(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 28, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Oct. 31, 2021)

Buskers bolster the Market soundtrack, but for how long?

By Jean Sherrard

Some sights peel back your eyelids and jet right into the brain, never to be forgotten.

In my mid-teens, I acted in a 1973 production of “Hamlet” at the tiny Stage One Theater in Post Alley, just north of today’s Gum Wall. Post-rehearsal, as I climbed narrow concrete steps up to Pike Place Market, a busker dressed all in white and sporting a mime’s makeup danced and lunged through a cheering crowd.

Armed with a set of spoons, he battered them against every available surface — from his knees, teeth and cheeks to pillars, sidewalks and banisters — scooping rhythmic staccatos out of thin air. He was Artis the Spoonman, and I was spellbound.

“I’d been playing spoons since I was 10,” recalls Artis, now living in Port Townsend, “and always wanted to be a performer.” Moving to Seattle from Santa Cruz, he frequented Fremont taverns, playing jukebox duets for tips, and soon established a fanbase.

Next stop: Pike Place Market, not yet a tourist haven but a place where locals gathered to shop and stroll.

“Aside from street fairs, the Market was one of the only venues for buskers in the early 1970s,” Artis says. “We had a busking community, share and share alike, performing in the commons for the people.”

Pianist Jonny Hahn, originally from Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, still shares that sensibility. Busking since 1986, he embodies the Market’s soundtrack.

“I play a combination of lengthy improvisational instrumental pieces and songs with lefty political lyrics,” he says. “The Market has been my home because of the artistic freedom quotient.”

Wrestling his 64-key acoustic piano onto a Pike Place corner every day, he bears bittersweet witness to a particular strain of social evolution.

“It started with smartphones,” he says. “People’s attention spans were diminished by orders of magnitude. Constant texting and Googling and taking photos completely altered public space.”

Dealing a further blow was Covid. In March 2020, Market busking was prohibited. Hahn relocated, playing his piano beneath the old Green Lake Aqua Theater until the Market reopened to performers last June 25.

Public response to his return moved Hahn deeply: “It was just heart energy spilling over. People just kept saying how glad they were to have me back. The music was something they really, really missed.”

However, few other performers have returned to a place once considered a busker’s paradise. Will they come back? Hahn is wary of predictions.

“I don’t have any idea what will happen next month or next year,” he says, “but I am committed to the Pike Place Market.”

WEB EXTRAS

Click through to our 360 degree video, featuring Accordion Cat playing a soulful cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Plus a couple more photos of Artis the Spoonman in an earlier Market, along with 1983 video footage of Artis at the Winnipeg Folk Festival:

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 14, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Oct. 17, 2021)

Eagle Falls near Index: ‘An easy jump, but hell if you don’t make it’

By Jean Sherrard

Lee Pickett was surely the most prolific photographer to grace Snohomish County. His 1910 move from Seattle to the tiny mountain town of Index provided Pickett with opportunities aplenty to document the burgeoning highways and railroads and the booming logging and mining industries.

In the 1920s, he was appointed official photographer of the Great Northern Railroad. His stunning images recorded construction of eight-mile Cascade Tunnel (1929) — then the longest in the western hemisphere — and quickly cemented his reputation.

His more whimsical portraits reveal Pickett’s playful side. This pair of “then” photos, snapped a decade apart, feature Eagle Falls along the Skykomish River, three miles east of Index.

The first, from 1916, features boulders at the falls’ base, a perennial picnic spot and swimming hole for locals. The gent in jacket and fedora poses stiffly while, across the bottom of the negative, Pickett has written, in the reverse script mastered by period photographers: “Hell’s Gate at Eagle Falls. An easy jump — but — hell if you don’t make it.”

In our “now” photo at the same location, the boulders have shifted position, their top halves seemingly lopped away. These changes are due not to erosion or earthquakes but to explosives intended to reduce steep grades for adjacent Great Northern track beds.

During a recent visit, a members of a videography class from Hillside Student Community watch as 15-year old Will Maltz, trained in the urban gymnastic sport of parkour, leaps the gap between boulders.

Our second “then” photo features the upturned canoe of local lumberjack (and Pickett regular) Al Faussett. In 1926, Fox Pictures offered $1,500 to anyone who would row through nearby Sunset Falls. Faussett built a sturdy craft to survive the ordeal, but Fox reneged on its offer.

Undaunted, the newly minted daredevil persisted, reveling in his growing celebrity, but cashing in proved elusive. On Sept. 6, 1926, hundreds of onlookers crowded the Eagle Falls banks to watch Faussett risk life and limb. Most declined to pay for the privilege, and the drama of his descent fizzled when his canoe stuck partway down the run. A friend soon dislodged it with a long pole.

Faussett spent the next three years shooting Northwest waterfalls, breaking bones and suffering repeated concussions until retiring on his waterlogged laurels.

The photographer Pickett (1882-1959) ended his career in the late 1940s, health ravaged by decades of exposure to developing chemicals. Today, his Index home houses the Index Historical Society’s Pickett Museum.

WEB EXTRAS

And for a 360 degree video view of Eagle Falls, along with Jean’s narration, head in this direction.

In a late breaking addition, photo historian Ron Edge sends along the following Pickett portraits.

Click twice on the following panoramas to zoom in and explore. To create these spectacular images, Pickett used the Cirkut camera manufactured by the Rochester Panoramic Camera Company. Thanks, Ron, for these remarkable photos of a vanished landscape.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 16, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Sept. 19, 2021)

Tower lets Port Angeles hear a regular ring of promise

By Jean Sherrard

On a warm evening in mid-August, smoke from hundreds of British Columbian fires had crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca, turning the sun an unsettling red over Port Angeles, where I’d paused for a photo and a bite to eat. Offering solace, the Clallam County courthouse bell tolled the hour as it had for over a century.

For Port Angeles, 1914 was a banner year, pregnant with promise. A gleaming hydroelectric dam had just been erected on the Elwha River, supplying the county seat’s electrical needs. The city’s first large sawmill was built on the waterfront and connected by rail to stands of virgin timber to the west. A vast regrade was well under way, raising the waterfront, filling gullies and lowering the steeper hills. And work on the new courthouse, featured in our “Then” photo, was largely complete.

Evidence of the area’s human habitation reaches back almost three millennia, with two Klallam villages sharing the harbor for at least 400 years. They called it I’e’nis (reportedly meaning “good beach”), which morphed into two names now in use: Ediz Hook (the city’s long and protective signature sand spit jutting east into the Strait) and snow-fed Ennis Creek, which empties into the bay.

Port Angeles’ natural, deep-water harbor was noted by Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza in 1791 and dubbed Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (Port of Our Lady of the Angels). One year later, British Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver, a staunch Anglican, shortened the name to its current two words.

In the mid-1850s, the first permanent white settlers arrived, staking Donation Land Act claims near Native villages. Over succeeding decades, land speculators, shady political operators, a utopian colony and pulp and paper mill operations flourished while ejecting the Klallam from their ancestral homes.

Designed by early 20th century Seattle architect Francis W. Grant, the two-story neo-classical brick and terra cotta-trimmed courthouse was nothing if not aspirational. Built to replace a wooden structure destabilized by the regrade, its graceful, sturdy lines reflected bright boomtown hopes. Locals also appreciated its rock-bottom price of $64,000.

The four-faced clock/bell tower — today proudly featured on the Clallam County seal — was installed after a serendipitous discovery. Francis Grant unearthed an unclaimed, Boston-based E. Howard and Co. clock, manufactured in 1880 and shipped around Cape Horn to Seattle. It languished in storage for decades until the architect encouraged Clallam County to pick it up for a $5,115 song.

It continues to sing to this day, faithfully striking every half hour.

WEB EXTRAS

No 360 video this week due to the theft of my monopod on a beach near La Push. However, a few oceanside photos may help salve the loss.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 9, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Sept. 12, 2021)

Twin architects banked on a legacy of faith plus finance

By Jean Sherrard

Keen to serve both God and Mammon, Louis and Michael Beezer defied scriptural maxims to the contrary. Twins whose architectural firm produced edifices for faith and finance, they skillfully negotiated the two worlds.

Born on July 6, 1869, in Bellefont, Pennsylvania, the Beezers arrived in Seattle in 1907. Different from competing firms, they were hands-on designers, overseeing every step of the construction process.

In 1908, their vision for a new “mosquito fleet” terminal at Colman Dock, with its Italianate clock tower and dome, drew acclaim, Thereafter, the industrious pair enjoyed commissions from Alaska to California.

The Beezers were devout Roman Catholics whose extensive work for the Archdiocese of Seattle included the Immaculate Conception School (1909), Dominican Priory of the Blessed Sacrament (1909–25) and Edward J. O’Dea High School (1923). After the St. James Cathedral dome collapsed beneath a 1916 record snow, a trusted Louis Beezer helped rebuild the destroyed sanctuary while improving its abysmal acoustics.

Financial institutions provided bread to match the ecclesiastical butter. The Beezers’ neo-classic banks throughout the West include the focus of this week’s column.

Having relocated from downtown digs in 1895, the University of Washington was booming — in both enrollment and revenue. Its beleaguered comptroller regularly ferried cash and checks to central-city repositories, spending a half-day or more in weary commute.

Providing a sober solution was the University District’s first financial institution, Washington State Bank, founded in 1906 by professors, administrators and business leaders — and we do mean sober. By state law, the sale of alcohol was banned within two miles of campus.

By 1913, the bank, expanding with the university, commissioned the Beezers to erect a stately, two-story structure at 45th and University Way. It was such a calm, rural intersection that neighbors described choruses of frogs serenading from nearby ponds and swamps.

The establishment’s ground floor and basement offered opulence and security, while a lofty, second-floor ballroom and concert hall welcomed fraternity and community dances.

Our “Then” photo depicts a livelier U-District, packed with shops and businesses catering to students. A banner stretched across 45th Street publicizing a “University Legion Frolic” accurately dates the photo to 1925. In late September that year, the new American Legion Hall on the southwest corner of 10th Avenue and 50^th Street hosted the affair, which promised dancing, “free vaudeville” and a “Young Woman’s Popularity Contest.”

We offer a fiery footnote: In 1976, the legion sold its hall to Randy Finley, who converted it to the Seven Gables Theater. Shuttered in 2017, the charming moviehouse burned down last Christmas Eve.

WEB EXTRAS

We visit 45th and University Way for a 360 degree video featuring the column. To watch, click here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 19, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Aug. 22, 2021)

An aerial depiction of Seattle’s too-busy bay feels right for its time

By Jean Sherrard

The camera never lies, so goes the maxim. Yet photographers have stretched the truth on occasion, long before Photoshop made fakery a breeze.

Last Feb. 27, Clay Eals and I chartered a helicopter, the left door removed for photography. This week’s “Now” photo, from 800 feet above the waterfront, illustrates the potential for spectacle and perspective.

Seeing this elevated view, photo historian Ron Edge responded by sending me our serendipitous first “Then” photo — a shot I’d never seen. “Pretty close!” Ron marveled.

It was a prevalent postcard of a vibrant Elliott Bay, taken Sept. 15, 1936, by pilot/aerial photographer Charles F. Laidlaw, who apparently captured a miracle of near-misses. In it, various crisscrossing vessels provide visual bon-bons for today’s maritime historians.

Most recognizable at lower left is the beloved, streamlined ferry Kalakala, placed into service in 1935 and departing Colman Dock on the Bremerton run that she would make for 30 years. Above left, the night steamer Iroquois arrives from Victoria via Port Angeles. Puffing from Pier 3 (now Pier 54) is the sturdy oceangoing tug Goliah, built in 1882 and later converted from steam to diesel. Barreling south is the Coast Guard cutter Tallapoosa, fresh from fleet duties with the Bering Sea Patrol. At lower right, the Army Corps of Engineers dredger Michie heads due west.

Whew! Such a spectacular view of Seattle’s busy port.

Trouble is, it’s mostly fiction. Skillfully inserted, complete with brushed-in wakes and waves, none of these vessels (identified by veteran ship historians Michael Mjelke and Paul Marlow) were present in Laidlaw’s original photo, our second “Then.”

One explanation for the empty bay lies in the widening ripples of the Great Depression. Imports and exports had plummeted since the 1929 crash, threatening maritime commerce with ruin.

By the mid-1930s, widespread labor unrest sporadically shuttered ports along the West Coast. Under sympathetic President Franklin Roosevelt, unions flourished. William Randolph Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer even paused publication for the first time since its 1863 founding due to striking writers and editors.

What’s more, Puget Sound’s Mosquito Fleet, dozens of lively craft ferrying passengers and cargo bowed to grander but fewer vessels. “Suddenly, in the mid-(19)30s, people found that their Fleet was gone,” wrote marine historian Gordon Newell. “(Seeing) the quiet reaches of the Sound, they began to feel that something fine and exciting was missing.”

In that context, Laidlaw’s marine manipulations feel right for the time, a quiescent harbor being no subject for a popular postcard. With no end in sight to the Depression, maybe Seattle was ready for a boost, even one fabricated with a photographer’s fib.

WEB EXTRAS

In place of Jean Sherrard‘s usual 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect, below we have aerial video of downtown by Clay Eals.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Aug. 5, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Aug. 8, 2021)

In wartime fear, ‘empathy is the only thing that can bind us’

By Jean Sherrard

This week we interview Frank Abe, author of the graphic novel ‘”We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration” (Chin Music Press and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, 2021), illustrated by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki, and co-authored by Tamiko Nimura.

This powerful account of courage and confrontation offers compelling lessons for us today.

Jean: When and where does this story begin?

Frank: It begins with the FBI arresting 150 immigrant leaders in Seattle in the hysteria following the start of World War II. The men were marched in the pre-dawn hours from the U.S. Immigration Detention Building to King Street Station, where The Seattle Times captured a photo of them on the platform boarding a train for the Department of Justice alien internment camp at Fort Missoula, Montana. When I first saw this photo, I knew it would be central to the story of Jim Akutsu, one of our three main characters.

Jean: Why a graphic novel?

Frank: It matches the epic sweep of a movie at a fraction of the production cost. I asked Ross to draw Jim’s mother as clawing through the bars and screaming to her husband after reading the description in the Times of “tear-stained eyes” and the din of “staccato chatter” in the morning air.

Jean: Your book takes an uncompromising view of systemic exclusion and racism.

Frank: Many fathers were separated from their families, who were themselves incarcerated at camps like Minidoka, Idaho. Jim and his brother Gene refused to be drafted until the government restored their citizenship rights, starting with their freedom. We emphasize that the government was responsible for targeting these families based solely on their race.

Jean: The storytelling has a documentary feel to it but also feels intensely personal.

Frank: Everything is drawn from the historical record. Readers can immerse themselves in the personal stories of our characters in a way that generates empathy. Empathy is the only thing that can bind us when the same elements of wartime fear and ignorance of the “other” survive to this day.

Jean: So the empathy signals a warning bell along with possible remedy?

Frank: Our book opens with the FBI knocking on the door to arrest Jim’s father. It ends with ICE breaking down the door to deport unwanted immigrants. In 1941, America feared a second attack from the Pacific. Just one year ago, we had a pandemic-era president dog-whistle “China virus” and “Kung flu,” received by some as permission to kick and punch Asian Americans on the street. Some things haven’t changed.

WEB EXTRAS

This week features a special 360 degree video of Jean’s 12-minute interview with Frank Abe at King Street Station. Includes select illustrations from “We Hereby Refuse” plus Frank’s reading from the John Okada’s classic “No-No Boy.” Not to be missed. (And if you’d prefer to hear just the audio of Frank’s chat with Jean, click right here!)

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on July 22, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on July 25, 2021)

Jimi Hendrix makes his final home run at Sick’s Stadium

By Jean Sherrard

On Sunday, July 26, 1970, it was a typical outdoor Seattle scenario, rainy but right.

In our early teens, my friends and I hunkered on Tightwad Hill, the steep and legendary bluff across Empire Way (today’s Martin Luther King Jr. Way) from Sicks Stadium. Generations of baseball fans had preceded us there, finding catbird seats for minor-league games in Rainier Valley.

Today, however, rock was the draw. Two groups, Cactus and Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys, opened the show. But we were there for the headliner — Seattle’s own Jimi Hendrix, playing his fourth-ever hometown concert.

Raised in the Central District, the throbbing heart of Seattle’s Black community, self-taught Hendrix had never learned to read music. Left-handed, he turned his guitar and the world upside-down. In just four years, he’d become a superstar, astounding audiences with revolutionary (sometimes incendiary) musicality. At 27, he was one of rock’s greatest instrumentalists, though the pressures of his meteoric rise were mounting.

Inside the post-Rainiers, Angels and Pilots ballpark, thousands of eager fans including today’s “Then” photographer, 16-year-old Dave DePartee, were watching from the muddy infield. This column’s founder, Paul Dorpat, then a concert promoter and underground newspaper publisher, stood backstage.

From Tightwad Hill, the stage was a postage stamp, but the loud rock pummeled us. Fans repeatedly tried to sneak over chain-link and wood-slat fences, painfully confronted by rent-a-cops spraying mace from catwalks. Barriers were breached only once, by a trio who lifted a fence and slid under to Tightwad huzzahs.

Just before Hendrix began, harder rains fell from a steel-wool sky. The mix of water and electric instruments was worrisome, but after rubber mats were installed, the show resumed.

And here’s where the narrative flips. Consider, if you will, an exhausted, moody Hendrix playing before a home audience, the backstage jammed with family, friends and obligations. What followed was a note of generosity echoing from Jimi’s youth.

On Sept. 1, 1957, Elvis Presley had played Sicks’ Stadium for an ecstatic crowd of 16,000. Short the buck-fifty admission, 14-year-old Hendrix watched the show perched atop — you guessed it — Tightwad Hill.

Thirteen years later, Hendrix instructed the stadium crew to throw gates open and let in hundreds of young cheapskates, including me, from the same bluff. Roaring approval, we scrambled down the incline and inside, thumbing our noses at the defanged rent-a-cops.

Tragically, this was Hendrix’s last concert in the continental United States. Less than two months later, on Sept. 18, he died in London of an accidental drug overdose. His sonic earthquake continues to shake and inspire to this day.

WEB EXTRAS

A handful of treats, including Jean’s 360-degree video accompanying this column, recorded on location at Lowe’s Home Improvement (not far from the stage in Sick’s centerfield). To see it, click right here.

Also, check out David Eskenazi’s artwork for the poster printed by Tower Records on the 10th anniversary of Hendrix’s death.

And if we ask nicely, Clay Eals may relate the story of his letter which appeared in Life magazine. (Happy birthday, Clay!)

= = = = =

Clay here on July 29: Thanks, Jean, and I apologize for posting this section a week later. My daughter’s six-day visit from Philly to celebrate my birth put a lot of stuff on hold, and I’m just catching up!

Indeed, as anyone who was around in fall 1970 can well remember, the overdose deaths of counterculture rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin hit hard and stirred a range of emotions. In particular, the essay below by Albert Goldman struck a chord, in part because it appeared in well-known and well-read Life magazine . (Click the image to enlarge it.)

On a whim, I decided to write a letter for Life to consider publishing. Imagine my delight to receive this hand-signed reply:

Imagine my further delight to receive this letter four days later:

Then came publication of the Nov. 6, 1970, edition of Life magazine itself. (The cover featured then-President Richard Nixon in youthful days, holding a violin.) My letter appeared at the top of page 21:

Particularly in retrospect, my letter seems inartful. (Why did I use the word “thing”?) But I’m sure my 19-year-old self was trying to drill down to the emotions of the matter. I suspect the Life editors printed my missive because it had a more positive tone than a previous letter from someone else who slammed the Goldman essay.

Only two years later, Life magazine (which had started up in 1936) shut down. It rebounded in 1978 but shut down for good in 2000. This means that there are people in their mid-20s who have never seen a copy of Life magazine on a newsstand. In our short-attention-span society, surely many don’t even know what Life magazine was.

Much the pity. Large-format, photo-filled Life magazine was once a big deal, certainly a pace-setter. Where is today’s Life magazine? Probably in a zillion pieces spread out all over the internet.

Reminds me of a joke told from the stage by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul & Mary. His arms spread wide, he said the most important magazine used to be Life. Narrowing his arms, he said the most important magazine became People. Narrowing his arms further, he said People had been supplanted by Us. And he predicted the future’s most important magazine would be — you guessed it — Me!

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on May 27, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 30, 2021 )

Up, up and away in our AYP Balloon

By Jean Sherrard

To mark this week’s return to the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held on the University of Washington campus, we must give credit where credit is due — to French ingenuity. From coq au vin to kitesurfing, movie cameras to motorcycles, France has perennially delighted the world with marriages of innovation.

The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, had launched the first piloted aeronautical ascent in 1783 (to this day, hot air balloons in France are called montgolfières). Meanwhile, Louis Daguerre, creator of the daguerreotype photographic process, had captured the earliest cityscape portraits in 1838.

In 1858, an inspired Paris photographer, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (known by the sobriquet “Nadar”), wedded the two technologies. Leveraging unwieldy equipment into a hot-air balloon basket, he singlehandedly invented aerial photography. Fifty-one years later, this came in handy at Seattle’s first world’s fair.

Our A-Y-P aerial, though not high-tech for its time, offered breathtaking spectacle, showing off the exposition’s Beaux Arts structures (merci again, France) that partially encircle Geyser Basin. Looking northwest, this view features the imposing, domed U.S. Government Building, while the ornate, curved structures on both sides of the basin focused on mining and agriculture.

The UW’s Drumheller Fountain (aka Frosh Pond, where first-year students once were dunked in ritual initiation) later was constructed on the watery footprint of the 1909 basin. But few other A-Y-P artifacts endured. Meant to be as ephemeral as a stage set or a wedding cake, the A-Y-P’s gleaming “white city” soon gave way to the more permanent and austere structures of Collegiate Gothic architecture.

A wider version of this panorama appeared Sept. 19, 1909, in The Seattle Times, filling the front page below a banner headline, “Remarkable View of Exposition Taken from Captive Balloon.” A subhead explained, “After Many Futile Attempts Camera Artists Succeed in Getting Fine Bird’s-Eye View of Exposition Grounds.”

At first, the weather had refused to cooperate, ruining hundreds of negatives. But finally, the Times reported, “the haze which has been hanging over the grounds for the last month lifted, and atmospheric conditions for aeronautical photographs were ideal.”

The balloon’s cramped basket accommodated no more than two photographers outfitted with bulky cameras (sans tripod) and must have supplied equal parts claustro- and acrophobia. Augmenting that anxious mix, “the great gas bag,” the Times said, “pulled heavily on the retaining wire and shifted about in the wind.”

A single exposure turned out “particularly fine.” Snapped just 30 minutes before rains resumed, the photo was “as distinct as if it had been taken from the ground.” Despite the difficulties, proclaimed one photographer, “we are more than satisfied with the result.”

WEB EXTRAS

To see our 360 degree video featuring Geyser Basin/Drumheller Fountain — and hear Jean narrate the column, click right here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on May 13, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 16, 2021 )

To salute childhood memories of MOHAI, we go high

By Jean Sherrard

French novelist Marcel Proust famously described dunking madeleines — scallop-shaped cookies — in lime blossom tea, opening a sensory gateway to the lost world of childhood.

Our 69-year-old regional treasure, the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI, pronounced by locals as if inversely greeting one of the Three Stooges) also evokes such transport.

To jog my memory, I recently posted a question on social media: “What do you recall from school field trips to MOHAI?”

The result: hundreds of citations from adults once bused as students to MOHAI’s original Montlake building. The top 10:

• The fully furnished Victorian dollhouse.
• The 10-by-24-foot painted mural of the Great Seattle Fire.
• The actual glue pot that sparked the fire.
• The hydroplanes (specifically Slo-Mo-Shun IV).
• The diorama depicting the Denny Party’s arrival and Duwamish welcome at Alki.
• The stuffed gorilla Bobo, formerly of Woodland Park Zoo (and an Anacortes home).
• The 43-foot-long working periscope.
• Suspended by wires, Boeing’s unique B-1 wooden float plane, built in 1919.
• The original Rainier Beer neon “R.”
• Carved figureheads from wooden ships.

