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A few weeks ago Jean and I were invited to the Washington Athletic Club (WAC) to give an illustrated lecture on how we go about delivering these weekly “repeats.”  It is Jean’s and my tenth anniversary – about.  With both text and pictures, I began this weekly feature in the winter of 1982.  Jean rescued me in 2005 when he started helping with the “nows.” By then we were old friends. Now he does all the repeats.  I both thank and need him.

The day before our WAC lecture, Jean took the opportunity of visiting the club’s roof, thereby extending his practice of illustrating Seattle from its high-rises.  This time Robert Laurent, our gracious host and the Club’s Senior Event Manager,  accompanied him.  This Sunday’s “then” is one of the three historical photos that Jean carried with him.  (The other two – or three – are included here below this introduction.)  None of them was named, dated or credited, although I suspect another old friend, Lawton Gowey did the recording.  Lawton also explored the city on its sidewalks and from its roofs, and he (since deceased) and I shared at least three abiding interests: London history, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and historical ephemera of Seattle, which we regularly exchanged.

Like any high-rise panorama, this one is both stacked and stocked with stories, of which we can only touch a very few.   First, far right in the “then,” the twin towers of St. James Cathedral (1907) transcend the First Hill horizon.  In the “now,” one of the two towers peeks through the slot of First Hill that is revealed between the Park Place Building (1972) and One Union Square (1981).  Left-of-center, its neighbor, the Two Union Square (1987-88) reaches fifty-six stories and is the third highest building in Seattle.  Together, One and Two hide most of the horizon revealed in the “then.”   

On the left, Eagles Auditorium (1924-5), home of ACT Theatre since 1993, fills the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Union Street, and to the east its terra cotta skin approaches the green glass of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center (1985-88).  From internal evidence the historical pan barely predates the Seattle Freeway section of Interstate-5.  Consequently, there is no Freeway Park, which in Jean’s “now” is knit with both the Park and the Center and the autumnal-toned landscape seen between the two Union Squares.  Instead, the “then” gives us a spread of the parking lots and small hotels that once sat on a few of the thousands of parcels of Seattle properties cleared for the freeway.

For a reader’s game of hide and seek, we will name a few more of the built landmarks that appear in either the “then” or “now” panoramas or in both: the Exeter, Normandie, Cambridge, Van Siclen, Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, now Town Hall since 1999, Horizon House, both Virginia Mason and Swedish Hospitals, the side-by-side Marlborough and Panorama, Nettleton, and – giving these away – the new blue and salmon colored Meridian Tower, which rises behind the spreading Electra apartments on the left.  The concrete Electra was built in 1949 as one of Seattle’s largest mid-century moderns and converted to condominiums in the 1990s.

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s a few more shots from the WAC rooftop:

And the WAC from below:

Anything to add, boys?  Yes sir.  First a now-then clip on WAC that we managed in 1999.  That we will follow with a harsh of features Ron Edge has flavored for the neighborhood.   We may conclude by reaching beyond these horizons with some pans we think classic, including at the bottom Seattle’s first, the Sammis 1865 pan of the pioneer town.

 

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A PANORAMA SAMPLER

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The oversized posters hanging in the first floor corner windows of the Wax and Raine Building, on the right, reveal the date for this look east on Jackson Street from First Avenue South.  (Granted, you can not read them at the print size offered here, but you can trust us.)  They promote the 1904 visit on August 24 and 25 of the Ringling Brothers Circus to Seattle’s exhibition grounds, located at what is now the High School Stadium in Seattle Center.  The circus came with one rhinoceros, two giraffes, and forty elephants. It was also the year that the earnest and still steady Wax and Raine Building first opened. 

In our featured photo at the top, the lonely man standing in the company of a fire hydrant on that same southeast corner of Jackson Street and First Avenue South might be adopted as a symbol or sign for this sturdy street.  Aside from a few hotel lobbies, there is little sidewalk commercial bustle here.  Jackson Street was then primarily stocked with wholesalers and manufacturers at home in new quarters built in the early years of the twentieth century, most of which survive.  Perhaps the man on the corner is headed north for the big bar facing First Avenue inside the Jackson Building, out of picture on the left.  It was the sudsy

home for Olympia Beer, the “it’s the water” that was Rainier Beer’s principal Puget Sound competitor.  The Jackson Building, construction in 1901 for the Capitol Hotel, is also distinguished by the loving attention it has since received.  Architect and preservationist Ralph Anderson restored the classical landmark in 1963.  It was the first renovation in what soon became a movement and a decade later the Pioneer Square Historic District.

Through its first half-century First Avenue South was easily the busiest retailing strip in Seattle and was appropriately first named Commercial Street.  After its largely framed four-block-run from Yesler Way to the tide flats below King Street was consumed by the Great Fire of 1889, along with all else in Seattle’s original neighborhood, Commercial Street quickly returned to its varied enterprises.  In the roaring 90s, following the fire, Jackson Street

was a generous contributor to Seattle’s skid road neighborhood of bars and cheap lodgings, especially on its south side where it nearly reached the King Street train trestles above the tide flats.  During the 1890s, Salvation Army street bands trumpeted concerts that competed with house bands in the bars along Jackson Street.  This sawdust row of cheap lodgings and obliging bars was razed to make way for the manufacturing and wholesaling brick neighborhood shown at the top.

Below: THE PLUMMER HOME at the NORTHWEST CORNER of OCCIDENTAL AND JACKSON IN THE LATE 1870s.

Within a block of this intersection in the 1904 Sanborn Real Estate Map there are five hotels, a flour and feed warehouse, a ship chandler, a second-hand store, several machine shops of various sizes, a shirt factory, a printing press, a rubber factory, three plumbers’ supplies, a candy factory, a photo engraver, a bakery (in the alley behind the Capitol Building) and a saw shop, the latter promoted by the billboard, shaped like a circular blade, that sits atop the roof, right-of-center.   The blade also appears above the roof of the Luna Park bound electric trolley below, circa 1907.  Note as well the Washington Shoe Manufacturer sign left-of-center and the Wax and Raine Building on the right.

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I’m going to deviate from our usual pattern and include a few photos from the Hands Around Green Lake event that just concluded minutes ago.

Anything to add, guys?  Certainly Jean.  Your “Hands Around Green Lake” diversion is most caressing.  Thanks much.   Living near the lake you have often shared some unique moments out of its vibrant life with us.  NEXT: Ron Edge has gathered an assortment of neighborhood features and strung them below.

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I imagine that among PacificNW readers many have explored this magazine’s namesake surrounds via its many adventurous roads and highways.  And I’m confident that among these explorers, several will have driven to within a few feet of this week’s featured subject, but then missed it.  Jean Sherrard estimates that he has made about twenty visits to this basalt bluff above the Yakima River.  First, of course, he had to find it by studying the photographer-essayist Hugh Paradise’s featured photograph. At legal speed it takes about two-and-a-half hours from Seattle to reach the half-paved shoulder that Jean describes as “a little triangle squeezed between Washington State Route 821 and about a two-hundred-foot fall into the Yakima River.”  Sensibly, the Washington State Department of Transportation has set no “park here” signs marking Jean’s postage-stamp sized “parking lot.”  It can be by found following the ensuing instructions. 

About four miles south of Ellensburg the now nearly century-old Yakima River Canyon Road, while keeping for the most part close to the river, follows the eroding trout stream’s serpentine cut through the Umtanum Ridge.  The Ridge takes up most of the skyline in the now-and-then photos.  The highway curves its way through about ten oxbows (that is twenty curves, some of them hairpins) on its way to the lower Yakima Valley. After about the eighth curve, the Canyon Highway reaches the landmark Red’s Fly Shop, which is actually a sumptuous lodge, and begins a half-mile climb to the unmarked Paradise/Sherrard petite parking place.  At the top if you suddenly enter a highway regrade that cuts through the bluff you were just ascending, you have gone a few feet too far.  Turn around and try again.

The artist Hugh Paradise was born in 1912 in Montana and died in Seattle in 1979. His Post-Intelligencer obituary described him as a “retired free-lance writer and photographer, who resided in the Seattle area for over 40 years.”  I have studied and admired Paradise since a friend shared a few hundred of his negatives with me several years ago.  His name fits.  Paradise wrote short essays illustrated with his arcadian photographs for Sunset Magazine.  An

appreciative Sunset editor described him to me as “poetic.”  He married Anne Marie Van Cleve in 1942, whom he frequently posed in the middle-distance of the northwest landscapes that attracted him.  Paradise was also exceptionally smart.  He belonged both to Mensa and the Triple Nine Society, gregarious and inquiring societies for people with high intelligence scores.  His obituary describes his “major interest” as “the world about him.”

Hugh Paradise had a handicap, a breathing condition that prevented him from ranging far into the scenery he photographed. For this photo high above the Yakima, he was forced to stay near the side of the road. In the 1960s, this magazine’s predecessors, The Seattle Times “Charmed Land Magazine” and The Seattle Times “Color Rotogravure, the Sunday Pictorial Magazine,“ published several examples of Hugh Paradise’s intimate art.  While I never met him, I continue to collect him. 

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Anything to add, lads?

Starting with you Jean.  First dear readers,  we have encouraged Jean to include some of the photos he has taken during his many visits to the Yakima Canyon.  They are grouped directly below the feature text, that is, between it and this answer to Jean’s by now conventional question about “extras.”

Hey, Paul – here are a few selections of the canyon from over the years. The first set repeat Paradise’s shot in different weathers and seasons. The second are a handful that I dug up at the last minute. Enjoy.

Ah but we have very little in the way of our own Times features that cover the state’s “dry side” subjects.  Choosing to pull neither text nor photos from “Building Washington,” the History of Washington State Public Works that we published years ago, which is filled with images from every corner of the state, we have played it convenient and  linked first a feature on the dedication of what we popularly call the Mercer Island Floating Bridge.  We do it for the sufficient reason that our featured photo looks to the east in the direction of Yakima, as do the second, third and fourth links below. For the last of these, this week, eleven links we shall pivot far north to the wet side of Alaska with the feature built on Jean’s recent visit to Juneau.  Following those we will sprinkle a few of the east side (of Washington State) subjects that we pulled three years ago for the “Our Daily Sykes” feature, which printed here a few hundred photographs taken by Horace Sykes, mostly in the 1940s, of his trips around Washington – and the West too – as a sensitive fire insurance adjuster with a good camera and eye for picturesque compositions.   And we will likely find a few other images that touch on Yakima, the river or the city too.

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HORACE SYKES NEARBY THE RIVER

 First will show a few photos of Horace.  His home was above the beach in Magnolia.

 

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Here is another Foster and Kleiser photo of a prominent business intersection in Seattle where the famous billboard company may have been planning, or merely hoping, for a giant-sized sign.  Let us imagine it on the roof above the Harrah Brothers grocery at the scene’s center. (The grocery fills the space behind the three plate glass windows shown above the motorcar moving south on 10^th Avenue North.) 

The Harrah brothers opened their new store on August 25, 1931. The “then” photograph is dated 1932, so the comely light brick business block, designed by architect Earl W. Morrison for the southwest corner of Broadway and Roy Street, is about a year old.  The Harrahs were not new on Broadway, having first settled on this North Broadway block about twenty years earlier.  The brothers ran their first Seattle Times classified ad in June 1910, when they were looking for a “first-class bread baker.”  A year later in an illustrated Times advertisement on April 14, 1911, the grocery’s new van was pictured. Below it the partners bragged in print that with their auto-delivery, “Harrah Bros. succeeded in supplying their patrons with Hot Cross Buns in time for breakfast this morning.”

In 1934 this corner was disposed for a tavern by Washington State’s then new Liquor Control Board.  With prohibition recently over, the Board fancied it for a bar, and somehow convinced Berlin Cleaners, which was then holding the corner next door to Harrahs, to relocate two blocks south at 619 Broadway North, where a popular baked bean merchant name McCullock was persuaded by the sturdy board to move to the nearby Haynes Candy Store on Olive Way.  The confectionery had been swayed by the Liquor Board to move to a nearby and vacant storefront on E. Pine Street.  Despite the Board’s Machiavellian efforts, by 1939 this southwest corner of Broadway and Roy had been temporarily reformed from alcohol to ice cream.  However, in seven more years it reverted to spirits with the first of the De Luxe taverns.

With “De” and “Luxe” joined, the Deluxe in Jean’s “now” opened in 1962 with Joe Rogel and Bernie Minsk the gregarious partners.  Sixty-four years later, Rogel’s son Barry is the owner.  Living nearby on Broadway while teaching film at the Cornish School in the 70s, I remember well both Joe and Bernie, and their hamburgers.  In 1970, the humorist and Times restaurant reviewer John Hinterberger described how “about 200 people streamed out of the Harvard Exit,

turned right and many streamed into the Deluxe Tavern; adjacent buildings with a symbiotic relationship.”  The still charmed and cosmopolitan neighborhood of Capitol Hill will, I figure, forever thank Joe, Bernie and Barry for their burly and buttered baked potatoes. [Long ago I drew for Joe and Bernie a bake potato adorned with butter and sour cream and imagined as a billboard on the roof of the tavern.  When & if found I will attach, or introduce with an addendum.]

THE CORNER TAX CARD FROM THE LATE 1930s Followed by two other tax photos of this west side of the 600 block on Broadway.

BELOW:  TWO of the MCKALE SERVICE STATION, ACROSS ROY STREET from the CORNER STOREFRONT – The FUTURE DELUXE.

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Anything to add, fellahs?  Surely Jean, more Edge Links of the neighborhood.

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Surely some – maybe many – PacificNW readers will remember this magazine’s predecessor, The Seattle Sunday Times Rotogravure.  That weekend supplement covered regional stories that were illustrated – often lavishly – with sepia-toned photographs.  For instance, on June 18, 1939, the Rotogravure accompanied members of “A Seattle Camera Club … On a Picture Hunt” north on the then freshly-paved Pacific Coast Highway.  Their destination was Rosario Beach and anything picturesque along the way. This full-page feature was adorned with ten rotogravure illustrations, including one of the club members posing with their auto caravan beside this week’s subject, “the ancient, picturesque stump that has been preserved beside the highway near Arlington.”  

The camera club was following in the lustrous wake of Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha of Norway, who, a few days earlier, had driven through this often sideswiped artifact without hitting it. Here, approaching the estuary of the Stillaguamish River and about mid-way on their ten-week tour of America, the attentive Royal Couple surely read the interpretive text framed in a triangle above the entrance to the tunneled trunk.  It reads, “Relic of a Vanquished Forest / Western Red Cedar / (Thuja Plicata Don) /Age 1250 years / Preserved at Request of Snohomish Co. Pioneers /A.D. Arlington, Washington 1922.”  

Soon after the royals and the clubbies visited the stump, Boyd Ellis, Arlington’s well-collected postcard purveyor, recorded the historical photo in 1940 and numbered it 51 at the print’s bottom-right corner.  In his decades of exploring the northwest for marketable snapshots of landmarks and other roadside attractions, Ellis snapped at least a dozen exposures of this Giant Cedar Stump.  Our featured “then” is one of at least two stump portraits he took, posing the same auto (perhaps his) and ascribing to it the same print number.  Ellis’s work is so bountiful that it has spawned experts among his many collectors.

Jean’s  late-summer visit to the Arlington stump was not intended for a feature but for a roadside pause at Interstate-5’s Smokey Point Rest Area.  The highway department has the stump at “milepost 207 about eight miles north of Marysville.”  More to the point of the Big Cedar Stump’s heritage, the thousand-plus-years-old artifact has been associated with Arlington since the late 19^th century when that town was abuzz with mills.  The Big Arlington Stump is about three and one-half miles from Arlington as the crow flies, and there are ordinarily plenty of crows hanging around highway rest areas.  Jean, of course, knew about the stump from Ellis’s photographs, which date from before the highway department moved the stump to this, its last home in 1971.  I will brag some by noting that I first stumbled upon the stump, and without injury, in the late 1960s when it was still beside the highway, about one mile north of the Smokey Point Rest Area where Jean found it.  I was headed for Vancouver and pulled over.

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Anything to add, guys?  Yes Jean with examples of suburban life, mostly.   We chose these, again, from past features that we have scanned.  Most of them are from after 2008 when we started blogging and scanning.  Since the Sunday Now and Then column began in the winter of 1982 there are many features relevant for whatever generalizations might be made for any given Sunday, we have, however not found the time to scan them all.   As for stumps and, for that matter, logs too, we have gathered a few, which we hope to include here with an addendum along the way (aka down the line.)

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On the eve of its dedication in late 1911, the Society Theatre at the northwest corner of Broadway and John Street was anticipated in The Seattle Times as “the most pretentious” of any of the neighborhood theatres then popping up on greater Seattle’s street corners.  The Society would have accommodations for “500 people in a structure 35 x 120 feet in dimension … (it) will cost about $6,000 complete and will be finished with ever-modern convenience for its patrons.  It will be a one-story building of frame and brick with an ornamental front, following the Spanish Mission style of architecture and composed of brick and stucco.” 

Built with speed, the Society opened its doors to its surely excited neighbors on Friday,  December 8, 1911, with “four reels of new films and two song specialists.”  For that first night, the Society’s “specialists” would “consist of a male duet and a song by a young woman soloist.  There will be no attempt at vaudeville, it is said.”  Most likely “it” was the Society’s manager, George W. Ring, who did the saying.  Up from Portland, Ring brought with him “a large expansive smile and several years experience in the moving picture game.”  Managing neighborhood theatres included promoting neighborhood values, such as chumminess and convenience. One of

the Society’s “modern conveniences” almost assured that there would be no delays for re-threading the projector.  From the start, the Society had two, and both were Powers No. 6 moving picture machines.  On opening night the two Powers moved pronto from “Old Billy,” a “Selig film, dealing with the comic adventures of an old fire horse belonging to a fiddler,” to “An Aeroplane Elopement, a Vitagraph comedy-drama.”  Two “scenic films and two biograph comedies” and the specialists’ singing completed the inaugural bill.

Also in 1911, as a sign of the times, the Alhambra, one of downtown Seattle’s big stock and vaudeville theatre venues, converted to showing motion pictures exclusively.  In the same year the Pantages Theatre opened as a terra cotta-clad palace for presenting whatever played well, including vaudeville, stage plays, and film.  After many adjustments, in 1966 the Pantages (later renamed the Palomar) wound up as a parking garage – the big one at the northeast corner

of University and Third Avenue.  Up on the Hill, the Society changed its name to the Broadway in the early 1920s and continued to show films at its busy intersection until the winter of 1990.  Rite Aid Pharmacy, its next-door neighbor to the north on Broadway, took over its place by expanding into the corner, while keeping the “BROADWAY” part of the theatre’s vibrant neon marquee for promoting flu shots and such. 

