UPDATE: On Jan. 21, 2026, the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board voted 5-0 (with two recusals) to table Seattle Parks’ proposal for Gas Works Park, with conditions for Parks to address.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 21, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 25, 2025

Past, present, future:
Balancing safety and art at Gas Works Park

By Jean Sherrard

(Reader’s Note: This column is being published a day early to coincide with today’s pivotal Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board meeting regarding the fate of the Gas Works towers.)

In February 1971, 13-year-old Peter Steinbrueck accompanied his father, architect Victor Steinbrueck,

to an abandoned industrial site on the north shore of Lake Union.

The coal-gas plant had been shuttered since 1956. Its towers, pipes, and vats were widely regarded as toxic leftovers — candidates for removal rather than reverence.

But camera in hand, Peter saw something else.

“I was just a kid exploring,” he told me recently. “But even then, you could feel the power of it.”

While his dad sketched the two dominant towers from the ground, Peter photographed him at work, capturing a moment when the site’s fate hung between erasure and reinvention.

Even then, its uncertain future had drawn the attention of landscape architect Richard Haag. He had come to Seattle to help establish the University of Washington’s landscape architecture program at

Victor Steinbrueck’s encouragement. Haag proposed transforming the abandoned gas plant into a public park — a radical idea at the time.

Haag never sugarcoated the site’s condition. “It was awful,” he recalled in a 2015 interview. “I just thought, ‘God, what a horrible place … What an ecological disaster.’”

But where others saw only blight, Haag saw possibility — and a design problem to solve.

With no forests or rock outcroppings to anchor a conventional park design, Haag camped on the site, sleeping beneath the towers, waiting for the place to declare itself.

It did, unmistakably.

Facing fierce public opposition — particularly from the

family of late City Council member Myrtle Edwards, who viewed the plant as an ugly stain on the lakefront — Haag defended the towers in public hearings by turning them into characters.

The largest became “Myrtle Edwards.” The one behind it, standing in her wake, became her husband.

“Wait a minute,” Haag realized. “Here’s a whole family.”

By anthropomorphizing what critics dismissed as junk, Haag reframed industrial debris as presence — what he later called “obdurate objects,” refusing to disappear. When Gas Works Park opened in 1975, the towers remained.

A half-century later, the skyline has risen around Gas Works Park, but the vision of open engagement has narrowed.

In 2015, Haag and historian Thaisa Way publicly argued to “Free the Towers” — remove the fencing around them and allow visitors to walk among the structures as sculptural ruins.

That hope has collapsed with tragedy. Since 2012, at least three people have died after falling from the park’s structures, most recently a 15-year-old boy in July. Eleven others have been injured in the past decade, some suffering broken bones or brain damage.

In the aftermath of those accidents, grieving parents called for the site to be declared a public hazard. The city, facing anguish and liability, confronts a painful question: Has preservation of the structures become untenable?

For now, Seattle Parks & Recreation has reinforced the fencing that encircles the central tower complex.

Noted Seattle public artist John Fleming finds the fencing dispiriting — visually dominant, hostile in tone and, as the tragedies have made clear, no guarantee of safety. It leaves the city trapped in a seemingly impossible binary: leave the hazard as it is, or remove it entirely.

“Do we cut down our trees because someone might climb one and fall?” Fleming asked during a recent visit. “You can’t eliminate all risk from the public realm. We have to live with facts on the ground,” he continues. “But that doesn’t mean tearing everything down.”

Fleming — whose public art includes “Western Tapestry” along Western Avenue below Pike Place Market and “Grass Blades,” an installation at Seattle Center composed of 110 tall, brightly colored vertical metal pieces — has an idea for a third way: a protective wrapper encircling the tower complex.

In his concept, a smooth, serpentine wall of colorful panels weaves around the rusting Gas Works bones. It would be impossible to climb and could rest lightly atop the capped, toxic soil, avoiding deep foundations.

The proposal is practical and philosophical.

The towers would no longer beckon as a playground. But instead of a fence that shouts “keep out,” Fleming describes his proposed art wall as a tribute — both to the historic structures and to the imaginative impulse that first saved them.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video of this column, head over here.

Also, Peter Steinbrueck shares his astonishing never-before-seen photos of Gas Works, snapped in February 1971 when he was just 13 years old.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 11, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 8, 2025

Built in 1925, restored Devonshire Apartments preserve affordable housing

By Jean Sherrard

FOR A CENTURY, the red brick Devonshire Apartments have anchored the northern edge of Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. The Tudor flourishes of the handsome, U-shaped touchstone have greeted generations of clerks, shop workers and downtown strivers.