Honorable mentions included a 5-inch deck gun from the USS Colorado, a J.P. Patches exhibit and ex-President Warren G. Harding’s pajamas.

Pulling back from the intimacy of memory to vertiginous spectacle, our twin aerial photographs —separated by 72 years — afford us a north-facing, bird’s-eye view of present-day MOHAI and its surroundings.

Our 1949 “Then” image, from photo historian Ron Edge, features MOHAI’s current home, the Naval Reserve Armory on Lake Union’s south shore. Designed by Seattle architects William R. Grant and B. Marcus Priteca (best known for his majestic Art Deco movie palaces),* the Armory was dedicated on July 4, 1942, during the uncertain months following the U.S. entry into World War II.

Post-war, its campus aided recruiting, training and mustering. Sometimes it served as a community dance hall. Docked in its slips might be decommissioned minesweepers, destroyers and the occasional submarine — significantly the USS Puffer, survivor of a record 38 hours of depth-charging and a perennial tour magnet until 1960, when it was sold for scrap.

MOHAI moved to the former Armory in 2012 after its original Montlake building, which opened in 1952, was shuttered to accommodate the expanding State Route 520 floating bridge.

In our aerial repeat, snapped from 1,200 feet, the museum is blooming in morning light just north of booming South Lake Union. Amid MOHAI’s imaginative redesign and relocation, many of its beloved treasures remain in rotation, fostering continued recollections for Seattleites young and old.

To revisit (and maybe add) your own MOHAI memories, join us at PaulDorpat.com.

WEB EXTRAS

To see our spectacular 360 degree video of this week’s column, click here. It includes the now and then photos as well as video of our extraordinary aerial adventure (shot by Clay). Jean narrates.

*A gentle correction from friend of the column historian Larry Kreisman: “I have to correct your mention of Priteca’s movie palace architecture because, apart from the Hollywood Pantages, his theater designs are primarily Greco-Roman classical (Coliseum and most of his work for Pantages) or Renaissance Revival (Orpheum). The Admiral and others he did in the 30s and 40s we’re streamline moderne and we’re neighborhood movie houses, not palaces.”

We blush and offer thanks, Larry!

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on April 29, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on May 2, 2021 )

Visualizing our victories over virus to ring out a new celebration

By Jean Sherrard

Born last summer at the height of the pandemic, my younger brother’s 9-month-old twins, Talia and Gavin, have not yet acquired what psychologist Jean Piaget termed “object permanence.” Bright toys supplied by distanced aunts and uncles are quickly forgotten — out of sight, out of mind.

Similarly, when the terrors of infectious disease recede in the rearview mirror, the collective memory may not serve. Even as countless lives have been saved, a sizeable plurality of humans worldwide remains vaccine-hesitant.

Lest we forget, it was on April 12, 1955, that church bells rang out across the nation, celebrating clinical trials proving that Jonas Salk’s poliomyelitis vaccine had defeated a scourge that had been deadly for decades.

In a front-page banner headline, The Seattle Times shouted, “Vaccine is effective, potent, safe.” Below, an article said vaccination would “smash polio’s terror and tragedies … [ending] the fear that has long gripped the hearts of parents.”

Only three years earlier, in 1952, U.S. polio had peaked. Nearly 58,000, mostly children, fell ill. Of those, polio had paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,000. Most outbreaks took place in summer. Infections seemed random and unpredictable. A child playing with friends one afternoon might end up hospitalized by evening.

But vaccines ended polio in the Americas by 1992, largely eliminating it across the globe. It was not the only viral killer brought to heel. Smallpox, which killed more than 300 million in the 20th century, was eradicated. Inoculation vastly reduced measles, yellow fever and hepatitis.

Today, however, vaccines may fall victim to their historical success. Some who have not personally witnessed a viral catastrophe apparently deem it unreal.

Hilary Godwin, dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, faults social media for amplifying misinformation. “We in the sciences and in public health,” she says, “need to regain the trust of the general population, in a bipartisan way.”

Godwin also addresses an understandable mistrust of the medical establishment in Black and Native American communities: “We must not only recognize historical injustices and inequities but also elevate the conversation to talk about them openly.”

Joining the conversation is Ken Workman, fourth-generation great-grandson of Chief Seattle and a Duwamish tribal elder, who received his first COVID-19 inoculation in March.

“I’m alive today because my family survived the genocide of welcoming Europeans,” he says. “We survived gifts of smallpox blankets. We survived gentrification and displacement. The world may be all up in arms over COVID, yet for me this is just another day.”

Between tides of uncertainty and hope, will we someday be able to ring out a new celebration?

WEB EXTRAS

Just another photo of Ken Workman, snaring the traditional post-jab lollipop.

A few weeks ago, on March 14, 2021, I met Ken down at Golden Gardens and shot a few photos of his traditional farewell extended to a Tlingit crew and canoe. The rainy weather did not dampen spirits.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on April 22, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on April 25, 2021 )

Beach magic bathes Link2Lake quest in diverse Rainier Beach
By Jean Sherrard

Tucked between a boat launch, an adjacent parking lot and a beige restroom with all the charm of a quartered Quonset hut, the scruffy Lake Washington shoreline of Be’er Sheva Park might seem an unlikely place to find magic. Neither woo-woo nor hocus pocus, it offers an unexpected alchemy of earth, water and sky, arranged like lips pursed for a kiss.

On a recent visit, I happened upon what looked like an impromptu block party. In this cherished gathering spot, Rainier Beach neighbors were listening to music, picnicking and admiring the returning geese and waterfowl.

This story, however, begins much earlier, with melting ice. More than 16,000 years ago, receding glaciers shaped the Pacific Northwest — and Rainier Beach — into its current greenscape.

The first humans to settle the area were Duwamish. Members of one tribal branch calling themselves the Lake People had wintered along the lake’s shores for millennia. European settlers arrived in the 1860s, evicting the Lake People from their ancestral homes while appropriating the land for themselves.

Annexed by Seattle in 1907, Rainier Beach today is among the city’s most racially and culturally diverse neighborhoods. Eighty percent of its residents are people of color, while, in their homes, 57% speak a language other than English. These historically underserved communities reside in one of only two Seattle neighborhoods (the other is the Duwamish River valley) without an extended public shoreline or a signature waterfront park.

“Nevertheless, our neglected little beach has always been a focal point for community-building,” says Shannon Waits, who co-chairs the steering committee of a group called Rainier Beach Link2Lake. The nonprofit’s plans for lakefront improvements are shovel-ready, pending final funding. “The neighborhood,” Waits says, “is determined to make beauty in this place despite systemic oppression.”

Buoyed by the slogan “Where’s the Beach,” Rainier Beach residents have eagerly contributed design ideas, suggesting basic improvements to the parcel’s infrastructure that most other Seattle waterfront parks take for granted.

“The community envisions a green waterfront that celebrates the pedestrian experience,” says George Lee, project manager, who enthusiastically tallies the envisioned upgrades. “We’ll add basic amenities like picnic tables, barbecue grills and a covered stage that doubles as a shelter. Add to that a boardwalk and lighted walkways, not to mention a big natural beach for families to play on.”

The abracadabra begins this summer with a mural painting project, enlisting young community artists to enliven the exterior walls of the plain-Jane restroom. For more information on the capital campaign, visit rainierbeachlinktolake.org.

WEB EXTRAS

A few more shots from the park.

For our accompanying 360 degree video, click here.

(Published in the Seattle Times online on March 28, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on March 25, 2021 )

Then you see it, now you don’t — our first April Fool’s quiz

By Jean Sherrard

(For those visiting this blog following The Seattle Times link, we offer extra tomfoolery! Perhaps you’ve discovered the editing error in the print edition of the magazine. If so, add a fourth category to our grading rubric: consider yerself a Queen City Queen/King!)

We at “Now & Then” admit that we can be lured into April folly any old day of the year. While fishing the currents of popular history, we occasionally pull in old boots and dogfish. This year, we extend the opportunity to our dear readers to troll along.

Our “Then” photo, looking north at Seattle’s downtown business district, is a revelation. Fearless photographer Frank H. Nowell arranged for an early ride up to the unfinished (and unwalled) 35th-floor observation deck of the famed, pointed Smith Tower. In 1913, one year before the tower opened, Nowell captured this early panorama from the loftiest human-made structure on the West Coast.

Following in his footsteps 108 years later, I repeated the panorama (“Now 1”) and made several telling discoveries — of alteration, misinformation and exaggeration — ideal for an April Fool’s multiple-choice challenge in which we peel back a layer or two of the Smith Tower’s terra-cotta clad onion.

(click to enlarge photos)

Question 1
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

In our primary pair of photos, several decades of growth have obscured the northern prospect. Which of the following can still be seen?

A: The Central Building

B: Queen Anne High School

C: Lake Union

D: The Rainier Club

E: St. James Cathedral

Question 2
NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

Our second pair of photos reveals a more recent switcheroo. In a view north along the Second Avenue canyon, the Space Needle has seemingly disappeared. Where has it gone?

A: Magician David Copperfield followed up his Statue of Liberty vanishing act.

B: The Space Needle was returned to the box it came in.

C: Yet another condominium joined the fray.

D: Amazon created a new pop-up Seattle headquarters.

E: Regraded Denny Hill re-emerged to assume its rightful place.

Question 3
FISH TALES

At the Smith Tower’s front entrance, a brass plaque has misinformed passersby since 1989. Which of the following statements are not true:

A: Lyman Cornelius Smith was from Syracuse, New York.

B: The Smith Tower is 42 stories tall.

C: Smith was a founding partner of Smith & Wesson.

D: L.C. accumulated much of his wealth manufacturing typewriters.

E: In 1914, Smith Tower was the tallest building outside of New York City.

(scroll down for the correct answers and a grading rubric)

(keep going)

(a bit further)

(Burma Shave!)

Answers

1: A, D and E

2: C

3: B (even a generous observer counts no more than 38 stories)
C (Horace Smith founded Smith & Wesson) and
E (at 495 feet, Cincinnati’s Union Central Tower was 30 feet taller).

The Rubric

One correct answer: You’re a Mercer Mess
Two correct answers: You’re a Pike Pundit
Three correct answers: You’ve attained Seattle Chill

WEB EXTRAS

For a spectacular 360 degree view from Smith Tower’s 35th floor Observation Deck (along with Jean’s dulcet narration), click on through.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on March 11, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on March 14, 2021 )

Commercial visionaries meet for a towering talk in 1909
By Jean Sherrard

The place: inside Bartell’s Owl Drugstore on Second Avenue, just north of Yesler Way. The milieu: a lovely evening. This vignette is imagined, but the historical details are factual!

The proprietor arranges a display in his shop window. The entry bell jingles. In walks a well-dressed customer.

Smith: George Bartell, isn’t it?

Bartell: Lyman Cornelius Smith, as I live and breathe. Let me guess. You’re here for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition?

Smith: Indeed. All the way from Syracuse in upstate New York, and well worth the trip. Seattle has surely proven her mettle with this magnificent world’s fair.

Bartell: So what can I do you for, L.C.? Liver pills, trusses? Our new Syrup of Hypophosphates is a fine picker-upper.

Smith: I have news, George. I’ll be turning 60 next year. I’m no Carnegie, but I’ve done all right.

Bartell: Can’t hardly go wrong manufacturing shotguns and typewriters, L.C.

Smith: Truth is, I’m inclined to erect something special right here on this spot. Make my mark.

Bartell: Mighty kind of you to give me notice personally.

Smith: You’ve been here, what, 10 years?

Bartell: Eleven. After my year in the Yukon in ’98.

Smith: Didn’t “pan out,” eh? (He chuckles.) I was thinking 18 stories tall, but my son Burns wants to go higher.

Bartell: Just opened my fourth drug store, L.C. I say go big or go home.

Smith: Which is why I asked my architects — the Gaggins brothers — to up the ante. How’s 42 stories sound?

Bartell whistles appreciatively.

Smith: Tallest building west of the Mississippi. Steel-framed, white terra cotta, my initials carved on every floor.

The bell jingles again. In walks a man in a butcher’s apron. He offers a package.

Man: Two pounds of nice fresh cod for you, George. Just what the doctor ordered.

Bartell: L.C., this is Nessim Alhadeff. Runs the Palace Market next door.

Alhadeff: Sold Mr. Smith oysters a few years back when I first signed the lease. Are rumors true? You will tickle the sky?

Smith (with a laugh): Scrape the clouds, Nessim. And how’s family life?

Alhadeff: My brothers are here working for me now — all from the Isle of Rhodes. My English is still not so good, but getting better.

Yet again, the bell jingles. In walk a man and boy of 4 or 5.

Man: Got anything for an upset tummy? My boy ate too much cotton candy at the fair.

Bartell: Seltzer, maybe?

Man: Say “Thank you,” Ivar.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 degree video in living color (and dramatic black and white), narrated by Jean, please click on through here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 25, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Feb. 28, 2021 )

There’s nothing metaphysical about the fate of this once sacred space
By Jean Sherrard

Those with an ecclesiastical bent — or, thanks to Pete Seeger and the Byrds, a rock ’n’ roll penchant — know that for everything there is a season.

These structures understand it viscerally: Seattle’s Town Hall, the Rainier Arts Center in Columbia City and two each called “The Sanctuary,” an event venue in West Seattle’s Admiral District and a luxury townhome complex on Capitol Hill. Designed without overtly religious symbols, these repurposed community gems were built as in the early 20th century by Christian Scientists.

Founded by Boston-based Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the Christian Science movement emerged in 1879 with a mere 26 followers. Eddy’s metaphysical teachings ignited the fastest growing religion of its time, eventually garnering nearly 270,000 members. Burgeoning congregations enthusiastically erected mostly Classical Revival style churches nationwide, including Seattle.

“With the appearance of the edifice for First Church (on Capitol Hill in 1906), Christian Science became more visible on the city skyline,” recounts church historian Cindy Peyser Safronoff, in her 2020 book “Dedication: Building the Seattle Branches of Mary Baker Eddy’s Church.”

Naturally, local mainline denominations grew wary of the competition. The Rev. Mark A. Matthews, influential pastor of Seattle’s 10,000-strong First Presbyterian Church, lobbed an early slam, labeling Eddy’s teachings “blasphemous, immoral, licentious and murderous.” Despite denunciations, however, Christian Science growth and construction flourished across the city.

Within a hundred years of its founding, Christian Science joined many other churches in turn-turn-turning to a fallow period. Dwindling congregations scarcely could afford upkeep of their “sacred spaces” while land values soared.

Case in point: the former Third Church of Christ, Scientist, shown in this week’s “Then” photo. Designed by Portland architect George Foote Dunham and completed in 1922, it was sold in 2006, the congregation trusting that the new owner – celebrity-attracting megachurch Churchome (then City Church) – would keep the structure intact.

But it is up for sale again, this time with a recently granted demolition permit, raising preservationists’ ire. “Replacing this elegant contributor to the historic Olmsted boulevard would be criminal,” says Larry Kreisman, former Historic Seattle program director. “It’s a perfect candidate for adaptive reuse as a lecture and concert hall or as a community center.”

More such spaces soon may be lost. Churches and other institutions in similar straits, suggests Kreisman, should partner with preservation organizations. “The solution,” he says purposefully, “is creative thinking, brainstorming and a willingness to explore alternative paths.”

Because there’s also a season for preservation.

WEB EXTRAS

Our narrated 360 video will arrive tomorrow! In the meantime, enjoy these interiors, courtesy of Larry Kreisman.

(click to enlarge photos)

(To be published in the Seattle Times PacificNW Magazine on Feb. 14, 2021)

Grounded in work, hope continues to flower at Volunteer Park
By Jean Sherrard

In the hothouse of our civic life, voices and temperatures keep rising. Resonating for many today is President Ronald Reagan’s  famous sentiment: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’ ”

However, the gardener watering orchids in our 1938 “Then” photo might have begged to differ.

That decade’s Great Depression, devastating the nation with a 25% unemployment rate, provided fertile ground for the landslide 1932 election victory of visionary new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. His New Deal programs sparked a revolution, providing millions of federally subsidized jobs for desperate Americans through the Works Project Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and other agencies.

“For Roosevelt,” says New Deal historian Brent McKee, “work relief was preferrable to cash relief. He believed that given the opportunity, most people would choose to work.”

As a result, the Pacific Northwest blossomed with sizeable infrastructure projects, from trails, roads and highways to dozens of schools, libraries, post offices and other public buildings. By itself, an acknowledged granddaddy of New Deal projects, the Grand Coulee Dam in Eastern Washington, ensured many thousands of construction jobs between 1933 and 1942.

But smaller efforts also eased joblessness. Innovative projects offered work to historians, artists and musicians, acknowledging their vital cultural contributions. And in 1938, with WPA sponsorship and a nod to the beauty and solace nurtured by nature, 10 unemployed women were hired by the Volunteer Park Conservatory on Capitol Hill as assistants to head gardener Jacob Umlauff.

“Among their jobs is the task of helping care for [10,000] orchids,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted. The women were “light of touch and long of patience … very handy around such delicate plants.”

After four seasons of intensive training, the program offered each worker “a certificate as a Gardener, with a specialty in orchid culture.” Such a vocation could not have taken root in more fertile grounds.

Modeled after the 1851 Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace in London, the Conservatory was a jewel in the crown provided by the Olmsted brothers-designed Volunteer Park.

The Seattle Times acclaimed the $50,000 glass-paned structure as “a thing of joy and beauty” and the finest greenhouse west of Chicago.

Still operated by Seattle Parks, the Conservatory has been closed since last April due to the pandemic. But workers keep up its vast orchid collection, donated in 1921 by philanthropist Anna Clise, also founder of Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. It remains one of the nation’s finest.

Thus, while our national debate rages on, inside the steamy glass of the tropical Conservatory, hope continues to flower.

WEB EXTRAS

We are blessed with a selection of extras this week. For our 360 video featuring the Conservatory, click right about here.

Next, more of historian Brent McKee’s generous contributions, scanned at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.  The following photos are all from the late 1930s and feature the WPA horticultural training program at the Conservatory.

Lou Daprile, Marketing Coordinator for Friends of the Conservatory, took the selection of lovely “now” photos below to accompany the column. Thanks, Lou!

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Jan. 21, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Jan. 24, 2021)

Underground convenience, sheltered from the storm

By Jean Sherrard

From a rooftop vantage in 1910, our “Then” photo looks east to a newly completed cast-iron and glass pergola straddling the triangular city park of Pioneer Place, now Pioneer Square. A collision of junctions charting early settlers’ land disputes, this fertile ground set the stage for Seattle’s future.

After the Great Fire of 1889, a downtown built of brick and stone rapidly rose from the ashes. Prolific architect Elmer Fisher led the charge, designing dozens of buildings in the muscular — and fireproof — Romanesque Revival style.

Taking the lead in 1890 was Henry Yesler’s Pioneer Building, the massive edifice at left. No slouch at right, on the south side of James Street, was the Seattle Hotel, built in 1891 on the flatiron footprint of its destroyed predecessor, the Occidental.

Soon, fueled by coal and gold, adolescent Seattle nearly tripled in population to 237,194 in 1910 from 80,671 in 1900. Improvements in plumbing, electricity and transportation met the expanding need while the city also eagerly planned its coming-out party, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.

Boosters anticipated visitors from across the globe, many of whom would arrive by train and ship, passing through Pioneer Place, Seattle’s commercial hub. But they sensed that a key convenience was missing.

Their solution — considerate but controversial — was to build a lavishly appointed public lavatory with walls of Alaskan marble, brass fixtures and terrazzo floors. To welcome the expected hordes, the vision was to bury it at Pioneer Place and cover its stairwell entrance with a graceful, Victorian-style pergola that would double as a shelter for streetcar passengers.

A flurry of letters and editorials erupted. Many lamented potential loss of the tiny greensward. Others forecast yet another promotional feather in the city’s cap. In the end, fans of the commodious “comfort station” won the debate, and excavation began.

The dig yielded an intriguing archeological find. Newspapers breathlessly reported the unearthing of Henry Yesler’s 1852 sawmill foundations, west of the Pioneer Building where his first home once stood.

The lavatory and pergola, designed by architect Julian Everett, proved late for the dance, opening Sept. 23, 1909, mere weeks before the exposition closed. But naysayers fell silent when the underground toilets proved immensely popular, averaging more than 5,000 flushes a day.

The palatial privy survived until the late 1940s, when it was abandoned and capped off forever. The pergola, however, endured. Intermittently ravaged by rust, earthquakes and errant trucks, it has been restored repeatedly over the years and continues to serve as a reservoir of history and shelter from the storm.

WEB EXTRAS

What a treat! One of those rare occasions in which Jean uses his 21′ extension pole. Its full length must be seen to be believed. Check out our 360 video for proof.

And these just in! Our longtime column partner, photo historian Ron Edge, sends along two photos, which more precisely illustrate the entrances to the palatial loo.

Also, we present a floor plan for the underground restroom, a 1970s view of its deteriorated state, and a Seattle Times photo of the excavation prior to construction of the “sinking ship” garage nearby.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Jan. 7, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Jan. 10, 2021)

Sluicing away Jackson Street to unclog the city’s future arteries

By Jean Sherrard

Long before becoming a student of Seattle history, I had a recurring (and oddly unsettling) dream of hiking an unbroken ridge between First Hill and Beacon Hill. Were it not for Reginald Heber Thomson (1856-1949), our city’s current topography may have matched my dreamscape.

When Thomson first stepped onto Seattle docks on Sept. 25, 1881, he told a friend that the city was built in a hole and he meant to dig it out. The 25-year-old’s ambition might have been attributed to youthful exuberance, but in the decades to come, his words would prove prophetic. Appointed city engineer in 1892, Thomson began by installing water and sewage infrastructures (still in use today) before attacking Seattle’s hills and valleys.

Notes David Williams in his masterful 2015 history of Seattle topography “Too High and Too Steep,” to Thomson “a functioning city was like a human body.” He insisted that “enlarging and improving what he called the city’s arteries” was vital to Seattle’s future health.

Picturesque piles of glacial deposit — like Denny Hill north of downtown — were, in Thomson’s view “an offense to the public,” interrupting the free flow of traffic. In 1898, the hill’s decapitation commenced, using hydraulic hoses (called “giants”) to liquify and sluice away the moraine.

When Rainier Valley residents complained that the Jackson Street incline’s steep 15% grade obstructed access to Seattle’s business district, Thomson lent a sympathetic ear. Intrigued by their initial suggestion to tunnel through the hill, he eventually advanced a “far cheaper and far better” solution — utter removal. “Every house and every garden and every street” in the affected areas might be lost, but he judged the sacrifice necessary to make municipal headway.

In May 1907, the hydraulic giants began their work. Enormous pumps fed up to 25 million gallons of salt and fresh water daily to their pressurized hoses, expelling a thousand cubic yards of dirt during each eight-hour shift.

Completed in December 1909, the Jackson Street project covered the largest surface area of all Seattle regrades: 56 blocks in total, with 29 lowered and 27 raised. More than three million cubic yards of dirt were moved, lowering Ninth and Jackson by 85 feet and raising Sixth and Weller by about 30.

My recurring dream may harbor some whiff of lost geography, yet the force of R.H. Thomson’s vision resides. While often trading natural beauty for an engineer’s expedience, his straightened, flattened, stretched Seattle provided a blank canvas for cityscapes to come.

WEB EXTRAS

To see our Now & Then featured in spectacular 360 video, along with an audio narration by Jean, click here.

A few more regrade-themed spectacles below:

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Dec. 10, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Dec. 13, 2020)

Danger, poverty, hope fuel ‘Coals of Newcastle’ immigrant story

By Jean Sherrard

When I teach an annual Northwest history course to middle-school students, one of my favorite pre-COVID lessons included an often-muddy field trip to Cougar Mountain in the foothills between Bellevue and Issaquah and their once-flourishing but nearly forgotten mining communities.

