THEN: Details crowd Irwin Caplan’s absorbing 1968 cartoon poster of Seattle’s downtown and West Seattle shore. One version (this one) was in metallic green with a mustard background, the other in mustard with a light-blue background. Frederick & Nelson sold them for $1.95. Preserved copies today sell on the internet for much higher prices. (Clay Eals collection)NOW: Emulating the 1968 Seattle poster’s view of downtown from West Seattle, the offspring of the late Irwin and Madeline Caplan, all in their early 70s, stand at Hamilton Viewpoint, from left: Joan Clarke of North Bend, Steve Caplan of downtown Seattle, and Robert Caplan of Peoria, Arizona. (Clay Eals)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 26, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 1, 2026
Whimsical details from 1968 Seattle enliven classic Caplan poster
By Clay Eals
Eye-level, it’s push-pinned to my hallway wall. If I’m not in a hurry, one of its details arrests and rivets me, always inducing a grin. I imagine the same experience for countless others over the past nearly 60 years.
Here’s an alternate version, in mustard with a light-blue background. (Clay Eals collection)
Our “Then” image is a 30-by-40-inch poster, a fanciful take on downtown Seattle and the West Seattle shore in 1968.
It looks like a cockeyed cross between a bird’s-eye map and “Where’s Waldo?”
As period caricature, it emphasizes some aspects and conflates others, but that’s part of its charm, invoking memories and inviting comparisons to today.
THEN: Irwin “Cap” Caplan works in his Laurelhurst home studio, circa 1968. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)
Commissioned by the revered but long-gone Frederick & Nelson department store (now, there’s a memory), the poster was the vision of Seattle artist Irwin Caplan (1919-2007).
Throughout his life, from his upbringing in Madison Park to Garfield High, the University of Washington and beyond, Caplan created images in plentiful styles and forms. But he made his fame after World War II as a premier magazine cartoonist.
THEN: From 1955, a Caplan cartoon for Collier’s makes its point with no need for a gag line. (Courtesy Steve Caplan)
His panels graced an astonishing array of mid-century periodicals: Look, Time, Liberty, True, Holiday, This Week, Argosy, Esquire, Ladies Home Journal, the New Yorker and, in syndication, from Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Later, he created commercial art and Seattle Times Sunday magazine covers, also teaching drawing and painting at the UW.
THEN: Caplan’s self-caricature, mid-1950s. (Courtesy Steve Caplan)
It was as if a pencil, pen or brush never left his hand. “If he was awake,” says RobertCaplan, oldest of three offspring, “he was doing art.”
Caplan’s dizzying Seattle poster became a career highlight. Priced at $1.95 (mailing tube 10 cents extra), it sold enough to go into second printing. “The longer you look,” the Frederick’s ads aptly strutted, “the more familiar names and landmarks you see!”
THEN: Along with the Chief Seattle statue, Seattle Post-Intelligencer globe and Monorail (all at left), this detail from Caplan’s 1968 Seattle poster shows the now-defunct Frederick & Nelson department store with its signature doorman. Frederick’s commissioned Caplan to create the poster. (Clay Eals collection)
Therein, the Space Needle whirls, while downtown’s soon-to-open Seafirst Building (now Safeco Plaza) —then the city’s highest high-rise, nicknamed “the box the Space Needle came in” — sports a “Big Daddy” pennant.
THEN: This detail from Caplan’s 1968 Seattle poster shows five Boeing mechanics dangling from a jet above the Smith Tower. (Clay Eals collection)
Flying past the Smith Tower is a plump jet from which five mechanics dangle. A trailing banner, oblivious to imminent corporate calamity, proclaims, “Boeing Job No. 50327.”
Six superimposed ovals spotlight districts like Seattle Center, in which Caplan asks “Where’s Zollie?” — a salute to Zalman Volchok, who booked the Beatles’ first Seattle concert in 1964, at the Coliseum (now Climate Pledge Arena), and later general-managed the city’s then-new, now-departed basketball SuperSonics.
