Richard Berner died around 2:30 pm last Saturday Nov. 3, 2018. At the time Jean and I were in West Seattle helping the West Seattle Historical Society with it’s annual “gala auction.” That benevolent huckstering went so well that the gala ran both bountiful and long, and our plan to visit Rich following the auction was prevented by the small worries of slipping time. Two days later we learned that it was also snipped by the singular one of Rich’s death. Born at the very end of 1920, Richard did not make it to 100. As the founder of the University of Washington Library’s Archive he was a mentor to many of us, and friend too. Rich was a fine blend of ready compassion and good humor.
BERNER’S BOOMTOWN
(click to enlarge photos)
We are pleased now to introduce Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration, the first of Richard C. Berner’s three books named together Seattle in the 20th Century.When the details, stories, and insights are explored with a close reading, Berner’s accomplishment is by far our widest opening into Seattle’s twentieth century, the first half of it, from the 1900 to 1950. Those fifty years were also the second half of Seattle’s first hundred years, if we begin our counting with the footsteps of mid-western farmers settling here in the early 1850s.
Richard Berner, a recent portrait
Volume one was first published in 1991 by Charles Press, and the publisher – “Rich” Berner himself – made a modest list of its contents on the back cover. We will repeat it. “Politics of Seattle’s urbanization: dynamics of reform, public ownership movement, turbulent industrial relations, effects of wartime hysteria upon newfound civil liberties – all responding to the huge influx of aspiring recruits to the middle class & organized labor as they confronted the established elite. Includes outlines of the economy, cultural scene, public education, population characteristics & ethnic history.”
For this “printing” we have added many captioned illustrations, some of them copied from news reports of the events Berner examines, and we have almost always succeeded in placing each next to the text it illustrates. On-line illustrated editions of Volume 2: Seattle 1921-1940, From Boom to Bust and Volume 3: Seattle Transformed, World War 2 to Cold War will follow – but not at the moment. The collecting of illustrations and putting them in revealing order with the narratives for Volume 2 and 3 is still a work in progress. Readers who want to “skip ahead” of our illustrated presentations of Berner’s three books here on dorpatsherrardlomont can find the complete set of his history as originally published in local libraries or through interlibrary loans.
How Rich Berner managed it is a charmed story. He undertook what developed into his magnus opus after retiring in 1984 from his position as founder and head of the University of Washington Archives and Manuscripts Division. Between the division’s origin in 1958 and his retirement Rich not only built the collection but also studied it. Berner worked closely with Bob Burke, the U.W. History professor most associated with the study of regional history who first recommended Berner, a University of California, Berkeley graduate in history and library science, for the U.W. position.Together, the resourceful professor and the nurturing archivist shepherded scores of students in their use of the archive. Rich Berner is the first to acknowledge that he also learned from the students as they explored and measured the collection for dissertations and other publications. By now their collected publications can be imagined as its own “shelf” of Northwest History.
News clipping showing Rich C. Berner “as curator of manuscripts for the University of Washington Library.”
Rich Berner showed himself also a good explicator of his profession.His influential book, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical Analysis was published by the University of Washington Press in 1983 and was awarded the Waldo Gifford Leland Prize by the Society of American Archivists. Composing this historical study on top of establishing and nourishing the University’s Archive and Manuscripts Division may be fairly considered a life’s achievement, but, with his 1984 retirement Berner continue to work in the archive at writing his three-volume history. He published Volume Three in 1999, and so, continuing the charm of this entire production, he completed Seattle in the 20th Century before the century (and millennium) was over.
Rich & Thelma
(Lest we imagine this scholar chained to his archive we know that with his wife Thelma, a professor of Physiology and Biophysics in the U.W. Medical School and the first woman appointed Associate Dean of the UW graduate school, this famously zestful couple managed to often take to the hills and mountains.)
Rich was born in Seattle in 1920 – the last year explored in this his first volume. His father worked on the docks as a machinist, and for a time was “blacklisted” by employers because of his union advocacy.During the depression, while Rich was attending classes at Garfield High School, his mother ran a waterfront café on the Grand Trunk Pacific’s pier at the foot of Madison Street.
Rich in uniform
During the war Rich served with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Following it with help from the GI Bill he matriculated at Cal-Berkeley with degrees in both history and library science. It was also in Berkeley that he first met Robert Burke, then Director of the Manuscript Collection of the Bancroft Library. Rich worked part time there.
For Seattle, as for any city of size, there is a “canon” of publications that are necessary reading for anyone wanting to get a grip on local history. The first half of the Seattle Canon may be said to begin with Pioneer Arthur Denny’s Pioneer Reminiscences of 1888. The pioneer canon receives its own magnus opus with the combined works – multi-volume histories of Seattle and King County – of Clarence Bagley, himself a pioneer. That Berner was already attending Seattle’s T.T. Minor grade school in 1926 when Bagley was still three years away from publishing his History of King County is evidence of the “Boomtown” included in the title of this Berner’s first of three books on Seattle history.
With rare exceptions the books included in this first part of the Seattle Canon were published by their subjects, like Denny’s still revealing Reminiscences, or under the direction and/or support of their subjects, like Bagley’s still helpful volumes. They are generally “picturesque histories” written to make their subjects seem more appealing than they often were. The stock of motives for “doing heritage” are there generally supportive or positive, showing concern for the community, admiration for its builders, the chance to tell good stories, and often also the desire to learn about one’s forebears although primarily those truths that are not upsetting.Not surprisingly, and again with rare exceptions, these booster-historians and their heritage consumers were members of a minority of citizens defined by their wealth, race and even religion. It would be a surprise to find any poor socialists, animists or even affluent Catholics among them.
Part Two of the Seattle Canon may be said to have popularly begun with Skid Road, historian-journalist Murray Morgan’s charming and yet still raking history of Seattle. Published in 1951, the year of Seattle’s centennial, it is still in print, and has never been out of it. Richard Berner has dedicated Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration to Morgan. The post-war canon is often corrective of the sins of the pioneers. The works of Morgan and many others, certainly including Berner, are not generally clothed in the pious harmonies of their predecessors, the ordinarily stress-free narratives expected of those who were writing under the “pioneer code.”
In our opinion Rich Berner’s three-volume Seattle in the 20th Centuryis the greatest single achievement of our Seattle Canon – “part two.”It has the scope and details required. It is profoundly instructive and filled with the characters and turns of fate that any storyteller might admire and wisely exploit. Within Berner’s three books are the wonders of what they did, the touchstones of their devotions and deceptions, their courage and hypocrisy, meanness and compassion.Certainly, it has been our pleasure to help illustrate this the first volume and to also continue on now with volumes two and three.
Paul Dorpat 10/1/2009
Archivist-Antiquarian as Young-Equestrian posing in front of the Berner family home on Seattle’s Cherry Street.Student at Seattle’s Garfield High SchoolRich Berner’s father, top-center: machinist on the Seattle waterfront.“High school or college, I’m no longer sure.” – Rich BernerRich Berner, second row third from left, posing for a group portrait of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division at a Colorado camp during the Second World War.With Thelma on Mt. StuartThelma & RichThe Robert Gray Award from the Washington State Historical Society
THEN: Pioneer Seattle photographer Frank LaRoche’s revealing record of Princess Angeline’s last home is also stocked with clues for finding its location. We have put helpful aids – like a map – in the blog pauldorpat.com. [Courtesy, the Museum of History and Industry]NOW: Ron Edge shows his back to the spot where Princess Angeline posed on the porch of her new home in the early 1890s. By Ron’s figuring the princess’ home, had it been preserved as a monument with all else the same, would now be protected inside the Market’s new covered parking lot, but not her porch. It would be taking the weather with the small copse of bamboo that has found a break in the built neighborhood about 130 feet north of the Pike Street Hill Climb.
The Northern Pacific Railroad’s photographer F. Jay Haynes included Princess Angeline’s home site during his 1890 visit to Seattle. Soon after his visit Angeline’s new cabin was built for her directly north of this her older one. The shed was removed but not, apparently, the stump that here crowds it on the right. (Courtesy, Murray Morgan)A “Rosetta Stone” snapshot framed in a circle that shows the remnants of Angeline’s First Cabin and behind it the front facade of her Second cabin, which was also her last.
This Sunday we, Jean Sherrard, myself, and especially Ron Edge, our collector-cartographer with a devotion to details, hope to convince you that we have discovered the correct location for the footprint of Princess Angeline’s home. Angeline, many of our readers will know, was the daughter of our city’s namesake Chief Seattle. Born around 1820, she was in her prime by the time Euro-American settler-interlopers first arrived here to stay in the early 1850s. The princess got on well with the city’s founders, and it was one of them, Catherine Maynard, who gave her the royal name. Catherine, a nurse and wife of the village physician, Doc Maynard, explained that her new name better fit her elevated status. (Although surely the princess’s native name, Kikisoblu, was as euphonious as Angeline.)
Angeline supported herself washing clothes and weaving baskets, which she sold. She also posed for pictures, both candid street shots and prepared portraits. The latter, like the Edwin J. Bailey portrait shown here, were snapped in studios where the native princess was sometimes – although not here – posed with a mix of props and backdrops that promoted her authenticity. Through Seattle’s first half-century, the princess was easily the most popular subject hereabouts, and when she could, she charged a fee for posing.
The princess also accepted help and may have expected it. She enjoyed a free grocery tab at Louch’s Market on First Avenue, which was not far from her home, whose true footprint we will now reveal with the help of photographs. In 1890 the N.P. Railroad photographer, F. Jay Haynes, took what may be the earliest surviving photo of Angeline’s home. I first used and misused it for this feature on May 13, 1984. While Haynes did not peg his portrait of the Princess sitting near the front door of her seemingly windowless shed, I embraced the commonplace belief that her home was somewhere near the waterfront, between Pine and Pike Avenues, and probably closer to the latter. My mistake was in making it a beach shack by interpreting Haynes’ prospect largely on the basis of the patch of horizon that shows to the left of Angeline’s shed. That is not the beach and Haynes was not looking west but nearly northwest through the neighborhood of small warehouses and squatters’ sheds that climbed the western slope of the now long gone Denny Hill.
We must thank Ron for this correction and also for introducing photographer Frank LaRoche’s setting of the Princess and her dog posing on the front porch of her new home, built for her in 1891 by the local lumberman Amos Brown. Printed to its full width, the LaRoche photograph reveals a wide swath of Belltown landmarks that lead us with the help of Ron’s triangulation to within a few feet of Angeline’s last home. Although the princess died in 1895, her Amos Brown-made home survived and served at least as evidence until the printing of its footprint in Vol.2. page 127 of the 1905 Sanborn Insurance Map. To follow Ron Edge’s revealing lines and to explore more photographic evidence of Angeline’s home and the neighborhood, please visit the web page pauldorpat.com. It is so noted every Sunday, including this one, at the bottom of the feature’s text.
WEB EXTRAS
Just a few special treats to sweeten the (already sweet) pot. First off, a big thanks to David Peugh, through whose condo we were given access to the site; his son Jeff (pictured below) graciously escorted us.
An alternate NOW: Ron Edge with Jeff Peugh (r)A bamboo thicket grows in the shadows above Ron’s shouldersThe ‘now’ view from Kikisoblu’s front porch; the Fix/Madore building (originally the Standard Furniture Co. Warehouse) on the left, the concrete walls of the Pike Place parking garage on the right, and the soon-to-disappear viaduct to the west.Looking back east at the green cut from just in front of the viaduct with Ron Edge at the bottom of the steps…
Below, Paul presents the evidence which led Ron Edge to his discovery.
With this portrait I will imagine Angeline laughing at my clumsy mistake.
This is meant to be – or will be – a feature about our victory in locating the home site of the daughter of Chief Seattle for whom the pioneer settlers adopted the name Princess (and sometimes Queen) Angeline. We have known with considerable confidence that her cabins – at least two of them for which we have photographs – were set somewhere near Pike Street, below what has been since 1907 the Pike Place Public Market. But we wanted the footprint – or close to it.
Here from the rear is Angeline’s last home. The Miner Hotel, one of our landmarks that helped Ron Edge put Angeline’s home in its proper place shows its corner tower, upper right. The view looks south. The tree on the left and the cabins there are clues as well.
After assembling perhaps all available clues – maps and photos – Ron managed to find the home, or proper footprint, for this home, and Jean posed him, as it were, on the front porch of Angeline’s home for the NOW, where she posed with her dog more than once, for she for the boom years before her death in 1896 probably the most popular photographic subject in Seattle.
Here highlighted in yellow is a sign of Princess Angeline’s enduring draw. The adver is from The Times of December 12, 1904, eight years after her death. [click to enlarge]One year later developer C.D. Hillman, is proud to imagine that the cabin in which Princess Angeline was born is on property he is offering for sale and and so is free for him to show in the neighborhood with his “Greasy Pole Climbing” for the year’s Independence Day Picnic on Mercer Island.
As if reflecting on the claims of the boomtown that surround her, she, it seems, needs no introduction, ca. 1903. [click click to read]MORE ANGELINE INTERLUDE –
Included within the frame of this week’s featured photo are the helpful clues for locating the footprint of Angeline’s cabin. They are listed in yellow upper-left. Click to Enlarge.
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Both the number and inserted thumbnails should help you orient some of these parts/clues to those notes in the featured photo. CLICK CLICK CLICK TO ENLARGE
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An unidentified photographer looks north thru (and above) the ruins of Angeline’s older home to the front south facade of her new home. This photo was obviously of great help in finding the footprint.
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Looking north from the roof of the Standard Furniture Co. Warehouse with Western Avenue on the right. The landmark tree is number two. By this WW1 era shot Angeline’s home is gone. Most of it – perhaps all – would have been out-of-frame to the bottom.
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The red line is drawn down from the tenement on Front Street at Pine into Angeline’s last home.
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The neighborhood looking north along the waterfront from the King Street coal wharf in 1890. Construction is nearly the as yet not built central tower of the Denny Hotel, upper-right, on the front hump of Denny Hill. It straddles Third Avenue between Second and Fourth Avenues a few feet more than 100 feet above the regrades.
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Angeline’s back yard – again.
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Helpful details from both the 1893 and 1904 Sanborn Insurance Maps. The red circle marks Angeline’s cabin.
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A Google Earth space shot superimposed on the 1904 Sanborn Insurance Map.
The Standard Furniture Co. Warehouse c1905 (now the Fix/Madore building)
THEN: This 1939 glimpse east from Ninth Avenue follows Pike Street to the end of the about three-quarter mile straight climb it makes on its run from the Pike Place Market to its first turn on Capitol Hill. [CLICK to ENLARGE and so on]NOW: A swath of landscaped concrete first poured and planted in the 1960s has replaced the row of former hotels and shops that once lined Pike Street in its ascent of Capitol Hill. Jean Sherrard has put his back to the window-arched tunnel that distinguishes Pike Street where it passes beside the Washington State Convention Center.
The featured look east on Pike Street from Ninth Avenue is dated May 21, 1939. In about two decades more this neighborhood would be cut, crushed, and cleared for the construction of the Seattle Freeway. Through these two blocks between NinthAvenue and Boren Street, Pike’s mixed neighborhood of cafes, hotels, barbershops, and furniture upholsterers would be revamped into a concrete ramp over a concrete ditch. That this part of Pike was once an “upholstery row” surprised me. In 1938 (I have a city directory for 1938 but not 1939) there were five furniture upholsterers listed in the few blocks between Eighth and Melrose Avenues. It is at Melrose that Pike begins its turn east to conform to the more recently platted street grid on the ridge. The jog’s directional change is indicated with an adjustment in the name to East Pike Street, which in 1939 was one of Seattle’s principal “auto rows.” East Pike also marks the subjective – and by now traditional – border between the First and Capitol Hill neighborhoods.
Another same day snap by the billboard rangers, Foster and Kleiser, on Pike Street, but here one block east at Terry Street. The hotels here on the south side of Pike include the William Penn, far right, Hotel Crest, left of the power pole, and the Wintonia, which I remember for its wild tavern in the 1970 with bad manners contesting with good music. Across Pike and a block east is the Villa Hotel at the northeast corner of Boren and Pike..
Also with the help of the Polk City Directory for 1938 I have counted four hotels in these two blocks between Ninth Avenue and Boren that were lost to the Seattle Freeway (Interstate Five): the Stanley, here at Ninth Avenue, the William Penn and the Crest near Terry Avenue, and the five-floor Hotel Alvord, on the left. (Jean Sherrard’s repeat also reveals a survivor. The Villa Hotel at the northwest corner of Pike and Boren can stands out in the photo above. It cal also be glimpsed directly above the trolley in this Sunday’s “then.” It is more difficult but not impossible to find in the “now.”)
A Times clip from December 8, 1924A Seattle Times clip from March 3, 1933A Seattle Times clip: Oct. 23, 1936.Sprinkled throughout most hotel and apartment house histories are true crime stories of many sorts. This one for the Alvord was published in The Times for July 23, 1930.
The Alvord’s publicity stream begins in 1924, the year of its construction, and reaches its most sensational height around midnight on March 1, 1933. Mildred Russell, the 24-year-old bride of violinist and orchestra leader Jan Russell, opened a window in search of fresh air and used all five of the hotel’s floors to fall to the ground below. The Times qualified the ground as “soft earth.” From her merciful bounce, Mildred received only a few bruises and a cracked skull. “I had just lit a cigarette,” she said. Only three years later, Margaret Thaanum fell from the Alvord’s third floor to her death. The trained nurse was trying to walk the three-inch ledge outside her window.
The single and double fees for the Alvord Hotel a few weeks before the economic crash of 1929. And below: a few weeks more than one year following the crash.From The Times classifieds for Feb. 21, 1931.
Returning now to the trolley heading east on Pike Street, on this spring day there was a growing sense that these often rattling common carriers were about to lose out to the busses and trackless trollies promoted by internal combustion and “big rubber.” Two years more and most trolley tracks in Seattle were pulled up and the disrupted brickwork patched with asphalt and/or concrete.
COMING UP – This Spring the 50th ANNIVERSARY of the FOUNDING of HELIX. We hope to completed the scanning of every page – by then. Keep watch. The above was printed on a back cover of one of the (very roughly) 130 weekly (for the most part) tabloids.
On this Sunday, May 21, 1939, we learn from The Times that while Hitler and Mussolini were preparing a military alliance with their Rome-Berlin pact, Seattleites were anticipating in the week the grand Potlatch Pageant and its big parade. (Hitler and Mussolinivented that “Germany and Italy have no intention of using any country as a tool for egotistical plans, which is happening only too clearly on the other side.”) Two days later Boeing’s Yankee Clipper inaugurated the first commercial airway service between the Unites States and Europe. Perhaps playing it safe at the start, other than the crew of fifteen, the clipper carried only mail, four tons of it.
