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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 16, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 19, 2023

Colonnade of continuity lights up Portage Bay in Montlake

By Jean Sherrard

In 2019, photographer Colleen Chartier and urban planner Rob Wilkinson, neighbors in an elongated oval that divides the Montlake Cut from the SR-520 corridor, learned that their street’s beloved but decrepit 100-year-old lampposts were soon to be removed and replaced with modern counterparts.

For the two, the pending loss was personal. With their spouses, both had raised children in the neighborhood, and each of the 14 columns — though dinged, rusty and layered in peeling paint — was a repository of community memory.

What’s more, the gently tapered, cast-iron lampposts, installed circa 1920, were identical to those still lighting the Olmsted Brothers-designed Volunteer Park on nearby Capitol Hill. Destined for the scrap heap, these historic artifacts just had to be saved.

Former partners in Art-on-File, a small photography business, Chartier and Wilkinson had traveled the world for decades, documenting public art and architecture and changing cityscapes. From their explorations, the two understood that the colonnades (literally, rows of columns) of ancient Greece potently symbolize strength, endurance and importance.

Brainstorming a rescue plan, they recalled the colonnades in the disparate cities of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Moline, Illinois. “These,” Chartier says, “are urban spaces where land and water meet, enhanced by necklaces of lampposts.”

Erecting a similar colonnade in nearby West Montlake Park, fronting Portage Bay, appealed to them both. “The idea was beautiful and simple,” Wilkinson says. “Elegantly laid out, we thought it would be irresistible.”

Seattle City Light, however, was hesitant, citing legal liability. But Wilkinson persisted, eventually tracking down Dan Peters, the contractor tasked with disposing of the old fixtures. After hearing the pitch, Peters responded, “No problem, dude. Where do you want them?”

But where to temporarily cache 14 lampposts, 600 pounds each? Nearby Seattle Yacht Club offered storage for six months, which became an even more generous three years. The rest of the neighborhood was equally supportive, many enthusiastically underwriting restoration of the columns and erection of the colonnade.

More hurdles followed, some bureaucratic, others pandemic-related. Progress slowed. Wilkinson and Chartier prepared an exactingly illustrated 40-page proposal that kept inspiration alive while shepherding the project from permitting through bidding and construction.

Today, after 3-1/2 years and hundreds of hours of donated labor, the colonnade stands. Was it worth the trouble? Without a doubt, asserts the pair.

“It’s about presenting these commonplace artifacts in a way that honors their inherent beauty,” Chartier says.

“We’re battle-scarred,” Wilkinson adds with a rueful grin. “It turns out that building something so simple and lovely is really, really hard.”

WEB EXTRAS

Fascinating extras, this time round. First, check out our 360 on-site video of the column, read by Jean.

Then scroll down for some remarkable documentation of this amazing project. To begin with, the PDF of their 40-page proposal, beautifully crafted to ensure greatest impact.

More photos from Chartier and Wilkinson taken over 3 1/2 years.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 2, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 5, 2023

Fish stories come true on Ballard’s legendary Emancipator

By Jean Sherrard

Brad Buske’s earliest memories are of old salts playing pinochle, smoking cheroots and telling fish tales on the Everett waterfront, where his family runs a seafood processing company. One story consistently stood out, burnished in the retelling, and Buske knows it by heart.

It happened in the late summer of 1958 after a robust season for sockeye in Puget Sound. Of 400 local purse-seiners vying for salmon, the Emancipator, a sleek 65-foot wooden boat built in 1918 by the Skansi Bros. of Gig Harbor, had finished among the top 10 boats for gross stock. In 28 consecutive days, its nets had hauled in a respectable 25,000 fish.

When the state fish commission offered a last-minute extension, declaring a one-day open season on Fraser River sockeyes, Emancipator owner and skipper Nick Barhanovich jumped at the chance. “And if we happened to catch a few fish,” recalls crew member Ray Fadich in his 2020 book “The Big Run,” that would be “icing on our cake.”