In the wet Pacific Northwest, as every homeowner can attest, iron rusts and wood rots with alacrity. Entire towns may disappear into the tangle of eager rainforest.

Case in point: the adjoining villages of Newcastle and Coal Creek, once home to more than 1,000 residents. For nearly a century, the hamlets fed the hungry maw of industry, power generation and home heating with vast tons of coal, besides helping to build the rails and docks that transformed Seattle into a major port city.

Local journalist and historian Lucille MacDonald and son Dick MacDonald first published their classic monograph, “The Coals of Newcastle: A Hundred Years of Hidden History,” in 1987, in collaboration with the Issaquah Alps Trails Club and the Newcastle Historical Society. Thirty-three years later, the historical society deemed it time for an update.

It took a village of 15 to tackle the mammoth task of revision. Nearly 18 months in the making and approaching 200 pages, lavishly illustrated with maps, graphs and many previously unpublished photos, the updated version is a history buff’s delight.

The story begins Jan. 9, 1864, when after “months of diligent search,” an exploratory party led by King County Surveyor Edwin Richardson made an exhilarating discovery on the banks of today’s Coal Creek. “This brook,” a weary Richardson recorded in field notes, “is remarkable for its numerous croppings of superior stone coal.”

Within weeks, Richardson and several companions staked out 160-acre claims surrounding the creek. Extraction soon began, at first haphazardly but increasing exponentially, and over the next 100 years yielded nearly 11 million tons of coal.

While the area’s vivid history is told with careful attention to detail, the book also shines with moving accounts of the lives of miners, their families and communities. Immigrants arriving in a new world found a toehold at the coal face.

Newcastle’s cemetery, now a historic landmark, provides haunting evidence of these lives lived and lost. The names on its moss-covered headstones reflect a record of migration from across the world. From China, from Europe, from the Americas they came, of many races and religions, confronting physical danger and exploitation, poverty and discrimination, and yet seeded with hope for a brighter future.

As my students have come to understand, it’s a lesson worth mining.

WEB EXTRAS

A few items, beginning with another photo of the writing team members and a map from the book itself. For more info on “The Coals of Newcastle: A Hundred Years of Hidden History,” visit newcastlewahistory.org.

For our 360 degree video taken at the site, and to hear this column read by Jean, visit us here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 26, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Nov. 29, 2020)

In our Covid crisis, ACT’s ‘Carol’ strikes a compassionate chord

By Jean Sherrard

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”
—from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”

In a column comparing historical photos with their modern counterparts, we are particularly keen not to “shut out” still timely lessons of empathy and forbearance offered by Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” particularly during today’s pandemic and civic crises.

Published on Dec. 19, 1843, his instantly popular novella had been written over several weeks in a white heat of exuberant creation. While the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign saw the reinvention of Christmas conventions from decorations to turkey dinners, Dickens’ ghost story etched them into routine.

A Seattle tradition for 45 years, ACT Theatre’s production of “A Christmas Carol” continues to strike a chord for generations of families.

Founded in 1965 by Gregory Falls, head of the UW School of Drama, ACT provided an alternative to the Seattle Repertory Theatre, then devoted to classical fare. The vibrant young company emphasized modern playwrights and themes, as well as adding jobs for a growing community of actors.

In 1976, Falls adapted and directed Dickens’ “Carol,” featuring acclaimed local actor John Gilbert as Scrooge. At a lean 90 minutes, the ACT version not only sold out two shows nightly, providing a sturdy income stream, but also won praise as one of the nation’s best.

To understand why, I spoke with ACT’s former artistic directors Kurt Beattie and Jeff Steitzer, as well as today’s artistic director John Langs.

Through the years, the ACT version avoids the trap of “bloated spectacle,” says Beattie who has often played Scrooge. He says it hews to Dickens’ original intent, which was to encourage “actual change in a class-bound society indifferent to the suffering of the poor.”

Dickens’ tale of redemption and transfiguration also is “the essence of great drama,” says Steitzer. “Scrooge is a man who was given a second chance and took it.”

For many Northwest theatergoers, the ACT “Carol” has become a ritual not to be missed, even during a season in which live theater is suspended.

“In a very difficult year,” says Langs, “we didn’t want to deprive people of a beloved holiday tradition, so we’ve created a kind of movie for your ears.”

This year’s audio show features music, sound effects, and a cast of 17, with Beattie and Steitzer reversing their previous roles from 1998. It will be available on-demand Nov. 27-Dec. 27 at acttheatre.org.

WEB EXTRAS

Check out Jean’s 360 video, captured across the street from ACT Theatre. Also featured, photos from previous ACT productions of ‘A Christmas Carol’:

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 5, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Nov. 8, 2020)

Light – and a legendary photographer – carom through the canyon

By Jean Sherrard

On a recent early fall day, I once again scrambled after a hero. From La Push to the Columbia River, from Mount Rainier to the Denny Regrade, renowned photographer Asahel (pronounced “EH-shell”) Curtis (1874-1941) has led me on a decades-long, merry chase.

With boundless energy and ambition, Asahel explored every corner of our fair state with a visual imagination that, to my mind, surpasses the artfully composed photos of his more famous brother Edward (noted for his 20-volume masterwork, “The North American Indian”).

In contrast, Asahel hauled his battered camera through every environ and season to snare serendipitous scenes that crossed his lens. Eschewing fussy studio portraits, his “slice-of-life” photos document the quotidian, from Makah whalers to wheat farmers, loggers to factory workers. A founder of the Mountaineers Club, he also captured breathtaking vistas of our highest peaks.

This week’s “then” photo, taken by Asahel in 1932 at the south end of the Yakima River Canyon, is a picturesque joy. The ribbon of highway — with its single lonely car headed north, the empty railroad alongside the river, cradled by basalt hills — offers a haunting portrait of a singular landscape.

Gazing into the fertile Yakima Valley, Asahel would have conjured a lost paradise. In 1907, he had purchased a 9-acre orchard near Grandview as a family retreat from the hurly burly of Seattle city life. After the 1929 stock-market crash, Curtis forfeited his farm and deeply regretted it.

Inarguably, the 25-mile canyon is a photographer’s dream. Light plays over tawny hills around whose roots the Yakima River winds like a verdant green fuse. Driving the canyon road 20 years ago, I assumed wrongly that the water had eroded a path through the basalt.

Counterintuitively, the river came first, says Central Washington University geologist Nick Zentner, perfectly exemplifying an “entrenched meander canyon.” Twelve million years ago, the river twisted and curved across a flat plain, he says, while the basalt hills heaved into place 7 million years later, the result of tectonic pressures originating in what is now central California.

Today, tamed by road and rails — and the diversionary Roza Dam (erected in 1939) — the canyon drive supplies a series of spectacles that shapeshift dramatically with each season.

Asahel died in 1941 at age 66. Not until 1964 were his ashes interred at a Snoqualmie summit wayside memorial. Soon after its dedication, daughter Polly recalled in a 1988 Seattle Times interview, a lightning bolt destroyed the urn, scattering Curtis’ ashes to the winds. Her roving father would have keenly appreciated this fate.

WEB EXTRAS

Jean here: Several extras this week. The 360 video was taken on a Yakima Canyon slope – David Lee provided support as I shot the ‘now’ photo.

Below, a number of Yakima Canyon photos I’ve taken over the years – including, at top, recent photos of the canyon blackened by late summer fires; specifically the Evans Creek complex, which burned many square miles down to the river’s edge.

Now, a few more photos from the canyon’s caroming light and shadow, taken over the last decade or so.

On the same day I took the ‘now’ for this column, we visited Johnson Foods in Sunnyside. The cannery has been packing Mama Lil’s Peppers for many years.

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Oct. 22, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Oct. 25, 2020)

This classic masonry building met a lot of peeps along ‘Flesh Avenue’

By Jean Sherrard

This week’s “Then” photo features an amiable bunch of C. Sidney Shepard Co. employees who might have enjoyed a bit of wordplay if given a chance. Their short-lived wholesale metal shop operated between University and Union streets on the west side of First Avenue.

Mirrored reflections in the shop windows date the image. A billboard across the street promotes Denman Thompson’s touring production of “The Old Homestead” for March 17-19, 1904. Though the hit play tempted audiences for years to come, Shepard’s shop ended its run at the Post Edwards Building in 1906.

The Post Edwards (aka the Hotel Vendome) arose in the boom one year after the 1889 Great Seattle Fire. Prolific architect William E. Boone (descendant of Daniel of the legendary raccoon-skin cap) adopted the then-popular Romanesque Revival style. For torched Seattle, the fireproof masonry stonework offered a sense of security that wood could not.

The Hotel Vendome (“Commercial and Family Patronage specially solicited”) promoted itself as a respectable alternative to sketchier lodging on First Avenue, though itinerant psychics, mediums and spiritualists prowled its lower floors for decades. Madame Melbourne and Venus the Gypsy (who promised “satisfaction or no fee”) read the palms of Yukon-bound gold seekers, while the Rev. Edward Earle (“world’s greatest psychic”) foretold the fortunes of soldiers headed into what then was called the Great War.

By the mid-1940s, Anne and Lucius Avery had bought Post Edwards, rechristening it the Seven Seas Hotel and Tavern. Upon her death in 1969, “Mom” Avery was feted for her fondness for seafarers and skills as a bouncer, but the increasingly gritty street had filled with strip shows, porn and pawn shops, cementing its reputation as “Flesh Avenue.”

So when the Lusty Lady, the peep show with a famously punny marquee, arrived at the Post Edwards in 1985, it seemed to suit the neighborhood. Uniquely, however, the venue was run by women, and it was there, in 1992, that young photographer Erika Langley found a gutsy and radical project.

To tell the real story of the place, manager June Cade urged her to sign on as a dancer. Shy and terrified, Langley nevertheless agreed and never looked back. Her 1997 book “The Lusty Lady” was the celebrated result.

After publication, Langley continued dancing until 2004. “I learned so much about humans and sexuality and judgment,” she says, “and in this unlikely place, I had found my tribe.”

Since the 2010 closure of the Lusty Lady, the Post Edwards has drooped with inactivity. As the marquee might say, the building needs more than a sheet to test its metal.

WEB EXTRAS

First, most definitely visit ErikaLangley.com. She’s an amazing photographer with a genius for both image and storytelling.

To see our 360 video taken along First Avenue, and hear Jean’s accompanying narration, dance on over here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Oct. 8, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Oct. 11, 2020)

The tunnel that reshaped the waterfront (no, not THAT one)
by Jean Sherrard

Just over a year and half has passed since the ribbon-cutting ceremony opening the 1.7-mile Highway 99 tunnel that replaced the geriatric Alaskan Way Viaduct. Four years of burrowing with Bertha, one of the world’s largest tunnel borers, followed by two years of construction and months of viaduct demolition, left behind a wide-open waterfront, ripe for re-imagining.

That most ambitious of Seattle tunnels invites comparison with another one completed 115 years ago. It, too, was an attempt to solve a waterfront problem. Alaskan Way, originally Railroad Avenue, was ribbed with a wide swath of eight sets of parallel train tracks. The dangerous clatter and din of passing trains separated the upland city from its vigorous bay.

Seattle’s transformational city engineer, Reginald H. Thomson, devised the re-routing of some of that traffic, convincing James J. Hill, the Great Northern railroad magnate, to send his trains through a 5,141.5-foot tunnel from the waterfront to the proposed King Street train station (built in 1906 as a marble temple of transport suitable for the aspiring young city).

On April Fools Day 1903, construction commenced at the tunnel’s northern portal, employing pressure hoses to wash away vast tons of dirt and expose the face of the hillside. Within two months, work began a mile away on the south portal.

Hundreds of men at both ends dug day and night for two years in a fiercely competitive race to the middle. In a marvel of precision engineering, the two boreholes were only a fraction of an inch off when in October 1904 they met. Wags among the workers joked that they had built the longest tunnel in the world: from Virginia to Washington — streets, that is. And for its time, the tunnel did break records. When completed, it was the highest (25.8 feet) and widest (30 feet) tunnel in the world.

The tube was lined with 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 feet of concrete, reaching its deepest point 111 feet below Fourth and Spring. Curiously, it also delved through remains of an anaerobically preserved primeval forest at Fourth and Marion. (Soon after exposure to air, the trees reportedly turned to mulch.)

Though overhead property owners worried about their buildings’ foundations, the only actual casualty of construction was the Hotel York at the northwest corner of First and Pike (in our “Then” photo sporting an enormous mural puffing up Owl cigars). Its underpinning undermined, it was razed in November 1904. In 1912, it was replaced by the Corner Market Building, which to this day anchors the Pike Place Market.

WEB EXTRAS

To watch our 360 degree video, which includes two passing trains and Jean’s narration, click here.

Plus a bit of a backstory here. I found a lovely ‘then’ and tried to repeat it, only to discover that the quality was subpar. The original is not lost, but included in the many thousands that Paul donated to the SPL; so for the time being, unavailable. Here, then, is my first attempt at repeating the shot from below:

And, in no particular order, shots of construction and trains!

(click and click again to enlarge photographs)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Sept. 24, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Sept. 27, 2020)

A soaring salute to post-World War II car culture

By Jean Sherrard

World War II didn’t just beget a population boom. It also produced the throaty roar of automobile engines. Along with the proverbial chicken in every pot, a growing middle class aspired to afford a car in every garage.

To accommodate the soaring increase in traffic, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided 90 percent funding for a nationwide network of controlled-access interstate highways. The proposed Interstate 5, crossing 1,381 miles between the Canadian and Mexican borders, became one of the jewels in its crown.

This week’s “Then” photo comes from Leo Bernard, whose father, Harvey, moved his young family to Seattle from Minnesota in 1954 to take a job with Boeing. “Photography and mountain climbing became his twin passions,” Leo says, “and we rarely saw him without a camera.”

From a boat deck near the north end of Lake Union, Harvey Bernard captured his Ektachrome transparency of the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge under construction in October 1960.

From his vantage, three of seven concrete piers tower above Lake Union, along with a diagonal hash of equilateral steel trusses, providing support for the imposing double-deck bridge. Within a year, its eight-lane wide upper deck and reversible four-lane lower deck would span the 4,429-foot gap between the University District and Capitol Hill. At the time, it was the longest bridge of its kind erected in the Pacific Northwest.

Just west of the piers, the Wayland Mill silo burner squats like an abandoned potbelly stove. The mill produced Bungalow brand cedar shingles for decades before closing after the war. Restaurateur Ivar Haglund purchased the property in 1966 and installed his Salmon House, which still stands today.

To the mill’s right, the nondescript, grey warehouse, built in 1954, was purchased in 1963 by George and Stan Pocock to construct their legendary racing shells. Pocock supplied shells for “The Boys in the Boat,” who rowed them to gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a story featured last March in this column.

In 1989, Seattle-based glass artist Dale Chihuly bought the 11,352 square-foot building, converting it to a combined living space and glass-blowing studio.

For months, the span, when completed, was a bridge to nowhere. The southern reach of the Seattle freeway had become temporarily mired in controversies over labor and design. Thus, according to the encyclopedic tome “Building Washington” by Paul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy, planners of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair proposed using the bridge’s empty decks for overflow parking.

The scheme never materialized. But modern motorists are all too familiar with I-5 as a parking lot.

WEB EXTRAS

Check out Jean’s 360 degree video including a late summer boat ride – and featuring young Keenan and Elijah. To be posted soon.

Also, here are a few more lovely photos from Harvey Bernard, contributed by his son Leo.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Sept. 10, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Sept. 13, 2020)

Greetings, goodbyes, and the growl of Greyhounds no more

By Jean Sherrard

I left home for the first time in the mid-1970s, bound for college on a cross-state bus. My parents stood together at the gates of the bustling Greyhound depot at Eighth and Stewart, but only my mom waved goodbye as if wiping a fogged window.

Just another emotional departure – to be followed a few months later by a joyful reunion – enacted in the charmless station, witness to decades of greetings, farewells and brimming buckets of tears.

Known for the slender, mid-stride canine in its visual brand, Greyhound began with a single 7-seat bus in 1915. The ubiquitous fleet rolled across America’s heartland and into its hearts, mythologized in popular culture as the buzzing locus of accessible romance and adventure.

From the Oscar-bedecked Frank Capra comedy “It Happened One Night” to Paul Simon’s aural anthem “America,” boarding a bus suggested the promise of open roads, unknown vistas and cute meets. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Twenty years before Greyhound acquired it, Seattle’s Central Terminal was erected in 1927 by the Stone and Webster Management Company, a nationwide utilities cartel with fingers in many pies. (Its complex genealogy can be traced directly to today’s Puget Sound Energy.)

While anti-monopoly laws eventually divided the pies into smaller slices, its three-story, brick-clad Seattle structure was an innovation, accommodating motorized cross-country buses and intercity electric trains within a single station.

Its lively inauguration on Sept. 12, 1927, included a parade of progress along Stewart Street, led by a primitive, hand-drawn sled and concluding with “the most modern motor coach.” Bertha Landes, Seattle’s first female mayor and the honorary conductor, rang a trolley bell to herald the Seattle-Everett Interurban car’s virgin trip from the sparkling station.

This confident investment in the future of mixed-use travel had a shelf life of only 11 years. By 1939, buses shouldered out trains and tracks were torn up and smelted down, replaced by gasoline engines and rubber tires.

In 2015, the terminal was demolished, giving way to high-rise development. I have visited the site several times to capture a photographic whiff of those heartfelt arrivals and departures where Greyhounds once growled. That aroma, however, has been dispelled by the winds of change.

The newly completed Hyatt Regency monolith – at 45 stories and 1,260 rooms, Seattle’s largest hotel – surely boasts luxurious interiors and spectacular views of the city. But its glossy, street-level exterior seems uninviting.

A passing mail carrier offers a trenchant critique: “Five years ago, Eighth Avenue was filled with little shops and businesses. Now it’s all glass walls. Did you know that over there was once a bus depot?”

WEB EXTRAS

As promised, a few photos from 2010, when the depot was still operating at 8th and Stewart:

Then a melancholy few from 2015, nearing the end of demolition:

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Aug. 27, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Aug. 30, 2020)

A hearse is a hearse, except when it was an ambulance

By Jean Sherrard

As our pandemic-proscribed summer wanes, we may mourn canceled vacations and neighborhood barbecues, but another singularly American institution, beloved by scavengers, collectors and photo-historians, also has bit the dust – the garage sale.

This week’s “Then” is from an album discovered in West Seattle by Bert Prescott at just such a sale in the 1970s. The collection, dating between 1921 and 1923 and shot by an anonymous photographer, features more than 60 images of commercial and official vehicles, ranging from milk and grocery delivery vans to buses and construction and fire trucks.

This ambulance of “The City of Seattle,” captured on Fourth Avenue near City Hall Park, is both lovely and rare. Serving the City Emergency Hospital, literally a stone’s throw away, the vehicle provides insight into a transitional moment in Seattle medical history.

Along with police headquarters, the city jail and the health and sanitation department, the hospital was crammed into the flatiron Public Safety building (now 400 Yesler), and space was at a premium. A city-owned ambulance was an extravagance soon to be replaced with a more economical solution.

Typically, hospitals of the time contracted with funeral homes for emergency transport, providing a profitable second use for hearses. And it passed muster. Whether injured or deceased, prone human bodies require similar dimensions for delivery.

Jason Engler, an Austin, Texas, funeral director and historian for the National Museum of Funeral History, provides a related piece of undertaker lore. “A hearse would get to the cemetery,” he says, “and no sooner had pallbearers removed the casket than they’d head back out on an ambulance call.”

In trade lingo, they were exchanging their black coats for white ones. What’s more, went a morbid joke, if a patient’s survival seemed dubious, an undertaker might dawdle round the block before reaching the hospital, perhaps instead ending up at the funeral home.

In forward-thinking Seattle, Engler suggests, some citizens seemed to treat the joke seriously. To change the status quo, a mayoral delegation traveled in 1922 to Portland, where an enterprising Frank Shepard ran a successful ambulance service unaffiliated with funeral homes. Might he be persuaded to move north?

Shepard agreed, with conditions. Relocating to Seattle in 1923, he purchased ambulances from Butterworth Funeral Home and negotiated a non-compete agreement: Area funeral homes would stop providing emergency transport if Shepard agreed to stay out of the funeral business.

By 1924, the city of Seattle contracted with Shepard Ambulance to serve its hospitals. Over the decades, the company steadily expanded until 1995, when it merged with American Medical Response (AMR).

WEB EXTRAS

Check back soon for our 360 degree video featuring this location.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Aug. 13, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Aug. 16, 2020)

A colossal contribution, and a blast from Paul Dorpat’s present

By Jean Sherrard

This week we drop in on our “Now & Then” column founder, Paul Dorpat.

For 37 years, his witty wisdom (and wise wit), drawn from deep wells of history – and a vast collection of old photos – provided a weekly fount of delight for thousands of fans. Clay Eals and I take ongoing inspiration from Paul’s legacy, but Dorpat ain’t done yet.

Having recently moved from Wallingford into senior housing near the Pike Place Market, he has overseen the contribution of his extensive archive of historical books and manuscripts, as well as more than 300,000 images, to Seattle Public Library.

“I hope my donation will inspire others to do the same,” Paul says. “When we protect and share our history, we can give our community a depth that’s truly resounding.”

Andrew Harbison, the library’s assistant director of Collections and Access Services, concurs: “We’re thrilled to receive this incredible gift and look forward to making the collection available for the public to see and enjoy.”

But that’s not all.

Along with the rest of us, chafing at the isolation imposed by COVID-19, Dorpat continues to collate his many thousands of hours of documentary film and video, dedicated to making this treasure trove available for future generations of historians and documentarians.

“For me, revisiting the past,” Paul says, “has always been a blast.”

WEB EXTRAS

A few more bonbons for friends and fans alike.

Here’s one of my favorites. When Paul and I took a 2005 trip to London and Paris together, we met up with our dear friend and colleague Berangere Lomont (a professional photographer who has through the years served this column as our Paris correspondent). While strolling in the 5th Arr., we did a double take. Paul’s doppelgänger was sitting at a street-side cafe table! The photo op was too good to be missed. Paul sauntered over to the adjoining table and sat down, pretending to examine a menu.

Berangere took the still and, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh, I pointed the video camera.

More recently, Clay Eals managed to capture a video of Paul feeding gulls on the waterfront (the perfect accompaniment to my still photo used in the column).

And in no particular order, a clutch of Paul pix throughout the years.

Stay tuned. More to come…

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on July 30, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on August 2, 2020)

In civil rights, what has – and hasn’t – changed in 57 years?

By Jean Sherrard

1963, the year of our “Then,” and today, arguably much has changed:

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• The Fair Housing Act of 1968.
• School desegregation.

So why do we often feel stuck in quicksand? Protest signs spaced 57 years apart could have been written by the same hand.

Nationally, amid a vision of hope, the summer of 1963 produced profound turmoil:

• On June 11, Gov. George Wallace stood on the University of Alabama steps, blocking entry to two Black students until the National Guard cleared their path.
• On June 12, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his Jackson, Miss., home.
• On Aug 28, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place at the Lincoln Memorial, culminating with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s indelible “I Have a Dream” speech.
• On Sept. 15, four young Black girls were killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.

In Seattle, 1,000 marchers gathered on the hot morning of Saturday, June 15, at Mount Zion Baptist Church at 19th Avenue and East Madison Street and were inspired by the words of Rev. Mance Jackson, pastor of Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (today’s Curry Temple CME Church at 172 23rd Ave.).

Jackson called for “a plan of action,” demanding fair housing and employment practices for Black citizens, whose 10% jobless rate tripled that of the city overall.

“The time is now or never,” he said. “We declare war on … America’s greatest enemies: discrimination, segregation and racial bigotry. … We will have to sacrifice and suffer. Somebody may even have to go to jail.”