The Boeing Clipper at Matthews Beach, its testing harbor on Lake Washington.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, blokes? Blokes but not bullies we will find some links and other decorations and put the UP.
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A detail from the 1912 Real Estate Map. Note the two brick structures (including Seattle Taxi) in block 108 on the right. CLICK TO ENLARGE
Seattle Taxi is on the left in this look south 9th Ave. from Pike Street.
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The buildings on Ninth Avenue south of Pike Street, including the Seattle Taxi, are still standing in this aerial of the neighborhood photographed sometime before it was cut through by Interstate-5. Compare to the photo below.
Courtesy, Ron Edge
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RETURN to a detail of the neighborhood pulled from the 1912 Baist Real Estate map
THEN: The Phoenix Hotel on Second Avenue, for the most part to the left of the darker power pole, and the Chin Gee Hee Building, behind it and facing Washington Street to the right, were both built quickly after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. (Courtesy: Museum of History and Industry.)NOW: The Phoenix Hotel was destroyed with the 1928-29 Second Avenue Extension. The hotel was replaced with the new street’s intersection, while the surviving Chin Gee Hee Building, originally behind it, was reshaped for the new northeast corner of Washington Street and Second Avenue.
Public historian Kurt E. Armbruster, one of our sensitive explorers of Seattle’s cityscapes, recently sent me his snapshot of the Chin Gee Hee Building at the northeast corner of Washington Street and the Second Avenue Extension. Kurt regards it as “a little gem” and, it seems, it is the last remaining piece of architecture to survive from Seattle’s First Chinatown, in the neighborhood of Washington Street and Second Avenue. It was a community of the mostly single men who help build the region’s earliest railroads, labored as domestics and on the pick and shovel gangs that helped dig, for example, the canal between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
Kurt Armbruster’s snapshot of the “little gem.” Thanks Kurt.
Chin Gee Hee arrived in Seattle in the mid-1870s and soon prospered as a labor contractor, a merchant and a builder. Partnering with Chin Chun Hock, another and even earlier Chinese contractor-merchant, Hee and Hock hired Seattle’s earliest resident architect, William E. Boone, to design two commercial buildings for them in Chinatown. Although both were consumed by the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, they were quickly replaced by the two
Chinese labor contractor at his desk.Chin Gee HeeSeattle Times clip from Feb. 15, 1927 comparing Chin Gee Hee to the Great Northern Railroad’s Jim Hill.
grander three-story hotels featured in the featured photo at the top. The greater part of Chin Chun Hock’s Phoenix Hotel is to the left of the darker power pole in the photo’s foreground, and the full front façade of the Chin Gee Hee Building, facing Washington Street, is to the right of the pole. Boone styled both as orthodox Victorians. It is claimed that Chin Gee Hee’s hotel was the first brick building completed following the ’89 fire, however, we may be permitted to show some reservation about this claim as we do many other “firsts” in local history. The thirty-plus blocks of the business district was a cacophony of construction following the fire with the builders’ general racing urge to open first.
The Phoenix Hotel on the right with the Chin Gee Hee building out-of-frame to the right., ca. 1912. Long ago we did a now-then feature using the above and blow photos. When we find it we will insert it.
A clip from The Seattle Times for August 25, 1897.
Judging from news coverage, the Phoenix was the seedier of the two hotels. On August 11, 1905, the hotel’s manager W.A. Morris was charged with robbing one of its drunken guests of $45.00. While the manager confessed his innocence, the police told the Seattle Times that “Morris conducts one of the worst dives in the city.” Earlier that summer the police had made an opium raid on the Phoenix, noting that the hotel had “developed into a full-fledge opium den and in the last month a half-dozen smokers have been caught there.” Meanwhile, also in 1905, the Phoenix’s neighbor, Chin Gee Hee, left Seattle to build a railroad in China. He was subsequently awarded by the last emperor with the honor of a peacock feather and a retinue of servants and soldiers, presumably to help him guard the rails.
THE SECOND AVENUE EXTENSION as seen from the SMITH TOWER. Above before: March 14, 1928. Below after: June 11, 1929.The Phoenix Hotel at the former northeast corner of Second Avenue and Washington Street can still be seen (below the center) near the bottom of the 1928 photograph. The Chin Gee Hee Building is behind it, to the left. In the 1929 photo below, the Phoenix has been sliced away and the southwest corner of the Chin Gee Hee clipped.
A detail from the 1908 Baist Real Estate Map, still twenty years prior to work on the Second Avenue Extension. Our choice intends to feature at its top the intersection of Washington Street and Second Avenue with the Phoenix Hotel named at its northeast corner. And please not the green marked park at the top. We will show more of it below. A detail of the same intersection (upper-left) from 1912. Later an owner of the bound Baist map drew through the detail the borders of the Second Avenue Extension, which cuts through the Fire Department Headquarters at the northwest corner of Main and Third Avenue. In the photograph that follows directly below the extension work is underway with a remodel of the building at the southwest corner of Main Street and Third Avenue. The doomed fire station is directly across Main Street, and behind and above it the transcendent Smith Tower inspects it all like an adolescent hall proctor. It’s fifteen years old. Looking south on Second Avenue S. over Yesler Way and the Fortson Square park and trolley stop. The Phoenix Hotel can be found on the left. A feature clip about Fortson Square is include with the line of features placed at the bottom of this feature. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]Looking south on Second Ave. S. during an early Potlatch Parade. Note the Phoenix Hotel upper-left.
Most likely too hard to read but still revealing of the early hopes for the Second Avenue Extension. The Seattle Times clip dates from Oct. 18, 1925. And far right is part of a clip on Ye Old Curiosity Shop founder Pop Standley’s curio-congested West Seattle home.The completed extension.A detail from the city’s 1936 mapping aerial. The completed Second Ave extension leaves several sliced structures including the Chin Gee Hee Building. Can you find it? Note the Smith Tower, upper-left, and across Yesler Way from it the triangular park named for Fortson, a Spanish American War volunteer – a heroic one.
The Phoenix’s transgressions were fixed forever in 1928 when it was razed with the “improvement” of the Second Avenue Extension, a 1,413-foot cut through the neighborhood between Yesler Way and Jackson Street. It was hoped that the extension would make Second Avenue a ceremonial promenade leading to and from the train depots. The Chin Gee Hee Building was saved with only its west end sliced away. This eccentric reduction, combined with the recessed gallery cut into the third floor above Washington Street, surely heightened the building’s gem-like charms. Martin Denny, the proprietor of the Assemblage, the Chin Gee Hee’s principal commercial tenant, shared the greater neighborhood’s underground mystery that the Phoenix Hotel’s basement may well survive under the intersection.
THREE OTHER GLIMPSES OF THE CHIN GEE HEE BUILDING
A 1963 tax photo looking north over Main Street and the Second Ave. Extension to the shining southwest facade of the Chin Gee Hee Building.The Central Business District with Chin Gee Hee near the center of this record from the Great Northern tower., ca. 1930. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]Rubble from the 1949 earthquake. The subject looks south on the Second Avenue Extension from its southwest corner with Yesler Way. The southwest facade of the Chin Gee Hee Building rises with its six windows above the damaged swept-back auto parked on the right.
WEB EXTRAS
Here’s detail of the Chin Gee Hee Building, which Kurt adores:
The abbreviated Chin Gee Hee building
Anything to add, les mecs? Certainly Jean, first a long list of features pulled by Ron Edge from the last eight years or so of Now-and-Then, and then a few more and earlier features.
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First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 9, 2003
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First appeared in the Times, Feb. 28, 1999.
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First appeared in The Times, March 14, 1999
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Evidence that Jean visited Pioneer Square and the Chief during our recent flurry.
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Above, and continued below, a July 2, 1929 clip from The Seattle Times.
Greetings. We discovered that this weekend’s contribution to The Times PacificNW mag has been dropped, or rather postponed, for this January One, 2017 the annual “Pictures of the Year” (last year) takes every page, except, of course, those with the ads. In its place we will assemble a miscellany: a pile of oddities.
PIONEER AGING
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The INTERLAKEN BIKE TRAIL – Perhaps An Early Pause to Tweet
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WORLD WAR ONE SURGERY BASE HOSPITAL NO. 50 ( IN FRANCE) SUPPLIED WITH DOCTORS AND NURSES FROM WASHINGTON STATE
NURSE AT THE BEACH (NORMANDY)
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CAPITOL HILL BUS STOP at the Southwest Corner of BROADWAY and REPUBLICAN –
In 1976-77 during my residency above Peters on Broadway I snapped two thousand or more photographs – both bw and color – of those waiting for a bus and/or boarding it. It was part of an art in public places program, which, I think or bet, Anne Folke at the And/Or Gallery (and performance space, also on Capitol Hill) was behind. Some of the photographs wound up on the busses – beside the interior ads. (Or they might have had busses that were dedicated to the public arts project sans commerce.)
Friends of the Rag performed for our cameras – we also shot film. (Some day all will be revealed.)
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POLITICALLY CORRECT GRAFFITI – CA. 1975 on Eastlake
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MERIDIAN PLAYFIELD – From WALLINGFORD WALKS, 2006-2010 [click to enlarge]
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REST IN PEACE
Composer Norman Durkee at my 40th Birthday party, Oct. 28, 1978.Friend of art and justice, Doug McBroom (on the right) with his contribution to MOMA’S Forsaken Art Collection. Occasion: 2013 founding of the Museum Of Forsaken Art with a banquet at Ivar’s Salmon House. All those attending paid for their own salmon, (except those who forgot to, slackers for whom Jean Sherrard picked up the bill) and contributed an object of art to the collection, which now waits and calls for an old or new member to help build the web page sharing the estimated 1000 parts of the collection. Please step forward.Tiny Freeman over the shoulder of KRAB RADIO founder Lorenzo Milam on the evening of KRAB’S LAST DAY on the air. (There’s a good history of KRAB on HISTORYLINK should you want to know the date – and more.)
Tiny Freeman (on the right) on the sidewalk beside the Central Tavern on First Ave. South.Christ’s Nose – early and late Gothic examplesMISSING LINK from Stanwood High School photo album
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PROVERBS FROM 1889 AND A PROHIBITION-SYMPATHETIC CARTOON FROM A SEATTLE TIMES CLIP FOR MARCH 18, 1913. [CLICK TWICE to Read]
PIONEER SQUARE BAR and only 45 DRINKING DAYS LEFT
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BRAIN POWER – FOUR FREE LECTURES – MOORE THEATRE
ESTES CONDUCTS HIS KIDS IN A TREE LIKE NOTES ON A MUSICAL STAFF – LIFE MAGAZINE NOV. 21, 1938
HELIX – The Return of the REDUX From Paul Dorpat and Bill White
The five issues of Helix freshly posted below are a continuation of what was posted previously – where we let off many months ago. With this return we embrace again our intention to post them all, although most likely with less rigor. It may be a month or more before we post another one. In this we also depend upon Ron Edge who has done the scanning, and so well. Bill and I hope that you will also respond and reflect on what you read – any or all parts of it. Record your comments on anything you read in these Helixes, and send the MP3 to Bill at BWhi61@hotmail.com by the end of April, at which time Bill will edit audio histories from the MP3’s he receives and post them here with the Helix issues. If you prefer to post a written commentary or response, please join our Helix Redux Facebook site, home of lively conversations on all things Helix and related. https://www.facebook.com/groups/217636941681376/
POSTSCRIPT: MP3’s received after the end of April may be included in the next issue to be posted.
Below is a photograph of the concert advertised at the bottom of the back cover of Vol. 4 No.8
Before this coming Sunday’s feature is published we want to insert an addition to last week’s feature about the Galbraith and Bacon Wall Street Wharf and the Bark Montcalm that was tied to her south side most likely in early November, 1910 and not “circa 1912” as we speculated last Sunday. Here’s the feature photo, again.
Courtesy, Lawton Gowey
We received three letters responding to our uncertainties about which Montcalm this was and, as noted, the date it visited Seattle. Reader Kyle Stubbs was first to respond, and noted that “I am only aware of one Montcalm that was a barque-rigged sailing vessel. That is the Montcalm of 1902, 2,415 tons built at Nantes, France, which was used in around Cape Horn service by La Societe des Voiliers Nantais. The vessel was broken up in the Netherlands in 1924.”
The next letter came from Douglas Stewart, a seasoned cardiologist with the University Medical School and hospital, whom I first met last winter after I fell to the kitchen floor, tripped by my oxygen gasping heart’s tricks with consciousness, or loss of it. The good doctor is also an enthusiast for most things maritime, and even rows to work from his home, which like the hospital sits beside Portage Bay. He found that the original nitrate negative for this photograph is in the keep of the University Libraries Special Collections. In their terse cataloging of it a librarian concludes that this was the “decommissioned sailing ship Montcalm at dock, probably in Seattle ca. 1912.” The date is almost certainly wrong, and the “decommissioned” attribute is unclear or uncertain. Decommissioned when? The library’s data also describes this Montcalm as an “armored sailing corvette . . . originally built for the French Navy in 1865.” While a Google search for everything that is a Montcalm and floats will surface a French corvette with that heroic name dating from the 1860s, it is, again, almost certainly not this Montcalm. The first French corvettes of the 17th century were much smaller than this bark or barque and were built to carry cannons. They got bigger, surely, but not this big. and continued to be built for cannons not concrete and wheat like our Montcalm.
The Montcalm at the Wall Street Pier as illustrated in the Seattle Times for Nov. 2, 1910, and as mistakenly titled the Antwerp. The professional headline or title writer did not consult the reporter or caption writer, a common enough mistake in newspapers. Almost certainly the feature photo on top was recorded by the same photographer. (Courtesy, Seattle Public Library and The Seattle Times)
The third and last contributor to this quest for a proper caption is our old friend Stephen Lundgren, who for this sort of investigation into maritime history prefers the sobriquet Capt. Stefan Eddie. I confess to having used the Captain at times as a capable “World Authority on Everything,” resembling the Professor played by Sid Caesar on his TV show in the 50’s – the best part of that decade. Capt. Eddie also did what I should have done, which is consult the Seattle Public Libraries assess to the key-word search opening into The Seattle Times on-line archive between 1900 and 1984. Stephen found, for instance, the clipping above, which was almost certainly photographed by the same camera or camera person as the featured photo on top. From reading the Times reporting during the Montcalm’s few days stay in Seattle, the Captain concludes, “Took about an hour trolling the Times database and verifying the ship history facts. That it is rigged as a bark, with a steel hull, narrows the search. It’s at the Galbraith Dock probably between discharging the cement cargo in West Seattle and before loading outbound wheat at Smith Cove. The Galbraith Co. dealt in Cement. Question is what buildings were constructed with this Belgium-shipped concrete?” Capt. Stefan Eddie’s last question really goes too far. How could anyone be expected to follow the concrete from ship to foundations?
An early record of the West Seattle elevator. Why we wonder did the Montcalm unload its concrete here, an elevator for grain, when it was Galbraith and Bacon at Mill Street that was the dealer in concrete?
Finally, Captain Stephan Eddit added to his missive something more of his charming familiarity with the Montcalm subject. He explains, “Lars Myrlie Sr. tells me (in Norwegian) ‘I gots off that damm frenchie ship as soon as it gots to Seattle, it was a hell ship and I damm near gots my head stove in off the coast when the load shifted and knocked the other cargo loose cement in bulk, which meant our sure deaths if we gots a leak. Sure it was a steel ship but them damm rivets popped when a hard one hit, like a bullet they was and then came the squirt. My brother gots me off the Galbreath dock and over to Port Blakely and no more damn frenchies for me, Tusende Tak Gotts!”
It took the Montcalm 195 days to carry its 3,000 tons of concrete from Antwerp to Seattle. The ship was registered at 1,744 tons, so the concrete gave it lots of steadying ballast for the storms. However, there were no storms except the expected ones around Cape Stiff, the sailors’ name for Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Otherwise her crossing of the Atlantic was one of constant calms and so not of great speed.
Two months before “our” Montcalm visits Elliott Bay another French Montcalm called on us and stayed and partied long enough to qualify as a floating embassy.
About two hours ago our friend and expat in Lima, Bill White, was honored on a stage at the Seattle Public Library. Or rather his e-book CINEMA PENITENTIARY was honored, he could not make it from Lima. CINEMA PENITENTIARY is one of three books selected by the Seattle Public Library to be included this year in its lending collection. We hope that some blog’s will remember that now a few years back we included an excerpt from CINEMA PENITENTIARY. Now, below, Ron Edge will return it to the front of this blog (before the week’s now and then comes forward this evening) that posting. It will be linked to five reports that Bill made while on his long journey to his New World by ship in the fall of 2012. We miss you still Bill and CONGRATULATION, of course. As agreed we should try to resume the posting of Helix issues later this fall. (Once we figure out our Skype tangles.) A WARNING: Bill is fond of re-writing so the chapter from CINEMA PENITENTIARY that we printed here two years ago, may have been polished or something since then. If so now you can compare them. Contact the library. It is a treat.
Click the festive photo from Bill to review all his post for his “Journey to a New World”
I’ve grown fond lately of returning to the snapshots I took of the neighborhood during my nearly daily Wallingford Walks between 2006 and 2010. (I should probably still be at it.) I’ll share (or push) some of these over the next few days or longer, and find a general name for them all later. Here is No.1, which is really twenty settings I made for a fallen Wallingford leaf in 2008. [click to enlarge]
THEN: One of a few photographs recording from different prospects the Fremont trolley car barn on Dec.11, 1936. North 35th Street, on the right, was originally named Blewett for Edward and Carrie Blewett. In 1888 the couple, fresh from Fremont, Nebraska, first named and promoted Fremont as a Seattle neighborhood. That year Fremont also got its lumber mill. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
In response to our last blog feature, the one about the Fremont Car Barn and the rest, an old friend and officer in these trenches, archivist Ernie Dornfield, answered our question regarding what was the use of those ghost-colored solid forms in the otherwise vacant lot between the house on the left of the subject and the car barn beyond both? Here’s Ernie’s letter plus a “grab” from this computer’s screen of a City Archive photograph that shows one of those “gray things” being installed. If you follow his advice and access the city clerk’s information service you will find many more and even much more beyond gray concretions.