Joining a flotilla of competing boats near Point Roberts, the Emancipator initiated a set and then began pulling in its seines. What happened next was mind-boggling.

Within the enclosed circle of nets, Fadich describes a “frenzy” of teeming fish, “water boiling as if in a huge cooking pot.” The delighted crew filled the hold to the brim, then loaded the deck gunnel-deep till the stern was almost awash. Fadich worked the bilge pumps till he was “blue in the face” just to keep the vessel above water.

That single set comprised 15,000 fish — nearly 80,000 pounds. It was one of the largest single catches in Puget Sound history.

Today, Brad Buske, 36, is the proud owner of the Emancipator, which he bought for a dollar in 2013. “By that time, the boat was basically floating dirt,” he says. “We removed the old fish hold with a shovel.”

The Emancipator was transferred to Port Townsend, where Buske says master shipwrights rebuilt it beam by beam: “We did our best to keep all the lines as original as possible, trying to preserve its history — not to create a dead replica but a working boat with a purpose.”

Buske views himself a caretaker of that history. “To me,” he says, “this boat is a living thing. There’s oil and sweat and fish juice soaked into its timbers.”

Several months a year, with Buske at the helm, the Emancipator continues to ply Puget Sound as a tender, transporting fish between the today’s salmon fleet and his family’s cannery, adding salty chapters to its ongoing story.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 video of this column, narrated by Jean, please join us at  Fisherman’s Terminal.

More photos of the Emancipator included below:

Passing through the Ballard Locks:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 16, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 19, 2023

Coming to our late-night rescue for 69 years: Dick’s Drive-In

By Jean Sherrard

“You don’t know where I’ve been!” the angry guy repeated.

“You don’t know where he’s been!” chimed in his sidekick.

The muzzle of a gun he pointed at me seemed as enormous as a Kalakala ferry porthole on a night crossing.

“I, I don’t know where you’ve been,” I agreed, quaking, my hands raised. What to do? Should I meet his eyes or not? I was fixated on the deadly weapon.

It was the early 1980s. I had just finished performing in an Empty Space Theatre play on Capitol Hill. After a convivial beer or two at the Comet Tavern, I stopped off at Dick’s Drive-In on Broadway. Just as I joined the line to order, a parking-lot scene was coming to a climax.

A young mixed-race couple (black guy, white gal) in a convertible sipped on milkshakes while two white guys in fatigue jackets circled them in a lather, hurling racial epithets.

“C’mon, cut it out,” I called, fortified by Redhook and youth.

That’s when the gun appeared.

The line parted around me like the Red Sea, but someone shouted, “Leave him alone!” Moments later, customers and servers behind the windows took up the refrain: “Leave him alone!”

The gun barrel wavered indecisively, then lowered. The guy and his sidekick hopped in their car and peeled out of the lot. The Dick’s crowd had come to my rescue.

My Deluxe and Fries were particularly tasty that night. In the immortal words of the Bard, all’s well that ends well.

Richard Spady (1923-2016), eponymous co-founder of Dick’s, whose family still owns the small chain of drive-ins, opened his first restaurant in 1954 in Wallingford. He and his partners adopted simple principles: quality ingredients and quick service. They found almost instant success and stuck with the formula.

Sixty-nine years later, long lines continue well past midnight. The oldest fast-food joint in town is still one of its most popular, repeatedly topping polls for the region’s favorite eatery. Afficionados include songsters Sir Mix-a-Lot and Macklemore. Both immortalized Dick’s in rap.

The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also was a customer. So, still, is his partner Bill Gates, who, legend has it, once flamboyantly tried to pay for a cheeseburger with a $1,000 bill. But times have moderated the local billionaire, who now seems to prefer anonymity.