Our “Now” is from Thursday, June 4, 2020, 10 days after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody convulsed the nation. After days of angry protest, police erected a temporary barricade at 11th Avenue and East Pine Street, separating them from Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Late in the afternoon, a small group carrying bouquets of lilies and helium balloons pushed to the front of the crowd. A Black protester shouted an obscenity, stripped to his shorts and hopped the barricade, hands aloft. Alone, he advanced toward a line of squad cars.

Behind him, the crowd seemed to catch its breath. Some pleaded for him to turn back and avoid arrest. Others took up a chant: “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Shortly, the protester was arrested and taken into police custody.

In 1963, King challenged us to envision a world in which we can “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Then and now, accomplishing that arduous task is our civic duty.

WEB EXTRAS

Also, check out our 360 degree video, narrated by Jean, shot on location at 11th and East Pine.

(click to enlarge photos — Clay and Paul advise, ‘Click again’)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on June 24, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on June 28, 2020)

In challenging times, the Post Office delivers human connection

By Jean Sherrard

When it opened in October 1852, Seattle’s first postal station was little more than a mahogany desk in Arthur Denny’s log cabin at what is now First and Marion.

It had been 11 months since the Denny Party landed at Alki Beach. The urge to connect with the outside world was strong. Even a pocket-sized post office offered settlers a sense of stability.

For The Seattle Times, Arthur’s daughter, Louisa, wryly recalled perching on her dad’s desk as he sorted mail when a boat came in: “It was not a monumental task, as there was very little mail coming and going.”

Decades later, however, our “Then” displays a hive of activity at Seattle’s downtown post office at the northeast corner of what is now Yesler Way and Post Avenue. The scrawled inscription, “Waiting for mail at Seattle’s Post Office,” explains the long lines, adding cryptically, “Mostly strangers.”

The note may offer a calendar clue. By late 1886, with an economy recovering from three years of recession, hundreds of “strangers” arrived seeking jobs. The newly employed no doubt eagerly queued for mail from families they had left behind. By fall 1887, crowds abated when the post office hired four mail carriers and began the tradition of free delivery.

To document today’s version of this practice, with permission from Seattle’s postmaster I recently joined 12-year postal veteran Azuma Ohta on her appointed rounds, starting at the Seattle Carrier Annex at Fourth and Lander, where days begin with sorting letters and packages.

Beyond snow, rain, heat and gloom of night, every carrier bears scars from being chomped by dogs, clawed by cats and stung by bees and wasps. Azuma is no exception. Twice-bitten, with one attack by a canine whose owner left a door ajar, she still identifies as a “dog person.”

During the pandemic, postal workers older than 60 and otherwise at high risk have been allowed to take several months off. Younger carriers have filled in, so Azuma has been working 75 hours a week, more than during the hectic holiday season.

Another unexpected effect of the coronavirus has been to boost the contents of carriers’ mailbags. “People are hungry for physical connection beyond Zoom and email,” she says. “They’re sending more cards and letters than I’ve ever seen before.”

Tagging along on her Capitol Hill route, I can see that Azuma is a beloved fixture. Passersby sing out cheerful greetings. She has watched babies become adolescents and witnessed love and loss, marriage and divorce.

Tim King often meets her at his door for a chat. “We adore Azuma,” he says. “She brightens our days, and these days can use some brightening.” By any measure, that’s a monumental task.

WEB EXTRAS

Be sure to visit our Seattle Now & Then 360 channel, where you can listen to and view this column in glorious 360 degree color! Jean narrates.

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on June 4, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on June 7, 2020)

Historic downtown church confronts Seattle’s ‘original sin’

By Jean Sherrard

This past Jan. 25, during an evening lecture at Plymouth Congregational Church, historian David Buerge spoke of the city’s “original sin”: 54,000 acres taken from the Duwamish Tribe without recompense, leaving Chief Seattle’s people, who had so warmly welcomed early settlers, landless and homeless.

In response, the Rev. Dr. Kelle Brown, Plymouth’s lead pastor, had a forward-looking suggestion. “We have been squatting on First People’s land for nearly 170 years,” she said. “We’ve been blessed with the beautiful asset of this property. It’s time for the church to begin paying down our debt.”

Only a week past the 150th anniversary of the church’s first Sunday service, her audience voiced strong support for initiating discussions with the tribe. Those familiar with Plymouth and its long history of civic engagement were not surprised. From women’s suffrage and civil rights to immigration and homelessness, the church has wrestled with thorny issues of every era.

Before the church’s founding in 1870, Mayflower descendants John and Carolyn Sanderson determined that Seattle, with a population of nearly 1,000 mostly single men, lacked ecclesiastical choice. Methodists and Episcopalians had established solid toeholds here, but Congregationalism (with direct links to the Pilgrims) might add the tempting solidity of Plymouth Rock.

Their choice of pastor, charismatic John F. Damon – also a prominent Mason – was propitious. Church historian Mildred Andrews notes that Damon was “skilled at playing upon the emotions of his hearers” and in high demand for both weddings and funerals (at which there was “never a dry eye”).

Becoming known throughout the region as the “marrying parson,” Damon soon drew crowds of 100 for both morning and evening Sunday services, a staggering 20% of the town’s population. Pioneer Arthur Denny, lured from the Methodists, was inspired to donate a lot at Second Avenue and Spring Street for Plymouth’s first church.

Church membership soared. Besides the Denny family, notable congregants included James Colman (builder of the original Colman Dock), engineer Hiram M. Chittenden, developer James Moore (whose Moore Theater still stands at Fourth and Stewart) and Seattle’s first female mayor, Bertha Landes.

This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the church’s most ambitious offshoot. In 1980, after witnessing men sleeping rough on the church’s doorstep, the Rev. David Colwell braced his congregation: “One homeless person is one too many.” Today, Plymouth Housing provides supportive dwellings for more than 1,200 people in 14 buildings across the city.

For her part, Brown envisions a vital role for the church in years to come: “We must never lose sight of the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, and make sure that as a church, the lens we use is one of justice.” Plymouth’s proposal to enfranchise the Duwamish people will take a pioneering step toward atonement.

WEB EXTRAS

And here’s our accompanying narrated 360-degree video of this column, as promised.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on March 19, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on March 22, 2020)

Roughing It on the waterfront with Mark Twain, 1895

By Jean Sherrard

In the hot, dry summer of 1895, virgin timber burned throughout the Pacific Northwest. For locals who only seven years before had witnessed the Great Seattle Fire that reduced 30 downtown blocks into piles of ash, the suffocating, brown pall must have evoked unpleasant memories.

On Aug. 13, when a 59-year old Mark Twain (given name: Samuel Clemens) stepped onto Colman Dock, his eyes and throat were irritated by not only the smoke but also the ill effects of a rare cold.

Earlier, the chair of a reception committee had tendered profuse apologies: “I’m sorry the smoke is so dense that you cannot see our mountains and our forests.”

“I regret that your magnificent forests are being destroyed by fire,” replied Twain. “As for the smoke … I am accustomed to that. I am a perpetual smoker myself.”

Nevertheless, he may have considered delaying or canceling his sold-out performance that evening at the Seattle Theater, Third and Cherry — a 90-minute comedic lecture with an unlikely subject: “Morals” — were it not for his recent bankruptcy and pressing need for cash.

Internationally celebrated for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and its sequel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (widely considered the greatest American novel) as well as humorous short stories and travelogues such as “Roughing It,” Twain was less fortunate when it came to money. An ill-advised publishing venture, compounded by the crash of 1893, had left him more than $80,000 in debt, which he felt honor-bound to repay.

“I do not enjoy the hard travel and broken rest inseparable from lecturing,” he said, “but writing is too slow for the demands that I have to meet. Therefore I have begun to lecture my way around the world.”

Entreated by Australian promoter Carlyle Smythe, who long had sought his participation in a tour abroad, Twain committed to a packed set of performances across the northern United States, then to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.

His friend and manager, Major James B. Pond, who accompanied him on the U.S. portion of the tour, described Twain’s reception here: “A great audience in Seattle … The sign ‘Standing Room Only’ was out again. He was hoarse, but the hoarseness seemed to augment the volume of his voice.”

Critics concurred. “A great literary improvisation,” gushed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “To tell the story of such a lecture is like trying to narrate a laugh.”

In Victoria 10 days later, accompanied by beloved wife Olivia and daughter Clara, Twain boarded the Warimoo, bound for Australia. Before departure, Pond recalled, the perpetual smoker bought 3,000 “Manila cheroots” (cigars) and four pounds of Durham tobacco, calculated to be just enough for the month-long voyage.

WEB EXTRAS

A special thanks to David Horsey and Colleen Chartier for the assist. For Jean’s narrated 360 degree video, click here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 20, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Feb. 23, 2020)

Seattle’s Deepest Snow, at First & Cherry, 1880

By Jean Sherrard

Since 2005, when I began contributing photos to this column, whenever flakes of snow begin to fall, I pack a camera bag and hit the slippery Seattle streets, clutching a sheaf of old photos to repeat. However, in those 15 years I’ve repeatedly failed to capture snow blanketing First and Cherry, as shown in this week’s classic “Then” photo from 1880. The Captain Ahab in me calls it my “white whale.”

Longtime Seattleites may recall wistfully the rare blizzards of 2018, 1996, 1969 and 1950 (whose 20-inch blitz set the latter-day record for greatest one-day snowfall).

Their effects were dwarfed by Seattle’s second biggest snow, beginning Feb. 1, 1916, when 21.5 inches nearly KO’d the young city. On Groundhog Day afternoon at 3:13, the dome of St. James Cathedral collapsed under the extra load, only hours after a morning Mass attended by a group of schoolgirls from Holy Names Academy.

My grandmother Dorothy later recalled that as a girl of 10 she joined thousands of skaters on frozen Green Lake in the cold snap preceding the snow.

But the king of snows in the Queen City was crowned the same year that Seattle, its population having grown to 3,500, overtook Walla Walla as the region’s largest town.

In a “state of the territory” address published Sunday, Jan. 4, 1880, in the Seattle Intelligencer, territorial Gov. Elisha P. Ferry warmly promoted our region’s temperate, near-Mediterranean climate. “Ice and snow,” he wrote, “are of rare occurrence and almost unknown in Western Washington.”

That same evening, the weather gods replied with a vengeance. Bitterly cold winds invaded homes “through cracks not before known to exist,” the paper reported. The next day, snow began to fall and continued through the week, collapsing awnings and threatening buildings across town.

Yesler’s Hall, used for dances, concerts and theatricals, was “in danger of wrecking; the walls cracking and opening from the enormous weight upon [its] roof.” Only the quick action of men paid an exorbitant $1 an hour to shovel off the snow averted disaster.

At week’s end, the Intelligencer projected the snow “would average a depth of six feet on the townsite of Seattle.” In a petulant potshot (take cover, Elisha), it continued, “If any one has anything to say of our Italian skies and climate, shoot him on the spot.”

On Jan. 12, the Seattle Fin-Back, a free weekly rag, polled elderly natives on “the snow question.” Chief Seattle’s daughter Kikisoblu, known as Princess Angeline, said she “had never seen so much snow at any one time.” Old Ned, however, who lived at the foot of Battery Street, was less impressed. He boasted that he had “seen snow 50 years ago over seven feet deep” when Angeline was a mere child.

WEB EXTRAS

Check out Jean’s visit to First and Cherry in our delightful 360 video.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 6, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Feb. 9, 2020)

Tripping the light fantastic at Seattle’s Trianon Ballroom, ‘Cupid’s Headquarters’

By Jean Sherrard

Advertising that patrons would “trip the light fantastic,” the legendary Trianon Ballroom, designed by architect Warren H. Milner, opened its doors on May 20^th, 1927, at Third Avenue and Wall Street. With its springy, white-maple floors, overseen by a giant, silver, clam-shaped bandshell, the Trianon quickly became Seattle’s premier dance palace.

Held the same day Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, the Trianon’s inaugural drew the city council, chamber of commerce and Bertha Landes, Seattle’s first female mayor. Four-thousand dancers foxtrotted to the sounds of Herb Wiedoft and his Brunswick Recording Orchestra. Between sets, dancers were entertained by vaudeville acts and a dancing exhibition by Priscilla Pharis and George Blanford, a couple who had triumphed at a recent dance marathon in Los Angeles.

The Mediterranean-style dance palace showcased the nation’s biggest of big bands, including Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo and Louis Armstrong, along with the local Max Pilar and Vic Meyers bands. (In 1932, Meyers, swapping bandstand for grandstand, would be elected Washington state’s lieutenant governor, serving 20 years.)

The Trianon became “Cupid’s headquarters,” contended Ted Harris, its longtime manager, in a 1975 Seattle Times interview, “because so many guys and gals met their future mates there.” Couples, he said, gathered on the long, open balcony, with its 17 arched windows facing Third Avenue, for “a little romantic action.” For late-night swing shifts and visiting servicemen during World War II, the Trianon remained open till 5 a.m.

Despite condemnation from some Seattle pulpits, couples continued dancing cheek to cheek at the Trianon until its closing in 1956. By then, ballroom dancing was declining in popularity as youths of America fell under the spell of the less formal dance moves of rock ’n’ roll.

Here we must sound a particularly sour note.

Through much of its tenure, the Trianon’s owner, John E. Savage, insisted upon a segregated dance floor, claiming repeatedly (and falsely) that a city ordinance prohibited “mixed [race] dancing.” The result: hugely popular African American musicians were welcome to perform, while African American dancers were turned away. For Seattle’s growing black community, this irony was painfully bitter, scarcely remedied by management’s “compromise” of selected Monday night shows set aside for “Colored Folks.”

After the ballroom’s closure, the building was converted for use as a Gov-Mart department store, then into an exhibition warehouse for a business selling pool tables, shuffleboards and jukeboxes.

Before partitioned office spaces took over the vast Trianon interior, the maple floor was cleared one last time. On May 18, 1985, two days shy of the 58th anniversary of its original opening, the Trianon held its last dance in the ballroom. All were welcome.

WEB EXTRAS

As promised, here’s another of column regular Ron Edge’s found treasures: a pdf of the opening night booklet for the Trianon (18 Mb).

For more Now & Then fun, click through to this week’s 360 degree video, narrated by Jean.

And a few late-breaking photo additions from Paul:

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Jan. 23, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Jan. 26, 2020)

Connecting thirsty Seattleites with the life blood of water

By Jean Sherrard

Begin with a taste test. Fill a glass with water straight from the tap. Take a sip. Before swallowing, swish it between your teeth and over your tongue. If you’re in or around Seattle, the water you’re savoring likely flows directly from the Cascades, filtered from snowpack down through mountain streams and rivers that have supplied the city and environs for more than a century.

This week’s photos reveal obscure vestiges of the infrastructure that has made it all possible.

Arguably, our earliest water-supply system began with Henry Yesler, who in 1854 ran a suspended V-flume from a spring near Eighth Avenue and Madison Street just past his original homestead (near the heart of today’s Pioneer Square) to his waterfront sawmill.

Other settlers followed suit, tapping the abundant streams and springs of First Hill, then still crowded with virgin timber, improvising a creaky patchwork of wooden pipes and flumes.

As the young city grew, need for a less Balkanized water supply became apparent. The privately owned Spring Hill Water Company, incorporated in 1881, initially fit the bill, integrating sources and expanding to meet the needs of a thirsty population. In a substantial upgrade, the company studded First Hill with large wooden tanks, and a newly built, steam-powered pumping station on Lake Washington kept a 4-million-gallon reservoir on Beacon Hill brim full.

But on June 6, 1889, nearly 30 blocks of downtown Seattle burned to the ground, largely due to the failure of the Spring Hill water supply system. Tanks and reservoirs alike ran dry before the fire could be doused. Out of those flames a public utility was born.

Within months of the fire, the City of Seattle purchased Spring Hill Water Company and planned for expansion. All eyes

turned to the Cedar River, long recognized as a potential source of abundant, pure water, flowing from Cedar (now Chester Morse) Lake, some 35 miles southeast. The proposed gravity-fed water-supply system would be the one of the largest engineering projects yet undertaken by the rapidly rebuilding city.

Politics and economics might have shelved the project were it not for the vision and leadership of a newly appointed city engineer, Reginald H. Thomson, known for a formidable drive and intelligence.

Throughout the 1890s, Thomson lobbied tirelessly for Cedar River water, identifying the liquid as “the life blood of a city.” At last, on Jan. 10, 1900, from the Landsburg timber-crib dam (elevation: 536.4 feet), water coursed through 28 miles of wooden stave pipes around the south end of Lake Washington and north to two city reservoirs on Capitol Hill.

The expansion was just in the nick of time. Over the next decade, Seattle’s population exploded to nearly 240,000 from 80,000, tripling its thirst for pure mountain water.

WEB EXTRAS

First, a huge thanks to Dave Muto of the Seattle Public Utilities, a veritable fount of information and my generous tour guide at Lake Youngs.

I’ll add in a few photos of the water works at Lake Youngs. Dave kindly provided several of the captions.

Our narrated 360-degree video can be found here.

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Jan. 9, 2020
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Jan. 12, 2020)

Just as Seattle’s viaduct tumbled, so did a coastal sea stack

By Jean Sherrard

In our rapidly changing cityscape – where viaducts may crumble, buildings may tumble and residents surely grumble – we depend on increasingly fewer fixed points to ground us (the Pike Place Market is here to stay). Out on the coast, however, even the points of reference that we perceive as immutable can give way in our lifetimes.

Today’s example is one of the tough rock spires whittled from coastal bluffs and headlands, surely noted by sea captains Cook, Bodega y Quadra, Gray and Vancouver and other meticulous 18^th century mapmakers who sought an elusive Northwest passage and maritime shortcut between Europe and China.

The spires are known as sea stacks. In a landscape slashed and walloped by wind and tide, they generally stand as unyielding sentinels of things past.

Our “Then” photo is one of many I’ve taken at Rialto Beach north of the mouth of the Quillayute River near La Push. It features an intact sea stack, one of many that my extended family have appreciated as we combed the coasts of the Olympic Peninsula for more than 50 years.

Late last summer, however, we initially were oblivious as we passed the jumbled slabs of rock captured in our “Now” photo. Negative space, we discovered, can be hard to comprehend – in particular, the loss of structures of such seeming permanence.

But after a momentary loss of bearings and a literal double take, we noted that one of our reference points – a singular pillar emerging from eroded, softer soils over hundreds of years – had toppled into rubble. Just when did this happen? And was it a rare event?

For answers, I turned to Bill Baccus, the Olympic National Park’s physical scientist. After nearly 35 years, he works in the “vital signs” program, which monitors the parks’ ecosystems over time. His patrols range from remote mountain lakes and glaciers (nearly half of which were lost to global warming during his tenure) to the outer coast’s intertidal zones.

“The coast is a constantly changing landscape, especially in terms of morphology,” he said. “One month, the beach will be totally scoured. You’ll see exposed rocks you haven’t seen for months or years. The next thing you know, the sand or gravel has returned. In contrast, the sea stacks are some of the few static features that don’t really change over time. This is the first time I’ve ever seen one entirely collapse.”

Baccus first noted this stack’s demise in June 2016. He surmises that it must have occurred during an especially violent series of storms the previous winter. The precise date, however, is unknown. We invite readers who regularly visit Rialto Beach to submit an earlier photo of our tumbled spire.

WEB EXTRAS

As promised, here are a few photos snapped over the years, summer and winter, at LaPush.

[A reminder from Paul, Jean and Clay: Signed and personally inscribed copies of our award-winning book, Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred, are available for immediate delivery. Order now to receive your copy in time for the holidays!]

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Dec. 12, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Dec. 15, 2019)

From 12,000 years ago comes the nudge of native history

By Jean Sherrard

“For at least 12,000 years, the Duwamish people have been living here. They are buried under the streets and the sidewalks and houses of Seattle. Their DNA rises from the roots of the trees and when the wind blows through the leaves, those are the sounds of our ancestors.”
   – Ken Workman, descendant of Chief Seattle

For our recently published book, “Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred,” we chose 100 subjects from more than 1,800 columns that Paul Dorpat has contributed since he began in 1982. This week’s subject is one of our favorites. Originally appearing in March 2005, we present it afresh and updated with an amended cast of characters.

It features Kikisoblu (c. 1820-1896), eldest daughter of Chief Seattle, leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Catherine Maynard, the second wife of Doc Maynard, renamed her Angeline, and in time she became known as Princess Angeline because of her father’s status and her inherent dignity.

Refusing to be transported across Puget Sound to the Suquamish reservation, she lived for many years in a shack on Seattle’s waterfront. To survive, she worked hard, taking in laundry and selling her handmade baskets to settlers who displaced her people.

She lived in destitution but had her protectors. Late in her life, the Board of King County Commissioners instructed a grocer to give her whatever she needed and to send bills to the county.

For our “Now” photo, we enlisted the aid of two direct descendants of Chief Seattle. Mary Lou Slaughter, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Kikisoblu, is a master cedar weaver whose baskets and traditional clothing are prized for their artistry. Ken Workman, whose great-great-great-great-grandmother was Seattle’s second wife, is a Duwamish tribal council member and eloquent spokesman for his people – in both English and Coast Salish Lushootseed.

Mary Lou brought along several of her creations, including a cape for herself and a vest for Ken. During the 10 minutes we spent shooting the photo, both Clay Eals (column partner and our book’s editor) and I noted that Ken seemed uncomfortable, glancing over his shoulder several times.

Ken recalls: “I felt a couple little pushes on my elbow, as if someone was urging me to get out of the way – I said to myself, ‘Jean, take the picture’ — but when I looked around there was no one there.”

Skeptics may be wary, but Ken regards this insistent prod on his arm as yet another reminder of ancestors present, even in the oxygen we breathe. The nudge of history, I would accede (after pursuing many hundreds of photo repetitions), is strong in these parts and now and then gently urges that we step aside and pause to remember what came before.

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photo, and to hear this column read aloud by Jean, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Below is a link to a video interview of Ken Workman.

Below is a link to a video interview of Mary Lou Slaughter.

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 21, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Nov. 24, 2019)

What are the odds? Descendants of 2 Seattle immigrants find family members in the same 1929 photo

By Jean Sherrard

More than 30 years ago, my wife and I disastrously hosted our first Thanksgiving feast meant to introduce Vietnamese neighbors to an American immigrant ritual and roasted our first turkey. Benjamin Franklin’s favored bird, bane of chefs and home cooks alike, often emerges from the oven raw or overdone, but our perfectly basted 14-pounder seemed to achieve a happy medium. As I transferred it from pan to platter, however, a previously unnoticed bag of giblets exploded from the neck cavity. We assured our slightly unnerved friends that this was not part of the traditional fare.

In this week’s “Then” portrait of King Street Station coach yard workers and trains, taken 22 days before the Oct. 24, 1929, stock-market crash that launched the Great Depression, we encounter another particularly American story of arrival, immigration and citizenship. Ninety years later and by coincidence, two Seattle descendants of men portrayed here separately presented us with this rare image.

It began when Casey McNerthney, visiting a postcard and photo exhibition in Portland in April, spotted a panoramic print in a dealer’s booth. Its inscription tallied with his great-grandfather Matt McAlerney’s time at the coach yard. Leaning in to examine the photo more closely, Casey delighted in finding Matt’s face in the crowd. “No way,” he thought. “What are the odds of that?” Casey purchased it on the spot.

Having immigrated to Seattle from County Down in Northern Ireland in 1911, Matt McAlerney soon found work with the Great Northern Railroad. In October 1916, he met Lily Kempson, a young fugitive who had fled Dublin after playing a significant role in the failed Easter Uprising. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple married and had seven children. Matt continued his rail work through two world wars, retiring in the mid-1950s.

Our second serendipitous contributor, 96-year old Emil Martin (originally Martincevic), at an October book event in West Seattle, presented us with the identical photo and pointed out his father, Petar Martincevic. Petar arrived in Seattle in 1910 from Yugoslavia and began work as an air-brake mechanic in the coach yards. He died in 1964 at age 86.