The Sunday Seattle Times article gave a nice overview of the history of the Villa Apartments. It did not mention Capitol Hill Housing’s role in reviving the building. While rooms may no longer rent for $2.50 a week, the Villa Apartments still stands because of the work of Capitol Hill Housing. In the late 1990s, this affordable housing and community building organization purchased the Villa, which had fallen into disrepair. The commercial facades were restored, strong retail tenants were attracted, and a major extension was added on to the back side of the property. The renovation was a key early act in helping transform Pike/Pike from a driving corridor to a destination. In a neighborhood where new studio apartments now rent for more than $2,000 a month, the Villa is an example of CHH’s efforts to strengthen the community and keep rents affordable for regular working people.
A few years ago, in collaboration with the Northwest School, CHH added a mural to the west side of the site. I’ll attach a photo of it. The muralist was Derek Wu working with NW School students.
Last leg on Wagon Road to the McGilvra homestead on Lake Washington and at the future Madison Park.
THE MCGILVRA ESTATE
(First published in Pacific, March 4, 1990)
In 1867 John and Elizabeth McGilvra moved into the first ome on the Seattle shore of Lake Washiongton.Six years earlier, John had been appointed the first United States attorney to Washington Territory.His friend Abraham Lincoln had given him the job and McGilvra responded by trekking the entire territory twice a year as both federal judge and attorney.It was an exhausting task for which McGilvra did not seek reappointment, In 1864, the McGilvras moved to Seattle and, once John had completed a wagon road to the their 450 lake shore acres, they moved in.
This, apparently, is the oldest surviving view of the McGilvra home.It was photographed around 1880, or about the time the McGilvras began running a sonce-a-dayround-trip stage coach to Seattle.Most of their paying passengers were persons who had settle somewhere on or near the lake, man of them on the east side.Throughout the 1880s the McGilvra dock was the busiest on the lake.
Or might this be the earliest recording of the McGilvra estate? Nah. It seems newer to me – the big home, the road, the fence. And beyond, the mountains are a picturesque fantasy without any similarity to the “Cascade Curtain” as we know it from Seattle.
The wagon road and the daily stage were abandoned in 1890 with the completion of the Madison Streete Cable Railway, an enterprise in which the McGilvras made a sizeable investment and which included Madison Park, the grounds for many amusements.Beisdes a large dance pavilion, lakeside bandstands and boathouse, exotic gardens and promenades, the park included a baseball diamond, and after 1890 connection with the city’s growing system of bike paths.
Madison Park from the Lake.Two Madison Park Beach subjects from the Lowman family album. (courtesy, Michael Maslan)
In the summers Elizabeth and John’s acres became the site of a tent city raised on platforms provided by the McGilvras.The couple also allowed the construction of cottages, but not houses, on their land.It was a peculiar arrangement: the builders were not sold the land but were required to pay a yearly tithe.One local newspaper of the time described the McGilvras’ development as “perhaps the only feudal estate in the U.S.”This arrangement held until the 1920s, long after John McGilvra’s death in 1903.
Elizabeth and John McGilvra “at rest” in Lakeview Cemetery, ca. 1995. I embarrassed that I no longer remember the name of the researcher between Mother and Father. She joined me at this time in preparing and giving a lecture on the history of the Madison Park neighborhood before a short-lived group with an interest in the same.The McGilvra home – late (Courtesy – again! – of Ron Edge, bless him.)
I’m posing here in 2003 with a few of the Daughters of the Pioneers at Pioneer Hall beside Madison Park. For many years I visited with the daughters once a year carrying with me a new slide show of some interest to them. They were always the best of audiences, vigorously adding to the stories. Alas 20 years before this visit, there were many more Daughters than here.
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Looking east on Madison to Lake Washington ca. 1891.West on Madison from near 39th, 1999
MADISON STREET CABLE, ca. 1891
(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 9, 1992)
Judge John J. McGilvra, the pioneer who laid out the line of Madison Street, wanted to get to his homestead on Lake Washington the quickest way possible.So after climbing First Hill and crossing Broadway, Madison street continues on its own way cutting through the city grid.East of First Hill Madison Street was “first,” and the developing of the grid on Second Hill and beyond it to Lake Washington followed.McGilvra’s short-cut negotiated the city’s ups and downs with considerable ease, and, of course, still does.Beginning in 1890, these gradual grades helped considerably in the construction of a cable railway the entire length of Madison from salt water to fresh.
Madison Cable Railway on the turntable at the Lakeside end.The Madison Cable Railway powerhouse near 21st. Avenue
In the early 1890s passengers enroute to the excitements of McGilvra’s many lakefront attractions, after first passing though still largely forested acres, dropped into the scene recorded here: grounds cleared primarily for the enterprises of leisure.The view at the top looks along Madison Street from near its present intersection with Galer Street. The Madison Park Pavilion, left of center, and the ball park – the bleachers show on the far left – were the cable company’s two largest enclosed venues.But the beach itself was an equal attraction with floating bandstands and stages for musicals, farces, and melodramas in which the villains might end up in the lake.
The Madison Park waterfront by LaRoche
The Madison Park beach well after the 1916 nine-foot lowering of Lake Washington for the ship canal.
McGilvra’s fiefdom – he would only lease lots, not sell them – and the railway’s end-of-the line attractions also featured dance floors, bath houses, canoe rentals, restaurants, promenades, a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and a dock from which the “Mosquito Fleet” steamed to all habitable point on Lake Washington.
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A NEIGHBORHOOD ECCENTRIC
(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 20, 2005)
It is pleasure to have stumbled upon another neighborhood eccentric. This one appears on page 99 of “Madison Park Remembered,” the new (in 2005) and good natured history of this neighborhood by one of it residents, Jane Powell Thomas. The author’s grandparents move to Madison Park in 1900. In her turn Thomas raised three children in the neighborhood and dedicated her history of it to her seven grandchildren. (The historical photo is used courtesy of the Washington State Archive – Puget Sound Regional Branch.)
Much of the author’s narrative is built on the reminiscences of her neighbors. For instance, George Powell is quoted as recalling that the popular name for this dye works when it still showed its turrets was the “Katzenjammer Castle.” Seattle’s city hall between 1890 and 1909 was also named for the fanciful structures in the popular comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids,” and George Wiseman, the Castle Dye Works proprietor in 1938 (when this tax photo of it was recorded) certainly also traded on this association.
City Hall, aka the Katzenjammer Kastle, on 3rd at Jefferson, ca. 1905.
The vitality of this business district was then still tied to the Kirkland Ferry. Wiseman’s castle introduced the last full block before the ferry dock. Besides his castle there was a drug store, two bakeries, a thrift store, a meat market, two restaurants, a tavern, a gas station, a combined barber and beauty shop, and a Safeway. And all of them were on Wiseman’s side of the street for across Madison was, and still is, the park itself.
The ferry Leschi, here by evidence of the caption, at the Madison Street dock. Normally the Leschi used the Leschi Park dock.
Studying local history is an often serendipitous undertaking charmed by surprises like Dorothy P. Frick’s photo album filled with her candid snapshots of district regulars and merchants standing besides their storefronts in the 1960s. Introduced to this visual catalogue of neighborhood characters by Lola McKee, the “Mayor of Madison Park” and long-time manager of Madison Park Hardware, Thomas has made good use of Frick’s photos.
A detail of Madison’s “castle” appears as backdrop to this ca.1900 portrait of a cable car. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
“Madison Park Remembered” is now (in 2005) in its second printing, and although it can be found almost anywhere, Jane Thomas was recently told that her book had set a record by outselling Harry Potter — at Madison Park Books.
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MADISON PARK PAVILION
(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 19, 2004)
Like Leschi Park, Madison Park was developed as an attraction at the end of a cable railway line. Both featured exotic landscapes, waterside promenades, gazebos, greenhouses, refreshment stands, garden-lined paths, bandstands, and boat rentals, even lodging. Leschi’s early novelty was its zoo. Madison Park’s was the baseball diamond. (The roof of the bleachers can be seen on the far left of the historical scene.)
An early 20th Century birdseye sketch promoting the ambitious Pope and Talbot development of Washington Park, but showing the primary landmarks then of Madison Park including the Pavilion, bottom-center. Also note the log canal at Montlake, and the islands in Union Bay. .
Both parks featured monumental-sized pavilions with towers on top and great ballrooms within. The theatre-sized room in this landmark could also seat 1400 for melodramas, minstrel shows, musicals, farce, vaudeville and legitimate theatre. For many years members the ever-dwindling mass of the Pioneer Association chose the Madison Park Pavilion for their annual meetings and posed for group portraits on the front steps.
Here the grand eastern face of the pavilion looks out at Lake Washington. The pleasurable variety of its lines with gables, towers, porticos and the symmetrically placed and exposed stairways to its high central tower surely got the attention of those approaching it from the Lake. (For many years beginning about 1880 Madison Park was the busiest port on Lake Washington.)
Some of you may have the talent (or knack) for seeing this in stereo without the benefit of special classes. Now relax and cross your eyes.
However, most visitors came from the city and the real crush was on the weekends for ballgames, dances, band concerts (most often with Dad Wagner’s Band), theatre, and moonlit serenading on the lake — ideally with a mandolin and receptive ingénue looking for pointers on how to navigate a rented canoe.
The Pavilion stood for a quarter century until destroyed by fire on March 25, 1914. The attentive eye may note how the Seattle Park Departments playground equipment at Madison Park repeat the lines of the grand central tower of the Madison Park Pavilion. (Historical photos courtesy of Lawton Gowey and Larry Hoffman)
The posers here are Nina and Bill, two blonde friends visiting from California and yet feeling at home.
Here’s another fine contribution from our Stephen. [Click twice to enlarge and so the better to follow Stephen’s points.] He must have given most of an afternoon to polish my “1904” date – a fleet speculation – for the Curtis photo that Rob Ketcherside (or his editors) chose for the cover of his new and first book “LOST SEATTLE.” Thanks again to Rob for a fine addition to the local canon and thanks to Stephen too for his admonishments. [Somewhere I have a portrait of Stephen, which I’ll add later. The rest is Stephen’s.]
Rob – CONGRATULATIONS! Hardcover, no less and in color. Far better than Arcadia . Good show!
Checked it out at University Bookstore who reported that it’s been flying off the shelf today. Sales! And Publicity by Paul. Very good.
My, my, nostalgia. My wife and I took in the Music Hall shows a couple times, Julie Thompson and her first Svengali, Jack McGovern, including at his other venue, the now China Harbor. So much else, I can remember it well. Thanks for not mentioning my Dad in the Kalakala story.
The Yesler Hill and the Courthouse story are very good and accurate. You are hereby adjudged an honorary Profanity Hill expert now. The hanging may proceed. Sez Judge McCann, who was the police court judge. Next case!
You even knew about the secret 1928 City Council ordinance to level the entire hill. Pretty damn obscure. I bet Richard Conlin voted for that. Before he voted to create Goat Hill. Pity he was replaced by a Wobbly.
Now as for the cover harbor photograph – Where’d you find it? Corbis? Hah. They don’t create anything.
what makes somebody think it for 1904 as date for this partial panorama? I don’t think so.
Since you didn’t ask. And didn’t state that in the book, fortunately.
I am more inclined to 1905, even more likely mid1906, having tentatively identified some of the ships in the harbor or at wharf and found what are perhaps contemporary photographs of the Moran Bros Co shipyard – all three “anonymous,” one a AYPE era colorized postcard, and two of them sourced to Joe Williamson, who collected earlier photographers’ works (My bet is Asahel Curtis for all of these aerial views, esp the colorized verson, although Frank Nowell is a possibility, as he was known to climb rooftops and courthouse towers at the time )
One of the white curving prowed steam schooners is very surely the revenue cutter Grant (three masts and tall steamer stack, it was a coaler, to the right), moored as was usual at one of the harbor buoys. It spent a lot of time at these in the final years up to its surplus sale in late 1906, its iron hulled geriatric engines condition usually keeping it within Puget Sound. The other white hull is another 19th century federal revenue steam cutter, I have several suspects that were active here at the time. It shows up at the launch of the Nebraska.
The 4 stack torpedo boat destroyer is most likely the USS Perry (Bainbridge class) which also spent a fair amount of time in Puget Sound waters 1904/1905, as part of the Pacific torpedo boat fleets guarding us from errant Russian and/or Japanese fleets. Or British. I was hoping it was the USS Decatur but that was elsewhere in the SE Asian fleet at the time.
Paul would remember a similar torpedo boat destroyer in a harbor, included in one of the works of nostalgic art donated to the MOFA last month. Probably the Decatur “opening up” the Japanese ports.
On the very far left within the coal smoke is either the USS Nebraska being fitted out after its October 1904 launch, before its late 1906/7 delivery to the US Navy OR another battle cruiser which was also moored at this dock, the armoured cruiser USS New York (3 stacker). I’ve seen a Times photo of this cruiser but missed noting the publication date, as if one can trust the Blethen press as being accurate. As noted above, there are three existing photographs of that ship from somewhat aerial perspective, one including the full-length postcard of the SS Orizaba et al, and two others which show the stern and bow of same, and including the 3 stack warship etc. It very much resembles your harbor shot edge. See attached montage.
However, here’s the curveball, or sinker (more appropriately). The 1889 launched tropical steamer SS Orizaba, single raked stack, two masts, is said to have first arrived in Seattle June 1, 1906 after its purchase by the Northwestern Steamship Co for the Alaska trade and then made her first trip to Nome, arriving June 25 and returning with $750,000 of gold. On Aug 7 1906 her name was changed to the SS Northwestern. At some point c1909 its cabins were expanded, enclosed/rebuilt (Alaska is not the Caribbean!), it was transferred to Alaska Steam and it continued its storied if notorious Alaskan career for three decades as the most often sunk, beached, refloated, and eventually in 1942, bombed West Coast/Alaskan ship. What survived is still in Dutch Harbor.
So I’d go with summer of 1906 – the Nebraska was still at the Moran yards, the destroyer Perry still hanging around, and the cutter Grant often moored in the harbor. The Hanford building on the corner of First and Cherry wasn’t finished until sometime later in 1906, so that is the outside of the timeframe.
Ironic aside: if indeed the Orizaba and the New York were at the same shipyard in 1906, they both died 35 some years later in the Pacific War (New York scuttled in Manila Bay December 1941, the Orizaba/Northwestern in Dutch Harbor May 1942), and both remain where they lay. The iron hulled mechanically failing Grant sank in a storm up in northern Canadian waters in 1910 after being converted to a fish freighter, and the torpedo boat Perry was eventually scrapped after WWI.
Collegially, as I get back to my own work
Stephen Edwin Lundgren
such as revisting Gorden Newell’s work, with Lost Ships of the Pacific Northwest
Orizaba/Northwestern’s career : Alaska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered
Side note: The Grant ended its career with two involvements with the salvation of survivors and later resurrection of the victims of the doomed steamer Valencia off the British Columbia coast. But that’s another story, mine.
Can’t help you with the street clocks. I don’t wear a watch anymore.
Does anybody really know what time it is? or really care?
Paul: bottom line, I say photo is June 1906 not 1904. Sez me and Ace Curtis. He sez send him two bucks for the publication fee. Payable to his account at Dexter Horton downtown. And who the hell is Mr. Corbis? I still got the plate somewhere in the root cellar unless it ended up on the greenhouse roof.
That intrepid Boeing retiree Werner Lengenhager’s capture of the Namu’s sidewalk sign. (Courtesy, Seattle Public Library)
Phil’s comment follows.
“2013, and 1966 was a long time ago…but what an outstanding experience in my life. I was privileged to be hired by Ted Griffin to work with Namu at Smith Cove in the early part of 1966 until Namu was brought to Seattle. Then, I was given a wireless microphone and said to present demonstrations of Namu to the public…which I did many times that summer.
“I really came to love Namu with the closeness of feeding, petting, scratching his back, sides and belly. Many times I was able to get very close to Namu while feeding him with a slice of salmon. I was 21 at the time, and really enjoyed the people who came to see the show.
“At times, Namu, when demonstrating a high jump, would go back into the water without hardly a splash. Other times, however, he would come down kinda falling over so as to completely soak the ones in the way of the huge wave & spray! One incident in the evening took place with no one there, but two men and a lady who were dressed to the hilt for a night on the town. For them, I’m sure it was as memorable an evening as it was for me. When I cautioned them they’d be safer from getting wet if they went up the ramp and observed from there, they decided to take a chance and see at float level. You guessed it…it was the greatest of Namu’s jokes on the crowd…the got entirely drenched. Their reaction??? They all, after catching their breath from the cold water drench, broke out laughing, and even grateful for this fantastic memory…seeing the huge body of Namu nearly leap completely out of the water (after having carefully popped his head out of the water prior to the jump, scoped out the situation…including the three observers and the ball held out high above the water by yours truly). Then, with no time to react, they saw Namu falling toward them! You can well imagine the rest…as I see it still clearly in my minds eye.
“Thanks for the memories, Namu and Seattle”
This appeared in part first in the Seattle Times for August 23, 1970.
We learn in this issue that it is the last of our bi-weekly offerings. After this we went weekly until the end. We surely felt confident. Here again, although thousands of miles apart, Bill White and I read an issue together with the generous help of Skype. These edited versions are shorter than the time we took and recorded, but still even with Bill’s pruning we do ramble and sometimes stumble. Each trip (issue) we discuss is, however, certainly instructive, and considerably more than smoldering nostalgia for our lost youth. Well I should speak for myself, for Bill, much my junior, is still living lucky and in his prime. Thanks – repeated – to Ron Edge for doing the scanning. It certainly suites his assiduous side, and boundless love for old publications. [If you have any old regional papers – really old – please consider sharing them with Ron. He’ll make a disk for you, Id’ bet.]
In our last Sunday feature I shared with Berangere and Jean the hope that some reader would respond with explanations for the largely mysterious – for us – submarines that we included there. We were blessed with just such from Bill Hoeller. Now we will print out his explanations beneath the subs they apply to. And we will introduce this with the introduction to his first letter to us. Thanks much Bill.
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Dear Paul,
Having been born and raised in Seattle I always look forward to your Seattle Now & Then feature every Sunday. In 1940 when I was born I lived in the Rainier Valley. My wife and I currently live in Wallingford. I saw you had some questions concerning submarines, which I know a little about, so I thought I would respond. I’m also anxious to see additional posts about submarines.