THEN: This oval detail from Caplan’s 1968 Seattle poster depicts the University of Washington. (Clay Eals collection)
Another oval highlights the UW, framed by the motto “Lux Sit” (“Let there be light”) alongside a “Love” picket sign and a nod to the Helix underground paper.
Hydros, Chief Seattle, the ferry Kalakala, Pacific Science Center and future Rainier Tower architect Minoru Yamasaki — the references seem delightfully endless.
The scene is jam-packed, busy, vibrant. Also, some would say, prescient.
THEN: On top of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and First Avenue businesses, this oval detail depicts the Pike Place Market and efforts to save it. (Clay Eals collection)
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Joan Clarke, Steve Caplan, Robert Caplan and especially Raulin Sterne 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
We’ll begin this array of extras with several rarities submitted by readers in response to this post:
This cartoon poster of San Francisco — created by Jim Michaelson and copyrighted by San Jose’s Dave Schiller for Sparta Graphics — has format, colors and style eerily identical to that of the Irwin Caplan’s 1968 Seattle poster. Did this poster inspire Frederick & Nelson, Irwin Caplan or both one year later? We may never know. (Courtesy Glen Beebe)Here is the signature of artist Jim Michaelson from the from the right side of the poster, below the light-colored cityscape. (Courtesy Glen Beebe)Here is the Sparta Graphics credit from the lower right corner of the poster. (Courtesy Glen Beebe)This undated original Irwin Caplan painting hangs on the wall of reader Howard Droker. (Courtesy Howard Droker)This 1971 original Irwin Caplan painting hangs on the wall of reader Howard Droker. (Courtesy Howard Droker)Irwin Caplan was one of six artists who created designs for the Rainier Beer Cartoon Jubilee series of beer cans in 1956. His signature appears at the base of the green can at right. (Courtesy reader Carl Scheurman)In December 1968, West Seattle’s Mike Munson, then a Northwestern University journalism student, displays Christmas gifts with Caplan’s 1968 Seattle poster on the wall in his apartment in Evanston, Illinois.Caplan’s 1968 Seattle poster has “pride of place” over the fireplace of Seattle’s Susan Ehlers, who bought it in person in about 1969 at Frederick & Nelson. (Courtesy Susan Ehlers)Irwin Caplan draws while he was a student at Garfield High School or the University of Washington. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)THEN: Caplan’s 1935-36 interpretation of the Hooverville camp on the Seattle waterfront when he attended Garfield High School. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)1937 Irwin Caplan monkey mural at Garfield High School. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)1937 Irwin Caplan mural of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox at Garfield High School. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)1937 Irwin Caplan report card from Garfield High School. Note circles over “i” letters in first name. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)November 1939 Irwin Caplan cover art for University of Washington Columns magazine. (Courtesy Steve Caplan)Charcoal drawing by Sgt. Irwin Caplan at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for Army manual or magazine during World War II. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)Irwin Caplan drawing of future United Nations site outside his New York apartment, March 1, 1948. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)Irwin Caplan painting of workers taking down building to make way for United Nations, New York City, circa 1949. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)Irwin Caplan cartoon for Collier’s, published in “1949 Best Cartoons of the Year.” (Courtesy Steve Caplan)Irwin Caplan cartoon for Saturday Evening Post. (Courtesy Steve Caplan)Irwin Caplan works at office desk, New York City, 1951. (Courtesy Steve Caplan)Irwin Caplan cartoon and mini-profile for the 1954 book “What’s Funny About That?” (Courtesy Steve Caplan)Irwin Caplan cartoon from book “1955 Best Cartoons of the Year.” (Courtesy Steve Caplan)Title page of “1955 Best Cartoons of the Year.” (Courtesy Steve Caplan)A Garfield High School mural commemorating Irwin Caplan and his 1962 Seattle World’s Fair poster. (Courtesy Steve Caplan)In this southwest-facing view, Caplan places the old Plymouth Congregational Church in context with its neighboring high-rise in 1966 when the church faced demolition from the April 29, 1965, earthquake. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)Feb. 23, 1936, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p61.May 26, 1937, Seattle Times, p34.May 27, 1937, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p15.April 28, 1963, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p36.Sept. 15, 1968, Seattle Times, p16.Oct. 4, 1968, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p15, Emmett Watson column.Oct. 16, 1968, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p18.Dec. 10, 1968, Seattle Times, p16.March 9, 1969, Seattle Times, p119.March 23, 1969, Seattle Times, p154.March 23, 1969, Seattle Times, p155.June 24, 1969, Seattle Times, p13Jan. 17, 1971, Seattle Times, p130-131.May 5, 1974, Seattle Times, p146.May 5, 1974, Seattle Times, p150.Nov. 25, 1979, Seattle Times, p213.Aug. 31, 1980, Seattle Times, p168.Sept. 7, 1980, Seattle Times, p12.Sept. 14, 1980, Seattle Times, p14.Sept. 11, 2005, Seattle Times, p33.The first page of an undated, six-page RC Harvey magazine profile of Irwin Caplan. (Courtesy Robert Caplan)Feb. 25, 2007, Seattle Times, p19.Feb. 25, 2007, Seattle Times, p25.
THEN: Billy King stands with “Market Memories” when it was freshly painted in 2011 on Level 4 of Pike Place Market. At top, vendors tend fruits and vegetables. Below are what King cheerfully calls “the milieu of winos, dinos, dingbats and aristocrats,” characters observing, drifting or looking for “interaction.” King’s murals suffer little graffiti. He attributes that partly to inclusion. “I try to have a little bit of every racial, economic or cultural type,” he says, an approach he believes gives would-be vandals pause. (Courtesy, Billy King)NOW: Today, King joins the vibrant, larger-than-life characters featured in “Market Memories.” A narrow green border surrounds the painted mural, in King’s words, “drawing attention to the art itself.” The mural is dedicated to “GRB,” the initials of George Bartholick, an architect who contributed to restoration of the Market in the 1970s-80s. (Jean Sherrard)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 19, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 22, 2025
Border control: How muralist Billy King outlines the world
By Jean Sherrard
Billy King believes that borders define attention.
A longtime Seattle artist and muralist, King, 77, is best known for large-scale works in Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square — vibrant, colorful panels crowded
King sits in a market housing foyer, just before being chased from the premises.(Jean Sherrard)
with vendors, hustlers, passersby and dreamers. He also paints, sketches and makes prints, finding recurring cosmic and human patterns in any medium.
On a recent weekday afternoon, hunting down King’s murals is an adventure in occasional trespass. Some adorn well-traveled paths. Others are tucked into apartment foyers or half-forgotten corridors. At least
Two 8×8 plywood panels Billy King painted for the South Arcade of the Pike Place Market in 2003. Both works later disappeared following renovations and changes in ownership. King says he has never seen confirmation of their fate and invites readers to keep an eye out. This is one of the only known photographs of the artwork. (Courtesy, Billy King)
one, King says, has simply disappeared. Whenever he explores downtown, he brings along food for “the first homeless guy we see.”
Sure enough, outside a downtown doorway, King hands a small bag
King wanders his beloved Market (Jean Sherrard)
of snacks to a ragged man holding a cardboard sign. After a companionable howdy-do, King offers design advice he learned decades ago while working at Sean’s Produce in the Market.
“Have you got a magic marker?” he asks the man. “Draw a black border around the edge of your sign. That border means people have to look at it. If you leave the edges open, it’s optional.”
A sign in Post Alley for King’s long-defunct art studio. (Jean Sherrard)
Born in Coos Bay, Ore., King grew up in Spokane before arriving in Seattle in 1966 to study art at the University of Washington. Like many artist peers, he never graduated — “a badge of honor,” he calls it — and worked a succession of jobs: railroad yard checker, dishwasher, bartender and Market vendor. Art, however, remained the through line.