As a boy, Emil came to know his father’s co-workers well. He says they were of “many nationalities including Irish, Yugoslavian, Scandinavian, Italian, Belgian” along with “an unusually large number of White Russians” who fled across Siberia following the 1917 Russian Revolution.

In the proud faces of these immigrant men (and a handful of women), many who left behind strife, political oppression and poverty, this Thanksgiving we salute their hope for better lives in a new world.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360-degree video of the “Now” photo shoot with Jean’s narration, click here!

Also, head over to Casey’s fascinating biography of his great-grandmother Lily Kempson (and a bit about Matt, as well).

Casey thoughtfully sent along photo ID’s of each and every participant:

Clay Eals visited Emil Martin, the serendipitous provider of the second copy of our “Then” photo, and snapped this portrait:

To read Emil Martin’s short memoir of his own work at the King Street Station coach yards, click on the embedded page just below. For a much more detailed and fascinating handwritten account of Emil’s life and times, check out this remarkable document he provided. Thanks, Emil!

Emil adds on Nov. 25, 2019: “I would like to make one correction in my reminiscence article. I said the 5 and 10-cent stores were Kress and Rhodes. Rhodes had a department store at the SW corner of 2^nd Ave and Pike St. It should have been Kress and Woolworth. Kress was on the SE corner of 3^rd and Pike. Woolworth was on the SW corner of 3^rd and Pike and was the one with the soda counter, piano music and live birds.”

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Oct. 24, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Oct. 27, 2019)

At Fun Forest, we rode the chill-filled Flight to Mars

By Jean Sherrard

“From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”

Inspired last summer by that traditional Scottish poem, I asked archivist Ron Edge to send me his scariest photo for a Halloween column. What he forwarded triggered a small avalanche of memories.

In the late 1960s, I and thousands of other student volunteer crossing guards were bused to Seattle Center’s Fun Forest, the then-flourishing amusement park, for a day of unlimited free rides as a reward for our service to local school districts. Arriving on a typically gray morning, my friends and I made a beeline for what we agreed was the best — and most chill-filled — ride: the Flight to Mars.

Leering, gaptoothed gargoyles from space covered the exterior walls, portending further spine tingles and terrors within. As 11-year olds, we were in the Goldilocks zone: too old for trauma, too young to scoff. The  beetle-shaped cars were two-seaters — my best friend Alan and I could scarcely conceive of their future romantic uses — and we clutched the restraining bar as the car lurched forward and clattered through swinging doors into darkness visible.

Lit by black light, sudden, lurid tableaux flared up. Enacted by jerkily primitive animatronics, scenes of murder and mayhem scattered retinal imprints ’round every twist and turn in the tracks. Echoing along the dark corridors, the delighted shouts and screams of otherwise-sober members of the junior safety patrol were punctuated with expletives that would have appalled our elders in broad daylight. Mere minutes later, we emerged, pulses still pounding with adrenal fizz.

The Flight to Mars that we experienced was a second installment of the ride in this week’s “Then” photo, from the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. When the fair ended, the ride was put into storage for several years, until it was rebuilt on the same spot, where it remained a Fun Forest staple for nearly three decades.

Today, the campus of Paul Allen’s Museum of Pop Culture (originally the EMP Museum, designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 2000) encompasses the entire footprint of the Flight to Mars.

In spooky synchronicity, the spirit of the ride might be said to haunt the lower levels of MoPOP. Its current dungeonesque exhibition, “Scared to Death: The Thrill of Horror Film,” sports a labyrinth of scenes that echo and amplify the anxieties of the season.

Happy Halloween!

WEB EXTRAS

A few photos snapped in the dungeon. Neal Kosaly-Meyer kindly volunteered to pose amidst the horrifying tableaux. For our narrated 360-degree video of the occasion, click here.

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on Oct. 3rd, 2019,
and in print on Oct. 6th, 2019)

A ‘monument to Masonry’ — and the movies

By Jean Sherrard

Inspiration always has bolstered the brickwork at the southeast corner of Harvard and Pine.

From its construction in 1916 as a Masonic Temple, the brick-and-terra-cotta building was the collaborative effort of 18 Masonic lodges.  Designed by legendary Seattle architect Charles W. Saunders (whose many credits include the Alaska Building, the Terry-Denny Building in Pioneer Square and the University of Washington’s Denny Hall), the 63,000- square-foot structure was built for $250,000.

“When the last touch is finished,” claimed lodge president Frederick Johnstone, in an August 1916 Seattle Times interview, “it will be one of the finest temples west of Chicago.”

Marking the occasion, a week-long “housewarming and carnival” was planned for early October, during which the 8,000 members of Seattle Masonic lodges, their families and friends and the general public would be invited to visit this “monument to Masonry.” Festivities would include “all sorts of ‘dignified stunts’ and dancing, accompanied by splendid music.” The addition of the celebrated “Captain, the horse with the human brain,” who could answer “with nods and hoof beats a great variety of questions,” would cap the week of celebration.

Indeed, the crowds were wowed by the Masonic masonry. The temple boasted a full stage with dressing rooms and the latest in “indirect lighting and … independent ventilation,” plus an 1,800-seat auditorium, not to mention “one of the finest dance floors on the Pacific Coast.”

Flash-forward several decades. Long after Captain’s hoof beats had faded away, the temple accommodated local Masonic lodges, besides serving as a venue for community ceremonies, celebrations and performances, ranging from cellist Pablo Casals to our own Paul Dorpat, who recalls attending a summer rock concert in 1967, “when this then-inhibited 30-year-old Lutheran first unzipped his knees with hours of free-form hippie-dancing.”

By the late 1970s, big changes loomed. “Capitol Hill was becoming a tough neighborhood,” says Jim Russell, current secretary of St. John’s Lodge in Greenwood. “It was hard just finding a safe place to park. The temple also needed extensive restoration, and our membership numbers were declining.” In 1992, nearby Seattle Central College purchased the building to expand its growing campus.

Down the hill, a young but burgeoning Seattle International Film Festival had lost its primary venue, the Moore Egyptian, and was seeking a suitable replacement. Visionary founders Dan Ireland and Darryl MacDonald leased the temple’s massive auditorium, remodeling and rechristening it the Egyptian Theatre.

Since those early days, SIFF has grown exponentially. With more than a dozen venues, this year’s festival showcased 400-plus films from nearly 90 countries for some 140,000 attendees. Known since 2014 as SIFF Cinema Egyptian, the theater also screens films year-round and is celebrated as Seattle’s premiere single-screen historic theater, even without an educated horse.

WEB EXTRAS

Check out Jean’s narrated 360-degree video, shot on the penultimate weekend of this year’s Seattle International Film Festival.

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on Sept. 19, 2019,
and in print on Sept. 22, 2019)

A suburban Eastside gully emerges as elusive 1874 coal tramway

By Jean Sherrard

Let’s begin with dispelling some myths. X rarely marks the spot. Most “Eureka!” moments occur after long and exacting endeavor. And there is no free lunch. Actually solving a mystery demands insight; hard work; and, occasionally, dumb luck. 

Our intrepid crew of historical treasure hunters did just that, combining resources to defy odds and, with two extraordinary images pointing the way (one is this week’s “Then” photo), rediscover a slice of a forgotten world.

In our July 21 column, we featured Kurt E. Armbruster’s book, “Pacific Coast: Seattle’s Own Railroad,” which relates a blockbuster story of trains and coal. Here’s the prequel.

Four years before the first steam engine rounded the southern bend of Lake Washington, the Seattle Coal and Transportation Company built a 1,200-foot tramway descending precipitously from a collection point in the Newcastle hills to docks on the lake.

For 39 months, between October 1874 and January 1878, the counterbalanced trams — each hauling three tons of coal — made more than 85,000 trips. In 1874, 9,027 tons of coal were delivered by Seattle Coal and Transportation to Seattle docks. In 1875, the first full year after the tramway’s completion, the company delivered 70,157 tons.

Muscling the trams onto barges docked at the tramway’s foot was only the first stage of a complicated, gargantuan journey. Towed 10 miles north, the trams were offloaded onto tracks crossing the quarter-mile-wide Montlake Portage and rolled onto barges traversing Lake Union. More tracks led to bunkers at the foot of Pike Street, whence waiting freighters delivered coal to energy-hungry San Francisco.

Although this history was thoroughly documented, one nagging question persisted: Exactly where was that first inclined tramway? The missing link emerged when a unique pair of 145-year-old photos arrived out of the blue at the Eastside Heritage Center. Tantalizing clues beckoned.

Rising to the occasion was a crack team of investigators, from railroad and maritime buffs to Newcastle coal-mine authorities — even a scuba diver. For several years, armed with metal detectors, diving equipment and hiking boots, they combed possible locations. Our “Then” photo supplied talismanic authority, but could its unique view ever be rediscovered amid a clutter of suburban roads and houses?

Their final answer: a resounding yes. Months of toil culminated in their discovery of an untouched, ivy-choked gully, originally carved out by the tramway, between Lake Washington Boulevard and Interstate 405. Celebrating this “Eureka” moment, they marked the spot with an enthusiastic (but figurative) X.

Eastside historian Kent Sullivan offers the following coda: “We’re just people who are willing to pick at threads. We pull on them without a clue as to whether they lead to an end. And what’s even more exciting,” he confesses, “is if there isn’t any end.”

Please join the Newcastle Historical Society at 7 p.m. Sept. 26, at Bellevue Library’s Room 1, for a presentation on this discovery and other rare images.

WEB EXTRAS

You can also check out our narrated 360-degree video, shot on location below Newcastle.

(Click and click again on any image to enlarge it)

(Published in Seattle Times online on Aug. 22, 2019,
and in print on Aug. 25,, 2019)

A willing suspension – from sky-high to high drama

By Jean Sherrard

Since 1972, Seattle summers have opened and closed with multiday festivals: Northwest Folklife on Memorial Day weekend, and Bumbershoot on Labor Day weekend. Hosted at Seattle Center, both events signal a change of seasons. They also inherit the legacies of the Century 21 Exposition (aka the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair), whose revitalizing alterations “Now & Then” has oft explored.

Our “Then” photo, looking northwest during the fair, features one station of the Union 76 Skyride, located at the former corner of Second Avenue and Republican Street. Traversing 1,400 feet and reaching the height of a six-floor building, its bucket-shaped orange and blue cars provided a bird’s-eye view as their overhead wheels rolled above the grounds. When I experienced the still-operating ride two years later, the three-passenger limit meant my father stayed behind while my mom, little brother and I floated and gloated.

Built by Von Roll Iron Works of Switzerland, then the world’s largest producer of aerial tramways, the Skyride became one of the fair’s most popular and — for only 50 cents — affordable excursions. (Union 76 gas stations offered buy-two/get-one-free tickets with every fill-up, recalls historian Alan Stein.) The Skyride’s southern station also stood only steps from the Monorail.

Visible from the Skyride, the Seattle Playhouse — built for the fair in only 34 days — beckoned from Mercer Street. The venue showcased national and international acts, from the Julliard String Quartet and Japan’s Bunraku Theatre to the Pacific Ballet and Hal Holbrook’s one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” Reportedly, Holbrook suggested it as the perfect location for a repertory theater.

The newly formed Seattle Repertory Theatre took up Holbrook’s challenge in November 1963, fronting inaugural productions of “King Lear” and Max Frisch’s “The Firebugs.” Original troupe members included Marjorie Nelson and a young John Gilbert, later stalwarts of the local acting community. (Nelson married prominent architect and preservationist Victor Steinbrueck, neatly squaring the circle.)

In the early 1980s, the Skyride’s northern station bowed to what we might call a theatrical suspension of disbelief, when the Rep departed the aging Playhouse to create state-of-the-art digs on a nearby corner lot. As an aspiring actor, I witnessed this vision beginning to assume reality when I was fortunate to be cast in two plays in the inaugural season.

The result has, like the World’s Fair, become a gift to Seattle. Through the decades, by showcasing a steady diet of star-studded, groundbreaking and world-class theater, the Rep has, like the Skyride, become a high-wire act.

(To learn about Bumbershoot’s early years, check out our 2001 video history BumberChronicles. Also, my 1980s radio adaptation of Don Quixote for NPR features actors Nelson and Gilbert)

WEB EXTRAS

Check out further details in our Seattle Now & Then 360 video.

To hear a snippet of our Globe Radio Repertory adaptation of “Don Quixote”, featuring Marjorie Nelson and John Gilbert, click here. Marjorie delivers a lovely performance as Quixote’s concerned housekeeper Maria and John portrays Father Pero Perez, a long-time friend, with all the mastery you might expect. In this introductory scene, Maria approaches Father Perez to inform him that her master has returned from another delusional adventure and plead for his help. Both actors knock it out of the park.

The back story here might also be of some interest. In 1984, after being injured (a torn hamstring) at the Rep while playing Charles the Wrestler in “As You Like It”, I decided to move into radio production.

With partner John Siscoe (owner/operator of the Globe Bookstore in Pioneer Square), I wrote an adaptation of “Don Quixote” and together we pitched it to NPR Playhouse. Our subsequent productions appeared through the early 1990s, and were largely funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. We were fortunate to work with some of the finest actors in the country, most of whom were based in Seattle.

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Aug. 8, 2020
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on Aug. 11, 2019)

Suffragists provide ‘proof of life’ for the good fight

By Jean Sherrard

In real life and in the movies, “proof of life” is an oft-used trope in which kidnappers pose a hostage grimly holding up a newspaper’s front page. This week’s astonishing panorama of suffragists, unearthed by researcher Ron Edge, uses a publication to provide proof of a different sort: the life of a movement.

Nearly 70 women and a handful of men lined up a century ago, with mostly stern faces that might reflect not merely the conventions of unsmiling portraiture, but also their years of struggle to secure a fundamental right of democracy. In a note on the back of the photo, they are identified only as “Women suffragists circa 1915.” Two clues, however, provide more precision.

At far right, a partially obscured sign for Wilson’s Modern Business College places us at Second Avenue and Stewart Street (the terra-cotta-clad two-story building from 1914 is being replaced this year by a high-rise). The other pointer is that women are holding up four copies of the March 18, 1916, edition of “The Suffragist,” the weekly newspaper of the Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage, founded in 1913 by activist Alice Paul and published in Washington, D.C.

The paper’s cover depicts the suffrage opera “Melinda and her Sisters,” staged as a benefit for Paul’s Union at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. None other than Broadway headliner and movie actress Marie Dressler — who, 17 years later, played the title role in “Tugboat Annie,” a film made in Seattle and loosely based on the life of Thea Foss, founder of Foss Maritime — played the operatic lead.

The long campaign for women’s suffrage, however, had not been merely an Eastern affair. By 1896, four Western states — Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho — had voted to authorize the franchise. Efforts in Washington languished until Nov. 8, 1910, when the state’s male voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to our state constitution, giving women the right to vote here, and reinvigorating the national debate.

California followed suit in 1911, with Arizona, Kansas, the Alaskan Territory, Nevada and Montana soon to follow. But hidebound Eastern and Southern states proved resistant, so Paul rallied her members to travel the pro-suffrage West for six weeks and whip up enthusiasm.

Luminaries of the tour included Harriot Stanton Blatch (daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Florence Bayard Hilles and Elizabeth Selden Rogers, “speakers known throughout the country for their personality and power.”

In Seattle, the “Suffrage Special” tour took flight. “Visiting Suffragist Joyrides in Aeroplane … Scatters Tracts,” bubbled a front-page Seattle Times headline. The story explained: “The doctrine of ‘Votes for Women’ reached its apex 1,400 feet above Seattle when Miss Lucy Burns … flew over [the city] in [Terah] Maroney’s beautiful flying yacht … and scattered handbills.”

(A prescient side note: One year earlier, Mahoney had taken William Boeing on his first flight, after which Boeing told his partner George Westervelt: “There isn’t much to that machine of Maroney’s. I think we could build a better one.”)

The women’s Seattle tour stop did not disappoint. A crowd of 1,500 packed the Moore Theatre on May 1 for rousing female oratory. Proclaimed Selden Rogers, “The force of women is needed in the land for peace, strength and righteousness.”

The next morning, the envoys gathered for a boisterous pep rally at the University of Washington, where they were welcomed to Meany Hall by Henry Suzzallo, UW president. (Today, the microform collection of the UW library named for him houses the entire seven-year run of “The Suffragist.”)

In the afternoon, a downtown luncheon took place at the New Washington Hotel, now the Josephinum Apartments. Our “Now” group photo was staged just around the corner.

By 1920, requisite states had ratified the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote (though many women of color remained disenfranchised even after the passage, legally or because of discriminatory practices). In 1923, Alice Paul became the first drafter of the Equal Rights Amendment. The fate of the latter might well lie in the wisdom and spirit embodied in our “Now” photo.

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the “now” prospect and compare it with the “then” photo, and to hear this column read aloud by Jean, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Thanks to Clay Eals for painstaking identification of the participants in our “now” photo (from left). We have included only the names we know. Please help us fill in the gaps!

Allison Feher; Alyssa Weed; Leah Litwak; Assunta Ng, founder, Northwest Asian Weekly; Michelle Merriweather, president and CEO, Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle; Sheila Edwards Lange, president, Seattle Central College; Sadiqa Sakin; Marie McCaffrey, co-founder and executive director, HistoryLink; Jessica Forsythe; Lily Wilson-Codega, director, Seattle Office of Intergovernmental Relations; Lisa Herbold, Seattle City Council member; Teresa Mosqueda, Seattle City Council member; Lorena González, Seattle City Council member; Courtney Gregoire, Port of Seattle commissioner; Sally Bagshaw, Seattle City Council member; Debora Juarez, Seattle City Council member; Jenny Durkan, Seattle mayor; Pramila Jayapal, U.S. representative, Seventh District; Debra Smith, CEO, Seattle City Light; Christine Gregoire, former Washington governor; Michelle Gregoire; Mitzi Johanknecht, King County sheriff; Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Council member; Claudia Balducci, King County Council member; Constance Rice, former vice chancellor and senior chancellor, the Seattle Colleges; Emily Pinckney; Karishama Vahora; Maqsud Nur; McKenna Lux; Nura Abdi; Jessica Finn-Coven, director, Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment; Pat Griffith; Kathryn Tyson; LaNesha DeBardelaben, executive director, Northwest African American Museum; Mariko Lockhart, director, Seattle Office for Civil Rights; Ann Murphy; Linnea Hirst; Kiku Hayashi; Julie Sarkissian; Dianne Ramsey; Amy Peloff; Connie Hellyer; Dave Griffith; Joanna Cullen.

We continue this week’s Extras with a slight mea culpa. Two photos were taken on July 2nd – the first just prior to some delayed arrivals. We reassembled for a second portrait, but lost a few participants in the process. Here’s a version of that earlier photo:

A big thanks to all who joined us for the repeat!

(click to enlarge photos)

By Jean Sherrard

My great-grandfather, Arthur Manvel Dailey, arriving in Seattle in 1888, soon found work in the coal mines northeast of Renton. His sweetie (my future great-grandmother Agnes Johnson) was a schoolteacher in distant Ballard. Family lore tells of the arduous round trip from Newcastle to Ballard each Sunday, but for an ardent young suitor a few hours of travel were fair exchange for the weekly allotment of kisses.

And yet, were it not for a 40-mile stretch of “small, grimy, seemingly insignificant” pioneer railway, asserts historian Kurt E. Armbruster in his colorful latest book, “Pacific Coast: Seattle’s Own Railroad”, my ancestors’ romance – not to mention a growing young city’s fortunes – may have been much dampened.

From their arrival in 1851, early settlers knew that hopes for a profitable future rode an iron horse. Arthur Denny said he located on Puget Sound believing “that a railroad would be built across the continent to some point on the northern coast within … 15 or 20 years.”

Over the next two decades, however, those expectations were dashed by a number of obstacles, including conflict with native peoples, slumps of the economy, and the U.S. Civil War. In 1873 came more bad news. To Seattle’s dismay, the Northern Pacific Railroad sited the terminus of its cross-country line in Tacoma, leaving the Queen City isolated on her Elliott Bay throne.

But as railroads languished in King County, another economic engine built up steam. Immense seams of coal, pushed up by the Seattle Fault, had been discovered by the mid-1850s, and the foothills east of Lake Washington soon became teeming hives of activity. “In the nineteenth century,” says Armbruster, “coal was king … and Seattle had coal” – indeed, one of the largest coalfields on the west coast.

Vast shipments of “black gold” were readily snapped up by energy-hungry San Francisco to support its industry and transportation. But the convoluted, Herculean transport from coalface to waiting sailing ships in Elliott Bay took long days and cut deeply into profits.

Seattle’s citizens, stung by the rebuff of big rail, conjured an ingenious solution: build a railway that incidentally provided King Coal with a profitable route to market. And on May 1, 1874, thousands of eager Seattleites assembled to do just that. On that single day, a mile-long stretch of rail bed was cleared along the base of Beacon Hill for the somewhat presumptuously named Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad, eventually renamed the Pacific Coast Railroad.

In the end? Rails that, although never extending much further east than Black Diamond, shortened the mine-to-dock transport from days to mere hours. As a result, Seattle – and Grandpa Dailey – realized benefits that endured for decades to come.

WEB EXTRAS

Click through for a narrated 360-degree video of our Black Diamond ‘then’ photo, shot from the ‘now’ location.

Also, check out a video of Kurt E. Armbruster’s lecture at the Black Diamond Museum.

Anything to add, rail fans?

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on June 6, 2019,
and in print on June 9, 2019)

From ‘the hideous remains’ of the Great Fire, a new and improved Seattle rises

By Jean Sherrard

Thirty eight years after its founding, Seattle catapulted to worldwide attention via reports of catastrophic destruction.

The June 6, 1889, fire that incinerated more than 120 acres and nearly 30 blocks of downtown occurred on what might be called a slow news day. Only one week earlier, a burst dam in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, had swept away more than 2,200 lives, shocking the nation (in response, generous Seattleites pledged $576 for flood relief). The fire that leveled the wooden business district of our pioneer town – although it caused no fatalities aside from a Panglossian “million rats” – was also featured in newspapers across the country.

Within days, a New York Times headline read: ‘The Great Seattle Fire … It May Be a Blessing in Disguise.” Seattle land tycoon Henry Dearborn, visiting the East Coast, predicted: “The fire has cleaned out all these [tinder boxes] which were a constant menace to the city” but soon would be replaced “by fine, fire-proof structures.” Seattle residents enthusiastically agreed.

At first, however, hometown papers adopted a gloomier tone. The morning after the fire, the Seattle Daily Press succumbed to purple prose: “Besides the smoking, tomblike ruins of a few standing walls … people are left living to endure with sheer despair … blackness, gloom, bereavement, suffering, poverty, the hideous remains of a feast of fire.”

Yet the same morning, 600 citizens gathered at the surviving Armory on Union Street between Third and Fourth avenues in a display of civic gratitude and confidence. The crowd cheered the news that arch-rival Tacoma had offered aid and succor, as had San Francisco and other cities and towns. When some suggested that aid pledged to the Johnstown homeless be diverted for Seattle use, the crowd shouted, “To Johnstown! Let it go to Johnstown!”

Echoing through the Armory was a commitment to “pull all together” and “rise like a phoenix” while constructing a new city of brick and stone. Streets would be widened and leveled, while a fervent appeal was made to “Seattle Spirit.” On Saturday, June 8, Post-Intelligencer headlines affirmed: “A New Seattle Will Arise … Sweet are the Uses of Adversity.”

Operating from tents, local businesses prepared to rebuild. Impresario John Cort, having reopened his burned-out Standard Theater under a canvas big top, featured a joke that brought down the house: “How’s business?” asked the straight man. The comic replied, “Intense!”

The pun proved prophetic. In less than two years, Seattle’s population nearly doubled to almost 45,000, and 3,500 new buildings arose, mostly in the devastated core. Voters authorized a more dependable city water system, and a municipal fire department formed. Thus, just in time for the 1897 Gold Rush, a small pioneer town reintroduced itself as an ambitious young city.

WEB EXTRAS

For a good time, click on through to our spoken word 360 video.