Ten years ago, late one weekday evening, Gates and I approached separate windows at the Wallingford Dick’s and coincidentally called out the same order: a Deluxe, Fries and a Coke. He was alone and unassuming, wearing the same sweater he’d worn on “The Daily Show” the night before.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video featuring this column, please head over in this direction.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 2, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 5, 2023

Magnolia Beach offers proverbial wave of the future

By Jean Sherrard

In 1913, below Magnolia Bluff and today’s Discovery Park, a Webster & Stevens photographer captured this revealing pair of images of South Beach. In the northwesterly view, gleaming West Point Lighthouse anchors a sand spit, known to the Duwamish as Per-co-dus-chule or “thrusts far out.”

Early mariners knew the peninsula as Sandy Point and welcomed installation of the lighthouse in 1881, the first on Puget Sound, to warn of the hazardous shoal at the north end of Elliott Bay, site of many shipwrecks.

The lighthouse compound was accessible only by water until the arrival of the Army at nearby Fort Lawton in 1900, when a steep dirt road was cut from the top of the bluff down to the shoreline. Even then, lighthouse keepers and their assistants led an envied if isolated existence.

In 1984, West Point Lighthouse was one of the last stations on the West Coast to be automated. Owned and operated by Seattle Parks since 2004, its beacon continues to guide sailors safely home.

But what of nearby 300-foot Magnolia Bluff, lined with native madrona trees? Theories abound as to its misnaming. Most likely Navy Captain George Davidson erred during his 1856 survey of Puget Sound, confusing one broadleaved evergreen for another.

The beach itself also invites puzzlement. Aside from the absence of color, little seems to distinguish then from now. But Port Townsend oceanographer and coastal hazards specialist Ian Miller begs to differ.

“It’s hard to express how excited I [am] by these 110-year old photos,” he says. “We have so few historical images of these bluffs and shorelines, and I’ve never seen anything like them.”

For Miller, two elements warrant particularly close study: the size and quantity of logs on the beach and the coarsening of its sand and gravel, both of which provide vital environmental clues. Today, with much of Puget Sound “armored” by seawalls, riprap and hard surfaces, natural beach formation has been significantly disrupted.

South Beach, however, nourished by the gradual erosion of its towering bluffs, has maintained equilibrium, rebuilding itself through sedimentation over time. Its sands provide vital spawning grounds for smelt and other forage fish, prey for salmon. “From an ecological standpoint,” Miller says, “these are very important elements of the marine food web.”

What will the next 100 years bring? “As sea levels continue to rise,” Miller says, “this section of beach may provide a microcosm for Puget Sound restoration.”

In other words, reducing coastal “armor” and allowing resilient shorelines to erode and rebuild naturally may be the wave of the future.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 video version of the column, click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 19, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 22, 2023

Single-track minds imagine a Seattle monorail a century ago

By Jean Sherrard

In February 1962, a week after John Glenn orbited the earth and two months before the opening of the Century 21 Exposition (aka the Seattle World’s Fair), the Seattle-Post Intelligencer featured a mysterious photo in its Sunday magazine. Discovered in the archives of a “pioneer” photo studio, it depicted a familiar if antiquated Seattle cityscape but with futuristic alterations.

Skillfully added to the original photo, painted ribbons of monorail track snaked down Fourth Avenue and through Westlake, while cars atop the tracks bore a logo: “Universal Elevated Railway.”

Even keen-witted 93-year-old Joshua Green, from whose eponymous building the portrait had been taken, had no recollection of its provenance.

Challenged to solve the enigma, however, older readers soon supplied answers. A retired patent attorney recalled filing the original designs in 1918, and several early investors trotted out their now-worthless stock certificates.

Turns out the city’s nearly completed Alweg monorail, set to glide between Westlake and the World’s Fair, had been largely envisioned more than 40 years earlier by prescient inventors and entrepreneurs. Uncannily, one of their proposed routes even mirrored that of the Alweg.

This early monorail design was the brainchild of an unlikely crew, including noted physician Dr. Royal McClure, wealthy Sedro Wooley druggist Albert Holland, Capitol Hill garage manager David McClay and Seattle engineering professor Robert Rockwell. In May 1917, they incorporated as the Universal Elevated Railway Co. and declared their intension to make Seattle the world’s monorail capital.