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Anything to add, kids?  Yes Jean, and most of them from or near the neighborhood.

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In today’s “now” scene, West Seattle’s savvy Bob Carney poses for Jean Sherrard on Point Place Southwest, a short block that leads from Alki Avenue Southwest and dead-ends at the green campus of the Alki Point Lighthouse. Its light first penetrated the ordinarily peaceable waters of Puget Sound in 1913 after the federal lighthouse service bought much of the Point from the Hanson-Olson clan who had purchased it in 1868 from Seattle pioneer Doc Maynard.

In his hands, Carney holds a copy of our “then” photo as part of bound pages of his research into the life of the first Alki Natatorium, the landmark featured in the photo. (Derived from Latin, “natatorium” denotes a building that houses a swimming pool. Aficionados abbreviate it as “nat.”)

Years ago, while delivering an admittedly half-baked lecture on West Seattle history to its historical society, I was asked if I had evidence of this early human aquarium. Like many others attending, I imagined that the question was about the later Alki Natatorium, built nearly a mile up Alki Beach from the Point, just east of the Alki Bathhouse, and opened in 1934 with “Seattle’s own swimming champion, Helene Madison, as permanent instructress.”  Bob

Carney’s research reveals that the earlier and largely forgotten natatorium at the Point was equipped with “gymnasium paraphernalia” and featured a “bathing tank” 130 feet long, 53 feet wide and from 22 inches to 9-1/2 feet deep, filled daily with Puget Sound waters kept at 74 to 76 degrees. The east end of pavilion, the part showing here with five gables hosted a variety events, most involving dance. The structure was appointed like a Japanese

teahouse – note the hanging lanterns – and its demise was equally exotic. Like the dome atop Seattle’s St. James Cathedral on First Hill, the roof on West Seattle’s first oversized swimming pool collapsed Feb. 1-2, 1916, under what remains Seattle’s deepest (or second deepest – it is debated) 24-hour snowfall.

Soon after Bob showed me this print, researcher Ron Edge found five others (all of them already inserted above)  while visiting the Museum of History and Industry library to help make detailed scans of many of its classics. Most likely, all were recorded together in 1905 when the nat was a brand new enterprise undertaken by the Alki Point Transportation Company. Nearly a decade before the Alki Lighthouse arose, in 1904 the company had built both the natatorium and the steamer Dix to render hourly service between this, the firm’s new West Seattle attraction, and Seattle’s central waterfront. (The Dix notoriously sank in November 1906 in a collision killing more than 40 of its estimated 77 passengers.)

We conclude with a too-short nod to the many heroes of local heritage who volunteer with the dozen or so Seattle and King County societies that nurture and share our history. Using our example, Bob Carney is described by Clay Eals, executive director of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society, as “a stalwart volunteer for us over the past three decades, doing everything from serving on our collections committee (evaluating submitted artifacts for possible accession) to putting up exhibits at our Log House Museum. Behind it all is a heart of unrivaled size.” 

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Another few laps, lads?  Jean, Ron and I are pleased to exersize with you.  Below are a line-up of West Seattle features previously printed Pacific and so shown here, some of them recently.  We will also insert a few relevant others.

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Two mildly eccentric signs can be found on this photograph of the southwest corner of 9^th Avenue and Columbia Street on Seattle’s First Hill.  Hand-written on the grass, the more obvious sign is mistakenly captioned “727 – 9^th Ave.”  The corner is held now by a roundabout to the front door of the nearly new Skyline Retirement Community at 725 9^th Avenue. The “then” is another of the many thousands of tax photos taken during the Great Depression for the King County Assessor’s office by skilled photographers working for the federal Works Progress Administration. The WPA was one of the many  “alphabet soup” agencies created by President Roosevelt and his progressive cabinet to make both public works and work: works such this photographic inventory of every structure in the county, and work – with pay checks – for many including the photographers.  This archive is still used by county assessors and homeowners, as well as historians. 

The second sign is harder to find.  It is nailed to the side of this mansion that somewhat resembles a Greek Temple.   The sign appears above the second floor porch near the iron ladder, which served as a fire escape.  Reading “The Sunset Board Room,” this second sign was, we expect, wrapped in wit by the Sunset’s manager, the progressive Emma A. Hausman.  Above her portrait that appeared in The Times for March 3, 1918, Hausman was described as “one of the most prominent club women in the city.” Also in 1918 she

was chosen to direct the work of the local Democratic Club, and a year earlier she had been elected chairman of The Women’s Civic Improvement Club’s Auxiliary to the Seattle Red Cross.  The Sunset’s classified ads in The Times were often personalized with Hausman’s name, as for the second of June, 1917:  “Mrs. Hausman has one large room, suitable for man and wife, 2 business men or young ladies.  First class in every particular 721 9th Ave.”  Through its about sixty-six years on this corner the big home was listed at 721. 

Actually, manager Hausman had many more rooms than one to rent in the Sunset. According to the 1937 tax record, this neo-classical mansion included twenty-seven rooms: seven on the first floor and eight on the second, all with nine-foot ceilings.  And there were seven more rooms in the attic and five more in the daylight basement. The Times reports that its first owners, the Archibald Blackburn Graham family, moved in on April 6, 1901.  The Seattle Times for December 22, 1900, counted the Graham’s new home among the “handsome new residences of substantial quality completed within the year.”  It cost $15,000, the same price that The Times publisher A. J. Blethen paid for his also manor-sized new home on Queen Anne Hill’s Highland Drive, also in 1900.

Archibald Graham was an arch-capitalist, described in pioneer historian Clarence Bagley’s “History of Seattle” (1916) as “a man of resourceful business ability who recognized the difficulties, the possibilities and the opportunities of a situation.”  Graham was a charmed opportunist, whose lucrative successes included, to name a

few, flour milling (including the Novelty Mill in West Seattle), mining, lumber, and printing.  Graham also developed new neighborhoods in Seattle, the booming and beckoning West Coast city that the 39-year-old speculator moved to from West Virginia with his

growing family in 1891.  Jewelry was his last enterprise, and many jewels were found neatly packaged in his pockets after he fell one hundred feet to his death on May Day 1915, from the recently completed steel bridge over Ravenna Park.  The police found no “foul play.” No doubt hoping to deflect suicide speculations, Archibald’s puzzled friends noted to a Times reporter that he had left his home happy that morning and had “no financial troubles.” What made him leap, they concluded, was some combination of acute insomnia and recurring agoraphobia. One friend was quoted “It was the involuntary act of a man overcome by the influences of high places.”

A year later Graham’s family moved from their First Hill mansion into the upscale Olympian Apartments at 1605 E. Madison. It is reported in The Seattle Times of July 30, 1916, “Mrs. Emma Hausman has taken Mrs. Graham’s residence on the corner of 9^th and Columbia and will open … a first-class boarding house for particular people.” Emma Hausman and Jennie Graham knew each other from years of playing cards together.  And so it seems that the sale of the Graham mansion to Emma Hausman may have had a sisterly side to it.

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Anything to add, lads?  Natch, beginning with 30-plus past features from the neighborhood gathered and placed by Ron Edge.  We call the Edge Links.

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SKYLINES

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The recently formed Pike Place Market Historical Society was born with what I suspect is an exclusive irony attached to it.   While it is the youngest of enthused locals focused on Seattle heritage, it may also be the most mature.  The accumulated knowledge of its membership is both stunning and accessible. The charms of the Market have also nurtured its own historians.  What follows comes in part from the PPMHS and its members.  Bless it and them. (Please visit the blog listed at the bottom to learn more about the Society and what it knows about this covered curve.)

Had he lived long enough, I am confident that Frank Shaw, the photographer the of today’s featured photo, would have become a member of the Society.  Shaw’s attraction to the Market is professed in the scores of large-sized negatives and transparencies he recorded there.  The about-to-retire Boeing employee began visiting the Market with his Hasselblad in the early 1960s, just in time to record those politically important years when the well-funded forces campaigning for urban renewal wrestled with the citizen-volunteers fighting for the Market’s repairs and preservation. 

On its cardboard border, Shaw dated this colored portrait of the only curve on Post Alley May 1, 1966.  It was a  Sunday morning a mere half-century ago.   Market explorers will know that this is where Post Alley, heading for the Market, turns for its one short block climb to the intersection of First Avenue and Pike Place.  Of

 

the many entrances into the Market, I expect this is the one least used, but also the most charming.  It is also the most gate-like and therefore potentially ceremonial for staging events like the Tiny Freeman presided Soap Box Derbies on Post Alley in the early 1970s.   Shaw’s shabby alley surely prefigures the internationally known “Gum Wall,” here with its profane patina of donated wads.      

Two feature films (and perhaps several smaller ones) have used the curve for art: “Mad Love” (1995), in which the film’s leads share their first date at a punk show here in the alley, and the better known “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), where the curve and its entrance to Seattle’s first municipal rest room (1908) were converted into a burlesque theatre for the James Caan vehicle.  It was also just off this curve that Seattle’s well loved Empty Space Theatre got its start in 1970. It was followed by Stage One, where, we must note, in 1972 the tall but mere 15-year-old Jean Sherrard, this feature’s “now” photographer, played the part of Laertes, the brother of Ophelia, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Jean notes, “There were rarely more people in the audience than in the cast.” 

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I’ll toss in a couple gum wall shots for those who haven’t visited:  Anything to add guys?

Surely Jean and thanks for gum blog sticking below, Jean.  Ron Edge has also added a few relevant neighborhood features below the below and at the bottom.

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In a note scribbled on the 1937 tax card for this modest block, it is named the “triangle.”  Bordered by Pine Street, 5^th Avenue, and Westlake Avenue, it is really one of about a dozen triangles attached to Westlake Avenue through its seven-block run between Fourth Avenue and Denny Way.   The triangles, and about seven more irregularly-shaped blocks, date from 1906-07 when Westlake Avenue was cut through the original city grid.  This eccentric

regrade was meant to channel the increasing traffic to Denny Way, there to continue north through the “funnel,” as the South Lake Union retail neighborhood was then sometimes called, to the picturesque viaduct built in 1890 for pedestrians, wagons and trolleys along the west shore of Lake Union all the way to Fremont.

The featured photo at the top  is one of three Webster and Stevens Studio photographs of the original charming flatiron with its waving cornice.  It sights north over Pine Street along the east side of Westlake.  Another of the three photos is printed directly below.  It looks in the opposite direction, and shows the same single motorcar parked on Westlake (perhaps the photographer’s) and the produce stand with its fruit and customers protected by an awning opened over the sidewalk.  The Pearl Oyster and Chop House is the

next storefront south of the produce stand.  Taped to it windows are more than one poster promoting the week-long visit to the Metropolitan Theatre, beginning Monday January 7, of the Shakespearean troupe led by the “eminent” Shakespearian John E. Kellerd.  It is by this bit of advertising that we can easily figure that the three photos were taken sometime either in late 1917 or early 1918.  Frankly, this discovery saddened me because I prefer this little triangle with its curvilinear cresting and large basket-handle windows to its several successors, the first of which is shown on the tax photo printed above, three images back or above .  (The third of the three Webster and Stevens photos follows, all are used courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry, aka MOHAI.)

An 1891  Birdseye and Three Maps – 1893, 1908 & 1912 – of Location

In the 1908 Baist Real Estate map [two illustrations up] only a small wooden shed is foot-printed in the triangle block, bottom-center.  By four years later, in the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, the block has been tightly fitted for the little retail center captured at the top of this feature.   Through its few years  it was also home for the Seattle station of the Everett Interurban, which started running in 1910.

Sometime in 1918 this attractive triangle was razed and replaced with a three-story structure that bordered the block with a foundation sturdy enough to support a twelve-story high-rise that was never constructed. Through its more than half-century of service and two remodels (the tax card tells us in 1949 and 1959),

the three-story triangle serviced many retailers. The tax-photo (two above) illustrating the last of these changes reveals a nearly windowless brick mass impressively filling the block with “Weisfield’s Credit Jewelers” signed in big neon letters on its south façade facing Pine Street. (I remember this and I suspect many of you do as well.)

Judging by the tenants’ advertisements sample above and published in this paper through the first weeks of 1919, the quickly-built three-story replacement was completed sometime in late 1918.  Among the first tenants were The Silk Shop, Violet Tatus’ New Hat Shop and the New Owl Drug Company. The building was named the Silverstone

after Jay C. Silverstone, a Kansas City native who moved to Seattle with his family to found the Boston Drug Company.  Silverstone became a super-promoter for properties in this nearly new retail neighborhood.  When he added the little flatiron to his neighborhood holdings, the headline for the Seattle Times for Sept. 2, 1917, read “New Retail /District Sets Record Price for Seattle Realty.”  Silverstone and his brother Hiram, a physician practicing in Kansas City, purchased the block from Seattle architect John Graham, paying “$56 Per Square Foot for the Westlake Triangle,” which figured to $250,000, most of it in cash. 

BELOW: TWO STRESSFUL SILVERSTONE CLIPS from the TIMES

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Surely Jean.  As is his way, Ron Edge has pulled up several neighborhood shots and stacked them below.  Held in each are more, some of which will be repeated many times through the selection.  Which is our way.

 

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ALSO NEARBY (Chapter – or feature – NO. 20 from Seattle Now and Then Volume One, which can be read from cover to cover on this blog, and it found in the front page bug ”

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We might wonder what the photographer, F. Jay (“the Professor”) Haynes, found captivating in this long stretch of the Seattle waterfront.   It reaches from a small sample of the Magnolia Peninsula on the far left to the outer end of the famous namesake wharf that the pioneer Henry Yesler rebuilt after the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, which destroyed it and practically everything

else on Seattle’s central waterfront.  Although difficult to read, both at this size and in the subject’s morning light, the shed/warehouse seen on the far right (of the  featured photo at the top) has Yesler’s name printed on its west wall facing Elliot Bay.   We will insert here another look at the water end of Yesler’s Wharf most likely photographed in 1890-1.  The wharf  is left-of-center, and the block-lettered name is the same and easier to read, especially if your click-to-enlarge the pan and all else.

We imagine that there may have also been a sensitive side to Haynes’ choice  – an aesthetic motivation.  The vessel near the featured scene’s center, which atypically reveals no name on its stern, marks a striking divide between the intimate waterfront congestion of barrels and half-covered bricks on this side of Yesler’s dock, far right, and to the left of the steamship, the long and somewhat mottled urban growth that was then North Seattle. Belltown’s gray dapple on Denny Hill’s western slope, left of center, is composed almost entirely of improvised and rent-free squatters’ vernacular sheds, both on the hill and on the beach.

Haynes’ subject might also have been assigned.  Born in Michigan in 1853, the year Seattle’s mid-western founders moved from Alki Point to this east shore of Elliott Bay, Haynes missed the Civil War but not an apprenticeship with Doctor William H. Lockwood’s Temple of Photography in Ripon (‘Birthplace of the Republican Party’), Wisconsin.  In the Temple he learn his trade and met Lily Snyder, his co-worker and future wife.  Together, they purchased from the Northern Pacific Railroad a Pullman car, which they fitted for a photography studio.  In exchange for publicity photographs of the railroad’s expansion and rolling stock, the couple – while raising a family – traveled the greater Northwest, prospering with their own rolling dark room and sales gallery.  To his status as the Northern Pacific’s official photographer, Haynes added the same distinction for Yellowstone National Park, where he has a mountain named for him. 

Dating this (at the top) visit by Haynes to Puget Sound has left me with an ‘about’ year of circa 1891, two years following the Great Fire.  By obscuring the center of the Denny Hotel on Denny Hill, the steamship’s smokestack also hides the hotel’s tower, the last part of the hotel built, and thereby a perhaps helpful clue toward a more refined date. Finally, with the help of an array of historical photos, Ron Edge, a devotee of Seattle history, has determined that the resting steamship here is the City of Kingston and not, as I first thought, its younger sister, the City of Seattle.  Ron discovered that there were small differences between them, especially at the stern on the railing for the lower deck.  The City of Seattle had a railing. 

WEB EXTRAS

Jean: We had help along the way on taking this photo… Thanks to Laura Newborn from the State DOT for making the connections and Marty Martin, Facilities Manager, for accompanying me onto the decaying Pier 48.

Paul: Jean, strip it, the pier, is of its clues.  Do you remember – and did you attend – any of the big Book Fairs that used Pier 48 sometime in 1990s?

Jean: I did not attend, though I vaguely remember.

Anything to add, fellow travelers?  This week like the last 200 or more we’ll pile on a few more features to the Edge Links that Ron put up.   But first a copy of the montage that we used to figure out and describe for Laura and Marty the prospect on Pier 48 that we calculated was the correct one for a proper repeat.  The red arrow marks the spot.  You may wish to notice the range of freedom Jean has used for his art.

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The designers and/or carpenters of this slender house may have taken care to give its front porch a stairway both wide and high enough to pose a large group portrait, perhaps of Delta Gamma Sorority’s charter membership.  It was the first local sorority to receive a charter from a national organization. The lobbying, which began in 1900, was rewarded on May 15, 1903, the last day of Delta Gamma’s annual convention held that year in Wisconsin.  One year later the coeds were living here at 4730 University Way.

 

The Greek letters Delta and Gamma are signed on the tower of the featured photo at the top, which seems otherwise useless, since there is neither room enough nor light for either a crow’s nest study or a co-ed’s bed chamber. The photograph’s source, the Museum of History and Industry, gives this University District scene an annum of 1904. The neighborhood was then still more likely referred to either as Brooklyn or University Station.  The latter was named after or for the trolley that carried students and faculty to the new university from their remote residences in spread-out Seattle.  The former was the name first given the neighborhood by James Moore, Seattle’s super developer, in 1890, the year the future University District was first successfully platted.  There was then no knowledge of the coming surprise: the University of Washington.  The name Brooklyn was embraced as a cachet pointing to another suburb (Brooklyn) that also looked across water (the East River) to another metropolis (New York.)