Yet this resilient 1925 structure has more than once come close to death, threatened by economic collapse, eyed by developers and nearly surrendered to decay.

A rare alignment of community will and financing has granted the Devonshire a new lease on life, securing the property’s 62 units as affordable housing for the next century.

Designed by locally prominent architect Henry

Bittman, the building rose during Belltown’s regrade-fueled boom as Wall Street Court — a name that reflected prestige until the 1929 stock market crash. Two weeks later, newspaper ads quietly reintroduced the property under a less toxic banner: the Devonshire.

For nearly a century, its design remained intact, including a basement garage tucked beneath its courtyard — a rare amenity in the early auto age. Discreet brick openings in the exterior masonry reveal vintage pie-safe vents, narrow enough to cool a pastry but too tight for anyone to pinch one. What’s more, the original terrazzo floors and mirror accents in the central stairwell were carefully preserved during the gut renovation.

By 1979, developer Martin Selig, who later built the 76-story Columbia Center, proposed replacing the three-story walk-up with a 48-story tower. Tenants protested and prevailed, saving the bricks but not stopping time. In 2021, a plumbing failure signaled the structure’s pending demise.

Community Roots Housing, the Devonshire’s nonprofit owner since 1993, chose to preserve and modernize. Backed by $33 million from the city Office of Housing, Heritage Bank and federal tax credits, the organization completed a top-to-bottom restoration. “Every time we peeled back a layer, it was like playing back an idea from 100 years ago,” says Jordan Sullivan, real estate director.

Crews poured new concrete shear walls inside the masonry to meet seismic codes. They solved puzzles ranging from odd rooftop structures composed of stacked old-growth timbers to ancient ducts, nicknaming the new walls after cheeses — cheddar, never Swiss. (“No holes allowed,” Sullivan quips.)

One facade detail puzzled the team: repeating terra-cotta shields bearing a large “S.” Did it stand for Seattle? Newly unearthed 1925 documents offer a clue:the letter likely honors F.M. Stanley, the original owner who abandoned the “Wall Street” branding after the crash.

For new tenant Kat Metrovich, the “S” means survival.

A former PCC cheesemonger priced out of Queen Anne, Metrovich says landing affordable digs feels life changing. “It’s challenging to locate housing in this town if you’re not right in the money,” she says. “This feels like home.”

According to Community Roots CEO Colleen Echohawk, that sentiment is the renovation’s true measure. “The goal is simple,” she says. “To keep people housed and happy for another 100 years.”

WEB EXTRAS

 For a narrated street-side 360 degree video view of the Devonshire Apartments, click here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

 

Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 11, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 14, 2025

For Space Needle’s longtime Santa, Christmas is all about presence

By Jean Sherrard

Some things must be seen to be believed. The transformation of mild-mannered Russell Long into Santa Claus is one.

Emerging from a basement changing room beneath the Space Needle, snowy-bearded Santa Russ encounters wreaths of smiles and spontaneous delight.

“Santa, you’re back!” exclaim Needle staffers with childlike glee. In the gift shop, visitors clamor for ussies with Saint Nick as others point and wave.

While we ride the elevator to the observation deck for our photo shoot, I ask what draws people, young and old alike. He twinkles, then takes my breath away.

“Unconditional love,” he says gently but firmly.

Long’s metamorphosis began nearly 30 years ago when, facing early retirement from Microsoft, he felt adrift. A pastor at his church made an offhand suggestion: with his rotund figure, full beard, and kindly demeanor, why not play Santa for the season?

He joined Arthur & Associates, the Seattle company that has supplied Santas for many decades. In 1943, its founder, Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Art French, watched crowds visiting the Frederick & Nelson Santa through his office window and thought, “We should be taking pictures of that.” The following year, French opened a photo studio in the department store and began snapping shots of tots on Santa’s lap. He made over $10,000 in a single month, several times his annual P-I salary. His idea spread nationwide, becoming a holiday tradition that endures eight decades later.

Long dove in. Dyeing his blonde hair and beard white was, he recalls, torturous. “The bleach was so strong, I had to breathe through a hose for half an hour.” A local tailor hand-sewed his first velveteen red suit.

By 1998, Santa Russ was greeting families at Bellevue Square. Later generations followed him from mall to Needle, bringing children and grandchildren to perch on his lap.