Hustle and timing eventually landed King in a 1974
King pauses in the mid-1970s in the Market with artist Gertrude Pacific. Unofficially proclaimed Mayor of the Market by denizens of local taverns and market vendors, King often officiated at marriages and funerals while continuing to produce art. (Paul Dorpat)
Smithsonian exhibition surveying Pacific Northwest art, a turn that “confounded and irritated” local critics because King was, in his words, “a nobody.”
Early on, he learned that declaring oneself an artist mattered as much as credentials, a lesson reinforced when, in 1977, King received his first major mural commission for the Fairmont Hotel Apartments on the First Avenue side of the Market.
Adapted from an early photo, this painting features farmers and vendors unloading wagons and preparing stalls in the Market Arcade. Commissioned in 1977, it hangs in the foyer of the Fairmount Hotel Apartments, now Pike Place Market housing. (Jean Sherrard)
Inspired by a classic, early 20th-century photo of Market farmers unloading wagons, he reinterpreted the scene. “When you make art, you have 10,000 elements,” he says. “The artist’s job is to winnow that down, first to 1,000, then maybe 100. Out of that, you paint the most important 30.”
Such distillation defines King’s best-known works. For his Market and Pioneer Square murals, he has painted primarily from memory. The result isn’t nostalgia. It’s taxonomy — a living catalog of urban roles still very much with us.
The Pioneer Square mural, installed in 2002, was originally a sliding blackout panel designed to conceal brightly lit downtown windows from passing Japanese submarines (!) during World War II. King dons a fedora to join the chapeau-sporting crowd of colorful hustlers. (Jean Sherrard)
On a return visit to the Market, we encounter the same homeless man. His cardboard sign now includes a neatly drawn black border. King notices immediately and gives a thumbs-up. Attention, after all, begins at the edges.
Billy King refreshes a café-and-bistro mural he painted in 2012 on an outdoor patio wall at Maximilien in the Market, The painted figures echo the life unfolding just steps away — a visual conversation between art and the café it overlooks. (Jean Sherrard)
THEN: The barbershop of Kashiro Kawakami is shown circa 1911-14 at 125 Prefontaine Place. S. One clue to the image’s location is a painted sign across the street reading “Grand Union Hotel” at upper left. Seattle Public Library’s Sean Lanksbury delved into this image during an October talk to the library’s foundation, which has funded archival work on the Dorpat collection. (Paul Dorpat Collection, Seattle Public Library)NOW: Standing in for barbers are the library’s Gergana Abernathy, archivist for the Dorpat collection, and Sean Lanksbury, Special Collections service manager. The storefront, recently a Caffe Vita branch, is to reopen soon as Saigon Drip coffee shop and event center. (Clay Eals)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 15, 2026
Early Japanese barbershop image reflects Seattle library’s care
By Clay Eals
By itself, our “Then” photo poses a multifaceted mystery. Not coincidentally, the story behind our “Now” photos — in which I’ve had a small hand — offers satisfying answers.
A nearly 115-year-old image reveals an immaculate barbershop, three workers, a customer and the view of a city streetscape through the front window. The scene abounds with signs and rich visuals. But who are these people? Where are they? Why?
This shot shows a storefront just off Yesler Way along a curved, diagonal side street near the brand-new Smith Tower. It’s little more than a stone’s throw from what was, and still is, known as Japantown (Nihonmachi), where immigrants began settling in the 1880s to work in fisheries, railroads and logging.
The barbershop owner, perhaps one of the depicted men, was Kashiro Kawakami. Born circa 1886 in Japan, he likely first came to the United States in 1902. A farmer, he returned to Japan in 1910, marrying and sailing back to Seattle with his wife. They had three children here while he worked as a barber at the photographed site in about 1911-14. Records go silent after 1916. Perhaps the family moved back to Japan.
