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On April 28 Denny Park Lutheran Church  celebrated its 125^th Anniversary.  Thru the years the parish has changed its name and affiliations a few times while building four sanctuaries on four different corners. All were sited near the business district – at the expanding northern end of it.

As an example, this, the first of the congregation’s homes, was built quickly at the northeast corner of Pine and 4^th on a lot that cost $2,000 in 1888 and was sold for $19,000 a dozen years later.  The congregation then soon moved seven blocks north to Fifth and Wall and built again on a cheaper lot.  These adept economics were typical of many congregations sitting with their churches on Seattle lots made increasingly valuable during those most booming years of the city’s growth.

Named the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church by its 16 founding members in 1888, services were first held nearby in the Swedish Lutheran Church and when ready in the basement of this their own first sanctuary.  To build such a stately tower must have required the charitable labor of at least a few skilled Scandinavian carpenters.  By 1890 there were twenty churches within six blocks of these Lutherans at 4^th and Pine, and seven of these twenty were identified by their attachment to Sweden, Norway, and/or Denmark.  And the Scandinavian migration to Puget Sound picked-up in the 1890s when thousands more moved here, for nearly everything was like the old country: the fish, the trees, the dirt, the snow-capped peaks but without a state religion.

Leaving this southeast slope of Denny Hill in 1904, the new parish – with less tower but more pews – was still located on the doomed Denny Hill. Then five years later the second sanctuary was razed with the hill and these Lutherans were forced to build sanctuary number three.   Erected at Boren and Virginia, it was the congregation’s home from 1912 to 1939 when they moved again, this time to Eighth and John.  The parish then changed its name to Denny Park Lutheran Church identifying with the “green pastures” of its neighbor, the city’s oldest public park.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?    Mostly photos Jean, although we will start with another feature, one that looks east on Pine Street from near 2nd Avenue in the early 1890s.  It includes our Lutherans at the northeast corner of 4th and Pine, the Methodist Protestants at the southeast corner of 3rd and Pine.  The feature first appeared in Pacific on March 2, 1986, and is almost entirely about the Methodists – bless them.

METHODIST PROTESTANTS at 3^rd and PINE, ca. 1892

(First appeared in Pacific, March 2, 1986)

            The first two churches in Seattle were both Methodist.  One was Methodist Episcopalian and the other Methodist Protestant. Long before any Methodists settled in Seattle, their denomination split over how much power to give bishops.

            In 1865, when the Methodist Protestants of Seattle built their church, the primary difference between it and the earlier Methodist Episcopal sanctuary was not doctrine but color. The first church was white and the new MP sanctuary was painted brown. From then on they were known simply as the white and brown churches.

            Here the “Brown Church” has lightened up, with the third “permanent” home for the congregation. The original brown colored church at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street was replaced in 1883 with an enlarged sanctuary. Its new stone veneer skin, however, did not save it from the “Great Fire” of 1889. This is the parish that the congregation, after worshiping for a year in tents, built in 1890 at the southeast corner of Pine Street and Third Avenue.

            Clark Davis became pastor in 1885. He bought the lot and built this church for about $40,000. Next door he raised a comfortable parsonage for himself, his wife Cleo and their two sons. The Gothic Revival sanctuary could seat 1,000 and often did. Clark was ambitious and in 1896, after resigning his pastorate, he went for and won the jobs of registrar at the University of Washington and secretary to its Board of Regents.

            The Pine Street Regrade (1903-06) lowered this comer 10 feet and converted the church basement into its first floor. With regrades on Third Avenue and Denny Hill coming at them, the parishioners sold their comer for $100,000 and moved in 1906 to a new stone church on Capitol Hill. As soon as the Methodists moved out, the Third Avenue Theater moved in.

 

NEXT we will ZOOM-IN on another look up 4th Ave from about the same time as the above classic.  Both are from the Webster and Stevens Collection kept at the Museum of History and Industry.

 

 

 

 

 

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A few more photos will be added tomorrow after breakfast.  For now it is “climb the stairway to nighty-bears.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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If for your next road trip north to Everett across our rolling “North Plateau” you should choose Aurora – and we recommend it – keep an eye out for this by now cherished landmark.  You will find it a few blocks south of the county line.  If you pay attention, the two-story flatiron Echo Lake Tavern, will seem to be pointing it’s narrowest end at you just above and west of its namesake lake.   

In the summer of 1905 construction on the Seattle-Everett approached what artful promoters called the Echo Lake Garden Tracks.  For “$500 dollars, $50 dollars down and $10 a month” five acres parcels were plugged as “suitable for chicken duck and goose ranches.” Herman Butzke opened the Echo Lake Bathing Beach instead.  Butzke had been admired as a singing bartender at Seattle’s famed “Billy the Mug” saloon. He was also a picture-framer, and finally before opening his resort, a plumber at the nearby Firlands Sanatorium.  His first customers at the lake were nurses who paid a nickel to use his shelters for changing.

Click the Firland text below TWICE to enlarge.

This landmark tavern came later.  After a new route for Aurora was graded here in the mid 1920s, Echo Lake resident Theodore Millan built the two-story roadhouse in 1928 on its triangular lot squeezed between the new Aurora and the old Echo Lake Pl. N.  Here the latter leads to the canoes, tents and new beds of Scotty’s short-lived Paradise.  With the uncorking of prohibition in late 1933, Millan rented his flatiron to Carl and Jane Melby, for their Tavern.

Vicki Stiles, the helpful and scholarly Executive Director of the Shoreline Historical Museum (nearby at 18501 Linden Ave. N.), had heard rumors that the florist Carl Melby had more than liked his booze during prohibition as well. The sleuthing Stiles discovered that Melby had been arrested at least three times transporting mostly illegal Canadian liquor.  (We follow below with several Seattle Times clips on Melby’s career.) One night at Sunset beach near Anacortes he was chased into the Strait of Juan de Fuca up to his neck, collared and pulled ashore.  In 1942 the then 56-year-old tavern owner was finally felled and also near Anacortes.  While fishing off Sinclair Island, he was leveled by a heart attack. Considering Carl’s inclinations his death may have been mellowed by liquor – legal bonded liquor.

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yes, and starting with more Aurora by returning with the “Edge Patch” below to the extended feature we ran here on March 16 last, which was, I think, shortly before we started having consistent inconsistency from both our blog’s server and it program.   So touch Signal Gas immediately below and repeat a variety of what are mostly early speedway views on Aurora.

 

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ECHO LAKE

(First appears in Pacific, July 7, 1985)

            Almost half a century ago, it took a little over an hour to go from Seattle to Everett on the Interurban. The electric cars reached 60 mph on the straight stretches – an adventure still remembered by many. The Interurban stopped at North Park, Pershing, Foy, Richmond Highlands, A1derwood, Ronald – names still familiar. It also delivered passengers to several lakeside stations as well – including Martha, Silver, Ballinger, Bitter and Echo lakes. The name “Bitter” was misleading, however, because that lake was the spot for the decidedly sweet excitement of P1ayland, for many years the region’s largest amusement park. But few remember Echo Lake as it appears in this week’s historical setting.

            Construction began on the Interurban in 1902, in Ballard. By 1905 it reached 14 miles out to Lake Ballinger, just beyond Echo Lake. The line prospered, at first not so much from paying customers as by hauling lumber and its byproducts and accessories. It’s a fair speculation that Fred Sander, the Interurban’s builder, hired Asahel Curtis to photograph this morning view of the new-looking pile trestle that spanned the swampy northeast comer of Echo Lake.

            Sander soon sold out the streetcar company to Stone and Webster. By 1910 they completed the line to Everett and replaced Sander’s little passenger cars (like the one posing in the photo) with 10 long and plush air-conditioned common carriers. In 1912 the company also buried its Echo Lake wood trestle beneath a landfill.

            The next year, 1913, Herman Butzke, his wife and daughter, Florence, moved into a two-room cabin they built at the southwest comer –  or opposite shore from the Curtis photo – of Echo Lake. They were the third family to move to the lake, and Florence Butzke Erickson still lives there. [In 1985]

            During the summer of 1917, nurses and doctors from the new and nearby Firland Sanatorium periodically escaped from their care for tubercular patients to swim in the clear waters of Echo Lake. With their help, Butzke built a few lakeside dressing rooms, and thereby began the half-century of the Echo Lake Bathing Beach. (It closed in 1966 for the construction of condos.)

            The Seattle-Everett Interurban did not last so long, but When it did quit, it was one of the last of the nation’s rapid-transit systems to surrender to the new taste in transport: the car. The modern pathway for the auto was the Pacific Coast Highway – or, in town, Aurora Avenue. It, like the Interurban, also passed by Echo Lake, and in the late 1920s when it was being built, property lots about the lake were being pushed as the “highlight of Plateau Norte, the most beautiful and attractive homesite addition ever offered … A heavily traveled highway such as the new Seattle-Everett 100-foot boulevard is like a gold-bearing stream.”

            Within 30 years, this gold-bearing stream would be stripped of its glitter and give way to the freeway. Now [1985] Interstate 5 is in its third decade and looking, perhaps, for the relief of rapid transit. Much of the old Everett Interurban right-of-way is still intact: a grassy strip of power poles and little parks. It seems to be waiting for the Interurban.

 

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The “revelator” here is the hole on the right.  From the guardrail on Holgate Street we get a somewhat rare look down into the old tideflats, or nearly so.  A lot has already been dumped in that hole, but far from enough to yet fill it.  In Jean’s “now” it is as high as Holgate and sturdy enough to support trucks.  Buildings now stand on concrete foundations and not on driven pilings like those supporting, at the 1923 scene’s center, the 45 steam-heated rooms of the Holgate Hotel, and the Alaska Stables, far right.

Asahel Curtis (the more famous Edward’s younger brother) dated this negative May 22, 1923. It is one of Curtis’ many recordings of what was named the “Ninth Avenue Regrade.”  (We will attach more of them below.) Ninth is now long since renamed Airport Way, and here at the end of Holgate, it can just be made out running north and south – left to right. On the far side of Ninth are joined-twin factories that were built like wharves early in the 20^th Century above the highest tides that then still reached Beacon Hill behind them.  In Jean’s repeat the

surviving “inland piers” are partially outlined in white.  As the Seattle Times advertisement printed above reports, its Feb. 12, 1905 edition – and many more – were printed from plates using Great Western Smelting and Refining Co.’s metal.  The Seattle branch of Great Western was housed here, one door south of the Salvation Army’s Industrial Department, in these wharf-like sheds.

Above: Looking east across 9th Ave. S. with the north facade of the Great Western factory on the right.  The photo is date 1923.   A year later the Salvation Army’s Industrial Dept. has moved to 914 Virginia Street and 406 12th Ave. S..  Possibly the reclamation work on 9th Ave. S. had something to do with the moves.

Below: Like the subject above, this was also recorded on May 22, 1923 and includes on the right the south facade of the Great Western factory.  The largest structure on the left – on the west side of 9th Ave. S. south of Holgate Street – is the Holgate Hotel.  The two story darker box to the south of the Holgate is the Bon Apartment House.

Above: Entrance to the Bon Apartments, on the right.  The sign above the Bon’s open front door reads, “The Bon Apartments, 1915 Holgate, furnished, housekeeping and sleeping rooms.  $1.25 a night and up.  Free gas and lights.”

Airport Way’s first incarnation was in the early 1890s as a 24-foot wide plank trestle called Grant Street.  Approaching the business district at its north end Grant was given the grander name, “Seattle Boulevard.”  For the most part, it ran a few feet off shore from the often-sodden Beach Road that was first surveyed in 1862 at the base of Beacon Hill.  (In the winter travelers took to the hill.) The trestle was soon joined in 1892 by the Grant Street Electric Railway that reached its power plant in Georgetown and beyond that South Park too.

Already in 1919, the Alaskan Stables, far right, began running in The Times classifieds under “Livestock” its horses, harnesses and saddles for sale.  By then the sounds of trolleys, trucks, and motorcars were readily heard on Seattle Boulevard.  Here the great sliding door into the stables is closed above the hole that was once no doubt covered with the stable’s own timber trestle.

WEB EXTRAS

As you know, Paul, the blog has been plagued with server problems which recently seemed to grow exponentially. We have, however, made alternate plans which we hope to put in place over the next week. There may be some downtime, but it should be temporary and certainly shouldn’t be any worse that the interruptions we’ve already encountered. So onwards and upwards! Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean.  First and directly below Ron Edge (of the sometimes Edge Clippings Service on this blog) has put up three links to other features from this tidelands neighborhood, or nearby it.  They may be familiar for two have appeared here recently.  But, again, we treat these now-then repeats as themselves repeatable –  like musical themes used in different contexts.   Following these pictures-as-buttons I’ll put up a few more Asahel Curtis photos take for this project of raising the tidelands to the level of the streets, here on 9th Ave. S. (aka Airport Way) and connecting streets like Holgate.

And then I’ll reread the text at the top and revisit my notes to see if there may be something in the latter that will add to the former.

[CLICK the PICTURES Below]

FOLLOWS more photos by Asahel Curtis – or his studio – of the public works on 9th Ave. S. in 1923.

ABOVE AND BELOW:  Two by Curtis looking north on July 19, 1923 from, the captions explain, from the southeast corner of Henry’s Cook House.

 A FEW THOUGHTS WHILE RE-READING MY NOTES for the FEATURE ABOVE

* John Holgate made the first potential settler’s footprint on future Seattle soil in 1850 when he visited that summer and built a lean-two somewhere near the future Pioneer Square – or Place.   He explored the surrounds until October and then returned to Portland and beyond to promote Puget Sound to his family and look for a wife.  When he returned the land he had chosen beside the Duwamish River and near its mouth had been taken in the interim and so Holgate substituted a claim on top of Beacon Hill and in line with his future namesake street.   Holgate’s younger brother Milton also settled in Seattle, tragically.  The teenager was one of two settlers who lost their lives during the Battle of Seattle on Jan 26, 1856.

* The Holgate Hotel, listed at 1901 9th Ave. S., was managed by John and Minnie Wildzumas, who lived in the  hotel.  In a 1917 classified ad is described as a workingman’s hotel with steam heated rooms, and restaurant “in connection.”  The fees for this “modern” hotel were then $1.50 and up.   The Holgate endured.  A May 19,1960 classified lists it as “close to Boeing (with) reasonable, single, housekeeping rooms and parking.”  The Holgate was put up for Public Auction on Dec. 1, 1968, listing “furnishings of 45 room hotel: Curved glass china cabinets, bookcase-secretary, bentwood chairs, brass beds, commodes, dressers, chests, gas and electric ranges, refrigerators, miscellaneous tables, chairs, wardrobes etc.  Preview Sat. 11am to 4pm.  United Auction Service, Bud Chapman., Auctioneer.”

* Great Western Smelting and Refining Co. came to Seattle in 1903, but not directly to this factory on 9th Ave. S., although nearby.  The first factory was at First S. and Connecticut until a roof fire uprooted them.  An adver. for March 3, 1912 puts them at 1924 9th Ae. S.,     The 1924 Polk Directory listing for Great Western makes note that the city directory was printed on metal GW metal.  By 1928 the business has changed its name to Federate Metals Corp and continue to note that the printing of that year’s business directory was done with plates furnished by Federate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What, we wonder, motivated this photographer to move off the sidewalk and use these mid-block weeds in her or his composition.  Was it, perhaps, to keep the brand new stone apartment on the left in the picture? The address is 1425 Harvard and the apartment is fittingly named the Boston Block.  It opened its flats to renters in the summer of 1903.  The location was certainly convenient but the monthly fee of $37.50 was not especially cheap for even the five room flats it was renting.

However, the primary subject here is probably the “vaguely Romanesque” but also new Seattle High School on the nearby horizon.  It opened in 1902.  On the evidence of a short stack of snapshots of which this is one, the likely year for this recording is 1903 or ’04.  With the photographer’s back near Union Street, the prospect looks two blocks north to the school’s south façade on the north side of Pine Street.

That, of course, puts Pike Street at the bottom of the hill, less than a block away in the draw between First Hill – with the photographer – and Capitol Hill with the school. Soon motorcars and their servers would crowd the sides of Pike with show rooms and parts stores for Seattle’s first “auto row.” The domestic clutter here of what appear to be single family residences would for the greater part be either replaced with business blocks, converted into boarding houses or succeeded by substantial apartment houses like the one on the left.

Lincoln, Seattle’s second high school, opened in Wallingford in 1911 the year Seattle High Changed its name to Broadway and first opened night classes.  This Broadway diversity was extended with skills schools like Edison Tech and “self-help” courses during the 1930s.  In 1946 Broadway was given over entirely to adult education including classes for veterans returning from World War Two.

After pioneer architect William E. Boone’s grand stone pile was sold in 1966 to Seattle Community College, Dr. Ed Erickson, the school’s president, publically hoped that “nostalgia and emotions will not get in the way” of College plans to raze what some of the high school’s activist alums still lovingly called the Pine Street Prison.  Alums and architects on both sides were enlisted for the battle that followed to preserve or pull down Broadway Hi. Second only then to the fight to save the Pike Place Market, the Broadway effort managed to keep only the school’s auditorium.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Because of the lingering ghost or ghosts in our blog machine we will keep it short Jean.  When these spirits are exorcized – or these problems answered – we can return to offering good-‘n-big additions to our features.  We love this recycling of years of features written and old photos collected and interpreted.  But for now we will wait, except we will also not wait.  That is, I’ll attach a few other photographs of the new High School, understanding that at least a few of our readers will have discovered the temporary trick for reaching the latest offerings on this blog, which is to go fir to its archive, aka its past pages.   There the ghost is temporarily restrained.

 

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The satisfactions of street photography include cluttered cityscapes like this one at the northeast corner of University Street and Second Avenue.  The principal tenant was a lawyer named Joseph Jones, who also hustled here, “nice dry wood to burn.” The mostly hidden banner sign reads, we think, “Joe’s Wood Yard.”  Even without a caption this subject is easily located with the grand contribution of Plymouth Congregational Church, the upstanding brick pile one block east on University at Third Avenue, far right.

Also on Third and made of brick, the backside of the Ethelton Hotel, far left, suggests a tenement except that the weekly rates of “$9 and up” were not cheap for the time. And we know the time within a few days.

The clue comes bottom-center with the 3^rd Avenue Theatre’s sidewalk poster for the play “A Woman’s Power.”  It opened at “Seattle’s only popular prices theatre” on Sunday March 10, 1901. This scene was recorded surely only a few days earlier.  The repertoire players, led by Jessie Shirley, are trumpeted again far left with the larger and no doubt colorful billboard behind the horse.  And The Seattle Times theatre reviewer was pleased.  Shirley’s performance is described as “highly infectious to her audience.” The play is complimented for the “purity and excellence of the moral it teaches,” lessons we would more readily expect from the Congregationalists up the hill.

A few days later on the Times theatre page, Plymouth Church, with the Ladies Musical Club, did some of their own promoting of a strong woman, this time with a celebrated musical virtuosity.  On Monday Evening, March 25, the “world-renowned pianist Teresa Correna” performed on a Steinway in its sanctuary.  Tickets were one dollar.  Meanwhile – and repeatedly – in a small movie theatre directly across 2^nd Ave. from Jones’s wood yard, one could buy for one dime the cheap thrill of a “ride through the Great Northern Railroad’s Cascade Tunnel.”

After a good deal of delving with maps, directories, and photographs, we learn this northeast corner’s pioneer oddity.  Beyond woodpiles it was never developed until 1903 when the brick and stone Walker Building was raised and stayed until the late 1980s.  And Joe Jones was not the first fire wood salesman at the corner. In the 1892 Corbett Director John King is listed doing the same.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Blog Troubles & Shamless Commerce  April 4, 2013

http://pauldorpat.com/shameless-commerce/blog-troubles-shameless-commerce/

 Northern Life Tower  Feb. 16, 2013

http://pauldorpat.com/seattle-now-and-then/seattle-now-then-the-northern-life-aka-seattle-tower/

 Northold Inn  Nov. 3, 2012

http://pauldorpat.com/seattle-now-and-then/seattle-now-then-the-hollywood-tavern-on-university/

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Seattle is often admired for its live theatres and the many actors who walk their boards and perform for a city that is also known – we are not surprised – for its love of reading, besides listening.  Now one of our more prolific historians, Kurt Einar Armbruster, comes with “Playing for Change.”  Given its subject – and subtitle – “Burton and Florence James and the Seattle Repertory Playhouse,” we may expect that many of Pacific’s theatre-loving literati will be drawn to it.

In “Orphan Road: The Railroad Comes to Seattle,” (1999) this author untangled the complex early history of Puget Sound’s railroads.  In 2011 the University of Washington Press published “Before Seattle Rocked” Armbruster’s early history of Seattle’s musical culture.  And now comes his also dramatic history of our first “Rep” written this time with what was surely inspired speed.  “Playing for Change” is also self-published, a practice that it getting more-and-more popular, possible, and fast.

Pictured here are some of the cast of Calico Cargo, local actor-playwright Albert Ottenheimer’s musical telling of the then already famous Seattle story of the “Mercer Girls:” the New England women, some of them Civil War widows, who followed Asa Mercer, the University of Washington’s first president, to Seattle to teach and/or have their pick of a well-stocked selection of industrious and lonely bachelors who eagerly awaited them on Yesler’s Wharf.   That, it seems, is probably the scene depicted here.

Calico Cargo opened in September 1946, and played to great success, filling the 340-seat Repertory Playhouse at the southwest corner of 41^st Street Northeast and University Way for fifteen weeks.  George Frederick McKay, the University’s admired composer, was a contributor.  (A good selection of his compositions can be found on the Naxos label.)

The Jameses started the Rep in 1928.  Thru its long and vigorous life, it played both the classics and original plays, some local and some controversial.  For the more than 20 years of the James direction it inspired imagination and reflection in its players and patrons. But that story is told best by Armbruster in his radically affordable book.  “Playing for Change” can be had for small change – $13.99.  It is found at the University Book Store, Elliott Bay Books and on line.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Jean I’ll gather these “extras” as I may, but considering the recurring troubles we are having with this server or program or what? there is – it seems my now – a likelihood that the link will shut its door sometime before I can deliver.  This inspired a new attitude that resembles patience on our parts, and we hope on our dear readers too.  Someday we will have this sorted out or corrected.  Then we will return to our full schedule and perhaps more.

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THE STATE’S FIRST THEATER

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 4, 1992)

The scene above of the players preparing to take their Washington State Theater to schools across the state is one of the handful of photographs that illustrated former university archivist Richard Berner’s most recent book.    “Seattle 1921 – 1940 From Boom To Bust” is volume two in Berner’s projected trilogy, “Seattle in the 20th Century.”  Northwest historian Murray Morgan says the 556-page book, “is the best-organized more thoroughly researched, most useful book yet written about the city.”

As for the theater: After teaching drama at Cornish School in the mid-1920s, Florence and Burton James established Seattle Repertory Playhouse in 1928, renting stages around town.  They moved out on their own in 1930.  The brick playhouse here in the background, was designed for them by local architect Arthur Loveless.

The James persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation and the state’s Department of Public Instruction to sponsor the country’s first state theater.  Scenery and costumes were moved about the state in this truck; the caravan of actors trailed in cars.

The theater’s first production, “No More Frontier,” was written by Idaho playwright Talbot Jennings.  In their first season, the touring company played – astonishingly – before 70,000 students.  After each show the players, in costume, took questions from the audience.  They were paid a livable $75 a month. (Actor Howard Duff is third from the right, top row.)

The James were also responsible for securing Works Progress Administration funding for a local “Negro Repertory Theatre,’ which, for some productions, employed as many as 50 African-American actors.

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The placid description below of Glenn Hughes and his Showboat Theatre should be supplemented/adjusted with a reading of Kurt Einar Armbruster’s, “Playing for Change.”

SHOWBOAT THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 4, 1986)

The old Showboat Theater on the University of Washington campus was recently called “a distant derivation of a derivation of a derivation of the riverboat.”  That description was offered by Ellen Miller-Wolfe, coordinator of the local Landmarks Preservation Board [in 1986]. It may be that lack of architectural purity which will eventually doom the sagging Showboat. It is scheduled to be demolished soon.

When or if it bows out, the Showboat will leave a legacy of fine theater and personal stories. (It is said to be haunted by the ghost of its founder Glenn Hughes, a man once known on the English-speaking stage west of Broadway as “Mr. Theater. “)

The theater’s opening night, Sept. 22, 1938, was a banner-draped, lantern-lighted, elegant black-tie setting for the old farce, “Charlie’s Aunt.” One of the showboat’s best remembered offerings was the 1949 production of “Mrs. Carlyle, ” written by Hughes and starring Lillian Gish, the silent screen star and stage actress.

The theatrical variety and often professional quality performances that six nights a week moved upon the Showboat’s stage were a far cry from the fare of the old ”’mellerdrammers” that played the real showboats of the Mississippi River days. Chekhov, Thurber, Sophocles and, of course, Shakespeare all made it onto Seattle’s revolving proscenium stage. And some of its players were Frances Farmer, Robert Culp and Chet Huntley (who later switched careers to the theater of national news).

The original design for the Works Progress Administration-built “boat” came from another member of the UW’s drama faculty, John Ashby Conway, who envisioned it being occasionally tugged about Lakes Washington and Union for off-shore performances. Instead, for its nearly 50 years [by 1986] it has been in permanent port on Portage Bay, supported, for the sake of illusion, a short ways off shore on concrete piling.

[In 1the mid-1980s the destruction of the then unused but not sinking showboat was forestalled for a time by a group called SOS (Save Our Showboat).  Many of its members once acted on its stage and have left their sentimental shadows there.  As I recall it was long after an SOS denouement that, as if in the night, the Showboat was razed to below its waterline.]

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TRYOUT THEATRE

There are 300 clips in the Seattle Times archives with reference to the TRYOUT THEATRE, another theatre group associated with the University of Washington but not necessarily on it.  A Dr. Savage in the school’s Department of English was one of the generous drivers of this nearly eight-year program to produce plays written for it – most of them from the region.  The last clip is a chatty letter from Savage’s wife to the Times during their visit to the theatre scene in New York City, and after the couple and their family have moved on to California for a new appointment with the Drama Department of U.C.L.A.   Printing such a chatty family letter as news would be unlikely these days.  It is an old flower that is now refreshing.

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A REP REVIVED

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In this disrupted street scene we get a fine lesson in how homes were propped while the ground below them was removed during street regrades – here on Spring Street east from Fifth Avenue.  Near the end of the grading these two supported residences will either be lowered with a jack – one spacer at a time – or given a new first floor with a new foundation.  (As it happened, they were lowered.)

St. Francis Hall, the institution up Spring St. at its northwest corner with Sixth Avenue, far right, was built in 1890-91 by Rev. F.X. Prefontaine.  Seattle’s first Catholic priest was known as much for his street savvy as for his pulpit homilies.  Prefontaine rented his new hall first to Jesuits for their original incarnation of Seattle Prep, but then also to many others, including the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Foresters, dance instructor Professor Ourat (from Florence) and the Andante Non Troppo Club also for dancing.  The hall was managed in the end by the Woodmen of the World and briefly named for them.  The name change was testimony to the admired priest’s flexible disposition.

I’ve chosen “about 1909” as the year for this subject largely from past assumptions joined with some of these half-lighted evidences.  For instance, by 1909 St. Francis Hall has passed from sight and citation – or nearly so.

With a little Ron Edge computer-aided sleuthing we were pleased to discover that in 1884 Matilda and Nelson Chilberg built the home standing here above the corner. Stocked by eight broad-shouldered brothers from Sweden – including Nelson – the industriously extended Chilberg family was famously diverse in its interests. For instance, Matilda and Nelson opened a grocery at the foot of Cherry Street, raised oats on the Swinomish Flats, ran a dairy in Chimacum (near Port Townsend) – selling the milk and cheese in the lumber camps – opened another grocery in Skagway while prospecting in Alaska.  In Seattle the couple opened three new additions to the city.

In 1908 with their daughter Mabel, a teacher at Seattle High School, these Chilbergs left their pioneer corner and moved further up the hill.  The prospect of this upheaval on Spring Street most likely spurred them.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes and No.  Jean asked this question – again – on the eve of one of this blog’s greater crashes.  I had gathered the parts for a lengthy answer, but then the blog went down and stayed so for a days.  Later – like now – when it would have been possible to return and assemble the “anything” I was busy with the next thing or “otherthing.”   Surely sometimes down the way the anythings I would have put up will appear in other contexts.

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

The now century old Gables on Capitol Hill is surely one of the most courtly of Seattle’s apartment houses. The landmark holds the northwest corner of 16^th Avenue East and Harrison Street.  Most of our apartments – what architectural historian Diana James calls our “shared walls,” the title of her recent history of them – were built in Seattle during the city’s years of exploding growth.  Our population quadrupled between the mid 1890s when Seattle got very busy outfitting miners for the hardships of the Yukon and the First World War when different “traveling men” were sent off not to gold fields but to the muddy and bloody ones of France.

The Gables first opened to renters in 1911, although the shared observatory with billiard table, dance floor and attached roof garden on the fourth floor was a year late.  It was one of the largest of the 61 apartment buildings managed by Seattle’s super-realtor then: John Davis & Co. The 24-unit apartment was built in two parts, the Annex on the southwest corner of the triple lot – here to the far left – and the much larger U-shaped expression of Tudor nostalgia.  At the time it’s style was described as “Old English.”

“

Neither the Gables rent nor renters were cheap.  This addresses’ highest call for 1912 was $45 for a 5-room apartment – about $1,000 today. While the kitchens were cramped, the living rooms were large enough to entertain.  For what may be one of the earliest scheduled cultural moments there, Mrs. Harry Louis Likert opened her apartment’s door on the Tuesday afternoon of Nov. 12, 1911 to the Emerson Club.  We assume it was for reading and discussing Ralph Waldo.

Readers interested in – or excited by – Diana James’ “living history” of the kind of Seattle’s digs in which residents often enjoy but sometimes endure “Shared Walls,” might want to mark their calendars for June 8^th. On that Saturday at 10 am James will lead a Historic Seattle walking tour down and around 16^th Avenue East while interpreting what is, she explains, “Probably Seattle’s most intense concentration of apartment buildings representing a wide variety of styles.  Of course the Tudor Gables are included.  For details and pre-registration best to call Historic Seattle at (206) 622-6952.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, a few more old features from the neighborhood but beginning with another Old English apartment – a fresh one.  But first a technical confession.  We are, you know, in another wrestle with our server Luna Pages.  So while we will try to join more features to the Gables story we suspect that we will be stopped along the way.

We begin with something, again, from Diana James, an identification of another Capitol Hill apartment, one that has been recently in the news and will continue to be watched with the construction of the big transit tunnel beneath Capitol Hill.  The  hill’s station and access to the tunnel service is being built on the site of the now, of course, raised Eileen Court at the southwest corner of 10th Ave. E. and E. John Street.  Long before there was household or studio scanning I made inter-negatives from an album that include both the construction subject and the as-built record of the Court, which was first named the St. Albans, after an ancient English town that is now about 20 miles north of the center of London.  (By a pleasant coincidence Diana and her family spent a year there many ears ago.)  Diana give the Eileen Court photos a circa date of 1908, which fits well-eough the album from which they were copied.

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FIRE STATION NO. 7

Back-to-back with the Gables and facing the commercial 15th Avenue at its northeast corner with Harrison was Fire Station No. Seven, a tidy brick pile of which we have snapshots mixed here with “contemporary” subjects taken more than twenty years ago and posing person who were staffed in either the Environmental Works community design group or the Country Doctor health clinic – cleverly combined as Earth Station No. 7 –  that replaced the fire prevention paraphernalia.

FIRE STATION NO. 7 at 15^TH Ave. & HARRSON Street.

(First appeared in Pacific, May 4, 1989)

In 1924 the Seattle Fire Department got rid of the last of its horses. At the beginning of that year the city bought motorized fire apparatus #66 and at the end of year rig #82.  Showing here is one of the city’s earliest fire engines, #7.   According to fireman Galen Thomaier, the department’s official historian and also the proprietor of the Last Resort Fire Department, a fire fighting museum in Ballard, it is a coincidence that this rig was also assigned to Fire Station #7 at 15th Ave. E. and E. Harrison Street on Capitol Hill.

The red brick Station #7 opened in 1920, sans the poop-shoots and hayloft of the 27 year-old frame firehouse it replaced. The jewel-like station served for fifty years more, closing March 23, 1970.  Apparatus #7, however, worked out of Fire Station #7 only until 1924 when it was moved to Station #16 near Green Lake. It survived in the system until 1937 when it was sold.  The department’s first motorized apparatuses were displayed at the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition before they were commissioned in 1910.  Numbered consecutively the department’s most recent 1988 addition is apparatus #386.  It cost $328,000 or $319,000 more than rig #7 (not figured for inflation).

Station 7?s survival was briefly threatened when the city surplussed it in 1970.  QFC, its neighbor to the north, petitioned to purchase and raze the structure for parking; however, as many readers will remember, 1970 was a watershed year for preservation.  On Earth Day of that year a number of community design activist at the UW School of Architecture formed Environmental Works.  Then with the health clinic Country Doctor and a number of other then new social services they leased the old station from the city and so saved it.  They also renamed it, Earthstation #7.  In its now [1989]  nearly two decades of community service, the interior of the old station has been renovated four times.

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THE BAPTISTS on HARRISON – One-half block west of the Gables and across Harrison Street stood the Capitol Hill Tabernacle.  A glimpse of its position can be found far-left in the week’s primary subject at the top.

CAPITOL HILL TABERNACLE

(First appeared in Pacific, June 9, 2002)

For its 1996 centennial celebration Tabernacle Baptist Church – or “TAB” as its member call it – published a church history replete with pictures, the line of pastoral succession, the statistics of worship service and Sunday School attendance, descriptions of its several moves, and the dramatic story of its origins.

The TAB began in conflict.   A protesting minority of members left First Baptist Church after the freshly ordained young Bostonian Pastor S.C. Ohrum failed by a few votes to win 3/4ths approval to keep him beyond a six months trail at the central “mother” church.   The dissenters formed Tabernacle Baptist in 1896 and hired Ohrum as its first pastor.  Their formidable leader was a Ulysses Grant appointee who for many years was the chief judicial officer of Washington Territory.   Judge Roger Sherman Green carried a pedigree to his protests; he was the grandson of Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

For a short while the new church hoped to challenge the old as Seattle’s, to quote Green, “but one central Baptist Church” however, the lure of affordable land on the top of the then booming residential Capitol Hill proved more attractive than old protests.  On Sept 21, 1902 Sunday school children paraded from the TAB’s temporary barn-like hall at 11^th Avenue and Jefferson Street to the southeast corner of 15^th Avenue N.E. and Harrison Street where the congregation would stay for three-quarters of a century.

Soon after the TAB’s present senior pastor Thomas Ruhlman answered the call in 1980 his congregation moved from temporary quarters at 15^th N.E. and 92^nd Street to join with North Seattle Baptist in Lake City.

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ST. NICHOLAS CATHEDRAL

(First appeared in Pacific, ca. Jan. 2008)

When the St. Nicholas congregation consecrated their new cathedral on December 19, 1937 it was not quite completed.  The accompanying photograph of that day’s procession led by Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco reveals the tarpaper that still wraps most of the sanctuary.  Church historian Sergei Kalfov explains that the brick façade was added sometime later in 1938.  The sprightly and surviving entryway was also constructed then.

The five cupolas springing from the roof symbolized Jesus Christ and the four evangelists.  Kalfov notes that a church with seven cupolas might stand for the seven sacraments, and so on.  Ivan Palmov, the architect, was also responsible for the St. Spiridon sanctuary in the Cascade Neighborhood.

Both congregations primarily served Russian immigrants, beginning with those that fled the 1917 revolution, when the church in Russian was persecuted and the Czar Nicholas II and his family assassinated.   The Cathedral was dedicated to the memory of the Czar, but its name also refers to the fourth century “wonderworker” St. Nicholas the bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey.

What separated the members of St. Nicholas from those of St. Spiridon was, in part, the former’s continued devotion to the Russian monarchy.   This past May 17th the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russian and the Russian Church, after nearly 90 years of separation reunited in Moscow.  Kalfov explains “St. Nicholas was the first Cathedral to a host a pan Orthodox service shortly after the signing of the Act, where over 14 Orthodox clergy served for the fist time in such a service.”

The congregation’s 75-anniversary celebration continues until May 22, another St. Nicholas Day.

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CAPITOL HILL METHODISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, 8-23-1993)

That there is very little to distinguish Capitol Hill Methodist church from its dedication in 1907 to its recent [1993] re-dedication as the offices of the architectural partnership Arai/Jackson is evidence of this landmark’s power to escape the crowbars and vinyl sidings of outrageous progress.

When we think church many of us — perhaps most — think Gothic.  Since the Victorian revival of medieval style the popularity of this type of English Parish sanctuary spread speedily throughout Christendom including the southeast corner of 16th Avenue and John.  The architect John Charles Fulton, a Pennsylvanian, was so good in designing popular parishes that in 30 years he sold the plans to nearly 600 of them.

This is the third sanctuary — all of them Gothic variations — built by the city’s second oldest congregation, the members of First Methodist Protestant Church.  The first, the “Brown Church” at Second and Madison, was raised by Daniel Bagley the congregation’s founder and first minister.  It was the second sanctuary built in Seattle and the first to be destroyed by the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  The congregation fled its second edifice at Third and Pine when the 1906 regrade of Third Avenue put its front door more than ten feet above Third’s new grade.

When new, the Methodist’s Capitol Hill address was nearly in the suburbs, but briefly so.  The neighborhood quickly grew and changed replacing its single-family residences with the culture of mixed uses that still distinguishes Capitol Hill.  But with the steady loss of its families the congregation dwindled.   The church’s successful application in 1976 for official landmark status for its sanctuary was done as much to help preserve the congregation as its building.  But by 1991 when the costs of maintaining the old Gothic sandstone pile accelerated well beyond the small congregations powers they moved nearby to share the quarters of Capitol Hill Lutheran Church on 11th Avenue.

The church’s new residents have neither fiddled with its exterior nor made changes within which cannot be readily reversed should the church ever return to being a church.  Actually Arai-Jackson’s work on the structure’s interior is nearly religious.  Their conversion of the sanctuary’s dome room is uplifting.  Its worth a visit.

And these particularly sensitive architects have other responsibilities besides caring for their office’s landmark status.  It is essential that sanctuaries  — especially Gothic ones — so evocative of the preternatural as this should have had at least one ghost sighting.  For the Methodists on Capitol Hill, however, it required one of the building’s latter day users, a new age divine, to claim to have seen none other than old Daniel Bagley anxiously pacing the sacristy.  Now partners Steve and Jerry Arai, Cliff Jackson and Tom Ryan must expect that not only architectural tourists will want to occasionally eavesdrop on their quarters but also an ancient cleric in a “diaphanous bluish light.”

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Both views look southeast at Holy Names Academy across the intersection of 21st Ave. E. and E. Aloha Street.   Now [2007] at the threshold of its second century on Capitol Hill, Holy Names Academy opens each school day to about 650 students. (Historical photo courtesy of John Cooper)

HOLY NAMES ON CAPITOL HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 2007)

A century of greening on the Holy Names Academy campus has half-draped the full figure of architects Breitung & Buchinger Capitol Hill landmark, with trees.  However, if the landscape were stripped away we would discover from this angle (from the northwest) a Baroque Revival plant that has changed very little since the “ real photo postcard” photographer Otto Frasch recorded it almost certainly in 1908.  The big exception is the tower at the north end of the school, on the left.   While the earthquake of April 29,1965 did not collapse the tower it did weakened it so that it was removed.

The Sisters of Holy Names arrived in Seattle in 1880 and opened first their school for girls in an available home downtown.  In 1884 the school moved to its own stately Gothic structure on Seventh Avenue near Jackson Street and remained there until the Jackson Street Regrade (1907-1909) made kindling of the school when the block was lowered about sixty feet.

Construction on this third campus began in 1906, the cornerstone was laid in 1907, and in the fall of 1908 the school was dedicated.  Of the 282 students then attending the new facilities 127 of them boarded there.  Many came from Alaska, some from “off the farm,” others from distant rural communities, and a few from nearby and yet still hard to reach contributors like Mercer Island.  In 1908 Holy Names served all 12 grades plus a “Normal School” for the training of teachers.  By 1930 the Normal School was no longer needed, and it closed, as did the grade school in 1963.  By 1967 both convenient transportation and distant alternatives were sufficiently available to allow the school to discontinue boarding students.

Classes may already have begun when Frasch took his photo but certainly the structure’s north wing (the one closest to the photographer) with the schools chapel was not yet finished, and wouldn’t be until 1925.  The chapel was included in the ongoing cycle of restoration that began for the school in 1990.  Scaffolding for the grand structure’s exterior renewal has been a familiar feature for several years.  The restoration has kept apace with the funding – not ahead of it.

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ROYCROFT CORNER

(First appeared in Pacific in 2005)

Almost certainly 1935 was the year this photograph of the Roycroft corner was recorded.  The names of these businesses at the southeast corner of Roy Street and 19^th Avenue E. all appear in the 1935 business directory, and business life expectancy at the hard heart of the Great Depression was poor.

We may note that neighborhood movie houses were one exception to this general attrition.   At little palaces like the Roycroft for 15 cents – a price made more or less permanent here with neon – one could waste a shiftless afternoon sitting through three B movies.   The “Great Hotel Murder”, listed here at the center of this triple feature, is described in the often grouchy Halliwell’s Film Guide as a “lively program filler of its day.”

“Air Hawks” the last film listed is good corroborating evidence for choosing 1935. Released that year by Columbia pictures this story of two aviation firms fighting over a U.S. airmail contract starred the pioneer pilot Wiley Post playing himself.   It was one of the aviator’s last roles.   Later that year Post visited Seattle with the comedian Will Rogers before the two flew off for Alaska and the crash that took both their lives.

The Roycroft was one of the many neighborhood theaters that was built around Seattle in the late 1920s to feature the then new pop culture miracle of talkies.  Watson Ackles managed the Roycroft Theater in 1935, a year in which three other Ackles are listed in the city directory as working in some capacity with motion pictures.

By 1935 this largely Roman Catholic neighborhood was already quite seasoned.  The 19^th Avenue trolley line was laid through here as far north as Galer Street in 1907 – the same year that St. Joseph Parish was dedicated nearby at 18^th and Aloha and that Bishop O’Dea laid the cornerstone of Holy Names Academy.

In the historical view the cross-topped Holy Names dome stands out.  In the contemporary scene the recently restored cupola is hardly visible because the Capitol Hill urban landscape has grown up in the intervening 66 years.

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Most likely in 1902 Marcus M. Lyter either built or bought his box-style home at the northwest corner of 15^th Avenue and Aloha Street.  Like many other Capitol Hill addition residences, once the landscape was added, Lyter’s home was somewhat large for its lot.  (Courtesy Washington State Archives, Bellevue Community College Branch.) What Jean found when he recently revisited the corner was . . . well what did he find?

15^th & ALOHA CAPITOL HILL, ca. 1902

(First appeared in Pacific, late 2008)

Here we have that happy partnership of a new trolley and a new home.  And the streets – Aloha on the left and 15^th Avenue on the right – are paved as well.