The work isn’t without strain. “My cheeks hurt those first few days,” he says. “You don’t realize how much smiling it takes. And you have to train your mustache to curl up — it makes the smile bigger.”

Each appearance begins with a quiet ritual of transformation. “White gloves first, then gold spectacles, then the robe,” he says. “By the time I’ve finished dressing, Santa has arrived.”

The enduring moments aren’t about presents. “One boy, around nine, told me what he wanted most was for his dad to quit smoking,” Long says. “I turned to the father and said, ‘Did you hear that? He wants you to stick around.’ That’s when you realize Santa can touch a whole family.”

He also recalls parents arriving from Seattle Children’s Hospital, bringing fragile children for what might be final photos. “You never forget those visits,” he says softly.

So what’s Santa’s secret? He sparkles. “We all need to give our gifts,” he says. “Everyone has something: time, kindness, love. It does us good when we give it.”

For Santa Russ, the gift is presence itself. “I know how to listen,” he says. “Being heard and accepted — that’s the true spirit of Christmas.”

WEB EXTRAS

First, a bit of shameless self-promotion. Join me for the 18th annual Rogue’s Christmas, this Sunday at Seattle’s Town Hall!

Now back to our regular programming! To watch a narrated 360 degree video of the Santa Russ column recorded atop the Space Needle, click right here.

Also, check out a few extras from Santa Russ himself beginning with 18 sequential annual photos of Isabel Brownlow.

Afterward, you’ll find a half-dozen Seattle Post-Intelligencer news clips detailing the origin of Santa photos here at Frederick & Nelson by P-I photographer Art French in the mid-1940s.

Plus, there’s video of a Dec. 20, 2017, “Eric’s Heroes” story from KOMO-TV, courtesy archivist Joe Wren, covering the Frederick & Nelson Santa-photo story.

In addition, here’s a column from four years ago about Seattle’s 1968-1976 giant Westlake Santa.

And from my column partner Clay Eals, scroll down further to see several more Santa-related extras!

Santa-related extras from Clay

By Clay Eals

First is a charming take-off on a classic holiday poem, “T’was the Plight Before Christmas,” by West Seattleite Sue Barry. It makes for a delightful, read-aloud piece, perhaps best-timed for Christmas Eve. You might call it a union tale, but the message goes much further. To download it, just click the Santa-hat image here:

Next is a repeat from five years ago from this blog — but actually from 40 years ago when it first was published!

I offer this “Black Santa” story of mine that appeared Christmas Day 1985 on the front page of the West Seattle Herald, for which I served as editor. The fine photos were by Herald photographer Brad Garrison. This is posted with the permission of Robinson Newspapers.

I have tried searching online for Tracy Bennett, the subject of this story, who would be 62 today. Alas, I have turned up nothing.

Still, this story about Tracy and his view on the Santa milieu remains timely, powerful and inspiring — at least, that’s my hope.

At the time I wrote it, the story resonated quite personally, From 1985 to 1993, I volunteered more than 100 times to play Santa for children and adults at parties and in schools, community halls and private homes throughout Puget Sound as part of the American Heart Association’s “Santa with a Heart” fundraising program. As any Santa will tell you, it was a uniquely heartwarming and unforgettable experience. (See clippings at bottom.)

Please click any of the images once or twice to enlarge them for easy reading. And if you want to read the transcribed Black Santa text instead of reading directly from the images, scroll down.

Merry merry, and ho, ho, ho!

West Seattle Herald, Dec. 25, 1985

‘Just for you’

Black Santa relishes children’s happiness

Santa Claus, known as Tracy Bennett in the “off”-season, walks into a class of busy fifth- and sixth-graders at Hughes Elementary School in West Seattle.

“Hi, boys and girls,” says Santa.

“Oh, hi Santa Claus!” the students respond, almost in unison.

“Howya doin’?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good. I thought I’d drop in and visit you for a minute.”

“Yeah,” say a couple of students. “You changed colors.”

“Yeah,” answers Santa, “I sure did, didn’t I?”

By CLAY EALS

When most of those who are opening packages under the Christmas tree this morning think about “the man with all the toys,” their vision probably doesn’t look like Tracy Bennett.

That’s because Bennett is Black, while nearly all of the Santas in the world — at least in the United States — seem to be as white as the North Pole’s year-round snow.

Bennett isn’t bothered, however. He keeps an upbeat, optimistic attitude about the seasonal craft he’s practiced for the past 12 years. He says he’s encountered subtle prejudice from adults and skepticism from kids, but he boasts of being able to win over most of the doubters.