Anything to add, firebugs?   A few off fires.  We will be restrained.

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(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on May 30,, 2019,
and in print on June 2, 2019)

130 years ago, poor planning added fuel to Seattle’s Great Fire

By Jean Sherrard

Great cities often have burned to the ground, some over and over again until they got it right. New York, Boston, Chicago and London were reduced to cinders yet repeatedly rebuilt. The cruel lesson: Invest in incombustible masonry and stone, or pay the fiery piper.

Young, aspiring Seattle learned that lesson at 2:30 p.m. June 6, 1889, when Swedish immigrant John Back, 24, overheated a glue pot in a cabinet shop in the basement of the wooden Pontius building at Front Street (now First Avenue) and Madison Street.

From the Post-Intelligencer: “I was about 40 feet away,” said Mr. Kittermaster, a fellow employee, “and I saw Back seize a pail of water to throw upon it. I shouted for him not to do it, but [he] seemed excited and danced about with the pail before he dashed the water.” The hapless Back recounted, “I run and took the pot of water … and poured it over the pot of glue, which was blazing up high. When I throw the water on, the glue flew all over the shop into the shavings, and everything take fire.”

In minutes, Seattle’s first steam fire engine arrived but had trouble finding the source of the flames through the billowing smoke. In a miscalculation of planning, downtown hydrants had been planted at two-block intervals, with hoses a block too short. Led by Mayor Robert Moran, crews fought a valiant but losing battle. Overburdened city water mains lost pressure. Streams from the abbreviated hoses eased to a trickle.

At First and Marion, in the basement of the Dietz and Mayer Liquor Store, whiskey barrels exploded, fueling the flames, which spread quickly to nearby saloons. By late afternoon on this hot, blustery day, the entire Denny block was a raging inferno.

Against a cacophony of steam whistles and pealing church and fire bells, homeowners and business owners raced frantically to save possessions, loading up wagons and retreating up to First Hill, south to the tidelands and even out onto the doomed docks.

Post-Intelligencer editor Thomas Prosch wrote, “For a couple of hours after the fire crossed Yesler, the spectacle was a magnificent one, the flames rising high in the air … while the noise of falling walls, the crackling, the occasional explosions, the shouts, added to the flare and heat in making the scene a memorable one.”

Seattleites watched that scene with horror and fascination as their firetrap of a city burned. In 12 hours, the downtown business district — 29 blocks and nearly a square mile — had gone up in smoke.
Amazingly, no one died, though it’s estimated the fire did $20 million worth of damage, in 1889 dollars.

Next week: the aftermath, and the phoenix arising from its ashes — a Seattle that rapidly learned the lessons of brick, sandstone and an abundant water supply.

WEB EXTRAS

Please click on through to our 360 video of the current location plus a spoken word version of the column.

Anything to add, les pompiers?

As usual dear captain – a jumble or a farrago of fire – a few more repeats from the time and/or the event.

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WE RETURN NEXT WEEL WITH MORE FIRES (scattered) & RUINS 

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on May 9, 2019,
and in print on May 12, 2019)

Bolstering a booming city by transforming its landscape

By Clay Eals

For those who may doubt the potential for documentary photography to enter the realm of art, we submit this stunning panorama, looking north toward downtown Seattle in 1916.

Elements of this are expressive, ephemeral, even ethereal. This is in part because two beloved and glowing touchstones of our past – the Smith Tower (far right, completed in 1914 and for decades fondly known as the tallest building west of the Mississippi) and Sears Roebuck Tower (second from right, completed in 1915, becoming the Starbucks Center in 1997) – take a backseat to Seattle’s rapidly evolving industrial backbone on the splayed flats of the lower Duwamish River. It’s a plain that we now call SoDo.

We see no people, but evidence of their existence abounds. The chief subject, barely afloat in the foreground, is a small, sturdy freight boat, which the Webster & Stevens photographer may have showcased to symbolize an even earlier time when seafaring was the primary mode of commerce and connection for a city defined by its water.

Today maritime remains a robust force, competing and collaborating with cars and trucks, trains and planes. But here the lonely vessel stands nearly marooned by the ebbing of the tides and the flow of profiteering that sought to bolster the booming city by transforming its landscape.

What was once a mass of muddy marsh from West Seattle to Beacon Hill was being relentlessly filled in, starting 20 years prior, with the remains of the downtown regrades as well as from the straightening, widening and deepening of Seattle’s only river (named for its native Duwamish tribe) and the creation of Harbor Island. Thus was the city’s typical cloud cover increasingly mixed with plumes of pollution.

Affirmation of this industrial bustle is embodied here by Northern Pacific tracks – one full of cars, the other full of weeds – entering from the southeast, with some tracks curving right (north) to the Stetson & Post lumber mill, marked by sprays of white smoke. The mill had its beginnings in 1874 and relocated from Dearborn Street in 1915 to its East Waterway site. Moving left (west), we also see two massive freight-storage terminals at Hanford and Lander streets.

Moving farther west in this spectacular vista, we see the busy Barton & Company, packer and distributor of “Circle W” mutton, lamb, ham, bacon and byproducts (slogan: “Eat Less, but Eat the Best”).

So why is this ex-swamp called SoDo? The contentious origin, hilariously detailed in Dan Raley’s fine 2010 history book “Tideflats to Tomorrow,” boiled down to geography. It means South of the Dome. What dome? The short-lived Kingdome (1976-2000), on the site of today’s CenturyLink Field. Did we say ephemeral?

WEB EXTRAS

For even more great history, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Anything to add, salty dogs?

Absolutely! Here, in chronological order, are seven clippings from the Seattle Times online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column. Click on any clipping to enlarge it. –Clay

(click to enlarge photos)

In the year 2000, Kodak announced that consumers around the world had shot more than 80 billion photos, setting a record. Yet that record has been exponentially broken. Last year alone, nearly 1.5 trillion photos were taken (some 4 billion per day), mostly on smartphones to share on social media. Our yearly total comprises more than all of the photos taken in the 150 years before this millennium.

As a result, entire categories of photography are disappearing. Itinerant street photographers no longer offer portraits for pennies, wedding shoots are in steep decline, and postcard photographers are few and far between.

Among the photographers featured in this column over the years, J. Boyd Ellis looms large. A former high school principal in Marysville, he bought the Photo Art Studio in 1921 in Arlington, his hometown. For more than 50 years, he and his son Clifford traveled the state, capturing photos of stunning vistas and local curiosities (such as hollowed-out stumps large enough to squeeze through in a Model T) to sell as postcards to tourists and locals. Prolific collector John Cooper, with a stock of more than 5,000 Ellis cards, explains, “No one covered the state like Ellis, because he was no specialist. He went everywhere.”

This week’s “Then” photo, taken in 1942, soon after the United States entered World War II, boasts some of Seattle’s finest mid- to high-rise commercial structures from the city’s boom years of the 1920s. The four-story Great Northern Railway Building (right foreground) and its across-the-street neighbor, the 15-story 1411 Fourth Avenue Building, are Art Deco masterpieces, completed in 1929. Designed by brilliant, eclectic architect Robert Reamer (who also created Lake Quinault Lodge and Yellowstone National Park’s Old Faithful Inn), they gracefully anchor the Central Business District. The often-glazed terra-cotta-clad buildings include the 10-story Gothic Revival Fourth and Pike Building (1927) at the far end of the block, and the landmarked Joshua Green Building (1913), peeping out just opposite. Keen-eyed readers also will note the “US 99” sign affixed to the lamppost at lower right, evidence that before the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Highway 99 poked along Fourth Avenue.

Standing recently at this vantage, I happily rediscovered this Seattle treasure: a downtown block that had hardly changed over the past 80 years, increasingly rare in our rapidly morphing city. Emphasizing the point, just over my right shoulder (and out-of-frame), at the southeast corner of Fourth and Union, the uniquely “sloping” 58-story Rainier Square Tower is under construction. Upon completion in 2020, it will be the second-tallest building in Seattle. No doubt its visage will be shared many thousands of times in the coming months — and perhaps in a postcard!

WEB EXTRAS

To explore our 360 video view of the same location, click here!

Anything to add, compadres?

Jean, your’s is a splendid essay revealing this elegant block on Fourth Avenue, and Clays’ attentions to last Sunday’s Eastside landmark was sweet as well.  Add to these expository lessons  in fine journalism your arching optics  at the corners we feature and who can resist?  I confess that the Eals and Sherrard additions to these weekly explorations  are welcomed by this ancient mariner who is now more often  resting at the dock by the bay.  Thanks for this new vigor.   There is still so much to cover and uncover and our citizens are everadding to it.   Thank-goodness for the two of you.   May you continue your explorations for at least another 37 years.    Sincerely, Paul Lewis Charles Dorpat

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(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on April 25, 2019,
and in print on April 28, 2019)

‘North Bend’s Famous McGrath’s Cafe’ stopped traffic — or maybe that was the stoplight

By Clay Eals

One way to make yourself famous is to declare yourself to be. That’s not merely a modern maxim. A case in point is this 1948 view looking west toward “North Bend’s Famous McGrath’s Café” along what used to be U.S. Highway 10 through downtown North Bend, 30 miles east of Seattle. This 20-foot-tall neon sign was so massive that it required a rooftop superstructure to keep it in place.

Jack McGrath, an entrepreneur from the Southwest, built his eponymous eatery in 1922, expanding it in 1926 to a second floor with a 45-room hotel that was conceived by the same architects, Bertram Stuart and Arthur Wheatley, who designed the Bergonian (later Mayflower Park) Hotel and Marlborough and Exeter House apartments in Seattle.

McGrath sought both to enthrall locals and captivate the curious who passed through the upper Snoqualmie Valley lumber berg on their way to and from the Cascades.

The canny promoter used ads in the North Bend Post to reassure parents: “Proud to say we have 16 feet of soda fountain with lots of hot water for glass washing … If your daughter or son is dancing at McGrath’s in the evening, we want to assure you that they are in as good environment as when at home.” To reach motorists reading the more regional Seattle Times, McGrath touted delights east of the mountains (“It’s apple blossom time in Wenatchee … Nature puts on its annual show!”) as well as his town (“The Gateway to the Winter Playgrounds”).

The lure of cross-state travel took off, of course, with the early-century advent of the motorcar and the development of an automotive route over Snoqualmie Pass, which had been graded and graveled by 1915, straightened and widened in the 1920s and 1930s and, by 1942, following the 1940 opening of the Mercer Island floating bridge, paved and opened as a four-lane highway.

At the behest of locals insisting on a safe way to cross what became Interstate 90 to get from one side of the town to the other, a traffic signal was installed on July 1, 1965, just to the right of our “then” image, one of only a handful of such vehicle-stoppers along the length of I-90 from Seattle to Boston. Cars regularly jammed up at the light (on one Memorial Day, they stretched 13 miles east of North Bend and endured a two-hour delay) until a bypass opened in 1978 one-half mile southwest of this scene.

The thought of such bottlenecks likely doesn’t occur to most of the tens of thousands of motorists and truck drivers zipping along Interstate 90 and bypassing North Bend today. But it might have put a smile on the face of Jack McGrath.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?

Sure. Below are some of the source materials for this  column. It’s fun to see what newspaper ads looked like so long ago. –Clay

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The illustrations we looked for are among the thousands that as yet have not made it over from the old Mac to the NEW.   Instead, and with some confessed regrets, we will have to restrain our extras to a few clips that did make it over, ones that brush the sides of the east side on the old Yellowstone Highway that could lead you to Key West and Trinidad and even Moscow.  

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CERTIFICATE of MOFA MEMBERSHIP.  (Ron Edge design)

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(click to enlarge photos)

Many of the landmarks included in our “Now & Then” stories have appeared in these pages more than once, with instructive changes. This feature is a fine example.

This week’s “Then” photo, which looks northeast from the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Washington Street, is a fine example of themes with variations. In our decades of recording “performances” here, the stage of this intersection has brought along five such encores. There are six repeaters, if we include the Yesler Way viaduct over Fourth Avenue in the count. And we should.

Seen here on the far left of the featured photo at the top, Yesler Way is a landmark that keeps on giving. The first pioneers soon discovered and followed it as a native path between Lake Washington (near and before the big lake’s Leschi Beach was named) and Elliott Bay (near Pioneer Square or, if you prefer, Pioneer Place).

Many of us have long memories of this feature’s centerpiece, the Grand Union Hotel. We noticed it first with our young eyes as a dilapidated and then-deserted landmark built across Yesler Way from Seattle City Hall at 400 Yesler Way. Mayor Wes Ullman was the municipal hall’s savior around 1970. Here (in the week’s featured photo) it is mostly hidden behind the old hotel, although parts of the hall’s ornate corners reach above the hotel. Staying with the featured photo, that’s the top-heavy tower of the old King County Courthouse, upper right.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Jimmy?  Yes Jean, we have Jimmy yet to add, but cannot find him.   Ron and I will be none too pleased if we discover that you have again been hiding Jimmy with another of your practical jokes.  And this prank of your’s is much too practical for it is Jimmys parents whom we have to pay off with no-charge Jimmy-sitting sessions every time you sequester Jimmy who by now loves this hide and seek far too much.  Remember his parents want him home by 5pm.  But now we give up and prepare to climb the stairs to Nighty-Bears (copyright:  Bill Burden.  Bill was last seen living near the hip Nevada City, California and running a small business there leaning on one of Bill’s long loves, Coffee.   Ask him sometime about its history.) .  We hope to return later today with more relevant clips for this week’s blog, but now, again, we walk the stairs.

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Shooting around town yesterday, I drove along the waterfront and found an extraordinary scene. Here are a few shots of viaduct demolition…

(click to enlarge photos)

In 1909, Seattle’s first World’s Fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, attracted to the University of Washington campus (home to the exposition) many of the citizen types for which local pioneers had long yearned.

The eastern investor-developers – if they would just listen to the siren about ‘manifest destiny’ – were constantly coaxed to the far Northwest with deals such as cheap land and natural resources waiting to be dug. The selling worked. Increasingly, the eastern bankers — and their suburban officers in San Francisco — gained a developing appreciation of the proven Northwest advantages. If they could be persuaded, the well-heeled visitors would lay down big cash. With Seattle’s booming population, it was not merely lumber, fish and minerals that locals hoped to sell, but the land itself, and the human touches that adorn it — including, eventually and inevitably, skyscrapers.

This old story of high-rise vanity, often repeated, features armaments and typewriter manufacturer Lyman Cornelius Smith and banker-developer James Hoge. The two paused to chat and interrogate each other while visiting the fair. Both had acquired a good amount of Seattle real estate, and each was coyly itching to raise a namesake cap to his credit: Seattle’s tallest tower.

In preparation for their private excesses, the happy hucksters wondered what might be a proper height limit for such a building. Both agreed that Seattle’s first tower, the 1904 Alaska Building, was perhaps for something like eternity a passionate-enough expression of raw loft, an example set above its own corner at Second Avenue and James Street that did not need to be exceeded.

Of course, we now know who won this trickster’s vanity game for fat wallets. Because the two landmarks ascended only two blocks apart, we still can count the sum of their floors from the corner of James Street and Second Avenue. It wasn’t the banker named Hoge who did the excessive reaching. Rather, it was Smith, with our gleaming terra-cotta-tiled Smith Tower, professed when it opened in 1914 to be 42 stories high. To this count, we prudently will add: “more or less.”

Hoge started the competitive lifting first, and he built fast. The Hoge building’s steel frame, shown in our “Then” photo, was completed to its top 18th story in 1911. It took a mere 30 days to raise the frame, which at the time was claimed a record. This speed gave Smith plenty of time to assemble his own frame, to “something like” 42 floors. (It has always been a local question: “How do you count the floors in the Smith Tower’s pyramid top?”)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Not quite.  I’m going nighty-bears (copywrite Bill Burden) first.   Perhaps some clips later today.  Ron’s already long asleep. Or is he up and giving the bears a bath?

(click to enlarge photos)

(Published in Seattle Times online on March 25, 2019,
and in print on March 28, 2019)

Signs of commerce in an earlier Seattle boom

By Clay Eals

When the Lumber Exchange building appeared here last September, it stood as a mere backdrop as we focused on a panoply of political signs hoisted by labor protesters parading on Second Avenue.

In today’s view (at the top) looking southwest at the intersection of Second and Seneca Street, and taken in mid-1904 or soon thereafter, one year after its completion, the appeal is different. Instead of the street, we are drawn to the collection of commercial signs above storefronts and in the windows of this stately, seven-floor sentinel.

Each name evidences the bustle of business in the midst of a population boom in the first decade of the century that solidified Seattle’s status as the Northwest’s dominant city. Enterprises inside included lumber sales, reflecting the name of the edifice, and ranged from the trades of apparel, insurance and steel to the practices of law, dentistry and government.

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Builder J.A. Moore took pride that inside the alluring entry arch could be found a vestibule and hallways finished in white onyx and marble quarried in northeastern Washington. This stonework, the Seattle Daily Times reported, “is not excelled in beauty by the marbles from the most famous quarries in the Old World.”

Two ground-floor shops competed by contrasting cut-rate with couture. From its coveted corner spot, Singerman & Sons – descended from venerable Toklas, Singerman & Sons, later morphing into MacDougall’s department store – promoted the high life. In advertising “top-notch” men’s spring and summer suits for $15 to $25, the firm proclaimed, “The fabrics are of the purest wool, in grays, browns, stylish plaids and fancy mixtures. The tailoring is of the highest class, insuring faultless fit.”

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South of the arch, under awnings, and accompanied in our “then” by a horse-drawn wagon and newfangled motorcar, The Leader dry-goods store promoted periodic “fire sales” of damaged goods as low as 10 cents on the dollar. Its slogan: “Seattle’s Great Price Fighter / The Great Cheap for Cash Store.”

Sauntering down Seneca to the building’s below-grade floor, we find the prow-shaped sign of Max Kuner, “Nautical Optician,” a beguiling name for an esteemed watch and chronometer maker who dealt in items and services related to the sea. Five years later, in 1909, Kuner joined a covey of experts accusing explorer Frederick Cook of fabricating that he had reached the North Pole. As Kuner told the Times, “I think it’s a fake.”

A further allusion to today’s headlines came on Nov. 13, 1903, when the Timesreported that federal inspectors, based in the Lumber Exchange, had intercepted a train to take into custody 30 people from Japan who had “surreptitiously” bypassed immigration law to enter the country from British Columbia. The inspectors interrogated their captives in a two-room office on the building’s second floor. The Times ended its story: “It is not yet been determined what will be done with the Japanese.”

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WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lumberjacks?  Mostly more lumber Jean.

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Our February snow, like the October 1937 deposit photographed here on University Way, was something greater than one of our more-typical winter teases that rush to mush. In these two years — 1937 and 2019 — a white blanket packed a few inches above our chilled cityscape and stuck around.

Portland, 170 scenic miles to the south, received its heaviest snowstorm in 31 years in 1937. Hundreds of autos were stalled, truck farmers were unable to reach Portland’s markets, and all the city’s schools were closed. It was called a “child memory event.” Here in Seattle that year, at the northwest corner of University Way and 55th Street, University Heights School (built in 1903) also was closed, but only for one day.

The photographer’s preferred subject here is surely the two husky trolleys busting north through the half-foot-deep drifts on “The Ave.” These municipal carriers had a mere three years left for rolling on rails before being scrapped when the city’s street railways were replaced with buses and trackless trolleys, most of them in 1940.

Portland’s greater 1937 storm taught its transit team an unrequested lesson: It was neither streetcars nor gas-powered buses that worked best in the 1.-foot drifts that fell there. It was the trackless trolleys and rolling rubber.

Many of our readers, I suspect and hope, can identify the high-rise immediately to the right of the charging trolleys at the Seattle scene’s center. The modern 15 stories (some sources claim 16) of Art Deco design were dedicated in 1931. The hotel was built and financed with a community bond drive during the early years of the Great Depression.

There was then plenty of time for Edmond Meany, the hotel’s namesake professor, to prepare one of his speeches for the dedication. Meany’s sententious offerings were typically well-stocked with school and neighborhood history.

Meany lived with his wife near the north end of the University Bridge and so also near the hotel. He died in 1935 in his campus office while getting ready for a class. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, his name was removed from the front door of the hotel. It is now called the Hotel Deca — not for Meany and his stories, but for the landmark’s modern design. Meany also had a campus hall named for him.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?

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This past Feb. 2, 2019, I joined a line of ticket holders stretching round the block to enter the Viaduct via the Seneca Street off-ramp. Tens of thousands paid their last respects and bid a fond farewell – for some, a hearty good riddance – to the double-decked edifice admired for its spectacular, egalitarian views of Seattle and its waterfront. Gray skies clearing, the Hello/Goodbye Viaduct Arts Festival lined the upper deck with art exhibits, performers and food trucks.

WEB EXTRAS

Just a quick shout out to Clay Eals, the editor of our new book Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred. (Incidentally, good news about the book. Out of an initial 5,000 copies, we are down to several hundred. And most of those sales were made, due to the book’s tardy arrival from China, in the month before Christmas!)

Together, Clay and I took that final commute along the Viaduct and recorded it for posterity; we also walked the Viaduct on its last pedestrian weekend, and among the photos I shot was this special portrait of Clay. Above his left shoulder (riding a Market pig) is the Terminal Sales Building on the corner of First and Virginia where his parents first met and courted. According to Clay, were it not for that structure, he would not exist!

And below, a few more Viaduct snaps to round things out….

Anything to add, spelunkers?

Alas my old MAC has at last failed me. Ron has gone to bed long ago, as is his steadfast habit of health, and so we have no Mac-machine to take Old Mac’s place. Perhaps next week we will get MAC going again, or more likely replaced with the new MAC purchased for me and given to me at my 80th birthday last Oct. 28, 2018. And so meanwhile Ron and I are not in this run. — Paul

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Dear Pacific readers, both this week and next Jean Sherrard, our ‘repeater’ will also serve as our writer-researcher. Jean has been both climbing and covering the last days of our Alaskan Way Viaduct with his reaching pole and, as you will discover, his ready prose. Me? Because of something I ate, at my fresh age of eighty I’ll be ‘busy’ on the couch exploring my first vacation at The Times since I began this weekly service in the winter of 1982. Appropriately, perhaps, it is snowing. Paul.

Jean here, fresh from wandering an Alaskan Way Viaduct making its final curtain call, equal parts Irish wake and a celebration of new beginnings. A couple of minor mishaps at two major ribbon cutting ceremonies, separated by nearly 66 years, provide wry bookends to examine the nearly 66-year-long lifespan of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The first, on April 4^th, 1953, marked its triumphal opening. Built for $8,000,000 (yes, you read that right!), the new double-decker highway was expected to funnel 25,000 vehicles daily above the confused tangle of downtown city streets, alleviating Seattle’s increasingly snarled traffic, and providing ample room for an expanding population.

On a lovely afternoon in April, one day before Easter Sunday, Seafair Queen Iris Adams handed a Paul Bunyan-sized four-foot long pair of silver scissors to Mayor Allan Pomeroy, who attempted to cut the ribbon. It creased but would not cut. “Aw, come on!” the mayor exclaimed. D.K. MacDonald, the director of the Automobile Club whipped out his pen knife and adroitly sliced the ribbon in half to the cheers of the crowd.

This February 2^nd, dignitaries gathered again to celebrate the opening of the viaduct’s replacement, the double-decker Highway 99 tunnel bored out beneath the waterfront – a huge project of civil and civic engineering, dividing residents into conjectural camps: of views lost and gained, congestion abated or increased, a cityscape invigorated. Celebrants included past mayors, city and county council members, and Governor Jay Inslee, reputedly running for president. When the governor stood to address the crowd, however, his mic cut out. He improvised gamely, shouting at the top of his lungs, but his unamplified speech could scarcely be heard; nevertheless, minutes later, his smaller, sharper scissors separated the ceremonial green ribbon quite handily.