All the best,
Bill Hoeller
This submarine is the H-Class submarine H-1 (SS-28). She was commissioned as the Seawolf, but was renamed the H-1. The H-3, built here at the Moran shipyard, was named the Garfish (SS-30).I’m still trying to find the name of this submarine. She’s a Balao or Tench class submarine that underwent a Guppy conversion. The shark fin looking thing up near the bow and just aft of the sail are two of the three sonar arrays for the PUFFS passive underwater fire control BQG-4 system that would give the range and bearing of a target. The third array would be well aft on the submarine. The high sail was added to the original configuration of the boat to provide more protection for those on the bridge from heavy seas, and was referred to as a North Atlantic Sail. These sails were also made partially of plastics to reduce weight and reduce corrosion. The boat may very well have been a foreign submarine when this photo was taken, one of the many Guppy boats we gave away. LATER . . . Thank you very much for asking Paul. You’re more than welcome to quote me.
Regarding the mystery boat moored across from the Continental Can Company, I belong to the United State Submarine Veterans, Inc. (USSVI) so I asked a friend of mine, Patrick Householder, who lives here and who once was the National Commander of the organization. The USSVI has over 13, 000 members, so the pool of knowledge within the group about U.S. submarines is infinite. Patrick knows more than most about U.S. diesel submarines.
Patrick said the boat was either the USS Salmon (SS-573) or the USS Sailfish (SS-572), and now that he said it I agree. Since the Salmon was a west coast boat and the Sailfish was an east coast boat, the boat in the picture is the undoubtedly the Salmon. I should have thought of Salmon because she was in our flotilla in San Diego when I was on Sea Devil (SS-400).
Salmon and Sailfish were purpose built as radar picket boats and both were 350’ long, which at the time was huge. The standard Gato, Balao and Tench class fleet submarines at the time were 312’ long. The boats carried a huge radar antenna on deck aft of the sail, and another huge antenna on top of the sail when they operated as picket boats, but when they were re-classified as regular diesel attack submarines their huge radar antennas were removed. [Here I asked Bill Hoeller to explain the meaning of “picket boats” in his passage above. His answer follows.] Don’t hold my feet to the fire on this, but the term “picket” would be likened to a picket fence around a house to act as a barrier to keep dogs in the yard (or perhaps outside the yard.) During the battle for Okinawa destroyers formed a picket barrier away from the main battle fleet to give early warning of Japanese aircraft Kamikaze attacks, and although the destroyers performed their job well many of them naturally became targets of the Kamikaze and many were sunk. The notion came up that perhaps a submarine could better do the job by submerging before the aircraft attacked, but nothing was done until shortly after the war. Perhaps eight or so conventional fleet diesel submarines were configured with huge search radars that allowed them to determine the range, distance and altitude of an aircraft. Here on the west coast I remember there were the Spinax, the Rock, the Raton and the Rasher. The Salmon and the Sailfish were purpose built as radar picket boats, as was the nuclear powered submarine USS Triton (SSRN-586). She was the boat that sailed around the world submerged. The whole program of using submarines as radar picket boats didn’t last long, perhaps for a year or a bit longer. Radars on long range aircraft performed the job much better.Here’s a photo of Salmon in San Francisco Bay that I found on the Internet. I think it’s rather cool.These two boats are the Bass (SS-164) and the Bonita (SS165). They were V-Class boats.Here’s the Bass again. Inboard of the Bass is probably the Barracuda (SS-163). The outboard boat is the Dolphin (SS-169). When she operated out of the old Coco Solo submarine base in Panama she was the D-1. Like the Bass and Barracuda the Dolphin was a V-Class boat.Below as you know is the USS Carp (SS-338). She was a Balao class boat, commissioned in February 1945, and made one war patrol before the war ended. She was sold for scrap in 1973.The USS Puffer (SS-268), a Gato class submarine, had a stellar career in WWII. She sustained one of the longest depth charging of any submarine, over 31 hours. She was submerged for 38 hours before coming back to the surface. Puffer holds a special place for me. I enlisted in the Navy aboard her in 1957 when she was the training boat for Submarine Reserve Division 13-16 here in Seattle at the Naval Armory. I spent a lot of time aboard her, and spent a lot of time marching around inside the Armory. You mentioned you lived for a time in a houseboat along Fairview, and told the story of the Puffer going adrift. When I was fourteen I worked for a commercial diver as his tender. He had a moorage for his diving barge at the north end of Lake Union, just east of the Gas Works. He managed to corral a lot of galvanized barrels. We filled the barrels with water, placed them under houseboats between the cedar logs upon which the houses were built, and blew the water out using compressed air, which helped to raise the houseboat up a bit. The cedar logs over the years would become waterlogged and slowly sink. We worked on houseboats all around Lake Union and Portage Bay.
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HOPEFULLY – if we can find it – we intend to return to this SUBMARINE SECTION of our blog with something on THE PRINCESS ANGELINE, the “first atomic submarine built for Puget Sound commuter service.” We doubt that it was ever built.Were we not quoting we would have preferred to write “planned for Puget Sound commuter service.” Please check for it later.
We were not very good about getting every issue of Helix properly noted for its number and date. This was the first issue printed after the first (of 3) Sky River Rock Festivals gathered together over Labor Day. So this is from 1968. Without any confidence in the internal evidence of this tabloid itself, we have dated it above “early September, 1968. It occurs to me that this negligence or uncertainly is, in part or from one prospect, a sign that we were then living in eternity. (This week – for the next Helix and hopefully within a week or two – we will look for other photos taken at the first Sky River. An google search will certainly show others.)
We have learned from our friend Bill White – now living in Ilo, Pero (see the snapshot below) – that for a year of his early adolescence he lived on Lake Ballinger and remembers it fondly. And he has written about it too, in CINEMA PENITENTIARY, his manuscript about growing up with movies. Bill, you may remember, before moving to South American, wrote movie reviews for the Post-Intelligencer and other publications. In place of Lake Ballinger, here Bill poses for Kelly Edery White, with his current waterway, the Pacific Ocean from the harbor of his home now in Ilo, Peru.
This recent snap of Bill White was photographed by Kelly Edery White. She is related.
Paul,
Although I was living on the lake the whole year, it seems than i mentioned it only in the first paragraph. so maybe it is not appropriate for the blog. but here it is anyway, there is a bit more about the region as a whole, which might be of interest to your readers.
Bill
EXCERPT from CINEMA PENITENTIARY
by Bill White
After my mom got married, her new husband took us so far North we weren’t even in King County anymore. The house was on Lake Ballinger and to get there we had to walk up a private street. We had a dock and a rowboat, and every day after school I’d row out to an island in the lake where I’d stay until dinnertime.
On the other side of the lake was the Shriner’s club. If I came too close to the shore, half a dozen fez-topped apes would run at me with waving arms and holy-war expressions. I had seen these characters before, passing themselves off as Seattleites as they waved demurely from their float during the Seafair Parades. I used to think they were harmless weirdos, like the clowns and the pirates, just some old men who liked to dress up and ride in parades. It wasn’t until I had to share my lake with them that I discovered them to be nothing more than hog-greased tyrants.
My school was brand new, and so far away that I had to ride a bus. There was no movie theater within walking distance, so I made do with television shows, which were the main subject of conversation in the lavatory. “So is the one-armed man real, or do you think Kimball really did kill his wife?” some guy asked me while I was trying to take a leak between classes. “What do you think?” I sneered, zipping up my pants and leaving without washing my hands or waiting for an answer.
On dead weekend nights, my stepfather took the family to the Sno-King Drive In, which was North almost all the way to Everett, a town famous for the stink that came from its paper mills. We saw some terrible junk up there, the worst of which was a Bob Hope double feature of “Call Me Bwana” and “A Global Affair.” Now that I think about it, I don’t even know if my mom actually married the guy or not. I don’t remember any wedding or anything. Just us being packed up and moved out of the Queen Anne mansion and into this house on the lake. The girls were told to start calling the guy “papa,” but I wasn’t told anything, so I kept on calling him by his first name. He always liked to leave the drive-in before the second feature had ended, and I learned quickly that it was no use to raise a complaint.
My real dad returned to Seattle on a temporary project with Boeing, and my older sister and I spent several weekends with him in Ballard, where he had taken an apartment to be near his mother, who was sick with cancer. My sister was already sixteen, and would spend most of the weekend with her friends from Queen Anne, while I went to the movies with my dad. Even after he moved on to his assignment in New Orleans, where he once got caught in a flood and spent two days in a tree fighting off snakes, I kept going out to Ballard to visit with my grandmother, who was nicknamed Mop Mop.
We even saw a few movies together. During the World’s Fair, she had taken me to the Cinerama Theater to see “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.” Now we went, in a party of lesser relatives, for “It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” It appealed to the older people, who recognized all the old-time comics, but to me it was just a bunch of exaggerated expressions on oversized heads. Still, I loved those red, stuffed rocking chairs and a screen that wrapped itself right around my eyes.
Mop Mop lived in a spooky apartment complex filled with Senior Citizens, so the whole place had that old people smell. There was a manager who was always outside interrogating strange people who had wandered onto the property. He was more like a gatekeeper than a concierge. The most memorable thing about her apartment was the T.V. Guide that was always on the top of the set. I had never seen one of them before except in the check-out line at the supermarket, and didn’t realize anybody actually bought them. I thought they were just there to browse through while waiting in line to buy groceries.
Ballard is a Scandinavian neighborhood adjacent to the Western end of the ship canal, a manmade waterway connecting two freshwater lakes with the saltwater Bay. There is a difference in the water levels of the fresh and salt water bodies, so they built the Government Locks, an enclosure where the water travelers are quarantined while the water level is adjusted so they can move from one body of water to the next. The Locks are a popular tourist attraction that also boast a salmon ladder where kids and other curious characters stand around to try to get a glimpse of some fish. As it was close to Mop Mop’s apartment, we often went there for a Sunday afternoon picnic to eat some of the pies my stepmother had baked.
School chugged along until a day at the end of November when the boys and girls gym classes were combined so we could learn square dancing. I liked the way everybody got a turn to dance with everybody, but just as my turn came up to dance with the girl I had my eye on, an announcement came over the public address system to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot.
My dad came by to get my sister and me that weekend, and we watched the funeral on Mop Mop’s T.V. Dad started crying during the ceremony and I asked him why. “You didn’t even like Kennedy. Why are you so sad about him being dead?” He took me by the shoulders and answered emphatically. “When a President of the United States is assassinated, it doesn’t matter what you thought of him, it is a national tragedy.”
Although I wasn’t in drama class, I auditioned for the school play and got the lead role because I played the cornet and the play opened with the kid blowing some notes into the phone to impress a girl on the other end. It had been written in the 1930’s and was called “Make Room For Rodney.” I can’t remember a thing about it except for playing the first bars from “Blues in the Night” and then hollering egotistically into the phone.
We performed the play at in the middle of December and I got razzed by a lot of the guys in the hall for being in it. Later, on a Monday afternoon right before Christmas vacation, a girl came up to me in the cafeteria and asked why I hadn’t been to school the previous Friday. I told her I hadn’t been feeling well so had stayed in bed and read Harold Robbins’ “The Carpetbaggers,” and she answered that she hoped I was feeling better. After I told her that I was, she said she had been planning to ask me if I wanted to go with her family to the drive-in movies that weekend. I asked her what was playing and she told me “In Harm’s Way.” I couldn’t imagine going to see a war movie with a girl, so I just walked away without saying anything, and she went back to the table where her friends were and she never spoke to me again.
It was unusual to be approached like that, because hardly any of the seventh grade girls wanted anything to do with the seventh grade boys. They were all hanging around with guys in the eighth or ninth grade. But when I got to the ninth grade, all the girls had boyfriends in high school. It seemed I never got old enough to do anything.
A movie theater opened sometime after the first of the year. It was a warehouse of a building called the Lynn Twin because it was split into two auditoriums. It was set alongside Aurora Avenue, which was the primary interstate thoroughfare before the freeway was built. In order to get there, I had to be driven by new new-stepfather, and often would be asked to take my little sister along with me.
I liked taking my sisters to the movies, having been doing it since the oldest among them, who was four years younger than me, had the interest to come along. As the other girls got older, I started taking them as well. My older sister was usually too busy with her boyfriends to take them, but before she discovered boys, she would frequently have charge over me at some parent-sanctioned event, such as Walt Disney’s “White Wilderness.”
That was 1958, and my dad drove us there and dropped us off. We had to wait in line for almost three hours, as the next show was sold out. Consider that the theater held 1,500, and you will get an idea of how popular Disney pictures were back then.
Northgate was the country’s first open air shopping mall. It had an Indian theme, and there was a big totem pole at the Northern entrance. One of the things that mystified me about the theater was a section that was enclosed in glass. I later learned this was the crying room, where mothers sat with their crybaby kids.
My dad was always late picking us up from the movies, usually because he would stop to have a beer at the tavern on the way and he could never have just one. There were times we waited for hours outside a theater before he finally showed up. This new stepfather was always on time, an attribute that did not make me like him any better,
My sister and I saw a Robert Mitchum movie at the Lynn Twin called “Man in the Middle.” Neither of us got much out of it, but Keenan Wynn had one line that became a staple around the house. He was playing a soldier accused of murdering a British officer in India near the beginning of World War Two. Mitchum was the officer assigned to his defense. “You make me want to throw up,” he said in answer to something Mitchum said. I don’t remember why he said it, but we sure had fun saying it to each other in the months after seeing the movie.
We got a lot more out of the ”The Miracle Worker,” which we had seen the year before, shortly after being schooled with the blind children at John Hay. That movie not only gave us some empathy for the handicapped, but lent us many gestures to imitate in play, especially one in which Helen Keller curled her fingers and back-handed the side of her head. We used to do that when we wanted to irritate our mother.
It was sometime in the Spring that our English teacher told us we had to write an essay for a national contest. Remembering that movie about Helen Keller, I decided to read some books to find out more about her because I thought she would make a good subject. My essay won the prize, but I didn’t get anything. The prize went to the school, not the student.
One thing I found out when researching Helen Keller was that the movie was based on a play by William Gibson, the guy who had written “Two For the Seesaw.” That made me realize how much stuff we learn about just because some guy gets the idea to write a play, or a book, or make a movie or something. Without that play, there would have never been a movie, and all those people like me and my sister who saw the movie might never have known about Helen Keller. Even if we had learned something about her in school, we never would have thought of her as a real person. We had even gone to school with blind people, but knowing them in real life didn’t help us to have any compassion for them. But seeing the movie did. Even though it might have looked like we were just making fun of Helen Keller when we played finger games and tried to say water, the truth was that somewhere deep down we were discovering what it meant to empathize with someone.
Once in a while the Lynn would show some scary stuff, and I got to go alone. The poster for “Strait-Jacket” warned that it would vividly depict ax murders. It didn’t. At least not the way “Deep Throat,” a decade later, would vividly depict blow jobs There was one good shot of George Kennedy getting his head chopped off, but the rest of the murders were shown either in shadows on the wall or isolated shots of Joan Crawford swinging an ax.
“Dead Ringers” was the co-feature, with Bette Davis playing twins. It was more serious, and much duller, that the Crawford picture. I had seen the two actresses together a couple years earlier in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” but knew nothing of their past careers as glamorous movie stars. I wasn’t yet old enough to stay up all night watching old movies on television.
Seeing the titles “Love With the Proper Stranger” and “The Stripper” on the Lynn Twin marquee gave me an instant boner. When I found out that “The Stripper” came from a William Inge play called “A Loss of Roses,” the movie made more sense to me. As “The Stripper,” it was a cheat, but “A Loss of Roses” signified that it was supposed to be a sad movie, not a sexy one. “Love With the Proper Stranger” was, like “Two for the Seesaw,” a movie about a guy and a girl who did a lot of talking with each other. I was too young to understand a lot of what was going on, but I loved eavesdropping on the adult conversations, and looked forward to the time when I would be talking about things with girls as they lounged around my apartments in their underwear.
At the end of the school year, I went to my first party and kissed all the girls. I went from one to another, trying each of them out and liking them all. Unfortunately, we moved out of our house on the lake right after school ended, so I never saw any of those girls again, and had to start from scratch.
Our old friend (who yet does not seem to age), rock-n-roller, bluesman, front-stage photographer, party-thrower, columnist, incessant wit and politico, Jef Jaisun sends this press-photo and clipping – his creations from a 1979 concert at the Capitol Hill Masonic Temple on Pine Street, the site of the Link Lingenbrink’s Artist League balls covered here earlier this week. Thanks to Jef.
After an about three month wrestle with our blog’s server we have persuaded it with a little more cash and plenty of pitiful coaxing to do us right, and so have returned for more weekly (we hope) postings of HELIX. This week it is the issue penultimate to the first SKY RIVER ROCK FIRE FESTIVAL. It is for the most part about the line-up of artists expected over that Labor Day Weekend outside of Sultan on Betty Nelson’s strawberry farm. (The berries were not in season.) Again, Bill White and I have returned with some joined reflections on what we find within the tabloid, and this time Bill has also attached a MEDLEY of SONGS performed by SKY RIVER ARTISTS at that time – or nearly then. He found them , of course, on YouTube. Ron Edge is engineering it all – or nearly. The long-distance recording on Skype that features Bill and I did not record off of Skye Itself. Rather, Bill (in Peru) had to fall back on the work of his small recorder set between himself and his computer in his apartment about 100 yards from the Pacific surf. It is a prudent precaution he consistently takes. So this week, while Bill’s voice is not filtered through the computer’s speaker, mine is, and resembles, Ron notes, a “mouse in the corner.”
You may have noticed that here – recently and often – you cannot notice. The blog is up and down regularly as of late. Now it is up for as long, I hope, as it takes to write that we are looking for alternatives to our present server. In Paris, Berangere is too far away to fix it. Wherever – now in Wallingford – I don’t know how. And so Jean has had to stretch his work bench to handle these – to use now two rarely used categories from our “All Gategories” list for this blog – “unintended effects” and this “shameless commerce.” Last Sunday’s now-and-then got no “extras” to the title story about the regrade on Spring Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues because, again, we could not “write to” or add additional contributions to the blog. This coming Saturday/Sunday we hope to elaborate on the Repertory Theatre feature that will be published in Pacific – we think – and I will then contribute as well a few of the missed “extras” to the Spring Street story. Meanwhile we await our fates while trying to keep our faiths. But then what became of these students (below) in the well-ordered typing and shorthand class at the Wilson Business College in Seattle, ca. 1900?