The historical negative from which the print was cast is also signed and numbered, bottom-left, “135 W & S.”   This makes it a very early offering of the Webster and Stevens studio.  (Through many of its earliest years the studio was the principal provider of editorial photography for The Seattle Times.)  This negative is so early that it did not make it to the Museum of History and Industry were the bulk of the studio’s work – more than 40,000 negatives – is protected and shared.

Rather, this print is kept in the much smaller “Metro Collection” at the Washington State Archive.  A note on the back of the photograph reads, “James P. Henry motorman taken about 1897.”  Hedging on the date was wise for Capitol Hill trolley car #127 was not delivered to Seattle until 1902.

A more likely date is 1903 when another W&S photo – number 130 – of the home, sans trolley, is featured in a spring issue of the Seattle Mail and Herald with several other homes as examples of residences built in the then new – since 1901 – Capitol Hill addition.  The weekly tabloid identifies the home as belonging to Marcus M. Lyter, a lawyer.  We may imagine – only – that this is Lyter peering through the window of car #127.  But Lyter, it seems, soon vanishes from the Seattle scene.  And did his home disappear as well?

If the reader visits the northwest corner of 15^th and Aloha, as Jean Sherrard did recently, and locates one of the few openings, they will find within the semi-evergreen landscape that stuffs the lot, the same home.

NEARBY – 15TH & MERCER

What is now the southeast corner of Seattle University – it’s Championship Field – was for many years a transportation center for the south end where first the Seattle Electric Company’s street trolleys were sheltered and later the Seattle Transit System’s trackless trolleys, like these.  Both views look northwest from 14th Avenue and E. Jefferson Street.  Historical photo courtesy Warren Wing

THE TRACKLESS FLEET

(First appeared in Pacific, ca. Oct. 2005)

Around noon on the 15th of December 1940 when the winter sun cast long shadows over the Seattle Transit System’s new fleet of trackless trolleys the by then veteran commercial photographer Frank Jacobs took this and a second view of the Jefferson Street car barn and its new residents.   Here Jacob looks northwest from the corner of 14th Avenue and Jefferson Street.  (The second view looks northeast over the fleet from 13th Avenue.)

By a rough count – using the second photograph to look around the far corner of the barn – there are 114 carriers parked here outside for this fleet portrait.  That is about half of the 235 Westinghouse trackless trolleys that were purchased by the city with a loan from the federal government.  The first of them were delivered earlier in March of 1940, and only three years after Seattle voters by a large majority rejected them in favor of keeping the municipal railway’s old orange streetcars.   But the transportation milieu of the late 1930s was even more volatile than it is now and the forces of both rubber and internal combustion  – for the city also purchased a fleet of buses – won over rails and even sacrificed the cherished but impoverished cable cars.

When the Jefferson Car Barn was constructed in 1910 it was the last of the sprawling new garages built for the trolleys in the first and booming years of the 20th Century.  The Seattle Electric Company also built barns in Fremont, lower Queen Anne, and Georgetown to augment its crowded facility at 6th and Pine.  The Georgetown plant was also the company’s garage for repairing trolleys and, when it came time in 1940-41, also for scrapping them.

The finality of that conversion from tracks to rubber is written here in the yard of the car barn with black on black.  Fresh asphalt has erased the once intricate tracery of the yard’s many shining rails.

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For the contemporary repeat I could not resist moving a bit closer to the two landmark brick apartments at Summit Ave. and Republican Street on the right.  When constructed in 1909 and 1910, from right to left respectively, they were given the romantic names the Menlo and the El Mondo.  The latter has kept its original moniker but the former (the one nearest the camera) has a new name: the Bernkastle.   Between them they added 31 units to a neighborhood that was then only beginning its conversion from single-family residences to low-rise apartments like these.

THE WATER FAMINE of 1911

(First appeared in Pacific, summer of 2004)

After seven inches of rain in two days the pipeline that supplied Seattle its Cedar River water was undermined and broke near Renton on November 19, 1911.  The week-long water famine that followed closed the schools for want of steam heat, sent whole families packing to downtown hotels where the water service was rationed but not cut off, and featured daily front page warnings to “Boil Your Water” – meaning the water one caught in a downspout or carted from one of the lakes.

There were alternatives.  One could purchase water for 5 cents a gallon or wait in line to fill a bucket from one of the 24 water wagons – like this one — that the city dispatched to residential streets.  Pioneer springs on the slopes of First Hill were also uncapped.  Pioneer historian Thomas Prosch who lived near the spring at 7th Avenue and James Street told a Seattle Times reporter,  “I went down and got a pail of it myself. I have drunk it for years and no better water exists.”

Finding the unidentified site of the historical scene with the city water wagon was mildly intuitive for I lived on Capitol Hill’s Summit Ave. for five years in the early 1970s.  I quickly drove to the spot just south of the intersection of Summit and Republican Street.

In 1911 – the date of the photograph – brick apartments like those on the right were still rare in a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes.  Eventually, however, much of this part of Capitol Hill was converted to higher densities because of its proximity to downtown and the convenient rail service.  (Note the northbound rail on the right for the trolley loop that returned to downtown southbound on Bellevue Avenue one block to the west.)

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Any winter parade on Capitol Hill’s Broadway Avenue in the early 1950s may have had something to do with what was then the national basketball celebrity of Seattle University and its two high-scoring guards Johnny and Eddie O’Brien.   (Courtesy Ivar’s Seafoods Inc.) Jean, again with the help of his ten foot pole, gets the credit for a contemporary repeat of another historical scene taken from a prospect and elevation since lost.

Broadway Parade ca. 1951-52

(First appeared in Pacific summer of 2008)

A likely date for this noontime parade on Capitol Hill is late 1951 or early 52.  If I have researched Studebaker convertibles correctly that is a 1951 Champion Regal model on the right crossing the Thomas Street intersection with Broadway Avenue.  It may well be on loan from the neighborhood’s Belcourt dealership at 12th and Pine, which advertised itself then as “Seattle’s oldest and largest Studebaker dealer.”

The two convertibles – a Stude’ and a Chevy – carry in all five women sitting high in the cars’ backseats.  I prefer to think these are honored coeds (rather than Seafair royalty) celebrating some part of the Seattle University’s 1951-52 basketball season when the records set by their O’Brien twins, Johnny and Eddie, brought national fame to the Catholic school in Seattle, which, like its phenomenal guards, was small.

The photograph was taken from Ivar’s on Broadway, which opened in 1951 in a gas station converted for serving an ambitious menu of fish and chips, Mexican and Chinese cuisine, and hamburgers because the students insisted on them.   This original print for this scene also comes from Ivar’s – from its archive.  It is grouped with other student rally subjects including one’s taken in Ivar’s parking lot appointed with a stage for dancing cheer leaders, the basketball stars and proud priests posing above a swarm of fans.

Across the street at the northeast corner of Thomas and Broadway (upper-left) is the long-lived Checkerboard Café and Cocktail lounge.  From my years on Capitol Hill in the early 1970s I remember it as Ernie Steel’s Restaurant, with its dark bar, sportsman’s murals stained by decades of nicotine and deep frying, and that special smell that such places share with each other and which no scented evergreen can cover with its small green branches.  Now that red brick corner has been opened to sunlight, as Julia’s on Broadway.

 

WEB EXTRAS

WEB EXTRAS

(click to enlarge photos)

Lying here at low tide in the slip between waterfront Fire Station #5 and the nearly new Pier 3 (54), the little freighter T.W. Lake was built in 1896 by its namesake, Thomas Lake, a productive Ballard builder of “mosquito fleet” steamers for Puget Sound.

On Aug. 25, 1900, its holds stuffed with empty grain sacks, the T. W. Lake steamed north to the LaConner flats where fields of oats were in shock, ready for threshing and wanting sacks.  The steamer may have also later helped carry the Skagit Valley’s sacked oats here to Pier 3 (54), and its principal tenants, Galbraith and Bacon.   James Galbraith began selling hay and feed on the waterfront in 1891, and Cecil Bacon, Galbraith’s new partner, was a chemical engineer with extra cash to invest in expanding the partnership onto the new Pier 3.

Built in 1900-1901, and seen here all in a row, Piers 3, 4, and 5 were parts of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s contribution to then boom-town Seattle’s elaborate makeover of its waterfront.  The Yukon gold rush first heated Seattle with “gold fever” and surplus wealth in 1897.  That was also the year that Reginald Thomson and George Cotterill, the city’s brilliant and politically-adept engineers, convinced dock owners and the railroads to conform to the city’s state-sanctioned plans for a uniform waterfront.

These abiding landmarks were part of waterfront changes that were later seriously threatened only once, and that following World War Two when the Port of Seattle considered replacing them with great longitudinal piers for the bigger ships then expected.  Instead, the waterfront moved its trans-shipments to new longitudinal piers south on the tideflats.  There they built parking lots for containers, with no pier warehouses needed.

A small but steady part of Puget Sound’s “Mosquito Fleet,” the T.W. Lake served well and long, but ended tragically on Dec. 5, 1923.  Loaded with 300 barrels of lime and en route to Anacortes from Roche Harbor she ploughed into but not thru winds of 70 miles per hour plus.  The T.W. Lake sank off Lopez Island taking with her all 18 men aboard in one of Puget Sound’s greatest maritime disasters.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes
Jean and a lesson in memory too.  I began my search for other features
from the “same neighborhood,” in this case Pier 3/54, by a key-word
this blog to see whatwe might have already advanced here.  With Ron Edge’s help, I found so many
examples that after seven features I restrained myself, and looked no further.
Here they are in a row – the same row used here first on October 30, 2010.

They are in order,

The Fireboat Duwamish, circa 1912

The sidewheeler Alida 1870 ro 71

The fireboat Snoqualmie

The Norther Pacific Piers on Railroad Avenue ca. 1902

The “Mosquito Fleet” steamer Kitsap, ca. 1910

The sternwheeler Capitol City

and the Gorst Air Taxi that began flying back and forth between Pier 3 and
Bremerton in 1929 – just in time for the Great Depression.

To see/read them all just click your mouse on the photo of the Duwamish Fireboat, directly below.

Beyond these seven features we will conclude with a few more illustrated “notes” on Pier 3/54.   (The number was changed in 1944 by the military as an “act of war.”  The army hoped to rationalize – put in order – the diverse numbers and letters then used for the piers on Elliott Bay.)

The FOUR (4) Subjects that follow relate to the features that are buried (or trapped) under the BUTTON Above – the button that is the fireboat Duwamish. (Free them – Touch it, tap it, press it)

The Last of the seven features reached by pressing one’s mouse against the Duwamish Fireboat pix above, treats on the Gorst Air Taxi.   Here follows are some related subjects.

”]”]=====

 

 

 

IVAR at the FOOT OF MADISON

[Disclaimer:  I am currently rushing to complete my now one dozen years in the  making biography of Ivar Haglund titled – predictably – “KEEP CLAM”!   Watch for it in Fish and Chips stands near you.]

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Westlake Avenue was first surveyed in January 1905 – that part of it then first cut through the existing city grid between Pike Street and Denny Way.  By November of 1906 the new thruway was paved and being developed to all sides.  And the new sides were many.  Thru the roughly seven blocks of cutting, nearly 30 odd-shaped building lots and flatiron blocks were exposed, adding imaginative opportunities for cityscape and developers.  With its willful path to Lake Union and its eccentric new sides, Westlake was popularly, although not officially, called a boulevard.

Resembling most obviously a buoyant ship (one not sinking), here the American Hotel points its bow north between Westlake Avenue, (on your – the reader’s – right), and the alley between Fourth and Fifth Avenues.  The photograph was recorded from the Hotel Plaza, built one floor higher than the American, and set snugly between Westlake, 4th Avenue and Pine Street above its own wedge-shaped footprint.  From that foundation the Plaza looked south to the new five-star corner at Pike Street.

With its 70 “reasonably priced” rooms – $3.50 and up for a week – the American expected to service many transient salesmen.  But this American had troubles, changing hands twice before it was renamed Hotel Central in 1914 – to make a clear point of its touted location in the “center of everything.”  Frank Crampton, the new proprietor in 1910, was especially thorough with his renovations.  The Times reported “twenty-three rooms were vacated by undesirable tenants within three days after he assumed charge.”  Crampton hoped to fill his hotel with “permanent roomers for the winter.”

At its “stern” or far southern end, the American Hotel was attached to Northern Bank and Trust Company’s also new corner at 4th and Pike.  The bank soon added another five stories to reach the height it still holds in Jean’s “repeat.”  Late in 1916, the bank confidently advertised, “Eventually many of you will open banking relations with the Northern Bank and Trust Company.  Why not now?” The prediction failed and so did the bank in 1919.  Another bank, the Seaboard, took hold and named the ornate landmark “at the center of everything” for itself.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yes Jean and first a fulfillment of the second “now” you recorded on Westlake that well-lighted day.  Remember?  you looked south on the sidewalk mid-block toward Pike.   Jean  have discovered that I wrote a Times feature a few years back that looks in the same direction but from the north side of Pine Street.  I’ll include the clipping from that to cover your added now-then as well.

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CHANGES ON FOURTH AVENUE NORTH OF PIKE

So far I have never come upon a photograph of the intersection of 4th and Pike taken at the intersection before Westlake Was cut through there to Denny Way in 1906.   The Westlake cut is an accomplished feature in the photo below although the street is still a work in progress, and the Plaza Hotel is not completed.   Note here the steep rise of Fourth Avenue, on the left, as it climbs the southeast corner of Denny Hill to a horizon this side of Virginia Street.

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MORE of FIVE-STAR WESTLAKE at PIKE

We might have simply linked much of what follows to other past features on this blog for we have surely visited this 5-Star corner often over the past few years.  And we shall again.  Now we will anchor some of these “classics” directly to this feature.  Every time we use this old photo or ephemera or that one, we treat them within their new contexts as also somewhat renewed.

WESTLAKE HISTORY

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 13, 1983)

Both this “now” and “then” look north up Westlake Ave. from the southwest corner of Fourth Ave. and Pike Street. Great things have been expected of this five-star hub since its creation in 1906 when the odd but bold intrusion of Westlake Ave. was at last cut through from Denny Way. (As of this writing [1983] the city is still waiting.)

Our historical setting (above) dates from 1909. All of the larger structures are new and seem to elegantly promise that this unique hub will develop into Seattle’s 20th-century civic center. On the right is the Seaboard Building, which now, with another five stories added, still fills that comer. Just beyond it is the American Hotel, and across Westlake, the Hotel Plaza. The flatiron Plaza stood there until 1931 when it was razed to the first floor level and rebuilt more modestly for Bartell Drugs, which remained a tenant for over 50 years. During the prohibition years a cabaret in the Plaza’s basement was one of the town’s more popular speakeasys.

In our 1909 scene (two up) only a few horses, hacks, and three or four automobiles are at play. The streetcars and people actually own the street, and the former are outfitted with cowcatchers to mercifully ensnare the latter. In 1909 if you stayed off the tracks (and stepped about what the horses left) you were usually free to safely jaywalk or even stand about and converse in the street – like the two men on the right of our scene. (Again, the “scene” two-up.)

If Westlake were continued on south through the central business district (behind the photographer), it would at last meet First Ave. at Marion St. And that was the route for a Lake Union-bound boulevard proposed in 1876 by Seattle doctor and Mayor Gideon Weed. Although the citizens disagreed with Weed’s proposal, they were familiar with this part of the route north of Pike Street for in 1872 a narrow-gauge railroad was cut through the forest here to carry coal from scows on Lake Union to bunkers at the foot of Pike St. The coal cars ran up this draw until 1878 when the route was abandoned for a new coal road to Newcastle that went around the south end of Lake Washington. Then this old railway line, and future Westlake Ave., grew into a shrub-sided path popularly traveled for family picnics at Lake Union. It was called “Down the Grade.”

In 1882 a narrow boardwalk to the lake was built along the old coal railroad line and David Denny’s Western Mill first started Lake Union “working” at its southern end.  By the late 1880s the sides of the little valley between Denny and Capitol hills were cleared, and the streets which were laid out across this gentle ravine kept to the city grid.  The neighborhood of clapboard apartments and working family homes which developed here was another of Seattle’s many examples of town plats that gave little mind to topography except to surmount it. In 1890 Luther Griffith, Seattle’s young wizard of electric trolleys, purchased 53 lots along the old coal road’s grade, and proposed to cut a multi-use boulevard through the city’s grid directly to Lake Union. The city council disagreed.

However, by the early 1900s the city’s businesses had begun to move north out of Pioneer Square in such numbers that a new city center was desired, and the city engineers went back to the old Westlake proposals. The old route was surveyed in January 1905, and by November of the next year the 90-ft-wide street was paved and completed. This was 30 years since Mayor Weed’s original 1876 proposal.

If this Westlake precedent holds true, then the Westlake Mall, which was first proposed in 1958 and has since been a frustration for five mayors – Clinton, Braman, Miller, Uhlman, and Royer – should be completed in 1988 to the glory of the reelected fifth.

(As it developed Royer was reelected but the more splendid visions for this five-star corner and its “run” to the north were compromised to contingencies of the usual sort, like traffic on Pine Street and commercial urges that were difficult to distinguished from greed.  The “invisible hand” acted with neither prudence nor providence.)

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THIS PUZZLING MALL

I confess (about nine years ago) to having featured this intersection four times – that I remember – in the last 23 years.  So here’s the fifth, and I wonder what took me so long.  There are so many delightful photographs taken from this five-star corner looking north on Westlake from Forth and Pike.  But this scene with the officer probably counts as a “classic” for it has been published a number of times by other publications and he has not tired of it yet.

It is only recently that I looked closely at the policeman, and I think I have figured out what he is doing.  He is scratching his head.  Since this is a sign of deep thought – or at least puzzlement – I suggest that the officer here is wondering about the great changes have occurred in the only three or four years before he was sent this afternoon to help with the traffic.  (I’m figuring that this is 191o or very near it.)  Heading north for Fremont, trolley car number 578 – to the left of the officer – is only two or three years old and so is the Plaza Hotel to the left of it.  If the officer returns to this beat in a few years more he’ll probably know that there is a speak-easy running it the hotel basement.

Westlake Avenue was cut through the neighborhood in 1906 along what its planners described as “a low-lying valley, fairly level, with just enough pitch to give it satisfactory drainage.”  The plan was to connect it with “a magnificent driveway around the lake.”  But then some readers will remember that there have been many magnificent plans for this part of Westlake as well.  Beginning in 1960 with the opening of the Westlake Summer Mall — that quickly had its name changed to Seafair Mall — the blocks between Pike and Stewart streets were talked and dreamed over for a quarter century as the best available site for developing a civic center with a wide broad public place for a central business district that somehow wound up without one.

In 1960 one concerned person described the Seafair Mall as “This sorry little bit of pavement with a few planter boxes.” Forty-five years later there are at least more planter boxes.

[It is, again, nightybears time and I must climb the stairs.  There remain all in a line a few more permutations on this Westlake theme and perhaps I will slip them in later this afternoon.  If not they will keep for another Westlake visit.]

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WESTLAKE & FOURTH – March 12, 1919

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 17, 1982)

The day is Wednesday, March 12, 1919. The silent film “The Forbidden Room” is in the last day of a four-day run at the Colonial Theater on Fourth Avenue between Pike and Pine Streets. The film stars Gladys Brockwell who plays a “girl stenographer saving a big city from looters and plotters.” Brockwell’s performance, however, probably will be missed and the theater empty, for tonight the city itself will be the show as it celebrates the homecoming of “Seattle’s own regiment, the 63rd Coast Artillery.”

The photograph was taken in mid-afternoon and the parade of local heroes through downtown has just ended. Uniformed men and celebrating citizens are mingling in the streets and rehearsing, perhaps, for the night’s street dance in Times Square. At 8 p.m. fireworks will be set off from the roof of the Times Building and the newspaper’s next-day reporting of the celebration will continue these pyrotechnics: “Nothing in the successions of explosions that made the day the 63rd came home a day to be remembered with such historical red letter days as Armistice Day (and night), the Great Fire, the first Klondike gold ship, and the opening of the Exposition was more characteristic of the atmosphere of benevolent and jubilant dynamite than the merry street carnival and pavement dance last night that made Times Square a mass of swaying, noise-making, exuberant humanity . . . ”

Fireworks at the Times Building represented literally the figurative fireworks that found expression in every other event of the dizzy program which piled sensation on sensation until the city’s homecoming soldier sons admitted they scarcely knew whether they were coming or going . . .  ”From the roof of the Times Building rockets soared screamingly upward and flared out in fantastic shapes and lights and showers of fire . . .  Meanwhile bands – four of them – were making the night melodious with war tunes and the jazziest of jazz music – and throngs were dancing, looking skyward as they danced, and not bothering to apologize for bumps.” It is doubtful that even Gladys Brockwell’s melodramatic heroics could soar so high.

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PIKE & FOURTH – JULY 25, 1938

(First appeared in Pacific, 1-8-1989)

Although the date for this Fourth and Pike scene is recorded on neither the original negative nor on its protective envelope, uncovering it was not difficult. The newsstand at the center of this view includes face-out copies of both The Seattle Times and The Post-Intelligencer. Although we can’t read the date, we can, with the aid of magnification, make out a few of the headlines in the original negative. With those generous clues and a little fast-forward searching through the Seattle Public Library’s microfilms, the date for this scene is soon discovered. It is Monday, July 25, 1938.

The P.I., just above the dealer’s head, announces “A New Forest Fire Rages at Sol Duc.” A week-and-a-half of record heat had not only encouraged fires but also filled the beaches. And this Monday, Seattle was even hotter with the anticipation of a Tuesday night fight. Jack Dempsy’s photograph is on the front page of the P.I. The “Mighty Manassa Mauler” was in town to referee one of the great sporting events in the history of the city: the Freddie Steele vs. Al Hostak fight for the middle-weight title.

About 30 hours after this photograph was taken, hometown-tough Hostak, in front of 35,000 sweating fans at Civic Field (now site of the Seattle Center stadium), made quick work of the champion Steele. The P.I.’s purple-penned sports reporter, Royal Brougham, reported “Four times the twenty-two-year-old Seattle boy’s steel-tempered knuckles sent the champion reeling into the rosin.” Hostak brought the belt to Seattle by a knockout in the first minute of the first round.

The day ‘s super-heated condition was also encouraged at the Colonial Theatre (one-half block up Fourth) where the Times reported that “an eternal triangle’ in the heart of the African jungle brings added thrills in “Tarzan’s Revenge.” The apeman’s affection for a Miss Holms, on safari with her father, fires the resentment of her jealous fiancee, George Meeker. However, we will not reveal the ending to this hot affair, although by Wednesday the 27, Seattle had cooled off.

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NEON IN 1949 by BRADLEY – Neither GOWEY nor SYKES

This week’s view north on Fourth Avenue from Pike Street shines with neon and those by now nostalgic flame-shape municipal light standards that once graced nearly all the streets in the business district and a few beyond it.

Written on the slide with a steady hand is its most important information – except the photographer’s name.  “4th and Pike, Night, Kodak 35mm, Ansco Film, 8 f-stop, Dec 22, 1949.”  The shutter was left open for 10 seconds, plenty of time for the passing cars to write illuminated lines along both 4th and Westlake with their headlights.  With help from the Seattle Public Library’s Seattle Room I found the photographer: Robert D. Bradley.

I was given this slide and several thousand more in 1984 – a quarter century ago! – by my friend Jean Gowey, who was then recently widowed by her husband Lawton.  With thanks Lawton’s name has often appeared here as responsible for providing many of the historical photographs I have used through the now 27 years of this feature.  Beyond his professional life of keeping books for the Seattle Water Department, Lawton was very good at playing the organ for his Queen Anne neighborhood church and both studying and sharing his love for local history.  Hoping that I would make good public use of Lawton’s own color photography tracking the changes in the business district, Jean included them in the gift.

Along with Gowey’s slides came Bradley’s, and like this night shot, most of them are examples of cityscape beginning in the late 1940s and ending with his death in 1973. The largest part of Jean’s gift, Horace Sykes’s thousands of Kodachrome landscapes of the west from the 1940s and early 1950s, have little to do with Seattle but much to do with the human heart.  Until his death in 1956 at the age of 70, Sykes was a relentless explorer and a master of picturesque landscapes.   Almost certainly, Sykes, Gowey and Bradley were also friends.

I have often used both Gowey and Bradley’s recordings to better understand the modern changes of Seattle.  And now at last at 70 I am also exploring the west with the enchanted Horace.    I include now directly below an example of a Horace Sykes Kodachrome landscape.  Most of his slide are not identified, but that will make more the adventure of studying them – a Sykes Hide and Seek.  (For instance I for now speculate that the below “burning bush” photo is of a scene on the Yakima River.)  We intend to eventually give Horace and his art is own picturesque “button” here at dorpatsherrardlomont.   (AND WE DID carry on with Sykes, although not yet with the button.   We are not yet finished with Sykes.  For about a year-and-a-half we ran “Our Daily Sykes” with Horace’s kodachromes of the American West.  We reached 498 scenes, I believe.  I left one or two off the end so that I might finish it later.  It is, it seems, a neurotic inclination of mine.  However incomplete one can keyword the 498 Daily Sykes that were shared with blog readers in a testimony to the Horace’s sensitive eye.)

ANOTHER CORRECTION:

For those who can remember it, Jean Sherrard’s “now” with its starburst lights, repeats the illuminated Christmas star that the Bon Marche Department Store once hung from its nearby corner at 4th and Pine. [Correction! Thank goodness I was wrong – or rather very limited – and thanks to Kimberly M. Reason for her gentle correction. Many readers with Christmastime familiarity with these corners will know that the Bon star still shines, now as a local Macy’s tradition. My ignorance, I confess, is the result of living increasingly in the past and rarely going downtown – especially in December. Reason writes, “I would appreciate it if you would let your readers know that this 51-year-old Seattle holiday tradition is more popular than ever.” This year I hope to be there. And Reason recommends that you can find images of the star and parade on this link: http://www.macys.com/catalog/syndicated/remote/remotesyndication.ognc?Brand=PRESSRELEASE.

Forever Amber: A Film Review by Bill White

Published on October 18, 2009

Film and Music critic Bill White has kindly responded to our request that he write a review of the film showing at the Colonial Theatre in 1949, as revealed in the Kodachrome night slide feature Westlake Night Lights in the Seattle Now and Then published just below this insertion.

An historical romance set during the reign of Charles II,  “Forever Amber,”  directed by Otto Preminger in 1947, is as  dark and claustrophobic a look at society in collapse as any of the underworld-themed B-movies released during the same time. Two years later, Anthony Mann would accomplish something similar with “Reign of Terror,” although his film of the French revolution was a modest black and white production running less than 90 minutes, while “Forever Amber” was shot in Technicolor and ran nearly 2 ½ hours.

It wasn’t until Francis Coppola’s “The Godfather” that the interiors on a major studio film were underlit to such infernal effect.  Cinematographer Leon Shamroy, who took the opposite approach the year before in “Leave Her to Heaven,” in which he contrasted the dark story with a brilliantly vibrant visual palette, makes the royal court of Charles II as ghoulishly oppressive as the decaying chambers of Roderick Usher.  Although Shamroy won four Oscars for his cinematography, including one for “Leave Her to Heaven,” and was nominated for another eleven, he is largely forgotten today.

The story of Amber begins in 1644, during Cromwell’s rebellion against King Charles I, when the baby girl is discovered and taken in by one of the Puritans who later stands against the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when Amber resists her foster father’s decision to marry her off to a neighboring farmer.   He responds to her refusal by telling her that “vanity is Satan at work in the female soul.”   Paradoxically, it is the vanity of the male sex that makes Amber’s tale such a miserable one.

As Bruce Carlton, the callous privateer whose love Amber is obsessed with securing, Cornell Wilde walks atilt with surety of his superiority to every other living thing, including King Charles, who banishes him to the sea when threatened by his sexual rivalry.

George Sanders is suitably disdainful as the  king who can stop the performance of a play by his appearance in the royal box,  but relies on a revolving cast of compliant female subjects to maintain the  illusion of being  loved. In the end, when he leaves Amber’s quarters after her final rejection of him as a man, he calls “come, my children,” to a pack of faithful dogs.

It is Linda Darnell’s voluptuously cheap incarnation of Amber that gives the film its poverty row atmosphere.   She lowers the bar, just as Jennifer Jones did the previous year for David O. Selznick  in “Duel in the Sun,” on any grand aspirations producer Darryl Zanuck might have had for a prestige film.  It is because she drags the story into the gutter that gives “Forever Amber” its scent of damnation, and lifts it above the conventional drivel of those romantic melodramas commandeered by the crippling competence of a Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, or Katherine Hepburn. The screen would not again be endowed with such a fleshy heroine until Elizabeth Taylor embodied Cleopatra in 1963, a film that was also produced at 20^th Century Fox by Darryl Zanuck,

“Forever Amber” was one of the few films director Preminger didn’t produce himself, and evidence of Zanuck’s interference is all over it.  This is one of the factors that make the film such a fascinating artifact.  Although Preminger remained under contract to Fox for another five years, the name of Zanuck never again appeared on one of his films.

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AMERICAN HOTEL MISCELLANY

(click to enlarge photos)

In 1968 Seattle’s “black box” – aka the SeaFirst Tower – was topped off at 50 stories above Third Ave. and Madison Street.  Locals, who were either born here or came here before that introduction of the modern American skyline, will remember that our Central Business District once wore two crowns only, and both were distinguished.  Dedicated at an imagined 42 stories in 1914, the Smith Tower still reflects glowing sunsets from its skin of cream-colored terra-cotta tiles.  The Northern Life Tower, featured here, embraces the same sunsets with its already warm skin of blended face bricks.

Here – two photos up – we  join Jean Sherrard on the highest roof of Benaroya Hall for a colorful point with his repeat of what is now called The Seattle Tower. During its construction in the late 1920s, Gladding McBean and Co., the local supplier of the tower’s face bricks, ran ads describing the “enthralling shaft of beauty” as a “monumental endorsement” of its factory’s work.  And the manufacturer made a folksy point.  The oft noted “graduated color” of Gladding’s contribution used bricks at the top of the tower that like snow on the nearby mountains were lighter than those used near the street.  Jean’s repeat is wonderfully revealing of the tower’s graduated color and its other mountainous allusion: the five steps this Art Deco prize takes to its pyramidal crown.

[click the mouse twice for the fine print in the clips below]

At home in its resplendent tower the insurance company advised, “Why not buy the best and at the same time build the West?”  On April 5, 1929 the new landmark took center stage for the grand party and parade produced for the reopening of then freshly paved Third Avenue.  From its open 4th floor plaza, “Seven marriages were performed simultaneously by Superior Court Judge Chester Batchelor . . . in full view of thousands.”  A half year later Albert and Mae Cadle, the least lucky of the seven couples, sued each other for divorce, which was granted to Mae because of cab driver Albert’s “lack of support.”  Their day of judgment was October 24, the day the crash began, and forever after known as Black Thursday.

WEB EXTRAS

I’ll add in a few more views from the Benaroya rooftop, Paul, before I pop the question.

(Fine Jean, but let’s hope the readers also “pop” your thumbnail photographs to enlarge them.

Also, let me add a photo of my able rooftop assistant – whose name, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve misplaced.

Anything to add, Paul?

Lovely impressions from Benaroya’s green roof Jean.  Such a day!    We have, you know, been at this weekly stacking since 2008 and by now have a small horde of feature’s up for our beloved readers.   With the Northern Life Tower we return to a neighborhood that we have often visited before – for instance with the Pantages Theatre and Plymouth Congregational Church – and we will continue to exploit these links in these by now familiar surrounds.   We also encourage readers who like the play of key word searches to do it here using the search box (on top) to pursue related subjects like the Hollywood Tavern, the Brooklyn Building (sw corner of 2nd and University), Hall Wills parade on 4th (between University and Union), Denny Knoll and so on.   We’ll add now only three or four features and a few clippings (most of them from The Seattle Times) about the Northern Life Tower now known as The Seattle Tower. We will begin with a contribution again from Ron Edge – a in-house Christmas congratulations about the insurance company and its proud tower.  Thanks again Ron.

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(Best to CLICK TWICE when coming upon big clippings like those below.)

MACKINTOSH MANSE: THIRD & UNIVERSITY – Southeast Corner

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 24, 1988)

[As the first line hints, what follows below was first composed while Third Ave. was being tunneled for the transit in the late 1980s.] The current commotion along and below Third Avenue is a mere inconvenience compared with the upheavals that accompanied the 1906-07 regrading on the downtown street.  Imagine having to live next door to such disarray. That was the fate Angus and Lizzie Mackintosh, who built the mansion on the right at the southeast comer of Third Avenue and University Street. Not only did the work disrupt their view and domestic quietude, it left their home perched more than twenty feet higher than the regarded street.

Angus, a native of Ontario, and Lizzie, one of the pioneering “Mercer Girls” who came here in 1866 when the male-female ratio was 9-to-l, met while Lizzie was working as the first woman enrolling clerk in the state’s House of Representatives in Olympia. Working to promote lumber mills, railroads and banks, the couple had built enough of a nest egg to finance construction of the mansion in 1887.

The stately home had seven rooms downstairs, five upstairs and three quarters for servants under the roof. In 1907, soon after the regrade was completed, Bonney-Watson funeral directors, moved into the mansion.  As a sign that death has no end, the mortician was the second-longest continuously operating business in Seattle.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was first until its own recent passing. In 1928 the Northern Life Tower (later renamed the Seattle Tower), which many still consider the most beautiful office building in Seattle, was erected at the site.  Between the Mackintosh Manse and the insurance tower the corner was home for the two-story brick commercial structure shown below ca. 1918.

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VILLARD’S 1883 WELCOME

This street scene and its lineup of livestock and citizens was photographed on Sept. 14 or 15, 1883. The long afternoon shadow across Third Avenue suggests the former. The sun may have also been shining on the 15th, but Henry Villard and his entourage of distinguished guests arrived in Seattle at about 4 in the afternoon on the 14th and left later than night. These cattle are probably waiting for Villard to enter the University of Washington campus through the ceremonial arch, right of center, erected for the occasion on University Street.

Villard saw many more celebrations between here and Minneapolis after he completed the Northern Pacific Railroad to Puget Sound. Six days earlier and 847 miles away in Montana, Villard drove the golden spike that bound the transcontinental link between New York and Tacoma. Beside him in an entourage of 300 were former President Grant, many senators and the governors of every state along the rail line. Seattle was represented by its mayor, Henry Struve, and its “father,” Arthur Denny.

In these two photographs we get a sense of what prominence the territorial university held for the community atop Denny Knoll. The University Building is decked with garlands made from fir boughs – like the arch. For this day many of the city’s streets were, to quote Thomas Prosch’s “Chronological History of Seattle,” “thoroughly cleaned and adorned for miles with evergreen trees, arches, bunting and appropriate emblems and sentiments.”

Villard arrived in Seattle not by train from Tacoma but aboard the vessel Queen of the Pacific. Villard’s promise to bring the Northern Pacific directly to Seattle was not completed until the following year, and by then his railroad was in other hands whose interests in Tacoma economy meant poor and often no rail service to Seattle.

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DENNY HILL & HOTEL From Near 3rd & UNIVERSITY

(First appeared in Pacific, April 28, 1985.)

Luther Griffith is one of Seattle’s rarely remembered capitalists. In the 1890s he was out to sell street railways. For promotion purposes, Griffith put together a photo album featuring the work of pioneer photographer Frank LaRoche, a name that’s easy to remember because he wrote it on his negatives.  It’s not clear whether LaRoche recorded the photos on assignment for Griffith, or if the entrepreneur focused on the photographer’s work because it served his purpose so well. Griffith’s album shows off a Seattle that’s progressive, forward thinking and up to date.

The subject here is one example from the album. Taken in 1891, it flaunts one of early Seattle’s main urban symbols. There looming above the city in the distant half-haze is the elegant bulk of the Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. LaRoche must have set his tripod on the dirt of Third Avenue, one hundred yards of so south of Union Street, but he was safe. Compared to the modern race of internal combustion that is’ now Third, in 1891 it was a pleasantly relaxed but dusty grade where more than one horse and buggy (on the right) could casually park facing the wrong way on the two-way street.

The second tower in this scene (left of center) sits atop the brick Burke Block at the northwest corner of Third and Union. On the main floor the plumber and steam fitter A.F. Schlump did his business. Across Union is a mansion-sized home, a vestige of the old Single-family neighborhood. By 1891, this 1300 block of Third Avenue between University and Union streets was packed with diverse commerce. There was a dressmaker, a hairdresser, three rooming houses, a music teacher, a mustard manufacturer, a retail druggist, a wholesale confectioner, two tobacconists, a second-hand store, a restaurant, a sewing machine store and Mrs. Cox, who listed herself in the 1891 Polk Business Directory as simply, “artist.”

Also, at the Union Street end of this block was the Plummer Building, the two-story clapboard with the three gables on the photo’s right. This building housed more retailers plus a saloon and the Seattle Undertakers.

Ten years later, the progress on Third Avenue got so intense the Plummer Building was picked up and moved two blocks north to Pine Street to make way for the Federal Post Office. The post office is still on the Union Street side and pictured on the right of the “now” photo [when we once more bring it to light].

Beginning in 1906, Third Avenue’s forward-look started sighting through Denny Hill, which in the next four years would be nearly leveled as far east as 5^th Avenue allowing the street to pass through the Denny Regrade with barely a rise. The grand hotel, LaRoche’s subject and Griffith’s symbol, was razed with the hill.

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DENNY KNOLL’S DEATH KNELL

(First appeared in Pacific, August 6, 2011)

For this subject a photographer from the Webster and Stevens studio stood near the center of the intersection of Fourth and Seneca and aimed north on Fourth into an intended mess made by teams of sturdy horses.  Beginning in 1861 this was the original University of Washington Campus on Denny Knoll.

Note both the small bluff on the left side of Fourth Avenue, and other and higher vestiges of the knoll hinted on the far right.  The subject most likely dates from late 1907.   Had the photographer chosen this prospect a few months earlier, he or she would have looked across the green lawn of the campus to the tall fluted columns of the impressive portico to the university’s principal building used then as the city library.

At the scene’s center the light Chuckanut sandstone Federal Building, aka the Post Office, is getting a roof for its 1908 opening. To its left the impressive spire of Plymouth Congregation Church (1891) points to heaven above Third and University, although the congregation was then anticipating a sale and looking three blocks east to their current location.

Far left and nearing completion the eight-story Eilers Music Building became home for one of the region’s biggest retailers for pianos and organs that also promoted itself as “Seattle’s Talking Machine Headquarters” selling Victor’s Victrolas, and Columbia’s Graphonolas.  To this side of both the music makers and the Congregationalists is the subject’s oldest structure, the big home of Angus and Lizzie Mackintosh.  (Lizzie was one of the immigrant “Mercer Girls” of 1866.) The prosperous couple took residence there in 1887.  By 1907 they had retired to California for the weather and sold their mansion to Bonney and Watson Funeral Directors.

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We will conclude with a few more clips about the Norther Life Tower and thoughts at that time on towers and the ambitions of skylines and cityscapes.

 

(click to enlarge photos)

At seconds shy of 2:17 on the Monday afternoon of Aug. 13, 1951, a struggling Boeing B-50, less than a minute after taking off from Boeing Field and heading north, with its nose pointing up but its tail falling, just missed slamming into the tall brick tower of the Sick’s Brewery on Airport Way.  The shaking 99-foot long bomber next plunged to the roadway between the brewery and the Lester Apartments plowing into the north end of the three-story tenement and instantly torching it with about 3000 gallons of splashing aviation fuel.

[TO READ – CLICK TWICE]

 

Along with the crew of six, five residents of the Lester perished.  Many more were saved because of the adrenal-fired valor of Rainier Beer employees who rushed into the burning apartments helping pull many injured and/or panicked survivors to safety and the ambulances – and beer trucks – that rushed those that needed it to Harborview Hospital.

At least two of the workers were saved by Rainier Beer itself.  Brewery teamster Ira Scribner (a former pitcher for the Seattle Rainiers) explained for himself and Harold Anderson, “We just stayed at the brewery for three minutes between trips.”  The pause was for an extra beer.  “Otherwise the plane would have hit our truck as sure as shootin.”

The destruction of the Lester revived its ignominious origins.  In 1914 the national publication, Harper’s Weekly, pictured it with the caption “the largest brothel in the world.”  The scandal connected with its permissive construction on the city’s vacated 10th Avenue South – behind the brewery – spelled the end, by recall, of the rambunctious “open town” mayor Hiram Gill’s first term.

Historian Murray Morgan, famous for his treatment of Gill and much else in his local classic “Skid Road,” recalled for me how one of Gill’s waggish contemporaries noted that the big brothel’s developer, the Rex Improvement Company, was misnamed – but barely.  Without offering the correction, the party punster had noted that “Rex” was misspelled by one mere letter.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, a few features from the neighborhood beginning with the brewery and a feature written long before there was any inkling of Tulley’s rise or rumored fall.

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The RAINIER BREWERY – IN SOUTH SEATTLE

(First appeared in Pacific Jan.17, 1988.)

This historic view of Rainier Beer’s Bayview Brewery has been printed oft’ before. It is as easy to understand the scene’s popularity as it is to see that some of the brewery’s architectural features have survived into this century.

Researchers vary widely in giving the photo a date. It has been documented that at the time this photo was taken, the corporate name of the brewery was the Seattle Brewing & Malting Co., which dated to 1893. One of the brand names, of course, was Rainier.

Accounts also vary as to when the founder, Andrew Hemrich, first came to Seattle. Some say 1878, others 1881, but most of the brewer’s biographers claim he arrived in 1883. Once in town, Hemrich joined with a John Kopp in building a brewery here at Bayview just above the tidewater that then still lapped against the western slope of Beacon Hill. Since there was then still no year-round waterfront road into Seattle, the first barrels were brought to town in a rowboat.  On the scene’s far left is the mansion Hemrich built for his family in 1892, and on the far right are the narrow-gauge tracks of the Grant Street Electric Railway.

Hemrick next built himself another brewery down the viaduct in Georgetown. When Prohibition dried the state in 1916, the company’s Georgetown plant was claimed to be the sixth largest brewery in the world and the largest industrial establishment in the state.

Soon after the “noble experiment” was repealed in 1933, Canadian brewer Fritz Sick and his Tacoma-born son, Emil, purchased the original Bayview plant, renovated it and started brewing Rheinlander brand beer. Two years later the Sicks bought the Georgetown plant and the Northwest rights to the historic trade name “Rainier.”

It was not until 1957 that Emil Sick managed to purchased the nationwide rights to the Rainier label. By then the Sicks’ kingdom had grown into what the company claimed was the world’s largest brewery system. Five years later the Rainier label operations were consolidated into the Bayview plant.

ADDENDUM:  A decade or so after my little essay above was published in 1988, the Rainier Brewery was sold first to Stroh’s and then by Stroh’s to Pabst – the beer “in the land of sky blue waters” – which closed and sold the brewery in 1999.  The big R on the roof was replaced by a big T, to celebrate the plant’s conversion into Tully’s Coffee headquarters, and a few other stimulated enterprises like band practice rooms, a motorcycle fabricator, and a winery.  About Tully’s recent difficulties I know too little to make any recommendations except to lower the prices on their drinks.

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Above: Asahel Curtis’s 1904 portrait of Seattle Malting and Brewing Company’s big plant in Georgetown. Below: Staying in the 20th Century my black-white copy of it from the late 1990s.