Columbus Avenue was the name that Moore gave to the future University Way.  This was soon dropped for 14^th Avenue, until 1919 when the University Commercial Club joined the neighborhood’s newspaper, the University Herald, to run a contest for a new name, which University Way easily won. Brooklyn Avenue and 14^th Avenue were Seattle’s first fraternity/sorority rows.  In early December of 1904, the Seattle Times reported, “The Beta Chapter of the Delta Gamma Sorority of the state university gave a dancing party at its new clubhouse on Fourteenth Ave. N.E. Friday.”

University Way, especially, was a sign of the city’s and its university’s then manic growth.  Other Greeks soon joined the co-eds of Delta Gamma at addresses north of N.E. 45^th Street in Moore’s then new and only two-block-wide University Heights Addition, which had  been platted in 1899.  Seven years later, and directly to the east of University Heights, Moore opened his much larger University Park

Addition.  In this 1904 featured look east from the Ave. we can see that University Park is still a forest.  After 1906 it was increasingly stocked with homes for the University of Washington’s growing faculty and Greek community. Many of the students’ ‘secret societies’ first got their start in University Heights, often in mansion-sized houses larger than Delta Gamma’s, which were profitably let go for the developing businesses along University Way.  Typically the Greek houses eventually moved to nearby University Park.

After several moves, in 1916 Delta Gamma reached its present location at the northwest corner of NE 45^th Street and 21^st Avenue NE in 1916.  Twenty years later it ‘moved’ again while staying put.  In 1936 the sorority’s house was sold and rolled across 21^st Avenue from the northwest corner with NE 45^th Street to the northeast corner to become the house for the Phi Sigma Kappa Fraternity.  It was later named the Russian House, for its popular Russian studies and “Russian Only” rule.  Across 21st Avenue, NE. at the recently vacated northwest corner, the sorority built again, this time the grand Arthur Loveless-designed 80-year-old Delta Gamma house. In sum the sorority has now held to this corner for a century.  

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, guys?  Yup Jean – from the neighborhood where once we sometimes hung out, and the greater neighborhood where we still live with our lakes.   First Ron Edge comes up with about twenty links (again, all of which have their  own links, which inevitably include some duplicates), and I will follow Ron’s list with another string of clips – sometime after I have walked the dog.  It is now 3:54 AM.  And so depending on Guido’s performance, I may wait until tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon to add the promised string.

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Here is yet another billboard negative from the Foster and Kleiser collection that Jean and I have visited a few times for this Sunday feature. The anonymous photographer chose a prospect that exposed the company’s two billboards on the roof of the Virginian Tavern, the tenant of the modest brick building at the southwest corner of Virginia Street and Third Avenue. This time Jean’s ‘repeat’ shows us that in this block not much has changed in the intervening eighty years.  To gain some perspective on this booming town, the negative date, December 11, 1936, roughly splits the years between when the first settler-farmers landed near Alki Point in 1851 and now.

What were they thinking, the pedestrians and motorists here on Third Avenue?  Surely of the kings of England: both of them.  This is the day, a Friday, when it was at last fulfilled at 1:52 pm that the Duke of York took – or was given – the throne of his older brother Edward VIII who abdicated it for love. The Seattle Times, of course, trumpeted news about the switch, including a front page photograph of the new king’s daughter, the ten-year old Elizabeth who, an unnamed friend of the royals assured, as an “astute sharp-witted little girl” was figuring it out.  

The neighborhood was then variously called the Uptown Retail Center, Belltown, and the Denny Regrade.  Only the first two names survive.  It is likely that many of these motorists on Third Avenue between Virginia and Stewart Streets remembered the regrade itself, and knew that they were driving under what only thirty years earlier was the south summit of Denny Hill. 

Just left of center, the six-story White Garage, the tallest of the five buildings on the east side of Third Avenue, fails to reach the elevation of the historic summit.  It is also short of reaching the elevation of what before the regrading was the basement of the majestic Denny Hotel, a.k.a. Washington Hotel, that sat atop the hill and advertised itself as “the scenic hotel of the West.”  Both the south summit and the hotel were razed between 1906 and 1908.

Given that the featured photo at the top was photographed  in the midst of the Great Depression, Third Avenue seems surprisingly rife with motorcars. A review of some historical vehicular statistics may explain the motorized zest.  Four blocks away at Second Avenue and Pike Street, and only thirty-two years earlier, the city’s street department counted 3,959 vehicles visiting the intersection, of which only fourteen were automobiles.  One year earlier there were no motorcars – everything moved by horse or by pedal. By 1916 many Seattle cyclists had turned into motorists, and Seattle had some 16,000 cars.  By 1921, with the doughboys returned from World War I, there were about 48,000 cars in Seattle. By 1929 there were 129,000 cars on the city’s streets.  

Of the two billboards above the Virginian Tavern, the one on the left advertises next year’s model 1937 Buick for $1,099.  Figured for inflation, the price seems surprisingly affordable.  In today’s showroom, the sticker would convert to about $18.400.   It seems that despite the ongoing depression, if one had a good middle class job, it was possible to own the mobility and prestige of a brand new Buick. 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?   Ron Edge has put forward this week’s neighborhood links below – neither less nor more than nineteen of them, except that each is also bound to be packed with other links and so on and on.   I have not lifted so much.   It is, Jean, now nearly 5 am Sunday morning and I’m surrendering to my heart’s beating pleading for sleep.   However, should I survive the night I will return tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon to finish up this feature.  Now I lay me down to sleep . . . and the rest that passes all understanding.

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Here is the last busy remnant of Railroad Avenue that was piece-by-piece constructed on the central waterfront following the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  This Webster and Stevens portrait of it dates, most likely, from 1909. By then most of the waterfront’s new railroad docks were in place, from King Street on the south to the Pike Street Wharf.  But not here.  This vigorous confusion of ships and sheds is the interrupting exception.

The cluttered seaboard block, here at the front, begins on the left in the feature photograph with Fire Station No. 5 at Madison Street.  The purpose of its tower was for more than hanging wet hoses to dry — it also served as an observatory for the Harbormaster.  The station was one of four speedily built after the 1889 fire. The Snoqualmie, the city’s first fireboat, seen right-of-center in the featured photo with its dark double stacks, is parked here beside the station. Far right, reaching Railroad Avenue between Columbia and Marion Streets, is the east end of the new Colman Dock.  It was built in 1908-09 for the

prudently expected crush of tourists visiting Seattle for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exhibition.  The dock was replaced in the mid-1930s to welcome the Black Ball Line’s then new art deco ferry, the streamlined and yet generally trembling Kalakala.

Not trembling was the most famous resident of this block, the Flyer, the sleek mosquito fleet steamer.  While its name is posted at the scene’s center, edging the horizon along the crown of a shed, the steamer is away, surely at work.  Its routine itinerary was back-and-forth to Tacoma, covering between sixty- and seventy-

thousand miles a year.  It consumed about twenty-four cords of wood a day.  In the featured photograph at the top, note the firewood below and on the dock to the right of the  “…’ll Like Tacoma” sign.  The physically large but rhetorically modest sign was adopted by Tacoma boosters to lure fair-goers also to visit Commencement Bay and its “City of Destiny.”

Also below the sign is the Burton, the passenger steamer nestled between the Snoqualmie fireboat and the stacks of firewood.  The ninety-three-foot Burton’s raucous history gets sensational coverage in the “McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest,” edited by Gordon Newell.  With the also island-tending steamer, the Vashon, the Burton ran “one of the most bitter and spirited rivalries in the history of Sound steam-boating.”  Rate wars, races, pitched battles between the crews, and collisions “were the order of the day.”  You may doubt with me the most soiled of these dirty tricks: “the custom of a steamboat man of helpfully picking up a baby and carrying it aboard his craft on the theory that the mother would follow it and become a paying customer.”   

We have not as yet found the name for the nifty little port-holed steamer, front-and-center in the featured photo at the top.  We suspect that it was a patrol boat servicing the Harbormaster, and so also handy for chasing any sea-bound kidnappers that might first be spied from the tower. 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, guys?  Yes, Jean.  The sometimes shy  R. Edge has boldly brought forward some very relevant extras including more treatments or approaches to the featured spot, the  waterfront slip for Fire Station No. 5 at the foot of Madison Street.

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The impressive speed with which the Waldorf Apartments were topped-off at seven stories was explained in the Times for August 19, 1906. “The building has been put up in record time…for the past few weeks work has been carried on day and night. The carpenters who have prepared the framework for the concrete have worked in the daytime and the concrete men have done their part at night by electric light. When completed the Waldorf will be the largest apartment house in the city and the equal in all respects of any similar building in the country. It will be ready for occupancy about Nov. 1” Not quite.

The Waldorf Building Co. started soliciting reservations for its units late in October.  (see above)  The units had much to offer, including “first class janitor service,” night-and-day elevator service, and a laundry for tenants in the basement. The promotions warned that “satisfactory references (were) required.” Through the fall of 1906 the company almost routinely announced delays, until a few days before Christmas when it reported that the Waldorf was at last “ready for occupancy.” The formal opening, however, waited until the following March 27.

Diana James, author of Shared Walls, a history of early Seattle apartment buildings, pulled from her research a novelty connected with the Waldorf construction. “Each of the apartments is to be equipped with a peculiar device, an idea of Mr. Ryan (the Waldorf’s architect), for house cleaning, so arranged that any occupant of any apartment, by the simple attachment of a short rubber hose, can clean the apartment with compressed air in a few minutes’ time, driving all dust to the basement and eliminating the necessity of sweeping. This is a feature that so far as known has never been installed in any other similar building ever constructed.”

Perhaps because of its bay windows, I’d always imagined that the Waldorf was an oversized frame construction. I did not look closely. Rather it was not wood but concrete, and the attentive press was pleased to report, “absolutely fireproof.” The International Fireproof Construction Company was the builder. U. Grant Fay, superintendent of the construction, was, like the hotel’s status-conscious name, yet another gift from New York City. The Times announced his spring of 1906 arrival while piling on more prestige with news that Fay had been “superintendent of construction of the Hotel St. Regis of New York City, said to be the finest hotel in the world.”

In the early stages of construction, the Waldorf was wrapped in class by the local media. As an example, on February 25, 1906, the Times included an architect’s sketch of the Waldorf among five illustrations for a full-page feature titled “Seattle, The Beautiful Metropolis.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, kids?  Thru the years Jean we have touched these surrounds and with Ron Edge’s help we will follow our custom and feature a few of them.   As is also, by now, our habit, there will be repeats.   You may treat these as pavlovian opportunities or as annoying stumps in the road and jump beyond any of these web extras while coughing and/or grumbling.

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The posers in Jean Sherrard’s “repeat” are members of a new creation: the Pike Place Market Historical Society. By studied accord the members have concluded that Mark Tobey, the celebrated artist posing beside the artfully stacked Red Delicious apples in our “then,” prefigured their position.  Both are standing at the cusp of the ground floor of the Public Market’s Sanitary Market Building and the sidewalk on the east side of Pike Place.  At the top of their circle, Market merchant Jack Mathers, holding a crab, joins the historians. This fishmonger-musician has been stocking and selling at his steaming Jack’s Fish Spot since 1982. 

Mark Tobey first arrived in Seattle in the early 1920s, hired by Nellie Cornish, a respected piano teacher, to build a new visual arts department for her namesake school that was then primarily admired for its music and dance programs.  In his early thirties, Tobey brought with him from New York City some success working as a magazine illustrator.  It was long before he was often honored world-wide with solo shows and awards, including the Grand International Prize at the Venice Biennale of 1958.

Tobey was largely self-taught and quick to revelations.  Most important of these inspirations was his “white writing,” an at once flat and floating atmosphere made from squiggles and brush strokes influenced by Oriental calligraphy and much else.  By the testimony of his students, Tobey was also a volatile mass of pedagogic pizzazz, at once attracting and repelling.  An early student, Viola Hansen Patterson, confessed, “He was full of tremendous energy, such energy he’d bowl you over — Almost blow you out of the room. I did take three lessons with him, and then I caved in. It was too much for me.”  

A Post-Intelligencer photographer snapped the Tobey in the Market portrait  featured at the top, which is held at the Museum of History and Industry.  MOHAI photographer Howard Giske assigns it a deliberated date.  “That photograph of Mark Tobey was dated July 1961 by the PI staffers, but he seems overdressed for July…the dates recorded for the PI photos are often the file date and not creation date, so maybe just say 1961.”

Kate Krafft, second from the right in Jean Sherrard’s circle of Market historians, has written about Mark Tobey’s fondness for the Pike Place Market and the importance of his activism in its preservation.  “In 1939 and 1940 he spent many of his days in the Pike Place Public Market sketching produce, architecture and particularly the people of the Market. Between 1941 and 1945, he completed a distinctive series of pictures in tempera paint that were based on the prior market sketches, combining figurative work within the abstract-like maze of daily market activity. . . In 1964 the University of Washington Press published Mark Tobey: The World of the Market, a volume that included many of his Pike Place Market sketches and studio paintings with an introduction expressing his deep affection for the Market.” 

Krafft continues, “Late in the hard-fought seven-year long campaign to ‘Keep the Market,’ Friends of the Market mounted a public initiative campaign. The campaign needed to finance television spots but lacked the necessary funds.” Here the by then famous artist donated 29 lithographs to the Friends.  This gift served, Krafft concludes, as collateral for “a bank loan that funded the subsequent television ad campaign. The November 1971 public initiative was approved by the citizens of Seattle, thus creating what is known today as the Pike Place Market Historic District.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Certainly Jean, and again (and again) all are probably repeats in whole and in their parts.  We have put up a few features circulating about the Pike Market over the last few  months and so we again follow our common pedagogy that “repetition is the mother of all  learning.”  Sounds like Horace, but certainly I first learned it from my own mother, Eda Garena, Christiansen-Dorpat.

Ron Edge has again plucked forward  a few neighborhood features from the past, and following those we will use this week’s artsy temper as an opportunity to update our readers on the condition now of MOFA, our Museum Of Forsaken Art.   It is time now to join the membership.  As you will discover near the bottom all it takes is colored printer to produce an impressively official looking membership certificate and a witness for forge your name as your forge theirs.

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FOLLOWS NOW A FEW NEW* ADDITIONS TO MOFA  (*While new to the collection, they may be otherwise old.)  Details regarding their sources (the artists), medium and size will be included in the work that we are having a difficult time getting to.   This, we assure you, is not because  we dread it.  We do not dread it.  Rather, we will be thrilled to do it . . . later.  (Might you be a interested in helping . . . please?)  If we know a title we will use it, but rarely do we know the artist.  A reminder –  these are, or rather were, forsaken and for reasons not explained.  Most of them were formerly objectionable objects de art, and some surely remain so.

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Above: The Blue Boy – Below:   The Blue Boy Copy

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A REMINDER – TWO HAPPY MEMBERS

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CONTINUING – and concluding for now – MONDAY 8/15/16

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BELOW – ART EDUCATION

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In 1889 the parishioners of Plymouth Congregational chose to sell their first church, a frame-construction on Second Ave. near Spring Street, for $32,000, a sum that allowed them to build nearby the bigger brick sanctuary seen here at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and University Street.  The rear façade of their new

landmark faced the University of Washington’s first campus, whose ten acres made a verdant back yard for the monumental sanctuary.  On the right, the northwest corner of the campus climbs what was called Denny’s Knoll, until that unique hillock on the western slope of First Hill was regraded away for the creation of the Metropolitan Building Company’s “city within a city.”  The Cobb Building, the most distinguished survivor of the Metro Company’s lavish commercial makeover of the campus, can be easily found right-center in Jean Sherrard’s “repeat.” 

For my taste the featured photograph is the grandest of the many photo-portraits of this hybrid Romanesque/Gothic landmark recorded during its tenure at this site. By some mystifying morning reflection, the light out of the east brightens the tracery of the church’s grandest window, which faced west over Third Avenue. After about twenty years, the rapidly growing Plymouth congregation received an offer it could not refuse. Alexander Pantages, the vaudevillian impresario, wanted the corner for a

namesake terra cotta-clad theatre. On the fifth of May, 1913, The Seattle Times reported that a day earlier the “steeple was shorn from old Plymouth Church . . . to make way for the new Pantages Theatre.” Once its timber supports were sawn through, the lassoed spire was successfully guided by ropes and fell on the roof, rather than the street.  The congregation then moved to their present corner of Sixth Avenue and University Street, three blocks east of this one.

In the featured photo, both Third and University Streets still sit at their original nearly natural grade.  The later regrade that began in 1906, noted above, lowered the streets here by about ten steps.  That is what it took, after the second regrade, for Plymouth parishioners to climb from the new sidewalk up to their sanctuary’s pews.  Here there are no stairs, because the Webster and Stevens photograph was taken sometime before that 1906 regrade.  The photographers, Ira Webster and Nelson Stevens, were migrant Midwesterners who met while working in the Seattle Photo Studio, which they soon quit to found their own photography business in 1903.  They advertised their reach as “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.”  

We confidently speculate that the W&S partners took the featured photograph sometime in 1904.  The number, 658, that they inscribed on the negative, is a relatively low one, especially for an enterprise that ultimately produced over sixty-thousand images, many of them glass, and now shared and protected in the library of the Museum of History and Industry. To the left of the number, and also on the street, the partners have written the name of their subject, “Plymouth Church.” This treatment suggests that they considered the image worthy of their general commercial stock – perhaps for distribution as a “real photo postcard,” which were then becoming popular.

Our proposed date of around 1904 is somewhat supported by the presence, far left, of the Antlers Hotel, which opened in the summer of 1903 on the northwest corner of Union Street and Fourth Ave.  More evidentiary, directly north of Plymouth Church, the big corner lot, here on the left, was purchased in 1901 by the Federal Government for Seattle’s Beaux Arts Federal Building.  Construction began at that corner in 1904. Surely, many PacificNW readers will remember its pigeon-marked classical columns. 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?  Certainly Jean, and beginning with Ron’s gathering of a comfortable smoking jacket’s pocket of scans from other features from nearby the congregationalists – most of them on Third Avenue.  (We should note that Ron Edge does not smoke.   I do not know if he ever has.  He seems to have a good diet, based largely on cabbage.   Me too.)

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ONCE MORE ON THE CORNER

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We will add a few more neighborhood scene’s and some proof reading tomorrow following a night, we hope, of remembered dreams.