Human Hair - usually yours or a relative's - Art (not for sale - courtesy Granite Falls Historical Museum)Pedestrians at First and Wall, March 7, 2013
The cover for this issue uses a photograph of Betty Nelson’s pets – I think – at her “strawberry farm” outside of Sultan, where the first Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair was held on Labor Day weekend, this year 1968. Whoever laid out the cover continued this tabloid’s tradition of being wrong about the proper volume and issue numbers for the Helix then to hit the streets – and it was on the streets were circulation occurred. There were never very many outlets – just a handful of brave merchants. It was the vendors who kept the paper going – the vendors and record ads and the staff’s collective acceptance of poverty. It was hardly worrisome – with a little help from one’s friends. Again, Bill White and I gab about another issue and Ron Edge puts it and the colorful Helix Logo together, Thanks to us all.
Somewhat true to our new and relaxed schedule of reviewing an issue of Helix every second week – as it also continued to be printed here in the mid-summer of 1968 – we return to talking on top of each other employing (for free) the creative sputter of Skype’s marvelous recording tool.
Ron Edge has suggested that we name this edition – the audio commentary part of it – “Stall the Crowd.” Some ghost has got in the Skype Recording Machine Bill is using and flipped and twisted Bill and my conversation about Helix Vol. 4 No. 3 into what Bill names a “disaster.” But it is also a fanciful flop. Why would this latest instance of our routine conversations via Skype between Seattle and Lima sound like it has now been joined by whales? These third parties are not without their appeal. You may prefer them. Long ago when I first called Bill on Skype I heard the whales, although Bill did not. Well then, I thought, are these the whales that have not made it south of the Panama – our very own gratuitous but graceful sirens, our ghosts of Namus past and all the other Orcas in Puget Sound formally captured by brave but mad whaleboys. But Vol. 4 No.3’s recording oddities are more elaborate than its orca-acapella. Bill continues, “Our voices are out of sync, and getting worse as the recording goes on, until finally we are often talking at the same time on different subjects.” We might do that anyway – but not like this. Then it comes to Bill – the rescue by psychedelic insight. He concludes, “I may have saved it by heavy cutting and accenting the tone of an acid trip . . . some of the passages are quite lucid, others incomprehensible, but there is method here. It is something like two stoners talking.” Still Ron advices “Stall the crowd.” But how? For balance we need something that has clear and familiar continuity and, it turns out, we have it from Bill as well with his guitar relaxing on his and Kel’s Peruvian pallet and singing Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” under Kel’s direction. Here’s the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkZjEZMcLoI
We return to our postings of – if you have forgotten – the Seattle-based tabloid HELIX, which was originally published on newsprint between the budding seasons of 1967 and 70. With this issue Number 2 from Volume 4 we reach the mid-summer excitements of 1968. We were – surprisingly to this reader – still a bi-weekly then. (Surely, we will become a weekly soon.) Our haphazard insertions – as of late we have not made weekly those weekly offerings as originally hoped – are the result of working from two continents, although both are in the Western Hemisphere. During this audio commentary you will sometimes hear a not displeasing percussive sound behind the conversation. It comes from street work outside Bill and Kel’s apartment in Lima, Peru. The conversation between Bill and myself was dropped toward the very end for a short while providing a sonar like intermission. By now Bill has Vol. 4 No. 3 already in hand which was done on Ron’s new* oversize scanner, and so the work of recording/scanning the pages has been made easier for him and the results are somewhat clearer for all of us. (*It may be not new but used. Ron has a profound knack for finding his technology in thrift stores. While this is good for the environment it is not so swell for the gross national product, and that. we know, is an old conflict.)
THEN: Looking north down the Alley between Jefferson and James Street, in the First Hill block also bordered by Sixth and Seventh Avenues.NOW: The screen of trees on the right, border the 7th Avenue exit to James Street off of the 1-5 Freeway. The Seattle Freeway – the name used most commonly for it during I-5’s construction in the 1960s – was dedicated on Jan. 3, 1967. Dan Evans, the state governor then, helped with the big scissors.
[CLICK – sometimes double-click – to ENLARGE the IMAGES]
Most likely the photographer for this record of dilapidation was James Lee who worked with his cameras (both still and moving) for the city’s public works department. Both the Municipal Archive and the University of Washington archive include helpful examples of Lee’s field recordings, some as old as 1910.
This subject was used in the 1930s as evidence in favor of slum clearing for the then new Seattle Housing Authority’s plans for Yesler Terrace, the city’s first low-income housing project. Once built, Yesler Terrace came close to this site, missing it by a block. Lee looks north down the alley to James Street in the short 500-block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. His back is to Jefferson Street.
Perhaps the man standing in the shadows of the alley, bottom left, is Andrew Knudsen, who is listed in the 1938 Polk City Directory as living at 511&1/2, the likely address for one of these alley houses. A 72-year-old Knudsen is still there in 1948 when this newspaper reported that he was hit by a car driven negligently by Ken C. Johnson. Fortunately Harborview Hospital was nearby. Knudsen was treated and soon released, but Johnson, most likely, surrendered his license. Four years more when John W. Pearson is found dead at the same address, the city published a notice – again in The Times – asking anyone who knew him or off him to contact the Johnson and Sons Mortuary.
These little homes date from the 1890s – perhaps one or more may have been built already in the late 1880s when the slope up First Hill began its rapid development. And they were survivors. It was only the building of the Seattle Freeway – not Yesler Terrace – that brought them down.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? We will stay near “our alley” for the most part Jean – perhaps every part.
We had hoped to generously mark many of our prints with interior captions that marked the several points of interest. In this - for want of time and skill - we have failed. Here is an example - only. The alley of interest - aka "our alley" is directly above the caption, which rests on the rooftop of the then recently enlarged with added stories King County Courthouse. (Thanks here, again, to Ron Edger for used of several of his Seattle aerials.) The aerial dates from 1950.A helpful detail of "our alley" from the same Edge 1950 aerial. Our Alley appears here running through Block No. 45, Note the red footprint for the Puget Power transfer station (electric not waste) at the southwest corner of Jefferson and 7th Ave. The competitor, Seattle City Light, is also marked in red at the bottom of this detail. It sits on Yesler Way near 7th and Spruce. We will return to to the Puget Power plant below, and much else that appears here as footprints and drawn paths. (This early page from the Baist Atlas was used often and so bears the damage of that. But such scars are rare in our copy.)Looking northwest from 7th Avenue, we find near the center of this subject the Jefferson Street entrance to "our" alley. The big white structure above the alley is the Kalmar Hotel at the southeast corner of James and 6th Avenue. This "then" and the "now" that follows it, appeared with essay in this blog recently - somewhat. The "then" dates from late 1887 or early 1888. That spring Central School, far right horizon, burned to the ground. (That helps with the dating.)Jean's repeat from 7th Avenue. (Jean has a colored version in his own computer, but is at this moment off to Hillside School making sets for the next play production there, this time with his younger students, and everyone of them!)Frank Shaw's study of work-in-progress on the Seattle Freeway on January 26, 1963. Shaw stood somewhat close to 7th Ave. but on the freeway's path. He looks north toward the James Street crossing.Shaw returns on August 15, 1964. By then the IBM Building has joined the skyline, from Shaw's prospect it peeks above the Federal Courthouse. Another stalwart of this blog, Lawton Gowey - bless him - took to the Smith Tower to get this look thru the neighborhood soon to be marked by freeway construction. Like Frank Shaw, Lawton almost always dated his subjects. This one is from June 21, 1961. Our block is right of center - with the green verdure on its western half and then the alley and a few of the homes along it - the same homes that appear in the primary subject at the top of this blog. Trinity Church is above-center, and the north end of the Puget Power building is far right, at the corner of 7th and Jefferson. The Kalmar Hotel is in there too, center-right at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue and James Street. Lawton Gowey returned to the Smith Tower for his repeat on May 15, 1976. Actually, Lawton and his camera made many visits to the tower.Much the same territory from the Smith Tower in 1913 from the opportunist photographers of Webster and Stevens, visiting the top of the tower long before its 1914 dedication. A helpful reminder - a detail of "our alley" from the 1950 Edge aerial. Block 45 is missing the three row houses on 7th. We'll see them below - a few times.Another neighborhood revelation - with "our" block. The hand-drawn light blue bordered irregular compound indicates the borders of the Yesler Way Housing as originally planned. The most northerly of the borders part reaches halfway into our Bock 45. A hand has dated this original "1939" on its far-right border. It may be 1938. The same area as that outlined above, here for an artist's birdseye of the future Yesler Terrace Low Rent Housing Project
We return, above, to the Webster and Stevens 1913 look into the neighborhood from the Smith Tower in order to point out the Kalmar Hotel, at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue and James Street. James climbs the hill on the left. Fifth Ave. is the first street that crosses the subject – north to south, left to the right – near the bottom of the scene. (Our Lady of Good Help is found at Fifths intersection with Jefferson Street, the street that climbs from the subjects center.) Sixth Ave. is the next street up the hill, crossing the subject, left to right i.e. north to south. Jefferson Street between Sixth and Seventh (and further to half way between Seventh and Eighth) is not graded. So it shows the darker gray of weeds and such. Our alley, however, does cut a light swatch across it. Following the alley north to James puts us, as it seems, on the roof of the big and boxish Kalmar Hotel.
The Kalmar Hotel with the James Street Trolley climbing to First Hill at the intersection of James and 6th. (The text below appeared with this pix long ago in Pacific.)
The Kalmar photographed late in its life by Lawton Gowey. My recording of this same intersection of Sixth Ave. and James Street and its southeast corner from a few years back. Here the reader is encouraged to go forward into the shadows below the freeway and imagine there the "now" or "repeat" for the historical photo that follows of the Puget Power plant at the southwest corner of 7th Avenue and Jefferson Street. Our alley on the left, Jefferson Street crossing from the right, and the Puget Power transfer station surmounting all. Heed the familiar home - lower left corner - on "our alley." (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey - as a collector. The photo dates from the early 20th Century.)
Harborview Hospital is under construction in this 1930 view and the nearly decapitated King County Court House is soon to be razed. Note the by now shabby Puget Power plant, left-of-center and above it, and the beginning of "our alley" to the left of it. The Seattle City Light electrical transfer station on Yesler is far-right. Bottom-left, work is beginning on raising the roof several stories for the King County Courthouse, to a new top floor penthouse for the prisoners brought down to it from the old and still barely standing Courthouse seen here on First Hill - here aka Profanity Hill - in front of the Harborview construction site.The King County Courthouse on First Hill (aka in this part, Profanity Hill) under construction, ca. 1890.Only 40 years later, the columns "deconstruction", another sign of a booming metropolis.
Then Caption: The grades up First Hill from the Central Business district involved a variety of uneven dips that can scarcely be imagined since the construction of the Seattle Freeway Ditch. If preserved these old clapboards would have been suspended several stories above Interstate Five. (Pix courtesy Lawton Gowey) Now Caption: Jean’s contemporary view repeats the presentation of the Harborview Hospital tower, upper-right, while looking north from the Madison Street bridge over the freeway. Two blocks south of Jean’s prospect Columbia Street climbs First Hill.
Freeway Laundry
(First appeared in Pacific, May 18, 2008)
Here is yet another unattributed, undated, and unidentified historical photograph with yet very helpful clues – this time two of them.
First is the obvious one, the tower of Harborview Hospital upper-right, which was completed in 1931. We may compare the tower to a fingerprint, for when Jean Sherrard visited 6th Avenue, which we agreed was a likely prospect for this view of the tower, he first discovered that when he set his camera on 6th about 20 yards north of Madison Street that the basic forms in his view finder of Harborview tower and the tower in the historical photograph lined up. But it still “seemed” that he was too far from the tower to, for instance, imagine having a conversation in normal tones with the unnamed historical photographer across – I’ll estimate – about seventy years. Jean needed to move south.
The second helpful clue is the sign on the wall of the frame building right of center and above the hanging wash. It reads, “Admiral Transfer Company – Day – Night – Holiday Service.” The address for Clyde Witherspoon’s Admiral Transfer in 1938 is 622 Columbia Street, which puts it at the northwest corner with 7th Avenue and Columbia. Now we may move south from Jean’s original position on 6th Ave. to the alley a half block south of Marion Street and between 6th and 7th Avenues. If Jean could have managed to make it there he would have been suspended sixty feet or so above the center of the Interstate-5 ditch. Instead, for his second look to the tower he stood on the Madison Street overpass.
The houses on the left are in the 800 block on Seventh Avenue. Real estate maps show them set back some from the street. And whose uniformly white wash is this? Again in the 1938 city directory the laundryman Charles Cham is listed at 813 7th Avenue. Perhaps this is part of Cham’s consignment from a neighborhood restaurant.
MORE FIRST HILL LAUNDRY
Looking northwest from an upper terrace - or lower roof - of Harborview Hospital. At the lower-left corner are the 8th Avenue fronts of two of the houses seen in the feature of this one - the extended First Hill laundry story. The subject is dated 1930 and includes the nearly new Exchange Building, far left, the Northern Life Tower, right-of-center, and the also nearly new Washington Athletic Club, on the far right. Our alley is mostly hidden behind the structures and trees on the left between 8th and 7th and south of James. Trinity Episcopal Church is on the right. Long shadows from a late afternoon sun reach in the direction of the brilliantly new Harborview Hospital in this close-in aerial. Note the vacant lot, right-of-center. It is the former home for he top-heavy court house. Also note the homes at the southwest corner of 8th and Jefferson - in the home-stuffed block, left-of-center. The most northeastern of those are the same homes that appear in both the clipping above, and the panorama too. And here we glimpse, bottom-center, the tops for the three row houses on the west side of 7th Ave. in our block 45 between Jefferson and James. Just above and right of the row is Puget Power, while, far-right at Yesler and with its corner towers resembling a sanctuary for pubic works is its City Light competitor.
THE ROW on SEVENTH
Recorded in the late 1930s as a piece for Seattle Housing propaganda depicting the saddened housing stock on the western and southern slopes of First Hill. We are expected to feel some compassion for this old man (nice hat), who only needs a new home for him to revive from a life of sitting on steps above the alley - our alley. It was while preparing this posting that I determined where it was photographed, and, yes, it is from "our alley." Note the row houses above. Next we'll print a few subjects that include them. The row houses on 7th dazzle here - right of center - below the tower of Trinity Church. St. James Cathedral lights the horizon, and at the bottom below it - and in its archdiocese shadow - one can find Our Lady of Good Help Catholic Church at the southeast corner of 5th Ave. and Jefferson Street. Note the glowing tower atop Puget Power, upper-right. (Earlier, Jean and I posed a feature for this Romans photo, which was taken, we determined, from the Great Northern Depot tower. Try, if you will, a key word search on St. James and/or Romans.)Block 45 shows at the center of this Feb. 26, 1930 aerial by Pierson. The row is easily identified on the east side of 7th Ave. and left of Puget Power too. Both are near the subject's center. LaRoche's ca. 1891 look north on 7th Street from the front lawn of the King County Courthouse. The row houses appear here right of center. This "puts' our alley downhill and to the left of them. Central School appears on the right, filling the block between Marion and Madison Streets, and Sixth and Seventh Avenues. The over-sized Rainier Hotel is near the scene's center bordered by Fifth and Sixth Avenues, Columbia and Marion Streets. (Key word it - if you will.)Returning to the 1913 look east from the nearly completed Smith Tower we see the by now many "familiars" - the alley and its row of nearly identical and attached houses (three of them), Puget Power, the King County Court House, Kalmar Hotel, and, near the bottom-center, Our Lake of Good Help Catholic Church at the southeast corner of 5th Ave. and Jefferson Street.Our Lady of Good Help at the southeast corner of Jefferson and 5th Avenue.
OUR LADY OF GOOD HELP
(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 14, 1986)
That Our Lady of Good Help no longer graces the southeast comer of 5th Avenue and Jefferson Street is not the result of a slide in her parishioners’ faith but of one in the earth beneath her. The church’s 1949 demise was reported by the Times. “The city’s oldest Catholic church was abandoned hurriedly yesterday afternoon when it was discovered that the old frame structure . . . was threatening to slide into Fifth Avenue.” The heavy rains in February shifted the church, threw the windows out of line, tilted the chimney and, as the Rev. Joseph P. Dougherty noted while negotiating his way through the congregation’s last Mass, twisted the altar steps.
Our Lady of Good Hope at 5th and Jefferson with part of the west facade of Puget Power up Jefferson Street at its southwest corner with 7th Avenue.
Our Lady took her first “slide” 45 years earlier when the original sanctu•ary at Third Avenue and Washington Street was tom down and the valuable property sold for commercial use. The $104,000 received was not used to build this modest replacement on 5th Avenue, but rather helped fuel the building fund for the grand twin-towered St. James Cathedral above it on First Hill. When Seattle’s cathedral was dedicated in 1907, it fulfilled the archdiocese’s 1903 decision to move here from Vancouver, W A.
In its last year, 1903, the old Our Lady at 3rd and Washington was used by the archdiocese’s Bishop Edward O’Dea as his pro-cathedral while he made plans for St. James. This meant that the city’s first priest, Father Prefontaine, not only lost the old church he’d built, but that his congregation would ultimately lose its distinction as Seattle’s center of Catholicism.
Looking north on 5th Avenue in 1939. The front stairway to the parish is on the right and Jefferson Street just beyond it. Note the Drake Hotel at the southwest coner of 5th and James.
The cross-topped octagonal spire is the one part of the old Our Lady which was incorporated in this, its 1905 replacement on the corner of 5th and Jefferson. By then Father Prefontaine had retired to a home overlooking Volunteer Park. The home was his, for the French-Canadian Prefontaine was known not only for his jovial disposition, delightful ecumenical manner and love for Protestants, but also for his taste for fine food, good cigars, and real estate.
The city powers-that-were were so fond of the pioneer priest that while he still lived, they named for him the short street that skirts the property south of Yesler Way and that Francis X. Prefontaine himself first cleared for his sanctuary in the late 1860s. After his death, Prefontaine added to his landmarks by leaving $5,000 for the Prefontaine fountain that intermittently still spouts at Third Avenue and Yesler Way. But his “Lady” has slipped away.
The original Our Lady parish with dates inclusive and the affable father inset. A few First Hill towers in 1930. Work is nearly completed on the Harborview tower. Whilte the tip-top of the King County Courthouse is weight subtracted, the structure still seems to ponder, and will soon be razed. The Puget Power roofline - here left of center - is not so distinguished in 1930 as it was ca. 1905 (a few scenes above this one), and Our Lady of Good Help just escapes the lower-right corner. Grading for the Seattle Freeway subtracted the part of Yesler Terrace, which was due west of Harborview.May 16, 1964, Frank Shaw looks south-southwest over Seattle Freeway construction from a prospect near 8th and Jefferson.