BREWERY IN GEORGETOWN – NO MEDICINE LIKE IT

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 15, 1999)

In 1903 photographer Asahel Curtis began photographing the Seattle Malting and Brewing Company’s new Georgetown plant. On Jan. 25, 1904, his first return of many, he struck this vertical “portrait” view of, from left, the Malt House (with-the Moorish-minaret chimney), Brew House (with its twin ornamental tops) and Stock House.

Out of frame the brewery continues far to the right, reaching a monumental length of 885 feet. By 1904, this was the largest brewery west of the Mississippi River. With additions, by 1912 it had become “world class” – the sixth-largest in the world. Before Washington introduced Prohibition in 1916, for a time the brewery was the largest industrial establishment in the state.

In 1904 Georgetown incorporated – a “company town” safeguarding the business interests of its brewery. Company superintendent John Mueller was soon elected both mayor and fire chief. The number of taverns and roadhouses doubled, and by 1905 it required 25 horse teams to daily fill the Seattle appetite for Rainier Beer, the primary label of the brewery. That year the brewery employed more than 300 men. There was room to build worker homes beside the Duwamish River, which then still curved through Georgetown.

I have pulled most of these details from an essay Georgetown activist, Tim O’Brian and architect Blair Pessemier wrote in 1989 as part of their successful application to have the brewery added to the official register of city landmarks. This Curtis print accompanied their application. It illustrates beautifully their point that the oversize brewery is comparable to a medieval cathedral both in form and function. When new and intact – as we see it here – it dominated Georgetown and its citizens as if to say, to quote O’Brian-Pessemier: “We come to work” instead of “We come to pray.”  We might ad, “and we come to drink the new vigor and strength in very drop of Rainier Beer . . . to cultivate the habit that brings the glow of health and gives as well a new lease on life.”

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SEMPLE’S SOUTH CANAL

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 15, 1999)

Here’s one of Seattle’s historical believe-it-or-nots. When you ascend Beacon Hill from the Spokane St. interchange off 1-5, you are steaming up South Canal.

In 1895, an ex-governor of Washington, Eugene Semple, proposed taking on three herculean tasks at once: the straightening of the Duwamish River into waterways, the cutting of a canal through Beacon Hill from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington, and the reclaiming of 1,500 acres of tidelands with the dredging from the river and the droppings from the hill.

In July of that year, this ambitious work began with the dredging of the Duwamish River’s east waterway. Amid the ceremonial band music, speech making, and inaugural hoopla, the popular Semple promised the crowd that In about five years” his company would invite them all back “to witness the opening of the locks that will admit a great warship into Lake Washington.”

Yet, five years later, the only way to approach Beacon Hill by water was still in a row boat at high tide. By then Semple had reclaimed only 175 tideland acres. His detractors attacked this “specious and mischievous undertaking” to cut through the “quicksands and sliding clays” of Beacon Hill. Instead, they promoted a North Canal, the one that was eventually completed via Salmon Bay and Lake Union.

But Semple would not give up. In the fall of 190 I, he attacked Beacon Hill with 4-inch thick jets of water that reached 300 ft. into the air. On November 29 of that year, the Post-Intelligencer reported that when this hydraulic force was “turned onto the side of the hill, mud, sand, and gravel crumble away like ashes before a cyclone.”

The principal historical photograph featured here accompanied that article which also reported that this “halftone was taken for the P.I. by a staff artist who visited the scene of operations in company with Eugene Semple.” The photograph’s caption read, “End of waterway flume.”

You can see that flume running out of the bottom of the historical picture and into the high tide which twice a day covered Elliott Bay’s mudflats. The plan, of course, was to direct more mud through this flume and to cover the tidelands below with the hill above. And it worked – for awhile. Then the soft hill refused to be sculpted for ships and capriciously began to cave in.

Eugene Semple was forced to abandon his South Canal. Today, it has been reclaimed by a greenbelt and the more modest incisions of highway engineers. Their work was made easier thanks to Eugene Semple’s first cut into his South Canal.

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SPOKANE STREET From BEACON HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, April 19, 1987.)

 

Taken around the turn of the century (1900), two timber-trestle streets intersect for a “crossing the T’s.” Looking west from Beacon Hill, we see the trestle built above the tide flats south of Pioneer Square on Grant Street, now called Airport Way.  If you follow the second trestle, Spokane Street, it leads to the dark peninsula in West Seattle called Pigeon Point.

The first West Seattle bridge across the Duwamish River’s main channel is half hidden behind the screen of steam escaping the engine on the track parallel to Spokane Street.  The original negative is part of the Webster & Steven Collection at the Museum of History and Industry. Perhaps the popular W & S studios photographed ” this scene for Emmett Nist. That’s his Seattle Tacoma Box Co. sitting on pilings in the center of the photo.

The Nist company moved to 401 Spokane St. from its Lake Union plant around 1900 and stayed until 1975, when its Seattle and Tacoma .divisions joined in Kent.  The old tidelands site at Fourth Avenue South and Spokane Street is now a City Light lot.

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MUNICIPAL POWER on SPOKANE STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, March 30, 1997)

Seattle’s Municipal Power opened its South End Service Center on Spokane Street in 1926 – the year of this photograph – on land recently reclaimed from the tides. Seattle architect J.L. McCauley’s public building was not only functional but attractive. As the historical scene reveals, the restrained ornament used in the service center’s concrete forms has been enhanced with a skillful wrapping of the building in a skin of stucco and off-white plaster.

Signs for the structure’s principal roles – warehouse and shops – adorn its major division, to the sides of a slightly off-center tower where “City Light” is tastefully embossed on the arch just beneath its flag pole. The name is promoted twice on the roof, with block letters about nine feet high illuminated at night with about 400 bulbs for each spelling of CITY LIGHT.

The building survives, although its north wall facing Spokane Street was hidden in the 1960s by textured concrete panels. A new north wall is in the works (or was in the works in 1997.  By now it must be done.)  It will show off to visitors and Spokane Street traffic a curvilinear facade ornamented with public art made from recycled glass. Inside, a two-story skylight atrium will repeat the roof forms incorporated in the building’s original design.  (We must get around there and record at least some of this for an addendum!)

This saw-tooth roof, which runs nearly the length of the center’s west (right) wall above the shops, is to these eyes the historical plant’s strongest architectural feature.  Such tops were once commonplace in this industrial neighborhood.

The twenties was a decade of endless tests for City Light, as it developed the first of the Skagit River’s generators, Gorge Dam, and fought a service war with Puget Power when lines for the public and private utilities were still duplicated throughout the city’s streets.

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The BRADFORD STREET STAIRWAY in SOUTH SEATTLE – DEC. 15, 1916

(Appeared first in Pacific on Oct. 30, 1994.)

Ascending the Beacon Hill ridge was once an aerobic exercise.  Most of these climbs from the tideflats were on timber trestles like this one.  It meanders from the neighborhood of South Seattle to Seattle’s Beacon Hill reservoirs. This Bradford Street stairway was peculiarly precarious. Just to the south (right) of this scene the land falls away into a pit carved years earlier by the Seattle Brick and Tile Company, one of the many brick manufacturers that flourished with the rebuilding of Seattle after the “Great Fire” of 1889.

Ken Manzo, who as halfback for Cleveland High School’s 1937 city-champion football team counts as one of South Seattle’s favorite sons, remembers these stairs -vividly. On his paper route he climbed them daily, carrying the Seattle Star to his subscribers on 13th Avenue South. Manzo’s three-block ascent from 10th Avenue South gained 250 feet.

While fine for mining clay, the unstable glacial till of Beacon Hill was inclined to capriciously slip away. This public works scene was recorded as evidence that the Bradford Street foot walk and the houses on the left had neither fallen into the hole nor seemed likely to, following the latest cave-in at the pit.

These four photographs of the Bradford Street stairs were recorded for the city’s public-works department on Dec. 15, 1916.  Since then all inherited streaks while waiting for light – or fresh air – in the public works archive. The photographer notes the precise location of each negative. With the photo at the top we are “at a point 4 feet south of the intersection of the east margin of 10th Ave. South and the north margin on Bradford Street.” Today that’s the middle of Interstate 5. In the contemporary scene (When we find it, it will taken the place of the clipping scan we use here.) the historical photographer’s roost was about midway between the overhanging highway sign above the freeway’s northbound lanes and “the concrete wall beyond it.

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MAPLE SCHOOL

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 22, 1991)

This fanciful structure was the second of four Maple schools. The first was sited on what is now Boeing Field, and when constructed in 1866 it was the first schoolhouse in King County intended specifically for instruction. John Wesley Maple, 30, son of one of Seattle’s original settlers, was the first teacher. It was a job the future King County treasurer, which he later described as “the hardest work that I ever had undertaken.” Maple had 20 students, all of them small children except for 15-year-old Eliza Snyder, whom he later married.

Maple’s one-room schoolhouse was replaced in 1900 by this framed creation. The tower, coped ornaments and wide front ‘steps are monumental in their rural solitude. In 1907, however, the Oregon and Washington Railroad purchased the land and the schoolhouse was soon thereafter destroyed for the railroad’s right-of-way.

The third Maple School was built up the Beacon Hill ridge on the future site of Cleveland High School, and when construction began on the high school in 1926, Maple primary was jacked up and moved two blocks to 17th Avenue and Lucile Street and there remodeled.  The most recent and modern Maple Elementary School was constructed in 1972 at a fifth site, Corson Avenue South near Ferdinand Street.

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OXBOW BRIDGE on FIRST AVE. SOUTH: FEB. 24, 1916

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 23, 1900)

Serpentine was the most common description for the Duwamish River before it was channeled into a waterway. Within the 13 & 1/2 miles that were straightened and shortened to 4 & 1/2 miles was the Oxbow, the first large S-curve south of the river’s mouth.

In 1911, First Avenue South was extended over the Oxbow with a swing span bridge. Five years’ later, the river was straightened to bypass this Oxbow twist and the old channel was filled in. This scene, photographed Feb. 24, 1916, shows that work in progress. The photographer looks north from the bridge’s south approach.

By the end of year the river had abandoned its bridge, so the span was dissembled, moved about 300 yards south of its original site and rebuilt across the Duwamish’s straightened channel. In its second fitting, the Oxbow Bridge-was no longer in line with First Avenue South and the bridge’s curving approaches introduced a new oxbow onto the scene. Inevitably, this S-curve, combined with the narrow bridge’s two tight lanes, created one of the city’s worst traffic bottlenecks.

In 1955 the present bascule bridge was built midway between the ‘ old Oxbow Bridge’s two sites. The contemporary photo (when we uncover it) was recorded within a few yards of the spot on the old bridge picked by the historical photographer. The parked vehicles in the “now” sighting are grouped on a pie-shaped strip between the new bridge’s busy approach on the right and a quiet First Avenue South on the left.

The traffic relief brought by the new bridge was short-lived. Eventually it would  earn the reputation as the city’s most dangerous span.

(click to enlarge photos)

Here an autumnal sun brightens the endearing clutter of Pike Street, on Friday Nov. 6, 1953. The date has been hand-printed on the negative, bottom-right, and the time – approaching 2:25pm – is marked on Dr. James Sender’s street clock standing tall above the old sidewalk.

By 1953 Sender, a past president of the Northwest College of Optometry, had been fitting glasses in this neighborhood for more than twenty years, although at 108 Pike he is here nearly brand new.  Sender shared the address with the Mirror Tavern, where some customers surely found their future reflected in a glass of beer.  You will find a large part of the bar’s mirror-shaped sign hanging above the sidewalk directly behind Sender’s clock.

Judging from the optometrist’s advertisements, with this move, Sender began turning his attention increasingly from eye care to selling jewelry and fixing time-pieces, including his big one out front.  It was once nearly obligatory for jewelers in the business district to have a clock on the sidewalk, and to also care for it.

The Curtis view below is number only a few more negatives beyond the one above, but still there are some big changes in this Pike Street block between First and Second Avenues.  Readers are invited to get out their Polk directories and Seattle Times key word search tools to date them both. Remember please to let us know.  (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

I have learned from Anne Frantilla, Seattle’s Assistant Municipal Archivist, that the “purpose” of this public works recording was not to compose an engaging tableau of Pike Street culture, mid-20^th Century – which it yet is – but rather to spy on Sender’s clock and with other snaps other big clocks in the business district.  In 1953 a piqued Seattle city council was preparing to get rid of street clocks altogether. Too often, they chimed, these landmarks knocked pedestrians’ knees while keeping poor time.  They did not succeed.  In 1980 a different city council declared the then ten surviving street clocks historical landmarks.

Archivist Frantilla also directed me to Rob Ketcherside, a Seattle historian with an enduring interest in Seattle’s street clocks.  (We featured Rob in Pacific on Nov. 1, 2009 for a “now & then” subject on Green Lake history.) Ketcherside’s own “clock works” can be found on his website.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly Jean.  We will start with two color slides by Lawton Gowey that look into this same block in 1963 and 1976 followed by five other features all of which are on subjects within a few feet the one above.

FIVE FROM BEFORE (We’ve shown these Victor Lygdman shots at 2nd and Pike circa 1962 before but we include them again here – as Jean’s reminds – for “reference.”   For all Five Victor is standing at the southwest corner of  Pike and Second.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Above and Below: More than a century separates these two looks east up Pike and across First Avenue.  In the first block before Second Avenue among the shops on the left of the “then” are a tobacconist, a beer hall, a tailor, and two restaurants, the Boston Kitchen and the Junction Restaurant.  On a sidewalk sign the latter offers “Mocha Java Coffee.”  How hip!   Historical photo courtesy Lawton Gowey.  This one Lawton collected.

THE RUMBLE AT PIKE

(First appeared in Pacific, March 30, 2006)

The oldest recorded remembrance of Pike Street describes it as a blazed trail twisting between high stumps sided by violets, trilliums and wild currants, ending in a dense forest at about Eighth Avenue. Here, about 30 years later, is Pike at the tum of the century, in transition from its pioneer status as the community’s northern boundary to the retail district’s principal commercial strip. The bricks are in place – laid in 1895 – but a few of the pioneer frame business houses still shoulder the street.

Two different sets of streetcar tracks appear here. On the right the rails of the Front Street (First Avenue) Cable Railway tum up Pike from First. The slot for the cable, which is evident between the tracks, was removed in 1901 when this line was switched to electric power. The tracks on the left were laid for electric cars from their beginning in 1889. They follow the route of the old horse cars to Belltown originally laid here in 1884.

Standing at the entrance to the public market in the crosswalk on the west side of First Avenue and looking east up the centerline of Pike Street – like in this week’s “now” – you may imagine trains rolling directly through you and also under you. And while you may no longer see them they can still be felt.   The once popular Seattle historian-journalist J. Willis Sayre explains why in “This City of Ours” his entertaining book of Seattle trivia that was published for Seattle Schools in 1936.

Describing a tour on First Avenue Sayers writes, “Now lets go down to Pike Street.  Here you are directly above the Great Northern tunnel built under the city in 1904.” Today, if you are sensitive and wear wooden shoes (preferably) you can still feel the rumble below. However, the choo-choo-coming-at-you through most of the 1870s was Seattle’s first railroad, the narrow gauged train that carried coal cars transferred from scows on Lake Union to bunkers at the waterfront foot of Pike Street.  Again, it was not passing beneath Pike but along it – between what would become Westlake in 1906 and the coal wharf.  In “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle,” our oft-quoted 1930’s classic of local history, pioneer Sophie Frye Bass, David and Louisa Denny’s granddaughter, recalls jumping upon the coal cars as they rumble along Pike in the ’70s.  The Bass family home was on Pike.

Pike Street was named by Arthur Denny for his friend John Pike, who in 1861 designed the old University Building on the UW’s first campus. Sophie Frye Bass remembered when Pike was graded by Chinese laborers and how wagons crossing its loose timber planks would, depending on the season, either slap great waves of muddy water on storefronts or pedestrians or stir clouds of dust derived in equal parts from horse droppings and ground splinters. Much later when Pike was planked Bass recalls how “when the street sweeper . . . came rumbling along, all would rush frantically to close the windows.”

The historical view east on Pike was recorded a few years before the tunnel was built beneath it – sometime between 1897 and 1900.  One block away the trolley turning west off of Second Avenue onto Pike carries a roof banner advertising the sale of Gold Rush outfits at Cooper and Levi’s in Pioneer Square.  That national fever began in ’97, and in 1901 – we repeat –  the rails for the Front Street (First Ave.) Cable Cars were removed. Here on the right they still take a right turn to Pike from First Avenue.

When the tunnel was being built the public works department made it’s by now oft-sited traffic count on Pike St. at Second Avenue. Of the 3,959 vehicles that used that intersection at Pike on Friday Dec. 23, 1904 more than three thirds were one or two horse express wagons. The buggy count reached 178, but only 14 were automobiles had used the intersection.  Walking and public transportation – trolleys – were the way to get around.

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Then and Now Captions together:  The Pike Place Market started out in the summer of 1907 as a city-supported place where farmers could sell their produce directly to homemakers.  Since then the Market culture has developed many more attractions including crafts, performers, restaurants, and the human delights that are only delivered by milling and moving crowds.  Historic photo courtesy Old Seattle Paperworks, Pike Place Market.

FARMERS AND FAMILIES

(First appeared in Pacific, August 6, 2006)

A century ago Seattle, although barely over fifty, was already a metropolis with a population surging towards 200,000.   Consequently, now our community’s centennials are multiplying.  This view of boxes, sacks and rows of wagons and customers is offered as an early marker for the coming100th birthday of one of Seattle’s greatest institutions, the Pike Place Public Market.

Both the “then” and “now” look east from the inside angle of this L-shaped landmark.  The contemporary view also looks over the rump of Rachel, (bottom-left) the Market’s famous brass piggy bank, which when empty is 200 pounds lighter than her namesake 750 pound Rachel, the 1985 winner of the Island County Fair.   Since she was introduced to the Market in 1986 Rachel has contributed about $8,000 a year to its supporting Market Foundation.  Most of this largess has been dropped through the slot in her back as small coins.  It has amounted to heavy heaps of them.

Next year – the Centennial Year 2007 – the Market Foundation, and the Friends of the Market, and many other vital players in the closely-packed universe that is the Market will be helping and coaxing us to celebrate what local architect Fred Bassetti famously describe in the mid-1960s as “An honest place in a phony time.”  And while it may be argued that the times have gotten even phonier the market has held onto much of its candor.

The historical view may well date from the Market’s first year, 1907.  If not, then the postcard photographer Otto Frasch recorded it soon after.   It is a scene revealing the original purpose of the Public Market:  “farmers and families” meeting directly and with no “middleman” between them.  The subject directly below also looks east on Pike from its elbow into Pike Place.  It is dated July 19, 1919 – and captioned too.

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LIBERTY LANDMARK

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 21, 1988)

First Avenue between Pine and Pike streets was a principal early-century trolley-turning stage for lines to Madison Park, Capitol Hill, Queen Anne and Ballard. Add to the crush of streetcars the crowds at the Pike Place Market and bumper-to-bumper motorcars and you have a World War I-era urban mess that was exciting and even a bit dangerous.   Reigning over this congested scene was the Liberty Theatre’s monumental electric silhouette. The Liberty Theatre was built in 1914 to surround a 1,500-pipe Wurlitzer organ. Everyone agreed the theater’s acoustics were first-rate, and Oliver Wallace, the theater’s first organist, had a variety of animal and industrial sounds he could lend to the silent films he accompanied.

The Liberty was a wildly successful operation. One of the first local theaters dedicated to films, it could entertain ten thousand customers in a day. Sometimes the lines of patrons backed-up to Second Avenue.

In 1939, the Liberty celebrated its 25th anniversary with a complete remodeling including a new neon sign. It reopened to the world premier of “Only Angels Have Wings.”  The Liberty was sold in 1950 to the John Hamrick chain of theaters. In 1953 it got a screen and equipment for CinemaScope and stereophonic sound. But the conversion almost  certainly wasn’t worth it. One year later the Liberty closed, and on June 24, 1955, its razing began. The site now is a parking lot. The Wurlitzer organ was saved. First carted off to the Pacific Lutheran College memorial gymnasium, it now is in a church in Spokane.

MORE – and some of the same – ON THE LIBERTY

Above and Below: Between 1914 and 1955 the Liberty Theatre held the center of the First Avenue block between Pike and Pine Streets.  Replaced by a parking lot in 1955 its neighbors survive.  To the north (left) is the Gatewood, one of the 11 downtown buildings improved by the non-profit Plymouth Housing Group for low- income housing.  To the right is one of the few survivors of the old “Flesh Avenue” that was once First Avenue. Historical photo courtesy Lawton Gowey.  Jean, I think, shot the “now.”

LIBERTY THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific July 30, 2006)

How many Times readers can still remember the ornamental Liberty Theatre on First Avenue across from the Market?  On bright afternoons the light bounced off its terra-cotta façade illuminating the street.

It is now fifty-one years since Theatres Incorporated sent a letter to Ralph Stacy, then the King County Assessor, that the company had “demolished and removed the Liberty Theatre and accordingly request that you remove the building from your assessment rolls.”  Their intention to open a parking lot to “relieve the congestion around the Pike Place Market” was a sudden one.  Only months earlier the theatre’s managers had briefly closed the Liberty for a CinemaScope and stereophonic fitting – but for naught.

The Liberty first opened on Oct. 27, 1914, and it was built for movies.  There were only two dressing rooms, and both were in the mezzanine.  The theatre — with no pillars — was built around a 1500-pipe Wurlitzer organ that was famous in its time for special effects like birds cooing, crows cawing, and the surf pounding — an effect made within the organ by a rasping together of sandpaper blocks.  The organist also kept ready in his pocket a pistol loaded with blanks for William S. Hart shoot-em-ups.  The Organ’s largest part, a 32-foot bass pipe was removed when its soundings continued to knock plaster from the ceiling.  Throughout its 41 years the Liberty was known for splendid acoustics.

In “Household Magazine’s” review of “The Winning of Barbara Worth,” the 1926 silent film showing here at the Liberty, Gary Cooper is described as “the handsome young chap who stole the picture from Ronald Colman.”  And that’s something.  The movie was a hit and still being reviewed when the Liberty closed in December for new management and a new name. When it opened again on Jan 7, 1927 as the United Artists Theatre, Seattle Mayor Bertha Landes did the opening-honors standing beside a battery of U.S. Navy searchlights operated by uniformed sailors.  They were recruiters, it was explained.  Appropriately, the Wallace Beary vehicle “We’re in the Navy Now” was the film shown.

Two years and some bad debts later the theatre was again the Liberty and stayed so until replaced by the parking lot in 1955.

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ROYAL CANDOR

(First appeared in Pacific in 2005)

Called “Princess Angeline” by the settlers, Chief Seattle’s daughter lived in a small shed near the waterfront foot of Pike Street.    She often reached the business district by climbing the steep path she lived beside until her death at 86 in 1896.   Here the octogenarian rests beside Pike Street just west of First Avenue. Later Pike Street was regraded here and lifted to turn north onto Pike Place. The Post Avenue “alley” was also directed south from here.  In Jean Sherrard’s repeat, Rick Williams – brother to slain native carver John Williams and a carver himself – stands at the point where Post drops from Pike.  Williams holds a model for the totem pole to be erected in his brother’s memory.  On seeing the portrait of Princess Angeline, Williams said, “She looks just like my grandmother.”

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

This is one of three snapshots of a circus parade that Max Loudon, a sportsman-grocer with an adventurous camera, recorded at this pioneer corner and included in his photo album a century ago.  The others are of horses and a camel, both with costumed riders.  For this recording at First Ave. S. and Washington Street, Loudon did not need to travel far.  He worked in the neighborhood.  The horses follow.

We are confident that there is more than one elephant rounding the corner here, for Loudon also photographed the parade nearer its origins in what was then just beyond booming Seattle’s freshly graded Denny Regrade neighborhood.  One of those remaining parade subjects shows more pachyderms, six in a row – and there may have been more. All are crowned with tenders dressed like this one, and musically accompanied, we know from the news coverage, by a “steaming head-splitting calliope.”  I’m pretty confident the subjects that follow with elephants and camels were photographed on 5th Avenue looking northwest from – or thru – Thomas Street, and so where today the monorail enters into the embracing bowels of the Emergency Music Project.  For evidence, below the two photos we’ll attach a detail from our stalwart 1912 – the year of the parade – real estate map.

Block 56 at the center of the 1912 map detail above, shows a line-up of eight frame structures on the west side of 5th Avenue and just north of Thomas Street.  (Two street cross the details, Thomas below its center and Harrison above it.  Broad Street is named and a helpful clue for negotiating the detail.

A century ago – and continuing long after – the Sells-Floto Circus was famous for its big top shows, menageries with scores of exotic animals, and its primary means of promotion – these parades.  Out of Denver, Sells-Floto cut its ticket prices in half to a mere two bits (a quarter or 25-cents) in 1909, a move that filled it tents with joyful customers and its competitors with rage. (Click this TWICE, I believe.)

This year, 1912, Sells-Floto was part of Seattle’s second annual Golden Potlatch celebration.  The circus performed matinee and evening shows for two of the Potlatch’s eight days, and on the mornings of both it paraded down First Avenue from Belltown and back on Second Avenue. Loudon took his circus shots on either July 15 or 16, 1912, or perhaps on both.

Circus elephants were – as almost ever – our grandest earthbound visitors during the 1912 Potlatch, but they were not the celebration’s biggest attraction.  Those were the aeroplanes: Jean Romano’s Skeeter and Walter Edwards’ Curtis.  Twice daily they flew above the city and the bay.

Other Elephants have visited the old Potlatch Grounds – turned Seattle Center – since the early-century circus.  Here are two instances both by Frank Shaw, who – if you have been paying attention – you know lived in the neighborhood..   First – above – Shaw’s July 22, 1965 recording of a pachyderm line-up beside one of the lesser remainders from Century 21, followed – below – by Phil Dickert looking possessive of another elephants on the grounds.  Like Shaw – if I have read his caption correctly – Dickert was an abiding member of the Mountaineers.

 

And just for fun, let’s compare this Joshua Tree National Forest rock formation with the elephant’s eye above:

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul (who, readers, is just now feeling lousy with flu or bad cold – send him good cheer)?

Jean, I enjoy your commiserations and also the change you made to our feature’s title – trading those elephants for the euphonious pachyderms.   I was tempted to go on with an alliteration that was also truer to pioneer usage for they were more likely to call it Pioneer Place than Pioneer Square.  We could have put our pachyderms in place, but will avoid it.  I’ll now add a few features related to the neighborhood and/or to elephants.  And if there is time yet tonight we will close asking, “When is it fair or proper to suggest that someone resembles an elephant?  Earlier we discussed this matter, which I may need to still sleep on and return to in the morning, after a good nightybears, which we might just for tonight call nighty-elephants or nighty-pachyderms.  Let the also silly readers decide.

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DEXTER HORTON’S BANK

(First appeared in Pacific July 7, 1996)

Although not the earliest of the Pioneer Square Historic District’s many restorations, the revival of the Maynard Building was so faithful and full that this 1976 work won an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. The Maynard was an 1892 variation on the Romanesque-Revival style of most of the historic district buildings constructed immediately after the Great Fire of 1889.

This five-story home of the Dexter Horton Bank, Seattle’s first bank, was set at the site of the bank’s original home, a single-story building at the northwest corner of Commercial Street (First Avenue South) and Washington Street. Opened in 1870, it was one of the business district’s earliest brick-and-stone structures. (See feature following this one.) Enough of the earlier building survived the fire that Horton reused its frame for a temporary home until he could acquire the adjoining lot and built this comely creation of sandstone from Bellingham Bay and bricks from St. Louis.

This view was photographed about 1904, two years before the bank moved to a new home at Second and Cherry. The building’s new owners changed its name to honor Doc Maynard, the pioneer who platted the area in 1853 as part of his claim. In his elaborate research into Pioneer Square history, Tim O’Brian discovered that Maynard sold this corner lot to a Duwamish Indian named Miles Fowler, from whom Dexter Horton later acquired it. O’Brian and Pioneer Square Preservation Board member Greg Lang are preparing a virtual Walking Tour of Pioneer Square. When completed, it will be accessible through the World Wide Web, where users will be able to click their way to historical profiles of all the district’s blocks and buildings. The tour is being created with sponsorship of the Pioneer Square Community Council and a city neighborhood grant.

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Above:  Following the city’s big fire of 1889, its first bank, Dexter Horton’s at First and Washington, although gutted was still secure in its back wall vault and so both used and guarded.   (Courtesy, Seattle Public Library)  Below.  Jean’s repeat of the “basket handle” arching of the burned bank’s windows.  The Maynard building replaced it in 1893.

DEXTER HORTON RUINS

(Appeared first in Pacific, August 6, 2010)

Sixty-three safes were counted in the ruins south of Yesler Way after the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.   Sixty-three plus one.

The Dexter Horton Bank, Seattle’s first bank, at the northwest corner of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) and Washington Street, was still standing, although without a roof and gutted of its lacquered appointments, like tellers cages, furniture and window casements.   But in the back was the vault, the bank’s own safe, seen here over the shoulder of a standing guard at the missing front door.  There the valuables survived and the room and its locks were kept working and guarded for a few weeks following the fire.

Dexter Horton arrived in Seattle penniless but fortunate: he came early in 1853.  By working hard in Yesler’s sawmill, and saving his pay Horton managed to first start a store and then in 1870 a real bank at this corner with a real safe, one he brought back with him from an extended visit to San Francisco to study banking.  Five years later, in 1875, he replaced his timber quarters with this brick and stone creation, one of the first such in Seattle.

Before he was a banker with a safe, Horton got a reputation for honesty by taking care of working men’s savings as they were off exploring for whatever.  He secreted their bundled wealth about his store in crannies and most famously at the bottom of a barrel filled with coffee beans.

A few days following the 1889 fire the Times suggested that “the fire has, perhaps, been more beneficial to that portion of the city around Washington Street so long inhabited by prostitutes . . . It may be well to notify the painted element here now that cribs will no longer be tolerated.  In the future this district will not be given for such purposes but for legitimate business only.”  In this case the paper was, of course, half wrong.  Both the prostitutes and the bankers returned.

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Above:  Seattle was first developed along the four blocks of Commercial Street decorated here with small fir trees for a parade in 1888.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)  Below:  Following the city’s “great” 1889 fire, Pioneer Seattle’s two principal commercial streets, Commercial and Front (First Avenue) were joined directly here at Yesler Way and run through the site of the old Yesler-Leary building.  Consequently, Jean needed his ten-foot extension pole to approach – but not reach – the prospect of the unnamed historical photographer.

COMMERCIAL STREET – INDEPENDENCE DAY, 1888

(First appeared in Pacific, April 28, 2008)

For looking south through the full four blocks of Seattle’s pioneer Commercial Street (First Ave. south from Yesler to King) an unnamed photographer carried his camera to the top floor of the Yesler-Leary Building.  The occasion was a parade heading north towards the photographer and considering the array of small American Flags strung across Commercial this rare view was most likely recorded on the morning of July 4, 1888.

There was then both a physical and cultural jog here at ‘Yesler’s Corner” (later Pioneer Square). It required all traffic, (including marching bands), to go around the Yesler-Leary building in order to continue north on Front Street (First Avenue).  Yesler Way was also the border or line between the grander, newer, and often brick-clad Seattle facing Front Street (behind the photographer) and the old pioneer Seattle seen here  “below the line.”  Generally Yesler was a gender divider too, for only women with business there ventured “below the line.”

An 1888 Commercial Street sampler includes seven of the city’s dozen hotels, three of its four pawnbrokers, and three of its four employment agencies, nine of its forty-one restaurants, four of seven wholesale liquor merchants.  The tightest quarters were in the block on the left where fourteen storefronts crowded the east side of Commercial between Yesler and Washington Streets.  Among those quartered were a cigar store, a barber, a hardware store (note the “Stoves and Tinware” sign), a “pork packer”, two “chop houses”, two saloons and the Druggist M.A. Kelly whose large and flamboyant sign shows bottom-left.

By contrast Front Street featured more of the finer values and “fancy goods”, like books & stationary, dry goods, confections, jewelers, photographers, physicians, tailors and an opera house.  Of the thirty-seven grocers listed in the 1888 city directory, eighteen have Front Street addresses, while on Commercial there was apparently nowhere to buy an apple or a bucket of lard.

In another eleven months and two days everything on Commercial Street and most of Front Street would be destroyed by the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

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A CIRCUS PARADE – 2^ND AVENUE CA. 1902-03.

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec 11, 1994)

Any circus parade was a great promotion, an anticipated spectacle, and sometimes also a way to move the circus from the railroad depot to the performance site. That may be what’s happening with this Ringling Bros. procession on Second Avenue, here looking north from Seneca Street around noon on a sunny summer day.

Local circus enthusiast Michael Sporrer describes this as “one of the few Seattle photographs that is really good on elephants.” In Sporrer’s cataloging of Northwest circus appearances (a decades-old unpublished work in progress) he has Ringling Bros. here for two-day stands in late August 1902, ’03 and ’04. Since the most popular early-century Seattle venue for circuses was the open swale on Fifth Avenue North at Republican Street (now High School Memorial · Stadium) these elephants may be en route from the waterfront train depot to those green fields of Lower Queen Anne.

First and Second avenues – thru Belltown – were then the preferred routes to Queen Anne and North Seattle. Third Avenue stopped at Pine Street, one block and 100 feet below the front portico to the Victorian Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. Here, this looming landmark interrupts the left ·horizon. To the far left Second Avenue still climbs the western slope of Denny Hill, so this view probably dates from 1902 or even 1903, when the regrading of Second Avenue that brought it to modern grades began. By 1910 the regraders would raze Denny Hill as far east as Fifth Avenue, taking everything including the hotel.

George Bartholomew’s Great Western Circus was, according to Sporrer, the first real circus to visit Seattle. It came overland from Virginia City, Mont., in 1867-by wagon. The last real full-blown circus parade to trek through downtown Seattle probably was the Cole Bros. Circus procession in 1937.  (The key here is “full-blown.”  I remember watching contemporary colored news film in a KING TV editing room in the early 1970s that looked down from Yesler Way on a long line of elephants heading north on 4^th Avenue, while with their talented trunks they pruned some of the lower branches on the street trees along the way.)

The last big tent show hereabouts was Circus Vargas’ 1988 performance in Renton.

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Then and Now Caps together:  One hundred and four years separate these looks east on Union Street from 3rd avenue.  In the historical scene Union Street has been closed and appointed for the 1902 Elk’s Carnival.  The now scene dates from 2006, and I no longer remember who took it.   The clever title “Fattest Babies” was, most likely, Pacific assistant editor, Kathy Triesch’s contribution.   By then Kathy had been reading and passing on these features for, it seems, twenty years.

THE FATTEST BABIES

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 8, 2006)

For thirteen days, beginning Monday the 18th of August, 1902, the Elks Lodge managed to fence off a sizeable section of downtown Seattle and produce the city’s first multi-day summer festival, “The Elk’s Carnival.”  We may compare this temporary gate to Bumbershoot, which cordons Seattle Center for a long weekend of ticketing and celebrating.  And with the One Reel Vaudeville Show as its producer since the early 1980s Seattle’s annual arts festival also behaves in a few of its many corners like a carnival.

The Elks furnished its “center” with booths, circus tents, and rides on the then still open and green acres of the old University campus on Denny’s Knoll.  From the northern border of the old campus the closed carnival grounds extended west on Union Street from Fifth Avenue to a grand entrance arch that spanned Union half way between Second and Third Avenue.  A shorter arm of this enclosure also ran one block south on Third Avenue to University Street.  This section was lined with booths offering, the Seattle Times reported, “the best products of the best city on earth.”

In this scene with his back to Third Avenue the photographer looks east on Union Street to the old Armory, which has been freshly painted “royal purple and purity white” for the carnival.  The camera has also captured the rump of “Regina.”  The carnival’s “Queen Elephant” is heading in the direction of what a Times reporter described as her own “corner of the campus [where] standing alone in her magnificence” she attracted “an ever increasing crowd of men and boys content . . . to worship humbly at the shrine of one of Africa’s greatest children.”

Meanwhile Seattle’s greatest babies were being judged in a “pretty booth” in the Armory.   There were, of course, prizes for the “prettiest girl” and the “handsomest” boy, but there was also an award for the “largest and fattest baby sixteen months old.”   A week “over or under sixteen months” was considered “no bar to entry.”  After making the awards, the judge, a Dr. Newlands, confided to a reporter, “I have about concluded that it will be wise for me to disappear for a while.”

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ELEPHANT STORE

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec.30, 1984)

Seattle folks shopping for bargains in 1878 headed down Front Street and into the Elephant Store. There, in what was called a general store, they found bargains and a BIG selection. The store itself was a standout, a retail house among other buildings that looked like homes. Not true.

Most of the clapboards along Front Street (now First Avenue) also had profit as a purpose. One was a foundry, another a cigar store, another a drugstore, and down the block was a brewery.

The Elephant Store was raised at the southeast corner of Front Street and Columbia.   Moses Maddock’s drugstore is the dominant white structure two blocks north at Madison Street, just left of the photo’s center. Beyond that is where the more clearly residential part of Front Street began.

Also seen in the photo are Seattle’s first grand homes. The many-gabled home of Amos Brown at Spring Street is just above the drugstore and to right of the tall fir. Just to the left of the fir is the home of Arthur and Mary Denny, two of the city’s founders. When the Dennys moved into their fancy Victorian mansion in 1865, it was their third residence. Arthur lived there until his death in 1899. By then, the house was surrounded by multistory hotels and department stores.

In the photo, beyond the Denny home, Front Street jogs a little to the right and east at Pike Street, which was the northern end of Front Street’s 1876 improvement, by then the town’s greatest public work.  Before that regrading, there was a hump at Cherry Street (the site of the photographer Peterson’s perch), another rise at Marion and a ravine at Seneca deep enough to require a bridge.

This week’s scene depicts yet another topic of historical Seattle, bigger than either a street or an elephant. It is the hill on the horizon: Denny Hill. Here, the top of it reaches about 100 feet above the present elevation of Third Avenue, between Stewart and Virginia streets. This is the best surviving early record of Denny Hill.  (Or was when I first wrote this in 1984.  Since then Robinson’s 1869 panorama of Seattle taken from the second floor of the Snoqualmie Hall then at the southwest corner of Commercial St. aka First Ave. S., and Main Street showed in great detail the entire southern exposure of Denny Hill still with most of it’s virgin forest.

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MORE ELEPHANTS on PARADE

THE ELEPHANTS IN SASKATOON

 

For seeing the elephants in Saskatoon he took a room in the Windsor Hotel and was up well before noon awakened by the steam calliope hissing music that at night would have skeletons dancing behind the shaded windows above Main Street.  On circus day afternoon they kept on dancing but were not seen – hidden in the sunlight and forgotten for the elephant parade.  He heard one dancing in the room next to  his.  It was distracting.

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We shall return tomorrow with a few more Elephants or Pachyderms, including a searching consideration of our common enough practice of comparing others – and ourselves too – to animals with special consideration here to one of the species which likes showers – sometimes of water and others of dirt – but also has that endearing appendage to deliver them.

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(dateline: Sunday Morning, Jan 27, 2013 – Lesser Seattle)

Besides the street trees and the historic three-ball light standard on the right the obvious difference in the “now” is the parking lot that in 1969 replaced the storefronts that held the northeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Washington Street when, toting his camera, Werner Langenhager visited the block fifty years ago. (Historical photo courtesy of Seattle Public Library.)

SKID ROAD – 1956

(First appeared in Pacific, summer of 2006)

We may celebrate the photographer Werner Langenhager’s sizeable and sensitive record of Seattle with this “golden anniversary” (2006) example of his work.  With his back to Second Avenue Langenhager looks west on Washington Street to its intersection with Occidental Avenue where, most obviously, the big block letters for Ivar’s fish bar hold the northwest corner.

Ivar was sentimental about these pioneer haunts.  During his college years in the 1920s he wrote a paper on the Skid Road for his class in sociology.  To get it right Ivar spent a week living in a neighborhood hotel, visiting the missions, and betting in the Chinese lotteries.

For his first try at returning to the neighborhood as a restaurateur Ivar bought the old popcorn wagon in Pioneer Place (then the more popular name than Pioneer Square) in the early 1950s.  He planned to convert it into a chowder dispensary.  And he proposed building a replica of Seattle’s original log cabin also, of course, for selling chowder.  For different reasons both plots plopped and instead in 1954 he opened this corner fish house.  He called it his “chowder corner.”

Consulting the Polk City Directory for 1956 we can easily build a statistical profile for Ivar’s neighbors through the four “running blocks” of Occidental between Yesler Way and Main and Washington between First and Second.  Fifteen taverns are listed including the Lucky, the Loggers, the Oasis and the Silver Star.  But there were also ten cafes (including Ivar’s), six hotels, four each of barbers and cobblers, three second-hand shops, two drug stores, one loan shop, one “Loggers Labor Agency” and five charities, including the Light House.

The 1956 statistic for these four blocks that best hints at how this historic neighborhood was then in peril of being razed for parking is the vacancies.  There were twelve of them.

BOYD AND BRAAS – A LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

(First appeared in Pacific, March 14, 1993)

Some of the best and rarest views of Seattle’s reconstruction after the “Great Fire” of 1889 destroyed most of the city’s business district were photographed by William Boyd and/or Gene Braas.  Boyd and Braas were partners for two years, 1891-1892.  Their bug is printed here, lower right corner.

This view looks west on Washington Street, with the photographer’s back to Second Avenue.  It may be the single look up Washington Street that survives form the early 1890s; it’s the only one I’ve uncovered – or been shown, in this case by Rod Slemmons –  in 19 years of looking.

For topographic reasons there are, generally, many more historic photographs of downtown Seattle’s avenues than of its streets.  (The obvious exceptions are Yesler Way, Madison Street and Pike Street.)  Running north and south, it is the aveunes that are regularly appointed with landmarks and expensive commercial facades.

While not so architecturally distinguished, this lineup on Washington Street is culturally so, with loan offices, bars and bawdy stages.  The Standard at the southeast corner of Washington and Occidental – left of center and above the more distant of the scene’s two wagons – was notorious for the peddling of flesh and booze to the accompaniment of profane ballads.  In this neighborhood the rooms were cheap and lunches often free, but they were subsidized by liquor, gambling and expensive thrills.

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ELEPHANTS on PHINNEY RIDGE

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PACHYDERMS on the HORIZON

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PACHYDERMSIAN PEOPLE

Some in the exotic tableau above may be playing the role of a Pachyderm.  For now that is as far as my thoughts about our common enough practice of finding similarities between human animals and the other animals has come.  I’ll return to it later with an addendum.  But as a guiding warning for the platonic dreamers among us we are hardly at the top in every quality.  Even the best swimmers among us are pathetic when compared to the lesser swimmers in the Amazon.  And who can have a nose that dances like an elephant’s nose and picks up things and sounds like a French Horn?    If you want to help than find us some pictures of people that look like elephants.   Any part or practice of them.  Try this please.  If you squint your eyes while looking a Loudon’s above group shot, do they as a whole they may resemble an elephant in profile?

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

We can tell from the printing on their helmets that these are the volunteers of the Georgetown fire department.  And we can easily discover that all are posing at the southwest corner of Pike Street and 7th Avenue – the street names are signed on the power pole left-of-center.  Pike, with its trolley tracks and still fresh bricks, is in the foreground while 7th is mostly hidden behind the force.