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We will begin this little slice of Market history – the pie-shaped part squeezed between Western Avenue, on the left, and Pike Place, on the right – by imagining a clutter of shacks and sheds that were homes for the poor squatters who built them, beginning in the depressing years that followed the economic panic of 1893. Soon after the three-block-long Pike Place was cut through that neighborhood of cribs and shanties, the Seattle City Council chose it as home for a public market. 

That was in 1907, or roughly thirteen years before Webster and Stevens, the photographic studio that was long associated with The Times, recorded the here featured look north along the gracefully flexing line of the Market’s North Arcade.  Originally Pike Place was intended and graded not to sell produce, but rather to connect Western Avenue with First Avenue at an easier grade than the shorter, but much steeper, climb that survives on Virginia Street.

A growing battery of motivated motorists discovered this friendly grade and became so habituated to its advantages that there followed a nearly quarter-century encounter on Pike Place between produce and internal combustion. Traffic from the waterfront came this way as much to reach the new retail district beyond the Market as to make deliveries along Pike Place.  And the three-hundred yards of Pike Place was also used by barreling motorists to bypass the narrow business district and its increasingly congested avenues.  

Work on the North Arcade began beside Pike Place soon after the Market opened and was completed a few yards short of Virginia in 1911.  As is obvious in both our featured “now and then,” the width of this wedge-shaped block between Western Ave. and Pike Place narrows as it approaches Virginia Street, where those intending to head south must still negotiate a hairpin turn on to Western.

To the left, in its afternoon shadow, stands the turreted Seamen’s Home, which was built in 1910 and survived into the early 1970s.  At the photo’s center, or just beyond the far end of the North Arcade, the Armory marks the horizon with its roofline crenellations.  Dedicated in 1909, it was razed to some protests in 1968.  On the right, some of the signs above the shops on the east side of Pike Place reveal how this place, originally designed for the direct meeting of farmers and home-kitchen economists, accommodates what are apparently like-minded alliances, such as the Green Lake Farmers Association, the Washington Farmers Association, and the Family Shoe Market, “A Cut Price Shoe Store for Workers.”

Beneath its roof the North Arcade’s nearly 600-foot-long run shelters the busker-serenaded day stalls filled by farmers, craftspeople and manifold merchants, who, regardless of their prices, collectively continue to make the Pike Place Market what during the Friends of the Market’s long struggle to save it, Seattle architect Fred Bassetti famously and lovingly described as “an honest place in a phony time.” 

WEB EXTRAS

I’ll throw in a few shots from near the North Arcade roof.

Anything to add, lads? Jean your extras from the roof are fresh and invigorating, and not because of the fresh produce beneath you.   Ron Edge has again attached a few past features from the week’s featured neighborhood, and we have paid attention to the Public Market in our now 34 years of covering the city.  It has been more than a half-century since I first visited the market, but it was for a party not produce.

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ROSS CUNNINHAM’S insightful commentary on the public’s doubts about destroying landmarks for modern replacements appeared in The Times in 1963, the year in which the city’s first organized forces for preservation fought to protect the landmark Seattle Hotel in Pioneer Square.  While they lost that battle they clearly did not lose the war, and, we figure, they helped to sway this influential voice for the Times, Ross Cunningham.  Still, at least in this report, Cunnningham was mistaken about the fate of the Market.   Read it . . . and CLICK CLICK.

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I had been familiar with the right half of this panorama for nearly forty years, but beyond recognizing that Queen Anne Hill was on the right horizon, it continued to puzzle me.  Recently a studious friend, Ron Edge, while reviewing the Webster and Stevens Collection of historical Seattle subjects in the library of the Museum of History and Industry, found the left half, the street scene with the loosely parked array of motorcars.  After merging the two parts, Ron was able to match the historical porch of the home on the far left with the existing porch at the northwest corner of N.W. Canal Street and First Avenue N.W.  It is mostly hidden behind the landscape in Jean Sherrard’s repeat, again on the far left.  [Next, we will include two looks at the same neighborhood that sits, with these,  across the canal’s mostly completed ditch perhaps two years or three after the featured photo was first recorded in 1911.   The “existing porch,” noted above, can be found in both of the details. ] 

The site is about a half-mile west of the Fremont Bridge, on the north side of what, prior to the ship canal, was still called Ross Creek, Lake Union’s outlet to Salmon Bay. Before the Fremont lumber mill was constructed in the late 1880s, this was known as part of Ross, a community named for the truly pioneer family that first settled here in the 1850s.  Ross School on Third Ave. N.W. survived until 1940.  

We found a clue to the date for this celebration in another Webster and Stevens photo of this event, which included a detail of a Dreamland poster promoting a dance for the 2^nd of June.  From the evidence of the motorcars, we began our search in late May of 1911, and we were soon rewarded. The smoke rising from the center of the pan marks the moment – or nearly – when, to quote the next day Seattle Times for June 2, 1911, the elderly Judge Roger Greene

“stood on the little platform in the midst of a throng and waving, with all the vigor of his long-past youth … gave the signal which started the steam shovels in their task of digging the canal west of Fremont … It was the most dramatic moment of the entire day, which had been dedicated to the celebration in this city of the Progress & Prosperity events taking place on June 1.”  That singular day’s long list of promotions began downtown with a Second Avenue parade celebrating the completion of the 18-story Hoge building, briefly the tallest in Seattle, and the start of construction on the 42-story (more or less) Smith Tower. [For aging eyes like ours click the below twice for reading.  It is the Times next day report on the June 1, 1911 celebration.]

The parade, led by Kavanaugh’s marching band, included a long line of motorcars and “at least 400 Ballard citizens” carrying picks and shovels. The Ballardian canal boomers led the auto-less pedestrians up Second Avenue to trolleys waiting on Pike Street to carry them to Fremont and the afternoon program featuring prosperity-succoring VIPs, speaking loudly in counterpoint with the satisfied growling of steam shovels. 

The leader of the Progress & Prosperity Day committee was Millard Freeman, the brilliantly pugnacious publisher of the Pacific Fisherman, the Pacific Motorboat and The Town Crier.  With federal money at last insuring the canal project, Freeman promoted the Progress & Prosperity Day in part to get even by expressing his political resentments toward the canal’s “lurking foes … and to flay these opponents with the lash of pubic scorn and resentment.”  And at the end of the day, “to insure the steady progress of Seattle and the prosperity of all the people,” The estimated 310,00 residents of Seattle were urged to keep their porch lights burning city-wide between 9 and 10 pm.  

WEB EXTRAS

Additions, mes potes?  Several past feature from the canal or near it, Jean.  We claim no more.

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For reasons that may in part have had something to do with nostalgia for farm life and open mid-western pastures, the young city builders David and Louisa Denny protected from development most of the swale, or naturally cleared wetland, on their pioneer claim.  Much of that clearing is included in this look south from the still lightly developed southern slope of Queen Anne Hill, in the foreground, to the extensive scatter of structures on Denny Hill, crowned by its landmark Denny Hotel, at the middle distance.  The far horizon extends from West Seattle, on the right, along the ridge of Beacon Hill to First Hill, the ‘Profanity Hill’ part of it, where the brandishing tower of the King County Court House makes a perpetual promotion for law and order.

This week’s ‘then’ is one of a dozen or more panoramas that the photographer A. J. McDonald took of Seattle from a few of its hills during his, it seems, brief stay in the early mid-1890s.  (We will attached a few more below.)  This is one of the more softly focused of the photographer’s recordings, but it is still outstanding.  No doubt, McDonald is standing with his tri-pod on or near Ward Street and sighting south on Second Ave. N.  It is about 1895, the year the Seattle Dept. of Public Works regularized and thereby restrained the often imaginative collection of Seattle’s street names. 

Previously, Second Ave. N. was Poplar Avenue, and Ward was Villard Street. The last was named for the journalist-capitalist who brought the Northern Pacific Railroad to Seattle in the early 1880s and then promptly lost it. 

Running left-right (east-west) above the center of the pan is Harrison Street, which now passes through the fanciful clutter of the irregularly-shaped Seattle Center.  Nob Hill Avenue, which was Ash Avenue until 1895, reaches Harrison directly above the center of McDonald’s panorama.  Directly below that intersection is the swale, still holding on to its green, but now transformed into part of the artificial grass end zone of the Seattle Memorial Stadium.  [There is a good now-then comparison of the swale among the Edge Links that follow this brief exposition.]

The list of historical uses of this clearing begins with the Duwamish Tribe’s both ritual and practical potlatch celebrations, and their catching in nets the low-flying waterfowl passing between Elliott Bay and the then restful tulles at the south end of Lake Union.  With the Dennys in the early 1850s came their extensive gardens, which helped feed both their family and Seattle’s produce needs. In the late 1890s the swale was fitted with an army corral filled with horses and mules for help with the Spanish-American War.  Soon after McDonald’s visit, the swale repeatedly hosted other horses, with carnivals and traveling circuses.  Part of it was also developed into a fenced field with bleachers for professional baseball.  In 1927-28 the swale was appointed with the concrete core for Seattle’s arts and entertainment culture: the Civic Auditorium, Arena, and Civic Field.

In 1958, or thirty years later, the Seattle City Council allotted $7,550 for the clearing away of eighteen “dilapidated buildings” from the by then probable site of the Century 21 Exposition, Seattle World’s Fair. It is likely the McDonald’s panorama includes some of the condemned structures in the neighborhood beyond Harrison Street, on the far side of the swale.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, kids?  Sure Randall.  Ron has topped his past clips from the neighborhood with another by McDonald panaorama, one that looks northwest from Terry Avenue and Union Street towards Lake Union with the northeast corner of Queen Anne Hill on the far right.   But first we will “trump” Ron by showing a merge he composed of two other McDonald pans that were, like the featured photo, taken from a prospect on or very near Ward Street and looking east over Fifth Avenue.   That double pan follows now.  Please double click it.

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The SARAH B. YESLER HOME (for working girls), AKA the NEW WAYSIDE EMERGENCY HOSPITAL, AKA the CLINTON APARTMENTS, AKA the CLARION APARTMENT HOUSE, all of them at the northwest corner of Republican Street and Second Avenue North, and found in the shadows on the far right of the featured photo at the top, and also below.

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ANOTHER MCDONALD PAN – This from DENNY HILL to CAPITOL HILL with the Cascade Neighborhood in between.

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THE BAGLEY MANSION, Northeast Corner of Aloha and Second Ave. N.

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Here the reader will wonder, we hope, how Jean and I sought and found (we are confident) the site for his contemporary repeat. While the date, “1-4-22,” carefully hand-printed at the lower-left corner of the subject, does not, of course, name the place, the general environs and directions are familiar. The right horizon is Queen Anne Hill with the dark forehead of its Kinnear Park landscape top-center. Magnolia makes the more distant horizon, on the left, and below it the dark elevator on the Great Northern Railroad’s Smith Cove pier stands tall.

Considerable help for our search arrived when we flipped the hard card on which the original print was glued and gratifyingly read another caption: “Streets Western Ave. W. looking N.W. from 1^st Ave. W. Jan 14, 1922.” Note that the caption’s author has misread by 10 days the date printed on the print itself, which was most likely both correct and written by the photographer and city employee James P. Lee. Lee’s early 20^th-century photography for public works was both prolific and in focus. Obviously, Lee liked his work, and on the fourth of January 1922 he was at it on a Saturday.

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MAPS AND AERIALS OF  CONCERNED CORNER FROM 1904, 1912, 1929

Lee is looking from where First Avenue North and Denny Way would have formed an intersection except for this bluff. If we draw lines (or consult Google Earth) west on Denny Way and south on First Ave West, they meet here. First West and Denny “met” by extending Western for a half block between them, while not yet cutting it through to the waterfront, which in 1904 and 1912 was still the beach.  In Jean’s repeat, the sidewalk along the west side of Western Avenue West continues down and north to the waterfront. What the municipal photographer is showing his engineers is where they will be both cutting and filling to extend Western Avenue down to the also new Elliott Avenue, part of the tidelands regrade and reclamation then under way below the bluff. 

The decision to continue Western on to the waterfront north of Denny Way was made in 1917 but prevented by the city’s preoccupations with building ships and handling transshipments during World War I. By then, Seattle had become the second busiest port in the nation (after New York), and it was hard to keep city employees from fleeing for better work in the shipyards. Here, below, the Elliott sanitary fill is taking form, lifting the old tidelands to three feet above high tide. In 1923, both Elliott Way and Western, reaching with 15th Avenue N.W. to the then new Ballard Bridge, created a new speedway to the north end for a commuting population then riding rubber wheels, not hooves. 

In the late 1920s, O.M. Kulien built the Northwest Industrial Buildings that still stand here on the west side of Western Avenue West. Later, the Andrews family purchased the buildings, and later still, in 2000, remodeled them with a new name: the Northwest Work Lofts. Sid Andrews explains, “The Andrews family have by now owned the buildings for three generations – with the fourth in training.”  

WEB EXTRAS

I’m going to divert attention from our historical remit for just a moment to wish Stu Dempster a very happy 80th birthday!

Anything to add, lads?   Surely Jean, and an  joyful excuse. (You might might have included more of tonight’s photos of Stu and the crew.  It was because we enjoyed tonight’s orchestral tribute to Stu at the Chapel performance space in Historic Seattle’s Wallingford venue at Good Shepherd, and preluded it with a visit to a private affair celebrating Historylink’s prexy Marie McGaffrey’s 65th Birthday that we did not get as far into this week’s blog as we might have.  The neglect was worth it.   We start these “adds” with more links panned-out by Ron Edge, and will turn tomorrow with more discoveries including a dozen looks along Elliott Avenue mostly in the 1930s.  We will put it then to our readers to repeat any of them with their smart phones or other digital hardware and send them along to us and we will will slip them in.  All of them and with much credit and thanks.  What fun.  I may do it too Jean.  Ron?    (These mildly manic proposals are probably influenced by Fats Domino to whom I am now, by coincidence. listening, “all by myself” at 3am Sunday morning.)

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TIMELY INTERRUPTION from JAN 25, 1922 (The Times)

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AN ELLIOTT REPEAT CHALLENGE (or Game)

We invite you dear readers to take your digital cameras and repeat the dozen or so recordings below of Elliott photographed by/for the Foster Kleiser Billboarders between 1938 and 1942.   All of them have their own captions, however beware.  The descriptions are of the billboards and their positions  in relationship to the nearest streets that intersect with Elliott. Most of the captions also include company code.  If you have the gumption to partake in this Repeato-Exploration then please send us your digits and we will insert them with credits.  Include any insightful or heart-felt captions you like. Jean where do they send them?  Paul, they should send them to paul@dorpat.com

Here they are in no particular order.

[BEWARE and careful with the traffic]

No. 1

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No. 2

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No. 3

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No. 4

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No. 5

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No.  6

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No. 7

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No. 8 [Elliott Ave. lk. n. to 4th W., 1940]

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No. 9 [Elliott near Roy and Prospect, Feb. 12, 1940]

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No. 10 [Elliott lk s. fm 4th Ave. W.  Sept 21, 1939]

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No. 11

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No. 12

 

 

 

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Certainly many PacificNW readers are familiar with the elegant Rhodes residence at the northwest corner of 10^th Avenue E. and E. Howell Street.  Although a fortress-sized hedge largely guards the house gardens from sight, the street is by now a busy arterial. It is a century since the couple moved into this Capitol Hill prospect. From plans by local architect Augustus Warren Gould, the mansion was built big but not vast. Albert and Harriet Rhodes were childless.  Their ‘dependents’ were the 500 employees who worked in their Rhodes Department Store.  Before the move to Capitol Hill, the

Rhodes lived for a few weeks in the New Washington Hotel (now the Josephinum Apartments) on Second Avenue, conveniently only three blocks north of the couple’s prosperous store at Second and Union Street.  Their intention to leave the hotel for the hill was announced in the Society section of The Times for December 11, 1915, where it was also reported that Hotel management had hosted a complimentary goodbye banquet for the couple and their friends. On the next day, the 12^th of December, the paper’s classified section included a notice that the Rhodes were seeking “a thoroughly competent girl for general housework: references required; apply 1901 10^th Av. N.”    

We have learned from Carolyn Marr, librarian for the Museum of History and Industry, that this week’s featured historical photograph was recorded by the Webster and Stevens studio, for years the editorial photographer for this newspaper. If this photo was used in The Times, we have not found it.  However, we do know the car.  With help from Fred Cruger, our Granite Falls–based antique cars expert and collector, we know that this is a battery powered Detroit Electric.  (For goodness sakes, Fred owns one.) 

But is that Harriet Rhodes pausing at the open door to the battery-powered hardtop?  Or is it, perhaps, a hired model posing for the local Detroit Electric dealer (also on Capitol Hill) promoting the dealership’s pride in front of a status-radiating mansion?  Actually, we do think it is Harriet, based on the somewhat soft evidence of two later portraits of the department store owner.  (You might consult the blog listed below, and there compare the ‘resemblances’ and decide for yourself.)

Albert met Harriet in the Dalles, Oregon, while he was working as a traveling salesman of household goods for a Portland firm.  They married in 1893, living first in Tacoma, where Albert was joined by his three brothers who had followed him west from Wisconsin.  Together they started several stores, from populist five-and-dime dispenseries to posher shops, all with the family name attached.  After their move to Seattle the couple was consistently charmed with both business and social successes.  What Albert lacked was longevity. The front-page banner headline of The Times for February 17, 1921, reads: “A.J. Rhodes Dies in New York.”  He succumbed to the flu while visiting New York on business for the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.  He was fifty-six. 

Harriet began her remaining twenty-three years by expanding their department store.  One of the additions was an impressively large Aeolian Duo Art organ in the lobby dedicated to the memory of Albert. Harriet also travelled often, collecting art.   She returned to her Capitol Hill home with what an unnamed Times arts reporter described on August 9, 1931, as “endless treasures, yet each so complementing the other and partaking so surely in the dominating personality of the house that it is a home of rare beauty, not a museum.”  Harriet Rhodes died in 1944 after visiting New York and staying in the same hotel where her Albert had died.  Her obituary reads, “Close friends believe that Mrs. Rhodes knowing she was ill, made the journey out of sentiment.” 

WEB EXTRAS

Seeing that the high shrubbery concealed all but the top of this lovely mansion, I peeked around the leaves and grabbed a snapshot of the front of the house.