This week’s “then” photo was taken a day or two before the opening ceremonies in 1953. Amongst the three photographers pictured here, comparing their gear, are unidentified enthusiasts, snapping shots from an exciting new vantage. Behind them stands Smith Tower, then 40 years old, and still the tallest building on the West Coast (unsurpassed until the Space Needle in ‘62). At its base, the gleaming flat-iron Seattle Hotel, built after the Seattle fire of 1889 (70-plus years will pass before it is replaced by the infamous “sinking ship” garage in the early 1960s). And on the left, the Mutual Life Building, whose signage remains intact, still anchors a corner of Pioneer Square.

Next week, we spelunk into the Battery Street tunnel, soon to be filled with viaduct rubble.

WEB EXTRAS

Just for fun, I’m including several photos below from that last crowded walk along the Viaduct.

Anything to add, lads?  Here’s some modest relevances to your splendid captures on our esemplastic (momentarily) arterials.

postscript

Now at 4am on the Sunday (March 10) that your paper is delivered and so also our blog that dances with it, something is sprained.   The company from which we rent the software and the platform for the blog has made some changes since last I used it a week ago. I missed the warnings and instructions in changes, which they, no doubt, consider improvements and most likely are.  I, however, abide in my pre-digital fog and will need to take some instructions for an oxtogenarian’s (spelling? – please correct the spelling on your own.) fumbling.  And while you are at it look up the latest definition of esemplastic.) I suppose it is a fortunate coincidence that next week’s feature is a continuation of our viaduct reflections.  And so we’ll move what we have missed and messed this weekend to a long and playful time of it all next weekend.

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Here, side-by-side in one photograph, stands a three-part lesson in the changes at the southern slope of Denny Hill between about 1890 and Jan. 17, 1905 — the date consistently inscribed on this and a dozen other photographs uncovered by persistent explorer Ron Edge.

Most were recorded within two blocks of this unidentified photographer’s prospect on the north side of Pine Street between First and Second avenues. Many of the subjects are readily identified, especially the Denny Hotel, standing at the top of the hill’s north summit. Both grand and picturesque, the hotel is the centered landmark in six of the 13 photographs, self-evident even in the midst of the smoking regrade’s unfiltered commotion.

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Many more intimate subjects — like polluting steam shovels and spraying water cannons — are also readily found in several of the photographs. In our “Then” photo, there is a wagon on the left and a cadre of regrade watchers gathered far left at the southwest corner of Second and Pine.

You would, of course, be correct to treat the Ice Age remnant standing like a wedge of chocolate cake at the center of the scene as its oldest part. This monolith is part of the pioneer claim marked by Arthur Denny, one of the city’s first founders, as his Third Addition to Seattle. During its regrading years, standing remnants of the hill were sometimes described as “spite mounds” that were kept free of development — including cutting — by owners objecting to the special taxes levied for the regrade’s public works improvements.

We are left with the bookends of our “trinity” on Pine Street. The Griffith Hotel, far left, was an early and impressive addition to what would become the city’s retail district. It is depicted lifting its four stories at the southern base of Denny Hill in the 1891 bird’s-eye view of Seattle. The four floors of the landmark brick Colonnade Hotel, showing far right, were first built in 1900. They survive, reaching west of Jean Sherrard’s “Now” photo to the corner of Pine Street and First Avenue.

Should you care to play hide and seek with all 13 of Edge’s Denny Regrade prints dated Jan. 17, 1905, you will find them below, along with additional captions and other photos from the same “corner” of the Denny Regrade that have reached us through other collections.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  JEAN this Ron Edge and I now hope – still hope – late in the morning.   Check back – perhaps.

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LOOKING SOUTH on Second Ave. OVER THE HILL from Bell Street.

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below; PARISIAN DOPPERLGANGER by B. LOMONT (please indicated number and size and what you are willing to pay.)

Related N&T features.

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Here we agree, again, with the caption composers for the Museum of History & Industry’s archive.  Using a variety of sources, including city directories, tax records, and company signs, the MOHAI investigative staff dates this waterfront “Then” print to 1920 and so nearly a century ago.

As I remember it, the Museum’s need for skilled interpreters of the mostly donated holdings in their photographic archives was multiplied a few thousand times in the early 1980s (1983) when Pemco Insurance purchased the Webster and Stevens Studio (WS) negatives – most of them glass – for a philanthropic gift to the museum. Its nearly 44,000 images are a fine record of Seattle’s growth, primarily thru the first half of the 20^th Century. This week’s “Then” feature is included among those thousands.

From Washington Street the studio photographer looks north on Railroad Avenue — even above it. To his or her advantage the sensitive recorder reached this elevated position by climbing the city’s then nearly-new trestle for carrying municipal trollies south along the waterfront.  The riders were mostly headed to the many wartime manufacturers built above the tideflats and beside the man-made Harbor Island and its waterways. Or like many of those who were using the Alaska Way Viaduct until it closed for good on January 11, they were heading for their West Seattle homes.  A reminder: here we cannot see the  1919 trestle because the camera is looking north thru the widest part of Railroad Avenue, which was north of Yesler Way. The viaduct was already closed for a week when Jean Sherrard snapped this “Now” photo with his 21-foot monopod on January 18.  Clay Eals, the West Seattle resident-activist who served as the driver for Jean’s repeating was in mourning.  Clay remains a faithful promoter of the viaduct’s elevated views, but now only in nostalgia and shared pictures and stories. (You can follow Jean and Clay’s last day trip along the trestle on YouTube and on our blog listed below.  They used a 360-degree video camera.) I am especially fond of the triangular three story red brick building that stands out upper-right in Jean’s repeat as a Pioneer Square survivor.  In 1920, it was the home for the Truck Tire Company.   The sign shows far-right in the shadows of the building’s east façade.  This odd and curving cut was first drawn in the 1880s for a right-of-way along what was then still a mostly imagined waterfront litigated by competing railroads.   It was then cutely called the “Ram’s Horn.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Yes Jean an explanation or even perhaps an apology for not being able to fully ‘assemble’ the extra helpful photos for this exploration of an earlier viaduct than the one we are tearing down now.  Like the latter-day viaduct, THIS dear old MAC is exhausted and so we are about to replace it not with a tunnel or tube but with a new MAC that was paid for in part by donations of friends celebrating and ‘in service” at my 80th birthday party held on October 28 last (truly my birthday, indeed) at Pioneer Hall on the shore of Lake Washington.  We hope to return to this feature and stock it with what we planned for it, unless we have moved on to another preoccupation.  That is typical, perhaps, for you dear reader as well.

Ron Edge, on his super-machine (not a mac) will here put up a few relevant past features as it his helpful custom.

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Below: looking east on Washington Street from the curve on the Railroad Ave. elevated (for trollies) from which the featured photo at the top was recorded looking north.

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Here we say good bye to MAXINE my mac who did well for the last decade, but now, it seems no more, or too little to carry on. We hope to be back back NEXT weekend with MAXINE’S youngest brother MAX.

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Here is the “Pink House” beach landmark for which Alki Beach locals – especially those near the sand – feel protective.  In our “then” photo the Pink House is only nearly pink.   Our “then” is another “tax  photo” from the Depression-era’s WPA (Works Progress Administration) photographic inventory of every taxable structure in King County.  Many properties were exposed as tax-dodgers by the preliminary 1936 aerial survey of King County.

This dappled construction site could not escape attention in 1938, the date inscribed on the tax photo.  (The scribble, center-left, reads like May 6 “1936”, however, from other evidences, it is certainly 1938.)  The cottage is getting its conversion from a beachside Cash and Carry store into a wind-shakened residence.  In 1927 it was called “The People’s Grocery.” Somewhat mysteriously “GRO,” the first three letters of “grocery,” have been cut in half and separated for the home’s new six window exposure to the northwest on Alki Beach.  The sign’s shipboard remnants have been, it seems, salvaged by the carpenters for the new façade.  Clay Eals, West Seattle neighborhood activist wonders if the shuffled letters survive under the home’s namesake pink paint?  (Its pop name was vox populi – inevitable.)

Who painted it pink? Most likely Susan B. Griffin, a lead gardener at the University of Washington arboretum who lived in The Pink House at 2130 Alki Avenue for nearly 40 years.  Her niece Katy Griffin remembers that the master gardener “kept a beautifully maintained home and garden. It has been painted pink ever since I can remember. . . It was decorated with carefully chosen antiques, with beautiful glassware on the window sills that trembled every time the metro bus would go by. My aunt delighted in entertaining, and hosted many gatherings.” Griffen was also an exceptional landlord for her other properties in the Alki area and “treated her tenants like family…She kept a vegetable garden for all of her neighbors to plant and harvest.”  It was an inspiration for the community’s P-Patch Program.

The Pink House’s tax card (far above) dates its construction in 1909. According to West Seattle’s committed community of historians this waterfront bungalow was built for Granville and Henrietta Haller’s family, pioneers who in 1883 completed Seattle’s first and largest mansion, Castlemount, on First Hill’s summit near James Street and Broadway.  In ironic hindsight, the footprints for both Castlemount and what became the Pink house were chosen in part for their proximity to the sporting life (fishing and hunting) of Seattle’s pioneer “Indian-fighter” Granville and Henrietta Haller’s family.

Thanks to West Seattle researchers Greg Lange, Clay Eals and Matt Vaughan for their help in following the history of the Pink House.  Vaughan the long-time proprietor of West Seattle’s Easy Street Records was also the Pink House owner for a dozen years until 2010.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellas?  For you and your’s we shall try.

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Carrying a camera during the summer of 2006,  I started my daily Wallingford Walks, two to three hour circle treks thru the neighborhood from our front door on Eastern Avenue.  I carried with me both tested intentions and temptations to lose some weight while walking within intimate odiferous range of Dick’s Drive-In on NE 45^th Street. After four years of walking in the increasingly familiar circle I’d chosen I lost only a few pounds but gained hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots. With studied care I repeated –over and over – about 300 of my subjects, animating them through four years, 2006 to 2010, of their four seasons.

Here from several prospects near Eastern Avenue and 42^nd Street, we share one of our Wallingford Walks subjects: two landmark English Elms recently lost to the voracious Dutch Elm disease that first reached North America aboard a timber-hauling steamer in the 1920s.   (They are named “Dutch” for the nationality of the scientist who first described them.). Here in King County the elm bark beetles which spread the disease apparently first arrived in Seattle by wing from the east shore of Lake Washington– they can fly over 15 miles between rests. The root-hungry cousins that consumed Seattle’s elms came it is figured from Clyde Hill .

The elms were long prized far and wide for their service as street trees.  Tall and tough, if given care in resisting the beetles, elms can endure.  We used several aerial photo-surveys in figuring the approximate age of these two at their demise two years ago.   The earliest Seattle aerial from 1929 shows no trees on this parking strip.  Six years later they appear but then by surprise disappear sometime between the 1946 and 1952 aerials.  Not knowing the age of these two when first planted, we accept the early 1950s.

Neighbor Philip Wells counted that the hard-to-calculate exposed rings in the felled trunk reach into the seventies.  Wells notes that we do not know how long their first years were cared for in a nursery.  For comparison, it is estimated by expert arborists that of the 15,000 elms still standing in England’s Brighton, and Hove and East Sussex several are over 400 years old.

A memorial was made with a slab cut from the trunk of the most easterly of the two elms.  It rests on the parking strip with a print attached of the tree streaked by the blizzard of January 4, 2009.

BELOW: THREE GLIMPSES OF THE LOST ELMS

WEB EXTRAS

Just for fun, I’m including a few snowy shots of Green Lake from this evening. Enjoy the snow!

Anything to add, tree lovers?  I feel I can promote Ron’s love of healthy trees.  He was a student of landscaping at the U.W.  I am a liberal tree hugger who once but briefly lived in a carefully joined treehouse where doughnuts were regularly enjoyed with  green tea.

IN CONCLUSION

RON EDGE and I bring forward again more evidence of the Wallingford Walks I took most days from 2006 into 2010 when my lower knees – I call them my shins – were getting increasingly sore as my rich diet meanwhile advanced arthrightous in my knees.  (I am thankful for my knees.  It is something we seniors talk over with sympathy and tea..  One of the goals of all my walking was animation.  I carried no tripod but still managed to repeatedly record certain favored subjects – about 200 of them – during my years of nearly daily walks.  A few years back for the MOHAI’S LAST SHOW at their Union Bay location, Ron Edge helped me with making the first animations of about 25 of them.  Twenty-two are featured directly below.  And they include two sequences that concentrated on the neighborhood’s elms that then still stood at the southeast corner of Eastern Avenue and 42nd Street.  (If you want to skip to the elms they begin on numbers 25:09 and 28:00.  It is a not so long animation of about 40 mins so they appear beyond the half-way mark.) Trust me the jiggle in these animations can be improved later with the application of new aps meant to stabilize chosen subjects without correcting the animator’s spelling.

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For this week’s “repeat” Jean and I are including for somewhat sentimental reasons a third visit to the same Belltown (or North Seattle) intersection of Second Avenue and Bell Street.  The oldest of these three looks south thru the intersection when the neighborhood was shaped by Denny Hill.

(BELOW:  As this feature first appeared as the 52nd Chapter of Seattle Now and Then, Volume One, first published in 1984.)

This is WAS the northwest “corner” of the hill since razed: Denny Hill. The difference in the elevations recorded here sometime in 1902 or 1903 and now was a mere one foot.  This part of the Denny Hill regrade along Second Avenue began in 1903.  It is a rare look into the neighborhood when it was still a hill.

John Hannawalt of Old Seattle Paperworks (still in the Pike Place Market) first showed it to me in the late 1970s. I was quickened. While I knew nothing about it I wanted it to be at least part of Denny Hill, the Seattle hill had been episodically removed between 1876 and 1931.  And it was. These two-plus blocks between Bell and Lenora streets were razed to their present elevations between 1903 and 1908.  With the photo in hand, finding the intersection came

quickly, largely because I liked the bowls of beans, rice and cheese served at Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, still here at the southeast corner of this intersection.  Of course Mama was not in the Webster and Stevens Studio photo ca. 1902, but it was on my diet in 1978.

With the help of a jeweler’s hand-held magnifying glass I soon found the street name “Bell” on the telephone pole at the corner.  Standing above the corner, both in the photo and on my visits to Mama’s, were the three gables of the Wayne Apartments, a row built in 1890 and wonderfully still standing. I first published my “findings” in the Seattle Sun and it was on the evidence of that discovery that this newspaper first engaged me to write this feature in 1982.

The “then” in this week’s “repeat” pair probably dates from the late 1930s or even 1940, the year that, city-wide, many of the street cars were replaced with buses or trackless trollies.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Some visits with a few friends from the neighborhood – extended.

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We are giving this wonderfully cluttered northeast corner of Second Avenue and Spring Street a confident photography date of 1902.  A look at the corner from 1901 does not include the two-story brick building with its five basket-handle windows irregularly arranged on the second floor. Both photos, though — from 1901 and 1902 — show the Singer Sewing Machine building, seen here at far left.

Isaac Merritt Singer patented his foot-pedaled sewing machine in

1851, the year that Seattle’s pioneer party landed at Alki Point, unfortunately with neither a sewing machine nor a camera. I remember well from my mom’s home the Singer brand’s red “S” trademark. (It is seen here printed several times on the storefront.)

Now I am wondering whether the Gothic ornamental parts topping those second-floor windows might have been chosen by the building’s owner or architect to act as variations on the stained-glass window standing tall in the facade of Olympic Hall, behind the Singer building.

The Hall’s stock name is printed above the window. Without color, it is almost impossible to decipher from the sun and rain-bleached sanctuary first dedicated on Aug. 24, 1873, by Plymouth Congregational Church.

Like many other Seattle churches, the crowded Plymouth Congregational moved after the city’s Great Fire of 1889. It was a mere three-block move to a new and monumental redbrick sanctuary at the northeast corner of University Street and Third Avenue. After its abandonment, the clapboard church here at Spring and Second soon lost its tall spire. However, the old church was not neglected. Rather, it was well-used through its remaining 15 years as Olympic Hall by a variety of rent-paying educators and entertainers: both secularists and spiritualists.

We will conclude by noting which post-pioneer human needs were met in these storefronts in the early 1900s, before they were flattened in 1907 for the first four stories of the Baillargeon Building. (On June 9, 1907, its owners tooted in The Seattle Times: “We are asserting a claim to having completed a structure in the retail business section of Seattle, the superior of which cannot be found on the North Pacific Coast.”) To the right of the sewing machines, the row continues with a hat blocker and cleaner; a tailor; a watch maker with an optician; and, at the corner, what is probably a cafe.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?

Selections from the blog that are  now fitting touches on  some of the  subjects above.

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This winter week we share another snap from The Big Snow of February 1916. Except for Puget Sound’s prolonged pioneer blizzard in 1880, the 1916 snow bounding was the deepest in our city’s history. For any media, including the thousands of box Kodak’s in the hands of Seattle citizens, the four-day blizzard of 1916 was a sensational although slippery subject.  Like motorcars at the curb, cameras were by then nearly commonplace on Seattle mantles.   The absence of cars here on First Hill’s Ninth Avenue is best understood as related to the drifts and the absence of any snowplowing in these blocks by the understandably unprepared municipal streets department.  A team of horses pulling a covered wagon can be found at the scene’s center heading west on Columbia Street from its intersection with Ninth Avenue.  For snow like this teams were favored.

For this snap an unaccredited photographer looks north on 9^th Avenue with her or his back to James Street.  This First Hill prospect may have been reached from Pioneer Square aboard a James Street Cable car  – assuming that the Puget Sound Traction, Light & Power Co. cable cars were then still plowing through the drifts.   Or the photographer might have lived nearby.  First Hill was Seattle’s first neighborhood of accumulated wealth, which by 1907 would have often included cameras in the libraries.

Since 1907 the grandest interruption of Seattle’s skyline has been the Roman Catholic St. James Cathedral at Marion Street and 9^th Avenue.  Before February 3, 1916, St. James had three landmark elevations including the two Renaissance Towers and the cathedral’s centered dome.  On February 2nd, it lost the dome.  The architects who examined the crashed dome lying on the chancel floor concluded that the sanctuary’s roof was five times stronger than needed to hold even the heavy wet snow left by the blizzard.  The engineering culprit was a weakness in one of the dome’ steel supports.

For comparison we have also included a print of the Cathedral dome before its collapse and crash.  The damaged roof showing with the featured photo can be compared with the intact one, which although splendid in its soaring outline was, we learn from Maria Laughlin, the current director of stewardship and development for the cathedral, a handicap to the cathedral’s acoustics. What the crash took from the church’s eye it gave back – miraculously? – to its ear.  After the crash of its sound-swallowing dome, St. James has become a revealing space for concerts and much kinder to its organ and choir.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, brethren?

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During the last year of World War Two, Margaret Pitcairn Strachan, a Seattle Times contributor, made a wise choice for a weekly serial subject.  She named it “Seattle’s Pioneer Mansions and some of the events they saw.” It was an illustrated weekly feature with copy inches about five times longer than this one.  The author interviewed many of the surviving pioneers – most often their children – and the families often held cherishes photographs, which they shared with Strachan.

One of my earliest mentors; Lawton Gowey, the Seattle organist, historian, and collector of Seattle historical ephemera, first introduced me to Strachan’s series letting me take his perfectly preserved collection home to my copy stand.  Thru my now 37 years of writing this feature for PacificNW Magazine, I have used many of the 52 features Strachan researched, wrote, and illustrated for The Times.  The series began on September 3, 1944.  The Times’ front-page headline that Sunday was encouraging. It reads “Germans In Disorderly Retreat as 2 Yank Forces Enter Belgium.”

Strachan’s last feature on mansions appeared on August 26, 1945.   By her study of the then surviving array of Seattle’s historic homes – and their stories – Margaret Pitcairn Strachan (“Peg”) has made a profound and lasting contribution to our understanding of Seattle History. Our readers would be correct to conclude that both Jean and I strongly urge them to seek-out the Strachan originals (all 52 of them) with the help of the Seattle Public Library’s copy of The Seattle Times Archives.  (If you have a library card, a Seattle Public Librarian can lead you in its use both on line and over the phone.  If you have no card now is a good time to get one.)

The small mansion nestled here in a copse of its own maples was built in the early 1870s at the northwest corner of James Street and Third Avenue by one of Seattle’s truly powerful pioneer couples: Bailey and Barbetta Gatzert. The couple’s plan to follow the move of Seattle’s more affluent citizens up First Hill to newer and larger mansions was abandoned. By the year this photograph was taken shortly before the Third Avenue regrade in 1906 Bailey had died in1893. Babetta then built a retreat on the east shore of Lake Washington and called it Lucerne after the Swiss lake that she and Bailey admired (In this Alpine line they also raised Seattle’s first Saint Bernard).  At the turn of the century the Gatzert home was converted into shops.  A row of them running north on Third Avenue from the corner with James Street is easily seen here.  (The print has a metropolitan French name “Bloc de Lyon,” lower-left corner, because the major investors in the Gatzert block were French citizens.)

The accomplishments, businesses and charities, of the Gatzerts were so extensive that we will list a share of them here over the next day or so.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellas?

Potpourri of past N&T features

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When Ron Edge, one of Seattle’s busy and insatiable heritage explorers, first shared this panorama with me I was both excited and thankful.  I have remained so. Ron found it among about a dozen other pioneer Theodore Peiser photos from the 1880s that were recently added to the Seattle Public Library’s growing collection of free on-line photographs. This is a nearly panoramic glimpse into the Seattle neighborhood that was then a mix of our Chinatown and Skid Road.

Ron corrected my first hunch that this was photographed from the southwest corner of Occidental Avenue (when it was still named Second Avenue) and Mill Street in the mid-1880s – probably late 1884.  However, while my date was at least close to being correct, my place was too low.  Rather, this Peiser contribution was recorded from the top floor, or perhaps roof, of the showpiece Occidental Hotel, which by the time it was enlarged to fill the flatiron block between Second Avenue, James Street and Yesler Way in 1887-8, was only months short of being reduced to rubble during the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.  All else showing here (this side of the bay) was also destroyed.  For more temporal confidence another clue rides on Seattle’s street railway, which started running its horse-drawn cars on Occidental Avenue north from Washington Street in 1888.  We can see neither the rails here nor their horse power.

As might be expected, there is an abundance of surviving stories that were “written” to the sides of these streets, including the 1885 expulsion of the Chinese living here.  They were pushed out of town by that day’s anti-immigrant populists (we might call them).  The intersection of Second Avenue (Occidental) and Washington Street, seen here on the right, was the well-sauced center of Seattle’s Skid Road.  In the 1884-85 city directory I counted nine saloons busy above the tidelands between Yesler Way (Mill Street) and Commercial Street (First Ave. S.).  A few names include the Arion Beer hall, the Elite, the Flynn, the Idaho, the Sazare, and the United States – all of them wetting their appetites beside Washington Street.  (Please note, Murray Morgan’s engaging classic, Skid Road, An Informal Portrait of Seattle, is again in print, and now with an introduction by The Seattle Times’ own and also historic book critic, Mary Ann Guinn.)

We will begin another short story with a question. Does the two-story structure, right-of-center, at the southeast corner of Occidental and Washington (and also the next structure standing beyond it to the south), seem to be leaning to the right (west)?  We think so.  This was the soggiest part of the pioneer peninsula named Piner’s Point after Thomas Piner, a quartermaster on the U.S. Navy’s exploring and surveying Wilke’s expedition of 1841.  Mrs. Frances Guye’s a-kilter (if we are straight) boarding house was photographed in 1872 when it sat about two feet higher than it does here ca. 1884.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, paisans?

Potpourri of past N&T features

Links to previews features:

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On September 24, 1959, City Hall’s busy Board of Public Works easily approved a temporary display of Thor, the Air Force’s Intermediate Range Ballistic missile named for a Nordic deity with a not always righteous reputation and a rather ignitable temper.   The faithful to scale public relations copy of the Air Force’s Intermediate Range Ballistic missile was lifted above University Plaza, still one of the central business district’s rare public places.