NOW: Paul Dorpat at his 87th birthday party last October. (Clay Eals)
These details and many others about this photo emerged, starting in summer 2023, during detective-style research by Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections staff on a massive collection donated by historian and “Now & Then” column founder Paul Dorpat following his 2019 retirement.
Before his donation and at the library’s request, I was honored in early 2018 to spend 17 afternoons in Dorpat’s basement in Wallingford, logging negatives, prints, slides, discs, tapes, films and other media that he amassed for four decades to document a constellation of Seattle-area scenes. The total, covering a century and a half, exceeded 309,000 items. Many, including a glass-plate negative of the Kawakami image, were unlabeled.
NOW: Gergana Abernathy sifts large-format images from the Dorpat collection at rental space in the YMCA building near the central branch of Seattle Public Library. Access to materials will follow more work. “With a collection as huge and complex as this,” Lanksbury says, “we are still in process, and public release is still pending.” (Sean Lanksbury, Seattle Public Library)
Dorpat, 87, who now lives in a Shoreline care center, contributed his collection to the library because of its mission to provide free public access. But he also knew its staff would first marshal extensive tools — city directories, index files, databases and other collections — to give the materials meaning.
NOW: Working on the Dorpat collection at the YMCA building across from the central branch of Seattle Public Library, Gergana Abernathy pieces together a glass-plate negative depicting a store interior. (Sean Lanksbury, Seattle Public Library)
The barbershop photo is a telling example, says Sean Lanksbury, the library’s Special Collections service manager, who assumes that painstaking scrutiny of such images eventually pays off.
In this case, he says, the library contemplates a potentially wide-ranging impact down the road, “whether it be someone seeking images from that Seattle neighborhood, researchers on minority-operated businesses or, better yet, a relative of these particular Kawakamis.”
Work on the Dorpat collection continues. Public access — and posterity — await!
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Knute Berger, Sean Lanksbury and Gergana Abernathy 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column. (Notice anything different in this week’s 360 audio? If so, email your hunch toClay EalsorJean Sherrard.)
Plus, you now can browse part of the Paul Dorpat Collection at Seattle Public Library.Click here!
NOW: On a computer at the central branch of Seattle Public Library, Jade D’Addario, digital projects librarian, tracks details of a glass negative showing the interior of a bar. (Sean Lanksbury, Seattle Public Library)NOW: Boxes housing glass-plate negatives from the Dorpat collection fill shelves at the Seattle Public Library central branch. (Sean Lanksbury, Seattle Public Library)Dec. 20, 1904, Seattle Times, p9.June 30, 1910, Seattle Times, p4.May 11, 1911, Seattle Times, p7.
THEN: The G.O. Guy Drugstore, shown in 1900, occupies the ground floor of the Metropole Building at Second and Yesler. One year after this photo was taken, the storefront was the site of an infamous shootout between Police Chief Meredith and theater owner John Considine. George Omar Guy’s flagship store eventually expanded throughout the region, second only to Bartell Drugs. (Wikimedia Public Domain)NOW: Representatives from the nonprofit tenants and project team gather in front of the restored Metropole and the adjacent Busy Bee building, which were joined during the renovation to form a single sustainable hub. Standing outside are, from left, Line Nya Ngatchou (Spark Northwest), Kendra Walker (Satterberg Foundation), Sophia Thomas (Living with Conviction), Matt Aalfs (BuildingWork), Valeriana C.B. Estes (Social Justice Fund), Ruby Love (Seattle Chapter Black Panther Party Legacy Group), Sarah Walczyk (Satterberg Foundation) and James Lovell (Chief Seattle Club). Today, the building houses multiple non-profit organizations, which lease space at below-market rents alongside shared offices, childcare and community spaces. (Jean Sherrard)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 8, 2025
How Seattle’s 1892 Metropole Building went from gunfight to the good fight
By Jean Sherrard
On June 25, 1901, a feud between former friends turned deadly at the Metropole Building. Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a brace of revolvers, disgraced former Seattle police chief William Meredith ambushed theater owner John Considine outside G.O. Guy’s drugstore at Second Avenue and Yesler Way.