Exposure is what Bennett says he needs most. And so do the other Black Santas in America, he says.

Bennett got some of the exposure he desired last week when he walked the halls of both Hughes and Van Asselt elementary schools, the latter of which is attended by some students who live in southern West Seattle and the city side of White Center.

He roamed the halls at Hughes and, with the assistance of teacher Willa Williams, peeked into classrooms and dropped off sacks of candy canes, occasionally stopping for a few minutes to talk to kids on his lap. Bearing a staccato, smile-inducing “ho, ho, ho,” he almost resembled a politician, repeatedly extending his hand for a shake and greeting children with a steady stream of “Howyadoin’? … Howyadoin’, guy? … Hiya guys. Workin’ hard?”

The racially mixed classes responded in a generally positive way. Although one sixth-grader was heard to say, “I thought Santa Claus was white, because I saw a white Santa Claus at The Bon,” for the most part any negative comments centered on whether he was “real,” not on his skin color.

“He’s nice, but his hair’s made out of cotton. Weird,” said fourth-grader Jessica Canfield. “And he has clothes under his other clothes.”

“He’s fine, and I like him,” said fellow fourth-grader Johnny Cassanova. “He said that he would visit me, and he would try to get everything that I want for Christmas and to get good grades.”

Was he the “real” Santa? “Yeah,” said Johnny, “to me he is.”

“It went real good,” Bennett said afterward. “They were very polite. They weren’t skeptical. Mostly loving, you can tell.”

Bennett, who at 22 is unemployed and intends to go to school so that he can get a job either as a police officer or working with handicapped kids, began his Santa “career” at the young age of 10. “I started as a little dwarf and moved my way up,” the Rainier Valley resident said with a laugh.

Over the years, Bennett said, he’s been Santa at private gatherings and community centers in Seattle’s south end, and he’s pieced together a costume he thinks is unimposing. The key part, he said, is his beard, which is a rather flat affair.

“The big Santa Claus beards and hairs are so flocky, so thick, that it scares some children,” Bennett said. “His color of his suit and his beard is so bright already, along with the brightness of his face.

“A Black Santa Claus with a white beard seems to bring out an older look, and the color of my skin makes it look like a normal Black man wearing a suit.”

Consequently, he said, kids warm up to him rather quickly. “Apparently I work out pretty good,” he said.

Children, both white and minority, raise the racial question fairly often, Bennett said. They usually just say, “Santa Claus is white,” expecting a response, he said.

“But I really don’t say nothing. I just look at ’em and smile, or I say ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ and they usually don’t ask anymore,” he said. “I’m used to it, so it’s no problem.”

Bennett does look forward to a day when more Black Santas are around to break the racial ice at Christmastime.

“I’m not the only one, but I never see ’em in stores,” he said. If just one major downtown store would feature a Black Santa, “that would mean the 12 years that I’ve been working on it has started to come through,” he said. “It would be a breakthrough. I want it to happen.”

He also would like to see children exposed to Santas of a variety of races. “If we bring the children Black Santa Clauses, Korean Santa Clauses, Japanese Santa Clauses, the kids will like it after a while,” he said.

For that to happen, however, some prejudices will have to be broken down gradually. “You can feel it’s there,” he said. “You try to believe it’s not there, but you can see it in people’s eyes.”

Like any Santa Claus, Bennett finds it a “thrill” to portray Saint Nick to children. “When kids are happy, I’m happy. When they’re sad, I feel for ’em. I’d like to give ’em more than I can.”

He insists, however, that it’s important not to insist that he’s the “real” Santa when kids challenge him. He tells children, “You don’t have to believe in me. But I’m doing this just for you.”

“Why ruin a kid’s mind and say, ‘I’m real, believe me’?” he said. “He (Santa) is a beautiful man, OK? No one can take that away from him. But we have to tell what’s real from not. We have to tell our kids we play Santa Claus because we love children.”

Bennett also said it’s important not to push the religious aspects of Christmas as Santa. “When we talk about religion, we have to let kids do what they want, do not force them.”

Williams, the teacher, took the same approach in deciding to invite Bennett, a friend of hers, to visit Hughes. While Christmas “is a fun time and should be a time for joy,” she said she’s well aware of the Seattle School District’s policy that’s intended to separate religion from school activity.

Bringing Santa to the classroom — and a Black Santa at that — was an attempt to get students to “understand each other’s differences,” she said.

