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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 26, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 29, 2026

April Foolery Quiz: Think you know the towers of Seattle and Paris?

By Jean Sherrard

Springtime in Paris brings “poisson d’avril” — literally “April Fish.” On the first of the month, children across France tape paper fish to the backs of unsuspecting people in a ritual of gentle mischief dating back to the 16th century. While some link the tradition to the lean meals of Lent, it primarily celebrates the “catch” of a good-natured prank.

For several years, we at “Now & Then” have marked the arrival of cherry blossoms and the promise of warmer weather with our own brand of civic April Foolery. With the help of noted Parisian photographer Bérangère Lomont, a longtime collaborator of our column, we offer an exercise featuring two great structures: the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle. Each is shorthand for its city. But which is which — and which is not?

Space Needle or Eiffel Tower?

Choose one answer per question:

• The Space Needle
• The Eiffel Tower
• Both
• Neither

1. Which tower was built for a world’s fair celebrating technological progress?

2. Which one was conceived as a dining destination as much as an observation platform?

3. Plans for this one were first sketched on a napkin (or serviette, in French).

4. Which was primarily financed with significant government funding?

5. Financed largely with private capital, this structure generated enough revenue in its first year to repay its principal investor.

6. This one debuted in varied shades of red.

7. It was attacked by prominent artists as a monstrous eyesore.

8. Its official height increased after antennas were added.

9. Originally, it was intended to stand for only 20 years.

10. Which one was famously climbed by a reigning British monarch during its inaugural year?

The Answers (No Peeking!)

1: Both. The Eiffel Tower (1889) marked the centennial of the French Revolution. The Space Needle (1962) celebrated the Space Age.

2: Space Needle. Its revolving restaurant was central to the Century 21 vision.

3: Space Needle. Edward E. Carlson sketched his early concept after visiting Stuttgart’s TV tower.

4: Neither. Both relied primarily on private financing.

5: Eiffel Tower. Gustave Eiffel’s personal underwriting reportedly paid off during the first year of operation.

6: Both. The Eiffel began “Venetian Red.” The Needle’s “Galaxy Gold” was more orange than gold.

7: Eiffel Tower. A “Committee of Three Hundred” artists protested it in 1887.

8: Both. Each gained height through later antenna additions.

9: Eiffel Tower. Its permit ran 20 years. Radio transmission saved it.

10: Neither. Queen Victoria never climbed the Eiffel (she died in 1901). Queen Elizabeth II visited Seattle in 1983, long after the Needle’s debut.

Scoring Your ‘Catch’

• Master angler, 7–10 correct: You know your statehood and your steel. You’ve navigated the currents of history without getting snagged.
• Expert troller, 4–6 correct: Deepwater understanding, though on technical details you may have swallowed a bit of bait.
• Nibbler, 1–3 correct: You’ve got a taste for history, but big truths slipped the line.
• The poisson d’avril, 0 correct: You are the catch of the day — hooked, lined, and sinkered by our historical lures. Wear your paper fish with pride. And if you’ve discovered that one of these towers has been quietly affixed to your back, consider yourself properly celebrated. After all, April belongs to the fish.

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 video of this quiz on location at the Seattle Center, click right here!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 19, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 22, 2026

Mixed feelings vex mainstay owner of beloved Wedgwood Broiler

By Clay Eals

What can you say about a guy who never left his childhood neighborhood?

In 1981 at age 19, he became a dishwasher at a restaurant 10 blocks from home. Over 15 years, he worked his way up. In 1996 he bought the business, helming it for three decades, to the present day.

“I don’t know too many people who have done that,” Wedgwood native Derek Cockbain says with understatement. “The day I started, it wasn’t my plan. It just sort of fell into place.”

Cockbain, 64, stands on the cusp of giving up arguably the district’s best-known diner, bar and community hub — the beloved Wedgwood Broiler.

This classic steakhouse anchors a two-acre, 1960s-era shopping center on 35th Avenue Northeast. In recent years, the three-block-long property faced a high-profile proposal for a six-floor retail-residential development. It fizzled, but while no new project has been announced, such a plan could return.

Will the Broiler survive? Will its building be razed? The questions haunt its modest, strip-mall exterior and warm, dark interior whose layout, décor and furnishings have stayed largely the same for 50-plus years.

A tiny eatery began onsite in 1965. With a remodel in 1969, it became Sir Wedgwood Broiler. “Sir” fell off the name in 1973, but the initials, “SW,” carved big in north entry doors, remain.

“We try to stay consistent,” Cockbain says. “People who came in 20 years ago to have a teriyaki steak will come in today and have it, so it should be exactly the same. That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on.”

Another constant, however, is uncertainty. He’s had to rent month-to-month since COVID. Will he give up the ghost? His feelings are deeply mixed.

On one hand, a lifelong ethic prods Cockbain to make things work. That grit surfaced during a soccer stint at Nathan Hale High School, where he topped the Metro League in scoring. After he recovered from a broken ankle, his coach Joel Waters told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1979, “Derek can score with either foot. In fact, he scores more with his off foot than his right foot.”

But with dreams of traveling with his wife, Alycien, and other properties to tend, Cockbain also feels “done,” ready to retire. “I don’t want to work until I can’t enjoy it.”

Still, tenacity and heart come to the fore.