While Bill White is studying hard for the mid-term – already – in his Spanish language class there in his new hometown of Lima, Peru – he did manage to take this break to discuss with me the July 3, 1968 offering of our 24 page tabloid. Every week I am surprised by what we find including, so far, the fact that we had not yet turned into a weekly. I thought it was long before this. The attentive repeater will have noticed that we have not been keeping up with our weekly pledge, but then no one asked for promises and we have had extraordinary distractions like moving to Peru. By his every description Bill is loving it.
[We will here attach a Spanish translation of the above as supplied by Google. As Kel has instructed Bill these Google translations are often mistaken. This, then, gives Bill another lesson with the chance to correct Google – with Kel’s help.]
Mientras Bill White está estudiando duro para el mediano plazo – ya – en su clase de español hay en su nueva ciudad de Lima, Perú – se las arregló para tomar este descanso para discutir conmigo el 03 de julio 1968 ofrenda de nuestra página 24 tabloide. Cada semana me sorprende lo que encontramos incluso, hasta el momento, el hecho de que no se había convertido aún en una semana. Me pareció que era mucho antes de esto. El repetidor atento se habrá dado cuenta de que no hemos estado al tanto de nuestro compromiso semanal, pero nadie le preguntó por las promesas y hemos tenido distracciones extraordinarias como mudarse a Perú. Por cada uno de sus Bill descripción le encanta.
[Estamos aquí adjuntar una traducción al español de lo anterior según lo provisto por Google. Como Kel ha dado instrucciones a Bill estas traducciones de Google a menudo se confunden. Esto, entonces, Bill da otra lección con la oportunidad de corregir Google -. Con la ayuda de Kel]
With Bill White happily camped in his new Lima flat w. Kel, we now have a second Skype recorded reading of Helix, this one for June 14, 1968. Herein plans are made for the first Sky River Rock Festival – although not named so as yet – Robert Kennedy is shot dead, Lorenzo Milam reveals his esoteric review of KRAB Radio since giving up its management, and Walt Crowley reviews his favorite movie, 2001. And much more.
With Bill White now comfortably set in his New World neighborhood in Lima, Peru and the helpful SKYPE, we can put up the next issue of HELIX, the one probably from June 7, 1968. (The issue was not dated, but surely we are correct or no more than one days off.) Now we will week-in-week-out put these tabloids up – in their proper order – and have a good time both reading them and reflecting on them together. Please notice how the new and drier climate – plus the medicines applied by his doctor Kel – have cleared the stuff in William’s head and he is sounding fine. (SKYPE is, however, kinder to Peru than to Puget Sound. While Bill’s voice resounds, the Skype filters also amplify from our Seattle end that ssscar of recording, the hissing S. We hope to dampen it with our next offering – in a week or so. If not we will live with it. Repeated thanks to Ron Edge for processing all this and adding his art – the coloring of Jacque’s logos – as well.)
[Now settling into his Limarkian Adventures, Bill – our Party in Peru – will share some of what he finds in Lima, Peru and its surrounds – beginning below with MATSURI. We will attached all the photographs he sent except the fireworks. Those you may imagine. Bill may well write a song about the adventure, and sing it too.]
Japanese Cultural Week in Lima usually occupies the last week of October, but this year things got pushed back a few days, enabling this new arrival to the city to attend “Matsuri,” the traditional festival that closed the week on November 10th. The festival is a cornucopia of food, dance, music, and fireworks to celebrate the contributions the Japanese have made to Peruvian culture.
Although the first Japanese appeared in Peru as early as the 17th century, the epic immigration of Japanese to this new world did not begin for another two hundred years. By the end of the second world war, when another wave of immigrants arrived, five generations of Japanese-Peruvians had already established their presence here. Their influence can be seen throughout the country in the food, art, music, and architecture.
This is the 40th year that Japanese Cultural Week has been celebrated in Lima. Its closing festival, Matsuri, sponsored by the AELU (Asociation Estado le Union), is a Peruvian version of what is in Japan a traditional religious ceremony. Here in Lima, it is an opportunity for everyone to share in Japanese customs, from traditional dance and martial arts to the contemporary fun of manga and cosplay. There are J-Pop concerts and saki tastings, graffiti exhibits and a fashion show of traditional clothing.
Peru is home to over 50,000 descendants of Japanese immigrants. Matsuri is the perfect occasion to become familiar with some of them.
For this “Fair and Festival” installment we repeat a Pacific feature we printed earlier in , but now additions to help you, dear reader, find the spot more easily with aerial photographs and other points of view. The Eaton Apartments were set at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Thomas Street and so kitty-korner from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, once it lost its parish on 6th and Bell in 1928 to the last of the Denny Regrades. The long sky-lighted pavilion built there for Century -21 was named, for the fair, the Domestic Commerce and Industry Building (aka Hall of Industry.) It faced the Plaza of States (aka Flag Plaza). After the fair the building got a new and sensible name: The Flag Plaza Pavilion. It was home in 1978 for King Tut’s first lucrative visit to Seattle. The Eaton Apartments covered about one-third of the Flag Plaza footprint – the most westerly third. We will point it out again below in a 1928 aerial photograph and also in Frank Shaw’s colored slide of the apartment’s back or north facade during its last months before being razed for the fair.
Above: Looking kitty-corner across Thomas Street and Second Ave. North to the Eaton Apartments, ca. 1940. It is a rare recordings of Seattle Center acres before their make-over for the 1962 Century 21. Below: Jean Sherrard visited the intersection during the recent playing of the Folklife festival 2012, and “captured” folk-jazz artist Erik Apoe, with his guitar, leaving the festival after his performance. Bottom: During the 2012 Bumbershoot Jean returned to the corner which included then – for the duration of Bumbershoot – one of the escape gates from the ticketed festival. With his press credentials hanging from this next (although this year they were merely stuck to his shirt) Jean could easily come and go.
THE EATON APARTMENTS
(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 8, 2010)
I know nothing about the provenance of this photograph, except that it showed up as a thoughtful anonymous gift on my front porch among a small bundle of negatives. Still with the help of a tax card, a few city directories, and a scattering of other sources we can make some notes.
With his or her back to Sacred Heart Catholic Church, an unknown photographer looked northeast through the intersection of Second Avenue North and Thomas Street. The Eaton Apartment House across the way was built in 1909 – in time perhaps for the city’s first world’s fair. It held 19 of everything: tubs, sinks, basins, through its 52 plastered rooms. In the 1938 tax assessment it is described as in “fair condition” with a “future life” of about 13 years. In fact, it held the corner for a full half century until it was leveled to build Seattle’s second worlds fair.
The Eaton and its nearby neighbor, the Warren Avenue School, were two of the larger structures razed for Century 21. However, the neighborhood’s biggest – the Civic Auditorium, Ice Arena, and the 146th Field Artillery Armory – were given makeovers and saved for the fair. Built in 1939, the old Armory shows on the far right. Although not so easy to find it is also in the “now” having served in its 71 years first as the Armory, then the ’62 fair’s Food Circus, and long since the Center House.
This is part of David and Louisa Denny’s pioneer land claim, which Salish history explains served for centuries as a favorite place to snag low-flying ducks and hold potlatches. The oldest user of the Eaton Apt site was even more ancient. The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) brought King Tut, or at least parts of his tomb, to the Flag Pavilion in 1978. It was about then that Andy Warhol also showed up to party with SAM in the old pavilion, which in 2002 was replaced and greatly improved with the Fisher Pavilion.
Readers who have old photographs of this neighborhood from before the 1962 fair (they are rare) or of the fair itself might like to share them with historylink. That non-profit encyclopedia of regional history is preparing a book on the fair, one that will resemble, we expect, its impressive publication on the recent Alaska Yukon Pacific Centennial. As with the AYP book, the now hard-at-work authors are Paula Becker and Alan Stein. You can reach them by phone at 206-447-8140 or on line at Admin@historylink.org.
This Pierson Photo looks northeast over the future fair grounds late in July, 1928. It was printed with caption in the Seattle Times on the 29th of July, with the header for the caption reading "Look, Seattle, at Your Own Civic Center From Air!" The aerial is, obviously, filled with attractions. Our Eaton Apartments site at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Thomas Street, is easily found centered at the bottom of the aerial. One block north of Thomas is Harrison street, and where it meets Second Ave is the spot where the Coliseum's (aka Keyarena) western anchor or primary strut or beam (or what?) is anchored. Below we will visit the corner, again before the '62 fair.Here thirty-two years later is another aerial that was printed in The Seattle Times on July 13, 1960 - or near it - and photographed by Times photographer Paul Thomas. This one also looks northwest towards Lake Union, and shows the clearing the center well underway for C-21. The Times has helpfully attached identifying numbers, which we will now list. (1) Cleared of the Warren Avenue School and being prepared for the "state-financed Century 21 Coliseum." (2) Civic Auditorium from 1928; (3) Ice Arena (1928); (4) High School Memorial Stadium (ca. 1948); (5) National Guard Armory (soon to be renamed the Food Circus); (6) Nile Temple (kept for the fair and used then as the exclusive Club 21 where VIP's could relax and refresh while escaping the populace horde.) (7) Part of the future site of what the paper names "the five-unit federal Hall of Science" and we know as the Pacific Science Center. Just below and right of the circles "No.5" is the corner of the here razed Eaton Apartments. Frank Shaw's pre-fair coverage of the neighborhood shows here the back side of the Eaton - its north facade. The view looks south and a little east from the north line of Harrison Street, a few feet west of Second Ave. Shaw's photo was, of course, photographed sometime before Thomas 1960 aerial above it. Since 1961 standing here and taking the same aim as Shaw would show that west support for the Keyarena. (Which is more likely the Key Arena.) The next view - one from the Space Needle - in 1962 - marks the spot with a red arrow.The red arrow marks the spot - or near it - where Frank Shaw shot the photo that is placed above this one.That western beam, strut, support, noted here. Photographers have climbed it for the prospect of astronaut John Glenn during his morning visit to the fair. The view looks west somewhat in line with Harrison Avenue, which would put out-of-frame the International Fountain on the right and the Plaza of States (with the state flags) on the left. This is another Times shot - one by their long-time photographer Vic Condiotty. I met Vic in 1982, my first year contributing the weekly "now-and-then" to the paper.
We will wrap No. 23 with another Frank Shaw photo. This one, we figure, looks north and a little east from what would become the Pacific Science Center. The Catholics, at the southeast corner of Second and Thomas, are here right-of-center, which is also often the position of its clerics if not always the parishioners. Far-right, is the yellow strut, beam, girder, stanchion, transverse on the east quadrant of the Coliseum and here under construction. It appears above where the Eaton Apartments would be standing – if they still were. Queen Anne Hill is on the horizon.
This sixth installment of William White’s move 7 thousand miles south from Seattle to Lima concludes the series. Bill, however, will continue on as “Our Man in Lima” somewhat like Berangere is “Our Woman in Paris” except that she is also included in our name: dorpatsherrardlomont. Bill will, at his pace, send us more travel writing, but pretty much sticking to Peru. Hopefully, He’ll make it up to the Andes. Kel, we know, has a car and is an excellent driver. Meanwhile, we will be looking for other correspondents in far-flung places.
And here is a pretty view of the street where we live, taken from the window of our apartment:
Here is crumbling vista seen from the parking lot of the municipal building. Most street parking is officiated by attendants running up and down the streets issuing tickets to people while they park, and then catching them upon their return to collect whatever fees have been incurred. There are no parking meters; everything is done on a person to person basis, resulting in the occasional arguments over charges. At one point, we were charged for simply pulling into a parking space, then deciding not to stay there, It took some doing for Kel to win her argument with the fee collector, who hadn’t even written us a ticket yet, but ran out in the street at us as she say us pulling out.
In the markets, free agents hawking bags of asparagus compete with the established vendors for a sale. Sometimes they offer a better deal, but often their sudden appearance can lead to an impulse buy that is not the wisest purchase one could make. Shopping in Lima is a process of looking around for the best goods at the best prices before deciding on what to buy. Among the stalls of fruits of vegetables of variable quality and expense, the foods necessary to making a delicious dinner are waiting to be chosen by the cautious buyer.
And this is what an expertly prepared Peruvian meal might look like:
Even prettier is the person who prepared it. For those who have not met her yet, here is Kel, dressed for work at the clinic, after having enjoyed a breakfast of fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is my job to prepare for her when she awakens each morning.
[In this fifth installment of the serial sharing Bill White’s great journey into a new world he has at last reached what Peru’s conqueror, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, titled in 1535 the “City of Kings”. Now WILLIAM WHITE, a conquistador of the heart, makes his first claims on it nearly 500 years later.]
We arrive at the port of Callao, entrance way to Lima, on schedule at 10am Friday morning, November 2. There has been so much trouble and misinformation regarding the means and methods through which Kel will pick me up. The front desk is manned by a different crew every time I have had cause to do business there, and each time my story has to be explained anew, how I am disembarking at Lima, rather than continuing to Santiago, which is the final port on the cruise. Kel is told by the Holland America agent in Lima that she requires an email from the ship that includes her name, make of car, and license number, in order for her to enter the port. It turns out, however, that this is a cargo port, and no one at all is allowed to walk on the pier, and that a shuttle will take me to the gate, on the other side of which there is a waiting room where Kel will be sequestered until my arrival. So, after three days of fruitless effort, the solution turns out to be this simple. However, there are more serious complications to come.
I am moved quickly through the customs inspection and am looking for the person who issues the visas, but there is no such person to be found, and we leave without getting my passport stamped. Or so I thought. As we discover, upon visiting the immigration department to sort things out, the stamping of the passport and issuing of the visa has already been accomplished without my participation, and I have been given only a thirty days visitor permit. This will result in nothing more than having to pay a fine at a later date, but is maddening as I emphasized repeatedly to the cruise people that I planned to stay on in Lima to apply for residency. For the most part, the company runs their business very efficiently, but any abberation from the norm, such as my jumping ship to remain in Lima, does not compute in their system. No matter how many times I have told my story and to how many people it has been told, there is perhaps no way to record the information in a prominent way that would have led to my passport having been stamped in any other but the routine manner. I had been led to believe, by all I had read on the internet, that visas are not issued in advance in Peru. Instead, there is supposed to be someone there to interview you on your intentions, who then determines how long of a visa you require. I imagine that most people coming to the country do so by aeroplane rather than cruise ship, and that this must be the airport procedure, but there is no need to have such an official hanging about at the port when a cruise ship comes in.
At least there are no problems with Kel picking me up, and we begin our drive to Lima. Callao is a pretty run down area, and Kel warns me to keep the camera hidden to avoid attracting the attention of thieves, who would break into the car when we are stopped at a red light to get any valuables that we might be carrying. Eventually we enter a nicer area, where lovely houses such as the one pictured below are plentiful, and the architecture in general is varied and eye-catching.
After about 45 minutes of driving in Lima traffic, which is accomplished as much through the listening of horns as the movement of vehicles, we arrive to our pretty little street. In Lima, there is no simple way to predict the actions of the cars around you, but if a collision is imminent, someone will sound a horn, which is a way of saying, “I have no plan to stop, so get out of my way.” Kel is an excellent driver, and avoids several threatening situations as we have moved through the vehicular chaos of these streets.
Pictured below is a sight almost unknown in Lima, an empty street! For the most part, the city is constantly awash in the movement of life. Unlike the cities up North, people here are not governed by the regulations of stop and go, but dart about as they please. I recently saw a group of elderly ladies squeezing through the bucking cars at a lively intersection. Unlike Seattle, you will never see a group of people standing in the rain on a deserted corner, with nary a car in sight, waiting for the streetlight to change to green. Most intersections here don’t have lights anyway, which is the cause of so much intrepid aggression. Although most streets have clearly marked lanes, drivers seldom confine themselves to their boundaries.
[For the introduction to Bill’s travel literature return to the first installment of this serial. Here – below – Bill is steaming down the northwest coast of South America, heading for Peru, Lima and Kel. He is looking at the moon.]
The weather so far this morning is overcast and humid. If things were a bit prettier outside, a walk along the beach would be an appealing prospect, but I am more interested in talking with Kel about our plan for her picking me up on Friday. Cars are not allowed to approach the ship, so she will have to park somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the port gates, and then walk 50 meters or so to meet me as I disembark. I am so excited to be seeing her after these six years that I cannot put my mind to doing much else except anticipate that moment when we first see each other.
It is after two in the afternoon and there is nobody on the beach, so I’ll stay in. There is a movie at three that I’ll watch at least the first part of just to keep my mind free of irritation. Also, we have been receiving warnings of gastrointestinal diseases breaking out so now I’m shying away from the food, especially the desserts, which the sick women paw over. I have already bumped into a couple of coughers, I sanitize my hands continually and try to keep my fingers out of my eyes nose and throat.
Having passed several pleasant hours putting together the Panama Canal movie, I looked forwards to our nightly trivia meet. We won a bottle of champagne by coming in first place. I really like those two couples with whom I play, and try to arrive early so that we have enough time to chat before the game. Last night, we remained chatting for an hour while drinking our prize champagne, Then I hot-tailed it to the computer to Skype with Kel, after which I wandered about listening to the tacky singers and comedians in the showrooms and bars. there is a really sickening guy who plays Broadway tunes on the piano, but last night the cast from Tonight’s showroom act was hanging out there, doing some stellar versions of neo-Broadway hits such as “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I also enjoy hearing two or three selections from the string quartet each evening. Tonight, however, there isn’t much at all going on. Perhaps they are spooking it up for Halloweenie-o. I go back to my stateroom to read, but couldn’t sit still long enough to read that Pablo Neruda biography, but did manage to scab through several chapters of Roger Ebert’s memoir. What a dope he is. Then I walked up to the Crow’s Nest, where I saw, for the very first time, the Peruvian moon, the moon Kel sees when she is seeing the moon, and all those years when we looked at the same moon together from such far away points, seven thousand miles between us. And tonight, I stood on the deck of the ship, looked up and saw the moon from the same angle asked has seen it since she first saw it, as a baby with her eyes to the sky.
I had Hummus and Eggplant with focaccia for a midnight snack, topped off with five desserts and coffee. Dinner wasn’t much but the snack was tremendous. I like it here at night, wandering the decks in search of tacky entertainment. Tonight I saw a show that was an embarrassment even by Vegas standards. Just appalling. The Susan Boyles of the world have replaced the Julie Andrews and the male singers have been permanently corrupted by the effeminate register in which jean Valjean’s part has been written. What has happened to the masculine baritones of Broadway? Then I pleasantly dozed listening to the adagio strings, awake enough to hear the music bust asleep enough to remain seated. Many of the solo acts who play the same sets in the same bars have become laughingly tedious. How do they stand it, especially when the rooms are bare? But I like it here at night, wandering the decks, especially when the sea is smooth and the boat stable.