“When I told them Santa Claus might visit, one student told me, ‘I don’t believe in Santa Claus.’ Another said, ‘Santa Claus is my mom and dad,’ and another said, ‘Santa Claus is Jesus’,” Williams said. “It was just the idea of general thought and letting them express themselves and learning to accept each and every person and their differences as long as there isn’t any harm.”

For Bennett, the delight of being Santa is that “guy is just a giving person, you know?

“He gives away things to make people happy. If a child’s sick in bed, he sees Santa Claus, he’s going to try to smile as much as he can because he’s happy. When they say, ‘Santa Claus, you didn’t give me so-and-so,’ I say, ‘Well, maybe next year, OK?’

“I don’t tell them I’m going to get this (particular item) for them and get their hopes up. I tell them that maybe somebody will get it for them very soon.

“One guy said he wanted to go to college, and I said, ‘Maybe next Christmas or a few Christmases from now, you’ll be going to college and be saying you got your wish.’ ”

Bennett clearly is hooked on his annual role: “As long as I live and as long as I stay healthy, I’ll always be Santa Claus.”

P.S. Clay as Santa

As promised above, here are tidbits from my eight-year volunteer Santa Claus “career” for the American Heart Association: two clippings in which I demonstrate for other Santas the best way to don the uniform, plus a sketch I created to provide step-by-step guidance. Click once or twice on the images to enlarge them. —Clay

A bonus:

Just for fun and to keep with the theme, I also am including a Santa article I wrote that appeared on Christmas Eve 1980 in The Oregonian near the end of my eight-year stint as a reporter and photographer for that newspaper. Again, click once or twice on the image to enlarge it for easy readability. Enjoy! —Clay

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 27, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 30, 2025

Seattle’s Chinese Baptist Church has fostered community for more than 100 years

By Jean Sherrard

It was Friday, June 13, 1952. Fifteen 4- and 5-year-olds gathered for a graduation ceremony at Seattle’s Chinese Baptist Church nursery school, dressed in pint-sized mortarboards and black gowns. The school’s supervisor, Mrs. Harry Ruehlen, handed diplomas to each graduate.

Among them was Betty Lau, who still remembers the

musty basement classroom, the smell of chalk dust and the comfort of belonging.

Seven decades later, Lau stands before the same brick façade, joined by several former classmates. They reminisce about games, songs and afternoon naps, recalling how the church provided a place of warmth and community in post-war Seattle.

Founded in 1892, the Chinese Baptist Church served generations of families who made their homes and livelihoods in the surrounding neighborhood. Originally an outreach mission of Seattle First Baptist Church, it combined prayer services with English lessons for Chinese immigrants.

With no permanent home, early congregants first gathered in private homes and leased halls in old Chinatown. In 1902, they built a modest structure at Maynard Avenue South and South Washington Street. Two decades later, in 1922, the growing congregation purchased property at 10th Avenue South and South King Street.

By the early 1950s, Chinese Baptist served as a

spiritual center and anchor for young children whose parents worked long hours nearby. Its nursery school offered early education, socialization and — perhaps most important — a sense of place and welcome.

Lau recalls her teachers’ patient voices, one in English and one in Chinese, and the joy of receiving her diploma, which she kept for years. “I was very shy in public, but nursery school felt normal, like being in a bigger family,” she says with a smile. “I didn’t know the word ‘community’ yet, but that’s what it was.”

In the decades since, the church building has changed hands, and the neighborhood around it has evolved. Yet for Lau and her classmates, returning to that spot rekindles vivid memories of friendship, faith and beginnings.

Retired after 41 years as a secondary-school teacher, Lau sees clear lines between that early experience and her lifelong devotion to education and youth activities.

“Understanding where we come from,” she says, “gives students confidence and connection. Those who feel seen and supported thrive and carry that forward.”

The basement classroom may be long gone, but its lessons endure. Each reminiscence shared among Lau and her classmates summons cherished childhood scenes of caps and gowns — and parental pride — from a June day more than 70 years ago, when the future felt as bright as a diploma freshly handed to a 5-year-old.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click through here.

Just to make trouble, I’m appending the initial draft of the column I submitted to The Times. In a Now & Then first, our editors summarily rejected it. It took a complete rewrite to ease it into print. 