Once close allies, the two men had become bitter enemies after Considine’s accusations of corruption led to Meredith’s dismissal. Meredith fired first. His shotgun blast missed Considine, tearing through the store’s front doorway and lodging in the ceiling. Considine fled into the shop with Meredith close behind. The two wrestled until Considine drew his own .38 and shot and killed the former lawman, according to contemporaneous reporting in The Seattle Times and later historical accounts. (For an authoritative retelling of this story, visit HistoryLink, where historian Phil Dougherty masterfully lays out the fascinating, if sordid, details)
The encounter lasted less than 90 seconds. Seattle was transfixed. Though Considine was later acquitted, for years passersby stopped to peer at shotgun pellet holes still visible in the drugstore’s ceiling. The violence passed. The city moved on. The building survived—then slowly slipped into a long, silent decline.
Today, nothing remains of the drugstore or the damage. But the Metropole originally known as the H.K. Owens Building, financed by Henry Yesler in 1892 as a brick phoenix rising from the ashes of the Great Fire—still remains, across the street from the Smith Tower. A century after the shooting, it became the site of another fight. Not over vengeance, but purpose.
Following a damaging 2007 fire and more than a decade of vacancy and false starts, the building was purchased in 2019 by the Satterberg Foundation, a
Sarah Walczyk (left), Satterberg Foundation executive director, and Metropole Community Steward Kendra Walker sit at a conference table in the foundation offices. Like the stairwell, the furniture was custom-built with old-growth timber salvaged during the renovation. (Jean Sherrard)
Seattle philanthropic organization that experienced a seismic shift in 2014 when its endowment grew from $4 million to more than $400 million following a major gift. Instead of treating the Metropole as a conventional real estate investment, the foundation chose to make the building itself a tool of its mission, which centers on social justice, equity and community-based work.
Architect Matt Aalfs stands in a light-filled stairwell with the historic Smith Tower visible through the window above. The wooden steps were crafted from old-growth Douglas fir timber reclaimed from the building’s structural beams. (Jean Sherrard)
In 2018, it had architect Matt Aalfs and his firm, BuildingWork, transform the ruin into a hub for nonprofits with office, child care and community spaces while meeting the strictest possible environmental standards. The renovation achieved LEED Platinum certification, turning a 19th-century structure into a model of modern sustainability. The building is now fully electrified. Old-growth timbers milled in the 1890s have been salvaged and repurposed into stairs and furniture. Daylight reaches deep into the interior, and a structure once sealed and abandoned has been
Tenants and project managers gather on the brightly lit lobby stairwell. (Jean Sherrard)
reopened to the public.
If the shootout in 1901 reflected a young city struggling to establish order, the Metropole’s rebirth signals something quieter and harder: the work of sustaining a city over time. The shotgun pellet holes are gone. What remains is a foundation for the good fight.
WEB EXTRAS
For our narrated 360-degree video of this column, click here.
See below for a few more photos of the Metropole’s reconstructed interior:
Childcare for staffers of resident organizations is provided by Seed of Life. The facility features five light-filled classrooms that preserve the structure’s historic character, including exposed brick walls. (Matt Aalfs)Ruby Love (left) and Naudia Miller of the Seattle Chapter Black Panther Party Legacy Group stand in their first-floor space, which features a history of the organization. (Jean Sherrard)Valeriana C.B. Estes of the Social Justice Fund works in her office above Second Avenue.James Lovell in his Chief Seattle Club office, looking north along Second Avenue. (Jean Sherrard)A welcoming community space on the lower level reveals the building’s original brick walls. (Jean Sherrard)