We are off the coast of Peru now, and will be docking at 5:30am in Salaverry, and then I disembark at 9am the following morning in Lima.
What a journey this has been. I realize that never in my life have I gone on holiday, taken a vacation, or been anywhere in outside of the United States and Canada. As we passed through the Panama Canal, I could not really believe I was really there, in that place, and not just imagining it from the garret of the forsaken art house. Tonight I watched a Las Vegas-types show in the Showroom at Sea, a comedian/singer named ‘Doug Starks, who spent seven years portraying Sammy Davis Jr. in a tribute to the Rat Pack. I was thinking this may be the last time I will be in such a place for a long time, a showroom filled with international travelers, enjoying a Vegas show, something that incidentally I have never seen before. Sure, it was tacky, but there was an element of style to it as well, and I enjoyed the experience.
Earlier in the same room, I experienced an afternoon tea with ballroom dancing. This has been such a relaxing, pampered experience, having my stateroom cleaned to perfection twice a day, getting to know people from around the world, sleeping well at night, relieved of the worries and cares of life, but I can never fully appreciate these days because I am still apart from Kel, and would love nothing more than to be sharing these days with her, the way these couples, some of whom have been married for over fifty years, are enjoying sharing these days of theirs together. But to know that Kel and I will soon be one of these couples, making life and sharing life together, is the most profound joy I have known. And this life will begin 33 hours from now.
In these moments I think of my friends on the ship, and the sadness of leaving them. My trivia team won again tonight, and all expressed dismay at my imminent departure. They are such good, decent, intelligent people. And so much fun to be with. When I speak, they listen carefully and respond honestly and articulately. And when they look at me, their eyes are open, and I look back at them the same way, no false looks obscuring some hidden thought, everything open and sparkling. This morning Tony, a Chinese man living in Vancouver, came to my room and videotaped an interview with me that he wants to put on YouTube for the Chinese people who, he believes, will benefit from hearing what I have to say, or maybe just seeing is a person whose thoughts and expression are unfettered. He has read the excerpts from my Cinema penitentiary and wants to translate it into Chinese. Tomorrow I will give him the permission to do so, and strike some kind of a deal. Then there is Harvey, the Australian singer who was to have been in the talent show with me, but only the two of us applied to be in the show, causing its cancellation. There are other people I did not get to know well, such as the couple across the hall from me, the woman of whom was sick for a couple of days. It was so inspiring to see how the man cared so much for her, in fact the thing that touched me the most among these mostly older couples was the love they shared and the closeness between them. I will do everything in can to make Kel as happy as these men have made their wives, and even happier than that, because love is truly the greatest gift we creatures have received from this great, lonely cosmos in which we have come to life.
Last night was so rich in dreams that it seemed like I had slept many hours, but woke up after only two, then again after another two, so I was up looking at the tights of the Peruvian coast at 4:30, and went out at 6 after it became light enough to film>Now I am charging my camera so that it will transfer the material to computer where I can edit it. What a splendid morning, on the shores of Salaverry, the mountains rising from the desert, the pelicans on the rocks, the fresh overcast morning, I felt like kissing the ground.
And now we conclude the second part of this tale with “Pelicanos,” my first Peruvian movie:
Panama City Rising From the JungleThe Bridge of the Americas connecting the ContinentsPlundering the Sea at Manta, Equador
It is Tuesday morning, we are docked in Manta, Ecuador, and I don’t feel like going on a shopping trip here anymore than I did in the San Blas islands. Transiting the Panama Canal was the trip highlight, and I spent yesterday editing the footage I shot of it into a 5 1/2 minute movie that, I admit, looked better to me yesterday than it seems to me today. It’s not bad, though, and I shall probably look back at it with fondness, not only for remembering the thrill of the sights, but for the comical memory of all the mistakes made when I first attempted to shoot moving pictures with the Kodak camera given me by Paul.
To help orient what follows, bottom left, two "fairliners" (the name escapes me) avoid collision as the intersection of Thomas Street and Nob Hill Avenue. We life the view from a popular chapbook published at Fair time. It is filled with Worlds Fair subjects and titled "Worlds Fair Pictorial Panorama" (page 21). This looks east and a little south from the roof of the Food Circus (Center House) to the west leg of the Space Needle. It was from a few feet east of the foot of that leg that the fair and festivals repeating subjects published next were recorded. The Bell Telephone building, seen in part at the bottom-right corner, and the "General Electric Living Exhibit", at the center below, and the "Hydro-Electric Utilities Exhibit," standing like a starched collar on the far right, all make limited appearances in the Fair photo printed next.
(Click to Enlarge)
Sighting west from the foot of the Space Needle nearly three blocks to the tower for the Sacred Heart of Jesus sanctuary at the southwestern and off-campus corner of Thomas Street and Second Avenue. (The church tower is somewhat hidden behind the tree.) To the left of that distant tower sits a portion of the flamboyant roofline of the Christian Witness Pavilion (which we visited yesterday), the rear of Paul Horiuchi's Seattle Mural, at its northern end, and, far left, part of the nearby Hydro-electric Utilities Exhibit. Just left of the Space Needle's foot is part of the General Electric Living Exhibit, and to its left the south facade of the Bell Telephone Systems Exhibit, which resembles an oversize chassis or chamber for a self-inking rubber stamp. Also note the sign post pointing the way to several fair destinations. In Jean's Bumbershoot repeat the Center House (Food Circus) is no longer hidden behind Bell Telephones sprawling "systems exhibit." Note how the Space Needle with its remodel - by now a few years back - covered its ankles then with a skirt, above.
We continue now our postings of Bill White’s Caribbean reflections, as he steams south from Florida first to Panama and then onward to Peru to meet, at last, Kel, his fiancé.
The movie on the second night was “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” which I enjoyed but the ship was rocking so much that I started feeling a bit sick and left early, intending to watch the rest of it on television. Tomorrow they show “The Avengers,” which I will leave before the ending to Skype at midnight with Kel. We had such a nice long talk last night. Talking with and seeing my darling ponyo gives me something to look forward to all day, and the days are pretty dull, waking the decks, taking pictures of the same ocean. Yesterday I borrowed a couple books from the library; a biography of Pablo Neruda and a memoir from Roger Ebert. But even though there is a dullness about the journey there is also the undercurrent of excitement that prevents me from relaxing enough to concentrate on a book. Whatever I do, I am always looking for something else to do at the same time.
On the third day of the voyage, I am apprehensive about entering the shower, as yesterday I was unable to shut off the water and I had to call for help. The first person to arrive could not fix it. He thought the unit was loose and tightened it, but to no avail. The second to arrive simply shut it off and said there was nothing wrong with it. I had tried several times to turn the knob in the direction he showed me, but was not successful in any of those attempts. What will happen today when I try to turn off the water?
This is what happened during this morning’s abbreviated shower. I turned the water on carefully and maintained a low-pressure flow, turning it off altogether a few times while washing my hair and face. No problems. Then, for no apparent reason, the water pressure increased to its maximum and when I tried to turn the water off, it would not stop. So I got out of the shower, placed the shower hose in the sink so the water would not overflow from the shallow shower basin, and spent ten minutes or so aimlessly turning knobs back and forth. Then, for no apparent reason, the water turned off. I told one of the stewards that the situation with the water was erratic, and the shower needed to be inspected by a plumber to make sure the same disaster would not occur tomorrow. I don’t know if he understood a word I said. We shall see tomorrow.
I ran into one of the trivia team players today and we talked a bit about computers, as he had just come from a lecture on Windows 7. I told him I had been using an IMac and now was using the Toshiba laptop, and asked if he knew a good program for editing audio. He told me he used Audacity. This is the program I used to transfer my audio tapes to digital files, and I didn’t realize it was a garage-band style recording system, with editing functions as well as an importing function, so I will be able to both record the Skype interviews with Paul and edit them on it.
After we took second place in the trivia game, the ship experienced a severe roll that turned the upper deck pool into mini tsunami and shattered dishware throughout the ship. I barely noticed it, as I was taking a picture of a plant at the time, and were it not for the noise of breaking dishes might well have remained ignorant of the occurrence, for which the captain offered profuse apologies and feeble explanations. I only had a brief call with Kel before going to bed and falling asleep while listening to Donovan’s album, “Fairy Tale,” having discovered that the DVD player also plays CD’s.
I woke early to catch the sunrise, and became engaged in a prolonged conversation with an Australian couple, who informed me that their stateroom was right across from mine. The guy also had a Lumix Camera, a newer model than mine, and I checked out some of its functions, such as the macro zoom. Returning to the cabin, I received a call from Harvey, who wanted to come to my cabin and get in a little practice on the guitar. Harvey was a rock and roller from the early sixties who now played some country and national ballads, of which he demonstrated a few. They sounded much like our own frontier ballads such as Red River Valley and Home on the Range. We left the cabin to find that the ship had already arrived at the San Blas Islands, and I felt a real thrill at seeing land after a couple days on the high seas. I didn’t want to go ashore, however, because the stop was primarily to ferry passengers to a tourist bazaar where they could buy some of the products of the Cuna Indians. I had no interest in being shipped around as a source of income, preferring to stay on the boat photographing the Indians who had surrounded our ship in their canoes. Had I gone ashore, I would have been forced to pay a dollar to every Indian I photographed. I am beginning to notice that I am too often taking too many pictures of the exact same thing. I spent a long time circling each of the decks, taking pictures and soaking up the sun before returning to the cabin to doze through the most recent Twilight episode, which I had only seen once before and had such a vague memory of that I wondered at times if I had seen it at all.
In other trivial news, someone apparently came in and fixed the shower, as the water is now dispensed through a clockwise, rather than a counter-clockwise, turn, Still, I was apprehensive and kept it turned down low, switching it to off to soap myself and on to rinse, thus making sure everything continued to operate properly, with no water gathering for an overflow.
And now we lift anchor and leave the San Blas Islands, expecting to reach the Panama Canal at 5am and to enter it at 6:30. In the meantime, I look forward to talking with Kel, playing some trivia, possibly going to the German film, “The Harmonists,” and maybe checking out a comedian in the Showroom at Sea. There is a certain ennui, however, that overtakes one, trumping all plans and sending the poor soul to bed where even sleep drags by slowly.
The next attraction south of yesterday’s Christian Witness, the Safeco (or General Insurance) sponsored Official Information Center, was also squirreled into the southwest corner of the future Seattle Center. Jean needed only a short walk south on Second Avenue from the Christians to reach the former site of the open-aired booth with a roof spread low like a turkey’s wings protecting her chicks. It was another eccentric Century-21 roof, in this instance suggesting a Japanese temple. The open inside was staffed with a few female fair polymaths who could – it was expected – answer every questions asked. The place was torn down in 1981 after nearly 20 post-fair years of service as a picnic shelter. Behind it (to the west) behaving like an eccentric tent or a very large box kite was set the Seattle-First International Bank “building.” Design by the fair’s lead architect, Paul Thiry, the bank’s box was destroyed following the fair.
The site is now home for part of the Children’s Garden. Jean Sherrard’s two examples, below, of youthful vigor resting their feet after a day of hide-and-seek are Ron Edge and myself.
An early spring snow on March 3, brought out a Seattle Times photographer to record the chilled fair grounds about six weeks before the fair opened.This "aerial" from the Space Needle reminds us of the bright Salmon-pink coloring of the large Information booth. To the right of Safco is plopped the potato-pocket shape of the Nalley's Space Age Theatre. The Pacific Science Center is on the left, and much of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the upper-right corner.
We begin our postings now of Bill White’s descriptions of his trip to Lima Peru to meet, at last, Kel, his fiance of now six years. Those of us who know Bill might expect that his travel impressions would resemble those in George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” but we would be wrong. Bill spent most of his days “on the road” aboard a cruise ship he compares to a shopping mall sliding though two oceans like a glazed donut. So the heartfelt journey of reaching his intended took a while. Why did Bill chose not to fly but to travel by land and by sea? Perhaps it was, in part, in order to write about it all. And yet he has, for a while at least, given up putting fine lines to the train ride from Seattle to Florida, the first leg of his flight and his journey. The train windows were dirty but more important it was difficult to put aside his fixed idea about where he was going and whom he was going to soon see. But once on the Caribbean Bill started paying attention to his journey too, and most of what follows – in six excerpts – is his candid and sometimes sentimental descriptions of life on a cruise ship and his first days in Lima with Kel.
As Bill notes this elaborate relocation was most exceptional. Aside from a few years in Boston running a bookstore and a motion picture theatre and making art (of several sorts) he has been in Seattle working as a free-lance reviewer and writing novels. For the last few years Bill has been living in what we call “The Forsaken Art House” here in Wallingford. But now he has broken free. He has forsaken the forsaken for adventure first on the high seas and then with love in a far-away place. We wish him well – very well.
(We also note that once we have our Skype connections figured out Bill and I will return to the late 1960s and resume here our weekly readings and commentary of the remaining issues of the underground tabloid, Helix – in their proper order.)
We left Florida an hour ahead of schedule to outrun Hurricane Sandy. Indoor water sports were cancelled, and the eleven decks of the ship rolled a bit, causing passengers to rock on their heels in the stairwells, but the storm was headed north, and the m/s Veendam was going south, so we were spared the fate of a cruise ship that, unable to port in New York, left its passengers stranded in the Atlantic Ocean. Check-in at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale had been easy. When my baggage beeped, they waved it through anyway. It was probably the Swiss army knife Kel had given to me some years ago. Once in my stateroom, I was tricked into drinking a $2 can of coke, as six cans of soda and two of water had been placed on my table alongside an ice bucket, which caused me to assume they were complimentary. The other five sodas and the two waters are still sitting there, and I declined the steward’s offer to bring me more ice. It is odd that, although complimentary food is to be found throughout the ship, you are charged for the cokes placed in your room, but only, I presumed, if you drink them. Odder still is that certain concession areas will charge for items that are free in another area. An example of this is the Explorer’s Cafe, where coffee and pastries bear a price tag, while at the Lido Cafe the same pastries are pressed upon one at all hours of the night and day.
It is a simplification to say that a sea cruise is nothing but ten days of over-eating while looking at water. The television in the stateroom plays five different movies each day, and there is a DVD lending library of over 1,000 titles. On the first night of the cruise to Peru, I saw “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” but it was a crappy DVD projection. I left early, planning to watch the rest of it on the television the next day, and returned to my stateroom to watch my own DVD of Pasolini’s “Gospel According to Saint Matthew,” which put me to sleep almost immediately.
The ship is like a shopping mall in Las Vegas, tacky in an affectionate way. I have attended two lectures so far, both by fairly ignorant authorities. The person giving the history of the Panama Canal could answer few of the questions posed by the attendees, and drew a weak analogy between the fact that US ships have to pay a toll to traverse the canal, although the US built the things. His analogy was along the lines of everybody having to pay the same price for a bowl of oatmeal, whether or not they resided in an oat-growing state, while I thought a parallel between the tolls collected by some new highways might be more fitting. An introduction to Spanish was taught by a girl of Mexican descent who was raised in Connecticut, and her pronunciations were erratic and explanations of the roots of some of the words inaccurate, so I did not continue the course beyond that first day. Most of the food in the four restaurants is mediocre, the deserts being the exception. So far I have had banana crème pie, mango torte, and coconut cake. Lunch was a poor concoction of Chinese vegetables and rice, but the dinner of Chinese noodles and vegetables was palatable.
The second day of the trip began with an in-room breakfast that arrived a little after 8am and consisted of sliced banana, raisin bran cereal, a blueberry pudding, orange juice, and coffee. Since the coffee at Lido was stronger, I decided on the third day to skip the room service and head straight up to Deck 11 and get the better wake-up juice. Also, with the buffet set-up, one could have as little or as much of whatever one chooses at the moment. So I had a chocolate croissant, a blueberry muffin, and a banana, then came back to finally watch the ending of the Marigold Hotel movie, but paid little attention to it.
On the second day I also signed up for a talent show, and ran into Harvey from Australia at the Panama Canal lecture, who asked to borrow my guitar so that he could participate in the talent show as well. As it turned out, the two of us were the only ones who signed up, and the show was cancelled. Later that night, before the trivia game, I was invited to play couple of songs by the singer/guitarist Glenn, while he took a break. I did some rusty versions of In the Tomorrow and Love Minus Zero. I quite like the two couples who are my trivia team-mates. One is a retired Australian couple who both worked in the defense department, and the other an English couple who now live in Canada. We only got 10 out of 15 questions correct yesterday, with the winner scoring 12, but by the end of the cruise, had taken first place on four occasions.
In their golden celebration of Century 21 titled “The Future Remembered,” authors Paula Becker and Alan Stein give a touchstone history of the Christian Witness Pavilion (not to be confused with either the Christian Science Pavilion or the nearby Sermons From Science Pavilion.) “Two-thirds of the Christian Witness Pavilion was devoted to a children’s center, where children aged 3 to 7 got childcare mixed with evangelism. A 40-foot stained glass window [see here one the right] in the building’s facade was a major focal point, as was a 16-foot mosaic of 60,000 wooden blocks designed by Stanley Koth. [After the fair, Gethsemane Luther Church restored the blocks in their sanctuary’s narthex, while a Catholic church in St. Paul purchased the stain glass window.] The adult portion of the exhibit consisted of a small theater where visitors experienced a 10-minute sacred sound and light exhibition that employed a rocket launch countdown as metaphor for the journey through life.” By resembling, somewhat, one of the early satellites, the four-armed cross that topped the structure picked-up on the rocket metaphor. We learn as well from historylinkers Paula and Alan that 19 Protestant denominations and 14 Christian-centered agencies paid for this pavilion. The pavilion site is now part of the Center’s Children’s Garden but without the evangelism.
Looking south from the helipad on top of the Food Circus and over the shoulder, bottom-left, of the Bell Telephone Pavilion, to the Pacific Science Center and the Christian Witness Pavilion on the right.A Seattle Times photographer looks through the same block as the above subject taken from the roof of the Food Circus, but here from the "front steps" to the Pacific Science Center and looking north on Second Ave, not south. The by now familiar roof-lines of the Christian Witness Pavilion are on the left. This scene - and many others - were photographed by the newspaper for its April 21 "first day" coverage of the fair.
Perhaps the serendipitous promotion for the Christian Witness Pavilion was its best public relations. It’s hardwood substitute or variation on the Protestants favorite portrait of Jesus Christ, the one by the artist Solomon, arrived more than two months late. (Every Sunday-Schooler should remember it.)