Here’s the original version that was, said the Times, not ready for prime time:

Chinatown longtimers shun ‘international’ label: ‘We are Americans’

It was Friday, June 13, 1952. Fifteen 4 and 5-year-olds gathered for a graduation ceremony at Seattle’s Chinese Baptist Church nursery school, dressed in tiny mortarboards and black gowns. The school’s supervisor, Mrs. Harry Ruehlen, handed diplomas to each graduate.

Among them was Betty Lau, who still remembers the musty basement classroom, the smell of chalk dust and the thrill of belonging.

Seven decades later, Lau stands at that same brick façade, surrounded by former classmates and recalling with a smile how the church offered sanctuary in a city that had long drawn invisible lines denoting where Chinese families could and couldn’t live. Those borders, she says, still define a struggle for identity in Seattle’s Chinatown.

It was a pattern etched long before her time.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made Chinese immigrants the first group in U.S. history barred by race and nationality. In Seattle, exclusion persisted through property covenants, housing codes and loan denials that confined Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Black residents to a few downtown blocks.

Redlining maps from the 1930s shaded Chinatown bright pink — “hazardous”— a warning to banks not to invest.

This was coupled by what was labeled progress.

In 1928, the street called the Second Avenue Extension sliced through the second Chinatown, forcing re-location to King Street. The Interstate 5 corridor carved away another section in the 1960s. Construction of the Kingdome in the 1970s further impacted the neighborhood.

Each project promised renewal. Each time, Chinatown’s footprint shrank.

In 1951, a year before Lau’s nursery-school graduation, Mayor William Devin renamed Chinatown by proclamation, calling it the International Center. For the Chinese community, it felt like erasure.

Restaurateur Ruby Chow, who became the first Asian American elected to the King County Council — and become Lau’s mentor — bristled. The city of Seattle, she believed, had created a “reservation.”

“International,” son Brien Chow argues, implies Asian Americans are perpetual outsiders when they are Americans.

The linguistic sleight-of-hand eventually became civic policy, morphing into “International District,” then, as mandated by a 1999 city ordinance, “Chinatown International District” – the collective name of Chinatown, Japantown and Little Saigon.

Retired after 41 years as a secondary-school teacher, Lau says identity is essential to belonging.

“Understanding place and heritage,” she says, “gives students pride and connection. Those who are secure in their self-identity thrive and strengthen community.”

As former classmates gather with her at the church’s entrance, Lau eyes the neighborhood that raised them. Whatever any signs may read, for her it always will remain Chinatown.

So what do you think, gentle readers, on this rainy Thanksgiving? Interested to hear your opinions…

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 13, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 16, 2025

Expresso insight 50 years ago still inspires Cafe Allegro

By Jean Sherrard

Blink and you might miss it. Nestled in a University District alley just off The Ave, Café Allegro is an unassuming temple to coffee — and community.

For the past 50 years, its caffeinated regulars, many from the UW campus one block east, have gathered to study, create, reflect and converse in a locale that seeded ideas and conventions that forever transformed how the world sees and drinks coffee.

The café’s first owner, Dave Olsen, had no grand ambitions when he first opened its doors. After serving as an Army air-defense officer in Seattle, followed by two years as a carpenter, he rode his bicycle to San Francisco in search of direction.

North Beach’s legendary Caffè Trieste, often cited as

the first espresso coffeehouse on the West Coast, offered a roadmap.

“I was completely smitten,” he says, “by the taste and aroma of coffee, the whole vibe of a café.”

Olsen returned to Seattle in pursuit of a dream. In December 1974, he signed the lease for an improbable location — the alley garage of a former U-District mortuary — and, with $17,000 in cash and buckets of sweat equity, he opened Café Allegro in May 1975. He had assembled all the essentials: an Italian espresso machine, fresh-roasted beans, recipes and techniques.

Then the first customer strolled in.

“He walks up to the counter and orders a cappuccino,” Olsen says. “I did the best I could, slid it across the counter, and took his money.”

They made eye contact, and Olsen had a lightbulb moment.

“I suddenly realized it’s all about connecting with people and taking care of them,” he says. “That has served me ever since.”

After 11 years at Allegro, Olsen accepted a job under a

rising young executive at Starbucks named Howard Schultz.

“We really hit it off,” Olsen says. “Howard was the creative force with business acumen and ambition. I was sleeves-rolled-up behind the counter, roasting coffee and training people.”

Schultz bought Starbucks’ original six Seattle storefronts and within a decade expanded to more than 1,000 shops. Olsen served as the chain’s first green-coffee buyer, scouring the world in search of beans.