By late 1918, after filing more than a dozen patents, the partners offered stock in the company, intending to fund a demonstration monorail downtown. Surely, the world would soon beat a single-track path to their door.

A bold-faced promotional flyer touted the advantages of elevated transit system: “SURFACE OBSTRUCTION such as floods, snow, railroad crossings, congestion … derailing and THIRD RAIL DANGER” largely would be eliminated by their innovative designs, intended to replace nearly 200 miles of perilous existing railway on Seattle streets.

Yet it was not to be. In the final year of World War I, the federal government imposed austerity measures across the nation, discouraging unnecessary capital investments. To boot, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson was a decided skeptic. The gung-ho backers of the Universal Elevated Railway, though rich in imagination and ambition, could not raise enough out-of-pocket cash. In 1923, the struggling company closed its doors.

It would be another 40 years before a monorail car finally pulled into a station at Westlake.

WEB EXTRAS

For 360 degree narrated video version of this column, click here!

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 5, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 8, 2022

Newly enfranchised women spark 1911 recall of Mayor Hiram Gill

By Jean Sherrard

Seattle was once the Wild West, bitterly divided between an “open city” that tolerated gambling and prostitution south of Yesler Way and a “closed city” that would enforce laws everywhere without exception.

Amid this debate in March 1910, Hiram Gill was elected mayor but soon faced charges of corruption. Female voters, on the verge of acquired suffrage in our state, launched a successful recall petition. The campaign resembled a theatrical play, for which we’ve created a script with actual quotes from key players:

The cast:

 

 

Mayor Hiram Gill (1866-1919). Open-city proponent, former city councilman, lawyer noted for defending houses of ill repute, casually smoked a corncob pipe.

 

 

 

Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein (1853-1931). Gill’s police chief, 5-feet tall, walrus mustache, considered genially effective if utterly corrupt.

 

 

 

The Rev. Mark Matthews (1867-1940). Angular 6-foot-5 First Presbyterian preacher, popular denouncer of sin.

 

 

 

Alden J. Blethen (1845-1915). The Seattle Times owner/editor-in-chief, vigorous supporter of Gill.

 

 

 

Erastus Brainerd (1855-1922). Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor-in-chief, Queen City booster, open-city opponent.

 

ACT ONE 

GILL: I don’t pretend to be a very good man, but I know the law and will enforce it.

WAPPY: People don’t really want a clean city. They just say they do.

MATTHEWS: This city doesn’t want prostitution, gambling, all-night saloons or police corruption.

BLETHEN: Not one iota of testimony … prove[s] that Wappenstein has taken money as a public official.

BRAINERD: He would make a model chief of police were it not for his one known weakness — graft.

WAPPY: There will be a chance for all of us to make some money.

BRAINERD: [Gill] has allowed enforcers of the law to enter into lewd partnerships with breakers of the law.

BLETHEN: All the ranting of the P-I gang will never cause The Times to turn against these two men.

MATTHEWS: This is a campaign of decency versus indecency.

GILL: Public decency is not the issue. What do you care [about] some cuss shooting craps?

WAPPY: Mayor Gill is one of the most popular mayors Seattle has ever had, and there’s little danger of his recall.

GILL: If Charley Wappenstein had committed 100 murders, I will see that he holds his job.

MATTHEWS: Every ballot cast will be either for or against righteousness, civic purity and law enforcement.

BLETHEN: Gill’s fate lies with the women of Seattle.

ACT TWO

To his lasting regret, Blethen was correct. On Feb. 7, 1911, Seattle’s female voters resoundingly ousted Gill in the first mayoral recall election in U.S. history.

In 1914, Gill was re-elected mayor. Flexibly repentant, he had campaigned on a closed-city platform. Meanwhile, Wappy wound up in the state penitentiary in Walla Walla.

WEB EXTRAS

A few more photos to amplify:

Zoom in on the following astonishing portrait of the audience awaiting Hiram Gill in the Seattle Theater. The women are few though their voice would be heard days later.

For our narrated 360 degree video shot on location, click right here!