And here Jean to compliment your innocent peek is an advertisement from April 19, 1931 that uses the Rhodes manse and its landscape to promote Babcock Sprinklers.   The Rhodes big home was used by many as a handy landmark for piggy-backing prestige with directions.  Following the sprinklers, we will follow with two examples.

Anything to add, mes braves?  Yes, again and again we discover more than we have time to scan and put in place.   Again, Ron Edge has saved the day and found a dozen-or-so features to add from the neighborhood.  These are all grabbed from past blog posts.  There are about 50 others that have yet to be scanned, earlier features from before 2008.

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MORE RHODES AND ELECTRIC TRANSPORT

Harriet Rhodes gave a lot of her time, wealth and study traveling the world to collect art and artifacts for her home.  She was also a frequent sponsor of local art events and programs, and hostess to groups that were similarly disposed.  Included in the clips below is by any standard a wonderfully rich one describing what was inside the Rhodes home.  And the author is not credited?

(click to enlarge photos)

For this week’s “then” we have picked another of the tax photos saved from the County Assessor’s wastebasket.  About sixty years ago, Stan Unger, then a young King County employee with affection for the built city, salvaged about three-thousand of these prints.  Like this portrait of 615 Eastlake, most were copied from 2 1/2 by 4 inch negatives, originally exposed for the late-1930s Works Progress Administration’s survey of taxable structures in King County.  On the whole this ambitious study was the work of skilled WPA workers using good cameras with sharp lenses.  For the most part, however, the tax cards and files that described the measurable qualities, including lot sizes, fixtures, building materials, architects, values, and much more, were destroyed, including those for this charming home yearning to be enjoyed as a Victorian landmark. 

Often the subject’s date of construction was hand-printed on the back of the surviving prints, but not on this one.  We will need to use other sources to summon an outline of the home’s history.

From earl real estate maps and other photographs (and Ron Edge’s help in uncovering them), we learn that 615 Eastlake had a twin standing beside it from at least the early 1890s until 1906.  It was removed for the construction of the three-story Jensen Apartments and storefronts (601 to 611) at the northwest corner of Eastlake Ave. and Mercer St.  The Jensen, restored in the 1990s, stands on the left of our “now.”  The surviving Victorian cottage, showing in our “then”, was moved west in 1905 or 1906 to create more open space between the new apartment house and the substantial frame residence (617) on the right. 

 

 

Built on the lowest part of Capitol Hill’s western slope and from their many rear windows looking east over the Cascade neighborhood “flats,” these charming Gothic twins were not dainty. Their daylight basements served more like lower main floors, and were fitted with several windows each. (See them  three photos up.)  Still it was their well-ornamented east facades that these Victorians showed-off to Eastlake Avenue.  And on the evidence of the 1893 Sanborn real estate maps, they were also originally closer to the avenue. (See five images up.)  Beginning in the mid-1880s Eastlake was the railed route for horse-drawn cars carrying picnickers and others to Lake Union.  With users assured, immigrant William Jensen developed Jensen Grove, a German beer-garden, boat rental, bowling green and swimming beach attraction at the southeast corner of the lake.

When built, we speculate in 1890, the Victorian twins were set at the center of the block between Mercer and Roy Streets with the property line squeezed between them.  But who built the twins and who first lived in them?  The 1892 Colbert Directory has German immigrant, William Koch, at home in the north twin, while living in the snuggling south twin was William Jensen, the same Jensen of the Grove.  Most likely they built them too.  In the 1908 Baist Real Estate Map, Jensen’s name is printed on his south side of the block. By then the south twin (most likely) has been removed to make way for the Jensen Apartments at the northwest corner of Mercer and Eastlake.

The two Williams, neighbors Koch and Jensen, were partners in the Louvre, a popular café-tavern built quickly at the northeast corner of Madison St. and First Ave. following the 1889 fire.  The partners were also brothers-in-law.  Koch’s sister, Hulda , arrived in Seattle two weeks after its Great Fire, and soon married her brother’s business partner.  In the fall of 1909, the Times reported, “Mrs. William Jensen (Hulda) was hostess at a very pretty reception given in honor of their daughter Gertrud’s eighteenth birthday.”  By 1910 Jensen was sufficiently celebrated to lend, or more-likely sell, his name for use in a local advertisement for rheumatism and lumbago cures.

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Jimmy (I say Jimmy to honor Scotland’s ‘Remain’ vote – on the streets of Glasgow, if you call out ‘Jimmy’ every male in shouting distance will turn in acknowledgement – it’s the Scots equivalent of ‘fellah’)?   Yes Jean.  Do you imply that Scotland gave its majority to ‘Remain?’  Yes and yes again.  Ron has piled below eighteen past neighborhood features, some of which our readers will remember and then, probably remember again, for we do repeat and repeat.  That’s what we do, hey Jimmy?

(click to enlarge photos)

The Kenney Home on the western slope of the southern West Seattle ridge was both proposed and first funded by an immigrant couple who never saw it, Jessie and Samuel Kenney. Samuel died in 1894 and Jessie five years later. Her will confirmed the couple’s philanthropic plans for a “home or retreat for such infirm persons of both sexes of above sixty (60) years … who, by reason of poverty, are … unable to adequately provide for themselves, and where such persons, irrespective of their religious or political views, shall be gratuitously supplied as far as may reasonably be, with the shelter, care and comforts of a home, which shall be known as ‘The Samuel and Jessie Kenney Presbyterian Home.’”

As we might confirm from the featured photo, when the Kenney Home opened its neo-colonial landmark in 1909, the nearby forest of 100-foot firs still rivaled its Independence Hall-like tower at breaking the skyline. Our “then” looks north from the intersection of West Othello Street (crossing left-right) and 47^th Avenue. In this long block, 47^th has been developed with a 40-foot-high trestle, which carried the Seattle Electric Company’s streetcars over a gully that reached from a spring on the Kenney Home campus to the Puget Sound waterfront. While the Kenney Home was being constructed, the streetcar line was extended from the Junction on California Avenue to the ferries at Fauntleroy and beyond to a neighborhood jovially called Endolyne (end of the line).  [Here we will interrupt this feature with another of the same block.  It first appeared in Pacific on April 9, 2000. ]

Along with this admired landmark’s tower, the new common carrier was a great convenience to the neighborhood and often was referenced in classified ads and other published instructions. For instance, a Seattle Times “Club Meetings” listing for June 4, 1920, advised that the “Social Service Department of the Women’s Century Club will give its annual tea and entertainment for the old women at the Kenney Home. Bring Basket Lunch. Leave Pioneer Square at 11 o’clock.” The “old women” reference reminds me that it was not so long ago that a “retirement community,” in today’s preferred parlance, was regularly called an “old folks’ home.” Whatever the label, the Samuel and Jessie Kenney Home was one of our local firsts.

This Saturday, June 25, The Kenney will be open to all of us. On hand to welcome visitors to this benefit for the Southwest Seattle Historical Society will be the founders’ great-great-great nephew and niece, siblings Stuart and Michele Kenney. Also on hand with historical photographs and memorabilia, revealing how The Kenney has been expanded and renovated over its 107 years, will be experts on the subject from the Society. John Kelly will be there, too. A West Seattle historian who moved to The Kenney in 2008, John is an old friend from whom I often take helpful instructions. He explains, “I coast along here at 95. My grandmother lived until 107, and I expect to be here for a while. So think positive, Paul.”

The historical society’s fourth annual “If These Walls Could Talk” home tour, focused on The Kenney, will run from 3 to 5 p.m. (Tickets are $10 for members, $15 for non-members.) More info: loghousemuseum.info.

 

Although it would have been a walk, especially for some living in the Kenny, you could approach the retirement home by taking the waterfront trolley to the beach-side terminus south of Alki Point.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys? Yes Jean, and at the top of this week’s Edgelinks  is something we did a while ago on the Seattle City Archives.  Your “repeat” shows City Archivist Scott Cline and Assistant City Archivist Anne Frantilla posing in the archive.  This coming Tuesday,  the 21st, Cline is giving a public presentation of examples from the archives, and he will explain how they help us understand the history of Seattle.  I’ll be there and I think Ron will as well.  Can you get away from school Jean and join us?

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A FEW MORE FEATURES FROM OUR PAST & THE NEIGHBORHOOD

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(Click to enlarge photos)

[Jean here. As a special treat, we thought we should share a video link to one of our all time favorite Pineola songs! Produced by Trent Siegel -http://www.trentsiegel.com]

With 133 years of local music reverberating between them, this week we compare two bands posing at the intersection of Main Street and First Avenue South.  For our contemporary repeat Jean and I chose Pineola, a quintet we know, admire and enjoy.  But for the uniformed eighteen brass players in the historical photo, we consulted Seattle author-historian Kurt Armbruster, our mentor in diverse matters, including both the early history of Seattle’s music and railroads.  Kurt first offered a complaint that the big drum held in the shadows on the left does not have the band’s name painted on it. Next Kurt dismissed our first assumption that it was Seattle’s most legendary band, Wagner’s.  It seemed a reasonable choice because the stickered caption attached to the flip side of the original print reads, “Groups-musical The Town Band on 1^st Ave. and Main, Sept. 14, 1883. Wagner’s Band.” 

 

 

This, Kurt noted, was both too easy and too early, for T.H. “Dad” Wagner did not arrive in Seattle until the peculiarly smoldering day of June 7, 1889, a day after the city’s “great fire.”  Instead, the author of Before Seattle Rocked offered us three possible candidates: the Queen City Band, the Seattle Cornet Band and the Carbonado Band.  All are listed as playing during, and probably repeatedly for, Seattle’s grand celebration on a late-summer weekend.  The city put on a big show when welcoming the Northern Pacific Railroad’s President Henry Villard and his trainload of VIP guests to the last stop on the Northern Pacific’s Inaugural transcontinental run. Because the tracks between the competing cities were not yet laid, they arrived from Tacoma not by train, but on board the steamer, Queen of the Pacific.

Kurt also encouraged us to confirm his own research by repeating it, that is, by reading news coverage of Villard and his entourage’s brief but boisterous visit to Seattle. The Post-Intelligencer of Sunday Sept. 16, 1883, includes a sensational day-after summary of the celebration.  “If Seattle was filled with people on Friday, she fairly boiled over yesterday.  Talk about Fourth of July, yesterday was Fourth of July with a vengeance.” The Saturday parade “surpassed anything of the kind ever attempted on Puget Sound.”  The parade was led by the twenty-piece brass band from Carbonado, the town with Pierce County’s largest coal mine.  Later, the Seattle Cornet Band came before a special carriage carrying “Angeline, daughter of old Chief Seattle . . . for whom the ‘Queen City’ was named.”  The Queen City Band led the parade’s next division, which began with the fire department’s several apparatuses, followed by more horse-drawn floats, VIP carriages, and a “long line of mud wagons and dump carts, concluding with citizens on horseback and on foot.”  Two-miles-long, the procession concluded at the university’s then still downtown campus for grandeloquent speeches, followed by a feast of roasted salmon and steamed clams for the thousands attending.

The parade route was decorated with flags, posters, lines of fir trees arranged to both sides of the parade, and three arches. One of the arches is seen in part in our featured photograph that looks north on Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) through its intersection with Main Street.  The Post-Intelligencer described its construction: “For several days workmen have been engaged in putting together this bower of beauty.  The arch, or rather arches, of which there are four, are in the form of a square, one facing the entrance from each street, profusely trimmed with evergreens and Chinese lanterns, and studded with bunches of red mountain ash berries.”  

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, guys?  LOTS.  Ron Edge has put up twenty-seven (27) links to past features from 2008 to now.   Most have, again, something to do with the neighborhood, including the first two below that begin at this intersection of Main Street and First Avenue South.  At the bottom of this Edge list, nos. 26 & 27 are about music.  The first of these touches Town Hall, where Jean has produced now for many years the Rogues Christmas Show, which now regularly puts on stage the original music of Pineola,  the band featured here at the top.  The last, No. 27, reminds us of Kurt Armbruster and his book on the history of local music (most of it) titled, “Before Seattle Rocked.”   Finally, as time allows tonight I’ll fetch more features from the many more years before the blog began (which was about eight years ago), and a few other ephemeral attractions.   Please except our good intentions to edit all this tomorrow, most likely after many of you have already read it.

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THE BAR in the BASEMENT of the YESLER-LEARY BUILDING

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Aside from its internal evidence, that found in the photo itself, there is no surviving caption or credit for this record of the “N.W. – Cor. of 9^th & Union St.”  The 4×5 inch print came to me from Stan Unger, a generous enthusiast of regional history. More than a history buff, he is a preservationist, who more than a half-century ago saved an important part of our recorded heritage.  When Unger was working in the county assessor’s office in the early 1950s, he was invited to retrieve, and so also preserve from the ‘circular file,’ about 4,000 tax photos, most dating from between 1937 and 1941.

Here at its intersection with 9^th Avenue, Union Street completes a 3,000-foot run from the waterfront to a grade on First Hill too steep for a street.  Instead, one must climb a path – behind the photographer – that reaches Terry Avenue one block east and seventy feet higher. Well into the twentieth century the precipitous hill at this point was relatively useless for easy development.  It

stood out and up, covered with a remnant of virgin forest after the land around it was clear-cut in the 1880s.  On the 1904-5 Sanborn Fire Insurance map, the southeast corner’s surviving verdure is marked as home for an “Old Timber Reservoir” and not an  “old timber reserve”, which I first misread from the 1904 map.   (Photos taken from Denny Hill of the evergreen verdure that did

distinguished this steep section of First HIll  are found in the first of the “Edge Features” lined up below this short report.) Kitty-corner to the antique reservoir, and what landscape endured near it, there was as yet nothing on this northwest corner in 1904, but soon would be.  A foundation outline of the wholesale florist showing here appears on the 1908 Baist Map, above.  (And so also on the 1912 Baist five photos up.  A Works Progress Administration photographer almost certainly recorded the featured photo in 1937.

Below a second floor of steam-heated apartments, and next door to Sing Kee’s Chinese hand laundry (far-left), the Union Street addresses of 820-824 were held by the florist wholesaler David Lloyd Jones.  Born in 1897 in Carbonado, WA, he was the son of a Welsh immigrant coal miner.  David Jones became a Presbyterian leader, beginning in his twenties, of the church’s youth activities and continued into the 1960s as chairman of the planning committee for building the denomination’s Park Shore retirement home on Lake Washington.  In 1933 Jones was named Secretary of the Northwest Florists’ Association. His flourishing sales on Union attracted other wholesale florists to the street.  

In one of the cherished “Faces of the City” nostalgic features John J. Reddin wrote for the Times in the 1960s & 70s, the columnist remembered Union Street and “the many wholesale florists with their wares piled high outside on sidewalks, especially during the days prior to Easter or Mother’s Day when retail florists trucks and automobiles made repeat trips to the wholesale house for cut flowers, plants and florist supplies. But, alas, the Freeway’s ‘dog leg’ took part of upper Union Street and ‘Florist Row’ moved to a new location.”  Actually, the surviving florists scattered to varied locations.

In 1974 the 77-year-old David Jones rolled his car twice on Interstate 90 in eastern Washington, 50 miles west of Moses Lake.  He may have been returning from a meeting at Whitworth College in Spokane, where he served as a trustee for forty-one years.  The wholesale florist did not survive the wreck.

(Not fatally but comically, my reverend father, Theodore Erdman Dorpat, also rolled his car in the 1970s, and also on I-90 west of Moses Lake – the long relatively boring stretch before the drop to Vantage and the Columbia River.  But dad rolled once, not twice, and survived as he did ten years earlier when he rolled his car into a snow-bank north of Sandpoint, Idaho  while rushing to get to a scheduled Sunday service sermonizing  in Bonners Ferry.   We never knew if Dad’s frequent Guardian Angel explanation for his survival of mishaps  like these was an expression of his sense of humor, for he was a performer, or his faith.  Or some theological mix of of the two.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?   Yes Jean including some flowers at the bottom in memory of David Jones – and my Wallingford Walks of years past.  First, however, we hope that our readers will CLICK to open at least the first of the 26 Edge Links directly below.   It includes a few looks at our steep and long forested corner of 9th and Union recorded long ago from Denny Hill across what is now the retail section of the Central Business District.

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WALLINGFORD WALKS FLOWERS in memory of DAVID JONES and GOOD KNEES

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The fire started around 9:00 on the Saturday evening of July 26, 1879, in room No. 12 on the second floor of the American House. Only the day before the hotel advertised itself in the Daily Intelligencer as “The best and cheapest House in town for a poor man.” The hotel sat by the waterfront end of Mill Street (Yesler Way), near the Seattle Lumber Mill, which was reduced to rubble smoldering above a few salvageable saws.

On Sunday the newspaper opened its first report on the fire with a sensational exaggeration. “The long expected conflagration that was to destroy this wooden town has come and done its terrible work. In an hour a score of business houses were destroyed, half as many men ruined and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of property swept out of existence.” In addition to the cheap hotel where it started, the fire consumed “five saloons, a seamen’s bethel, a machine shop, a marble shop, two sash and door factories, a chair factory, a grist mill, a turning shop” and various other smaller structures. All were soon rebuilt, but to stricter fire codes that were enacted after the fire. Ten years later Seattle’s business district was nearly wiped out with its “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889, which razed more than thirty city blocks, including Yesler’s wharf and most of the waterfront.

This Peterson & Bro Studio photograph looks west from near Post Avenue through the ruins of the Seattle Lumber Mill. Volunteers, including sailors from ships in Elliott Bay, saved the several warehouses that were standing at the end of Yesler’s wharf with a great and heroic dousing of the dock. Volunteers armed with buckets and wet blankets also protected the Daily Intelligencer’s frame quarters at the foot of Cherry Street, which was also the home of the Peterson & Bro Studio.

The city’s nearly new Gould Steam Fire Engine performed well until its suction lining came loose. The engine had been delivered earlier that year with great fanfare. An enthused and expectant citizenry followed it and the six horses pulling it on parade from its waterfront landing – almost certainly on this dock – to Yesler’s Pavilion for a community dance and a “bounteous repast . . . prepared by the ladies of the town.”