Very likely most of these men were also employee’s of Georgetown’s Rainier Brewery.  Their leader is posing with two children at the corner.  He is also distinguished by his white helmet on which is printed “captain.” Appearing again but alone, the captain was snapped a half block west on Pike Street posing in front of a sidewalk billboard promoting the two-day – Wednesday and Thursday – visit of the Ringling Brothers circus to Seattle on August 19 and 20.

With help from Ron Edge and Margaret Fickeisen – checking calendars, directories and maps and such  – we think we know the “when” for this well-wrought scene.  It is 1903.  By then Pike Street was already the north end’s “Main Street.”  The “why” for this pause-to-pose is most likely a parade.  Notice, far right, the bunting on the hose wagon’s big wheel.

 

 

Both subjects – the one shown and the other described – were copied from Henry J. Fickheisen’s revealing photo album, which was shared with us by his son Frank, whose grandfather, Carl W. Fickheisen opened a bakery in Georgetown in the 1890s.  Both the baker and his son were members of the brewery town’s volunteer fire brigade, and at least young Henry has been identified posing here on Pike in 1903.  The teenager is the second uniformed figure from the right.  Both the trumpet* (a bugle actually) he holds in his right hand and his clean face distinguish him.

* Thanks to John Dunne we have changed “trumpet,” our first choice for the instrument in “young Henry’s” hand – the one printed on pulp with The Times Sunday edition – to “bugle.’  Here’s the whole of John’s kind correction.  “Paul,  I always enjoy reading your column, often the most interesting part of the Sunday supplement.  I have a slight correction for your photo today.  You identified the instrument carried by young Henry as a trumpet.  What he is actually carrying is a bugle, used to alert the volunteers and residents to a fire.  The bugle call is prosaically named “Fire Call”, which I recall playing during my time as a Boy Scout camp bugler and still fondly remember.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?    Jean, I am now searching for the parts to a feature I wrote on this block – Pike between 7th and 8th – a few years back.   If found it will be part of a short list of items that, again, relate to this neighborhood.  If I do not find it, I may still scan the clipping from the Times – when I find it.   Beyond that we will include a few other photos from the Fickeisen photo album from which we copied this feature.   (Thanks again to Ron Edge for scanning the entire album and to Ron’s standards, which are very steady and pixel-rich.) I’ll have it up before I climb the steps to nightybears (aka Nighty Bears) around 2:30 am.   [Actually is now 3:00 am.  We will return later this morning to do the proofing.]

Above:  A circa 1923 look south on 8th Avenue over Pike Street, bottom-left. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)   Below: Jean’s repeat took him high above the historical photographers prospect to the roof of Grand Hyatt Hotel’s parking garage stacked for about ten stories atop Ruth’s Chris Steak House at 8th and Pine.  From that height the considerable bulk of the Convention Center screens most of the First Hill horizon.   Jean thanks Darcy, Michelle, Steve and Lam, the helpful string of contacts, which guided him to the roof.

FIRST HILL HORIZON Ca. 1923

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 2008))

Throwing long shadows across 8th Avenue, a late winter sunset lights up a trolley heading south from Pike Street (bottom-left) to Union where it will turn right for its last leg into the business district.

The unnamed photographer stands on the roof, probably, of the Jackson Apartments at 1521 8th and records a neighborhood of hotels, apartments and furniture stores in the middle ground, below a First Hill horizon.  We’ll name, left to right, the line-up of landmarks there.

Upper-left, the still plush Sorrento Hotel. Below it the dark brick mass of the since passed Normandie Apts. at 9th and University.  Next are the twin towers of St. James Cathedral and to its right the Van Siclen Apartments which face 8th a half-block west of Seneca.  Follows the nearly new Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist with its gleaming cream tiles and centered dome, since 1998 home of one of Seattle’s greatest cultural assets, Town Hall.  To the right are the twin domes of the exciter-preacher Mark Matthew’s First Presbyterian Church – one dome for his office and the other for the radio station of what became, the congregation claims, “the largest Presbyterian church in the world.”   Far right, the brick tower of Central School at 6th and Madison completes the horizon-line tour.

The likely date for this scene is 1922-23.  The same photographer on the same visit to the roof turned around and recorded the Cascade Neighborhood to the north.  We will study that next week.

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Above: Looking north through a skyline of steeples towards the Cascade neighborhood and Lake Union, ca. 1923.  Courtesy, Lawton Gowey.  Below: Like last week’s repeat, this “now” took Jean much higher than the unknown historical photographer to the top of a windowless garage.  Here, on the far right, the landmark Camlin Hotel (1926), for decades home of the distinguished Cloud Room, is now dwarfed by new neighbors.

The CASCADE SKYLINE

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 2008)

If we recall last week’s selection, which looked south on 8th Avenue over Pike Street in the early 1920s, then we may here pivot with the unnamed photographer and look north on the same afternoon.  Here on the distant horizon are parts of Queen Anne and Capitol Hills, left and right respectively, and between them Phinney Ridge and Wallingford beyond the hazy north shore of Lake Union.

Like last week’s subject this one also has landmarks on its horizon, although unlike those none of these are brick.  Most are wooden churches serving the Cascade Neighborhood, which quickly filled with homes for working families, many of them Scandinavians, during the city’s booming years between 1890 and 1910.  There are five steeples here.  Farthest to the left is Gethsemane Lutheran church, which was dedicated in 1901.  The congregation with Swedish roots still holds that southeast corner of 9th Avenue and Steward Street.   Directly behind it facing Terry Avenue are the German Lutherans and their Zion parish, which dates from 1896.  In 1951 the congregation moved to Wallingford.

Three more steeples, left to right, belong to the Norwegian-Danish Methodists at Stewart and Boren, next more Norwegians at Immanuel Lutheran (1912), kitty-corner to Cascade School (1894) at Thomas and Pontius, and last at Terry and Olive, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, with a tower that here crowds the smoke stack on the far right.   Also on the horizon, and nearly at the scene’s center is the smaller stepped tower of Fire Station No 15 at Minor and Virginia.

The resident rooms in the Astoria Hotel, left foreground, at 8th and Pine, were brightened by bay windows that were then typical of hotels and apartments built beyond the central business district.  Across 8th Avenue from the Astoria, Bernard Brin kept his Brin School for Popular Music for a few years.  His rooftop sign reads, “Learn To Play in Ten to Twenty Lessons.”  No instrument is named.

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PIKE STREET FRESHET, May 3, 1911

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 29, 1995)

This flash food along Pike Street came not from above, but below. On the morning of May 3, 1911, a contractor’s steam shovel cutting a grade for Fifth Avenue through the old University of Washington campus sunk its steel teeth into a sizable city water main. In moments the pressure within tore the pipe like a cooked noodle, releasing a geyser at Fifth Avenue’s intersection with University Street. There the flood divided, one channel moving west along University toward First Avenue and the other north on Fifth Avenue, where it split twice more, first at Union and then Pike streets.  This is the last of those three floods.

This view – complete with wading dog – looks east on Pike toward its intersection with Fifth Avenue. “For half an hour the district between Pike and Madison streets from Third to First avenue was flooded,” said the next morning’s Post -Intelligencer; “Improvised bridges of planks served to carry pedestrians across the rivers, horses floundered along hock-deep in the yellow waters, street cars left a swell like motor boats and the appearance of things was generally demoralized.”

Damage from this man-made freshet was minimal – a few basements were puddled. The water rarely leaped the curbs, although this sidewalk along Pike seems an exception. At the alley behind the former Seattle Times plant on Union Street, a dike was quickly constructed from bundles of newspapers, preventing the tide from spilling onto the presses. The reporter for The Times was amused by the many “funny situations” created, including the scene “where a hurrying couple avoided delay and kept the feet of a least one dry by the man picking up his companion and carrying her across the small river.”

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A SMALL DISASTER at SIXTH & PIKE, March 3, 1920

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 19, 1997)

The occasion for this small disaster on Sixth Avenue has eluded me. Neither the records of the city’s engineering department (the photo is theirs), nor those of the fire or water departments (a hydrant has been broken), nor a search of the daily papers for March 3, 1920 (the date captioned on the negative), has offered the slightest hint. Still, the event was significant enough to call out the city’s photographer to record it.

One flood at Sixth and Pike, however, gives me an excuse to refer to another.

In her delightful book “Pig-tail Days in Old Seattle” – a treasure of local pioneer reminiscences – Sophie Frye Bass, who grew up beside this intersection when Pike was still an ungraded wagon road, recalls how after a rain the streams that once ran across Pike “became torrents.” One stormy Christmas, Sophie took a “pretty mug” she had found in her stocking outside “to play in the water when the swift current caught it out of my hand and carried it away. Evidently it was not meant for me, for it said on it, in nice gold letters, ‘For a good girl.’ ”

Also in her book, Bass, granddaughter of Mary and Arthur Denny, recalls how on a Saturday morning in the late summer of 1890 the peace of this place was suddenly interrupted when a cougar raided a chicken coop and bounded through the intersection, scattering pedestrians along Pike. The puma’s Pike was already a mix of residences and storefronts, and Sophie Fry Bass’ streams had been diverted.

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BRIDAL ROW – 6^TH & PIKE

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 20, 1983)

In 1888 young Dr. Frantz Coe came west from Michigan looking for a practice and found one in Seattle when ex-mayor Gideon Weed, then one of the oldest, best respected and established physicians in town, invited Coe to share his offices.

So the 32-year-old doctor sent for his wife, Carrie, and soon they were nestled into 606 Pike St., one of the six newly built and joined abodes that together were called “Bridal Row.”

The Coes, however, were not on a honeymoon, for they had three children, Frantzel, Harry and Herbert. Within a year, the city’s Great Fire of 1889 would destroy the Weed and Coe medical offices but not the domestic peace along Bridal Row, which was described by Sophie Frye Bass in her book, “Pigtail Days In Old Seattle,” as “an attractive place with flowers in the garden and birds singing in the windows.”

Sophie also lived on Pike Street with her pioneer parents, George and Louisa Frye, just across Sixth Avenue from the Coes. The Fryes had moved there many years before when Pike was a path and their back door opened to the forest.

Although no longer at the end of town, the corner of Sixth and Pike was still largely residential in 1890. While the central city was loud with the noises escaping from its booming efforts to rebuild itself after the Great Fire, the residents along Pike were still listening to birds Sing and sniffing flowers. Some of them, like the Frye family, continued rural routines of milking cows and gathering eggs.

Around 9:30 on the Saturday morning of Sept. 20 this settled peace was interrupted by what the next day’s Intelligencer called the “Panic on Pike Street.” Both Sophie Frye and young Herbert Coe witnessed a wild event.

Sophie Frye Bass recalled how “I heard the chickens cackle loudly . . .  and I shuddered when I saw a cougar cross Sixth Avenue; I could hardly believe my eyes.”

The cat had killed a chicken in the Kentucky Stables a short distance from the Frye home. There it also was shot in its behind and, quoting the newspaper’s account: “Enraged and uttering a terrific yell bounded the sidewalk and rushed down Sixth Avenue.”  The cat turned up Pike Street and, as “the panic spread to the thronged thoroughfare and all pedestrians made a rush for safety, with two great bounds the cougar landed in the yard of Dr. F.H. Coe’s residence.”

Nine-year-old Herbert, who was playing on the porch, heard the warning shouts and fled inside behind the front-room window. The big cat went to the window and looked at him, with his claws on the pane. For one long transfixed moment, they stared at one another until a man with a 44-caliber revolver emptied it into the cougar. Eight feet and 160 pounds the wild cat stumbled, bloodied the flowers along Bridal Row, and then lay still.

In our view of the Row, Herbert sits atop a fence post. Behind him is the window that kept him from the cat. In front of him is the then conventional wooden planking for the sidewalk, and here for the street as well.  With trolley service, Pike was the “main street” of the north end.

By 1895, with the encouragement of a very good practice and the steady conversion of Pike Street into a commercial thoroughfare, Frantz Coe and his wife, Carrie, would leave Bridal Row and take their children up to a “better neighborhood” on First Hill.  In 1902 they moved again, this time to Washington Park and into a new home with a view out over the lake. In 1903, Pike Street was regraded to Broadway Avenue and Bridal Row put on stilts with a new first floor of storefronts moved in beneath it.

Dr. -Frantz Coe died suddenly in 1904, two years before his son, Herbert, would graduate from his father’s alma mater, the University of Michigan Medical School.  On July 15, 1962, The Seattle Times published a feature titled “Seattle’s Four Grand Old Men.” One of these was the “beloved” Dr. Herbert Coe who by then had for 54 years been an essential part of the Children’s Orthopedic’ Hospital, including 30 years as its chief of surgical services and ten years as chief of staff.

Herbert Coe died in 1968 at 87.  He was survived by his two sons and widow, Lucy Campbell Coe, daughter of a pioneer hardwareman, James Campbell. Mrs. Coe recalled for us the details of young Herbert’s confrontation with the cougar and supplied the photograph of Bridal Row. This year (1983) Mrs. Coe will celebrate her 96th birthday.

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(click to enlarge photos)

From the roof, but more often from his second-floor window of Wedgewood Court, a comely lower Queen Anne apartment house, Frank Owen Shaw watched Seattle’s Century 21 take shape, especially the largest part of it: the Washington State Coliseum.  It was directly kitty-corner from his flat.

In 1957 the life-long bachelor moved into one of what the Wedgwood Court appropriately advertised then as its “nicely furnished bachelor apartments.”   From his privileged prospect, the Boeing quality control inspector, could also watch the Space Needle rise like a barometer of the fair’s heated construction, and he kept photographing this great pubic work both on site and from his window above the northwest corner of First Ave. N. and Republican Street.

Before Shaw moved out one month before the fair opened on April 21, 1962, he carefully framed his last 2×2” color slide from his second floor flat with his curtained window, and meticulously captioned it “Last shot from former Apt., March 20, 1962, 5:30 p.m.”   It showed the shining Coliseum topped by what I remember a friend’s daughter – a 6-year-old promoter-poet – describing for me then as “our splendid Space Needle.”

On the evidence of his carefully ordered negatives, one of Frank Shaw’s last photographs is of Bob Geigle posing at the top of the Needle in April, 1985.  For Geigle, a young employee then also at Boeing, Frank O. Shaw was “Frankoshaw” with the accent on the first syllable.  Bob remembers Frank’s dry wit as “sort of English old school.  And he was quite prim and proper too.  He loved to travel and climb mountains.  He took lots of pictures while climbing and some were published.  As he explained it, when he got too old to climb he started walking the city with his camera taking picture of what he called ‘what is.’”  Leaving lots of exquisitely real pictures, Frank died on Nov. 1, 1985, age 76.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Jean, we will begin with a short stack of other 2×2 colored reversals that Frank Shaw took from his apartment at the northwest corner of First N. and Republican Street of work-in-progress on the Coliseum.  If there is time left we’ll pull a past feature or two from the neighborhood, as well – if time allows – some other fair photography by Shaw.

Leaving the ambiguity of the above slide’s caption, ordinarily Frank Shaw kept his slides and negatives in good order and well marked with captions that included place names and dates and sometimes even the hour of the day.   These tidy habits are also evident in the two recordings that follow of the living room in his new apartment after nearly 15 years of use.  They were photographed on June 10, 1977

DECATUR TERRACE:  On May 31, 1961 Frank Shaw – still from his apartment window above Republican Street – turned his camera to the west and recorded the old David and Louisa Denny home, known as Decatur Terrace in its grander days, holding to its second footprint, the one at the southeast corner of Queen Anne Ave. and Republican.  It was originally built on a terrace that was near the center of the Shaw’s block – the block between First Ave. N. and Queen Anne Ave., Mercer Street and Republican.

The view directly below was photographed in the late 1890s by Anders Wilse from a prospect near the corner of Mercer and Queen Anne, or Temperance Ave. as it was then still called.  (There were no spirits even sipped in this home.)

 

 

Follows now a two-column copy of the text for this Pacific feature as it was printed in the second of the three “Seattle Now and Then” books.  (All three can be called forth and read in Ron Edge’s scan of their every page.  You will find them under the “history books” button on the front page of this blog.

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WARREN AVENUE SCHOOL

In the mid-1880s, the patriarchs of North Seattle – David Denny and George Kinnear included – urged settlers aboard a horse-drawn railway to their relatively inexpensive lots north of Denny Way.  Their efforts were rewarded as the flood of immigration, which increased steadily after the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883, pushed settlement into the land between Denny and Queen Anne hills.

By the turn of the century, this crowd of newcomers had established a neighborhood full of large families.  And beginning in 1902 more than 400 of the neighborhood children attended primary school on Block 35 of David and Louisa Denny’s Home Addition.

Warren Avenue School (on Warren Ave.) was built in 1902 and abandoned in 1959.  This view of the school is an early one.  The school’s demise came when the site was chosen first for an expanded civic center and soon after for a world’s fair: Century 21.  By closing time, the neighborhood around the school had long since stopped swelling with families.

The siting of the contemporary photograph was adjusted to make a comparison of the Key Arena’s and the school’s west walls.  The school’s fine-tuned position would put the children posing near its front door on the Key Arena’s floor beneath the rim of its north end backboard (if there is still a backboard around since the flight of the Sonics.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Early this autumn Jean Sherrard and I stood on the roof – as it were – of the home standing here at the northeast corner of 4th Avenue and Columbia Street.

We were presenting one of our “repeat photography” programs to the Seattle Surgical Society for its September meeting and banquet in the Rainier Club.  Timing our show with the desert, we included this apt subject, which includes part of the clubhouse, as a sweet surprise. We were fortunate that the banquet’s location – the large dining hall at the south end of the club’s second floor – hit the spot. While projecting this subject on the screen, we explained, “Here we stand above – or very near – this pioneer home site, which later the Rainier Club first razed and then built upon with its 1929 enlargement.

During our time with the surgeons we could not reveal the history of this modest home. We didn’t know.  But now with the help of our frequent contributor Ron Edge we discover that three generations of Burnetts lived there.  The subject appeared in the Seattle Times for June 2, 1918 and was headlined “It’s Seattle’s Oldest Home Built 53 years ago.”

[Best to click the below TWICE!  At least that makes a difference on this MAC.]

After Port Ludlow mill man Hiram Burnett built this six-room home during the winter of 1865, he and his wife Elizabeth moved to Seattle that spring so that their two children would be near the University.  When their son Charles graduated from the University and married, “he took his bride to live in the little house.”  The couple’s own son, Charles Jr. served a term on the Seattle City Council, and recalled his grandfather Hiram explaining that all the wood for the Seattle home – including the spruce siding – was first cut at his Port Ludlow mill and that he then “sent the pieces up here and merely put them together.”

[BEST TO CLICK twice.]

During his visit to the “oldest home” in 1918, the unnamed Times reporter was pleased to note that for a rental of $12.50 a month it “houses a force of industrious Italians who turn out plaster of paris reproductions of the famous art works of their native land.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Surely Jean.  First congratulations to MOHAI with the opening of its newly fitted home in the old Naval Armory at the south end of Lake Union.  As you know while we attended the new MOHAI for the opening arranged for members, a winter sunset broke through the clouds in the west and bathed the south Lake Union campus in a most auspicious golden light.   Here’s a merge of six snaps, and thanks to Ron Edge for fitting the pieces together.  [Click it TWICE to enlarge]

And praise be to thee Jean and  your part in the array of new exhibits.  Here’s a snap of you in front of the montage of “repeats” you did covering the curators chosen collection of historic – what else? – Seattle Theatres.  Visitors will find it and film clips galore on the first mezzanine.

As is our practice by now, we will add a few more features from the neighborhood, but first introduce them with a few aerials of the neighborhood.  Most – maybe all – come courtesy of Ron Edge.

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COLUMBIA STREET West from Second Avenue

(First appeared in Pacific, May 15, 1983)

The Great Fire of 1889 encouraged the city to rebuild bigger and in brick. But its first response was a huge hotel which was constructed quick and cheap, and entirely of wood. The Rainier was ready for occupancy only 80 days after the first lumber was unloaded at the building site. This effort was the kind of manic community labor we associate with instant barn raisings. The result was the somewhat barn-like fortress we see filling the center horizon of our historical scene and the entire block between Columbia and Marion Streets, and Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

While flattening the city’s business district, the June 6 fire also consumed most of its halls and hotels. The thousands of “floating strangers” who began flooding these “ashes of opportunity” to help rebuild the city and themselves often had to sleep in tents or under trees. Since the grand brick hotels of the 1890s, including the Denny, Seattle, and Butler, took time to build, the Rainier was put up in a flash by a collection of the “moneymen of Seattle” led by Judge “He Built Seattle” Thomas Burke.  The Seattle Press-Times reported that “its construction was made possible by public spirited capitalists stepping forward regardless of whether it would be a paying institution or not.” It wasn’t.

In its five years as a showy hotel with a breezy view of the bay from a wrap-around veranda, the Rainier lost $100,000. The Great Crash of 1893 had its sad effect. On August 16, 1894 the Press-Times reported “In all probability the handsome Rainier Hotel will be closed in the near future . . . What will be done with the Rainier Building is not known.” The gold rush of 1897 came too late to save the Rainier. Then the miners, coming and going, dropped their tired bodies into the beds of hotels down by the waterfront. These included the Rainier Grand Hotel at First and Madison, whose furnishings – included – were moved in from the abandoned and bankrupt Rainier up on the hill.

The scene (on top) was photographed not in the hard times of 1893-94 but in 1891-92: good times still for both the Rainier and the Seattle-Press Times. The newspaper was published in its offices at 214 Columbia Street, mid-block between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenues. (The top of the newspaper’s sign can be seen at the lower left-hand corner of the photograph.)

Arthur Churchill Warner took this photograph, which includes other landmarks as well. The James Colman mansion survived at the southeast corner of Fourth and Columbia for the 55 years between 1883 and 1939. Its boxish cupola just barely breaks the horizon line on the far right.  (There’s more on the Colman home below.)

Another tower is seen just above and to the left of the Colmans. Standing six stories at the corner of Ninth and Columbia, Coppin’s Water Works supported a holding tank for water drawn by an adjoining windmill from springs beneath Charles Coppin’s combined home and business. Throughout the 1880s his water works supplied users down the hill, the Colman’s included. The water was delivered through bored logs, some of which were uncovered during the early 1960s excavation of Interstate-5.

Eisenhower’s Seattle Freeway also cut through the site which for 59 years supported the brick towers of Central School. Kitty-corner across Sixth and Marion from the Rainier, the school was also completed in 1889. However, it was made of brick, more than two million of them. Central School was Seattle’s only high school until 1902 when Broadway High was built “way out on Capitol Hill.” The Central’s weakened towers were prudently razed after the 1949 earthquake. The rest of the main building was leveled in 1953. Alumni – or by now their children – still display their souvenir bricks atop fireplace mantels.

The Warner photograph is dappled with many other lesser landmarks. The Eureka Bakery, just left of center, was for years run by the pioneer Meydenbauer family. They are remembered by their namesake bay on Lake Washington and their creek which runs under Bellevue. Today, the Meydenbauer property on Columbia Street is filled by the old Central Building. Kitty-corner across Third Avenue, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce occupies the spot that in 1892 housed Bonney and Watson, the city’s oldest mortuary.

The Rainier Hotel was converted into apartments and survived until 1910. In 1896 the Seattle Press-Times became the Seattle Times and has – still as of this re-writing – survived.

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The RAINIER CLUB

(First appeared in Pacific, April 17, 1988)

In 1988 the Rainier Club celebrated its own centennial, one year before the state’s. Appropriately, it memorialized its century with a book history of the club. The author, Walter Crowley, concludes ” … as the wheel turns and future generations regard this curious mansion nestled at the feet of skyscrapers, the Rainier Club will still serve as a reminder of the remarkable individuals who shaped Seattle out of forests and mudflats . . .”It was only in 1986 that this “curious mansion” was officially recognized for what it has been since it was first constructed in 1904: a historical landmark. Wishing to keep its options, the club itself resisted the description for a time because the landmark designation restricts a structure’s future to those that preserve its historical integrity.

However, Seattle’s central business district would surely be more severe than it already is, were it not for the gracious relief of this well-wrought clubhouse. Modeled after the English example, this men’s club held its first meeting on Feb.23, 1888. The next day’s Seattle Daily Press reported that “the object of the club is like that of a hundred other kindred bands scattered over the face of the civilized world, the pursuit of pleasure among congenial conductors.” These convivial male circuits were lubricated by coffee, “freshened” with tobacco, and, no doubt, loosened some by spirits – very good spirits.

Of course, the Rainier is no longer a men ‘ s club. In 1977 the club’s bylaws were amended to admit women, and by 1988, as Crowley’s history records, over 40 of the 1200 resident members were women. The former entrance for women “guests” shows on the left of the historical photograph at the rear of the Marion Street side of the club.

This top view of the club (their third home) looks across Fourth Avenue and dates from about 1909 or soon after the 1908 regrading of Fourth Avenue. Of the Rainier Club’s Jacobean style, the work of Spokane-based architect Kirtland K. Cutter, Crowley notes, “However antiquated the Club was designed to appear on the outside, the trustees spared no expense for modem luxuries on the inside, including telephones in every room.” The club’s style was preserved when its size was nearly doubled in 1929 with the south extension, the work of Seattle architects Charles Bebb and Carl Gould.

Within these landmark walls many a landmark project has been planned, including Metro, Forward Thrust and both of Seattle’s world’s fairs – the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition and the 1962 Century 2l. This meritocracy of, in the beginning, men included familiar names like Thomas Burke, Horace McCurdy, William Allen, Clarence Blethen, Emil Sick and Ed Carlson.

Crowley quotes Carlson, “It used to be that if you had an important civic or political issue, you could get 25 or so people in a room at the Rainier Club and get a go or no-go decision.” Walter Crowley adds, “Those days are gone, for the leadership of Seattle has not merely shifted, it has fragmented, and with it the consensus from which the community’s establishment drew its tacit authority.”

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The MEYDENBAUER HOME – 3^rd & Columbia

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 1, 1987)

Before the rapid redevelopment of Third Avenue following its regrade of 1906-7, its sides were graced with old homes and churches. One home – the one shown here – belonged to William Meydenbauer, the town confectioner.

Meydenbauer was 18 when he headed for the United States in 1850 after an apprenticeship with a candy maker in Prussia. He made his way to San Francisco bu 1854, where after a nearly ruinous try at gold mining, and a short experiment with teamstering, he returned to the small but sweet rewards of confections.

The Meydenbauers, William and Thelka, moved to the Northwest in 1868 when Seattle had less than 1,000 cash-poor residents expecting growth for their 16-year-old village, but mostly waiting for it. Those post-civil-war years were sour, so the confectioner was welcome. The candy man built a home on Third Avenue at Columbia Street around 1880. Before that there may have been a crude shack on the property but little else. At the time, Seattle’s idea of refreshments for fancy public receptions was sliced apples and gingerbread.

The Meydenbauers bought the Eureka Bakery on Commercial Street (now

First Avenue South) and soon added to the town’s sweet offerings with a selection of well-dressed candies and sweets, including celebrated Yule cakes. Soon enough they and the town prospered and in the mid-188Os, the couple moved their business into a bigger bakery they had built behind the family home. The rear of that plant is pictured behind the tree and to the left of their home in this week’s “Then” photo.

By employing several helping hands and running two delivery wagons, Meydenbauer was efficient enough to sell wholesale. No doubt it helped that they raised eight children.  A son, Albert, continued in his father’s profession after the latter’s death in 19O6. After the 1007 regrading of Third Avenue, the Meydenbauer home, and much else on the block, was replaced by the Central Building, which is still , standing.

Long since this family is not remembered for its sweets but rather its waterway. In 1868 Meydenbauer rowed across Lake Washington and set a claim beside the Bellevue bay which still bears the family name.

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The FOUR FORMS of FOURTH

(First appeared in Pacific, May 8, 1983)

Every few decades with the help of earthquakes, fires, nervous engineers, and metropolitan dreamers, west coast cities like San Francisco, Vancouver, and Seattle are “made over.”  Seattle’s Fourth Avenue – the one in its Central Business District – has had four transformations.

Our historical photograph shows it passing into its third form, as Fourth Avenue is losing its residential emphasis. The sides of the street are being furnished with institutions, like the Carnegie Library and Rainier Club in the scene’s center, and hotels, like the Stander and Lincoln on the left.  This avenue have become Seattle’s deepest urban canyon with its sides of glass and polished metal.

The historical photograph was taken about 1905 by Arthur Warner a short time after the library, club, and hotels were built. By then the street had already lived through its first two forms. In the early 1860s Fourth Avenue was cut out of the virgin forest, some of which returned from Yes1er’s mill as planks for building the few modest homes that soon irregularly lined the sides of this stump-strewn path. Fourth ran from the tideflats on the south to as far north as Denny’s Knoll (not Hill) as Seneca Street. There it stopped at a white picket fence – a small swinging gate counterbalanced by horseshoes opened to the grounds of Washington Territory’s university, for years the city’s and Fourth Avenue’s most distinguished landmark.

Fourth Avenue’s second form was also residential, but with more lavish homes that faced a street which although unpaved was given a regular width, curbed against sidewalks, lined with utility poles, and lit at the intersections. The duplex on the right of the view above counts as one of these classier second-stage residences. The tower behind it is attached to one of this street’s distinguished mansions, the home of pioneers Agnes and James Colman. Like the McNaught mansion, whose tower is seen in the distance beyond the library, the Colmans’ spacious Latinate-Victorian showpiece was built in 1883 and remained through the turn of the century, a symbol of Fourth Avenue’s domestic elegance.

Already on entering their third decade these grand homes became vestiges of an earlier urbanity. In 1903 the imposing McNaught mansion was moved across Spring Street to make room for the Carnegie Library.   And in 1907-08 a metamorphosis occurred to the street itself which dramatically fashioned it into its third form. The Fourth Avenue regrade resulted in some casualties and many alterations. Denny’s Knoll was cut through and the old landmark university first moved and then leveled. Practically every structure along the new grade required either new steps to the old front doors, as with the library, or new front doors into their old basements, as with the hotels.

The city engineer’s longing to make “the crooked straight and the rough places plane” resulted in some very deep cuts. For instance, a contemporary photograph at Cherry Street (We truly have more than one but cannot at this alarming moment find them.) would be taken some two stories below Arthur Warner’s location in the historical view. The 4^th Ave. cut at this intersection was 24 feet. By 1911 a bricked-over avenue showed the same unruffled grade that made it the preferred course for the bed races of the 1970s.

Agnes Colman continued to live in her towering home until her death in 1934. By then her mansion, the last sign of the elegant eighties and alternately depressed and roaring nineties, was thoroughly surrounded by retailers and restaurants. Today that era of conservative cosmopolitan taste is recalled only by the Rainier Club, the single structure which survives from the “then.”  The five-story Rainier Club houses 57,000 square feet of plush sitting rooms, coat-and-tie dining rooms, and other elite areas only its restricted membership – and their guests –  know.

When the Columbia Center was completed as the crowning touch to Fourth Avenue’s fourth form, it filled the old Colman mansion site with more than a million and and a half square feet of office space stacked 76 stories high. In some future decade or century when the Columbia Center’s 954 feet are dismantled – or imploded – by God, man, or nature, Fourth Avenue Will be passing into its fifth form.

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THE HOTEL STANDER

(First appeared in Pacific, May 29, 2001)

[BEST to click the below TWICE]

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Photographed when the building was new, the Hotel Pennington Apartments facing Marion Street west of 4th Avenue promoted itself as “a home away from home. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)  Little – if anything? –  has changed on the south side of Marion Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in the about 80 years between this “now and then.” [I have a feeling that we included this feature with an earlier assembly of past essays.]

A LANDMARK ROW

(First appeared in Pacific,  Nov. 29, 2006)

Set aside for the moment the looming skyscrapers and note how little has changed between this “then” and “now.”  For ambitious Seattle this is rare, especially outside the city’s designated historic districts, like Pioneer Square.

The centerpiece here is the Pacific hotel, facing Marion Street between the alley and east to 4th Avenue.  The work of architect W. R. B. Willcox, it was completed in 1916 – or may have been.  Both the county tax records and U.W. architect Norman J. Johnston’s chapter on Willcox in the UW Press’ ever revealing book “Shaping Seattle Architecture” give the 1916 date.

However, in the 1918 Polk City Directory a full-page advertisement (facing Page 2004) for the “Hotel Pennington Apartments” as it was then called, includes an etching of the same front façade seen here but with the terra cotta tile work of the right (south) half continued to the corner of 4th Avenue as one consistent presentation.  Was the less ornate half of mostly burlap bricks at the corner a late compromise for time and/or economy?  Or was the “half-truth” of the elegant etching too appealing to either correct or leave out of the advertisement?

The other surviving landmarks here include, far right, a corner of the Central Building (1907) and far left, the familiar Jacobean grace of the Rainier Club (1904) across 4th Avenue.   And above the club is the current celebrity among landmarks – or the dome of it: the First Methodist Church at 5th and Marion (1907) which now seems saved for its second century.

When the non-profit Plymouth group purchased the Pacific Hotel – its name since the 1930s – for low-income housing it took care to preserve the building’s heritage and in 1996 was awarded the state’s Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in Historic Rehabilitation.  Tom English, Plymouth’s facilities director, is fond of revealing that although hidden from Marion Street the hotel is U-shaped, and so embraces its own “beautifully landscaped courtyard and Kol-Pond.”  The 1918 advertisement also makes note of it as the hotel’s “spacious court garden.”

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COLMAN MANSION

(First appeared in Pacific, August,28, 1994)

In 1915 a photographer from the Curtis and Miller studio recorded this view of the nearly new Oakland Inn from a rear window of the Central Building at Third and Marion. The scene may have been shot speculatively or at the request of the Oakland’s owners. Whichever, as seen from this prospect the Oakland appears as a platform or stage for the performance of the ornate Colman mansion. Agnes and James Colman built their Italianate Victorian home in 1883. They moved in soon after returning from a tour of Europe. This long vacation was the reward for years of prodigious pioneer labor. By then, the Colmans had created sawmills, machine shops, railroads, sailing vessels, coal mines and many buildings, including their stylish new mansion. The Colmans themselves, however, were never very stylish. When they returned, James Colman went back to work. As their granddaughter Isobel would recall, the Colmans were “never a society family. My father was too busy to become involved in leisure life.”

James Colman died in 1906. Five years later the wide front lawn in front of the family home was excavated for the Oakland Inn. Its sidewalk businesses here include, right to left, Imperial Coffee; Benjamin Rosenthal, tailor; the Cash Grocery (vacant); and, at the comer, the offices of the Pyreen Manufacturing Company. The entrance to the Oakland Inn was up Columbia Street.

Agnes Colman lived in her mansion behind the Oakland until 1936. As an elderly woman -she lived to be 94 – Agnes would come down from her home to hand out meal tickets to the audience of homeless or out-of-work indigents waiting for her on Fourth Avenue. There were, of course, many drunks among them and all were first required to listen to her familiar brief lecture on temperance.

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Two more scenes from HISTORYLINK’S 2008 fund raiser lunch at the Rainier Club.   I recently had lunch with a precocious social media programmer who suggested that for the entertainment of this blog’s readers we should offer some prizes.  He mentioned leaving “blanks to be filled.”   So be it.  The first two readers who can identify the characters depicted in these two snaps will win . . .  something.   “We will make it worth your while.”  Jean especially is a fine gift-giver.

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Hopefully a few trainloads of Pacific readers will remember Warren Wing, our recently deceased rail fan extraordinaire who after retiring as a postman started chasing trains and the pictorial history of Northwest rails full time.  Long ago Warren shared with the Ballard News Tribune this prized photo of a Great Northern passenger train nearly completing its crossing of the GN’s bascule bridge over the tidewater western end of Chittenden Locks.  The subject appears on page 82 the Tribute’s 1988 centennial history of their community, “Passport to Ballard.” Warren Wing has captioned it, “Great Northern Morning train to Vancouver B.C. passing Ballard Station.”  This carrier would have also stopped in Everett, Mt. Vernon, Bellingham and at the border but not, apparently, at the little Ballard Station obscured here in the shadow of the engine’s exhaust.

Rails first reach Ballard in 1890 with West Street Electric Company’s trolley service from downtown Seattle.  Three years later the Great Northern completed its transcontinental service to Seattle directly along the Ballard waterfront and beside the many mills that made it then the “shingle capitol of the world.”  This new route over the GN’s lift bridge was made necessary by the construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the flooding of Salmon Bay behind its locks.  On June 29, 1913 this paper reported on the progress of the canal and the “spectacular form” of this “mammoth bridge,” which it measured at 1,140 long and 26 feet wide “to accommodate a double-track system.”

In the pursuit of his “repeat” Jean Sherrard was soon inhibited by decades of changes. He recounts, “The overpass on 57^th Street that we had hopes for was too distant from our subject, and the corrected prospect was both too steep and covered with foliage.  This left me in the rail bed just left of the tracks. To approximate the elevation of the original photographer, I hoisted my camera atop my ten-foot pole.  Walking back to my car, however, I did make one discovery. The original depot had been moved a hundred feet or so west, providing a spectacular view of the water – it had also been converted into a home, while retaining its distinctive gables. A neighbor confirmed that the former depot was now a residence.”  It would have been ideal Ballard home for Warren Wing.

WEB EXTRAS

Paul, I’m adding a couple of thumbnails of the old Ballard depot in its new location, transformed into a home:

Anything else to add, Paul?

A few related features Jean, beginning with two details of the once charming Ballard station followed by an early look north through the bridge from the Magnolia side..

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SALMON BAY BRIDGE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 26, 1986)

James A. Turner, who shot these pleasing views of the Salmon Bay Bridge, was one amateur who managed to put his photographic passion – railroads – on track with his vocation. During the 1930s, before the city got rid of its trolleys, Turner was a motorman on the Ballard line of the city’s transit system. During the weekdays he rode above the municipal rails, and then, judging from the size of his production, James Turner spent a good many evenings and weekends chasing trains or waiting for them.

For these subjects, Turner set himself off-shore on a Shilshole Bay dock below the Great Northern’s Salmon Bay Bascule Bridge, and so just west of the Chittenden Locks.

The Great Northern’s popu­larity among rail fans is a combination of its magnificent mainline through the Cascades and the Rockies, its safe and sturdy construction, its long Cascade tunnel, and the dashing green and black color scheme of its locomotives. And, perhaps, most of all the line is respected for its symbol, the mountain goat. Its dignity was totemic. A monumental rendering of this goat logo was painted on the Ballard end of the bridge’s massive counterweight.

As noted above with illustrations illustrating this week’s primary feature, the old mainline of the G.N. used to cross from Interbay into Ballard on a long curving bridge which spanned Salmon Bay near where the 15th Avenue auto bridge now crosses the ship canal. The bascule bridge was built in 1913-14 in part to avoid that trip along the shingle mill-congested Ballard waterfront. But it was also constructed to meet the inevitable demands of the Hiram S. Chittenden Government Locks. This was a bridge you could quickly open to let the big ships in and out of the new, in 1916, fresh water harbor behind the locks.  The bridge was left open for the convenience of shipping, for it could be quickly closed for any train.

Turner’s photographs are but two of his many picturesque records of this Salmon Bay passage. He lived in Ballard nearby the locks on 24th Ave­nue NW.  If I remember correctly (close enough) these and three other James A. Turner perspectives on the Salmon Bay bridge appeared originally in Warren Wing’s book, A Northwest Rail Pictorial.

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A contemporary photograph of the Chittenden Locks taken from the same prospect as the historical would have required a roost in one of the upper limbs of the trees that landscape the terraced hill that ascends from the locks to the English Gardens. (Historical photo courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers)

“DEWATERED”

(First appeared in Pacific, June 27, 2004))

In the descriptive and yet homely parlance of hydraulics the historical photograph reveals what Army Corp of Engineers called the “dewatered pit” of the ship canal locks at Ballard. In the six years required to build the locks – from breaking the ground in 1911 to the dedication in 1917 – this photograph was taken near the end of the first year, in the fall of 1912.

That the historical photographer from the Curtis and Miller studio stood on higher ground than I did for the “now” is evident from the elevation of the Magnolia side on the right. The “then” looks both across and down on the locks, the “now” merely across it. Why?

The dry pit is considerably wider than the combined big and small locks because the excavation cut well into the bank on the north side of the locks. Much of the mechanicals for opening the big lock’s gates are hidden in the hill that was reconstituted and shaped with terraces in the summer of 1915 once the concrete forms for the locks took their now familiar shape at what is by someone’s calculation the second most popular tourist destination in Seattle. (What then is first?)

Most of the temporary dirt cofferdam, upper-right, that separated the construction site from the temporary channel was removed in the fall of 1915 after the greats gates to the locks were closed. Next, on the second of February 1916 the locks were deliberately flooded and the doors opened to permit commuters to make emergency commutes to downtown Seattle by boat when the “Big Snow” (the second deepest in the history of the city) shut down the trolleys.

The locks were left open for tides and traffic while the damn was constructed to join the locks to the Magnolia side. With the link completed the doors were again shut and Salmon Bay was allowed to fill with fresh water to the level of Lake Union in July 1916. The small lock began working later in the month and on Aug 3, 1916 the first vessels (both from the Army Corp fleet) were lifted in the big lock. The formal opening followed months later on July 4, 1917.

In preparation for the 1916 flooding of Salmon Bay behind the locks Ballard’s waterfront of mostly mills and boat works was measured for the changes.

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Above and below: After considering Shilsholia, which sounds similar to the native name for this waterway and means “threading the bead,” Lawtonwood got its name by vote of its residents in 1925. (Historical view courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry) In order to see over the well-packed “East Lawtonwood” Jean Sherrard took his “now” from near the north end of 42nd Ave. Northwest, about 100 feet above the waterway.  Behind him in “West Lawtonwood” the homes are often much larger and the lawns too.

“Threading the Bead” Between Magnolia and Ballard

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec.19, 2010)

Carolyn Marr, the librarian at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) and an authority of the photographer Anders Wilse’s years in Seattle, thinks that this his look east through the entrance to Salmon Bay – from Shilshole Bay – was probably taken in 1900.  That was Wilse’s last busy year in Seattle before he returned to Norway.  During his few years here Wilse received many commissions from businesses and the City of Seattle to do photographic surveys.  But why did he record this bucolic view over a Lawtonwood pasture with seven cows?

It was not long after Wilse recorded this view of the channel that the Army Corps started dredging it in preparation for the ship canal.  Throughout the 1890s smaller “lightening ships” hauled cut lumber from the many Ballard mills on Salmon Bay to the schooners anchored in deep water off of Shilshole Bay.  No vessels here, however.  The channel is near low tide.  You can make out the sand bars.

The home of Salmon Bay Charlie, a half-century resident here, can be found to the far right.  With irregular roof boards it may be mistaken for part of the shoreline.  Charley was one of the principal suppliers of salmon and clams to the resident pioneers on both sides of this channel.  Wilse gives us a good look across the tidewaters into a west Ballard that while clear-cut is still sparsely developed.  The Bryggers settled and developed that part of Ballard, and the few structures seen there may belong to them.

Librarian Marr finds two other related views in MOHAI’s Wilse collection. One looks in the opposite direction across the channel from Ballard, and the other is a close-up of Salmon Bay Charlie’s cedar-plank home.  Marr adds, “Wilse was interested in boats and waterways, as well as Indians.”