“The neighborhood doesn’t want us to go,” he says. “The problem for me is that I grew up here. I know everybody. I’ve got the kids I went to school with, I see my old friends, their parents still come in, and I don’t want to close the doors.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Valarie Bunn of the Wedgwood in Seattle History blog well as Derek and Alycien Cockbain 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.

Below, you will find 3 additional photos, a flier and 2 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.

 

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 15, 2025

Weyerhaeuser’s shrine to wood was built to move as waterfront changed

By Jean Sherrard

Meant as a grand showcase for the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company, the building in our “Then” photo provided an administrative headquarters in 1923 while offering a structural ode to timber itself. Weyerhaeuser’s timber-trade dominance at the time was legendary, rooted in the 1900 “neighborly deal” in which Frederick Weyerhaeuser purchased 900,000 acres of Washington timberland from railroader James J. Hill for $5.4 million.

After the purchase, Everett quickly became the manufacturing heart of Weyerhaeuser’s empire, with waterfront mills producing wood products shipped globally. To manage this reach, the company commissioned a headquarters that doubled as architectural persuasion. Designed by the firm Bebb and Gould, its stylized English Gothic structure was built not only to impress but also to move—literally. Architect Carl F. Gould anticipated future evolutions on the waterfront and engineered the building onto four giant crossbeams, making portability a feature, not a bug.

The structure was relocated at least three times. First, in 1938, it was barged along the Snohomish River to accommodate expanding mills. It moved again in March 1984, when the tug Whidbey towed the office from its base at

Preston Point to the new Everett Marina Village. Finally, in 2016, it traveled nearly a mile by land to its present home at Boxcar Park on the Everett waterfront.

Today, the Port of Everett owns the landmark, which was restored at the behest of NGMA Group CEO Kwok “Jack” Yang Ng to house The Muse Whiskey & Coffee, which serves as a coffee shop by day, speakeasy-inspired whiskey bar by night. During a recent visit, general manager Joseph Mottola and NGMA VP Rachel Escalle led a tour through the historic space. Mottola pointed out that the building was designed as a physical “demo”—each room features different trim work to showcase the versatility of Douglas fir, western red cedar and western hemlock.

At the building’s heart remains an original 160-ton

vault, its thick concrete walls now sheltering wine rather than payroll. The vault held a sharp surprise for restorers from Grant Construction: Designed to release tear gas if tampered with, one canister remained charged after a century. When disturbed during the 2023 renovation, it “popped”—a stinging reminder that some early security systems never lose their bite.

Mottola is particularly fond of the corner office associated with the Weyerhaeuser family. As the story goes, after his retirement in 1942, company President John P. Weyerhaeuser would occasionally return to “boot out” the current manager, reclaiming his former desk for a day or two. From there, he could look out over the docks, where log-laden ships still departed to fuel his family’s empire.

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video created on the Everett waterfront at Boxcar Park, click here.

A few more photos:

 

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 8, 2026

Seattle chose its first woman as mayor 100 years ago

By Clay Eals

In 1981, as newspapers struggled to employ non-sexist terms and I was in Oregon covering education for the Corvallis daily, the woman heading the school board pulled me aside.

“Please don’t write that I’m the chairperson,” she said. ”It sounds like I’m the one who sets up the chairs!”

In that vignette’s spirit of gender equality, this week we celebrate a centennial. Monday, March 9,  marks the 100th anniversary of the 1926 election of the first woman as Seattle mayor — and the first woman to helm any major U.S. city.

She was Bertha Knight Landes, serving just one term, when mayoral terms were only two years, unlike today’s four.

With her husband, Henry Landes, whom she later labeled her “tower of strength,” she moved in 1896 from Massachusetts to Seattle, where he became science dean at the University of Washington. Gradually she attained leadership in local women’s clubs whose influence swelled with passage of statewide women’s suffrage in 1910. She won election to the City Council in 1922 and 1925, serving two years as its president.

As acting mayor in 1924 while Mayor Edwin Brown attended the Democratic National Convention, Landes fired the police chief, whom she said was lax about bootlegging and gambling.

Two years later, seeking the city’s top job, she invoked domestic wordplay — “municipal housecleaning” — while promoting a pushback on vice.

Landes, just over 5-feet tall, was reserved and plain-spoken, choosing to neither accentuate nor duck her gender. “If the men will not show enough interest in their city government to get the right kind of candidates in the field, the women must,” the 57-year-old said the night before defeating the incumbent by 48,700 to 42,802 votes.

Ironically, her novelty in 1926 became a liability in 1928. “Her sex is against her,” read a New York Times subhead in capital letters. An elusive, wealthy businessman, Frank Edwards, whom Landes labeled “a name, a photograph and a rumor,” ran against her with the slogan “the man you would be proud to call mayor.” Though endorsed by newspapers and labor, Landes lost re-election, 39,819 to 58,873.

Landes died in 1943. After her mayoral term, it took 91 years for Seattle to elect a second woman to the post. Jenny Durkan served from November 2017 through 2021.

In our “Now” photo, we place new Mayor Katie Wilson, the third woman voted into the office, next to a Landes reception chair gifted to the city in 2006. It stands behind glass in a vast, first-floor City Hall meeting room named for Landes. In its honorary promontory, this chair is unlikely to be set up or taken down again.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Thuch Mam and Sage Wilson 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.

Below, you will find 4 additional photos, a 1928 Annual Report and 11 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.