The Daily Intelligencer concluded its Sunday report with a description of the frantic evacuation taken by citizens with their goods from quarters that were never reached by the fire. “Every place of business in the Yesler block, on Mill and Front Streets, [was] stripped of its contents except those in the Intelligencer building . . . Stores were wholly or partially emptied, and the streets were lined with furniture, boxes of groceries, clothing, drugs, jewelry, etc. . . Trusty men and horses and wagons were in demand at high prices. Reckless and ridiculous things without number, as is always the case on such occasions, were done on every hand.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Surely Jean, starting with nineteen Edge links and then followed by whatever we get up after lunch (your time dear reader) on Sunday (this day).  It is 3am, and time for me to prepare to walk the stairs to my horseshoe-shaped pillow in time to hear the birds outside my window welcome the light while I cover my eyes with a black sock for the duration.

 

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This row of strapping residences on Broadway stands near the summit of the long ridge that locals first referred to as “the first hill.” By the time these roosts were constructed in the early twentieth century, the “the” was increasingly dropped, but not the “first.” Broadway, along with Denny Way and Yesler Way, was so named to mark it as a border for the Central Business District. And it was platted broad too, eighty feet wide rather than the common sixty feet of other streets and avenues on the hill.

The size of the five big residences on show in this 1937 tax photo is a tribute to the late nineteenth century ambition of First Hill to distinguish itself as Seattle’s exclusive neighborhood of mansions. Usually raised above big double lots, these are exceptions, as each occupies a single lot. With the turn of the century, any exclusivity in this neighborhood was soon overwhelmed by Seattle’s muscular growth, and its needs for workers’ housing “within walking distance” or quick trolley rides to their employers beckoning. In addition to apartments, institutions such as schools, hospitals, and churches crowded First Hill in the early 1900s, so that its luxuriance was more in human stories than family wealth.  The pan shown just above reveals the early diversity of housing on First Hill.  It shows a mix of mansions, row-houses and apartments, but not institutions as yet.

On the featured photo of the Marion Street end of the block we have kept the tax record’s address, 832 Broadway, that has been scribbled by the assessor’s staff on the grass.  It is a “family dwelling” with eight rooms built by Jennie and Frederick Hope in 1900.  After her husband’s early demise, she continued to live in the home until her death in 1938. The surely zestful Jennie Hope liked to host all-French parties with no English speaking allowed. She also hosted a salon in her living room for Seattle’s Progressive Thought Club. The Times reported that for the gathering on January 23, 1910, Rev. J.D.O. Powers, a Unitarian minister, addressed the club on “The Purpose of Life.” On March 12, 1912, the Club’s question was equally big: “Why Are We On Earth?” (Regrettably, in neither instance did this newspaper publish any of the Club’s answers.) Jennie Hope also liked to take extensive trips, long enough to offer a few of her rooms for subletting during her absence.

Although it cannot easily be deciphered in the featured photo at the top, even in the original, there is just left of the Maple tree a neon sign attached to the roof of the porch at 824 Broadway, two doors south of the Hope home. The sign reads F. V. Rasmusson Funeral Home. The mortuary was easily the most reported and promoted of addresses on this east side of the 800 block. In 1942 John Kalin, its new owner-mortician, spread his hegemony by first purchasing the

larger residence north of his and then the Hope home a few years after Jennie’s death. Kalin advertised his funeral home as Catholic, and his final paid listing in the Times was a “last rosary” for Marcelino Ubaldo Lyco, a WWII veteran. The service was held in the John Kalin Chapel on November 22, 1965. A requiem mass was to follow the next day at St. Mary’s and finally a burial at Washelli Cemetery.

THE OTHER TAXED HOLDINGS ON THIS BROADWAY BLOCK – ONE ONE CHURCH

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THE LAST TENANT AT 808 BROADWAY – and on it. 

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WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  A few mostly neighborhood features, which promises that some of these will repeat others of these this week and earlier and so be familiar to some readers of this blog.   But let us be considerate of those for whom this is somewhat new, also remembering that for our seasoned selves “repetition is the mother of all learning.”

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Below: THE 800 BLOCK ON BROADWAY FOOTPRINTS in both the 1908 & 1912 BAIST REAL ESTATE MAPS.  [click to enlarge]

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In spite of its soft focus, I delight in this week’s historical subject.  It is rare: a nearly pioneer look into the heart of the Alki Point neighborhood early in its development.  Photos of the Point’s early beach life are nearly commonplace, but not off the waterfront shots like this one of its interior along what was then still called Hanson Avenue. 

The featured print at the top and the few more above this writing were copied from a cord-bound album of by now mostly scruffy photos originally gathered to promote and revive Rose Lodge in 1913. That was a dozen often struggling years after Benjamin and Julia Baker opened the lodge and its pleasure grounds on the Puget

Sound waterfront south of the Point.  Among the dozen or so photographs included in the album, the featured  one declines to promote the Lodge’s advantages or pose its recreating tenants and fifty neatly-framed tents. (The next print below includes some of those tents and playful guests.)  Rather, the photographer turns her or his left shoulder away from the resort to look north-northeast on what was then, six years after West Seattle’s incorporation into Seattle and its conformity of street names, 63^rd Ave. SW.  Of course, some of the locals continued long after to call it by its original name, Hanson Avenue. 

Norwegian immigrants Anna and Hans Hanson, with their brother-in-law Knud Olson, and their families, purchased Alki Point from Seattle Pioneer Doc Maynard in 1869.  The extended family farm, here in the featured photo at the top off camera to the left, kept producing into the 1930s, while rentals on the Point property helped its members through the Great Depression.  This Hanson-Olson “Alki-Aristocracy” included the Clam Digger, future restaurateur Ivar Haglund, whose mother Daisy was the Hanson’s youngest child, the only one born (in 1870) on the Point.

Daisy’s uncle Knud Olson had his own namesake street that intersected Hanson Avenue where now Admiral Way does the same with 63^{rd SW}.  That intersection is a few lots north of the large white-box-of-a-home that stands above the center of this streetscape. It was for many years the family home of Asa and Irene Schutt.  Irene

was an activist in the Alki Women’s Improvement Club and club meetings were often held in her home at 3226 63^{rd SW}.  The home, now painted green, survives.  Across the street from the Schutt’s home were still undeveloped acres that a pair of Los Angeles showmen proposed in 1927 to develop into a twelve-acre amusement park.  Its neighbors were mostly not amused and the necessary rezone failed.     

This featured photo and the others from the album were first shared with me in 1997 by Walter Baker Williams at the Southwest Seattle Historical Society’s then recently opened Log House Museum.  We met in the courtyard paved with bricks named for and contributed by donors, Williams included. In the 1960s, the Harvard educated attorney was a member of the state senate.  He was what was then called a “moderate Republican.”  For a middle name, his parents handed him Baker, the name of his grandparents.  Again, it was the Bakers that had opened Rose Lodge, and quite possibly grandpa Benjamin Baker who took this week’s featured historical photograph. 

Electrical Storms?  above and financial struggles below.

THE WILLIAM and/or KENNETH MORRIS Rose Lodge Month of May Example for 1928 & 1929

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, les mecs?  Yes Jean, yes yes.  Ron begins this week with some Alki Beach wear and then with a few more West Seattle features.  Following those we will tie some clippings to the tail of this week’s blog.

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This portrait of Georgetown’s sharp but short-lived Oregon-Washington Railroad Station is the third “then” we have pulled from an album of snapshots shot and/or gathered by Henry J. Fickheisen.  Henry was the son of Carl W. Fickeisen, an early Georgetown baker who started sweetening the Duwamish Valley with his cream cakes in the 1890s. Our first Ficheisen choice was a portrait of the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Brigade pausing and posing in uniform during a parade on Seattle’s Pike Street (Jan. 20, 2013.  We will place it below as the second “Edgle Link” after Jean’s request for “Web Extras).  Next we featured a sensational winter shot of Rainier Beer’s Venus fountain (Feb. 16, 2014). It was shown not flowing but frozen.  (Venus will  also appear below with the Web Extras: the fourth one. ) The depot photograph’s postcard qualities may make one wonder if Henry Fickeisen purchased it from a professional.  But his album has many examples of personal snapshots of both family subjects and landmarks sensitively composed.  Certainly we will feature other of Fickeisen’s early-20th-Century photos in future now-then features.

On July 28, 1910, the Seattle Times noted some early work-in-progress at this station.  “NEW DEPOT BUILDING foundation work has begun for the $5,000 passenger station of the Oregon and Washington Railroad at Georgetown.  The new depot will be located north of Graham Street and west of Swift Street . . . The new station should be completed within a short time.” 

Finding little else on the tidy depot, aside from the Times notice, I turned to Kurt Armbruster, Seattle’s encyclopedic rails historian, who answered with the photo below, which also includes the new depot.  

 In this search, Kurt also reached rail archivist Dan Cozine, whom Kurt describes as “one of our region’s leading authorities on railroad facilities and owner of possibly the largest local collection of engineering drawings, official correspondence, and other historic railroad ephemera.”  We learn from Dan that the Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Co., regional subsidiary of the Union Pacific, built the depot in 1910. The building’s large waiting room, baggage room, and 300-foot platform indicated that it was intended as a suburban passenger station to serve the growing south Seattle area. 

These grand intentions, however, were not to be. Most Georgetown-bound passengers arrived by street trolley and not on a main line train.   After the 1911 opening of the Union Pacific’s grand station at 5^th Avenue and Jackson Street, few trains stopped at Georgetown.  The frequent exceptions were those loading cases by the hundreds of Rainier Beer at the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company’s big brewery about two hundred feet to the north of the depot and across the tracks. 

 

Another reason, perhaps, that the depot received little attention was that in 1910 Georgetown was preoccupied with being encircled by Seattle.  On March 20, the Times predicted “Georgetown Will Come In.” The newspaper’s list of advantages that would come with annexation into Seattle included Cedar River water, “high school privileges,” a much better police force “for the same price,” a move from “practically no street improvements” to “all she needs,” respected contracts and protected rights, her own councilmen (for the Fifteenth Ward), and something more than “a meager fire department” like the one that the Fickheisen’s volunteered for.  The Times made no mention of trains or trolleys.  On the 29^th of March, the citizens of Georgetown decided on annexation and enhanced encirclement.  They joined Seattle.

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, laddybucks?  The seventeen “Edge Links” stacked below are all of the south-end subject – from “below the line” or south of Yesler Way.  The second one is a kind of exception.  Another Fickeisen photo – like the day’s feature – it follows the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Department to the corner of Pike Street and Seventh Avenue, most likely for a parade.

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BELOW: NOT A LINK BUT ANOTHER AERIAL FROM MOHAI. 

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A moderately large heading, “Going Up or Coming Down, It’s Still Progress,” is set between two press photos on page three in the Seattle Times for Monday, Feb. 25, 1974.  The illustration above the heading is an aerial of the Kingdome under construction, while below is a dramatic exposure of the Normandie Apartments being demolished by a wrecking ball.  The caption noted that the “five-story 112-unit condemned building” was 65-years-old but

would be “razed by the end of the week.”   The Times reporter could not have known, of course, that “progress” for King County’s sports palace would amount to less than one-half that of the worn brick apartment building at the northwest corner of University Street and Ninth Avenue. As many PacificNW readers will remember, the Kingdome was reduced to rubble and dust in an instant with its implosion of March 26, 2000. 

The Normandie, designed by prolific local architect James A Schack, opened its unfurnished units to tenants in the spring of 1910.  The agents, West and Wheeler, advertised this newest addition to First Hill’s growing abundance of apartment houses as “absolutely fireproof [with] all outside rooms, free telephone, elevator service, disappearing beds, ample closet room, roof garden, porcelain refrigerators, gas ranges, etc., in fact every convenience of an up-to-date apt. house.”  In 1928, an classified ad for the Normandie promised “an ideal home for business people” with “no squeaky floors or thin partitions.” 

What was routine for local landlords during Seattle’s 1962 Century 21 World’s Fair was a regular practice for the Normandie as well.  Prices were raised.  Through the duration of the Fair, the Normandie’s managers referred to their apartment house as an “apartment hotel” and charged the higher “daily rates only.”  The Normandie was promoted as only “five blocks to the Monorail terminal and department stores.” After that half-year of sometimes unfair fair accommodations, news from the aging Normandie was limited to a few funeral notices for residents, and a 1974 notice that along with its close-by neighbors, Horizon House and the Cambridge Apartments, the Normandie was included in “area 197” of the federal government’s list of bomb shelters. 

In spite of Seattle’s many hills and ridges and imbricating waterways, the lay of our land is much more picturesque than precipitous.  This First Hill intersection is an exception. After climbing east from 8^th Avenue, the steep grade on University Street stopped here and the street took a right turn (to the left) down 9^th Avenue to Union Street.  The alternative, continuing east on University, was strictly for pedestrians using the stairs evident in the featured postcard.  Normandie residents enjoyed the added convenience of a pedestrian bridge that accessed the apartments’ top floor from the upper and eastern half of this eccentric intersection.   

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, gents?  Jean, here’s a game.  Ron reminds us that we used the featured photo at the top in a previous feature as a “supporter” or more evidence for another subject.  Ron suggests that we invite the readers into a “hide-and-seek” for it, while assuring them that it is not included in the last of the dozen or so features he will next post below these salutations and explanations.

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Perched near, and somehow above, the sidewalk on the east side of Second Avenue, Frank Nowell, the photographer of this flood of fashionable pedestrians, is standing about a half-block north of Stewart Street. The crowd seems to spill onto Second from what the Times called the “immense viewing stand” on its west side.  The pack has gathered to celebrate President Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Great White Fleet’ during its four-day visit to Seattle.  The American battleships were circumnavigating the world in a show of her military prowess.

Designed to support a mix of spectators paying a dollar a seat and free-loading dignitaries, the Chamber of Commerce enlarged the viewing stand from ten-to fifteen- thousand seats in hurried construction the week before the grand parade of Tuesday May 26,1908.  Nowell’s camera (for the featured photo at the top) points to the northwest, so given the shadows on both the celebrants’ faces and The Harvard Hotel at the northwest corner of Virginia Street and Second Avenue, it seems likely that this was recorded after the morning parade when its route was safe to swarm. 

 

Before the parade, the Times predicted “a sea of bright-colored summer costumes and striking hats.”  Many of those bonnets included ostrich feathers, and surely some of those plumes were purchased at the Bon Marche’s May 21 sale priced from $1.50 to $6.95, depending upon the color and length.  The Bon also predicted

that the four-day visit of fourteen battleships from Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet would be “the greatest event in Seattle history.” It may have been, in terms of condensed sensation, remembering that in 1908 there were no radio, television or smart phones to distract one from mixing with others in patriotic fervor and sartorial show.  

It was this newspaper’s penchant to print on its editorial page the latest estimate for the city’s booming population.  At the time of the fleet’s visit, it was 276,462, plus about 125,000 more who reached Seattle by all means possible. Seattle’s suburbs were abandoned, the Times reported.  Full-up, the Great Northern Railroad “left 250 standing on the platform in Wenatchee.”  Fifteen-thousand arrived by railroad in one afternoon, which the newspaper headlined, “Chaos Reigns in King Street Station.” In its front-page afternoon summary of the morning parade, the newspaper estimated a total of about 400,000 for those watching the parade and marching in it.  The latter included 6000 men from the Fleet.   

This newspaper’s weeklong coverage of the Atlantic Fleet’s sensational visit is truly wondrous and often whimsical.  Readers, we are fond of reminding them, can use their Seattle Public Library cards for online explorations of the Seattle Times Archives.  You will be taken away.  And while delving we recommend both historylink’s essay on the fleet’s visit and Bob Royer’s astute reflections on his own blog The Cascadia Courier. Here’s the link http://www.thecascadiacourier.com/2014/07/the-arrival-of-great-white-fleet-in.html. I suspect that many readers will remember his early 1980s term as Seattle’s Deputy Mayor and brotherly advisor to Charles Royer, mayor then and for many years following.  Bob Royer is presently historylink’s Chairman of the Board.  

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Gosh Jean we spent a good  part of the afternoon searching the archive here in Wallingford for a sizeable stack of glass negatives of scenes from the fleet’s 1908 visit, but failed to find them.   Our club of addendums have now another member.  When we find them we will print them.  Otherwise we have, as is our custom, a few part features – most of them recent – from the neighborhood.   Thanks to Ron Edge for helping us mount them this week again.

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OTHER VISITS

The Atlantic Fleet also paused at Port Angeles, and marched in both Bellingham and Tacoma.  The first two views below are of the Whatcom parade and the third one shows the Tacoma Harbor -Commencement Bay –  light show for the fleet (some fleet – perhaps a later one.  I also seem to have misplaced my copy of Building Washington, which includes a thumbnail history of the Tacoma City Hall and clock included in the spotlighted Tacoma scene.)

 

OTHER FLEETS

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A Post-Intelligencer photographer standing at the summit of First Hill snapped this photograph at the intersection of James Street and Broadway in February 1940. That was forty-nine years and a few months after the electric trolleys, on the left, and the James Street cable cars, on the right, first started meeting here beside the Union

Trunk Line’s big red brick powerhouse and car barn stationed at the northeast corner.  Either on the instruction of the photographer, or motivated by a ceremonial urge, the crews of these cars are waving to each other across the short distance between them in the featured photo at the top. They are waving goodbye.  This is the end – or nearly.

Carolyn Marr, the Museum of History and Industry’s (MOHAI) librarian, tells us that the “given date” for this P-I negative is February 23, 1940.  This introduces a small problem, because the James Street cable cars made their last run around midnight on February the 17^th.  Perhaps, the date written on the negative holder

is its filing date.  For some cable car enthusiasts a sorrier possibility is that the cable car is here heading for its scrapping.  (This seemed unlikely to our attentive PacificNW editor, who wondered if this is headed for scrap what will become of the woman passenger?  We wondered – somewhat lamely in return – that perhaps this is the conductor’s wife, on board to support here hubby on his last ride.) This junking followed in the first year after the cars stopped carrying passengers up what the Seattle Times Associate Editor, James Woods, admiringly described as its half-century “elevator service” up the hill from Pioneer Square to this its summit. 

In the April 4^th printing of his feature, “Speaking for the Times,” Woods proposed, “Why not keep that James Street cable line going? . . . This would be greatly to the convenience and comfort of many people. It would also have advertising value, as one of the only two cable lines in American cities.  In that respect we would rate a James Street cable car considerably higher than a totem pole.”  Editor Woods was alluding to the arson-torched and dry-rotting Pioneer Square totem that was then being replaced, near James Street, with a replica.  Clearly it was a restoration that the editor compared unfavorably to bringing back the James Streets cable cars.  