One last note: those may be Scheuerman cows.  The German immigrant Christian Scheuerman and his native wife Rebecca were Lawtonwood pioneers.  Settling here in 1870 they multiplied with 10 children.

 

 

(click to enlarge photos – sometimes TWICE!)

The 1922-23 construction of the Olympic Hotel lured photographers to First Hill to record its grand dimensions while also capturing the central business district’s north end.  By then it had assembled an impressive jumble of brick and terra cotta clad business blocks, much of it retail.  (There was no Smith Tower and no need for one.)

On the far right, at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Stewart Street, the darker bricks of the New Washington Hotel (1908), top the cluster of business blocks at the southern border of the Denny Regrade. Far left, the Olympic, “Seattle’s first elegant hotel” is getting topped-off sometime in the more verdant months of 1923.

Seattle’s “grand hotel” opened on Dec. 7th of that year, a Christmas gift to the city, and only a few weeks following the dedication on Sunday Sept. 23, of the glimmering terra cotta tiled Fourth Church of Christian Science. That classic sanctuary shows here far left – directly below the Olympic.  It was built one hundred and ten feet square, with 1300 seats in curving mahogany pews, and topped by a copper-covered dome, which helped with its great acoustics.

For his or her recording the historical photographer visited an upper floor of the then nearly new Virginia Mason Hospital (1920). For his “now,” Jean Sherrard went to the hospital’s roof and discovered that the church could be found – a mere corner of its dome. (We encourage you to keep looking for it.)

In 1999 Fourth Church received its new calling as Town Hall, which returns us to Jean Sherrard, our weekly “repeater.”

For seven years Jean has been hosting Act Theatre and Town Hall’s Christmas edition of the by now honored series titled Short Stories Live. The Hall started Jean out in the slightly smaller lower level hall, but his productions became so popular that he and his players were moved upstairs into Town Hall’s Great Hall, beneath the high dome.  And on this very Sunday afternoon beginning at 4pm, Jean and three others (including myself invited to represent amateurs) will be reading with a little ham, humbug and Ho-ho-ho, the program of short stories and music that Jean has titled (Another) Rogue’s Christmas.

WEB EXTRAS

A couple of years ago, in preparation for another of our Town Hall Christmas Follies, we took the following photo:

Before I ask Paul our ritual WebExtras question, let me hasten to invite one and all to join us for what promises to be a delightful afternoon. The Seattle actress (and legend) Megan Cole will be joining us; along with our musical guests, the amazing Pineola (Leslie Braly, John Owen, and Josh Woods). For more info, please visit Town Hall’s own website.

And now, Paul, back to blogland with my perennial question – anything to add?

Yes Jean, a few more attractions/features from the neighborhood beginning with one put up on this blog in 2009 and now repeated with some additions.

(click to enlarge photos)

The “Fountain of Wisdom” is the name for the first fountain that Japanese-American sculptor George Tsutakawa built a half-century ago. The name was and still is appropriate for the fountain was sited beside swinging doors into Seattle Public Library’s main downtown branch.  In 1959 it was on the 5th Avenue side of the modern public library that replaced a half-century old stone Carnegie Library on the same block.  Five years ago this “first fountain” was moved one block to the new 4th Avenue entrance of the even “more modern” Koolhouse Library.

As the sculptor’s fortunes developed after 1959 his work at the library door might have also been called “ Tsutakawa’s fountain of fountains” for in the following 40 years he built about 70 more of them including the one shown here at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue and Seneca Street.  Named for Floyd Naramore, the architect who commissioned it, this fountain site was picked in part to soften the “edge of the freeway” especially here at Seneca where northbound traffic spilled into the Central Business District.

Photographer Frank Shaw was very good about dating his slides, and this record of late installation on the fountain, was snapped on June 10, 1967.  Tsutakawa is easily identified as the man steadying the ladder on the right.  Not knowing the others, I showed the slide to sculptor and friend Gerard Tsutakawa, George’s son, who identified the man on the ladder as Jack Uchida, the mechanical engineer “who did the hydraulics and structural engineering for every one of my fathers’ fountains.”

Gerard could not name the younger man with the hush puppies standing on one of the fountain’s petal-like pieces made sturdy from silicon bronze.  However, now after this “story” has been “up” for two days, Pat Lind has written to identify the slender helper on the left. Lind writes, “The young man in the ‘then’ photo is Neil Lind, a UW student of Professor George Tsutakawa at the time, who helped install the fountain.  Neil Lind graduated from the  UW and taught art for 32 years at Mercer Island Junior High and Mercer Island Hight School until his retirement.  His favorite professor was George Tsutakawa.”

When shown Jean Sherrard’s contemporary recording of the working fountain Gerard smiled but then looked to the top and frowned.   He discovered that the tallest points of its sculptured crown had been bent down.  A vandal had climbed the fountain.  Gerard noted, “That’s got to be corrected.”

WEB EXTRAS

Jean writes: It is nigh impossible to capture the visual effects of a fountain in a photograph. I took the THEN photo used by The Times with a nearly two-second shutter speed to approximate the creamy flow of white water over the black metal of the sculpture.  But there’s another view, shot at 1/300s of a second, that freezes the individual drips and drops.

The actual fountain must lie somewhere between the two.

A FEW FRANK SHAW COLOR SLIDES – SEATTLE ART

We have made a quick search of the Frank Shaw collection – staying for now with the color – and come up with a few transparencies that record local “art in public places” most of it intended, but some of it found.  Most of these are early recordings of subjects that we suspect most readers know.  We will keep almost entirely to Shaw’s own terse captions written on the sides of these slides.  He wrote these for himself and consequently often he did not make note of the obvious.   He also typically wrote on the side of his Hasselblad slides the time of day, and both the F-stop and shutter speed he used in making the transparency.  He was disciplined in recording all this in the first moment after he snapped his shot.  Anything that we add to his notes we will “isolate” with brackets.  The first is Shaw’s own repeat of the Naramore fountain at 6th and Seneca.

 

 

(click to enlarge photos – often CLICK TWICE)

On Monday May 12, 1941 a brass band leading at least three floats moved from Jackson Street south on Maynard Avenue into Chinatown with a parade that trumpeted the life of Dong On Long, the then recently deceased president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Dong, who had lived and worked in the neighborhood for more than a half-century, was famed for his wisdom as an arbitrator in what the Times called “the Chinese colony.”

Here the first float in Dong’s parade, with the beloved citizen’s portrait framed by a memorial wreath and inscribed, “Father” in flowers, passes in front of the Atlas Theatre. Running inside are either “Men Without Souls,” a prison movie with a young Glenn Ford, or “Ebb Tide,” a south-seas adventure staring Seattle’s Francis Farmer.  The welcoming marquee allows that smoking is permitted and that the Atlas never closes.  When it first opened in 1918, Seisabura Mukai, advertised his Atlas as “the finest in the south district . . .Large Capacity, Clean and Cozy, catering a First-Class patronage.” By the year of Dong on Long’s parade it was as likely used as a dark retreat.

Early in 1942 S. Mukai learned that he would be interned with other Japanese Aliens, and so soon leased his Atlas to Burrell C. Johnson, who with second-run double features, kept the Atlas running and warm.  That December Johnson was booked for operating a crowded fire hazard.  On, we assume, a cold Jan 3, 1944, the police routed “scores” of sleepers from the Atlas at 5 in the morning.  The Times reported, “twenty were held for investigation of their draft status.”

James Matsuoka, president of the neighborhood’s community council, advised the city in 1950 that the Atlas created as “atmosphere” that promoted crime, and that its license should not be renewed.  The police described “trouble with pickpockets, some strong arm robberies . . . and prostitutes.”  Johnson pleaded that “It’s a difficult theatre to run – perhaps the hardest in the whole city . . . I’ve been trying to do the best I can.”  He then promptly remodeled the Atlas with new seats, lighting, and candy bar and painted it in mulberry and chartreuse.  That summer the theatre continued its atonement during the International District’s Seafair Carnival.  For the citywide celebration the Atlas showed films with all Filipino and Chinese casts.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Some and not none – but not much.  Sometimes – like this time – our weekend efforts will run out of time.  We will plop in only a few additions, some clippings, and some photographs but neither, I think, supported with former features – merely with whatever captions we can string from them now.  [It is almost one in the morning and we mean to be to bed by 3am.]

OTHER CLIPS

A FEW NEW OLD STREETSCAPES FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD

[The location and date are ordinarily typed and attached – with tape –  along the bottom of the negative.  CLICK TWICE to enlarge.]

MEANWHILE, on Long Beach . . .

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

My hunch is that this smartly named Central Seattle Service Station opened in 1925.  It does not appear in the 1924 Polk City Directory – not as a garage or service station, both of which it was a year later.

One lot south of Marion Street on the east side of 6th Avenue – and now part of the I-5 pit – the station appears in a promotional photograph taken in the spring of 1925. The unidentified photographer aimed east from 5th Avenue through a block empty except for at a covey – or perhaps bevy – of white-uniformed nurses pointing at a big billboard that makes the hopeful, but as it turned out mistaken, claim that “On this Site will be Built Seattle General Hospital.”

Directly above the billboard the gleaming white service station appears at 812 Sixth Avenue, one lot south of Marion Street.  Its own covey of signs offer Associated Oil Products, Motormates Official Brake Service, Cycol products, parking, storage, repairs, cars washed and polished and free crank case service.  Located on the side of First Hill the incline was handy for coasting and starting cars with bad starters – a common problem then – on compression.)

My second hunch is that the close-up of the by then Standard Oil station printed here – and beside it the Crescent Apartments, a tenement row facing Columbia Street – was recorded sometime during the 1930s.  Cars were in need of more service then because so few new ones were being bought during the Great Depression.

Still there were lots of cars.  While the population of the previously booming Seattle slowed to a mere 22 percent in the 15 years between 1922 and 1937, the number of motor vehicle increased then by 211 percent.  Then in 1941 more than 50,000 new residents migrated to Seattle’s busy home front for the USA’s first official year in the Second World War.  Boeing built a parking lot near its new Flying Fortress Plant 2 for 5,000 cars.  By then and back here in Central Seattle – and as just noted –  the block once hoping for a hospital had been parking cars for years.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

We shall try Jean, again with a few past  features from the neighborhood.  And we will lead with a detail from our helpful Baist Real Estate Map of 1912.

Then above: The city’s regarding forces reached 6th and Marion in 1914.  A municipal photographer recorded this view on June 24.  Soon after, the two structures left high here were lowered to the street. (courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)  Now below: The corner’s final “humiliation” came as a ditch dug and concrete-lined in the early 1960s for the Seattle Freeway section of Interstate-5. (Photo by Jean Sherrard)

JAMES & VIRGINIA McNAUGHT’S PROMINENCE

(First appeared recently in Pacific and here too, May 2, 2010)

In 1880 or 81 Joseph and Virginia McNaught began building their home at the southeast corner of Marion Street and Sixth Avenue. It sat on a high point – a knoll – that made it stand alone against the sky when viewed from the waterfront. The couple took some kidding about having moved so far east of town.

Soon after following his brother James to Seattle in 1875, Joseph drove a herd of cattle from the Willamette Valley to a beef-poor Seattle. With the profits he then returned east for a law degree and marriage to the good-humored Virginia.  She was known for her wit.  Returning to Seattle the McNaughts became one the city’s most entrepreneurial couples with investments in transportation, mining, shipbuilding, Palouse homesteads, and stockyards.

For much of the two square blocks between 6th and 7th, and Marion and Cherry – all of it part of the I-5 ditch now – First Hill was mostly no hill.  Parts of it even lost altitude before joining again the often steep climb east of 7th Avenue.  With the grading of 6th Avenue, first in 1890, the home was lowered a few feet.  That year it was also pivoted 90 degrees clockwise.  So what is seen here facing north at 603 Marion previously was facing west at 818 Sixth Ave.  The regrade of 1914, seen here, lowered the sites old prominence about two stories to the grade of this freshly bricked intersection.

By then the McNaughts were off in Oregon raising alfalfa hay and living in Hermiston, one of the two town sites they developed.  The other was Anacortes.  Virginia named Hermiston, and it includes a Joseph Avenue.

Following this 1914 regrade the old McNaught mansion was modified and expanded into the porches for eight apartments.  All the Victorian trim was either removed or lost behind new siding.  Through its last years it was joined with its big box neighbor on Marion as part of a sprawling Marion Hotel until sacrificed for the freeway.

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MADISON POPLARS – LOOKING EAST from SIXTH Ave.

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 17, 1985)

In 1910, Madison Street, where it climbs First Hill, was a fashionable strip bordered by better brick apartments and hotels. This stretch of Madison was also lined by what Sophie Frye Bass described as “the pride of Madison Street . . . the stately poplar trees made it the most attractive place in town.” She wrote this in her still engaging book “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.”

The strip was not only popular but populated. Madison was evolving into a vital city link. The two cable cars pictured in this early-century view up Madison from Sixth Avenue started running there in 1890 when the Madison Street Cable Railway first opened service up First Hill and Second Hill and through the forest to Madison Park on Lake Washington. The white sign hanging from the front of the closest car reads, “White City, Madison Park, Cool Place, Refreshments, Amusements.” White City was a short-lived promotion designed by the cable railway’s owners to attract riders onto the cars and out to the lake. White City failed in 1912, but by then the top attraction at the lake end of the line was not the park but the ferry slip and the ferry named after the 16th president of the United States: Lincoln.

Madison’s popular poplars did not survive into the 1930s, according to author Bass. The granddaughter of pioneer Arthur Denny lamented in her book that by then, the endearing trees “had given way protestingly to business.”

In 1940, Madison lamented another loss when its cable cars gave way to gasoline-powered buses. Then, 20 years later, the entire block pictured in the foreground of the historical scene gave way to the interstate freeway built in the early 1960s.

Madison Street was named for the county’s fifth president. Arthur Denny, while platting Seattle’s streets in alliterative pairs, named the street one block south of Madison “Marion” after a young brother, James Marion Denny. Arthur needed another “M.”

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Then Caption above:  Looking northwest across a bench in the rise of First Hill, ca. 1887. The photographer was probably one of three. George Moore, David Judkins or Theodore Peiser, were the local professionals then most likely to leave their studios and portrait work to point a camera northwest from near the corner of Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)   Jean’s repeat, below, looks from the western border of the Harborview Hospital campus near what was once the steep intersection of Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.

THE BENCH ON FIRST HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Independence Day, July 4th 2010)

Long ago when first I studied this look northwest across First Hill I was startled by its revelations of the hill’s topography.   The hill does not – or did not – as we imagine steadily climb from the waterfront to the east.  For instance, here Cherry Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues – the white picket fence that runs across the scene’s center marks the north side of that block – keeps a fairly flat grade and then where it intersects with Sixth Ave. defies all our modern expectations and dips to the east.

James Street, on the left, climbs First Hill between 5th and 6th Streets on an exposed timber trestle.  To the lower other (north) side of that bridge there was an about four-block pause between James and Columbia, Fifth and Seventh, in (or from) the steady climbing we expect of First Hill.  Now in these blocks the flat Seattle Freeway repeats this feature ironically.

There are enough clews here to pull an approximate date for this unsigned cityscape, which looks northwest from near Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.  It is most likely sometime during the winter of 1887-88.  The best clew is the Gothic spire atop the Methodist Episcopal Church far left of center. There is still construction scaffolding on the south side of the sanctuary, which was completed at the southeast corner of Marion and Third Ave. early in 1888.  On the far right horizon is the big box of Central School – it burned down in the Spring of 1888 – and to this side of it the McNaught big home sits at its original grade on the southeast corner of Marion and Sixth.

In its details this panorama is strewn with other pioneer landmarks including the Western House (the name is on the roof – see the market detail below) at the southeast corner of 6th and James.  It is the large L-shaped box below the scene’s center.  Built in 1881, it was finally named the Kalmar House after a new owner’s hometown in Sweden.  It survived until 1962 when, in what architect-preservationist Victor Steinbrueck called “an act of esthetic idiocy on the part of the city,” it was razed for the Freeway.

The above detail shows the roof crest sign reading “Western House” marked in red.  The view below, while similar to the one above is later – ca. 1890.   It is also photographed from a distance further south on Seventh Avenue.  The Western House, however, has stayed place, holding to its same footprint at the southeast corner of 6th and James, and it has added a new top story.  It appears right-of-center.  Above the Kalmar is the grand bulk of the Rainier Hotel, which is directly across 6th Avenue from the McNaught home.  It appears far right.  The photographer here was F.J. Haynes, the Northern Pacific Railroad’s official photographer (he had his own RR-car) during his first visit to Seattle following its “Great Fire of 1889.”

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KALMAR INN – Southeast Corner of JAMES & 6^th Avenue.

(First appeared in Pacific, April 13, 1986)

In 1962, when Seattle showed the world Century 21, the fair with a “forward thrust,” the late Victor Steinbrueck first published “Seattle Cityscape,” the sketchbook that was to become a local classic. One of Its most lovingly rendered pen-and-ink drawings was of the Hotel Kalmar. In the caption, Steinbrueck wrote: “The only remaining example of an early pioneer hotel is the old Kalmar Hotel at Sixth Avenue and James Street. With Its pumpkin· colored wooden siding end hand-sawn details, It has been e picturesque pert of Seattle’s personality.  Built In 1881, much of Seattle’s history has been viewed from Its wide veranda, but now It is being destroyed to make room for the freeway.”

And destroyed It was, in April of 1962, despite efforts of local preservationists. It was razed “In a rumble of wreckers, derricks end c1amshell loaders,” The Seattle Times reported. For more then 70 years the Kalmar had lived intimately next to a different rumble, one that was regular – the c1anglng struggle of the James Street cable cars as they gripped their way up and down the steep side of First Hill.

Leonard Brand, who with his sister Viola were the last managers and residents of the Kalmar, grew up with the constant noise. In fact, the cable cars had rocked young Leonard to sleep. He was only three months old when his parents moved into the old Michigan Hotel after purchasing and renaming it after his mother s hometown In Sweden.

This week’s scene was probably photographed for the Brands, who are seen posing on the veranda. Leonard is in his mother’s arms and Viola stands by. The Kalmar was the only home these children knew until they were forced by the Freeway to retire to West Seattle.

All attempts failed to save the landmark. Steinbrueck lamented in an article at the time: “When I go back now to many of these places, nothing is left . . . I have only my pictures.” And for now, all attempts to find Victor’s sketch of the Kalmar, have failed. We will either insert it or add an addendum later.  We have promised a few of those in the past – promises we may still keep when the objects of our desire fall into our laps.  Meanwhile, here follows Lawton Gowey’s 11th hour record of the Kalmar, photographed on Jan. 17, 1961.

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NOW and THEN Captions together. The obvious continuities between this week’s photographs are the monumental twin towers of St. James Cathedral, upper right, at 9th and Marion and far left the unadorned rear west wall and south sidewall of the Lee Hotel that faces 8th Avenue.  Judging from the cars, the older scene dates from near the end of World War Two. The weathered two-story frame building at the scene’s center also marks time.  It was torn down in 1950 and replaced with the parking lot seen in the “now.”   Historical photo by Werner Lenggenhager, courtesy of Seattle Public Library.

NOSTALGIC RECORDER

(First featured in Pacific, Dec. 5, 2004)

In 1949 architects Naramore, Bain and Brady began construction on new offices for themselves at the northeast corner of 7th Avenue and Marion Street. Their new two-story building filled the vacant lot that shows here, in part, in the foreground of the older scene.  Consequently if I had returned to the precise prospect from which Werner Lenggenhager (the historical photographer) recorded his view ca. 1947 I would have faced the interior wall of an office that was likely large enough to have once held several draughting tables.  Instead I went to the alley between 7th and 8th and took the “now” scene about eight feet to the left of where the little boy stands near the bottom of the older view.

That little boy is still younger than many of us – myself included – and he helps me make a point about nostalgia.  The less ancient is the historical photograph used here the more likely am I to receive responses (and corrections) from readers.  Clearly for identifying photographs like the thousands that Lenggenhager recorded around Seattle there are many surviving “experts.” And more often than not they are familiar not only with his “middle-aged” subjects but also with the feelings that may hold tight to them like hosiery – Rayon hosiery.

Swiss by birth Lenggenhager arrived in Seattle in 1939, went to work for Boeing and soon started taking his pictures.  He never stopped.  Several books – including two in collaboration with long-time Seattle Times reporter Lucile McDonald – resulted and honors as well like the Seattle Historical Society’s Certificate of Merit in 1959 for building a photographic record of Seattle’s past.  The greater part of his collection is held at the Seattle Public Library. For a few years more at least Lenggenhager will be Seattle’s principle recorder of nostalgia.

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A RON EDGE CODA

This from Ron, and most fitting.  Another aerial that looks directly onto the block and showing most of the landmarks of concern this week, including a still spiffy service station on 6th, the McNaught home, Central School and its annex and part of the row homes on Columbia too – those that anchor at its northeast corner with Sixth Ave.

We may use it again when we soon respond with “extras” to our Town Hall feature – on the 16th of this month – where, among other uses, we give a last minute reminder that that Sunday Jean’s Town Hall Christmas Stories are being produced – by Jean as “A Rogue’s Christmas” – its his seven year.  Now you know two weeks in advance – thanks to Ron and his aerial.   The show begins at 4pm Dec. the 16th – yes that Sunday!

We might also use Ron’s aerial again for our feature on the Rainier Club’s expansion, for there it is – the club – near the lower left corner.   And so on and thanks to Ron.   (Really click this one to enlarge.)

 

 

WEB EXTRAS

I confess that preparing and polishing these negatives has been a delightful routine for me.  They are hard to leave along, for when handling them I am often stirred by uncanny feelings of my youth – full bore nostalgia.  The subjects date from about 1928 to 1942.  Remembering that the two collections came to us coincidentally, we have hopes that there are third and fourth parts left to be revealed.

(click to enlarge photos)

Nancy Ishii (bottom row second from the left in Jean’s “now”) figures that this portrait of her family’s farm beside the Duwamish River dates from 1934 or ’35.  Appearing in both the “now” and “then” are one uncle, Masao, two aunts, Michi and Sally, and her father, Nobi Ishii.  In cap and tie, the about twelve-year-old Nobi stands at the center of the group of seven in the “then.”  About seventy-two years later he gets to sit – again at the center – in Jean’s repeat.  (We position them all in the captions.)

What seems like magic is what does NOT appear in either subject – the sprawling 1,776,000 square feet of Boeing Plant 2, nor any sign of the nearly 7000 B-17 bombers that were built there.   The Flying Fortress factory’s first 60,000 feet were covered in 1936, a year or so after the Japanese American farmers were posed standing in their carrot patch by Henry Miyake of the International District’s Takano Studio.  Recently, the Wing Luke Museum called on the community to help identify the subjects in their Miyake collection, and many startling discoveries, like this one, followed.

Nancy, a friend, called for some help in “refining” the location of the farm.  With the help of aerial photographs (see below), the Duwamish Waterway bridge to South Park – seen in both subjects – and some fine tuning from Boeing historian Michael Lombardi, Boeing site server, Mike Prittie and Boeing communicator, Kathleen Spicer, we managed to confidently return some of the extended Ishii family to their farm for Jean’s repeat.  Imagine, if you will, Michael, Mike, Kathleen and I, all huddled behind Jean and his camera on the asphalt tarmac that was once Boeing Plant 2, near its southwest corner, and in the Ishii carrot patch.

The Ishii’s rented their acres from Joe Desimone, the South Park Neapolitan immigrant farmer who was also the Pike Place Public Market’s benevolent landlord.  In 1940 with the Boeing factory sprawling towards the farm, Desimone helped the family keep their planted rows beside the Duwamish River, although relocated about one mile upstream.  However, their kindly landlord could not, we know, keep them farming after the shock of Pearl Harbor.

The fate of the Ishii family and their farm during World War Two and after is an often distressing story, but still one with many happy moments and helpful lessons.  If you like, you may follow more of this on dorpatsherrardlomont, the blog noted each week at the bottom of this feature.  This week both Nancy Ishii and I will elaborate.  Just as likely, we will add an addendum later following more gathering of family photos.

BLOG EXTRAS

Below, a few more photos of the Ishii family at Boeing field; the first being a portrait of the Ishii elders who appeared in the original THEN:

 

Hey Paul, I hear that you and Nancy have a lot to add – tell me it’s so!

Jean, I think so – ultimately.  While I’m adding a few related features from nearly ancient Pacifics, Nancy is also pulling and scanning a few photos of her dad mostly from the 40s and 50s.  They will be the last items I’ll add to this blog, although they will be placed here when we get them.

Nancy suggests that we also show some of the research photos that we arranged in our earliest attempts to place the farm.  She knew that it was somewhere south of – but near – Boeing Plant #2, the one at the east side of the bridge over the Duwamish River to South Park.  Since the farm came first, the plant was a surprise to the family.  As noted above, it was “near” indeed, for the B17 factory eventually took over their garden, farm house, and barn. Here then are a few of the photos that helped us fine-tune the farm.

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(Remembering now that this was composed in 1992.) Six of the surviving seven of Tameno Habu Kobata’s children revisited the site of the family’s flower shop, now spanned by the Interstate 5 freeway.  They are, below and from the left, Kimi Ishii, Louise Sakuma, Mary Shinbo, Rose Harrell, Jack Nabu and John Habu.  Two of the Tameno’s 22 grandchildren are also included – Linda Ishii, far left, and Nancy Ishii, kneeling.  Nancy Ishii is responsible for researching the family history.

CHERRY LAND FLORISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 2, 1992)

In the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, Cherry Land Florists grew from a small grocery store into one of the largest retail flower shops in the International District. These views were photographed in 1941.

Ten years earlier Tameno Kobata, her husband John, and their eight children – six from her first and deceased husband, Teiji Habu – moved into the storefront at 905 Jackson St. The flowers, which at first were kept behind the fruits and vegetables, eventually took over, and the Kobatas’ little food store became their Cherry Land.

The business was mostly the mother’s doing – the father helped support the enterprise by working a second job as a waiter at the Seattle Tennis Club. The family lived in cramped and often chaotic quarters behind a partition in the rear of the store. A barrel with water heated on a wood stove by fuel scrounged from the neighborhood was the family bath, and the living quarters’ few beds were shared with privacy provided only by blankets hung for partitions.

The oldest girls, Kako and Mary, soon became skilled flower arrangers, and the younger children helped de-thorn roses, fold corsage boxes and prepare ferns for wreaths – after they had completed their homework.

In the sidewalk scene (on top) Tameno Habu Kobata and her second son, John Habu, pose between the flower boxes. John, who left home in 1935 at the age of 14 to make his own way in Chicago, returned “amazed” in 1940 to find his family’s flower shop flourishing. Within a year, with his help knocking away walls, Cherry Land expanded to the entire building.

After Pearl Harbor, the business instantly withered. The fear and hysteria of the early days of World War II brought internment for the Habu-Kobata family and 125,000 other Japanese Americans.

At war’s end most of the family was back in Seattle. When their industrious mother, Tameno, died unexpectedly in 1948, sons John and Jack returned to Seattle for her funeral and stayed. In the years after her death Tameno’s many children started a variety of local businesses, including three flower shops – among them a Cherry Land Two.

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Above: The Japanese Buddhist Temple on the north side of Main Street east of 10th Ave.  The “now” scene below was scanned from the clipping used in Pacific when the feature was first published in 1992.  Like many other “now” scenes not shown with these repeats, it is somewhere nearby in “stacks of decades” but not near enough to be easily found.  The temple site, like much of this Profanity Hill neighborhood was developed into Yesler Terrace in 1940.  Although now 20-years past I remember well the anticipation of the children as they waited for me to shoot the picture.  Although Jean Sherrard was not there in 1992, he was many years earlier a resident of Yesler Terrace when he was a tot.  Many doctors-in-training, like Jean’s dad Don, moved with their families into Yesler Terrace during, at least, part of medical school.  For teaching purposes it was close to King County(now Harborview) Hospital.

JAPANESE BUDDHIST TEMPLE on MAIN STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, July 12, 1992)

When the Japanese Buddhists dedicated their first Seattle temple in 1908, the congregation was seven years old and yet there were nearly 500 members. Meeting at first in a rented house on Main Street, east of Sixth Avenue, the congregation built their temple four blocks east, on Main just east of Tenth.

The title for the property and the charter for the church were signed by two trusted Caucasian citizens because racist federal laws then prohibited citizenship and ownership of real property by Asian immigrants. This discrimination was compounded by the Alien Exclusion Act of 1924, which barred Japanese immigration to this country. The congregation continued to grow, however, with the families that were its members.

The temple was included in the old Profanity Hill neighborhood that was ultimately condemned to enable the construction of Yesler Terrace. The congregation then again built on Main Street – further east. In its last years, the wood-frame temple was regularly vandalized by patriots who mistook a Buddhist symbol over the temple’s front porch for the Nazi swastika.  (You can find the ancient design in the top photo used for this feature.  It is above the Temple front door.)

The congregation dedicated its present temple at 1427 S. Main on Oct. 4, 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor came two months later. Within hours, the congregation’s leaders were detained and the church plunged into turmoil. With the infamous Executive Order 9066, the temple was shut down as the West Coast Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese ancestry were interned. During the war, the temple basement was used for storage of the interns’ belongings; after the war, the church helped to resettle its members.

One temple event well-known to the greater community is the ·Bon Odori Festival. Printed directly above, the night scene of the costumed celebrants in front of the temple is from the 1932 Bon Odori, the first held at the temple. Since 1955 the community event has been included in Seafair. The public is invited to this year’s [1992] Bon Odori at the temple next weekend, July 18 and 19.

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COLLINS PLAYGROUND – 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, May 31, 1992)

The American playground movement reached Seattle in 1907 with the  development of a three-acre site between Washington and Main streets and 14th and 16th avenues. It was named Collins Playground, after John Collins, a former city mayor who died in 1903.

The site was chosen because of its surrounding rainbow of races, nationalities, and religions. Progressives of the time believed supervised play in well-appointed playgrounds would encourage creative and peaceful recreation among the races and sexes. The movement’s advocates were assertive about providing girls equal opportunities for physical culture.

The sloping Collins site was divided into three terraces. The lower level was dedicated to field athletics such as baseball, and the upper to basketball, tennis, handball and gymnastics. The middle level was reserved for younger children, and had a wading pool, swings, teeter-totters and sand boxes .

For nine days in the month of August 1909, Collins Playground was made a deposit station for the Seattle Public Library. Of the 465 books involved, 1,409 loans were made and the librarian, Gertrude Andrus, made sure that the children read them. She also read stories to a total of 340 children – in the sandbox. This, most likely, is Andrus with her back to the camera. The experiment was a success and the service continued.

In 1976 the Seattle Buddhist Church, which since 1941 has been directly across Main Street from this sandbox, purchased the playground and developed its middle level into Wisteria Plaza. The elegantly landscaped terrace features an arching bridge above a rock garden and, shown here at the sandbox site, a Tsurigane Doh or, roughly translated, a bell pergola.  [If I am not able to readably find my negative for this repeat from 1992, I will, again, scan the Pacific clipping and insert it.]

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With the construction of Interstate 5, Maynard Avenue north of Main Street was abandoned. Kobe Terrace Park, named for Seattle’s Japanese sister city, and the Danny Woo Community Garden have since been developed on the site. In the contemporary photo (copied, again, from the Times clipping), the athletic 82-year-old Lulu Kashiwagi has climbed upon the park’s gazebo or observation tower, which looks down the center of Maynard Street into the International District.

JAPANESE BAPTISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, May 24, 1992)

The Wing Luke Museum, 25 years old this year [1992], has mounted its most ambitious exhibit ever. Named for the decree that interned 120,000 mostly West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, Executive Order 9066 is an eloquent survey of a century of Japanese settlement on Puget Sound.

The view printed here of the Japanese Baptist Sunday School appears near the beginning of the museum’s fluently ordered space. Most of these children are Nisei (second-generation Japanese), U.S. citizens born here to immigrants. Many, perhaps most, of them will have had their own families when they were forced into internment 32 years after this scene was photographed.

This is the Sunday school class of 1910, or so speculates Lulu Kashiwagi, historian for the Japanese Baptist Church. Lulu’s mother, Misa Sakura, sits at far left. The baby propped on her lap is most likely Lulu – born that year. Lulu’s older sister Ruth is behind her, held in the arms of a family friend, Mrs. Mimbu. Three of Lulu’s brothers are also in the scene.

Seattle’s Japanese Baptists trace their origins to a night school conducted by their first pastor, Fukumatsu Okazaki, in the community’s first Japanese lodging house, and then in the basement of its first restaurant. This industry soon developed into a Japanese YMCA and in 1899 incorporated as a church. The Rev. Okazaki is pictured here, top center, holding the “J” card.

Churches were the most effective hosts for Japanese workers fresh off the boats. They helped the understandably anxious sojourners find lodging, steered them to suitable employment, conducted English-language classes and offered both the warmth and security of a caring group for immigrants who had left their traditionally strong family support behind them.

Here the Baptist’s Sunday School is posed on Maynard Street. The tower of the King County Courthouse on First Hill tops the Scene. In 1908 the Baptists were forced from their sanctuary at Jackson and Maynard Avenue by the Jackson Street regrade. Within two years they” moved into a second home, again off Maynard at 661 Washington St. This part of the International District is still predominantly Japanese.

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EVACUATION – MARCH 30, 1942

(First appeared in Pacific Sept. 5, 1999)

On Dec. 10, 1942 the Associated Press released a story headlined “Arrows of Fires Point to Seattle.” Later reports, either buried or not printed, noted that white farmers clearing land near Port Angeles started the fires. The result of this and other hysterical news stories following the bombing of Pearl Harbor was an incendiary to the imaginations of West Coast locals, many of whom fully expected Japanese planes to appear suddenly over Duwamish Head.

The bombs were dropped instead on the families of Japanese Americans, both aliens living here (Issei), often for decades, and their children born into American citizenship (Nisei). In “Seattle Transformed,” Richard Berner’s recently published history of Seattle in the 1940s, the author’s unadorned telling of these routinely tragic stories reveals their exceptionally personal dimension. Berner also details the “administrative” side of this moral collapse: the general abdication of democratic courage by public leaders in the name of “military necessity.”

Because of their proximity to the Bremerton Naval Yard, the 54 Japanese-American families farming on Bainbridge Island were the first local group uprooted. Here on March 30, 1942, their guarded line is led across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) to the train waiting to carry them to the arid isolation of Manzanar, Calif. (Camp Minidoka in southern Idaho – the eventual destination for the majority of the interned families from the Seattle area – was not yet ready.) Of course, neither the Italian nor German populations living along the Atlantic seaboard were evacuated en masse to whatever deserts might have been prepared for them in Ohio or Indiana.

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(click to enlarge photos)

For this week’s especially convivial “repeat” Jean Sherrard and I persuaded our friends, artists Joe Max Emminger and Julie Paschkis, to walk a block.  In what Jean described then as the “pearl-like light” of that late September Sunday, the married couple, with a few friends, stand side-by-side on 3^rd Ave. S. holding examples of their art taken moments earlier from the walls of the nearby Grover Thurston Gallery.  Julie and Joe had just concluded their joint show at the gallery with a potluck. Appropriately, the month-long exhibit was named “Feast.”

About 93 years earlier Grace Loudon McAdams posed with a few happy friends on the same 3^rd Ave sidewalk mid-block between Washington and Main Streets.  The storefronts are the same.  Her older brother Max took the photo, and Grace, third from the right, steadies Max’s cycle with her hand on its seat. While that ca.1919 day was equally sunny it was surely not as warm as our recent Indian summer – although the motorcycle is an Indian.

I first met Grace about thirty years ago.  She shared with me her brother’s albums, and the sportsman Max took lots of revealing photographs.  His camera recorded some of the best snapshots of his hometown’s sporting life: park visits, horse racing, circus parades, beach-life, back stage vaudeville and the semi-pro baseball team he managed. (If you care to visit, we have posted more of Max’s subjects on our blog, dorpatsherrardlomont.)

Returning to our friends on the sidewalk.  Everyone attending the Feast’s last day potluck choose their own piece of “Salty Dough Sculpture” hung from one of the gallery’s walls.  Two examples can be found in Jean’s “repeat.” Jean and I also picked our pieces of artful hardtack for we have long been delighted by the imaginative adventures shared in both Joe’s and Julie’s art. You can read about the show and see all the work – including the wall of “salty dough” – and even get a recipe for making the bread pieces on the show’s own blog.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes, again, Jean.  But may your first find some snaps of Joe and Julie’s show, or in that line of any show of theirs you have in your art horde (or mine).   Then I’ll pick up with three or four additional features from the neighborhood or to the “theme.”

Jean here again. I’ll add in a few thumbnails from several of Julie and Joe’s previous gallery shows starting in 2006.

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THE FLU – 1918

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 18, 1984)

During the last month of World War I, Seattle was under siege by a global force more deadly than bombers and tanks. The city was in the grip of la Grippe, or Spanish Flu. The 1918 global pandemic took twice as many lives as the Great War.

In Seattle, a young man at the University of Washington’s naval training station was the first to die. That was Wednesday, Oct. 2. By Saturday, Oct. 5 the alarming rise of disease and death prompted the city’s sometimes hysterical mayor, Ole Hanson, to react. According to a daily newspaper, the mayor “placed in effect the most drastic regulations to which the city has ever been subjected . . . the city forbids every form of public assemblage.”

On Saturday night the dance halls were closed, the theaters dark. On Sunday morning, church services were suspended and on Monday the school bells were silent. The front page of the Monday Post-Intelligencer announced, “Gloomy Sunday is Result of the Influenza Ban.” The law against assembling had had its ironic reversals. “There were aimless, peevish crowds that strolled up and down Second and Third avenues Sunday afternoon, sat in hotel lobbies and collected in doorways and on street comers. They talked about the war . . . but mostly they lambasted the mayor.”

Sunday’s toll was four dead; Monday’s eight. On Tuesday 401 new cases were reported; on Wednesday that tally climbed to 424. The siege continued and citizens were ordered to wear masks. Newspapers reported on a possible connection between the war and the disease: “Mrs. A.B. Priest says that the pandemic is the result of a wicked suggestion sent out by the Kaiser’s psychologists . . . it is German propaganda in its most subtle form.” On Oct. 21, 30 deaths were reported. The toll had peaked, the grip loosened.

On Armistice Day, Nov. 11, the ban of public gatherings and the order to wear masks were lifted. “Seattle need be masked no longer,” the P-I reported and added that “the order has been more or less of a farce as far as the masks are concerned.” That afternoon and evening, Seattle was one parading public assemblage of unmasked revelers celebrating the double victory over death by war and death by disease. Mrs. A.B. Priest no doubt noted the connection and felt confirmed.

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Above: Neighbors pose on the front steps of photographer Lawrence Lindsley’s Wallingford home sometime in October 1918 when the city was “dark” and closed-down during the Spanish Flu’s Seattle visit.  The masks were required although the law was rarely enforced.  (Picture courtesy of Dan Eskenazi)

Below: Wallingford neighbor’s repeat the 1918 flu shot behind masks pulled from one of the group’s mask collection.   Only one among the seven is neither hidden nor unnamed: the Chihuahua Sparky.   Here Jean has handed the camera to me and taken one of the seven places on the porch.  At the bottom, all is revealed.

LAGRIPPE in WALLINGFORD

(First appeared in Pacific during the spring of 2007)

Dan Eskenazi, Seattle photo collector and old friend of mine, first shared with me these masked ladies posing with masked cats on the unlikely chance that I might know the porch.  Had the snapshot revealed a street number the choices would have been narrowed city-wide to a few hundred front steps.  But Dan’s little 3×4 inch print does better.  The names of the women are penciled on the back.  The flipside caption reads,  “Top row, Anna Kilgore, E. K. Barr, Ms Anna S. Shaw.  Lower row, Penelope and Tommy, Mrs Shaw and Golly.”

So seven creatures including the cats Tommy and Golly and all of them wearing masks by order of the mayor.  By the time the 1918 flu epidemic reached Seattle at the end of September la Grippe had caused more deaths world-wide than the First World War. When the rule about masks was lifted for good on Armistice Day, Nov. 11 the streets were quickly filled with bare-faced revelers.  Still Dr. T. D. Tuttle, the state’s commissioner of health, warned that “people who have influenza are in the crowds that are celebrating victory.  They will be in the street cars, in the theaters, in the stores.” Tuttle also confessed, “the order had been more or less a farce as far as the masks are concerned.”  (This explains, perhaps, why there are so few mask photos extant.)

Returning to the snapshot’s penciled caption, four of the five women are listed in the 1918 city directory living at 108 E. 43rd Street, in Wallingford.  Since that address is about 100 steps from my own I was soon face to face with Dan’s unidentified porch, except that it was one house west of 108.  But this slight move presented an opportunity.  It hints, at least, of the photographer.

104 E. 43rd Street was built in 1918, the year that the photographer Lawrence Denny Lindsley, the grandson of city founders David and Louisa Denny, moved in.  Perhaps Lindsley took the snapshot of his neighbors sitting on his new front steps soon after he took possession with his bride Pearl.  Married on September 20, 1918, tragedy soon followed.  Both Pearl and their only child Abbie died in 1920.  Lindsley married again in 1944 and continue to live at 104 into the 1970s.   When he died in 1974, this son of the pioneers was in his 90s and still taking photographs.

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THE BACHELOR LIFE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 19, 1997)

The bachelor life of Max Loudon is revealed in the albums he carefully filled with snapshots he took of his many adventures. Included are records of joyful events: the spontaneous November 1918 Armistice Day celebrations on the streets of downtown, the arrival of the circus to the lower Queen Anne fields (now Seattle Center), and skating on Green Lake during the long freeze of 1916.

Born in Nebraska in 1881, Loudon dropped out of Omaha High School at the age of 15 and headed west to Seattle. Here his personable intelligence (aka charm) carried him through an assortment of vocational adventures including manager of a semi-professional baseball team, traveling superintendent for a grocery wholesaler in Montana, manager of the general store for a logging company in Yacolt, Wash., and a trip north to Nome, Alaska, seeking – what else? – gold. As revealed in his letters home, this last adventure soon turned hellishly cold when his steamer stuck in the ice for two weeks.

Here in Seattle, the young Loudon cut his commercial teeth working nine years for Schwabacher Bros. Wholesale Grocers. He became warehouse superintendent for the Grocetaria Stores, in charge of all departments. His salary – whopping for the time – was $150 a month. Enough, perhaps, to support his sporting life as an amateur boxer for the Seattle Athletic Club, an expert fencer, a medalist marksman and – at least from the evidence of his albums – a womanizer.

Loudon’s subjects here are two of a dozen or more Stewart and Holmes Drugstore employees he posed on the alley trestle that runs above the railroad tracks entering the southern end of the city’s railroad tunnel, below Fourth Avenue and Washington Street. Of all the distaff subjects gathered for his alley shoot, these were most preferred; he took several snapshots of both, together and separate. Loudon did not, unfortunately, identify either of them.

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5-CLUSTER STANDARDS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 9, 1994)

The most likely subject for this official photograph of the city’s Public Works Department is the street light. “Seattle’s cluster lighting system is one of the finest in existence,” the lighting department’s 1911 report said. “This design gives a beautiful effect of festoons of decorative lights along the sidewalks . . . The illumination, which is ample, is produced by using 50-watt tungsten lamps fed from a small transformer in the pole base.”