And here are two related installments by our column founder Paul Dorpat:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 8, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 11, 2022

To grandmother’s house we swerve — around Lake Keechelus

By Jean Sherrard

“Lewis!!!”

This scream from my grandmother-to-be was followed, a split second later, by a swerve from my grandfather-to-be to avoid a head-on collision. He skidded off the gravel road and barreled toward a 100-foot cliff.

Let us freeze that instant of white-knuckled, bug-eyed terror and pause to consider life’s random fragility. From near-miss bullets and plane flights not taken, to Spanish flus and rattlesnake bites, every family history is replete with “what ifs” upon which threads of destiny dangle.

My maternal ancestors’ fate hinged for several seconds on the reaction time of my 21-year-old gramps, who drove a Model-T Ford in the late fall of 1927 on a treacherous switchback of the Sunset Highway, high above Lake Keechelus’s eastern shore.

Heading home to Seattle for the holidays from Whitworth College in Spokane, Lewis Randal and his fiancé —  Dorothy Dailey, then a senior — were taking a much-traveled road with a long and checkered past.

For likely thousands of years, Snoqualmie Pass (elevation 3,010 feet) offered a trail from east to west. In the 1860s, it was expanded to accommodate pack trains and cattle drives and later used by cross-state travelers and nascent automobiles. Early in the 20th century, however, traffic over the pass slowed to a crawl.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had designated Lake Keechelus, a primary source of the Yakima River, as the ideal reservoir to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of parched valley farmland. They erected a temporary wooden coffer dam in 1907 at the lake’s mouth, raising the water by 10 feet — just enough to make the existing road unusable.

The recently formed Washington State Highway Department, led by Joseph Snow (who engineered Seattle’s first major regrade) found itself between a rock and a wet place. Travelers on the east/west road, now partially flooded, were hostages to a private ferry operator who offered lake crossings at usurious prices.

Meanwhile, on the west side of the lake, astute managers of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad had planned ahead, carving railbeds well above the dammed waters. By 1909, their trains ran on a busy schedule, taunting bottlenecked traffic on the opposite shore with every steam whistle.

With convict labor, the state’s re-routing of the wagon road, part of the proposed Sunset Highway, was not complete until 1915. It remained unpaved until 1934, years after my grandparents flirted with terror.

A merciful thaw of the freeze-frame reveals that the Model-T was halted by a stump at the cliff’s edge, allowing them to proceed toward their (and my) destiny.

WEB EXTRAS

Just follow the link to watch our 360 degree video version of this column.

For your enjoyment, Jean added a few photos taken on the same late October trip of the eastern side of the Cascades in the Yakima Canyon near Ellensburg.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 24, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 27, 2022

Ninety years before Octavia Butler moved in 1999 from sunny Pasadena, California, to Lake Forest Park, 10 miles north of Seattle, then-real-estate developer and future Seattle mayor Ole Hanson (1874-1940) envisioned a neighborhood that would provide an escape from frenetic city life. In a promotional pamphlet, Hanson described an environment removed from “the sordid commercialism of today.”

In 1909, Seattle was booming. During the first decade of the 20th century, its population had nearly tripled (to 237,194 from 80,671 in 1900) in time to host its first world’s fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The Queen City had emerged as a major metropolis, with accompanying growth pains.

Hanson intended that his proposed development provide an antidote to the urban hustle and bustle: “Forget your schemes for a moment; lay aside your business; let the telephone ring; allow your callers to wait in the ante-room; Read — Ponder — and Dream.”

Butler could have heeded Hanson’s call when choosing her ideal neighborhood. Her mid-century modern home, built in 1957, nestled within easy walking distance of a notable bookstore, grocery stores and Lake Washington. It also offered a green refuge for the nature-loving writer.

Mike Daly, her across-the-street neighbor, moved into the neighborhood within months of Butler’s arrival. “We got to know Octavia little by little,” he says. “She didn’t have a car, which fit with her environmentalism. Sometimes I’d see her walking home from Albertson’s with two bags of groceries and offer her a ride. ‘I need the exercise,’ she’d say.