There’s another dating ambiguity here.  Although difficult, and perhaps for some impossible, to read, a poster holding to the right-front of the cable car promotes the 47^th Annual Policemen’s Ball scheduled for Thursday, February 22 at the Municipal Coliseum.  [We have inserted a blow-up of the poster five prints up.] The top of the poster advises, “Ride The Street Cars.”  That would be difficult on this cable car from this position on this corner.  The cable cars on James stopped running, we remember, on the Saturday night of February 17, 1940. 

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MOHAI has consigned the decidedly low number 27,175 to our featured negative from its P-I Collection.  Howard Giske, the museum’s now long-time pro-photographer, advises, “We are still numbering that collection.  It is a work-in-progress that is now reaching two million negatives. We suspect that it will reach far beyond that.”  And we add and hope that ultimately most of this collection will be on line for all to share and use, and that the museum’s library will be generously funded to do it.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?  Lots of links from the neighborhood and or of more ‘rails’ mounted by Ron Edge.  Most of them will be familiar to regulars.   Following that – Jean – you have promised to share a few of the scenes you gathered his past week on  your and Karen’s visit to the Columbia Gorge.  Our readers I know will love them.  I do.  I hope you put them up first thing Sunday morning.

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To those who do not live in West Seattle, the “parts” that best represent it are, I imagine, a trio of large landmarks: Duwamish Head, Alki Point, and Lincoln Park. We might make it a quartet by adding Schmitz Park, although I doubt that many residents of Laurelhurst, Wallingford or Ballard have ever ventured into its virgin wilds.  These four destinations are, of course, very familiar to West

Seattleites, but I will further speculate that it is none of the four but rather the Junction that best represents the heart and soul of West Seattle, the grand peninsula at the southwest corner of Elliott Bay.  It is the Junction, extending in every direction from the intersection of SW Alaska Street and California Ave. SW, that is the best-loved corner in that corner.   

Here – in the featured photo at the top –  is the Junction on September 23, 1941.  With its low-rise profile and small-shop milieu, Jean Sherrard’s repeat is similar to the neighborhood recorded two months and two weeks before the United States entered the Second World War.  At that time a photographer on assignment for the Foster and Kleiser billboard company was working to promote the Junction neighborhood as a fine place to advertise.  Note the sign on the roof left-of-center – and in the other company signs collected here.  The photographer has aimed his or her camera north on California from midway between SW Edmunds Street and SW Alaska Street.  The four shining and parallel lines marking the pavement at the scene’s center are the surviving remnants of the Junction’s creation in 1907.  That year the Fauntleroy and West Seattle electric streetcar lines first converged: a junction.  It also was the year of West Seattle’s convergence with, or annexation into, Seattle. 

Because of its connections, the Junction soon grew into West Seattle’s commercial center. William (known as W.T.) Campbell, a skilled real-estate boomer, was largely responsible for the Junction’s rising above the sometimes wetland (it began, in places, as a swamp).  And it was Campbell who built the two two-story brick buildings that still hold half of the intersection: the Campbell Building (1918) at the northeast corner and the Hamm Building (1926) at the northwest corner.  It is these two ornate landmarks that one of the city’s most energetic heritage groups, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society, is nominating as worthy of preservation with a project it has named “We Love the Junction.” 

Why?  Clay Eals, the group’s executive director, explains, “We know that none of us will live forever. But landmarking the unique structures that for the past century have created an attractive and vibrant center for connection and collaboration, for friendly commerce, for appreciation of the visionaries who came before us, for the inexpressible sense of home, and for affirmation of our humanity – this is the stuff of identity, of legacy and of hope.”  We will add that a visit to loghousemuseum.info, the group’s website, will reveal with moving splendor this heritage group’s good works, including those of “We Love the Junction.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mes amis?  Yes Jean, Ron has returned to the blog a few of its more recent neighborhood insertions.  While was have quite a stack of ancient features that we might have lifted here, we will not for want of time, which must be given to our next contribution to the Times, also a West Seattle feature – one from Alki Point.  For coda we will now slip in a poem on California Street, which seems – to me – to date from about 1940.   I confess that I do not remember where I picked it up.  Perhaps a reader will know and enlighten us all.

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For “SO SHORT A TIME” a CALIFORNIA AVENUE CLOCK – Courtesy, Southwest Seattle Historical Society

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This week’s ‘Now & Then’ is a rare – and perhaps the only – occasion in the thirty-four years of this weekly feature to find a ‘then’ that is a harbinger of a ‘now.’  After Jean Sherrard photographed the latter a while ago, I kept it on my desk as a challenge to find a historical scene that foretokened it, or nearly so.  The omen recently reached us through the agency of Ron Edge, a frequent help to this feature.  Ron let us know that a mutual friend, the public historian and collector Dan Kerlee, had earlier shared this week’s ‘then’ with him.  The pioneer photographer recorded his shot within a soft shout of Jean’s storm-soaked capture. It will do nicely. 

Here’s Jean recollection.  “On a spring evening, driving north on I-5 from downtown, I found myself in a torrent – a quantity and quality of rainfall that occurs in the tropics, but rarely in Seattle. Buckets, cats and dogs, and Noah’s flood were the metaphors that came to mind. The windshield wipers pushed through liquid an inch thick, and everyone in their right mind had slowed to a crawl. Then, minutes before setting behind Queen Anne, the sun broke through the downpour, slicing away a few lower-lying clouds. I exited at Lakeview Drive and splashed up to a viewpoint overlooking the freeway. Like most natives, I don’t carry an umbrella, so I held a cardboard box over my head to protect my camera while I snapped a dozen shots of the city north and south, capturing Seattle in one of its rarer incarnations, under a sun-soaked deluge.”

Samuel F. McKnight, the photographer of the fortuitous early scene (at the top) operated a studio here for a few years before and after the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  His surviving work is not large.  The featured print looks north-northwest across a Lake Union only recently divested of its surrounding forest. 

On this southeast corner of the lake, the line of Louisa and David Denny’s electric trolley to Brooklyn (University District) and Ravenna Park passes between the homes on Eastlake Ave., bottom-left, and a park/beer garden landscaped with a swimming beach and a screen of shade trees growing beside it.  This park with its windmill and tower was opened in 1886 as a lure to what was then the terminus of the horse-drawn Seattle Street Railway.  The little bay beyond the trees has since been mostly filled in.  The ships of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were long parked here, and the Lake Union Dry Docks, off-camera to the left in the featured photo at the top (but markedly shown three photos down), has been at work since 1919.  Fremont and Ballard, upper-left, are mottled with smoke and steam from their mills.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Surely – another necklace of links from more recent features unfolded by Ron and pulls in the ancient majority pulled by me.   Some visitors  – five or ten – may noticed that we have again failed to introduce our blog with a little and somewhat improvised video on the week’s featured photo.   In the midst of Jean’s play production and my organizing/editing some 1400 pages of “Keep Clam”  (a bio of Ivar Haglund), we are now and for a while so busy.   But at some point in this rejuvenating season we shall return with our playful – we hope – videos.

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Here’s an early mist-enveloped glimpse looking west into Ballard from the West Woodland corner of 4^th Avenue NW and NW 60th Street.  Turn around and the landscape rises sharply to the east, climbing Phinney Ridge to its Woodland Park summit. The homes of sawyers and other breadwinners have not as yet filled the blocks this far east from Ballard’s many lumber mills, although this West Woodland neighborhood has been nearly clear-cut and is waiting for buyers.   

The modest and yet surely comfortable home, posing above with its residents at the center, dates from the 1890s. It was probably built by the carpenter-contractor Rasmus “Robert” Jensen, the man standing on the front porch with his wife Marie and most likely their daughter Anna. The lawn is fitted with a small orchard.  In a later photo the fruit trees have multiplied and taken charge of the acres surrounding the home.  These learned observations come by way of Susan Pierce. who is posing with her son Andy for Jean Sherrard in his recent repeat.  Nine years ago Susan and her husband Blake moved into the home that stands directly east across 4^th Avenue from the pioneer Jensen abode.

 

From their kitchen window the couple look out upon the Jensen homestead.  It is a prospect not far removed from that taken by, if we can believe the pencil note on the back of the original print (above), Broback Photo, an itinerate photographer from San Francisco. The original print, number 6446, is kept in the Museum of History and Industry’s “original photo file.”  It is from these files that many grapevines of heritage study sprout – including mine. (I began my study of Seattle’s pictorial history with visits to the MOHAI library forty-five years ago.)

With her son Andy’s birth three years ago, Susan was awakened not only to nurturing her boy but the western slope of Phinney Ridge as well.  These nourishing urges came together while taking Andy and her camera for perambulations around the neighborhood, and her research continued at home during Andy’s naps.  By now the baby is a boy who can distinguish between a gable and a bay window. Susan opened both a Facebook page and blog on the subject of her neighborhood’s history.  The results are admirable, and flourishing too, with over 600 users.  With the help of her neighbors this genial grapevine keeps on growing.  You may wish to review the fruits of these labors, either on the blog at https://vintagewestwoodland.wordpress.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/vintagewestwoodland

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mates?  First what we did NOT add – another video.  The play is the thing.  Jean has two more weeks of play production ahead and then we hope to resume the video treatments of these weekly features again.  Otherwise we have more neighborhood features, some recent and some rather old.   We start again with the more recent features pulled forward by Ron Edge.  Click them to open them.   We count “neighborhood” here as anything from Ballard to Green Lake, but still we have acted with restraint.

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JOHN B. ALLEN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

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GRADING ON NORTHWEST 57TH AVENUE

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WOODLAND PARK (Northwest Corner)

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SIMPSON BIBLE INSTITUTE

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COLUMBIA LUTHERAN HOME

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In 1904 when the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company had nearly completed the construction on their oversize plant in Georgetown, the citizens there, at least 300 of them brewery employees, voted to incorporate. The citizens took to politics largely to facilitate the sale of booze and associated pleasures – to create a town free of censors, prohibitionists, and all but the least acquisitive of tax collectors.  The brewery’s superintendent, John Mueller, won two of the new town’s most important positions: mayor and fire chief.  The third position, chief of police, was paid well. 

Also in 1904, the brewery’s superintendent had a sincere talk with himself, the town’s mayor, about building, for the convenience of workers, a footbridge over the railroad tracks that separated the brewery from Beacon Hill, which is not so steep where it rises east of Georgetown. Although the footbridge was delayed for twenty years, the building of small workers’ homes to the east of the tracks was not.  Many of these survive.  On snuggly-fitted blocks 800 feet-long, upwards of thirty homes look at each other across streets, such as 16^th and 17^th Avenues South. 

When new in 1904, the 855-foot-long red brick brewery along Duwamish Avenue (Airport Way) was a few feet longer than St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican.  It was billed by its boosters as the largest brewery west of the Mississippi, and by 1912, after some additions were made, including greater ice production and doubling the size of the bottling works, the Georgetown brewery was listed as the sixth largest in the world.

Locally, Georgetown’s “cathedral to brewing” was described as the largest industrial establishment in the state in 1914, the year that plans for the Juneau Street footbridge were revived. The brewery covered the cost, about $3,300.  A C.H. Stratton won the contract on Dec. 10, 1914. Expecting to complete the construction in ninety days, he ran only a little late.  As the caption across the base of the featured print at the top notes, “Juneau S. footbridge Built 1914-5, Open 3-26-1915,” which may be the date, or close to it, this print was recorded.  A second caption at the bottom of the negative is too faded to include here.  It reads, “Secured by efforts of Dept. of P.W.” (Public Works).

It was a different sort of “public works” that caused Georgetown’s growth and increasing optimism of the mid-teens to flounder.  In 1916, the anti-saloon warriors and Washington State’s effective teetotaling legislators won the war against intoxicants by imposing statewide prohibition.  Rainier Beer was moved to San Francisco. After midnight on Jan 1, 1916, bars were closed and all the jobs serving the imbibing culture – including those of hundreds of brewery and bar workers in Georgetown – were over.  National prohibition, beginning in 1920, prevailed for thirteen often-farcical years of abstinence, until the breweries and bars were reopened in 1933.  Months earlier, on Monday, Oct. 17, 1932, the deteriorating Juneau Street footbridge was closed to pedestrians and soon dismantled. 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, chief?   Not as much as we ordinarily contribute.  We will make up for it in about one month when our now-then on the Georgetown RR Station will be featured.  It is a neighbor within yards of the pedestrian bridge.  We will treat on both subjects – the trestle and the station – then in our video, which since late last year has introduced the blog.   The truth is that Jean is also busy producing/directing another play with his students at Hillside School (in Bellevue – see the link for the school on our front page) and I am happy to give more time to wrapping up “Keep Clam,” my long work-in-progress on an Ivar Haglund bio.  Meanwhile here on some neighborhood-related features, plus a few bridges, from the blog’s recent past, which Rod Edge has pulled and placed.

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John McCoy, past archdiocesan spokesman and author of A Still and Quiet Conscience, a biography of Seattle Archbishop Emeritus Raymond G. Hunthausen, first alerted us to the decision of the archdiocese to create a centennial commemoration of the dome’s fall.  I next called Maria Laughlin, Director of Stewardship at St. James, to ask about the possibility of repeating the hole-in-the-dome shot from the Big Snow of 1916 during the commemorative service. She asked, “How does Jean feel about heights?”  After I listed some of his ascents, she agreed to introduce Jean to Brenda Bellamy who would serve as his guide.   Here’s Jean’s recap of the climb.

“After reaching the rooftop, we clambered through a small exterior door leading into the ‘attic.’ To avoid interrupting the centennial service below, we crept along catwalks and ramps in near darkness. Squeezing between struts and support beams, we climbed several ladders to reach our final destination: the oculus, a twelve-foot- (I’m guessing here) wide circular opening directly above the altar of the cathedral.  My guide had already hoisted a snowmaking machine up onto the opposite side of the oculus, waiting for a dramatic, if necessarily truncated, recreation of the Big Snow of 1916 during the service.

“I scooted around the upper outside edge of the oculus. While below us readers, quoting from newspaper accounts of the day, told the thrilling story of the dome’s collapse, I tried out different angles for our repeat. Particular culpability was ultimately reserved for the New York City engineers or fabricators who had assembled the dome’s flawed superstructure.  It was allowed that Seattle and the Good Lord were blameless.  At an appropriate moment, the lights dimmed and Brenda Bellamy switched on the snow-maker, sending a small blizzard of flakes down through the oculus and over the altar below. We then returned to the cathedral floor, where young Irish dancers were entertaining the congregants to the sound of pipes.”

Raised a Protestant, the centennial show has made me consider conversion.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Fra Paul? Brother Ron?  Yes, and we can promise you and the readers more twin towers.  We start, again, with Ron’s pull of relevant features – including on Protestant (3rd up from the bottom of the “Ron Links”) mixed in with a few more Catholics –  posted here since we began doing these weekly duties.   Then we will attach a few features from the distant past – again relevant ones.  (And we will surely miss a few of the many First Hill features we have managed to assemble over the past thirty-four years.*)

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1907 – 2007

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THE DAY THE DOME FELL

From the Seattle Times for March 27, 1983

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Albert Braun arrived from Iowa soon after Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889.  Or perhaps before.  I we can trust the photo published below, Braun was here on the day of the fire and enjoying come cold beers at the beer garden that was then open at Pike Street and Front Street (First Avenue).  The caption to his piece of Seattle Times nostalgia from 1934 makes some spirited claims.  

Whether before the Great First or after it, within a year-and-a-half of the young German immigrant’s arrival here, with financial help from local and mid-western investors, Albert Braun built this brewery about two miles south of Georgetown.  The then still serpentine Duwamish River is hidden behind the brewery.  Directly across the river, on its west side and also hidden, was the neighboring community of South Park.  Braun’s name is emblazoned on the brewery’s east façade, and so it was best read from the ridge of Beacon Hill and from the trains on the mainline railway tracks below.

The brewing began here mid-December 1890, and the brewery’s primary brands, Braun’s Beer, Columbia Beer, and Standard Beer, reached their markets late in March of 1891.  The 1893 Sanborn Fire Insurance map for Seattle includes a footprint of the plant that is faithful to this undated photograph.  The map’s legend notes that the buildings were “substantial, painted in and outside” with “electric lights and lanterns” and that a “watchman lives on the premises.”  It also reveals, surprisingly, that the brewery was “not in operation” since July of that year. What happened?

The economic panic of 1893 closed many businesses and inspired a few partnerships, too.  Braun’s principle shareholders partnered his plant with two other big beer producers, the Claussen Sweeney and Bay View breweries, to form the Seattle Brewing and Malting Co.  Braun’s landmark was then designated as “Albert Braun’s Branch.”  Of the three partnering breweries, this was the most remote, and it was largely for that reason – combine with the year’s panic – , it seems, that it was soon closed.  The upset Braun soon resigned, sold most of his interests in the partnership, and relocated in Rock Island, Illinois.  There, in quick succession – or simultaneously – he started work on a new brewery and fell in love, but with tragic results.  Early in 1895 (or late in 1894, depending) Albert Braun committed suicide, reportedly “over a love affair.”  

For six years this tidy Braun brewery beside the Duwamish River stood like a museum to brewing, but without tours.  Practically all the machinery was intact, from its kettles to its ice plant, until the early morning of Sept 30, 1899, when The Seattle Times reported “the nighthawks who were just making their way home and the milkmen, butchers and other early risers were certain that the City of Tacoma was surely being burned down.”  They were mistaken. It was Braun’s five-story brewery that was reduced to smoldering embers.  The plant’s watchman had failed that night to engage the sprinkler system that was connected to the tank at the top of the five-story brewery. The eventually flame-engulfed tank, filled with 65,000 gallons of river water, must have made a big splash. 

There is at least a hint that the brewery grounds were put to good use following the fire.  The Times for August 11, 1900, reports that the teachers of the South Park Methodist Episcopalian Sunday School took their classes “Out for a holiday on the banks of the beautiful Duwamish River, (and for) a pleasant ride over the river to the Albert Braun picnic grounds.” 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Here’s Lady Rainier to cheer you on!

Yup.  Ron has found a few links that prowl the territory – widely conceived – and we have reached far for four or five more.

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BEFORE PROHIBITION

JUST 45 DRINKING DAYS LEFT (A Collection of Pioneer Square neighborhood saloon life before they closed in Washington State on the first day of 1916.   Jean notices that here no women are to be found.  The photographer for these 5×7 glass plates has not been identified eiher.)