This pole transformer, a Seattle City Light innovation, was quickly adopted nationwide. It allowed use of low-voltage lamps that gave over 2,000 hours’ life. At the time of the 1911 report there were 1,631 poles lighting 25 miles of city streets; more than two-thirds were five-ball clusters like this one.

This view along Third Avenue South looks north across Main Street. The Seattle Fire Department’s headquarters is at the northwest corner, far left. The station’s third story was added in 1912, dating this photograph between that year and 1914, when construction began on the here not yet apparent City County building at Third and Jefferson.  (You will find it in many of the posing shots on third, at and near the top.)

The slice of the five-story sign just beyond the fire station is painted on the brick south wall of Stewart and Holmes Drug Company’s manufacturing headquarters, advertising its products and services, which roamed well beyond drugs to laundry and cannery supplies.

One block north on Third, on the southeast corner of its intersection with Washington Street, is the Union Hotel. This four-story structure has been recently renovated by the Downtown Emergency Service Center.

In 1928 the Third Avenue sidewalk south of Main Street was replaced by the pavement of Second Avenue, which was extended then to connect with the train depots on Jackson Street. (An displace of those changes recorded from the Smith Tower follows below.) The regrade also destroyed the fire department’s headquarters, which that year moved to its present location one block west on Main Street.

TWO VIEWS LOOKING SOUTH FROM THE SMITH TOWER – SHOWING THE CHANGES MADE FOR THE SECOND AVENUE EXTENSION, 1928-29.

[NOTE: Both views include – by arrangement – far left a glimpse of our sidewalk on the east side of 3rd Ave. S. between Washington and Main streets.  CLICK to ENLARGE!]

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Ten years before its speedy 1924 conversion into the Hollywood Tavern, this “English chateau restaurant and apartment hotel” opened in as the Northold Inn.  Sitting before their $1.00 table d’hote (a set menu with a fixed price) dinners, the guests attending its 1914 opening New Years Eve party were serenaded by George Hagstrom’s orchestra, and fussed over by the Inn’s gregarious manager, C.S. Colegrove.

The Northold and its English teatime environment was Colegrove’s inspiration.  He was also the manager of the Fraser-Paterson Department Store’s Tea Room. (It was next door, to the right, at the corner of University and Second Ave.) Judging by its own promotions, the new department store’s “refined luncheon resort” quickly became the favorite of Seattle women.”  Encouraged by the popularity of his tearoom, and with the “mind of an idealist,” Colegrove built this deceptively big English ringer in an “early craftsman style” and then “flooded it with good cheer, the warmth of a massive fireplace, big black leather settees and deep carpets.”  And more tea.

The quick change of ‘24 from Northold to Hollywood was done with the founder Colegrove’s blessings.  “It will be continued along exactly the same lines.” (Curiously, the tavern was but one part of a “greater Hollywood” that included Hollywood Farm, which claimed “one of the greatest herds of pure-bred Holstein cows in the country.”) The tavern’s advertised prices crashed with the Great Depression. A 1932 ad promises “Talk of the town full course dinners served every day – for 50 cents.”  Neil McMillan, the tavern’s owner, died early in 1937, the year of our W.P.A. tax photo.  A “for rent” sign is posted above the scrawl of the photograph’s tax information.  Hollywood Tavern has gone dark.

During WW2 the persevering landmark was mobilized first as a U.S.O. girls dormitory and then after the war as the American Legion’s 40 et 8 Club headquarters. As such it served the Legion for more years than it was an Inn and Tavern combined.  In 1975 food service returned with a feudal plan.  In an unwitting parody of founder C.S. Colegrove’s English tea-room, the new Mediaeval Inn resembled a feudal banqueting hall in which costumed “wenches” served mead (honey wine), Cornish game hens, potatoes and crusty bread while minstrels sang ballads and told bawdy jokes. The presiding Lord allowed customers to eat with a knife only, unless they sang for a fork.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, beside the few clips and adverts sprinkled about the main text above, a few neighborly subjects used in past Pacific features.   First the Walker Building, which was on the same block as the Northold Inn, at Second Ave., its west end.

The streaked lights from the headlights of passing cars in the exquisite night shot of Benaroya Hall by photographer James Fred Housel seem to repeat the trolley tracks in the 1904 photograph of the Walker Building at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and University Street. (Historical photo courtesy of MUSEUM of HISTORY and INDUSTRY / Contemporary photo by James Fred Housel, Courtesy of Seattle Symphony Orchestra.)

MUSICAL CORNER

(Appears in Pacific in 2004)

When it was razed in the late 1980s the brick and stone Walker Building at the northeast corner of University Street and 2nd Avenue was nearly as old as the 20th Century.   Named for Cyrus Walker, the famed lumberman, it was completed in 1903 so the construction noise most likely did not interrupted the first performance of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra which was late in the same year, the 29th of December.  The performance space was itself new: Christiansen Hall in the then nearly new Arcade Building directly across Second Avenue.

The first Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO) was a 24-instrument ensemble led by the violinist/conductor Harry West.  Probably most of the players also taught their instruments to enthused youth – and students were often excited to learn given the great importance then of live music.  Most likely many of the players also performed in one or more of the theatre and restaurant orchestras that then stocked the energetic Seattle music scene.  So there were certainly many good players among the first twenty-four under West and the SSO must of sounded quite fine its first night.

It is one of those most common of ironies – those of place – that the orchestra would eventually wind up in Benaroya Hall, its first permanent home directly across Second Avenue , 95 years after West first raised his baton.  This season, of course, the SSO celebrated its centennial at Benaroya Hall, but also at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, during its four-city East coast Centennial Tour this past spring.

Readers who known their downtown will remember what a strange corner this was in the few years between the razing of the Walker and the raising of Benaroya.  Plans for a 60-floor scraper as part of a proposed Marathon Block were abandoned because of the massive overbuilding of office space at the time.  In its place a wide sward was planted, and near its green center a temporary entrance to the bus tunnel resembled an opening to a civil defense bunker.  (Buried in my daily snaps are more than one recording of this – somewhere.)

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UNIVERSITY STREET – LOOKING WEST from 3^rd AVE.

(First appeared in Pacific, June 2, 1991)

There’s nothing cosmetic about this cityscape. The·photographer has recorded a candid capture of what University·Street west from Third Avenue looked like at the turn of the century. Less regard is given the architecture. (The modest homes on the north side of the street – to the right – where the Northold Inn was later raised appear in the early – penultimate – look up University Street across Second Avenue.)

While not dominating the scene, the Hotel Brooklyn, on the left, may look familiar. It is one of the few uptown (that is, north of Pioneer Square) 19th-century brick piles that survive. The hotel was completed in 1889, the year of the city’s “Great Fire.”

Construction on the Arlington Hotel also began before the tower, and its foundation helped stop the northerly spread of the flames along the waterfront.  The Arlington tower shows here just to the right of the Brooklyn and at the southwest corner of First Avenue and University Street, the site now for Harbor Steps.

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Above: Author-editor Hall Will photographed this parade scene looking south on Third Avenue from Union Street sometime between the Spring of 1947 and mid-1949 when the onset of polio forced him to put aside his photography.  (Photo courtesy of Hal and Shirley Will)  Below: The relatively recent construction of Benaroya Hall replaced a full block of mostly brick low and mid-rise commercial buildings, which in the early 20th century had taken the places of pioneer structures, including a few clapboard homes like the Charles Denny Home at the southwest corner of Third and Union, printer here at the bottom of this “now-then.”

HAL WILL’S PARADE

(Appeared in Pacific in 2008)

In February 1947, only a few months after Hal Will returned from his WW2 duty as a 20 year old army tug boat captain in the Philippines, he enrolled in the charter classes of the Northwest Institute of Photography.   The new school’s labs and classrooms were in the University Building, seen here in the “then” at the northwest corner of 3rd Avenue and University Street, left of center.

Hal took this photograph of American Legion members parading on Third Avenue sometime after enrolling and before he was inflicted in 1949 at the age of 23 with a life-long crippling case of polio.

Will’s photograph is spread over two pages in the Magnolia Historical Society’s most recent production, “Magnolia, Making More Memories.”  Hall is one of the about forty authors that were involved in the creation of this hefty nearly 400-page book.  His essay “Early Railroad Days: Interbay” shines with both his wit and his own photographs.  And his second contribution,  “Bad Judgment in Cebu”, is a wise and droll recounting of his army life in the Philippines.

In the maritime and heritage communities Hal Will is famous hereabouts as the founder and editor of the Sea Chest, a well-wrought periodical associated with the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society.  (The PSMHS was founded in 1948, or about the time Hal recorded this view with his 4×5 inch view camera.)  In the week before this last Christmas and after a short illness the erudite 81-year-old died.  Many others and I will miss his good wit, and frequent contributions to community history.

Fortunately, his fine writing – and he wrote a lot – can still be repeatedly enjoyed.  And so can our memory of him.

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DENNY HILL & HOTEL From Near 3rd & UNIVERSITY

(First appeared in Pacific, April 28, 1985.)

Luther Griffith is one of Seattle’s rarely remembered capitalists. In the 1890s he was out to sell street railways. For promotion purposes, Griffith put together a photo album featuring the work of pioneer photographer Frank LaRoche, a name that’s easy to remember because he wrote it on his negatives.  It’s not clear whether LaRoche recorded the photos on assignment for Griffith, or if the entrepreneur focused on the photographer’s work because it served his purpose so well. Griffith’s album shows off a Seattle that’s progressive, forward thinking and up to date.

The subject here is one example from the album. Taken in 1891, it flaunts one of early Seattle’s main urban symbols. There looming above the city in the distant half-haze is the elegant bulk of the Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. LaRoche must have set his tripod on the dirt of Third Avenue, one hundred yards of so south of Union Street, but he was safe. Compared to the modern race of internal combustion that is’ now Third, in 1891 it was a pleasantly relaxed but dusty grade where more than one horse and buggy (on the right) could casually park facing the wrong way on the two-way street.

The second tower in this scene (left of center) sits atop the brick Burke Block at the northwest corner of Third and Union. On the main floor the plumber and steam fitter A.F. Schlump did his business. Across Union is a mansion-sized home, a vestige of the old Single-family neighborhood. By 1891, this 1300 block of Third Avenue between University and Union streets was packed with diverse commerce. There was a dressmaker, a hairdresser, three rooming houses, a music teacher, a mustard manufacturer, a retail druggist, a wholesale confectioner, two tobacconists, a second-hand store, a restaurant, a sewing machine store and Mrs. Cox, who listed herself in the 1891 Polk Business Directory as simply, “artist.”

Also, at the Union Street end of this block was the Plummer Building, the two-story clapboard with the three gables on the photo’s right. This building housed more retailers plus a saloon and the Seattle Undertakers.

Ten years later, the progress on Third Avenue got so intense the Plummer Building was picked up and moved two blocks north to Pine Street to make way for the Federal Post Office. The post office is still on the Union Street side and pictured on the right of the “now” photo [when we once more bring it to light].

Beginning in 1906, Third Avenue’s forward-look started sighting through Denny Hill, which in the next four years would be nearly leveled as far east as 5^th Avenue allowing the street to pass through the Denny Regrade with barely a rise. The grand hotel, LaRoche’s subject and Griffith’s symbol, was razed with the hill.

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MACKINTOSH MANSE: THIRD & UNIVERSITY – Southeast Corner

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 24, 1988)

[As the first line hints, the below was first composed while Third Ave. was being tunneled for the transit.] The current commotion along and below Third Avenue is a mere inconvenience compared with the upheavals that accompanied the 1906-07 regrading on the downtown street.  Imagine having to live next door to such disarray. That was the fate Angus and Lizzie Mackintosh, who built the mansion on the right at the southeast comer of Third Avenue and University Street. Not only did the work disrupt their view and domestic quietude, it left their home perched more than twenty feet higher than the regarded street.

Angus, a native of Ontario, and Lizzie, one of the pioneering “Mercer Girls” who came here in 1866 when the male-female ratio was 9-to-l, met while Lizzie was working as the first woman enrolling clerk in the state’s House of Representatives in Olympia. Working to promote lumber mills, railroads and banks, the couple had built enough of a nest egg to finance construction of the mansion in 1887.

The stately home had seven rooms downstairs, five upstairs and three quarters for servants under the roof. In 1907, soon after the regrade was completed, Bonney-Watson funeral directors, moved into the mansion.  As a sign that death has no end, the mortician was the second-longest continuously operating business in Seattle.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was first until its own recent passing. In 1928 the Northern Life Tower (later renamed the Seattle Tower), which many still consider the most beautiful office building in Seattle, was erected at the site.

(click to enlarge photos)

The Arabian, at 7610 Aurora Ave. N., opened in 1925, with still some silent films and sometimes on stage eccentric uses that were a vestige of vaudeville.  When those performing live were also north end neighbors they could fill the seats.   For instance . . .

On October 21, 1926 W. O. Hammer, accompanied by a brass band and a motorcar parade, pushed Tom Egan, secretary of the West Green Lake Commercial Club, in a wheelbarrow up Aurora Ave to the stage of the Arabian Theatre.  Hammer had bet Egan that Jack Dempsey would keep his heavy weight crown.  He was wrong.  Gene Tunney won and Hammer paid before his neighbors.

The city’s new light standards were installed on Aurora in the spring of 1927 and celebrated with a “Light-Bearers Parade” to the Arabian Theatre.  Our subject from 1925 or ‘26 is too early to include them, and Jean’s “now” too late as well.  The Seattle Times clip, below, however shows one.  (Click it TWICE, to enlarge.)

On Jan. 15, 1928 while the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was performing on the piano for members of the Pro Music Society at the Olympic Hotel, the Patricia Perry School of the Dance was on the Arabian stage with a variety of dances as prologue to the motion picture “The Fair Co-ed.”  (I knew Patricia Perry, but not Bela Bartok.)

During the fall of 1928 the Arabian Theatre ran “beside” Clara Bow’s picture “Ladies of the Mob” an on-stage contest in the art of dancing the then popular Varsity Drag.  “Here is the drag, see how it goes, Down on the heels, up on the toes.  That’s the way to do the Varsity Drag.”  For another kind of “drag,” the following April 9 and 10, sixty “substantial business and professional men” – Masons all – dressed and deported like Broadway chorus girls on the Arabian stage for a benefit show they named “Vampin Babies Frolic.”

Mabel Randall, the Arabian’s last manager, also gave its stage to neighborhood extras, like the theatre parties and benefit style shows that were matched with appropriate films.  The Arabian screen went dark in 1954, but its stagecraft was resurrected late in 1955 when evangelist John H. Will’s Northwest Salvation and Healing Campaign, advertised its opening services for Dec. 11 at the “Old Arabian Theatre.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yes Jean as is our way a few more photos and features from the neighborhood. First a look north thru the same scene as at the top but more than a quarter century later – early in the silent 1950s – and shot from on high by a photographer from the city’s public works department.   He or she was probably perched in a cherry picker or platform made for checking utilities rather than from a big ten-footer pole, like your own.

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PAVED SPEEDWAY – AURORA at 84^th (Looking South) 1931

(First appeared in Pacific, March 31, 1991)

In 1931, Aurora Avenue was a calm thoroughfare, where cars could safely

park along its border and bakeries were more common than cut-rate motels. But the billboards (then promoting sliced bread) were a premonition of things to come for the North End street.

When state officials decided to direct a high bridge over the Lake Washington Ship Canal north toward Aurora Avenue, the byway would begin its transformation into a primary strip of highway. Its metamorphosis was assured in 1933, when the new speedway was cut through Woodland Park, despite spirited protests led by The Times.

Albert and Birdie Collier witnessed the change. They operated the Delicious Bakery  at 8320 Aurora Ave. N., left of center, and lived just across Aurora at 938 83rd St. Each year, they saw more passing cars and had to Increase their caution crossing the street.

Quickly, Aurora was becoming the busiest North End arterial. In a two-month period in 1937, more than 400 people were arrested for traffic violations on the speedway. When a meeting was called to discuss the problem, Harry Sutton, chief of the Police Department’s Traffic Violations Bureau, lamented, “Give a man a chance to drive 35 miles an hour under the law and he will drive 55 miles an hour.”

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WOODLAND STUMPS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 31, 1993)

Looking north through the center of Woodland Park across a-field of stumps on May 17, 1932, by a photographer from the Seattle Engineering Department. Three days shy of one year later, the first traffic rolled on what its enthusiasts called the “Great Aurora Highway.”

When an ordinance permitting the park’s bifurcation was passed by the Seattle City Council over the objections of the city’s park board, a front-page battle to save the park ensued. The leading advocate of this preservation and opponent of “park vandalism” was The Seattle Times.

“It is proposed,'” The Times editors wrote, “to build an 8,800-foot speedway 106 feet wide over a hill 293 feet high, and through 2,400 feet of the central portion of Woodland Park to save 25 seconds of time required to drive the 9,850 feet by way of Stone Way.” The Times figured the difference was ‘ about the length of three city blocks, and also noted that 107 homes would be sacrificed to the thruway.

Much earlier, When the Olmstead brothers were designing the city’s boulevards and parks, they included West Green Lake Way, connected with Stone Way, as the principal route for north-south traffic to circumvent Woodland Park. The landscapers proposed that the undeveloped center of Woodland Park be saved for, among other things, the expansion of the park’s zoological garden. In the meantime the Olmsteads recommended the old-growth forest in the park’s undeveloped interior be preserved.

Here are the stumps. Obviously, the campaign to save the park failed. The highway was approved by public vote. Answering an imaginary commuter’s question, “What will I get out of the Aurora thruway?” The Times answered, “A reminder at least twice a day that you sacrificed Woodland Park.”

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TWIN T-P’s 70th

[The feature that follows were first published in 2007 and made note then of its 70th birthday]

In the spring of 1937 the shining steel towers of the Twin T-Ps were lifted above Aurora Avenue.  They were strategically set across this speedway section of Highway 99 from the east shore of Green Lake. The Teepee, of course, is a form etched in the imagination of every American child and so this fanciful architectural corn (or maize) could be expected to lure a few matured kids called motorists off the highway.

Once inside the shiny example of Native American housing – the pointed and portable type used by the plains Indians – visitors were suddenly transported to the Northwest coast, for the decorations were done not on plains motifs but rather on designs like those we associate with totem poles, long houses, masks and spirit boxes.

Let’s imagine that almost everyone has eaten some of the regular American food at the T-Ps.  I did once and ran into my old friends Walt Crowley and Marie McGaffrey who live nearby.  If memory serves, they were enjoying prime rib.  Walt would later write twice about the Twin T-P’s for historylink.org, the web site of state history he directs.  The first essay (#2890) is a good summary of the exceptional story of this symmetrical piece of nutritious kitsch.  Walt’s second essay (#3719) is a lament following the July 31, 2001 early morning bulldozing of the landmark.   (If you so use the computer do it now – please.)

Jean has a more recent recording of this corner fill with what seems to be a new Condo.  I’ll urge him to find and insert it.  My black-white look dates from 2007.

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GREEN LAKE’S NORTHWEST SWIMMING BEACH

In 1921, Seattle’s health department closed Green Lake to swimmers. The seven-foot lowering of the lake 10 years earlier had accelerated its natural tendency to become a swamp. In 1922, runoff from the nearby Green Lake and Maple Leaf reservoirs was diverted into the lake to freshen it. The south end of the lake became especially stagnant with aromatic algae. So, also in 1922, the Seattle Parks Department carefully disassembled its bathhouse and moved it from the southwest (Woodland Park) corner of the lake one mile north to the crowded beach scene recorded here by Asahel Curtis.

The new beach was sanded and made sporting with a couple of large off-shore rafts, one with a high-dive platform. With this, the park department created a decent beach for swimmers. The more-or-less unisex swim gear of the time did not encourage sunbathing and, anyway, a “good tan” was a carcinogenic desire not yet widely cultivated.

Soon after the swimmers moved north, however, their end of the lake developed the same algae soup that gave the lake its name. By 1925 the beach was closed again, and Dr. E.T. Hanley of the city’s health department made the radical proposal that Green Lake be drained so that the muck on its 20,000-year-old bottom might be scraped away. After three years of tests and debates, Hanley’s plan was abandoned, as well as another drastic proposal that would have transformed Green Lake into a salt lake, with water pumped in from Elliott Bay.

Rather, in 1928, temporary relief was engineered by a combination of chlorinating the Licton Springs water that fed the lake; sprinkling the lake’s surface with copper sulfate, an algae retardant, and increasing the feed of fresh water from the Green Lake reservoir’s runoff.

At this beach, 1928 was also a big year for changes ashore. With the 1927-to-1928 construction of the brick bathhouse the shoreline was terraced with a long line of gracefully curving concrete steps. The same modern mores that exposed the skin disposed of the need for bathhouses. The bathhouse, which in its first year, 1928, serviced 53,000 people, was converted in 1970 into a 130-seat theater. Now bathers come to the beach in their swim suits.  Given the recurring restraint of the “Green Lake Itch,” many of them stay on the beach.

Above: a look at the beach showing raft with diving tower and Green Lake Primary School on the far shore.  Below: a look back to shore from the diving tower.

The view looks south from near the northwest “corner” of the lake. The still impressive timber of Woodland Park marks most of the horizon. On the far left is the profile of Lincoln High School and its tall chimney. This is another Price photo.

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McAllister’s Bikes where Wiwona meets Aurora.

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(click to enlarge photos)

The intended subject here is almost surely the obvious one: two blocks of grass. From the intersection of 4th Avenue, on the right, and Harrison Street (its sidewalk) on the left, the view looks north-northwest to a Queen Anne Hill horizon.

One long block away, and near the scene’s center, rests the Troy Laundry, a two-story factory of suds at the northeast corner of Nob Hill Avenue and Republican Street. For Pacific readers who remember last week’s Belgian Waffles, the laundry is only one block east (here to the right) of where that Century 21 confectionary was built in 1962.  (In the now shot the laundry would be in the high seats of the High School Stadium’s north side seating)

Fred Cruger, our reliable motorcar collector-historian, has helped us date this scene.  With the aid of a blow-up, Fred studied the Fords parked near the laundry, and recommends “1925 or 26.”  With those years in hand we imagine that the historical photographer understood that her or his record might well prove to be the last unobstructed look thru David and Louisa Denny’s swale.  It was here that those first pioneers cultivated their garden, one large enough to help feed the few hundred citizens living nearby in a village – Seattle – distinguished by Puget Sound’s first steam sawmill.

Bertha Landes, Seattle’s first and so far only women mayor, was a powerful booster of what our unnamed photographer surely knew was coming: a Civic Field, Auditorium and Arena.  Elected in 1926 before the construction started, Her Honor was out of office in 1928 weeks before her civic center was dedicated.  (Without reelection, Mayoral terms then ran a mere two years.)

In altered forms Seattle’s cultural center of 1928 survives. Civic Field got the first revision, a 1947-48 remodel into the concrete stadium for mostly high school football and soccer Jean has “peeked into” with his repeat.  Recruiting his trusty ten-foot-pole Jean shot blind over a stadium wall.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yup Jean we will take a few looks into the pasture-potlatch acres and their transformations.  We may note as well that we have visited Seattle Center in past blog contributions, and hope that readers will use the keyword search available to call them back.  For  starters try “auditorium,” “Seattle Center,” “Century 21,” “Bumbershoot,” “David Denny,” “Food Circus,” “Space Needle,” “Coliseum,” and, we expect, many other keys.

We’ll next sample three looks south from the southern slope of Queen Anne Hill to the subject. The first is dated loosely “in the 1890s,” and next with certainty 1900, and the last from late in 1960.

Next, for comparison, a 1928 look from northwest from the south stands to the west end of Civic Field as a large crew was preparing its turf, followed by a Century 21 shot by Frank Shaw, which looks in the same direction, but not from the Civic Field stands but from the south stands of Memorial Stadium during Century 21.  For Shaw the scheduled event is a high wire act.

Century 21 was anticipated by the “Festival of the West.”  This sketch below appeared in The Times for Dec. 16, 1956 with a generous foot of copy beside it.  The short caption explained that the “World Fair Commission recommend (that is) be held in Seattle in 1960 and 1961.  Festival buildings would be grouped at Seattle’s Civic Center.  In addition, a monument symbolic of the festival would be erected on Duwamish Head.  Also planned is an amusement zone on tidelands west of Duwamish Head.” Rather than a Space Needle, the lights of Alki Point will do, and they are turned on at the top of this festive fantasy.  It is curious and pleasing how often the city’s enthusiasts for festivals & fun have turned their longing eyes to Duwamish Head and the tidelands beneath it. “]

We conclude with a piece of ephemera from Ron Edge’s collection.  It is a lovely green booklet celebrating Seattle’s then new civic center – the one built on David and Louisa Denny’s pasture in 1927-28 – and so the foundation for both Century 21 in 1962 and the Seattle Center campus that followed it.

(Mouse the Green Cover to call forth the full booklet.)

 

(please click to enlarge photos)

Opened in 1925 with 42 units – a mix of two and three room apartments, all of them appointed with Murphy In-A-Dor Beds – the Pontius Court Apartments were named for the pioneer family that first platted and sold most of the land that ascends from the lowlands of the Cascade neighborhood to the highlands of Capitol Hill.

Built with six floors on the side of the hill, the Eastlake Improvement Company noted that most of the 98 rooms in its new brick apartment building came with views.  Besides the sunsets over the Olympic Mountains, the renters looked down upon a blue-collar neighborhood accompanied by the recurring chorus of children at play.  Of its many churches at least three were Lutheran, and these steeples were mixed with laundries around the neighborhood’s one big primary school after which it was somewhat puzzlingly named.  With Capitol Hill in the way, even from the top floor of the Cascade School, one could not see its eponymous mountains to the east.

The grandest and most invigorating way to move between these contrasting neighborhoods was by way of the Republican Hill Climb, showing itself here on the right.  Built in 1910, the climb went through three artfully designed half-block sections that complimented the distinguished homes to its sides.  A half-century later two-thirds of the stairway – the part between Eastlake and Melrose Avenues – was demolished for the Seattle Freeway, effectively breaking in two the greater Pontius neighborhood.

Of course the freeway took the Pontius Court too.  For its last listing in the Times classifieds, the apartment repeated some of its old sales song about a brick building with an elevator and “nicely furnished 2 room apartments” with views for – at the end – $65 a month.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes JEAN, beginning with the first three photos directly below.  Each is a link to former stories printed here that include subjects related to the Cascade neighborhood.  Ron Edge did the linking and he also pulled for us the most relevant of the several ca. 1960-61 aerials he has of the future path of the Seattle I-5 Freeway.   The part included here – after the three links – centers on the future freeway route north of Denny Way, which is at the bottom of the aerial.  Ron’s aerial presents a challenge to the reader to find – save for one – ALL of the “extra” features we will put up below it.  (Actually, some of these features also show up in the links above the aerial.)  We have limited our extra subjects to the eight number next.  See if you can find seven of them in the aerial. Again, they are all there except for one which just barely misses being included! Remember to double-click the aerial to search it in detail.

1. The charmed alley named Melrose Place North

2. The Republic Hill Climb

3. The Victorian vestige at the northwest corner of Republican and Eastlake.

4. The Moscow Restaurant

5. St. Demetrios Parish

6. St. Spiridon Parish

7. Immanuel Lutheran Church

8. Cascade School

(We might have put up a score more, except that we anticipate those “nightybears.”  But these eight we may get up by 3 A.M.)

Remember to double or triple click RON’S AERIAL for your search.

DIVE INTO the Aerial below by CLICKING it TWICE

TAKE the CASCADE CHALLENGE!!!

Fine the Subjects Featured Above and Below.

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When Werner Lenggenhager recorded the above view of Melrose Place North in 1955 he, no doubt, knew of its then likely fate – witnessed below.   (Historical pix courtesy of Seattle Public Library and the “now” recorded by our Jean.)

“COUNTRY ROAD”

The naturalists among you may be able to figure whether these are the leaves of summer or fall.  The photographer, Werner Lenggenhager, made his print in October 1955.  It is so stamped.  However, he may have recorded the photograph weeks or even months earlier.

On the back Lenggenhager has also titled his print “County Road.”  It was this photographer’s calling to record the doomed present, that is the old parts of the cityscape that were equally dilapidated and cherished.  It was that poignant combination that got his attention.   Almost certainly Lenggenhager understood the irony of his title.

By 1955 this “County Road” was already marked for the preferred path of the Seattle Freeway.  That year the state passed a toll road act intending to have drivers pay directly for the expressways for which they were increasingly clamoring.  One year later Dwight D. Eisenhower made every driver nation-wide pay for it.  For the new highway system Ike committed the federal government to paying a whopping 90 percent with an increase in gas taxes — not piecemeal penny-a-mile tolls.

This is Melrose Place North, the charming alley that ran north from Denny Way two blocks to Thomas Street between Melrose and Eastlake Avenues.   After an admittedly quick inquiry at the municipal records “morgue” I was able to find for this street only a 1910 plan for a proposed sewer that was evidently installed, for it is recorded in the 1912 Baist’s Real Estate Atlas for Seattle.  The 1910 plan indicates that grade changes to the alley as deep as 12 feet would be required for the laying of the sewer.  So this “Country Road” has been “improved.”

By my thinking Werner Lenggenhager gave our community one of its greatest gifts.  He gave his photographs to the libraries.  Examples of his work are collected at the University of Washington Northwest Collection, the Museum of History and Industry Library, and the central branch of the Seattle Public Library.  This last – the SPL – has thousands of examples of his sensitive exploration of this city from the early 1950s into the 1980s. They are all prints – so far as I have been able to determine no one seems to know what happened to the negatives.

Let Werner Lenggenhager be an example to other intrepid recorders.  Before your relatives sell your work – whether it is ten examples or ten thousand – in a yard sale get it into an archive or library.  It is time we started collecting images like this one for public use.

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REPUBLICAN HILL CLIMB

(First appeared in Pacific on Oct. 14, 1984.)

Included on our imagined list of lost places is the Republican Hill Climb. This elegant stairway was designed to reach higher than the hill. Its grand qualities were meant to be enjoyed for their own sake. And for half-a-century they were. The climb’s design involved three half-block sections. Each was comprised of two single stairways and one double, or branching staircase that circumvented a curving wall.

This view looks east from Eastlake Ave. N. The two men in the scene have apparently chosen to take the northern side of the hill climb’s first set of branching stairs. They might then have continued on another half block to Melrose Ave., which is just beyond the second curving wall. The very top of the steps is a half block beyond that, and, on the horizon, a third wall that marks it can be seen, barely, just above the second wall. (This top one-third of the Republican Hill Climb is still intact and in use.)

The Republican Hill Climb was approved “as built” by the Board of Public Works on February 25, 1910. This photograph was probably taken soon after that. The landscaping here is still nascent. Fifty years later, the Times published a different photo (not included here). It reveals that in its last days this Republican Hill Climb was pleasantly crowded by tall trees and bushes. The Times caption stated simply, “This stairway will be torn out when the freeway grading begins.”

Of course, that “dream road” not only ended the steps from Eastlake but also sacrificed a very invigorating connection between two neighborhoods, Cascade below and Capitol Hill above. But, as City Engineer R. W. Finke explained in 1952, soon after this freeway route was proposed, “Freeway traffic moves at relatively high speed without interference from cross-movements…Pedestrians, who are a constant hazard to city driving, are entirely removed.”  Pedestrians and much else.

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At the northwest corner of Eastlake Ave. and Republican Street this delightful but mildly anachronistic residence survived until 1961 when big changes across Eastlake – the construction of the Seattle Freeway – razed it for a three story commercial structure that was for years home to the Fishing and Hunting News.

VICTORIAN VESTIGE

When it was built in 1890 this steep-roofed Victorian was but one of the 2160 structures raised in Seattle during that first full boom year following the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.  Far to the north of the burned business district the Cascade Neighborhood home was “already somewhat retardataire for its time.”   That description is from Dennis Andersen, one of Seattle’s more productive architectural historians.

Andersen first discovered this photograph in the 1970s when the then still young scholar took care of the University of Washington Library’s collections of historical photography and architectural ephemera.  It is one of several photographs held there that were recorded (ca.1911) along Eastlake Avenue by James P. Lee — for many years the Seattle Department of Public Works photographer of choice.

The historian’s “retardataire” remark refers principally to the ornamental parts of the structure, it fanciful roof crest and the beautified bargeboards of its steep corner gable.  (We see from the photo below taken of its rear façade as late as the 1950s that those wheels with spokes were attached there as well.)

Andersen both reflects and laments. “It looks like a pattern book house to me and really more at home in the 1870s or early 1880s.  Also the protruding corner bay is an unusual feature that may have been added to enliven the design a bit.  It’s a great photograph of a house that we are sorry to see is gone.”

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Werner Leggenhager took his photograph of the Moscow Restaurant at 7365 Lakeview Blvd. E. in the mid-1950s. He looks to the west. With the construction of the Seattle Freeway (I-5) here in the early 1960s, Lakeview Blvd was routed on a high bridge that crosses above I-5 and offers one of the few accesses to Capitol Hill.

The MOSCOW RESTAURANT on LAKEVIEW

For more than 35 years the Moscow Restaurant was a fixture for the Russian-American community that settled in the Cascade and Eastlake corridor on the western slope of Capitol Hill. In 1923 it opened to the aromas of borsht, beef stroganoff, jellied pigs’ feet, Turkish coffee and Russian pancakes.

In 1923 and 1924 a tide of White Russians who had fought the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian revolution landed on the West Coast of the United States. Among them was Prince Riza Kuli Mirza, who painted a fresco of a Russian winter on a wall in the restaurant. Jacob Elshin, another soldier artist connected with the Imperial Russian Guard, designed the fanciful exterior as a candy house from a popular Russian fairy tale. Elshin soon opened a studio by producing hand-painted greeting cards, stage scenery, religious icons and an occasional oil painting. In the late 1930s while Elshin was painting murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration for libraries in Renton and the University District, the original owners of the restaurant sold it to Nicholas and Marie Gorn.

In 1958 Seattle Times columnist John Reddin visited the restaurant to share in the Gorns’ plight: the coming Seattle freeway. Nicholas Gorn asked, “How can we ever replace this atmosphere which is so vital to our business?” Of course, they could not. By the time Gorn and Elshin lost their candy house to the freeway, the artist was one of the better known painters in Seattle.

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SAINT DEMETRIOS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 12, 1986)

The Cascade neighborhood, squeezed in between Fairview Avenue North and -Interstate 5, is not the quiet, working-class district it once was. Neither is one of its most distinctive landmarks – the St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church at the southeast corner of Yale Avenue and Thomas Street – the stately structure it used to be.

Dedicated on Nov. 21, 1921, around the time the historic photo was taken, St. Demetrios was built partly with donations by communicants who worked in nearby Greek restaurants. The sanctuary cost around $50,000 – about the same amount the Overall Laundry Service paid for the building in 1963 when the congregation moved to its dazzlingly modern Byzantine house of worship on Boyer Street. The Cascade neighborhood’s fortunes have fared little better. Light industry and businesses have encroached on the community, filling it with warehouses, parking lots and truck traffic.

Although the church survives today, it has long since been stripped of its twin octagonal cupolas, and its stained glass has been boarded up. The building is now used as a warehouse.  There is growing interest within the Greek community to retrieve St. Demetrios for renovation and use as a Greek museum.

[Written in 1988, the above text’s hopes for preservation was trumped by R.E.I. Recreation Equipment Coop purchased most of the block and the southeast corner of Thomas and Yale is now fit with its parking lot. The structure should not be confused with the Russian Orthodox St. Spiridon Cathedral, still used for worship just one block north on Yale Avenue, and next in line for its own feature.]

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SAINT SPIRIDON

(First appeared in Pacific, May 286, 1991)

The nine crosses of St. Spiridon were ritually raised to the church’s now-familiar nine domes in the summer of 1938. A few weeks later the new Orthodox sanctuary was dedicated. Each member – nearly all were Russians – rang the new church’s bell.

Today, as in 1895 when the St. Spiridon parishioners moved into their first church on Lakeview Boulevard, the congregation is more ethnically diverse. Then the congregation included Greeks, Russians, Serbians, Syrians, Bulgarians and Gypsies. Now, by way of marriage and conversion, more than a handful of Anglo-Saxons worship at the church on 400Yale Avenue North.

In 1916 the Greek community. Departed to found Saint Demetrios, also on Yale Avenue, one block south of St. Spiridon.  [See the feature directly above this one.] In the years following this friendly separation, St. Spiridon became a magnet for immigrants fleeing the Russian Revolution. In 1923 as many as 6,000 immigrants passed through this parish, most intending to settle in America.

Ivan M. Palmov, architect for the new St. Spiridon, was a Russian immigrant who graduated from the University of Washington’s School of Ardiitecture. This view of the work-in-progress on Palmov’s design is one snapshot among many included in a montage constructed by Isabel and John Kovtunovich, the latter a St. Spiridon member since his migration from Manchuria as a teenager in 1923. The montage is on display in artist Elizabeth Conner’s window installation at 911 Media Arts Center, three blocks south of St. Spiridon on 117 Yale Ave. North.   Conner’s work, titled “Cascade: Elusive Neighborhood,” will be on display until June 3. [A reminder that this was true only in 1991 when this feature first appeared.]

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IMMANUEL LUTHERAN

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 11, 1988)

Unlike most of Seattle’s first churches, Immanuel Lutheran did not follow its parishioners out to the neighborhoods as the inner city turned to business. This sanctuary survives and still serves the Cascade neighborhood, which transformed from a community of modest homes to a neighborhood of warehouses, light industry, and small businesses.

Immanuel was founded in the early 1890s by Norwegian immigrants who remained faithful to their .Lutheran traditions. When the present sanctuary was· dedicated in 1912, prominent clergy from Norway participated in the ceremony. Since then this church has been the site for thousands of baptisms, weddings and funerals. And most of them were officiated by the Pastor Hans Andreas Stub. Stub arrived in 1903 and stayed until 1957. The pastor and his wife, the church organist, were so bound to their church that ultimately they moved into it. When the gymnasium was added to the rear of the sanctuary in the early 1930s, the Stubs took an apartment above it.

Contemporary architectural historian, Dennis Andersen (himself a Lutheran minister) speculates that Stub probably had the church’s architect, Watson Vernon, prescribe wood rather than stone for the sanctuary to make it easier to attach future additions. As Stub joined his evangelistic urge to “preach the Gospel as wide as all outdoors” with a community activism, (during World War I, Immanuel Lutheran was a factory for both souls and bandages) his congregation grew to 2,000 by the late 1920s.

By then many of Stub’s parishioners, who were strung out between Richmond Beach and Federal Way, began turning to churches nearer home. That, combined with the steady conversion of the Cascade community into a business district, initiated Immanuel’s decline as the regional center of ministerial acts for orthodox Norwegian Lutherans.

Now [in 1988] the Immanuel congregation numbers about 200.  Their work focuses on helping the inner-city hungry and homeless.

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CASCADE SCHOOL

(First printed in Pacific January 28, 1990)

Cascade School rarely looked like this. The absence of children would have seemed strange to anyone living in the hubbub of the early-century Cascade neighborhood.

The school’s first classes began on Jan. 6, 1894, with 200 students, and Cascade School soon spread like the neighborhood. In 1898 the center section of 10 rooms was opened and in 1904 the north wing, here on the left, was added, bringing the number of the landmark’s spacious high-ceiling rooms to 24.  It still was not enough, so portables were added. By 1908, 26 teachers were busy instructing the neighborhood’s scholars.

Apparently the school’s most beloved instructor was its third principal, Charles Fagan. As described in the school district’s 1950 history, Fagan approached the ideal type of teacher. “A man of sterling character, a keen sense of humor and an understanding of children, beloved by pupils and associates . . . led the school for 33 years . . . ever searching for and adopting that which was good in the new, yet cherishing and holding to that which was good in the old.”

Fagan died in 1932. By then the school’s – and neighborhood’s – decline already had begun, as occupant-owned working-family homes gave way to warehouses, factories and apartment houses serving the nearby central business district.

Cascade School was closed in the spring of 1949, before the end of the school year. The earthquake that year struck on April 13, thankfully during spring vacation. The school was so weakened by the quake that its students were not allowed to re-enter the building. By then only seven rooms were in use, anyway. Eventually, the old school was tom down and replaced by a school-district warehouse.

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CONCLUDING with the puzzling pioneer PONTIUS RESIDENCE – before the mansion.

Times Aug 17, 1940 p14

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(click to enlarge photos)

In a Seattle Times Classified Ad for August 1913, C.W. Latham, a dealer of West Seattle real estate, asks “Don’t you think it is a good time to come over and select that home site by the seaside?”  Latham’s list of reasons for moving to Alki was its new “$200,000 bathing beach, $60,000 lighthouse, and $75,000 new school.”  And it was easy to reach the beach. Direct 5-cent trolley service from Seattle began in 1908.  The dealer gave no address for his office.  His instruction that it was “near the Schmitz Park Arch” was good enough.

The arch may have been better named the Schmitz Boulevard Arch for it was not in the park but rather faced the beach.  In 1908, one year after West Seattle was incorporated into Seattle, the 2,700 foot long boulevard was graded to the park proper, which was then first described as a 40 acre “cathedral” of old growth forest.  In 1908 the German immigrant-philanthropists Emma and Henry Schmitz donated both the park and the boulevard to the city.

A stripped log spans the arch’s columns made rustic with a facing of river rocks.  The construction is here still a work in progress, for the two additional posts to the sides have not yet been topped with their keg-sized stone flowerpots.  The new Alki School, seen here far left across Alki Field, is partially hidden behind one of these incomplete shorter columns.  The school’s primary classes opened in 1913, also the likely year for this pubic works photograph, which we first discovered in “West Side Story,” the 1987 history of West Seattle edited by author Clay Eals.

Clay, by now an old friend, along with David Eskenazi, Seattle’s baseball historian, lured Jean Sherrard and I to their annual summer softball game at Alki Field.  Jean and I, in turn, lured their players off the baseball field and onto 59th Avenue West.  Jean explains.

“Herding the two dozen or so cool cats that comprised Clay and David’s annual baseball game/gathering was an amiable chore. We ambled from the diamond to 59th and SW Lander during the seventh-inning stretch, following rousing choruses of “Take me out to the ballgame,” the National Anthem and unanimous sighs of regret at Ichiro’s loss. On this glorious July day, the amenable players, on command and between passing cars, spread themselves across the avenue with one caveat from the photographer: ‘If you can’t see me, I can’t see you’.”  Both David and Clay can be seen.  (They can be seen again below in a manly embrace in the 11th of Jean’s snapshots of the Alki Players.)

WEB EXTRAS

I’m posting a few thumbnails of the annual game, Paul. These include Lil Eskenazi, the team mascot, the oldest and youngest players, mighty Clay Eals at bat, pitcher Dave Eskenazi, T-shirt prizes, and a few more highlights.

And here’s the group portrait – enough players for two teams with more than three outfielders for each:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few related features from the past, and we may be repeating some of them – even from this blog.  Remember, rather than check we promote a policy of benign redundancy in which every story or feature or photo is made fresh by context.  We use the musical analogy of a leitmotif.   First, here’s another “artist’s league” group portrait from long ago – ca. 1976 – in Cascade Park or playfield, about two blocks east of The Seattle Times.  Remarkably, one of the players in this group has made it – with a borrowed glove – into Jean’s 2012 portrait straddling 59th Ave. SW at Lander Street. (Possibly this fond bit of local softball ephemera has also appeared here earlier.)