In 1990, Olsen sold Café Allegro to then-managers Nathaniel Jackson and Chris Peterson, who continue the traditions Olsen established. Peterson juggles his day job as a lawyer with managing

the café and takes pride in roasting Allegro’s signature coffees.

“Our focus has always been the coffee and the community,” Peterson says. “We encourage people to hang out all day — to socialize and connect. And we’ve always been that way.”

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video featuring the Allegro and environs, click here.

Also, check out a video of Clay Eals’ Steve Goodman biography event held in the cafe’s upstairs room on Oct. 3, 2008. Clay’s book, Steve Goodman: Facing the Music, is now in its updated 6th printing!

Finally, a selection of photos from photographer Bill Kuhns, who’s documented Allegro life and times for decades.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 23, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 26, 2025

‘Secret Sauce’ saves island’s special gathering place, the Nordland General Store

By Jean Sherrard

Just east of Port Townsend, Marrowstone Island — so dubbed by Capt. George Vancouver on May 8, 1792, the same day he affixed “Mount Rainier” to a conical volcano southeast — harbors a bucolic sanctuary.

With a population of just under 1,000 that swells with vacationers each summer, the island’s unincorporated town of Nordland was founded by Norwegian immigrant Peter Nordby (1862-1919) who bought and platted its 187 acres in 1892.

Four years later, in 1896, Congress approved construction of Fort Flagler, a U.S. Army coastal artillery post at the island’s north end.

For more than a century, the Nordland General Store, built circa 1922, has stood at the island’s heart, selling groceries and supplies to locals and visitors alike.

Early records also illustrate a flip side to the business — its centrality to the community as a gathering place. The annual Strawberry Festival, first held a century ago, continues to draw celebrants peninsula-wide.

In recent decades, a lively Tractor Days parade has drawn farmers and lawn jockeys, rumbling their heavy machinery past the store every Memorial Day weekend. Other festivities include a pumpkin-weight guessing contest held before Halloween, a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in which Santa arrives by boat, and a Polar Bear Dip at noon on New Year’s Day.

In the early hours of Nov. 5, 2020, the store was sustained major damage from an electrical fire. The building was declared a total loss. “A little piece of

Marrowstone Island died when the Nordland Store was destroyed by fire,” reported the Peninsula Daily News.

Then-owners Tom and Sue Rose, nearing retirement, made the painful decision to put the business on hold. Townsfolk were unnerved, faced with the prospect of losing the island’s soul.

Longtime Marrowstoner Barcy Fisher and a more recent arrival, Patti Buckland, friends for more than 30

years, collaborated on an audacious business plan. To save this touchstone, why not convert the store to community ownership?

Cue huzzahs and applause. Inspired investors stepped up with nearly $400,000. 592 neighbors and friends chipped in $250 each for lifetime memberships to the co-op. What’s more, dozens of volunteers stepped up to help rebuild. Within 10 months, on May 25, 2024, the Nordland General Store staged its grand reopening. Rain notwithstanding, Buckland says, the event was attended by hundreds of exuberant neighbors.

“At the end of the day,” she says, “what we’re all about is serving our community. It’s not just about groceries. It’s about connection. That’s our secret sauce.”

(click to enlarge photos)

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.

 

(click to enlarge photos)

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!

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 21, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 24, 2025

‘Almost a Paradise’ for settlers was
a paradise lost for Coast Salish

By Jean Sherrard

In times of anti-immigrant fervor, a gentle reminder seems pertinent that most of us are descended from recent arrivers.

Col. Isaac N. Ebey, of Missouri, landed in the Pacific Northwest via San Francisco, seeking a home for his extended family. In the spring of 1850, he hired canoes to explore today’s Puget Sound — a reconnaissance that preceded Seattle’s Alki Landing Party by more than a year. Letters home describe a land of exceptional beauty, suitable for colonization.

Finally, Ebey chose to settle on Whidbey Island, taking full advantage of the Oregon (Territory) Donation Land Law, which granted married couples 320 acres each if they committed to working the land for four years.

Their square mile, Ebey wrote his brother Winfield,

was “almost a Paradise of Nature,” and he encouraged his extended family to follow him and his close friend Samuel Crockett to the island prairie. By 1854, they were joined by nearly 30 Ebeys and Crocketts, lured from across the United States.

While these pioneers quickly established profitable farms, the original Coast Salish inhabitants, living here for millennia, were displaced without compensation — a toxic model being repeated throughout the territory.