About two stories of stairs led a line of curious visitors up one side of the shiny Thor to an open door and on to a platform that eight feet later reached another open door leading to the stairway designated “down.”  It was a command that some of the visitors were no doubt pleased to obey,   And yet while walking that plank the explorers were, of course, safe, and kept free of the BM’s liquid fuel (aka gas), stabilizing gyros, and “pay package” of merely one nuclear bomb.

By the fall of 1959 Thor had been running through nearly three years of flight tests that included several crashes.  Meanwhile both the Navy and Army were working with their own Cold War responses to Russia’s surprising success two years earlier with the three weeks of world circling by Sputnik, a shining metal sphere with antennas.  I recall the “Sputnik Surprise” of October 1957 very well and I suspect that many readers will also remember that the satellite that began the space age was about the diameter of the two basketballs that were famously dribbled side-by-side by one member of the Globe Trotters.

More than for its citizens, the Seattle appearance of Thor was engineered for the about one thousand delegates to the 14^th Annual Convention of the National Defense Transportation Association, a happy group of munitions dealers and military brass that represented well what former President – and general – Dwight D. Eisenhower named “the military industrial complex.”  Unfortunately the primary show-time for Thor before the three-day convention was foiled by a forgetful air force sergeant who had the keys to the missile’s two doors, but was off-duty.  Besides the disappointed military brass, among those invited to walk the eight foot plank thru the full width of the Missile that special day was Donald Douglas, of Douglas Aircraft, the builder of the Thor.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, compatriots!  Welcome home to Green Lake Jean following your applauded performance on the morning KING TV show.

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This roof-top prospect taken by a Webster and Steven Studio photographer is rare.  Never have I come upon another First Hill portrait recorded from the King County Court House roof, with the exception of a few snapshots that look south over Jefferson Street and onto the public building’s adjoining Court House Park.  The original roof of the King County Courthouse was a mere Five stories although its footprint filled the block bordered by James and Jefferson Streets and Third and Fourth Avenues, and still does.

We may treat this as a panorama of First Hill’s mid-section extending from James Street, with its slots for the street’s namesake cable railway on the far right, to the surviving dome of the Methodist-Protestant church at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Marion Street, on the far left.  A missing dome or cupola is St James.  The Cathedral’s twin-towers at Marion Street and 9^th Avenue are on the far right horizon.  The dome crashed to the floor from the weight of the snow collected on the church’s roof in during the Big Snow of 1916. Central School with its own two towers breaking the First hill horizon above Sixth Avenue and Madison Street was removed for the building of the Interstate-5 Freeway in the mid-1960s.

The first five floors of the Court House took five years to complete, between 1914 and 1917.  By 1917 here were plenty of high-rise structures in the neighborhood including the then still highest building west of the Mississippi River: the Smith Tower holding 42 stories above the northeast corner of Jefferson Street and Yesler Way.  Other surviving towers include the Alaska Building at the southeast corner of Second Ave. and Cherry Street and kitty-corner to it the 18-story Hoge building.  There are others.

We found a year for the pan in the Ringling Bros Barnum and Bailey billboard advertising facing James Street. It is second-from-the-right in the broken line-up of Foster and Kleiser signs seen here directly above the crown molding of the Court House..  We found the year, 1917, on-line, and it fits.  The circus was in town on Monday, August 20, time enough after the Big Snow of 1916 to patch the roof.

The clutter of clapboard flats on the right of the featured photo is the gift of the relatively cheap lumber sold to the city’s many developers and the booms in its population and so also its housing in the late 1890s and after.  The rough edges cut by assorted street regrades leave some scars around the center of the pan, which is also well-lined with parked cars.  By 1917 family cars were nearly affordable.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, paisans?  More of the same Jean, meaning pixs that fit to some extent the who-what-where-when and even the why (sometimes) of the featured photograph.

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Links to previous Now & Then post

Jean here. It’s been a bit of a wild ride getting our books in from China – not to mention the nearly two weeks they spent languishing in US Customs! But they have arrived and we’ve just filled all our standing pre-orders (nearly 200!).

If you’d like us to pop a signed, inscribed copy in the mail tomorrow morning – or early next week – please order now. Media mail seems to be fairly efficient in and around King County, but I’d be worried about sending anything through the mail after this coming Tuesday. So if you’ve been waiting for the right time to order, and want a signed book to arrive before Christmas, here’s your chance.

If you have concerns about mailing, you can still attend a book event. Paul and I will be presenting and signing at the Bothell Library this Sunday at 2PM. And then one last event at the University Bookstore on the Ave between 3-6PM on Saturday, December 22.

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With a longing for television, a medium they did not yet know, or a train ticket to California, the thousands of Husky fans squeezed here within the limits of Seattle’s Times Square, settled instead for the The Times Automatic Football Player.  Displayed to the masses from a hut attached to the northeast corner of the Times Building, the Player was a creation of this newspaper’s Sports Section.  It showed the vital statistics of a game on a gridiron – somehow. Variations of the player were also used for baseball, prizefights and elections.

On the far-right of this week’s featured Webster and Stevens Studio photograph (at the top), you can see a cross-section of the Player’s “projection booth” (we will call it) attached to the elegant terra-cotta tiles of The Times Building,  The year is either1923 or 1925. We are not yet sure.  Both the candidate games were with the California Bears, and played on the University of California’s Berkeley campus.  The Seattle Times for November 16, 1923 promised with a banner headline across the paper’s front page that witnessing the “big game reproduced play by play on the Times Automatic Football Player” would be “the next best thing to going to Berkeley.”

For the November 14, 1925 game with the Bears, The Times estimated that “an estimated 80,000 Seattle fans crowded to listen as the key plays were shouted from an upper window of the Seattle Times Building.”  With this report the newspaper also provided a photograph of “a young woman using a megaphone to describe the game to the Seattle fans.”  That doesn’t seem so “automatic.”  The detail of a panorama of Times Square under the crush of Husky fans seems similar enough to the pan featured here that we will now choose 1925 with something resembling confidence.   (Just now in media res our dancing diplomatic advisor Gavin MacDougal advises us, “Further evidence that today’s ‘then’ is from 1925, not 1923, would be in this column:  Nov. 20, 2010.   There the first line says that the Medical Dental Building (which dominates the “then”) was completed in 1925.)

Cliff Harrison, the Sports Page Editor, did not see the game from a newspaper window, but rather from the Bear’s stadium. When the Huskies won Harrison was more than excited.  He concluded his report, “Tears roll down my check, but I can’t help it.” In the next day Sunday Times Harrison rejoiced, “The Golden Bear is no longer the champion of the West, the uncrowned king of football.  On top of the world tonight sits a silver-tipped husky, the grandest of all dog kind, the symbol of a football leadership for the University of Washington, which today defeated California 7 to 0.”  The editor played with the purple part of the team’s colors.  “They are supreme in the West, great, big-hearted strong-muscled men of the Northwest, men who broke the heart of what was once the champion, men who knew no defeat, who knew no fear as a great hostile crowd booed them for deeds they never did.”  The Times recommended that it would soon be time for Eastern Teams – like Dartmouth and Harvard – to “BOW DOWN TO WASHINGTON.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?

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Perhaps the date, May 16, 1950, scribbled on the unsigned note accompanying this early portrait of Northgate’s “Miracle Mile”, may be slightly off.  The view looks north from the center of Seattle’s first shopping mall during its, it seems. late work-in-progress.  On the far left a temporary footprint map of the center is propped up to face east across the center’s ‘Main Street’ to the Bon Marche, largest and most polished of the malls structures.   Built for three million dollars, the Bon was the new shopping center’s ‘anchor’ retailer. Most of the Mall’s lesser, but still large, parts kept to Quonsets, one of World War 2’s architectural preferences. Pre-fabricated Quonsets that could be easily assembled as pre-fabricated huts or expanded to the size of warehouses like the future Nordstrom Shoes, here on the left.  Northgate’s superlative Bon was never a Quonset.

Historylink, Washington State’s non-profit webpage encyclopedia of our state’s history, has the retail magnet opening on April 21, nearly a month before the photograph’s date claim.  “Designed by John Graham Jr., Northgate was the country’s first regional shopping center to be defined as a mall.”  The opening was shown on KING TV, then on the air for less than a year.  A Cadillac was given as a prize.  Some of the stores startled their shoppers with electric-eye doors.  A Christmas tree of world’s record size – it was claimed –  was raised above this Bon-fronting part of the mall.  It’s 212 feet were featured in Life Magazine.  The tree was captured with both day and night recordings for the Ellis studio’s state-wide distribution of “real photo” postcards. Ellis’s other Northgate Christmas card was captioned “World Largest Santa Claus – North Gate Shopping Center – Seattle Washington.” This Santa’s glorification does not seem to have been so truthful as that of the tree. Ron Edge, a frequent aid to this feature’s repeating, remembers, “Kids are still probably having nightmares from Northgate’s oversized Santa. With its menacing eyes it looked like a maniac.”

The Seattle Times for February 22, 1948 first reported that the “curtain of secrecy which has enveloped the mammoth project was pulled aside” revealing “the biggest suburban development of its type in the U.S.”   The term “mall” was most often used for the north-and-south center-line of the development.  In the early 1980s when I first began delivering freshly published now-then books to Seattle bookstores, I was thrilled to learn that running below the mall – the north-south center line of the by then lavish development – was an austere tunnel designed for speedy deliveries to Northgate’s many retailers, which then still included both chain and independent book stores.

From its start in 1950 Northgate showed an often wild popularity that stuffed its surrounding parking lots with thousands of visitors. It was a retail flood that would soon pain the established shops in the University District, Northgate’s competing retail neighborhood to the south.   Northgate’s many remodels created a covered and heated expanse of attractions. Besides the shoppers its comforts were used by seniors for winter walks, and exploring groups of teenagers practicing consumer – and human – development.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, shoppers?

1950

1952

1948

1950 

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There’s some arterial tension in this “then.”  Is the open and yet covered pick-up van on Occidental Avenue pausing with a full stop or advancing toward Yesler Way?  Is the driver trying to encourage the clutter of pedestrians to “move it” onto the Seattle Tacoma Interurban cars parked at their Seattle terminus?

This is nearly the center of Seattle’s skid road district.  It was a manly neighborhood and here in the fetured photo at the top it seems that it is all men who are boarding the parked common carriers about to head for Tacoma or some suburban stop on the way.

Skid Road was originally named for the greased logs that were laid to shoot timber off First Hill to Seattle’s waterfront mills. There survives remarkably – or distressingly – little pioneer evidence on where Seattle’s first skid road was constructed.  A convivial scholars’ debate endures between those choosing Washington Street and the more popular Mill Street, aka Yesler Way.  Whichever, the sliding log delivery most likely came close to crossing over this part of Occidental, a popular name for European immigrants who immigrated west to America from somewhere between Moscow and

Galway. Originating at Yesler Way, Occidental Street ran south into the then not yet reclaimed tidelands beyond King Street. By the time this busy street scene was shot, the neighborhood was long free of its slippery salmon oil and log deliveries.  (Again, we confess to not knowing the date for the featured snapshot from the circa 1920s,)

Many Asian merchants serviced the Skid Road district.  Seattle’s first Chinatown was just around the corner, east on Washington Street.  There were loan shops, barbers, oyster bars, and plenty of bar-bars where a free lunch might come with whatever drink one ordered – usually beer – and many of them.  Here professional bar bands competed for audio space and “keep the faith” souls with parading ensembles of Salvation Army brass players and drummers.  Adding to the percussion, the corner to the left rear (southwest) of the photographer was Seattle’s “Hyde Park” platform for protest, polemics and the occasional police riot.

Besides the Interurban cars, this cityscape is limited to two pioneer landmarks. The one that obviously survived on the right side of Jean Sherrard’s repeat, is the Interurban Building, the 1892 creation of the English-born architect John Parkinson who arrived fortuitously in Seattle six months before its Great Fire of June 6, 1889.  This red brick and sandstone Romanesque landmark was built for the Seattle National Bank, but after the Interurban’s completion from Tacoma to Seattle in 1901-02 it became the ticket office and waiting room for the Puget Sound Interurban Railway.

The wide façade facing south to Occidental Ave. from across Yesler Way is, of course, the still-mourned Seattle Hotel.  Like Parkinson’s bank it too was built soon after the city’s great fire of 1889. Seventy years later it was lost to the modern urges that preluded the Seattle Century 21 World’s Fair.  By comparison the strikingly puny “Sinking Ship Garage”, that replaced, it survives.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mes amis?   Weee

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GOOD MORNING to RON EDGE

Previous features of interest:

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For forty-three years – 1911 into 1954 – this elegant box of bricks and tiles, the Metropolitan Theatre, was among Seattle’s favorite attractions, a venue for many sorts of shows.  It was named for the Metropolitan Building Company, which held the lease on the University of Washington’s original campus. Pioneers first referred to the property as “Denny’s Knoll” for Arthur Denny, their founder-merchant-politician, that helped organize the giving of the knoll to Washington Territory for its first campus, and the state still owns its ten-plus acres.

Many of you are familiar, by photographs, with another ‘box’, the university’s first school building built in 1861 on this site.  It was adorned with a bell-fitted cupola for the waking of students and calling of classes. The façade was fronted with four classical ionic columns that looked west to Elliott Bay from its elevated knoll. You can still visit the original columns, which are preserved in the present UW campus’ outdoor Sylvan Theatre.  (Some may also wish to carry a flute, light incense and dance around them.)

After the University moved to its new and present Interlake Campus in 1895, the knoll waited another decade for the state to begin sharing its old campus with the expansion of the business district – for rents.  Many activist students joined nostalgic alums then pushing to save the school’s first multifarious hall, aka, the box.  The schoolhouse might have been saved with a move to the new campus or preserved at its original place on the old campus,  If the latter, it would have hindered Stone and Webster’s 1911 construction of the Metropolitan Theatre.  The northeast corner of the school’s first “box” overlapped the plans southwest corner of the Metropolitan Theater.  The fact is that in 1909, with a little moving of the theater’s footprint by its New York architects, Howells and Stokes, there was still enough room on the campus for both the elegant brick box and the cherished clapboard one.

This Webster and Stevens Studio portrait of the theatre at the top of this week’s feature is easy to date – within four days.  The clues, of course, are the posters pasted to the front of the theatre for promoting “Spring Maid,” a Viennese-inspired operetta on its west coast tour. Of course, It first stopped in San Francisco. While it was a light opera, the “Maid” was not a light haul, with a company of 94 and an orchestra of 35.  Tickets ran from 50 cents to $2.00.  The “Spring Maid” opened its four-day Metropolitan run on October 19, 1911. While it was the largest early performance to touch the Met stage, it was not the first event held there.  On October 12, a Columbus Day show was staged by the local Knights of Columbus, and aided by history professor Edmond S. Meany, surely the most prolific public speaker in the history of the UW.

Any sample of the international talents that took to the Met’s stage would include many plays and foreign films. The Swedish movie “The Girl and the Devil” was projected at the Met in 1946. Tennessee Williams’ play “Summer and Smoke” was produced in 1950.  Also that year, the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America performed at the Metropolitan.  Many members ate and slumbered at the Olympic Hotel that since its construction in 1924 had a grip on the theater (as shown in last week’s “Now and Then.”)  Byron Fish, the Times screwball humorist and reviewer, instructed the newspaper’s readers that “The S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.” was founded thirteen years before the bomb.  Its members are “pioneers in the nostalgic wish to return to pre-atom bomb days.”

The Met was torn down in the fall of 1955 to enlarge the Olympic Hotel’s ballroom and build a better front entrance on the hotel’s University Street side. After its demise, the Metropolitan began receiving a long line of nostalgic citizen press coverage.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Sure Jean.  While we are on the edge of exhaustion we know – at least by your reports – that you work even harder.   And here’s more of the same.   (We may proof-read later.)

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Here is another offering from the Webster and Stevens collection, held in the library of the Museum of History and Industry.  Early in the twentieth century Webster and Stevens moved their studio into the Seattle Times Building and handled the newspaper’s editorial photography. Consequently, I had some hope that I’d be able to date this contribution by finding it printed in The Times. (As I have noted before, The Times can be searched online through the Seattle Public Library.)  Nevertheless, while enjoying the pleasures of looking, I failed to find this photograph.  Perhaps Webster and Sevens recorded it for the Community Hotel Corporation, which successfully hustled the Olympic’s 1924 construction with bonds

invested by more than 3,000 citizens.  This local enthusiasm reminded some genuine old-timers of the ‘Seattle Spirit’ they had known in the late 1870s that supported Seattle’s struggles with what locals considered the neglect of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the competition with its company town, Tacoma.

Once the bonds started selling, the Italian Renaissance landmark went up with remarkable speed on acres that had been the first home for the University of Washington.  The Times enjoyed its coverage on what it called “the hotel of Seattle’s dreams.”  The construction began in earnest on April 1, 1923, on the 450-guest-room “hotel of its dreams.” The Olympic Hotel was built around the city’s by then cherished theatre The Metropolitan, seen at the top in the featured photograph.

The theatre was constructed in 1911 and closed in 1954 for the Olympic’s enlargement between its two wings. With its hurried construction, the hotel took on the elegant “dress of terra cotta tiles” near the end of February 1924, and by December 6, 1924, a dinner dance celebrated the opening of the Olympic, the city’s ‘grand hotel.’

I ordinarily travel with a sleeping bag and frankly know little of hotels.  For an informed opinion on the now Fairmont Olympic Hotel’s status among local hostelries, I asked Tamara Anne Wilson, a friend who is also widely experienced in the professional virtues of local hospitality.  From 1997 to 2003 Tamara kept several offices of her PR firm on the hotel’s twelfth floor. After naming and complimenting several other Seattle hotels, she concluded “there will never be anything like Seattle’s Olympic Hotel again. Valet, doormen and concierge that understand discretion, perfect classic martinis, comfortable seating areas that aren’t ‘trying too hard to be hip’.”

Finally, in the interest of ‘full disclosure,’ Tamara continues and concludes that in January 1960 when her father Lieutenant William Critch was preparing to ship to Okinawa with his bride of three months, Marlene Prosser, they got the order to leave instead for a preferred station in Hawaii.  The couple celebrated with dinner at Rosellini Four-10 and a night at “the” hotel.  The appropriate months later Tamara was born in Honolulu.  “The Olympic was conceived for the carriage trade.  I’m grateful I was conceived there.”

WEB EXTRAS

The creation of this column was documented by KOMO-TV’s Eric Johnson in an installment of his long running series, Eric’s Heroes. Thanks, Eric!

Anything to add, compadres?  Yes heroic Jean for you and your admiring platoon of fellow recorders (aka shutterbugs) we will pull free from the archive a few more features from the neighborhood often on the key subjects (hotels and theaters.)

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A note to readers: just a reminder that our new book, Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred, is available for pre-order now. Just click here, or tap the pre-order button on the right! Now back to our scheduled program…

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The first photograph of Lake Union recorded from Denny Hill was one of the many shots the famous itinerant Californian photographer Carlton Watkins made during his visit to Puget Sound in 1882. In spite of building an elevated platform on top of the hill to help him see and shoot the lake, only a glimpse of it is seen through a forest both selectively cut for the best lumber but also ravaged by a wind storm that flattened many of the trees on Denny Hill in 1879.

This Sunday’s feature (at the top) , was photographed in the early 1890s, looks north from Denny Hill to a Lake Union landscape dappled by a mix of virgin timber and pioneer construction. The Western Lumber Mill, the lake’s largest development, can be seen smoking at the south end of the lake. Built in the early 1880s, the mill escaped Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889 and overnight became the city’s principal supplier of the lumber that rebuilt what was already the largest town in Washington Territory.

In his caption on top at lower-left, photographer Frank LaRoche includes the name of his intended subject where he positioned his camera, and the address of his studio. With the help of other photographs, maps, and directories, it is possible to determine within a shout where LaRoche set up.  The best clue to LaRoche’s location is the Gothic one, right-of-center: the Norwegian Danish Baptist Church

at the northeast corner of Virginia Street and 6^th Ave.  The city’s Sanborn Real Estate Map for 1893 gives footprints for the city’s structures, including the church and the homes to this side of the Baptists.  From these footprints we may deduce that LaRoche was overlooking Fourth Avenue to the east.  While behind him, gleaned from other sources, early construction proceeds on the 400-room grand Victorian hotel, The Denny named for the city’s principle pioneer founder Arthur Denny.

On the evidence of another photograph, taken about 1904 by Asahel Curtis from nearly the same spot, but higher, possibly from a ledge or window in the Denny Hotel looking east over Fourth Avenue, the considerably more developed neighborhood sits in a late afternoon shadow cast by the hotel.  In three years the hotel

would be razed, along with much of Denny Hill.  By the result of another regrade that straightened Westlake Avenue between the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street as far as Denny Way in 1906-7, the Baptist’s tidy sanctuary, threatened by public works pruning, was sold to George J. Hodge, a developer who razed the Gothic landmark. Hodge paid the congregation more than $7,000 for their exposed corner.  Some of the largesse was used to build a new sanctuary near Denny Way and Yale Avenue, which I remember from the 1960s, in its last incarnation, as the BFD a pop music palace that sometimes featured psychedelic rock and roll.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Because you asked.

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Surely among those who take time to shape their opinions on architecture this façade of the Rhodes Store will excite some and alienate others.  For the latter, the building’s five-floor front may be too congested with ornaments.  I like them and have felt an enduring affection –- for a long as I’ve had a copy of the photograph —  for the playful front of this 10 Cent Store.  From 1924 to 1931 it faced east from the west side of Fourth Avenue where it sat two lots north of Pike Street. The store was named for four Rhodes brothers: Albert, Henry, William and Charles, mid-western farmers who moved to Puget Sound around 1890 to quickly become sibling-entrepreneurs in both Tacoma and Seattle. By 1900 they were flaunted as Seattle’s “leading tea and coffee house,” a success which should feature the Rhodes family in any history of Seattle’s preferred tastes.

The brothers’ first little Seattle storefront at 1325 Second Avenue, took a small part of the block-big Arcade Building. William was the manager of its bargain department although he was quick to explain, “We brothers have always worked together, pulled together financially and in business managements. Of course, we all look upon (up to) the big store Seattle knows as ‘Albert’s Store.’”  The oldest brother Albert and his wife Harriet managed the “big store” which with its organ in the lobby will certainly still be remembered by many locals. The big department store was built in the late 1920s with an enlargement of the Arcade Buildings’ north half, the part facing Union Street, between First and Second Avenue

Earlier while dreaming of dimes, and preparing to open the family’s economy bazaar, William promised “We will even sell a good brand of tea and coffee for ten cents a pound on our opening day.”  The door on Second Avenue first opened to the store’s10 cent assortment of dry goods, notions, furnishings, confectionary, china, glasses, kitchen needs and thousands of knickknacks on the morning of June 6, 1903.  Twenty-one years later the second Rhodes 10 Cent Store, pictured here, opened on the fifteenth of December, 1924. The Times liked it, reporting “The building presents some new ideas in the design of Seattle retail establishments . . . The exterior of the building is of Italian Renaissance Style, and is faced in glazed terra cotta.  One of the most striking features is the 24-foot arch recessed above the Fourth Avenue entrance, for scenic displays.”

The fair-weather mural framed here is one of only two photographs I’ve found of this ironically sumptuous 10 Cent store.  The other appears in this newspaper and shows the arch fitted not with a beach scene but a Christmas tree.  The Rhodes brothers second 10-cent store was short-lived perhaps from a combination of changing retail tastes, the sudden slam of the Great Depression in 1929 and an offer the brothers could not refuse.  In the late fall of 1931 the Seattle Gas Company signed a one million dollar twenty year lease to turn this ornate show box into the Gasco Building. The ensuing remodel stripped the Rhodes building of its ornamental pleasures (for some) to become the gas company’s center for billing and exhibiting modern appliances.  It first opened to the public in the spring of 1932.  The official housewarming party started at noon with KOL radio’s Kiddies’ Hour and the then “well-known Negro entertainers, the Deacon Jones Quartet.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, guys?