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Spud began on Alki Beach in 1935 as a seasonal sidewalk service in a clapboard shack.  Here in the late fall of 1938 it is boarded up until spring.  Now Spud is a year-round two-floored emporium that seats 80-plus lovers of deep-fried fish served with both tradition and a view of Puget Sound. [Historical view courtesy Washington State Archive, Bellevue Community College branch.]

SPUD on ALKI

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 16, 2003)

Brothers Jack and Frank Alger opened The SPUD on Alki Beach in June of 1935.  It was the beginning of summer but also the dead of the depression. At 10 Cent for a cardboard boat stuffed with fries and two big pieces of breaded ling cod the English-born Alger’s fish and chips serving was affordable, delicious and filling – but only in the warmer months.   In late fall the stand was closed and looked as it does here in this Works Progress Administration tax inventory photo recorded on Oct. 14, 1938.

To either side of SPUD in 1938 was a line of small beach homes, a few small apartments, Turner’s Shell station, Sea Home Grocery, Seaside Pharmacy, Alki Bakery, two groceries, a barber, a cobbler, a plumber, a tailor and four other eateries — two serving hamburgers and hot dogs and the other two fish and chips.  Most commonly on Alki Ave. s.w. were the vacancies but most importantly for the life of the beach was the Alki Natatorium Swimming Pool built across from Spud on pilings over the tides.

Following the war the shanty seen here was replaced with a nifty modern plant featuring portholes, and SPUD written in big bas-relief block letters over the front door.  Sheltered inside was a counter with four stools.   By then there were Spuds at Green Lake and Juanita as well.   The family continued to run the Alki Spud until Frank’s son Rick decided prudently at the age of 55 that he needed “to slow down and enjoy life more.”   Recently retiring to build their “dream home” on Hood Canal Rick and Terry Alger sold Spud to Ivar’s.

It was a both sensitive and poetic choice for also in 1938 when Ivar Haglund opened his first café – a fish and chips stand at the entrance to his aquarium on Pier 54 — the Alger brothers helped him.   Roy Buckley, Ivar’s first employee, learned his fish and chips while working at Spud.  All of them, Frank, Jack, Ivar and Roy were West Seattle lads.

While both Spud and Ivar’s survive in 2003, we may conclude by listing a few popular restaurants of 1938 that do not.  All are still savored in memory only.  Manca’s and the swank Maison Blanc; The Green Apple (home of the Green Apple Pie); The Jolly Rogers, The Dolly Madison Dining Room, and Mannings Coffee (several of them); the Moscow Restaurant and the Russian Samovar; Ben Paris downtown and Jules Maes in Georgetown; the Mystic Tea Cup, and the Twin T-P’s, Seattle’s Aurora strip landmark most recently lost to a (w)reckless midnight wrecker.

Two Examples of the Alki Ave now-then repeats, follow.

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In 1910 the city purchased much of the Alki Beach waterfront for the development of a groomed park and the seawall showing on the far right of the “now” scene.  Both views look east on Alki Beach from near 64th Avenue SW. About one century separates them. (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey – Contemporary photo by Jean, now nearly eight years past.)

ALKI BEACH BATHING

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 10, 2004)

This beach party scene comes from that most popular and yet unknown source: somewhere.   The beach is familiar enough – at the scene’s center is Duwamish Head marking the entrance to Elliott Bay – but neither the year nor the group nor the photographer whose back is to Alki Point are identified.

Depending upon who is throwing it this scene is a stone throw or two from the site where the Denny Party landed on Nov. 13, 1851.  Judging from the costumes and the development  (or rather lack of it) on the beach it was photographed about a half century later.  Most likely then if this is not a group from the neighborhood its members came to their picnic by boat for the electric trolley did not reach the beach until 1907, the year that West Seattle incorporated into Seattle.

By the time this driftwood tableau was photographed the attraction of Alki Beach as a summer retreat was already commonplace.  After regular steamer service was launched across Elliott Bay in 1877 the Daily Intelligencer advised “Now is a good time for picnics on the beach at Alki Point, so it will pay some of our new settlers to go over and see the spot where Messrs. Denny, Maynard and others lived during the ‘times that tried men’s souls.’” (I found this reference in “The West Side Story”, the big book of West Seattle history.)  We can only imagine what pains those we see frolicking and lounging here gave to the hardships of the founders.

There is a revealing similarity between the beach visitors in the “now” and the “then” scene: how few of them there are.  Alki Beach was frequented by throngs after the arrival of the trolley and the 1911 opening of Alki Beach Park with its oversized bathing and recreation pavilion  – 73,000 of them in 1913.  By comparison Jean Sherrard took this week’s “now” photograph last July 24, one of the hottest days of the summer.  While there are surely many more offshore attractions in 2004 then in 1913 when it comes to chilling dips we may also have become less robust.

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About 80 years separate the two later afternoon views on Alki Beach Park. Both look to the southwest from near the foot of 61st Avenue Southwest. (Historical photo courtesy of Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma, and, again, the contemporary one by Jean.)

ALKI BEACH PARK MAKE OVER

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 17, 2004)

Last week’s “then” looked northeast on Alki Beach.  This week’s record surveys the same stretch of sand but in the opposite direction.  Why spend two weeks on one beach?  Because about a quarter century separates the two historical photographs – last week’s and this one – and the changes are revealing.

As shown seven days ago a picturesque litter of driftwood distinguished the ca. 1900 West Seattle waterfront.  Here a quarter-century later the same waterfront is littered instead with bathers in wool suits and separated from a wide planked promenade by a seawall.   Actually the change from the irregular strand landed on by the founding settlers of 1851 to a groomed shoreline occurred very rapidly after the city condemned and purchased in 1910 the nearly 2500 feet of this shoreline between 57th and 65th Avenues Southwest.

In quick order the city built a large bathing pavilion (the historical photo is photographed from its roof) and the wide walk protected by the sturdy wall.  This radical makeover was dedicated on Independence Day 1911 and the following year the covered bandstand was extended over the tides.  That first year the city’s Parks Department estimated that 103,000 persons were attracted to the 75 concerts performed from its octagonal stage.

In 1925 the wooden seawall was replaced with a concrete one that was designed to protect the beach with a concave profile that inhibited the undertow of high tides.  In five years more the seawall was extended in the other direction (to the northeast) to within 150 feet of Duwamish Head.  At last in 1945 this gap was also acquired and improved to make a continuous recreational shore between the Head and the string of homes that lie between the public park and the closed – since 911 – Alki Point lighthouse (1913).

This chronology was gleaned from the book “West Side Story” and Don Sherwood’s unpublished (but often photocopied) manuscript history on local parks. (You can find it all on the Seattle Park Department’s web page – the history part of it.)  Much on Alki Beach history is featured in the exhibits and publications of the Log House Museum (one block from the beach at the corner of Stevens St. and 61st Avenue) and – as noted and shown above –  also in permanent display on the walls of the by now venerable SPUDS fish and chips on Alki Avenue.

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For the 19 years that the Alki Natatorium covered the beach it was closed and or in disrepair about as much as it was open to plungers and other recreations. The sprawling facility was camped on the tides side of Alki Avenue between 58th and Marine Avenues Southwest. Historical Pix courtesy of Don Myers.

ALKI “NAT”

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 6, 2005)

If we could but read the license plate on the bumper of the car (that looks very much like the one my dad drove the family west in from North Dakota in 1946) we could date this stark portrait of the Alki Natatorium.  Since much of the glass along the Alki Avenue façade is busted out we know that this scene was photographed sometime when the fitful entertainment center was not serving.

But when jumping there was more than swimming here.  For instance, the neon sign with the diving swimmer also advertises dining and dancing at the Shore Café.  And at least during the late 1930s when the Premier Amusement Company was running it, the “Nat” was also a skating rink.

This natatorium was the last of three built along the beach.  The first opened near Alki Point in 1905, but quietly closed while planning an “Oriental-styled” enlargement complete with “real Geisha Girls” serving tea and the “world’s largest swimming pool.”  The second opened in 1907 with Luna Park at Duwamish Head.  And although the amusement park was soon closed for introducing “lewd and disorderly behavior” the big indoor natatorium stayed open until 1931 when it was one of many targets torched by an arsonist that year.

Three years later this “Nat” opened a short distance up the beach from the Municipal Bath House towards the Head not the Point.  The “Nat” managed to survive the Great Depression but not a lawsuit by an injured swimmer in 1939.  In 1942 the Seattle Park’s Department renovated and reopened it in time for the preoccupations and parsimony of the war, and the place again closed.  Especially when dark, its great expanse of roof glass was pelted by naughty children (read boys) with rocks borrowed from the beach.  Several moves by the Parks Department and City Council to restore it following the war turned out to be good intentions only and in 1953 the Alki Natatorium was razed to the beach.

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Looking up the front steps of Seattle University’s McHugh Hall (the name and address are painted on the steps) we count nine coeds waving to a Seattle Times photographer.   The subject was first published in this paper on April 12, 1959, along side a second photo of the dorm’s oversized bathtub, both used to illustrate a feature written by Frances “Fran” Farrell and titled “It’s HOME to Seattle U. Co Ed’s”  Fran’s SU instructor in journalism advised her to write something for publication and the Times liked her story on McHugh Hall – her school dorm converted from the Anderson Mansion on First Hill  – so well that they gave it a full page.

In Jean Sherrard’s “repeat,” Fran, on the left, stands on newer Swedish Hospital steps beside Lois Crow.  With two others they shared a dorm room on the top floor – here upper right in the “then.”  Barbara Owen, one their upper-class quartet, waves from the open window.  Fran Farrell chose her subject with enthusiasm.  “Living in McHugh was a complete delight! As upper classmen we wanted someplace with more independence and camaraderie and we got it at McHugh.”  Freshmen and sophomores were housed in Marycrest, a new six-story dormitory.  It held none of the ornate charms of a lumber baron’s mansion.

Jean suggests that I ask readers if this week’s “now” is familiar.  He knows that it is.  As the “repeat” for a different story, we used this location recently – last May 19^th.  And there I – but not Jean – made a big mistake.  What I had learned years earlier – and earnestly believed until the Saturday before the Sunday publication – was that our May subject was Mrs. Anderson posing in her celebrated coach in front of her mansion here near the southeast corner of Minor and Columbia.  But – and alas – it was instead Mrs. Burke posing in her coach in front of her First Hill Manse, but three blocks away.  (If it helps, they remain short blocks.)  When Lois Crow, already an acquaintance of mine, discovered my mistake and shared it with me that Sunday morning, I was at least able to tell her that I too had discovered it a day earlier, but that it was too late to stop the presses.

We encourage you to read Fran Farrell Vitulli’s Times feature on the Anderson manse.  You can access it readily through the Time’s older archive (1900 to 1984) serviced on the Seattle Public Library web page.  It is a service that also offers what we may call the “joys of the key word search.”  You can also find a facsimile of Fran’s feature printed in Jean and my blog noted at the base of this writing.  And there, if you will, you may study my full confession, at once contrite and illustrated.

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Anything to add to this moving mea culpa, Paul?

Yes indeed, Jean!

As explained in this week’s feature, but more elaborately last May in this blog’s 11th hour anticipation or “catch” for the mistaken feature published in Pacific then – the one proposing to be about Mrs. Anderson and her famous First Hill carriage but actually showing Mrs. Burke and her’s, also on First Hill – here is the link to that May 17th feature.  It repeats, again, my full confession.  It also includes – perhaps as compensation Ron Edge suggests – a long list of other features having to do with First Hill and a few other large Seattle homes.   Thanks for your compassion.   To get to this replete repeat either CLICK THIS LINK or the picture below.  The picture is of another Anderson: Anderson Hall on the U.W. Campus.  After her lumberman husband’s death, Mrs. Anderson paid for its construction as a warm and useful tribute to him.   It was appropriately built for the school’s Dept of Forestry.

(Click to enlarge photos)

Dazzled – we hope – last week by a musical pig dancing above the sidewalk on Second Avenue north of Madison Street, we made promises to visit this week another attraction on that block.  By the time the Pig ‘N Whistle opened in 1919, its neighbor the Palace Hip Theatre, across Second at its southeast corner with Spring, had been showing animal acts and much more on stage for ten years.

The name blazoned here on and above the theatre’s boisterous corner marquee was its third.   The theatre opened as the Majestic on August 30, 1909, changed to Empress less than two years later and in 1916 with a remodel turned over again into the Palace Hip (short for Hippodrome.)

Soon after the summer opening this newspaper surveyed its wonderful construction.  “The entire designing and constructing of the Majestic Theatre in somewhat over five months from the date of John W. Considine’s order is an apt illustration of the Seattle Spirit.” Considine was the super-impresario and Edwin W. Houghton the happy if frantic architect, who proudly revealed to the Times reporter, “I was fortunate enough to have a client that had good enough judgment to select an architect whom he thought was capable and then leave him to do it.”

While the theatre’s dog acts were often splendid, they were but one of ordinarily six or seven acts that took the stage twice a day.  By some accounts it was Seattle’s “greatest house of vaudeville.” Of the hundreds upon hundreds of acts – comedy, song & dance, animal – that landed here for a run of a week or two, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel (later of Laurel and Hardy) are the most abiding names.  David Jeffers, Seattle’s historian of silent film, confesses, “I dream about this place.  A Greco-Byzantine interior of ivory and gold and 1500 seats!”

Thru its two decades the Palace Hip ran vaudeville, showed films, and staged plays.  For all of these a theatre-goer’s visit to the confectionary across Second was often a capper to any show.

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Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few past features from the neighborhood, some of which has already appeared here, still we put them forward again following thereby a kind of Wagnerian formula of motifs repeated in new settings.  Since five of these features include theatres we have a second motif.  We’ll begin though with BUCK JONES in the BIG PUNCH, the Fox film advertized on the marquee and in broadsides pasted to the Palace Hip’s  exposed walls at the corner and near the ticket window.

PANTAGES VAUDEVILLE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 20, 1990)

Alexander Pantages built his namesake vaudeville house at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Seneca Street in 1904. It was “the little Greek’s” second theater. The first, “The Crystal,” also on Second Avenue, was a converted storefront that Pantages opened when he landed in Seattle with a small fortune finagled in the Alaska gold rush. As Murray Morgan describes Pantages’ gold-field strategy in his Seattle history “Skid Road”: “He abandoned his dream of finding gold in the creek beds and concentrated on removing it from the men who had already found it.”

Pantages sold the sourdoughs vaudeville, at $25 a seat in his Orpheum theater in Nome. The price of admission to his first Seattle shows was a dime for a mixture of stage acts and short, jerky films. Pantages (or his legend) was illiterate, but having roamed the world before landing here he could converse in several languages. His English, it was said, was as bad as any. But he knew what the public wanted.

Pantages built a vaudeville empire that ultimately surpassed all others. Somewhat like royalty, his daughter Carmen married John Considine Jr., son of his chief competitor. At its peak the Pantages circuit included 30 playhouses he owned outright and 42 others he controlled. To an act he liked, he could offer more than a year of steady employment. Pantages sold his kingdom for $24 million in 1929 – before the crash.

To Pantages the best act he ever booked was the violinist he married. Lois Pantages always played the first act whenever her husband opened a new house. The first of these was across Seneca Street from the Pantages. He named it after his wife, and until it was destroyed by fire in 1911, the Lois was a successful theater. Also in 1911 Pantages purchased Plymouth Congregational’s old church grounds at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and University Street, and built his New Pantages Theatre, designed by architect B. Marcus Priteca, between 1915 and 1918. Later renamed the Palomar, it was a showplace many Seattleites will remember.  (This Pantages/Palomar is a subject that has been treated on this blog.  Please try the search box for it – if you will.)

This enchanting tableau looks across Spring Street to the early construction scene for the Baillargeon Building at the northeast corner of Spring with Second. Note at the top the Savoy Hotel is getting some added stories. The date, 1907, is evident at the bottom-right corner.  This is pulled from an album having mostly to do with the construction of the Seattle Gas Company’s facilities at what is now Gas Works Park.  (Courtesy Michael Maslan)

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In 1919, the California candy maker Pig’N Whistle opened in Seattle what it advertised in the Times as “the largest investment in a confectionary business which has ever been made anywhere in the world.” A year after Frederick and Nelson moved out, the block-long Rialto Building was ready for its new tenants, and the Pig got what had been the department store’s grand entrance on the west side of Second Avenue, centered between Madison and Spring Streets.

The elegant pig above the sidewalk was surely both big and dear.  And it moved.  Outlined in lights, two of its three hind legs were alternately lit to keep the animated leg kicking to the whistling flute the musical swine held to its snout with its hoofs.  For thirteen years, and through the full length of Seattle’s “urban canyon” from the Smith Tower to the Washington Hotel, the dancing pig could be seen kicking time to its music.

The Pig N’ Whistle was packed from the start.  Many of the stores nearby, like Meves Cafeteria, Rochester’s Men’s store, and Millers Luggage, promoted the pig as the landmark to find for their own services as well.  Repeated society and club reports of lunch and dinner meetings at the Pig’N Whistle gave this maker of Viennese candies and “dainty sandwiches” frequent and free promotions in the local dailies.

Days after the California confectionary opened, King Bros. Co., another men’s store nearby, described the pig as “a thing of beauty, and we trust will be a joy forever to the people of our growing city.”  Many years after it closed, Margaret Young, in a 1966 Times feature on the nostalgic lure of old Post Cards, professed to loving neon and wishing there were more of it, “but even more we miss something we never saw.”  She meant this dancing pig.  A victim of the Great Depression, the last listings for the Pig’N Whistle are from 1932.

Next week we will cross Second Avenue to the Palace Hip Theatre a half block north at Spring Street.  The theatre, of course, treated the pig well, with many among it’s audiences consuming the Pig’N Whistle’s confections and dancing to its live music before and after the Hip’s shows.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Merely two related features Jean – one from long ago, 1986, and the other nearly new from 2009 and so here its encore.

Looking northwest through the intersection of Madison Street (left to right) and Second Avenue to the Frederick and Nelson Department Store filling the half block on the west side of Second between Madison and Spring.  Note above the cable car heading for the waterfront on the far left.

FREDERICK & NELSON DEPARTMENT STORE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 28, 1986)

D. E. Frederick and Nels Nelson opened a second-hand store in Seattle in 1890. Soon they found it easier to buy unused merchandise than ferret out the old. So they discarded the nearly new trade, and in time their store became the largest and finest department store west of the Mississippi and north of San Francisco.

In 1897, in the first flush of the Klondike gold rush, the store was moved into the two center storefronts of the new Rialto building at Second Avenue and Madison streets. In 1906 the partners bought out the block, and Frederick & Nelson stretched their name the length of an entire city block – the Rialto block. This week’s historical scene shows Seattle’s first grand emporium during, or some time after, 1906.

Shopping at Frederick & Nelson was a different experience from today’s sometimes mad-rush shopping. At Frederick’s, you were invited to take classes, visit an art gallery, chat with friends over tea or just ride the hydraulic elevator. A big center room with a high ceiling for hanging tapestries and Persian rugs was a kind of sanctuary for consumption. Years later, you might not remember what was purchased but you would recall the experience of having really bought something significant – its aura.

Above and below, scenes from a Golden Potlatch summer celebration (1911-1914).

This touch of class also was found in the elaborately decorated show windows along Second Avenue, and even in the street itself. Every morning, Frederick and Nelson’s 16 heavy teams of horses paraded from their stables down the length of Second Avenue.

Nelson died in 1906, but Frederick continued to make the right moves, including the one in 1918 that took him “out of town” – all the way north to Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.  In 1929, Frederick retired to his home in the Highlands and sold his grand emporium to Marshall Field & Co. of Chicago. After his death 20 years later, his old golfing crony, 95-year-old Seattle Times columnist C.T. Conover, recalled Frederick as a kind of heroic capitalist saint who “left a record of straight shooting, fair play, honorable dealing, enlightened vision, common sense, civic enterprise, noble spirit and generous support of every worthy cause.”

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Above: A century ago – roughly – Engineer Leo Snow took this candid photograph of a single Native vendor set up at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street.  Thanks much to Dale and Eric Cooley for sharing this view.  Below: Appropriately, for the contemporary repeat Jean Sherrard recorded Cassie Phillips, a Real Change salesperson, showing her fare at the same corner.

SIDEWALK SALES

(First appeared in Pacific,  June 21, 2009)

Clearly the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street was good for sales both inside an out.  In 1906 Frederick and Nelson’s expanded from its mid-block quarters in the block-long Rialto building to both corners, at Madison and Spring Streets.  While the corner sign does not promote baskets it does list carpets and its sidewalk “competitor,” the basket vendor recorded here by amateur Leo Snow, also offers mats. Snow’s snapshot is wonderfully unique for its bright-eyed candor.

As confirmed by many other less lively photographs, including a 1911 postcard printed in “Native Seattle,” historian Col Thrush’s nearly new book from U.W. Press, this was a popular corner for both selling Native crafts and recording them doing it. Thrush’s postcard shows not one but three of what the postcard’s printed caption calls “Indian Basket Sellers” huddled at this corner.

When I began giving illustrated talks on Seattle history long ago I often included a native vendor slide in my show. Many were the times seniors in the audience would recall having been with their mother while buying a basket from Chief Seattle’s daughter, and often off this very sidewalk.  Since the 86 year-old Princess Angeline died in 1896, this “princess claim” was more than unlikely, it was impossible – I gently explained.  Still, however slanted, the memory of sidewalk meetings with Native Americans was still cherished in 1975.  Do any readers still retain such memories in 2009?

Sometime after the farm boy Leo Snow got an engineering degree from Ohio University in 1902, he carefully folded a 3-piece suit in his duffle bag and hopped a freight train to Seattle.  Scrubbed, adorned and qualified he was soon on the streets of this city looking for a job.  In 1945 Leo D. Snow retired after working 37 years for Puget Power, and along the way took many more sparkling snapshots with his foldout Kodak.

(click to enlarge photos)

Surely we know what every one is up to in this Granite Falls tableau.  They are thinking about the fire and what to do.  Four men have carried a glass showcase from the drugstore to East Stanley Street and while the other men at the corner seem to be standing idle most likely they are not.  The commotion inside the drug store’s open door must be both frantic and dreadful – grabbing and hauling the drugs and sundries while knowing that the roof overhead is on fire. As yet there seems to be no relief although we see that the volunteer fire brigade has unrolled a hose along S. Granite Avenue and may soon be shooting it’s April shower at the roof.

Judging by the shadows and the smoke the fire started in the morning and in the roof of the Cascade Hotel.  The hotel sign on the crest is engulfed.  Fred Cruger of the Granite Falls Historical Museum suggests that the town’s weekly, the Snohomish County Forum for April 27, 1933, most likely gave detailed front page coverage of the fire.  Unfortunately what was probably the report has long since been clipped away from the otherwise surviving issue.  You can examine this unfortunate “mutilation” in the Granite Falls Historical Society’s Newspaper archive at http://gfp.stparchive.com.  You can also explore the society’s thousands of pictures and documents online at www.gfhistory.org .   This society is a recognized model of effective heritage care and activism.

Granite Falls was first platted in 1891 in anticipation of the 1892 arrival of the Everett to Monte Cristo Railroad.  One year more, in 1893, this 22-room hostelry over a restaurant opened as the Mountain View Hotel.  The name kept to mountaineering when it was later changed to Cascade by a new owner.  By 1933 Granite Falls was an important destination in what was promoted especially during “the touring season” as our “Charmed land.”  The Big Four Inn and the Canyon Creek Lodge were both nearby, the latter with a six hole golf course that featured flowing water hazards. [This coming week we hope to enter here a short addendum on the both the Big Four Inn and the Canyon Creek Lodge.]

A week after the fire we are heartened to learn from the Forum’s May 4^th issue that the destruction was kept to the hotel. “The second story will be cut off and the lower floor will be repaired.”  Depression-time concerns were also addressed.  “Only Granite Falls labor is being used on the repair work, and all materials are being purchased locally.”  Cascade Drugs survived, and this sturdy pioneer of 1893 continues to serve mixed uses and hold to its footprint on the northeast corner of Granite and Stanley.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes  Jean beginning with the several other photographs of the fated hotel that we have inserted in the text above.  These too are among the special gifts we give to the text as originally composed and illustrated for Pacific – bless them.

Below we will add this time as “straight” extras (not half-hidden behind a link) the few more now-then comparisons that you visited and recorded recently with the guidance of Fred Cruger, a Granite Fall historian/archivist who often appears in this blog as our primary vintage auto expert.   Fred has also composed several interpretations/captions for the photo you repeated while in Granite Falls as well as short descriptions of the several records you made of the Grant Falls Historical Museum, for whose appointments, and interpretations he is also an admirable steward.   So here follows you and Fred.

The earliest photo, taken in the 1911-12 Winter, shows a large one-cylinder engine being hauled into town to provide electricity in place of the washed-out Pilchuck River dam.  The warning tower that once held the fire bell is still in place, since the building itself had just been moved 2 1/2 blocks from its original location (as the first downtown school, built in 1893) to the location still occupied by CIty Hall today.  The photo taken in Mar 1941 shows the building with significant deterioration.  The picture with the fire truck shows Fire Chief Hiram Jewell (also the local photographer) at the front of the engine, just a month before the combination City Hall & Firehouse was razed, preparing for the City Hall still standing today (erected by the WPA in 1941-2).

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The Granite Falls Cooperative Union was built in 1905 by Fred Anderson, but it operated for many years as the Granite Falls Creamery under John Curtis, who also happened to be the back president.  It was only three years ago that the original 1904 bank safe was recovered from the Creamery building and placed in the Granite Falls Historical Museum.  The building is owned by the local Masonic Lodge, which has an impressive meeting area upstairs, and the lower floor has always housed a grocery or retail merchandise business.  The building just beyond the creamery building in the modern photo was built in the 1920s by Oscar Wicklund, a local blacksmith, and served in that role through the 1950s.  The two-story Mountain View Hotel (later the Cascade Hotel) can be seen just a short distance past the Co-op Union in the original photo, and also in the modern photo (albeit as a one-story building, having lost its top story to fire in 1933).

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Taken prior to 1910, the old photo shows the bell tower of the first downtown school on the left, 3 blocks distant.  The local fire warning tower is on the right just 1/2 block from the photographer, and marks the soon-to-be place to which the school would be moved to become City Hall.  The warning tower was located about 30 feet beyond (south) of where today’s town clock sits in front of City Hall.  The old school served as combination CIty Hall & Firehouse for 30 years, until it was razed in 1941 and replaced by the current building (built by the WPA).  The dark building at the far right was the photo studio of Hiram Jewell, Granite Falls’ local photographer for decades.  The large two story building on the left in the original photo was built as Woodmen’s Hall, and continues to serve today as the American Legion Hall, although the trees block it from view.

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If you look carefully, you can see the top of a barber pole just above the Model T Ford (car at left) and a “BATHS” sign, which was present at both Granite Falls barber shops (the other shop was directly across the street).  The large building at the right started life ca. 1900 as The Lumberman (purveyor of fine wine and cigars), but by 1918, when this picture was taken, had become Klaus Bros. market.  Unfortunately, it burned down in 1920, but Henry and William Klaus rebuilt it as the brick Klaus Bldg that still stands today on the southwest corner of Stanley St, and Granite Ave.

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This looks east on Stanley St., and Granite Ave is the next cross street.  You can see the Cascade Hotel sign at its rooftop, which – as the reader will know by now – the hotel lost along with its second floor to the 1933 fire featured at the top.

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The Falls at GRANITE FALLS

FRED sends, as well, several photographs of the falls, which Jean also visited and repeated.

Here follows two by Jean

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GRANITE FALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM

Here we join Jean as he visits the museum with Fred.   It is Fred who supplies the terse captions for each of the nine subjects.

Jean here. Spending the afternoon with Fred Cruger as my guide to Granite Falls and the many wonders of his museum was a real kick. Fred has an artist’s passion and inspiration, a historian’s curiosity, and the meticulous nature of an engineer – in short, he’s a force of nature. His focus and energy have brought the Granite Falls community together to create one of the finest small town historical museums in the country.

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We will conclude – for now – with another Granite Falls feature that appeared in Pacific last year, and for which Fred Cruger took the “repeat” besides providing the historical subject, again out of the Granite Falls Historical Museum’s store of local heritage.

The stately Granite Falls Railroad Station was built for both the Everett & Monte Cristo Railway Line, and a political payoff.   (Courtesy, Granite Falls Historical Society.) From the prospect of the unnamed historical photographer, the site of the now long gone Granite Falls station has been returned to nature.  (Now photo by Fred Cruger)

THE GRANITE FALLS RAILROAD STATION

For itinerants and pioneer town photographers there were perhaps two subjects most often used to represent an entire community: “Main Street” and the local railroad station.   Here, as an example, the Granite Falls station is part of a prosperous tableau that includes Northern Pacific engine #366, and the sweetener of a pressing crowd on the station platform.

Fred Cruger, the current vice-president of the Granite Falls Historical Society, dates this real photo postcard 1909.  Fred adds, “there was quite a political battle going on between Snohomish (the County Seat) and Everett (increasingly the County economic center), about where the County seat should actually be.  Granite Falls was told that if they voted for Everett, they’d get a really nice railroad depot.  It may be difficult now to find the actual vote count, but we did get a great railroad depot!”

This political maneuvering dates from the mid-1890s when the original use of this railroad was to carry minerals from the mountains around Monte Cristo to smelters in Everett.  This enterprise was floated by J.D. Rockefeller and eventually so was the railroad by the autumn floods of 1896 and 1897, which damaged or destroyed tunnels and large sections of track.  Ten years more and most of the mining activity was over.  Hauling lumber and later tourists kept the line going until the early 1930s when tearing out the tracks was among the few new jobs open in Snohomish County during the Great Depression.  The Mountain Loop Highway – for which Granite Falls is the “gateway” – was graded in places over the abandoned railroad bed.

Fred Cruger, also an antique car collector, has often helped us in this column with the naming and dating of old motorcars.  Now we wish to make note that he and the Granite Falls Historical Society have created “then and now” cyber tours for both their community and the Mountain Loop tour.  They are, respectively, http://www.myoncell.mobi/13606544362 and http://www.myoncell.mobi/13603553170.

Two timely opportunities to try the tours and visit Granite Falls are for Show N’ Shine, the town’s classic and antique car show and parade, held this year on Sat. August 6, and for the Railroad Days Festival and Parade, this year on Oct. 1, another Saturday.  Not surprisingly the Granite Falls Historical Museum will also be open.

(The CM railroad’s logo below is used courtesy – again – of the Granite Falls Historical Society and Museum)

 

(click to enlarge photos.  At least on this MAC I click TWICE to enlarge the enlargement.)

This look east to Second Hill from the eastern slope of First Hill is both rare and puzzling.  The original was shared with us by Ron Edge, a frequent help to this feature, who acquired it as part of a small collection of early 20th Century Seattle subjects originally recorded or collected by a company that produced Magic Lantern shows.        We reckon, however, that the status of Second Hill development in 1905 – our speculated year for this cityscape – is an unlikely lantern subject, except, perhaps, by special order from either the Immaculate Conception parish, or Seattle College (Seattle University since 1948), for this view looks east from the campus of the latter to the new sanctuary of the former on the horizon at the southeast corner of E. Marion St. and 18th Avenue.

Forgetting for the moment the leaves on the trees, we may imagine here the Dec. 4, 1904 procession of parishioners and priests that climbed from First Hill up Second for the dedication of those two cross-topped towers and the nearly 1000 seats beneath them.  That’s enough pews for everyone that followed Wagner’s marching band.

For ten years previous to their joyful procession these Catholics had been teaching and worshiping in what still survives as the original building on the Seattle University Campus, the Garrant Building, named for the school’s founder.  It was built in 1894 by the Jesuit order for its ministry at Immaculate Conception.

If, like our study of the cleared but scarcely developed foreground, yours counts two blocks between the boardwalk near the bottom and the first street developed with houses, then this is 10th Avenue East at our toes.  We know that those homes face 12th Avenue.  We figured that out with help from eight houses on Second Hill, easily tracing them from Ron’s “then.” In Jean’s repeat they are hidden behind the imaginative mass of the campus’ somewhat new Chapel of St. Ignatius.  For our survivors we only looked on 13th and 14th Avenues between Spring Street on the far left and Marion, but there are, no doubt, many others on the hill.

Some time near its dedication on April 6, 1997, I visited the new Chapel of St. Ignatius with other members then of Allied Arts.   I recorded then the two exterior views below, but the interior record – a merge from two subjects – I took when Jean and I visited the campus recently to search and repeat the “then” at the top.  Hopefully Jean will add some of his own extras in the morning, then refreshed after his own nightybears – the soft coven to  which I will soon reach at the top of my own steps.  There is, you know, much more on the neighborhood reached below with a click.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

(for Paul’s compelling response, click HERE!)

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Lawton Gowey, a friend now long departed, is still a frequent contributor to this feature.  Ordinarily it has been with historical photographs from his collection but this time it is with one of his own Kodachromes, and as was his considerate habit, it is dated.  On the late morning of June 20, 1962, with his back to the landmark steel pergola (1920) at the waterfront foot of Washington Street, Lawton recorded a harbor patrol boat carefully jockeying between its float and the 27,000 tons of the Dominion Monarch.

The 682-foot-long Dominion M. was the largest of three ships parked on the Seattle waterfront during Century 21 to serve as hotel ships, aka “botels,” during the worlds fair. With the hindsight of the  “Marine History of the Pacific Northwest,” which he authored, Port Commissioner and maritime historian Gordon Newell admitted that the fair’s “predicted major housing shortage failed to develop.”  The botels were not much needed, and yet the shapely English vessel was for many a sensational attraction and during the fair Newell won the concession for leading tours aboard it.  Standing on its flying bridge, ten stories high, one looked down on the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

It is possible that Gowey also toured this big botel on the day he photographed it, for on that same June 6 Wednesday morning The Seattle Times humorist John Reddin wrote about taking the tour.  Reddin imagined or mistook his guide, Commissioner Newell, in his “white, tropical uniform,” as “Noel Coward playing the lead role in ‘In Which We Serve’”  Reddin concluded that Newell “easily could play Lieut. Pinkerton in ‘Madame Butterfly’.”

Almost certainly it was another waterfront regular E. A. “Eddie” Black who favored Newell with his tour leader’s role, for it was Black who intercepted the Dominion Monarch, then on its way to Japan for scrapping, to come to the fair first.  Black was a seasoned and savvy operator on the waterfront who escaped official leans on vessels tied to docks by making his rented cruiser a “permanent installation.”  He simply drove pilings to both the port and starboard sides of the Dominion Monarch.  This made the gangway to the ship’s lodgings and/or Newel’s dapper tours somewhat longer than if the Dominion Monarch had been tied snuggly to Pier 50.

WEB EXTRAS

One correction, Paul, to your otherwise excellent column – I was up before 6 AM to meet the SPD boat at the foot of Washington Street at 6:30 – a real sign of dedication on an early but lovely summer’s morning.

Anything to add, my friend?

To read Paul’s colorful response, click HERE!

(click to enlarge photos)

This shapely subject was uncovered long ago in a collection of unidentified negatives.  Only recently I discovered that finding its place was easy for the name of this apartment house is signed on the glass front door.  This is – or was in this early 20^th century record of it – the Wilhemina Apartments at 1413 Queen Anne Avenue.  It was then the tallest structure this high on the avenue with views to the city and the bay.  And it was conveniently set at the top of the “Queen Anne Counterbalance,” that exceptional tunnel machinery that helped pull trollies up the steep avenue and also safely govern their descent.

Historic preservationist Diana James, with her recent book “Shared Walls” our local authority on apartment houses, thinks it likely that the Wilhemina first took in renters in 1908, the first year classified ads appear in The Times describing its attractions. “Very choice 2-room apartment, nice, view, modern, high class, no children.” In a dozen years or so more the name was changed to Winona.  Rhyming with Wilhemina it was equally euphonious.  Able by now to intuit the origins of place names, the scholar James jests, “Perhaps it was renamed for the wife of a new owner.”

The Winona first indicates “no objection to children” in the 1920s. A Times classified for 1928 reads “Clean and cozy 2-room completely furnished apartments, situated in good district at the very low rental of $37.50.”  Following the market crash of 1929, the monthly rate was soon lowered to $25.  By 1955 it had doubled to a mere $52, but by then it had no musical name, only an address.

While Diana James doubts one published claim for the Wilhemina/Winona, that it was the first apartment on the hill, she admits that she has as yet found no older flat that has kept its footprint on the hill.  She adds, “I like it because it is what it is – its elegant symmetry with bay windows for light and centered balconies for fresh air visits. I could tell you that it is 12 units, with four to a floor, and probably two more in the daylight basement.”  What James could not surmise from the street, the present owner – since the mid 1970s – reveals.  There’s a detached 15^th unit in the rear.  Most likely, it was once a garage.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

(For Paul’s reply, click here!)

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Recently while retired U.W. Archivist Rich Berner and I sat side-by-side looking at old photos together in the now old Museum of History and Industry Library, Rich pulled from an archival box this week’s subject and turned it to me.  Instantly I felt that happy “Eureka” rush, for here, I was confident, was the Phinney Ridge Ferris wheel described to me long ago by a ridge partisan, who claimed that the big wheel stood across Phinney Ave. from the entrance to Woodland Park.

While thanking my informant for her memory, I continued to wonder if she wasn’t remembering instead the kiddie Ferris wheel and merry-go-round that were both once in the park, and not out of it.  How, I thought, could I have missed a Ferris wheel on top of that familiar ridge?  But I had, and so with Rich’s discovery I silently confessed – or thought, “Oh you of little faith.”

In the spring and early summer of 1925 George and Lucy Vincent installed first the “New Carousselle,” here generously signed above patriotic bunting at the front of their amusement center, and then “the Aristocrat,” which they described as  “one of six giant Ferris Wheels on the North American Continent.”  Both were, apparently, replacements for the smaller wheels they opened with in 1919 over considerable neighborhood resistance.  George’s father Robert C. Vincent, age 76, died after a short illness early in 1920, not knowing if his top of the ridge amusements would survive.

The son and executor, George, using then a mix of licenses and zoning, the sympathy of friendly neighbors who liked living near these revolving excitements, the clout of free enterprise, the favors of club life, and one restraining order kept the Vincent business in place until the night of August 26-27, 1934 when it caught fire.   Consumed was the Carousselle, the 62 hand-carved animals, the one thousand electric lights and the reflecting mirrors.  Gone were the skating rink, two lunch rooms, and the transcendent Aristocrat.  A few of the neighbors nearest to the ashes of the Carousselle’s mighty Wurlitzer Organ may have given thanks.

WEB EXTRAS

Click HERE to read more!

(click to enlarge photos)

Imagine asking the famous – and stuffed – gorilla named Bobo what were the two most popular artifacts on show at what since early June of this year has been the old Museum of History and Industry in Montlake.  Bobo – being a modest gorilla who thru many years kept a steady eye on the museum’s exhibits from his own glass case – would, I think, choose the “Founding of Seattle” diorama with its puppet pioneers and the Great Seattle Fire mural. I would agree with the western lowland primate.

The mural is shown here with its artist, Ruddy Zallinger, in a press photo that was first published in this newspaper on Dec. 5, 1952.  The then 34-year old Zallinger explained that he’d been working on the 10-by-24-foot mural for four months and hoped to complete it by Christmas.  For rendering the pioneer buildings the “scientific muralist” studied old photographs kept by the Seattle Historical Society.  For the flames he studied fires nearby at the Montlake landfill.

Raised in Seattle and taught at Cornish School, Zallinger was still fresh from winning a 1949 Pulitzer Prize for a much larger mural “The Age of Reptiles” that took five years to complete for the Peabody Museum of Natural History on the Yale University Campus, where Zalinger was also an instructor.

Zallinger’s Great Seattle Fire mural was dedicated on Feb. 15, 1953, the first anniversary of the museum’s opening.  A band playing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” accompanied the unveiling.  Those attending included at least fifty persons who were surviving eye-witnesses of the Great Fire of June 6, 1889, and some of their stories were told in a recorded program that followed the unveiling.  For the occasion of the mural’s 50th anniversary rededication on Feb. 15, 2003, there were, of course, no first hand witnesses attending.  Bobo, however, was there.

WEB EXTRAS

Click HERE to read more!

(click to enlarge photos)

The lawn just north of Seattle Center’s International Fountain has a sundry history that is unlike your own neighborhood.  David and Louisa Denny, the youngest of Seattle’s first pioneers who were not children, picked their claim here in the early 1850s, and “proved” it, in part, with a “North Seattle” garden that became an important source of produce for Seattle.

The Denny farmhouse was at 3rd and Republican which is about one long horseshoe’s throw to the north from where respectively in this “then” and “now” government horses are corralled and youth mingle.  The land east from here to the south end of Lake Union was mostly open, and so helpful for farming.  It was also dotted by willows, had some swampy edges and thereby provided both water for cabbages and beets and attracted ducks for hunting.

After the growing family built a larger home, also on Republican but nearer Lake Union, their farm was tended by Chinese immigrants and was then popularly known as China Gardens.  The army took possession in 1898 with a short-lived corral meant to supply horses and mules to the then glorified wars with Spain first and then the Philippine Insurrection.

In 1903 the Denny claim was outfitted with Recreation Park, the first stadium for the Pacific Coast Baseball League’s Seattle Siwashes, a name meaning Indians that was lifted from the Chinook trade jargon.  Most likely the Siwashes did not know that they were playing ball on grounds that long before bats swung at balls were used by the local Duwamish Indians for potlatches, their gregarious ritual for gaining prestige by giving gifts.

Somewhat similarly, Civic Auditorium, the first modern addition to the Potlatch Meadows and the Denny garden, was born of Pioneer Square saloon-keeper James Osborne’s $20,000 gift to the city in 1881.  Osborne stipulated a “civic hall” and with 50 years interest, his bequest both gave him posthumous prestige and Seattle its Civic Auditorium.  It was Seattle’s 1930 start on both Century 21 and a City Center on a unique neighborhood now long given to planting, performing and play.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

(To read Paul’s detailed response, please click HERE!)

 

WEB EXTRAS

(click to enlarge photos)

In 1875 Isaac and James Buzby opened the Starr Mills at the waterfront foot of Seneca Street.  The city’s 1876 directory compliments the mill for supplying a “need long felt.”  Here we see – we presume – five employees posing for a typical business portrait.  Four are neatly posed in the mill’s two stories of open doorways and the fifth one is riding the wagon with the team on the left.

The 1879 directory notes the Starr Mills “Extra Family Flour” – a surely comforting brand name – and describes the mill as also offering “constantly for sale, and at liberal rates, feed, cracked wheat, corn meal bran, shorts, middlings and chicken feed.”  In a 1950 feature from his long-lived “Just Cogitating” column, C.T. Conover, the Times pioneer reporter with the “heritage beat,” notes that “after a few years” of trying the Buzbys dropped their Family Flour and kept to milling “only feed for stock as Puget Sound wheat was too soft for successful flour making.”

This subject was grouped with several other historical Seattle scenes in a March 11, 1934 Times feature titled “WAY BACK – When Seattle Was But Youngster.”   The caption identified C. M. McComb as the man riding the wagon.  He was also the Times reader who loaned the paper the original photograph for inclusion in its popular “Way Back” series. Along with all else on the waterfront south of University Street, the Starr Mill was consumed by the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.