“We invited her over for dinner on numerous occasions, but she always politely declined. … A great neighbor, very personable but more of a private than a social-type person.”

Deborah Magness of Third Place Books concurred. While Butler attended reading and signing events, she also was a regular customer. “I very clearly recall ringing Octavia up at the cash register,” Magness says, “but between being starstruck and having the feeling she wished to go about her business quietly and anonymously, I did not interact with her at length.”

Susan McMurry, a neighbor several doors north of Butler’s former house, wasn’t aware of her presence in the neighborhood until reading her obituary in local papers. “After she passed, our local book club decided to read her wonderful novel ‘Kindred,’ in which a young Black woman travels through time to the era of slavery. I’m not very well versed in science fiction, but for me Octavia’s books transcend the genre, with their mix of history, philosophy and ethics.”

Matt Milios, who owns Butler’s former Lake Forest Park property and has been a devoted reader of science fiction since childhood, was delighted to discover that a favorite author once shared his home. While little trace remains of Butler’s tenure, several times a year ardent fans show up on his doorstep, seeking posthumous connection.

A nudge from the past arrived in Milios’s mailbox last summer. In a letter addressed to Butler, sent 16 years after her death, a local bank sought overdue payment for a safety deposit box. Milios forwarded the request to her California estate managers, who paid the time-traveling debt.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 27, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 30, 2022

As young vampires, ghouls and superheroes prowl our neighborhoods cadging for candy this Halloween, actual monsters roam the deeps — and the shallows.

Hideously transmogrified, they struggle upstream past the banks of Pacific Northwest lakes, rivers and streams in an intricate and terrifying water ballet.

While on the hunt for ghost stories suitable for this shivery season, I thumbed through regional reports of the supernatural, from a haunted Georgetown mansion to the spooky lower level of the Pike Place Market, but each tale seemed more trick than treat.

But I caught a break investigating a potential “Then” photo at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery when serendipity inspired a question.

“Know any scary stories about fish?” I asked hatchery specialist J.J. Swennumson.

“Soos Creek Hatchery,” J.J. said, referencing an Auburn facility. “That place was super freaky.”

Mysterious, dead-of-night music and an apparition named Homer made regular appearances. After the hatchery’s eerie old building was replaced, however, the spooks fell silent.

“But,” J.J. added impishly with a twinkle, “we’ve got zombies.”

Out of dozens of state, federal and tribal hatcheries, Issaquah with 250,000 annual visitors is our state’s most popular. Built in 1936 by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, the facility aimed to restore historic salmon runs to Issaquah Creek, devastated by decades of coal mining and logging.

The hatchery’s first salmon stock, borrowed from nearby Green River, was released into the creek to general rejoicing, followed by decades of activity.

We’ll get to J.J.’s zombies, but if you have forgotten your salmonid factoids, here’s a quick refresher:

For at least two million years, Pacific salmon have flourished in our cold mountain rivers and streams. From freshwater spawning beds, hatchlings eventually head downstream to the ocean where, after several years of feeding and growth, they chart a course for home.

In what marine biologists describe as one of nature’s most remarkable mysteries, migrating salmon take cues from the Earth’s geomagnetic field to traverse thousands of miles of saltwater and arrive at their natal river’s mouth. Upon entering fresh water, a sense of smell thousands of times more sensitive than a bloodhound’s guides the fish to their original spawning grounds.

With the change in salinity, however, they stop feeding entirely. Their once-sleek silver bodies alter color and shape as their internal organs, save those charged with reproduction, begin to fail.

Battered, scarred, scarcely alive, these “zombie” salmon finally arrive home to spawn a next generation. But their contribution doesn’t end there. Their decaying bodies, strewn along riverbanks, provide autumnal protein for wildlife and nitrogen-rich fertilizer for surrounding trees.

In other words, tricks and treats!

WEB EXTRAS

A few more photos of the hatchery and Issaquah creek below. Also, check out our 360 video featuring a visit to the hatchery.