and murals, 1,200 seats and a $10,000 pipe organ.

The alternate claim to fame, or infamy, for Clemmer is that he outflanked other local operators to mount lavish screenings of “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s cinematically innovative but racist 1915 epic about the Civil War and its aftermath.

Clemmer, who thrived in the Seattle theater business until his 1942 death at age 61, was a lifelong pitchman. In 1915 for Moving Picture World, a Seattle financier illuminated Clemmer’s aggressive approach:

“He came rushing into my office, pulled off his coat, unrolled a set of plans and started to talk. I excused myself, rushed into the next room and locked the safe. I was afraid he would grab my money, push me into the safe and run. Before he was through talking, I began to tremble in my boots for fear that I could not remember the combination to the safe in time to grab some of the stock of the Clemmer [Theatre] before it was all gone.”

Just one of myriad in-person, scene-stealing stories that Flom brings alive online.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Tom Blackwell and David Jeffers of the Puget Sound Theatre Organ Society, Lisa Oberg of University of Washington Special Collections, Bob Carney, Gavin MacDougall and especially Eric Flom 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 link to “The Birth of a Nation” plus 1 additional photo and 19  historical clips (including two Paul Dorpat “Now & Then” columns) from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Free all-day history conference Saturday, Oct. 11, downtown

If you’re enjoying “Now & Then” every week, you may want to immerse yourself in local history for a full day — and for free, no less.

The Pacific Northwest Historian Guild ‘s 32nd regional history conference will take place all day on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025,  at the Seattle Public Library downtown.

With the theme “Challenging History,” the conference features a keynote address by local historian Lorraine McConaghy, as well as sessions covering a wide range of topics, from research challenges and waterscapes to labor politics and historic preservation.

The conference also includes a special lunch presentation by yours trulies Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard, and it will conclude with a wrap-up session.

In addition to the presentations, attendees can visit a book table with works by conference presenters and displays from sponsors.

Financial support comes from the Washington State Historical Society, 4Culture, Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, and HistoryLink.org.

Registration is required but is free. You can register and find the full schedule here. Day-of check-in begins at 8:15 a.m., and the program starts at 9 a.m. The wrap-up runs from 4:45 to 6 p.m.

In addition, a night-before reception and annual meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, 2025, at the Mountaineers Seattle Program Center. Admission is $15 for Guild members, $25 for others.

Hope to see you there!

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Published in The Seattle Times on-line on Sept. 11, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 14, 2025

Seattle’s waterfront past can illuminate its future, new book says

By Jean Sherrard

“No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe…”

— John Milton, “Paradise Lost“

Had English poet John Milton toured the shadowy underbelly of Seattle’s waterfront — as seen in our 1934 “Then” photo — he might have found his own words apt. Rotting pilings, crumbling fill and the stench of decaying waste lay mostly hidden from public view.

In “Where the City Meets the Sound: The Story of Seattle’s Waterfront” (HistoryLink, 2025), author Jennifer Ott, HistoryLink’s executive director, traces this shifting edge between land and water.

HistoryLink’s 30th book charts the transformation from a Lushootseed crossing-over place, where a tidal lagoon met the Duwamish River’s mouth, to the parks, overlooks, boat tours and civic gathering spaces we know today. In the

1850s, the lagoon’s disappearance, Ott notes, “made it harder for Native people to claim space. Effectively, they were made invisible — a tension that still goes on today.”

While celebrating the waterfront’s feats of engineering, Ott also recovers overlooked stories of marginalized people and events. “Seattle’s urban history,” she says, “is about how the city was built and the choices that were made involving massive transformations of the landscape.”

She cites the many communities — from Native peoples, immigrants, dockworkers, fishers and more —without whom the waterfront would not exist and thrive.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, patchwork seawalls, pilings and landfills replaced tide flats with

solid industrial ground. South of Pioneer Square, more than 3,000 acres of tidal wetlands were filled, dramatically reshaping the Duwamish delta. Along the central waterfront, the plank-paved Railroad Avenue, built on pilings over Elliott Bay, became Seattle’s maritime front door, but also, in Mayor John Dore’s 1934 words, “a death trap” and “a menace to the life of all that use it.”

The waterfront’s Depression-era seawall, built from 1934 to 1936, secured the shoreline from Washington Street to Bay Street. Above it, Railroad Avenue was rebuilt as Alaskan Way. Two decades later, the 1953

Alaskan Way Viaduct loomed over the stretch — a postwar icon that Ott calls a “psychological and visual barrier” separating the city from its bay. “The waterfront became fly-over country,” she quips.

Today, with the viaduct gone and the seawall rebuilt

for seismic safety, the waterfront once again is being reimagined. Ott shows that Elliott Bay’s edge is more than a physical boundary. It’s a mirror reflecting Seattle’s shifting priorities.

Documenting its past, she suggests, can illuminate a path forward, bringing long-buried layers into the light. What’s more, “in understanding these layers,” she says, “we are given a deeper connection to this special place.”

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video on location at the waterfront, click right here.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 4, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 7, 2025

110-year-old Rhodes Mansion reflects Seattle retail royalty

By Jean Sherrard

When Seattle department-store magnate Albert Rhodes died unexpectedly on a business trip in 1921, a

life’s work may have been interrupted, but his grieving widow, Harriet, took the helm, dauntlessly proving herself in an otherwise male domain.

Up to that point, their lives might accurately have been described as charmed.

The first of four Wisconsin-born Rhodes brothers to arrive in Puget Sound, Albert settled in Tacoma in 1889 and worked as a traveling salesman. He found a

partner in love as well as in work and civic life when he married Harriet Williams from Dallas, Ore.

As the brothers’ Tacoma stores boomed, Albert opened his own Seattle branch, the Rhodes Company, in the Arcade Building at Second and Union in 1907. Its original 20-foot storefront rapidly expanded, cementing itself as a wildly successful retail force.

For their residence, Albert and Harriet enlisted noted Seattle architect Augustus Warren Gould to design a Mediterranean Revival showcase sporting spectacular

Lake Union views from north Capitol Hill. In 1915, the couple moved in permanently. The Rhodes mansion — popularly dubbed “the castle on the hill” — immediately became celebrated as an architectural jewel.

Still standing on busy 10th Avenue East, the gleaming white terra cotta edifice hosted lively social and civic gatherings, while husband and wife were no less committed to their hundreds of employees.

Lauded for paying the highest department-store wages in the United States, Albert also served as wartime president of the Seattle Chamber of

Commerce, promoting the city’s interests nationwide. He took pride in an unwavering commitment to civic duties. “Every man,” he insisted, “owes public service, without pay or reward, to his community.”

During a 1921 trip to New York City, he was stricken with the “Spanish flu,” which culminated in a fatal heart attack. “No death of recent years,” editorialized The Seattle Times, “has stirred the city so deeply as of this widely known merchant prince.”

Flags across town were lowered to half-mast to mark his passing. Dressed in black for years to come, Harriet

assumed the role of company president, and under her guidance the Rhodes department store expanded exponentially, filling an entire block with 10 floors of merchandising.

Significantly, the booming business remained

committed to the general welfare and equitable treatment of employees. With no children of her own, Harriet reportedly knew most of her staff by name. In return, they affectionately called her “Aunt Hattie.”

In 1944, she died after a trip to New York, staying at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where Albert had breathed his last. Her closest friends suggested that “knowing she was ill, [Harriet] made the journey out of sentiment.”

WEB EXTRAS

To watch our narrated 360 degree video, head over here.

For more spectacular interiors, see below:

Last but not least, Cupid!