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PROHIBITION

AFTER PROHIBITION

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Thanks to Gary Flynn the Bellingham-based “brewerian” for his writing on Braun’s brewery and many others.   In 2010 Flynn received the American Breweriana Association’s Excellence in Literature award for “Outstanding achievement in supporting the objectives of ABA and the Breweriana community.”

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Through our now thirty-four years of “weekly repeating,” the farthest we have strayed from Seattle’s Pioneer Square and/or the PacificNW offices has been to Spokane.  But this Sunday we have stepped as far as Juneau, Alaska’s capital. Jean Sherrard, this feature’s regular “repeater” for nearly a decade, has found it exhilarating.   Here’s Jean.

“Karen and I flew up to Juneau, a two-hour flight, on MLK Jr. weekend to visit our friends Robin Walz and Carol Prentice. Now we highly recommend Juneau in winter. It’s a small town of 30,000 people, nestled in the sea-level valley between impassible mountains (note: a little local ribbing at the expense of summer tourists, who stepping off the big ships and seeing snow, ask, “What’s the elevation of Juneau?”). During the chilly off-season the landscape is gorgeous and tourist-free. On Sunday morning we headed downtown to take this repeat of Frank LaRoche’s Gold Rush Seward Street. Robin and Carol, Karen, and some friendly locals crossed the street to enliven the photo, and then we adjourned to a table in the locally owned Heritage Coffee Company on the left – not too long ago a McDonald’s franchise.”

Actually, the only snow we can find in Jean’s January repeat is high above where Seward Street is stopped at the steep foot of Mt. Juneau. The snow this Sunday is mostly hidden in the forest.  In LaRoche’s “then,” (below the video at the top)  photographed sometime in the late 1890s, the corner for Jean’s coffee retreat on the left is occupied in part by The New York Store, where any anxious argonaut heading for the gold fields was assured by a mural-sized sign that he could get “cheap . . .the best men’s heavy clothing, underwear, rubber boots, etc.” 

Other outfitters, tobacco stores, bars, chop and oyster houses, and cheap lodgings covered most of the commerce done on Seward Street during the Rush.  Now jewelers, galleries, and souvenir shops waiting on what Robin Walz figures are the “up to fifteen- thousand passengers and crew who are set ashore from four-to-five cruise ships every day from April into October.”  Alaskan Heritage is an alternative to pricey knick-knacks on Seward Street.  The blue and pink banner hanging from the corner light standard on the right lists some of the attractions north of here at Front Street on Seward: “Governor’s House, Juneau City Museum, State Capital (and) St. Nicholas Church.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, pardners?  Sure Jean, and please mix with what you have written just above a few of the other shots from your visit to Juneau and its surrounds, although I suspect that some of those will be in the video at the top.  (What a labor it must have been to cut back Robbin and my dialogue from forty-plus minutes to twenty-something.)

Hi Paul, Jean here, with a few shots from Juneau and surrounds:

Immediately below are ten Edge-Links connected by Ron Edge to former blog features that are more-or-less relevant to this week’s subject.  Under these  links we will attach the several Alaska photos – most of them by LaRoche, one of the gold rush photographers from Seattle – that appear in the video at the top.  The bottom will round-out  – so to speak – with a few more by now nearly ancient now-and-then features that relate to the allures of Alaska.

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ALASKA GOLD RUSH ERA PHOTOS (seen and described in the video at the top)

 

FOUR FROM SITKA (as described in the Video at the Top.)

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This week’s subject, a snow-bound Ballard Avenue, was chosen ceremonially: it celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of Seattle’s – and the Northwest’s – Big Snow of 1916. (Actually, by the time this feature appears in PacificNW, our centennial commemoration will be a bit late, as this is being written in mid-January.)

On the first of February the snow began an unrelenting twenty-four hour drop that added nearly two feet more to the two that had already accumulated through an exceptionally cold January. For many Ballardians, the fact that prohibition began its sixteen year run at the beginning of 1916 added to the chill, especially on Ballard Avenue, celebrated for its saloons. With its rough count of Ballard Avenue bars, the famous newspaper feature “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” figured that there was “one for every church in Ballard.”

The new and heavy snow of early February “put on ice,” and sometimes under, commuting, public entertainment, classroom education, railroads, and weak roofs. The grandest disaster was on First Hill, where the St. James dome collapsed into the Cathedral’s narthex. For this exceptional occasion the Bishop expressed thanks that no one was in church.

Here (at the top) a neighborhood professional photographer, Fred P. Peterson, sights to the southeast with his back near what was until Seattle annexed Ballard in 1907, its City Hall at 22nd Ave. N.W. Peterson has stamped in red ink at the bottom of his snapshot a claim of copyright next to a caption, which records a “record snow fall of 38 inches” accumulated on the second and third of February. At least six trolleys are stalled on Ballard Avenue, and close to Peterson a motorcar straddles the avenue and its sidewalk. The sign swinging above it suggests that this might be a Studebaker stuck in its attempts to get service.

Measured principally by depth and not by winter mayhem, Seattle’s biggest big snow blanketed the village in 1880. (This feature could not commemorate that big snow with a centennial because “Now and Then” first got going in the winter of 1982. I remember that it was raining.) On Sunday January 4, 1880, the rain froze. On Monday it was all snow. Two days later the Seattle Intelligencer purposely exaggerated the depth at ten feet “in order to play it safe.” Pioneer promoters liked calling Puget Sound our “Mediterranean of the Pacific.” On Saturday, January 10, the Seattle Intelligencer advised, “If anyone has anything to say about our Italian skies . . . shoot him on the spot.”

Among our pioneers were many weather watchers who kept diaries. By their authority, six-and-a-half-feet of snow were measured in the first week of January 1880, and on the twelfth it began to rain.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?   Surely Jean, and before the reader reaches the collection of links that Ron Edge has put up, we will pause together and remember the historian Murray Morgan.  We may still consider him the “Dean of Northwest Historians.”  His Skid Road is the most read history of Seattle, and was first published for the city’s first Centennial in 1951.  Murray was born in Tacoma during the big snow of 1916.  Had he lived he would have been celebrating his own centennial about now.  His century will be celebrated at the Tacoma Public Library on Saturday the upcoming 27th, probably in the elegant and yet well-packed Murray and Rosa Morgan Room there.  Check out the library’s web page if you like.   Here’s a portrait of Murray taken by Mary Randlett and shared by her.  Below it  is another 1916 big snow shot.  We miss both Murray and Rosa.

MURRAY MORGAN’S CENTENNIAL

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We can be pretty confident about why James Lee photographed this look south across Ballard’s Salmon Bay to the Queen Anne Hill horizon. Lee has dated his negative – and presumably his visit here – June 23, 1915.  That was one month before the city’s public works department opened bids for the construction of two bascule bridges, of the department’s own design, both of which are still lifting, one in Fremont and the other here in Ballard.  Through his long service as a employee of public works, Lee’s efforts as a photographer of the city grew into one of the greater collections of Seattle subjects.  And, like this view, nearly all had some public works purpose, and were in focus, too. Many examples of his work can be studied through on-line links with the Seattle Municipal Archives.

The featured photograph at the top is the photographer’s record of the path that the Ballard Bridge would follow by continuing 15^th Ave. N.W. from Interbay north to Ballard proper. It would replace the 14^th Ave. Bridge, the clutter of contiguous spans on the left, whose first trestle was pile-driven into the shallow Salmon Bay in 1891. It was built for the West Street Electric trolley line, the first streetcar railway from the Seattle Waterfront to reach Ballard, which was then promoting itself as “the Shingle Capitol of the World.”  The industrious community’s first lumber mill was built on Salmon Bay in 1888, and by 1890 there were seven more – at least.   

I think it likely that it was the Phoenix Shingle Co. mill where Lee found his high prospect for shooting south through the line of 15^th Ave. N.W., although some Ballard mills changed names and positions often enough to be confusing.  In the 1912 Baist real estate map, included on the blog listed at the end of this feature, the Phoenix footprint is shown just east of a short wharf that extends 15^th Ave. about 200 feet into Salmon Bay.  The map reveals that Lee’s chosen overview is a few yards east of 15th Ave.  For his “now,” Jean Sherrard has nestled above the east side railing of the Ballard Bridge.  Although separated by a century, I think James and Jean are close.

The bridges at Ballard and Fremont (and soon the University District) were built for the Lake Washington Ship Canal.  Ballard had long campaigned for a canal, not to reach Lake Washington but for dredging to deepen Salmon Bay in order to move more lumber off and on to its waterfront.  In the spring of 1915 City Engineer A.H. Dimock calculated that once the bids were in and the contractors chosen it would take about a year to build the new bridges.  Here in Ballard Dimock was half right.  Work started on Sept 1., 1915.  However, a Times headline, “Ballard Viaduct Thrown Open to Traffic,” did not appear until Dec. 1, 1917. 

WEB EXTRAS

More to add, my droogs?  First, Ron Edge has posted eleven other blog features that will get one somehow to Ballard and/or Magnolia – sometimes with transfers.  We will also add a few more past features scanned from clippings.

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The Ballard Bridge profile from the east.  ABOVE, on February 24, 1917, with the piers but not the wings.   BELOW, on September 14, same year, 1917, now with the completed wings.

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ECUMENICAL BALLARD

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We may thank Jean Sherrard, the weekly provider of our “nows,” for finding and deciphering the name of the long ship posing here, the sizable four-masted Ecclefechan.  The name is attached to the bow on the far right, where it quarter-hides behind the ship’s anchor and its shadows. (To repeat his sleuthing you will need an enlarged print

and a magnifying glass.)  The Ecclefechan was named for a Scottish village about eight miles northwest of the border between Scotland and England and as close to the Irish Sea.  The town modestly thrived for two-hundred-plus years as a stop for stagecoaches on the six-day, 400-mile-ride between Glasgow and London.  (It now takes four hours and a few minutes by train.)

On February 5, 1881, when plans for the Ecclefechan were underway in a Port Glasgow shipyard, Thomas Carlyle, the favorite son of Ecclefechan, died.  As “the first man of English letters,” Carlyle had been offered a burial at Westminster Abby, but he declined in favor of a gravesite beside his parents in the churchyard of the town where he was born in 1795.  One description of the ship notes that a sculpted figurehead of Carlyle was fitted on its bow. It seems possible, or perhaps likely, that Thomas G. Guthrie, the ship’s first owner, was an admirer of the author. 

The Ecclefechan was short-lived.  On February 23, 1900, filled with 15,000 bales of Indian jute, the classified barque ran upon Skateraw Rocks about fifty miles short of Dundee, its port-of-call on the east coast of Scotland.  Although the ship broke in half, its cargo was saved.

Our “then,” but not our “now,” looks south from the Schwabacher Wharf at the foot of Union Street.  It was the only pier on Seattle’s central waterfront to survive the Great Fire of 1889, and so was the gateway for the shipped materials needed to rebuild the some thirty city blocks flattened by the fire.  The photo was recorded sometime after the fire and before the November storm of 1892, when “high and violent winds” collapsed the next dock south of the Schwabacher, Baker’s Dock at the foot of University Street.  Here it is still standing on the far side of the 290-foot-long and dark green Ecclefechan, resting at what since 1974 has been the south side of Waterfront Park. 

After its 1892 collapse, Baker’s Dock (it is written on photographer George H. Braas’s negative, lower-right) was rebuilt, longer and stronger, as the Arlington Dock.  (Compare the pre-and-post storm piers in the two “then” photos at the top.) About a dozen years later it was replaced by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway pier, which survives and now supports a Ferris wheel.  Five years after Braas used it for his prospect, the Schwabacher Wharf hosted the sensational arrival of the S.S. Portland, the “ton of gold” steamer

that in 1897 incited the hysteria surrounding the Yukon Gold Rush. Seventy years later the old wharf was torn down by its owner, the Port of Seattle, in preparation, in turned out, for the open water of Seattle’s Waterfront Park and Jean’s many-splendored view.

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, me lads?  Yes Jean, Ron has committed himself to a generous embrace of past features, and all are off the waterfront, or near it.

(click to enlarge photos)

With help from Tom Hitzroth, Chair of Redmond’s City Landmark Commission, I can construct a thumbnail history of the Redmond State Bank, one of that community’s designated landmarks. The comely brick structure survives at the northwest corner of Leary Way and Cleveland Street.  Somewhat typical for many community banks, this one has lent its front door a grandeur by cutting the bank’s footprint at the southeast corner of the chosen lot.  This allows the bank to continue with a bold angle its distinguished ways both north up Leary Way, here to the right, and west on Cleveland.  Clearly from this town center in 1912, by walking or riding two blocks or three west on Cleveland, one was soon out of town.

The date I chose for this postcard snap shot is mildly arbitrary.  That is, I intuit the date from experience. A half-dozen locals of some means and/or muscle incorporated the Redmond State Bank on July 28, 1911. Much of the muscle was provided by Clayton Shinstrom and Fred Roberts, who scouted the town’s surrounds for likely customers.  Clayton, according to his son Dick Shinstrom, whom Hitzroth interviewed in 2009, spent a lot of time on his bicycle and row boat canvassing the area and earnestly convincing the potential, but often skeptical, customers, that putting their money in his planned bank was safer than secreting it in the attic or barn.   

Given the widespread pioneer distrust of bankers, the father must have been convincing, for on September 11, 1911, less than two months since the bank’s incorporation, it guarded – and we imagine carefully invested – $10,012 in deposits.  By December the sum had reached over $32,000.  When Seattle Trust and Savings purchased the renamed First National Bank of Redmond in 1976, it held $13 million in deposits and certainly a sentimental corner in the hearts of many of its surviving depositors.   

Long before Redmond got its bank, it landed a federal post office and in 1888 its own station on the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, the line that opened the King County hinterland to more forestry, mining and settlement. The town was named by and for, sort of, its second postmaster, Luke McRedmond. Although Luke dropped the “Mc”, his neighbor, Warren Perrigo, equally a community founder, was not pleased, and apparently the two pioneer families thereafter were at odds. 

In identifying the town’s founder as Luke Redmond, the pioneer’s “Mc” was also dropped by the editors of Washington, a Guild to the Evergreen State, the now out-of-print but still popular depression-era big book of state motor tours.  On page 321 Redmond was included on an alternative route to Seattle from Fall City.  Nearly half of the book’s brief description of Redmond concludes with a fine example of silly human interest.  “Excitement ran high in 1935, when a black bear strayed into town, was treed, and, despite efforts of townspeople and police, sheriff and deputies, remained in the tree three days.”  (We will print directly below the Redmond page from the Washington, a Guide to the Evergreen State.  This is a repeat from last week, because it fits best here.  This big book was written in the late depression, supported by New Deal public works funding,  and published in the early 1940s.)

WEB EXTRAS

Something to add, boys?   Yes Jean, Ron Edge has put up a half-dozen former east side features, and below those a sample of Redmond Aerials from his collection of prints and/or scans.   These will be dated with a challenge to the readers.  All of aerials include-to-find the Redmond Bank (from this week), Brown’s Garage (from last week) and the two story brick Brown Building. This little hide-and-seek will be followed  by another Edge addition, a verdant panorama of Willowmoor, aka Marymoor.

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THE REDMOND AERIALS – BEGINNING with the  OLDEST from 1934 

[CLICK-CLICK to ENLARGE]

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MORE WILLOWMOOR aka MARYMOOR

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(click to enlarge photos)

I confess that I know neither who took this photo nor when, nor do I know whose fleet of trucks this is, nor the names of any of the, I presume, drivers posing with them.  (Hopefully, a Times reader will know and enlighten us all with a letter to the editor.)  With the combined help of Sherry Stilin, heritage activist, Tom Hitzroth, the Chair of Redmond’s City Landmark Commission, and Nancy Way, the author of Our Town, Redmond, I do know who built this sturdy brick business and when. Bill Brown was serving his first term as Redmond’s mayor when he began construction on what is now an official landmark, located in what high-tech Redmond is calling its Old Town Historic Core.  Both the date, 1920, and the name, Brown’s Garage, are posted above the front door, and another sign swinging above the sidewalk, lets one know that Good Year tires are included among the motorcar services that Brown is selling.

Earlier, before building his garage here at the southwest corner of Redmond Way and 164^th Ave NE.,  Brown had operated a popular saloon in the neighborhood.  It survives as another Redmond landmark: the Brown Building. When new in 1913, the two-story brick bar was the tallest commercial structure in town.  It may have also been the most companionable.  There was drinking on the main floor, while upstairs there was dancing in the big room, and, it seems, some hooking in the smaller ones. With national prohibition closing the legal taps in 1919, Brown turned his saloon into a drug store.  He then jumped from fixing sorrow through alcohol to mending motorcars in his garage with twenty mechanics’ stalls – plus a gas station.  Sherry Stilin explains that Brown’s motto was “All Roads Lead to Redmond.”

Conveniently, Snoqualmie Pass opened to adventurous motorists in 1915.  The improved Yellowstone Trail (aka the Sunset Highway) reached the pass through Redmond, but not yet as easily through Renton or the strawberry fields of bridgeless Bellevue.  Also a

graded road between Kirkland and Redmond had been completed in 1911. The astute Brown purchased an open omnibus to carry passengers between them. By author Way’s reckoning, Mayor Brown’s “biggest accomplishment” was the building and paving of the West Lake Sammamish Parkway between Redmond and Issaquah.  That Brown then also developed commercial home sites along the way would not be considered cricket today, although he was surely industrious.  This convivial and boomer mayor was widely appreciated and kept his title for three decades, until beat in the 1949 election in which 332 Redmond citizens cast their votes.  Now, a mere sixty-sixty years later, Redmond employs around six-hundred workers to serve its citizens.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?  Just a few relevant links from the east side.  On the whole, however, for the now 34 yeasrs of this Sunday Times feature we have not ventured across the lake that much.  We had a few eastern county runs when we were preparing the book “Washington Then and Now”  – it was published in 2007 – but since then not so much.  Next week when we feature Redmond’s pioneer bank, we will pull up a few more, including some aerials from Ron Edge’s scans.

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AS FROM ABOVE

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LONG BEFORE THE GILDED AGE

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KNOWN AND YET UNKNOWN

The pastoral and picturesque scene below I identifies itself as on Squak – aka Sammamish – Slough.  But where?  The bridge on the far right is surely a clew.   Again, we hope for readers’ help.