Jean Sherrard used the occasion of his contemporary “repeat” to explore Seattle history with his class of 5th and 6th graders from Hillside School.  Jean recalls, “Pouring over the old photographs, and maps, we walked the footprint of the mill and imagined the waters of Elliott Bay lapping at our feet.  After posing for a “now” photo beneath the viaduct’s looming exit ramp at Seneca we climbed the steps to First Ave., a site where a ravine once harbored a scatter of graves – a native cemetery.  When one of the students was convinced he could sense unhappy spirits, we headed for the Pike Place Market where we divvied up a pound of Turkish delight in Victor Steinbrueck Park.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Jean, when you arise on Sunday morning will you iunsert the first addition by returning and repeating your “now and then” that features another Hillside class, the one visiting Snoqualmie Falls with you two or three years past?   Following that I’ll find a few more features and photos touching on Busby’s Mill and the neighborhood near Seneca at the waterfront, or near it.

Here it is, Paul:

SNOQUALMIE FALLS – Seattle Now & Then, July 13th, 2008

Whidbey Island resident Teresa Pate sent this abundant view of Snoqualmie Falls to Jean Sherrard in response to Jean’s handling of other photos of this 270-foot cataract that appear in Sherrard’s and my book, “Washington Then and Now.” Pate explains, “The picture has probably been in the family 75 to 100 years.” Embossed directly on the photograph is the name “Evans,” perhaps the studio signature of David and Francis Evans who, in the early 20th century, ran Evans Photo and Art Shop in downtown Seattle.

Of the falls’ many thousand recordings this view is wonderfully appealing for putting the cascade “in full force” behind the delicate profiles of a fallen forest snag and two men, we imagine, in the grip of the sublime. To repeat this mildly telescopic effect, Jean used his 80mm lens for the “now.”

Above the roar of the falls Jean got the attention of his subjects by waving his arms. (His subjects, by the way, are also his students at Bellevue’s Hillside Student Community, a private school founded by Sherrard’s parents in 1969.

Readers will note that on the right of both views the same rock shows in the pool below the falls. Sherrard explains: “After triangulating the iron-shaped boulder evident in both photos, I surmised that the original photographer was standing well out into the river, probably on a log, as there’s no structure today that would bring me near that perspective. Usually the rocks below the falls are slick from the misting water, but on this day the wind blew up the canyon toward the falls, leaving the approach safe and dry.”

Several more remarkable older photos from the archive:

And a few more NOW pix to illustrate our trip down to the river:

Four years ago – how time flies….

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Above: Looking north in the mid-1880s from the Frye Opera House (1885) at First and Marion.  From an upper story the view looks over Madison Street.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey.) Below; With the help of a long (but not long enough) pole the “now” scene was recorded from an exterior stairway at the northwest corner of the Jackson Federal Building.

FRONT STREET NORTH OVER MADISON, ca. 1886

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 30, 2007)

More than a few publishers and local historians have silently thanked Fred Dorsaz and/or Edward Schwerin for carrying their studio’s camera to the top floor of the nearly new Frye Opera House to record this local classic, a birdseye into North Seattle.  The scene looks over Madison Street, up Front Street  (First Avenue), across the distant rooftops of Belltown and far beyond to the still hardly marked Magnolia Peninsula.

There was a touch of opportunism and pride in the partner’s climb and recording.  The original photo card has “Souvenir Art Studio” printed across the bottom, and if one looks hard, their business name is written again on the banner, which stands-out against the dark trees near the center of their photograph.

The Souvenir banner is strung over Front Street between the Pacific Drug Store building, bottom right, and the Kenyon Block, bottom left.  The Souvenir Art Studio rent quarters in “capitalist J. Gardner Kenyon’s” namesake commercial building.  Taking clues from the few signs attached to its sides so was the Globe Printing Company (one of the then only four job printers listed in the 1885-86 City Directory), William P. Stanley’s books, stationary, and wall paper store, and Robert Aberenethy’s “boots and shoes” store.  Like its owner Kenyon, Abernethy, it seems, also conveniently lived in the Kenyon Block.

On page 431 of the first volume of the three volume King County History by Clarence Bagley, the pioneer historian dates this view “about 1887.”    Given the absence in this scene of important 1887 additions and the presence of structures not around in 1885, the likely date is 1886 — although I’ll hedge with my own “about 1886.”   The small flags and bunting strung across Front Street, and the temporary fir trees decorating the sidewalks hint that this may be Independence Day, 1886.

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NORTH WATERFRONT 1889 FIRE RUINS

(First appeared in Pacific, 8-30-1998)

In this comparison the historical photographer’s back is to University Street, a little more than one week after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. A contemporary repeat would have put my back to the Alaskan Way Viaduct for an blocked view against the northwest corner of the Immunex headquarters.  (By now in 2012 they may have moved away or mutated.)

The larger ruin here is the dark brick skeleton of the Northwestern Cracker factory, center-right, one lot south of the southwest corner of Front (First Avenue) and Seneca streets. To its left and across First Avenue is the pointed facade of Annie and Amos Brown’s Carpenter Gothic home. It was one of the fire’s “heroic structures,” for the bucket brigade that saved it from all but blistered paint and burst windows also saved the neighborhood behind it, including the big-roofed skating rink, top center, and Plymouth Congregational Church, facing Second Avenue above the temporary white tents at far right.

On this west side of First Avenue the fire destroyed some of the 1876 retaining wall that held this bluff. Below the church and the tents, First Avenue is suspended above a ravine that once cut through the bluff at Seneca Street.

The wall below the bluff at far left is another savior. The brickwork on the foundation of the Arlington Hotel (Bay Building), begun before the fire, stopped the fire’s advance north. Behind the historical photographer was another impediment: a section of open water not covered with the timber trestle work we see in the foreground. Only the tracks of the Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad crossed this waterfront gap. There, at about 8:30 in the evening, another bucket line stopped the advance of a fire that had begun three blocks south around 3 p.m. that day.

Some of the structures on the left of the top of the two scenes above can be found also on the right of the scene directly above it.  The subject just above this caption shows, far left, the Arlington Hotel foundation at the southwest corner of First Ave. and University Street.  The full pan of this destruction is next – below.  There Beacon Hill spans much of the horizon and part of the Arthur and Mary Denny home at the southeast corner of Union Street and First Avenue is on the far left.   Note how the lines of both the “Rams Horne” track and the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Track move across the rubble and rebuilding efforts on the off-shore “trestle-town.”   Here, however, it is obvious that they will not longer “nearly” meet – as they do in photos shown above – because a new warehouse (far right) has been built directly over the “Rams Horne” right-of-way or, rather, lack of right-of-way.  That waterfront railroad was exceedingly resented by the locals and once destroyed by the fire had little chance of being fully restored.

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Above: The scene looks west on Seneca to its northwest corner with Second Avenue, where, depending upon the date stands either the Suffern residence or Holy Names Academy, the city’s first sectarian school.   (Pix courtesy of Michael Cirelli)  Below: With the economic confidence gained by the Yukon and Alaska gold rushes of the late 1890s, most of Seattle pioneer residences then still surviving in the central business district were replaced with brick commercial blocks.

HOLY NAMES ACADEMY – FIRST HOME

(First appeared in Pacific, June 17, 2007)

Sometime in the 1870s John Suffern  built a sizeable home at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Seneca Street.  We see it here but not knowing the date of the photograph cannot say if the Sufferens are still living there or if it is in the learned hands of the Roman Catholic Sisterhood of the Holy Names.

Suffern is first known hereabouts for his iron works and second for both building and captaining steamboats on Puget Sound.  After Issaquah pioneer Lyman Andrews stumbled upon some exposed coal on his claim in 1863 he carried a few lumps of it in a sack to Seattle where Sufferen tested it in his kiln and found the Issaquah coal excellent for firing.  In another ten years east side coal became Seattle’s principal export – most of it to California railroads.   By 1879 Suffern had turned to drugs.  That year’s directory adds an “e” to him name and lists him simply, “Sufferen, J. A. druggist, cor. Second and Seneca.”

The following year, 1880, the Sisters of Holy Names bought his property for $6,800 and arranged the home for their first Seattle school.  The Holy Names official history explains, “The building consists of two stories and a basement.  In the latter are the kitchen, cellar and pantry.  The parlor, music room, office and Sister’s refectory are on the first floor, the chapel, community room and a small apartment for the Superioress are on the second floor.”

Also in 1880 the Sisters of Holy Names built a second and larger structure on their property to the north of this white (we assume) house.  The addition included two large classrooms and a second floor dormitory for the city’s first sectarian school.  It opened in January 1881 with 25 pupils, and grew so rapidly with the community that in 1884 the sisters built another and grander plant with a landmark spire at 7th and Jackson Street.   The not so old Suffern home survived the city’s “great fire” of 1889, but was replaced in the late 1890s with the surviving brick structure, now the comely home for a Washington Liquor Store, and a custom tailor.

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The COLONIAL BLOCK

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 21, 1999)

The COLONIAL BLOCK, or building, at the southwest comer of First Avenue and Seneca Street is a local gem whose architectural shine saved it from destruction. “Colonial” is written in stone relief at the center of the building’s balustrade. It’s just below the colonial ornament of facing scrolls that hold between them the platform for a ball that crests the building.

The Colonial was designed in 1901-02 by the New York architect Max Umbrecht soon after he was transplanted to Seattle by the industrialist Lyman C. Smith of Syracuse – the Smith of typewriters, guns and, later, Seattle’s Smith Tower. With the commercial street level given to glass for light and window display, Umbrecht was left to arrange his restrained art through the upper three floors. A few of its  pleasures are the second-floor doors, which open to wrought-iron mini-balconies, and the central arched window, with bas-relief of garlands, torches and horns that fall from the windowsill like a banner.

The Colonial was one of several structures restored in the early 1980s for Waterfront Place, a mixed-use development directed by Mayor Paul Schell [Remembering here that Schell was still His Honor in 1999.] It was Schell’s rebound from losing his first mayoral race against television pundit Charles Royer in 1978. As past dean of the University of Washington’s School of Architecture, Hizzoner knows his architecture.

When pioneer Arthur Denny and friends first extended First Avenue north from Pioneer Square, they were stopped at Seneca Street by a ravine too deep to fill, so they bridged it here at this intersection. Later, Denny’s granddaughter, Sophie Frye Bass, identified the “high bluff on the south side” of this ravine – later the site of the Colonial -as “an Indian burial ground.”

Frank Shaw continues – Nine months later, and a few days, Shaw returns to the pit and records the work-in-progress of filling it with trees.  The date for the first two photos below is Nov. 21, 1975.

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

As far as I can figure from studying many photographs of Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, this line of commercial sheds was a unique response to the conflagration. Tents, not sheds, were the primary answer to the needs of a community that lost practically its entire business district.

The inferno ignited about 2 p.m. at the southwest corner of Madison Street and Front Street (First Avenue) and by sunrise the next morning, the flames had consumed about 32 blocks — but not this one.

In 1883, Seattle’s first pioneer industrialists, Henry and Sara Yesler, began building their mansion on this block. Here, they had nurtured an orchard, the village’s largest. Even with the new big home (part of it shows upper-left) the couple kept a few fruit trees on the side lawns. However, if there were any trees left on the mansion’s front lawn, they were removed after the big fire.

Along the Third Avenue side of the Yesler block, between James and Jefferson streets, Yesler and James Lowman, his manager and relative, nailed together temporary quarters for a few of the businesses that were flattened. For his burned-out stationary and printing company, the venerable Lowman and Hanford, Lowman picked the corner shed here at James and Third.

King County’s courthouse (its tower appears here far right at Third and Jefferson) is now City Hall Park. The 1882 courthouse was saved when soaked blankets were applied to the roof, and bureaucrats, litigants, judges and prisoners repeatedly splashed buckets of water against its clapboard walls.

Sara Yesler had died in 1887. Henry and his second cousin, Minnie Gagle, were living in the mansion at the time of the fire. Five months later they were married; she was 54 years his junior.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean – more features related to the “Great Fire” and in the neighborhood.  We should note that some of the stories may have been used previously in other equally apt contexts.  They perform like leitmotifs in this 0n-going Seattle Symph0ny.

FIRST, the ill-fated Seattle birdseye prepared shortly before the June 6 fire and then made mostly irrelevant except as a detailed memory of a business district that was lost to the fire.  I know of no other copy than this one – sometimes hand-colored – in which the burned area has been given a border crude enough, perhaps, to suggest destruction or even a struggling sign for smoke.

NEXT  black and white and color variations of the periodical Western Shore’s Sept. 21, 1889 coverage of the rebuilding underway following the June 6 fire.  (Click TWICE to enlarge)

The West Shore birdseyes look northeast from an imagined position mid-block between First Avenue (It reaches the lower-right corner), the waterfront (off-frame to the left), Washington Street (it runs across the bottom of the sketch) and Main Street (behind the artist).  The structure left of center on the north side of Washington is the Dexter Horton bank.  With some mending it managed to reuse the burned-out shell of its quarters for a few months following the fire.  On the center-horizon are the Central School at 6th and Madison (with the t0wers) and to the right of the school the Rainier Hotel on 5th between Marion and Columbia.  This big hotel was rushed together – of timber – to serve a city that lost most of its hostelries to the fire.  On the far right City Hall – aka the Katzenjammer Kastle – here still the County Courthouse – with its central tower faces the artist over Third Avenue between Jefferson and Terrace Streets.  The Katzenjammer appears in the principal feature (on top) one block south of the photographer.  To the left of the City Hall/ Court House we discover the Yesler Mansion and even a few of the temporary units built on its front lawn.  In the second photograph below the colored rendering of the West Shore birdseye we get a look back through this scene from the front porch of the Katzenjammer, but at an earlier date, sometime perhaps in July, or a few weeks after the fire.

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YESLER MANSION & PUBLIC LIBRARY

(First appeared in Pacific, August 22, 1982)

In 1882, Seattle pioneer Henry Yesler made the national news. The Harper’s Weekly story was about the mob lynching of three accused but untried murderers. The hanging was done from a stanchion braced between the forks of two maple trees on the James Street side of Yesler’s backyard. The Harper’s reporter either interviewed Henry or overheard him say, “that was the first fruit them trees ever bore, but it was the finest.” The artist’s sketch accompanying the article shows the outlaws hanging between Yesler’s maples, and beneath them in the crowd stands Henry Yesler busy at his favorite avocation: whittling.

Yesler continues to whittle in this week’s smaller historical photograph (above). His wife Sara poses with him in front of their home at First Avenue and James Street, the present site of the Pioneer Building. To their left (our right) are the hanging maples. Although hidden by the leaves, the stanchion is still in the picture, left as a morbid warning to visiting hoodlums. The year is 1883, and the street is decked out in lanterns, bunting and bordered with evergreens. Whatever the festive occasion, the Yeslers were also celebrating their good fortune of being the largest taxpayers in King County, and having survived in prosperity nearly 30 years in their little home in the center of town. The $92,000 assessment of Yesler’s King County properties in 1881, had risen to $318,000 by 1883.

So Henry and Sara Yesler decided on a larger extravagance, and hired an architect named Bowman to design it. In place of their modest one-story, five-room corner home they would have a three story, 40-room mansion which with its surrounding grounds would fill an entire city block between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue at James Street.

Construction began on the Yesler Mansion in 1883, but later that year so did the Depression. Both Henry’s prosperity and his home building faltered. By 1885 the Yeslers were nearly bankrupt. When, at last, in July 1886 they moved into their showpiece, it was still not finished. The planned ornate white oak, ash and redwood paneling was missing. Most of the rooms were-empty, so Henry promptly leased many of them as unfurnished office spaces.

By accounts Sara and Henry were a robust couple, with an exuberant habit of dancing into the late hours at public balls. When Sara died suddenly on Aug. 28, 1887, of a “gastric fever” she was only 65. Flags in the city and on ships in the sound were hung at half-mast, many businesses closed and the great house could not hold all the mourners. When the funeral services were over Henry was alone in his home with 40 rooms and a few renters.

Soon, and wisely, Henry decided to leave town. Ten days after his wife’s death, in company with James Lowman, his nephew who since 1886 had been managing Yesler’s business affairs, Henry headed east on the Northern Pacific. He carried two lists: one of friends and relatives to visit, and the other a shopping list of furnishings for his mansion. The 77-year-old Yesler was an intrepid traveler, and soon exhausted his 33-year-old nephew who returned home in October. Yesler kept going until Nov. 26 when he returned to his mansion with the flu and a badly sprained ankle. The injury, illness and memory of his whirlwind tour were, perhaps, enough stimulation to fill the void in his big house left by Sara.

It is also possible that Henry’s mourning was diverted by his second cousin, Minnie Gagle, a “good-looking girl with expressive gray eyes” and 56 years Henry’s junior. Minnie lived in Leitersburg, Maryland, Henry’s birthplace and one of the spots on his tour. In 1888 the Gagles moved to Seattle, by 1889 Minnie was living in the Yesler mansion, and on Sept. 29, 1889 she and Henry were married in Philadelphia, while on another trip east. Returning home, Henry now more than ever stayed in his mansion. But, his marriage seemed either so scandalous or bizarre to his old cronies “that many were alienated and stayed away.”

In 1892, at the age of 82, Henry Yesler, accompanied by Minnie, left his mansion for the last time on a tour to both Alaska and Yellowstone Park. Soon after his return his robust health slipped away. In the early Friday morning of Dec. 16, in the company of two doctors, two nurses, his nephew, his wife and the entire family, the bedridden Yesler wondered aloud if he was about to die. Millie answered, “Are you afraid of dying?” He replied, “No, I don’t care anything about it. The mere dying I don’t like, but the rest I don’t care anything about.” Then, after some nourishment, he added, “That’s all I care for.”

More than 3,000 mourners crowded the Yesler mansion and its grounds for the largest funeral the city had ever been part of.  A scandal as big as his estate ensued. Henry’s young nephew accused his young wife of destroying the will. And the city was involved because it was claimed that this “father of Seattle,” who had built the Puget Sound’s first steam sawmill, been mayor twice, paid the most taxes, had left the bulk of his estate, including the $100,000 mansion, to his city. Now the citizen’s repressed resentment for the scandalously young interloping Minnie broke loose. However, neither this prejudice nor the charges were supported by evidence sufficient to convict her.

In seclusion and guarded by her family, Minnie continued to live in the mansion until 1899 when the Seattle Public Library moved in. Sara Yesler, as the library’s first librarian in 1868, would have approved the change. Now it was librarian Smith who had his office in one of the bedrooms, the bindery in the kitchen, another room for periodicals, which left more than 30 rooms for stacks and storage. Our view of the Yesler Mansion as Public Library was taken in either 1899 or 1900. On New Year’s Day, 1901, it burned down taking 25,000 volumes with it.

In 1903, the Coliseum, a barn-sized theater “the largest west of Chicago seating 2,600” was built on the ruins. Then on May 4, 1916, an “immense pile of granite and terra cotta” was dedicated. Our view of the King County Courthouse, as of the library, is from Third Avenue. A plaque honoring Henry Vesler is at the entrance.

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In 1883 the city’s first industrialists Henry and Sarah Yesler rewarded themselves by building a 40-room mansion in their orchard facing Third Avenue between Jefferson and James Streets.  After its destruction by fire in 1901, the site was temporarily filled with the Coliseum Theatre (“The largest west of Chicago, seating 2600.”) until the first floors of the King County Courthouse – aka the City-County Building – replaced it in 1916.  This comparison looks east across Third Avenue.   Historical photo courtesy Plymouth Congregational Church.

UNRED RUINS

(Most of this feature is a reworking of what appears in the earlier feature directly above this one.  The clever “Unred Ruins” title is courtesy of a Times editor.  As a rule none of the titles we submit with our stories are used by the Times.  This is an old pulp tradition – there are headline specialists.  Sometimes – like this one – they come forward with pretty good headers.)

Henry and Sarah Yesler’s mansion was not yet twenty when it burned down early in the morning of New Years Day, 1901.  Actually, from this view of the ruins it is clear that while the big home was gutted by fire neither the corner tower (facing 3rd and Jefferson) nor the front porch – including the library sign over the front stairs – were more than blistered by it.

The Yesler landmark had a somewhat smoky history.  Although completed in 1883 Sara and Henry did not move in, and instead continued to live in their little home facing Pioneer Place for three years more.  When Sarah died in the late summer of 1887 it was in the mansion, which was then opened for the viewing of both Sarah – she was “resting” in its north parlor – and the big home too.

Soon after Sarah’s death Henry and James Lowman, Yesler’s younger nephew who was by then managing his affairs, took a long trip east to visit relatives, buy furnishings for the still largely empty mansion and, as it turned out, find a second wife for Henry.  It was a local sensation when next the not-long-for-this-world octogenarian married in his 20-year-old (she may have been 19) cousin Minnie Gagler.  (I have neither found nor made any special search for a portrait of Minnie.)

After Henry died in the master bedroom in1892 no will could be found. While Minnie was suspected of having destroyed it this could not be proved.  Consequently, the home was not — as Lowman and others expected — given to the city for use as a city hall.  Instead Minnie stayed on secluded in it until 1899 when she moved out and the Seattle Public Library moved in.

Instead of partying on New Years Eve 1900 Librarian Charles Wesley Smith worked until midnight completing the annual inventory of books that only hours later would make an impressive fire.  Except for the books that were checked out, the Seattle Public Library lost about 25 thousand volumes to the pyre.  (The charge that Smith had started the fire was never proven.)

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Facing Third Avenue, the Yesler Mansion and City Hall were photographed together in 1900, the last year they would stand side by side. In 1903, the over-sized but short-lived Coliseum Theater was built in the place o/the mansion. In 1916, the lower floors o/the surviving City County Building were dedicated there. Across Jefferson Street, the site 0/the rambling clapboard City Hall that was destroyed in 1909 was ultimately developed into City Hall Park.

PIONEER PAIR

(First appeared in Pacific, March 24, 2002)

So far as I can recall, this is the only photograph that shows, side by side, two of the more significant structures in our pioneer history. On the left facing Third Avenue is the Yesler Mansion; on the right, Seattle City Hall. From this look at City Hall you cannot tell it, but in its lifetime the hall grew into such a heterodox structure that it was popularly called “the Katzenjammer Castle.” (We will include a wider and later shot below that makes the point.) The nickname was drawn from a comic strip featuring the two mischievous Katzenjammer Kids, whose adventures took place in a cityscape stuffed with clumsy structures resembling Rube Goldberg inventions.

In its own, ornate way, the 40-room Yesler Mansion was also clumsy. In “Shaping Seattle Architecture,” Jeffrey Karl Ochsner of the University of Washington Department of Architecture notes its “highly agitated forms . . . irregular bays, picturesque profile and varied details . . . are typical of American High Victorian architecture.” I, for one, fall for this kind of clumsiness.

When construction began on the mansion in 1883 in time for the depression or “Panic of 1883,” its municipal neighbor was already standing for two years as the King County Courthouse. When, in 1886, Henry and Sara Yesler moved two blocks from their home in Pioneer Place (Square) to their big home, it was barely furnished. After Sara died the following year, Henry and his nephew James Lowman went east to visit relatives and buy furniture. Henry died in late 1892.

Seven years later, the Seattle Public Library moved in. The stay was short. On New Year’s Day 1901, fire destroyed the Yesler Mansion and 25,000 books. Twelve years earlier both buildings just escaped the city’s “Great Fire.”

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What we now refer to as the King County Courthouse was first known as the City-County Building when Seattle’s mayor George Cotterill and the King County Commissioners agreed to build and share the new building both needed.  Construction began in June 1914.  This view looks east across 3rd Avenue to where the building’s south side faces what is now called City Hall Park.

CITY-COUNTY BUILDING

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 2006)

For fifteen tiring years litigants negotiated First Hill to meet with bureaucrats at the King County Courthouse at 7th Avenue and Alder Street.   Consequently, that part of the hill overlooking Pioneer Square was often called “Profanity Hill.”  But on May 4, 1916 the new courthouse was dedicated, and it suited the Central Business District well, for it looked more like an office building than a courthouse.

The architect of its first five floors, the commandingly named Augustus Warren Gould, was censured by his peers and kicked out of the American Institute of Architects. In the book “Shaping Seattle Architect,” Dennis Anderson explains with his essay on Gould that the architect “violated professional ethics to secure this commission siding with Pioneer Square property holders who fought relocation of city-county offices to the [Denny] regrade area.”  Still Gould kept the commission and this is the result.

Six more sympathetic stories were added in 1929-31.  Unfortunately in the early 1960s, as Lawrence Kreisman (a familiar name to Pacific Northwest readers) notes in “Made to Last” his book on historic preservation, “A major remodeling [that] was intended to capture the spirit of urban renewal and cosmetically disguise the building’s true age destroyed many original features of the elegant marble-clad lobbies, windows and entrance portals.”

The U.S. Food Administration’s sign “Food Will Win the War” certainly dates this view from sometime during the First World War.   In addition to soldiers and munitions the nation was also sending food to Europe and homemakers were signed up as “kitchen soldiers.”   School children recited this rhyming pledge.  “At table I’ll not leave a scrap of food upon my plate.  And I’ll not eat between meals but for supper time I’ll wait.”  These were the years when horse steaks were sold at the Pike Place Market, President Wilson turned the white house law into a pasture for sheep, and the country’s 20th century long march to obesity was temporarily impeded.

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The “GREAT FIRE” of JUNE 6, 1889

(First appeared in Pacific, March 14, 1982)

The Wednesday, June 5, edition of The Times ran beneath its masthead an enthusiastic advertisement for a sale on summer parasols. It had been an unseasonably hot spring and the sun that lay on the city also fanned forest fires in the Cascades. Burning unchecked, they glowed by night and sprinkled ash on Seattle by day. The Times also reported front page that across the continent wetter weather continued on the ruins of Johnstown, Pa., where cold and heavy rains helped spread diphtheria. Six days earlier, May 31, a dam that spanned the Conemaugh River burst and in the time it takes a wall of water to rush 12 miles downstream devastated Johnstown, killing 2,200.

The Wednesday Times also printed an ad for Frye’s Opera House, and its “coming Friday night only appearance of the Cecilian Opera Co. . . .” also would feature “. . . new scenery and magnificent stage effects.”

A story inside continued the compliments. “Theater-goers during the past few weeks have observed a wonderful change in the stage settings at Frye’s Opera House . . . Since the first of the year Frye has put in ten new sets, including one fancy Gothic city, one chamber, a very elegant garden setting, a woods scene.”  Frye’s theater (at the present site of the Federal Building) was when built in 1883 the grandest local landmark with its mansard roof, 1,400 seats and a stage with seven trapdoors. The feature article concluded with assurances that “there are five large exits which provide against any danger of a panic in case of fire or an accident.”

Soon enough the fire came. There would be no Thursday Tunes, no summer parasols, no “elegant garden setting,” no “fancy Gothic city” and no Seattle business district.

The principal photograph looks south down Front Street (First Avenue) from Spring St. towards Madison and the intersection where the “Great Fire of June 6, 1889,” first ignited in a basement wood shop across the street from the Opera House. The crowd stands well back from the heat.  There was no defending the theater, which although brick, is still ablaze and would soon be consumed. The scene was shot around 3 o’clock in the afternoon shortly after the fire began. It is one of the few images of the fire itself. Most local photographers were busy saving their equipment.  We may imagine that many thousands of prints and negatives of the pre-fire city were lost to the flames. Within two hours the fire reached Pioneer Place (or Square) and by 7 o’clock the fire had eaten ‘its way to Main Street and would continue on through the evening past King Street to a wet death in the tideftats where the Kingdome now stands (once stood).

The Great Fire moved north as well. By sunset the spot from which the photograph was taken, near Spring, and all of the picture’s subjects, including the Minneapolis Art Studio, would be consumed. And in that direction another casualty is noted in Murray Morgan’s classic of local history, Skid Road.

“It climbed east up the hill toward Second Avenue from the Opera House. So great was the heat that the fire pushed backward against the wind across Madison Street and into the Kenyon block which housed, in addition to stores, the press of The Seattle Times.”

And The Times was stunned until Monday, the 10th, when its first post-fire edition would announce: “The Times is still on earth. It is slightly disfigured but still in the ring . . .The Times office went up in flames . . . nothing being saved except the reporters, the files and a few other implements of the trade.” This dauntless report was preceded by a rhyming headline which read:  “SEATTLE DISFIGURED, but still in the ring” this is the song Seattle will sing, New buildings, New hopes, New streets, New town, there’s nothing that can throw Seattle down. She goes thru adversity, fire and flame but the Queen City gets there just the same.”

This Queen City – named so earlier by a Portland developer – also got a lot of press attention nationally. But it wasn’t the leveling of 30 central city blocks that was news as much as the human interest it discovered in this frontier town’s steadfast generosity. Before the fire, citizens had pledged $576 in relief to the Johnstown disaster. After their own catastrophe, they decided still to keep the faith and send that pledge along to the flood Victims_

The Monday Times reported: “Everywhere confidence in the future of this city is maintained . . . The heaviest losers are the most cheerful.”  This booming optimism was encouraged in the eventual finding that no human lives were lost.  However, thousands of rats and at least one horse died that day.  As the Monday Times reported: “The men who left a head horse in a vacant lot off Madison near Broadway on the day of the Fire: If they do not removed the carcass, they will be reported to the police as the stench arising from the animal is sickening.”

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The off-shore reach of Yesler’s Wharf is impressive even after it was destroyed during the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.  The contemporary scene steps back perhaps two hundred feet to catch the ramps that serve the passenger ferries at the foot of Yesler Way.

YESLER WHARF RUINS – 1889

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 2003)

By a contemporary’s description Yesler’s Wharf and the rest of the waterfront was “transformed to charcoal” by the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.  The fire began around 2:45 in the afternoon at Front Street (First Avenue) and Madison Street.  Pushed by an unseasonably hot wind out of the north it skittered south along the waterfront reaching and engulfing Yesler Wharf by 5:30.

Stripped by the fire of its structures and planking the wharf revealed a substantial foundation of fill and debris gathered through nearly a half-century of serving as the community’s industrial center at the foot of Mill Street (Yesler Way).  This view looks east from near the wharf’s outer end to the still standing ruins of the ornate brick buildings that formed a show-strip along the west side of First Avenue for the two blocks between Columbia Street, on the far left and Yesler Way, on the far right.

Here perhaps three or four days after the fire (parts of the rubble are still smoldering) the wharf is already being rebuilt.  The new beams at the bottom of the scene have been attached to what is left of the pilings at the southern edge of the fill.  The fire obviously could not burn below the water line, and at low tide the best of the surviving stubs were capped and extended.  The fire has surely contributed to some of the fill showing between the beams.  The size of this scene can be gauged by the single worker standing on a beam right of center.

Barely visible left of center is a Lilliputian party of citizens in suits and dresses visiting the site.  They are probably carrying the passes that were required until the eleventh of June. That day a local daily reported that the “district was opened to the public and immediately invaded by a heterogeneous crowd of the curious, relic hunters, vagrants and thieves . . .  Riff raff and land pirates set about digging . . .  All articles of value that could be found in the ruins were seized upon and many disgraceful scenes enacted . . .  The military returned and drove the vagrants out.”

By the end of June nearly all the ruins had been razed, the debris removed and the fire district dappled with temporary tents for businesses.  At summer’s end the waterfront was almost entirely planked over, extended, and rebuilt with many more piers and warehouses larger than those destroyed by the fire.

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When its first ornate section was built in 1883 the Occidental hotel was perhaps the principal architectural sign of Seattle’s then recent ascendancy as the most populated community in Washington Territory.  With its 1887 additions the hotel covered the entire flatiron block between Second, Yesler and James.  Destroyed by the “Great Fire” of June 5,1889, the Occidental was replaced by the Seattle Hotel whose unfortunate destruction in 1961 by many reckonings mobilized Seattle’s “forces of preservation.”  A small section of its dismal replacement, the “Sinking Ship Garage,” appears in the contemporary photograph right of center between the Pioneer Building and the trees of Pioneer Square.

“HIDEOUS REMAINS”

(First appeared in Pacific, June 6, 2004)

One hundred and sixteen years ago this morning on June 6, 1889 that part of Seattle’s excited population that tired of watching the flames through the night and had surviving beds to drop into awoke to these ruins and thirty-plus blocks of more ruins and ashes.  The Occidental Hotel’s three-story monoliths — perhaps the grandest wreckage — held above the still smoking district like illustrations for the purple and red prose of that morning’s Seattle Daily Press. (It is printed above.)

“The forked tongues of a pierce pitiless holocaust have licked up with greedy rapacity the business portion of Seattle . . . It was a catastrophe sudden and terrific. Besides the smoking tomb-like ruins of a few standing walls . . . people are left living to endure with sheer despair . . . blackness, gloom, bereavement, suffering, poverty, the hideous remains of a feast of fire.”

Predictably, the reporter’s hideous remains were also fantastic and the city’s photographers were soon making sidewalk sales of scenes like this one.  If the best of these ruins had been allowed to stand it would have become both romantic and revered, but it was not.  The Occidental’s  “towers” were blown up on the evening of the eighth.  (Most likely it was either late on the 7th or 8th that this record of their silhouette was captured for the district was still generally ablaze on the sixth.)

The fire started at about 2:30 in the afternoon of June 5 at the southwest corner of Front Street (First Ave.) and Madison.  It took a little less than four hours for it to reach and jump James Street and ignite the north wall of the hotel.  In another dozen minutes the fire passed through the distinguished landmark and jumped Yesler Way to spread through the firetrap frame structures between Yesler and the tideflats that were then still south of King Street.

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Then caption: Looking north on an unpaved Second Avenue in July 1889.  The nearly new tracks on the left served the first electric trolley on the Pacific Coast when the conversion was made from horses to dynamos earlier in March.  Second was paved in the mid-1890s and thereafter quickly became Seattle’s “Bicycle Row” with many brands to choose from sold mostly out of small one story storefronts, especially in this block between Spring and Seneca Streets.  (Pix courtesy of Michael Maslan)  Now caption:  The widened Second north of Spring Street was half quiet when photographed on a late Sunday afternoon.

THE CANVAS RECOVERY

The city’s “great fire” of June 6, 1889 consumed most of the business district – more than 30 blocks – but not this block, the first part of Second Avenue that was not in some part scorched.  After the disaster it quickly served in the rebuilding that turned practically every available lot and lawn on Second into a sewn strip of temporary tents.  The Times for June 10 reported that while “the slabs and sawdust piles are still burning and sending clouds of smoke back over the town” over 100 permits had been issued to put up tents.

Judging by the canvas signs, the large tent on the far left, at the southwest corner of Second and Seneca Street, is shared by two firms: Doheny and Marum Dry Goods and the “manufacturers agents”, Avery, Kirk and Lansing.  Before they were for the most part wiped out by the fire the two businesses were already neighbors at the northwest corner of Columbia and Front (First Avenue).

Around two o’clock on the afternoon of June 6, or bout a half-hour before the fire started, Avery and his partners were suddenly $2,500 richer, when W.A. Gordon, a young man recently arrived from Maine, invested that amount, “everything he had” the papers reported, in the business.  The sudden cash most likely helped with the construction of the big tent.  Still we do not see Gordon’s name stitched to it.

We know from a Times article of August 2, titled “A Tent Occupant’s News” that a firm doing business on Second just north of Seneca had paid $2 a month per running foot for space to construct the framework for a tent and cover it with canvas “at the expense of several hundred dollars.”  Now less than two months later the landlord was asking the city to remove the tent for the construction of a building.  The threatened residents appealed, “We do not want to be thrown into the street.”

A few tents did business for a year before the city council decided there were “buildings enough for all” and ordered the last of them removed.

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Then Caption: Looking west on Cherry Street from Third Avenue into part of the “brand new” Seattle built after the “Great Fire” of 1889.    (photo courtesy Lawton Gowey) Now Caption: Within twenty years of the ’89 fire much of the new city was being rebuilt bigger.  Here the Dexter Horton Building on the right, the Hoge building, left-of-center and across 2nd Ave, and the Alaska Building, at the southeast corner also of Second and Cherry are surviving landmarks of that enlargement.  (by Jean Sherrard)

A STURDY CHERRY

(First published in Pacific March, 2008)

In 1890 the photographers William Boyd and George Braas formed a partnership seeing, perhaps, in the new city being built above the ashes of the old one destroyed in the “great fire’ of 1889 an opportunity to put their “mirror” to the great changes and prosper with them.  The partnership lasted barely two years and this example of their work most likely dates from 1892, although without a blade or leaf of landscaping we get no hints of the season.

The partners have titled it, lower-left, “Cherry St. Seattle” and given it the number “141.”  The view looks west on Cherry through its intersection with Third Avenue, and everything within their frame, excepting the old clapboards on the far left, is nearly new.  One can sense in this sturdy cityscape of brick, sandstone, and fine lines what an elegant city Seattle was after the fire — and almost instantly.

Right of center are the New York Block at Second Avenue and, far right, the Occidental Building, then home for the Albemarle Hotel.  Both structures were designed by the by then already venerable Seattle architect William E. Boone who sometimes topped his sensitive posture with a skull cap.  On the smoldering heels of the fire the Occidental Building was built quickly in three months and a few days.  The New York block was the opposite.  First designs were ready in 1889 but the building was not completed until 1892.  Both structures were later sacrificed for the grand terra cotta tiled Dexter Horton building, which occupies most of the “now” scene.

The Bailey Block at the southwest corner of Second and Cherry, far left, survives although most of its stone clad skin is hidden in the “now” behind the Alaska Building, which when it was added in 1904 was the Seattle’s first “absolutely fireproof all steel frame” skyscraper.

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Then Caption:  Looking west down a planked Columbia Street to the waterfront from Third Avenue, circa 1900.   [Photo courtesy Larry Hamilton]  Now Caption:  The Colman Building is the only survivor from the “then” but it can barely be detected, right-of-center, with added stories at the northwest corner of First Ave. and Columbia Street.  It is directly across First from the Norton Building, in 1959 one of Seattle’s first glass curtain wall skyscrapers.  [Now by Jean Sherrard]

COLUMBIA STREET WEST of THIRD AVE. Ca. 1900

Last week we looked west on Cherry Street from Third Ave. in 1892 and here a few years later we move one block north and look west again on Columbia to Elliot Bay.   In the foreground worn planking gives a texture to Columbia but at Second Avenue it runs into brick.

Behind the pole on the right, stands the stately little classic that was Seattle’s post office for most of the 1890s.   When it moved to new quarters in 1899, the sidewalk news depot and stationary store survived.  A few of the periodicals offered are hung in display beneath the large sidewalk awning.

At the corner with 2nd Avenue, the ornate two story Colonial Building was built by Harvard graduate Herman Chapin who also raised the plain four-story brick Boston Block directly across Columbia at its southeast corner with Second.  Constructed in 1887-88, their timing and locations were most fortunate for both buildings just escaped the city’s Great Fire of 1889 (although it cracked their windows) and following the fire they were temporarily stuffed with businesses displaced by it.

The broad-shoulder Haller Building holds the northwest corner of Second and Columbia, right of center. Built directly after the fire from a design by the prolific architect Elmer Fisher, its principal tenant here is the Seattle National Bank, one of whose directors was the “capitalist” Theodore Haller.

Just by the signs evident here in this first block on Columbia one can buy a sewing machine, photograph supplies, a haircut, a Turkish bath, a newspaper, and a meal at the Alley Restaurant, sensibly in the alley north of Columbia.  At the waterfront it is still a tall ship with two masts that rests in the slip between the Yesler and Colman docks.

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Historical Caption:  In the shadow of the Haller Building at Columbia Street an unnamed photographer looks south on Second and into what was then still the city’s primary financial district.  (Courtesy Michael Cirelli.) Now Caption; Second Avenue has been elaborately altered in the century between this now and then.  Still the Alaska building can be detected in both.  (Jean Sherrard)

FINANCIAL DISTRICT CA. 1908

This is the third week in a row that we have featured looks into Second Avenue’s financial district or here down it during Seattle’s greatest boom years, the two decades following the “Great Fire” of 1889 when the City grew from about 40 thousand to almost that many more than 200 thousand.

Two weeks ago we looked west on Cherry toward Second from Third, ca. 1892.  Last week Columbia Street was the subject, again looking west from Third to Second, ca. 1900.  And here about another eight years later an unnamed photographer records Second Avenue looking south from mid-block between Marion and Columbia, which is being crossed by a lonely motorcar and an electric trolley on the Lake Union line.

What stands out and up in this view is at is center: the Alaska Building (1904) at the southeast corner of Cherry, Seattle’s first skyscraper.

The banner strung across Second Avenue mid-block above the trolley reads, in part, “Old Time 4th at Pleasant Beach (on Bainbridge Island), Boats Leave on the Hour, 50 cents.  Including Dancing and Sports.”  So the photograph was recorded early in the summer.  Since there is no evidence of the citywide promotions connected with the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Expo, we choose 1908 – a century ago – as a likely date.

The Hinkley Block, far right, dates from 1892 and here it is filled with lawyers, dentists, and even some artists. The brick paving on Second is about 12 years old.  The oldest structures in this scene are the two on the left: the Colonial or Chapin Block on the northeast corner of Columbia and the Boston Block south across Columbia.  As noted last week both were built before the fire of 1889 and provided great service to businesses following it.  Post-fire photographs from 1889 show these two buildings standing along above the burned-out business district.

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The three blocks between Cherry and Madison Street have almost completely changed in the century since the historical photo was recorded looking north on First Avenue from Cherry Street.  The Colman Building (beyond the trees in the “now”) is the big exception.   If the year of the historical scene is not 1907, it is close to it. HISTORICAL PHOTO courtesy of Greg Lange

FIRST AVENUE NORTH of CHERRY STREET

(First appeared in Pacific Sept. 2006)

Somehow the historical photographer managed to carry his or her camera to a temporary perch and look north on First Avenue and above the Kenneth Hotel sign at the foot of Cherry Street. With a bustling sidewalk and street scene – including seven trolleys – this elevated portrait of First was favored with its own colorized post card.

In the 1850s this was still the site of a knoll on which the locals built the North Block House that protected them during the one-day “Battle of Seattle’ of Jan 26. 1856.  The Indians small arms fire from the woods beyond Third Avenue barely penetrated the logs of the fort although one local was hit and killed while peeking out the temporarily open door.  That casualty stood close to our photographer’s mysterious prospect.

James Clemmer, a young theatre man from Spokane, first managed the Kenneth Hotel in 1907, and lived there too.  Within a year he converted the hotel lobby into the Dream Theatre, the first Seattle theatre to treat films “seriously” by regularly mixing “one-reelers” with vaudeville acts.  The theatre was deep but narrow, for although seven stories high the Kenneth was built on one lot.  As such it was Seattle’s best reminder of Amsterdam.  From this prospect we cannot tell if the theatre is as yet below the hotel sign.

I raised my camera with a pole (or monopod).  Directly behind me is Pioneer Square and its official historic district most of which was built soon after the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.   Of course, most of the buildings showing north of Cherry Street in the older view were also built in the first decade following the fire but with few exceptions that they have been razed and replaced – in a few instances (like across First at its southeast corner with Columbia Street) with stock parking lots.

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Above, pioneer photographer LaRoche’s circa 1892 panorama of the restored business district looks down from the front lawn of the then new King County Courthouse over 7th Avenue.  The Yesler mansion appears far left.  Jean’s approximate repeat was taken recently from the roof of Harborview Hospital.  (Click these TWICE – please)

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