Isaac’s 61-year-old father, Jacob Ebey, took up

residence on his own 320-acre spread atop a bluff overlooking his son’s land. Soon, Jacob built an 18-by-40-foot, 1½ story home for eight family members and found success planting wheat, oats and potatoes while raising livestock, including a small herd of dairy cows.

Isaac’s fortunes also rose. Besides farming his land, he worked as a lawyer and customs official and served as a territorial legislator. Sadly, wife Rebecca Davis Ebey, who had joined him with their two sons in 1851, died in 1853 after a difficult childbirth. Ebey subsequently married young widow Emily Sconce.

In 1855, Territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens toured the region, insisting that tribes sign federal treaties to formalize the vast transfer of land from Indigenous to white hands.

Bitter disputes raged as Native populations already diminished by disease and displacement were corralled into reservations.

With tensions rising, the settlers built blockhouses — the mid-19^th century equivalent of “safe rooms” — to protect themselves.

Jacob Ebey erected a thick-timbered blockhouse a stone’s throw from his farmhouse, anticipating confrontation with local tribes. On Aug. 11, 1857, however, the family’s security measures were breached.

In retaliation for the killing of 28 tribal members by the U.S. warship Massachusetts, a raiding party, likely from the Kake nation of Tlingit from southeastern Alaska, killed and beheaded newcomer Isaac Ebey at his home, just above the beachfront landing that still bears his name.

WEB EXTRAS

More scenes from the bluff below Jacob Ebey’s cabin.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 7, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 10, 2025

For 40 years, Pike Place Market newsstand let us read all about it

By Jean Sherrard

We know of at least one canary that thrived in a coal mine against the odds. “From the start,” says Lee Lauckhart, now 84, “everyone tried to convince me print media was doomed.”

For 40 years, however, he ignored the naysayers, owning and operating “Read All About It,” his beloved newsstand in the Pike Place Market, beginning in 1979.

“Every day, we’d see dozens of regulars who became good friends,” he recalls warmly, singling out longtime

co-workers for special praise. “We were just like family.”

Born in Seattle, Lauckhart graduated from the University of Washington in 1968, signing on with Thurston County as a “registered sanitarian” before joining the “back to the land” movement: “I spent four years as a Snohomish dirt farmer.”

Stints selling newspapers in New York’s Gramercy Park then driving taxis in Seattle “were pretty nip and tuck,” he says. Then one of his cab fares offered him a job making “horseshoe nail” jewelry in the Pike Place Market. It felt like coming home.

Just divorced, he found housing for himself and his young daughter in the Market’s newly renovated Leland Hotel, “the one with the ‘Meet the Producers’ sign on it,” Lauckhart recalls.

In 1979, after four years as a “crafty,” he had a lightbulb moment. Friend and longtime newspaper hawker Sebi Nahmias had a coveted license to sell local dailies from his stand at First and Pike.

Lauckhart, then in his late 30s, made Nahmias an offer:

that together they open a general-interest newsstand in the Market offering publications from around the world. Soon joined by partner Steve Dunnington, they comprised an irrepressible entrepreneurial trio.

“Read All About It” opened Oct. 25, 1979, on a 10-by-30-foot pitch in the Market’s southeast corner.

The newsstand was an unqualified success — and its location didn’t disappoint. “First and Pike,” Lauckhart says, “was the busiest intersection in the Pacific Northwest.”

A slew of innovations followed. The partners arranged for daily New York Times deliveries (before dawn each

morning via Flying Tiger Airlines) while negotiating contracts with newspaper and magazine publishers across the globe.

After four decades, however, the final curtain. Thousands of newspapers had been shuttered, writing the final epitaph for purveyors of print media.

Lauckhart, by then the sole owner, stubbornly held on as a matter of principle. For 10 years, he paid employees out of the newsstand’s dwindling profits while surviving solely on Social Security.

On Dec. 31, 2019, the “Read All About It” canary, one of the last of its kind, finally sang its swan song.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video, captured on location in Pike Place Market, click here.

Billy King, noted NW muralist — once voted Mayor of the Market– is a longtime pal of Lee Lauckhart’s. He created the print of “Read All About It” featured above.

When we prepared this column, Billy was hard at work restoring a mural painted years ago for Maximilien, a French restaurant in the Market. Check out a few pix of Billy at work:

Finally, Lee Lauckhart’s favorite photo of the newsstand in situ, taken for a now-defunct rag called Endless Vacation.