The Solomon sub was lost twice by airlines but when it at last arrived in July it was met with rejoicing and press coverage at least in The Times.
Bill has arrived in Peru. Ron is back to scanning the issues and will have the next Helix in line and it is expected soon. First, however, we will put up a True Confession and or Sentimental Sea Shanty from Bill recalling his trip by cruise ship nearly straight south from Florida to Peru but with a necessary jog through the Panama canal. His letter will include a video of his passage through the canal and, we expect, more photographs of his trip by Sea. (The story of his train trip from Seattle to Florida may come later. Hope so, for I like traveling in trains and their tales too.) Meanwhile for the Helix routine to resume we must also wait while we figure out how to make Skype work between here and Lima. And that is the sum of it - until we put up Bill's Caribbean Shanty and soon.
This most recent record of the old Helix was record last Oct. 29, and may be compared to one below it from 2008, and then another from the 1970s. At the bottom the door is open, but to the first Helix office, which was in the University District on Roosevelt Way and a half-block north of 45th Street..
Below: While I recall the faces and beards of the two on the left at the Helix front door on Harvard Ave., I no longer remember their names. But to the right are Pat Churchill and Tim Harvey. Both contributed to the paper. Tim handled the UPS and LNS selections and edits and also did some of the best reporting for the paper, as well as drama reviews. In our recorded remarks Bill White and I have referred to Tim’s writing often enough. Rereading Tim I wish that I could indicated somehow my admiration. He may still be in Maine but I’ve not found him as yet. I remember that both Pat and Tim often had a cup of coffee in one hand and sometimes a smoke in the other. As did I and almost everybody in the smoke-filled office. But at that time we were eternal.
Above: This Post-Intelligencer press photo, courtesy of MOHAI, is too soft to read all the posters held high in 1948 for this demonstration against the state legislature’s Canwell Committee. The legible ones, left-to-right, read that “Every Canwell Committee member for [the] Lien Law” – “Atom Bombs and military training will not build houses or lower prices!” – “Canwell . . . want more pension cuts!” . . . “The Canwell Committe is illegal, unconstitutional and UnAmerican!” . . . “Every Canwell Committee member voted for Pension Cuts!” The business of the Canwell Committee is briefly described in the “now and then” printed at the bottom. Below: Late summer Bumbershoots are often visited by “get out the vote” activists. Like the 1948 protestors above, these activists do their work beside the south facade of the Centerhouse, AKA Food Circus: the old Armory.
Above: At the 42nd Street entrance to the U.W. students protest the Canwell hearings of 1948. Photo courtesy Museum of History and Industry. Below: The University District’s Methodist Temple is seen in part on the right of both views. Readers may remember the parking lot across 15th Avenue in the “now” scene. It was created in the late 1960s from the wreckage of the old white frame Wesley House – seen in the “then” – which was a residence hall for coeds. The lot was recently developed for housing, with some retail and office space as well. With this the popular and by now venerated Allegro Coffee House in the alley lost both the morning sunlight and its view of the campus green. The Allegro, either the oldest espresso house in Seattle or nearly, opened on May 10, 1975.
REGISTER YOUR PROTEST
(First appeared in Pacific April 20, 2008)
When the University of Washington opened its first classes on the new “Interlake Campus” in 1895 none of the students lived on campus and few in Brooklyn, the name then of the university district. Most came from town by trolley and were let off at “University Station,” 42nd Street and University Way. To reach campus they walked a mere one block east to the incline pictured here, and for many years this was the most frequented way to enter and leave the campus. For pedestrians it may still be.
Since the lawn here is exposed for sightseeing into the ‘district and sunbaths in the afternoon it has seen a lot of leisure through the years. I remember it as “hippie hill” in the late 1960s. Here, however, we see a protest underway on July 15, 1948.
The students are comfortably listening to speeches broadcast from a flatbed truck that is parked on the 15th Ave. You can see the banner near the center of the “then,” and it reads, in part, “Register Your Protest, Hear and Now, the Canwell Committee.” Albert F. Canwell was the one-term state legislator from Spokane who proudly campaigned on two planks only: no new taxes and no communists.
The speakers this noon were Lyle Mercer, president of Students for Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party, Ted Astley, a veteran’s counselor at the UW and Al Ottenheimer of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, which was just off campus. The Canwell Hearings injured them all. The University fired Astley.
However, the real targets in this “red scare” theatre were on the UW Faculty. After Canwell’s “I will not tolerate questions” proceedings were over, three lost their professorships, scapegoats for the school’s board of trustees who were relieved that the number did not approach what another legislator proclaimed to be the total accounting of communists on the faculty. That was 150: the same as that estimated by The Times for the number of students who attended this barely on-campus protest.
By now one of Seattle’s most cherished landmarks, the Seattle Mural is Paul Horiuchi’s daring glass tile departure from the exquisite collages he constructed from soft and translucent materials like rice paper. While it is now called simply “The Seattle Mural” I imagine it as the Buddhist’s “well-packed region” that is everything – eventually. Follow any line through the mural and eventually – or ultimately – you will end up where you began, and then keep going. Have you sat in the grass for a concert there and wound up wondering through the mural?
(Click TWICE to ENLARGE)
During Bumbershoot 2012 the Seattle Mural was mostly covered by adverts, stage decorations, and large built out video screens like the one showing here at the center. Jean's view repeats Frank Shaw's detail below from the fair. These puff-ball erections that were part of the fair's appointments seem makeshift - or make-do - by now. Part of the Bell Telephone Pavilion shows on the left. It sprawled between the Food Circus (the Center House) and the Seattle Mural, and was one of the fair's clumsier designs. We will see a larger depiction of it later in this fair-festival project and elaborate there. Shaw's 1962 puffs two-up remind me of artist-friend Fred Bauer's capture of this small pruned tree, which holds its own against the ivy that once climbed the exterior wall of one of the structures that the Seattle Center inherited from Century 21. I remember it but by now can now longer claim with confidence, which it was. However, I'll venture this: it may have been the east facade of the Flag Plaza Pavilion directly across Third Ave. (or Boulevard East) from the southwest entrance to the Food Circus. Who knows?Catching Jean Capturing a Glimpse of Horiuchi
WE POST another colorless MASTHEAD without body as we continue to exercise our RIGHT to RECESS, and include NO NEW HELIX this week as we wait for BILL WHITE to reach his PARAMOUR IN PERU before continuing our weekly commentaries on FRESH ISSUES OF HELIX via SKYPE – or something else that is cheap as well.
For DIVERSION we post now a BILL OF BILLS – SIX BILLS with (unidentified) WOMEN. One of these pairs includes our Bill who is now still on the Caribbean with hundreds of tourists heading for Panama and the passage there from the Old World into the New – so FITTING for our Bill. The remaining Bills are a mix pulled from our growing horde of scans. We may hint at their identities. Some will still know themselves.
Bill on Pike Place with an artist whose last name is the Ocean to which Bill is steaming.Bill with his Bride and very near BallardOur Bill at Bumbershoot with Julie "the torch."Bill with someone's bad eyeBill and his StigmataBlonde on Blonde recently moved to the foothills east of Sacramento.
For No. 16 we have move from No. 15 south across Republican Street through a portal between two fair buildings that have survived as parts of the Northwest Rooms of Seattle Center, which were once-upon-a-time home for much of Bumbershoot’s now largely lost Literary Arts program – both the readings and the book fair. For some of us this was the most evocative corner of Bumbershoot. While there is some literary art in rock it is not so varied or sustained as it was with Bumbershoot’s Literary Arts part or program.
Opened in 1903 and razed for Century 21, the Warren Avenue School crowded the southeast corner of Republican Street and Warren Ave. This put part of its north end, here on the left, in the Northwest room that was home during Century 21 to the Canadians, and during many Bumbershoots, to the festival's Literary Arts. While the streets are not named in this detail lifted from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, it is easy to identify them. Left-of-center in the green block there is the named Warren Ave School, still crowding both Republican Street, above it, and Warren Avenue, to the left of it. The school's footprint held where now, to repeat, are parts of the Northwest Rooms, the Fountain of Creation, and the Coliseum. This detail also shows the by now familiar Sara Yesler Home, aka Wayside Hospital, aka apartment house, at the northwest corner of Republican and Second Avenue, now home of the Rep. The undeveloped block here at the center, a playfield for the school, is now awash with the International Fountain. Mercer Avenue is at the top; Queen Anne Ave, far left; 4th Ave. far right. The section of interest, Section No. 2, is ponderously named the World of Century 21. It concentrates on the Coliseum, and can be compared to the Baist map above. The look down on it all from the Space Needle in 1962 that follows may also be compared to the Baist Map and this Ron Edge sandwich. The International Plaza, Seattle sculptor Everett DuPen's Fountain of Creation and just above or north of the fountain, Century 21's long rooms used as pavilions for, among others, the Canadians, Mexico, Denmark and Japan. Looking northwest from the Space Needle during Century 21. The subjects of both yesterday's No. 15 and today's No. 16 can be readily found below.
During the fair looking east through the Fountain of Creation with the International Plaza’s pavilions on the left – future home for much Jazz and Literary Arts at Bumbershoot.
Jean’s “repeat” put him up against the wall. He remarked “things have been moved.”
Catching a wading Jean getting his shot of the Fountain of Creation from the pool.
The Canadian mark can be read in this twilight look over Everett DuPen’s fountain during the fair.
After the fair as a sign that the Century 21 campus was being turned into a working Seattle Center, this sketch of the fountain and its surrounds appeared in the times. We reprint the caption. FOUNTAIN: The World’s Fair Fountain near the Coliseum designed by Everett DuPen, Seattle sculptor, serves as the foreground for a newly remodeled exhibit-banquet hall occupying the former Canada Pavilion at the Seattle Center. The former Denmark Pavilion, right, will be inclosed and used as a permanent restaurant. (Seattle Times, March 9, 1964)
Ron Edge's now familar superimposition of Century 21 - its outline - and Seattle Center from space, ca. 2007.
(Click TWICE to Enlarge)
Named the “World of Commerce and Industry” and numbered “3,” the northwest corner of Century 21 was only a small sampler of the things it’s ambitious titles* claimed. Included – and here we consult the numbers on the map – were, at least, the United Nations, the African Information Center, Thailand, Philippines, India, Korea, San Marino, Peru and the City of Berlin, all of it west of Boulevard West (2nd Ave.) and north of Freedom Way (Republican Street). While the fair had its share of quasi-democracies – how could one have a worlds fair in 1962 without such fakers – there were, it seems, no Commies. And yet, and as well, how in 1962 could one have a worlds fair without commies. Now they would be welcomed investors. Long since this northwest corner is pretty much filled with the Bagley Wright Theatre. [*The buildings that nearly framed No. 3 were wrapped around the International Mall.]
Titled by its unnamed provider - and perhaps by the anonymous photographer too - "view from Philippines Pavilion," the subject looks south thru the fair's International Mall to the open stage fit with seats to this northern side of the northwest terminus of the fair's Union 76 Skyride.With his back watching out at Mercer Street and with Second Avenue out of frame to the left, Jean's repeat looks along the eastern front of the Bagley Wright Theatre, home for Seattle's Rep. If memory serves me, this was the last "repeat" shot during our three Bumberdays.
At different times, two towers have looked down on the neighborhood around Fourth Avenue and Thomas Street. As landmarks go, they can be compared, although hardly. One tower is the city’s present baton, the Space Needle. The other tower belonged to Fire Station No. 4 with in its original form its elegant English-style architecture.
Station No. 4 was built in 1908 and first was occupied on Oct. 15 of that year. Its three grand double doors opened to a steamer, a pump and a hose wagon, all of them horse-drawn. Engine Company No. 4 had moved over from an old clapboard station nearby at Fourth Avenue and Battery Street, which had been razed that year during the Denny Regrade. According to fire service records preserved faithfully by Seattle Fire Department historian Galen Thomaier, only 13 years later the company moved back to Fourth and Battery into yet another new station. It is still there.
For four years following this final move in 1921, the still relatively new but deserted structure was idle until the Seattle Fire Department transferred over it alarm center from the SFD’s old headquarters at Third Ave. and Main Street.
For some reason, when this station was picked for the alarm center, its third-floor gables were cut away. The tower looked awkwardly stranded beside its flattened station before it too was lowered.
Fire Station No. 4 in its original stone-and-brick beauty – as pictured on top – was designed by one of Seattle’s more celebrated historical architect, one best known for his school designs. After James Stephen won a 1902 contest for school design, he was employed as the city’s school architect and designed more than 20 Seattle schools.
Look for . . . the Space Needle. (CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE)Look for the Fire Station, bottom-center. It is depicted in red - for the bricks.
Except for the temporary money gate at Bumbershoot, which with our press passes we had not need to either climb over or bust through, this repeat was pretty easy to figure. Jean and I both took repeats of the sunny Century 21 record of the southeast corner of the Food Circus. Jean in the full light, I in the twilight. His, I think, is the more accurate. In ’62 a stairway here then led up to something named La Balcone. Once inside, perhaps the stairs continued to the wrapping balcony that nearly circles the big hall. It may have been French food – perhaps Freedom Fries, named for liberty, equality and fraternity.
First CLICK TWICE to Enlarge. Then seek the southeast corner of the Big No. 11 or the little No. 36.
More than their latest models the Ford company’s Century-21 pavilion was about space, influenced by Sputnik and Buckminster Fuller – a geodesic cap or crown for thinking about space. On its “An Adventure in Outer Space” one flew through the close universe of planets and satellites. I did not visit it, but imagine that it was by today’s simulated trips a passive journey – like TV more than Disneyland. (Neither have I “visited” video games.) Even on Ford’s budget such a trip would be hard to create convincingly in 1962. But with a willing suspension of one’s critical faculties who needs to be convinced? Well, you and I do. This reminds me of the Great Fire of 1666 kinetic diorama at the Museum of London History, which Jean and I visited with a trot in 2005. For a recreation of the fire that flatted much of London one stood in a darkened closet and really suspended one’s disbelief while watching a jerky version of the fire grow through a window, as if seeing it across the Thames.
The Ford Pavilion was at the south end of Nob Hill beyond John and nearly up against Denny Way. Jean’s “now” is adjusted by a few feet to the east in order to include sculptor Alexander Liberman’s assemblage of industrial cylinders, some 40 feet long and sixty-four inches in diameter.
(Click TWICE to Enlarge)
Look for No. 69 on Boulevard 21. Or find the southeast corner of the Food Circus, aka Center House, and look south towards Broad Street.
This is the first photograph that Jean recorded for our fair-festival project. We had just entered the Bumbershoot gate on Mercer with press passes (The only way we could effortlessly afford it.) and followed instructions to the press room where with Ron Edge we were outfitted with other “special” passes and stickers and ephemera into other inner-spaces, which we rarely used, for we kept to the outside for the three days of Bumbershoot.
The proper and polite name for this space in front of the McCaw Hall is the Kreielsheimer Plaza – or is it the Kreielsheimer Promenade? This uncertainly is evidence for what we knew at the time it was being built and dedicated; that is was unlikely that many would remember the proper name. First it was a difficult name, and even if named Jones Plaza it would soon be swallowed whole by McCaw.
On an inspiration, Jean with his tall pole took this shot through the screens that are at night – sometimes – used as surfaces for colorful projections. (As least I hope they are still used so.) Jean and I, along with Mike James, Genny McCoy and Sheila Farr wrote the book history of the Kreielsheimer Foundation, which gave the money for the plaza (or promenade) and about about 100 million more for art around the Northwest, although most of it’s in Seattle. The family name with a difficult spelling is attached to many places hereabouts, but. again, rarely is it remembered or recognized. It’s a shame. While writing the book we grew fond of the family.
Jean’s recording at the top was for his pleasure. In it there is a band playing at the end of this promenade. I knew we had many photographs of the old Civic Auditorium and Opera House too, and we will next attach a few with short captions. None of them will be a “scientific” repeat or prefiguring of Jean’s shot, but they will all be of the place or very near it.
Like new in 1928. The grounds are still rough from all the construction to build a civic center. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)The Kreielsheimer Plaza was previously a parking space in front of the classic row of front portals to the auditorium - a space where cars and here a nearly double-decker bus were posed for promotions. (Courtesy, Municipal Archives)Some bunting for a Rotary convention in the late 1940s.Jeweler-photographer Robert Bradley's not dated Kodachrome record of the Civic Auditorium. Note the window dressings above the grand entrance. We wonder if it was considered attractive at the time? Do you like it now? This we propose - understanding that we can be very tolerant towards ourselves - was photographed from very near what is since 2003 the Kreielsheimer "space." The date is 1900. You can read it at the lower-right corner. You may have seen some of this earlier. For our fifth offering in this fair-festival package we gathered several shots that looked west and a little north on Republican Street from its intersection with Second Ave. The contemporary subject there is the Bagley Wright Theatre. In an earlier footprint that northwest corner of Second and Republican was held by the Sarah Yesler Home for working women. It had later and much longer use as an apartment house. We see it again here above the tents of the Army's horse and mule men here to watch over the stock headed for the Phillipines. Although not seen, Mercer Street is just out of frame to the right. So how far do you think this is from the big tenement with the tower? If it is one block and a few yards then these soldiers are posing in - or very near - the future promenade. I took this shot of the promenade from the Mercer Street side when Jean and I paid a visit during our production of the book on the history of the Kreielsheimer Foundation. That may have been nine years ago, but it seems to alive to have been so long ago.
Helix this week is austere, at least when compared to any of the 30 some previous offerings. And things will stay restrained for about two weeks more, for we have lost Bill White – temporarily. This week Ron Edge’s clever black-white lasso of the Moitoret Helix logo is left without color. Ron has restrained himself, for it is he that has been putting up those colored renderings every week – with about two years to go. (They should make a fine little Edge Animation. We can show it on YouTube.)
Now it occurs to me that this lack of color is prefigured by a slide I took many years ago of the front of the old and last Helix office on Harvard Ave. The place was plastered with bills. I’ll put it up. (For sake of disclosure, perhaps it was recorded with Tri-X and not color.) Someone – like Bill White – with a detailed understanding of Seattle’s Rock history will be able to date this by the bands playing.
[Now someone has: Mike Whybark. While Bill is on the train – thanks Mike. Here’s his comment, which can also be found far below. Mike refers to both front door shots of the abandoned Helix, this one and the other near the bottom of this contribution. We’ll put his truths in quotes, and this welcome interruption in brackets.
“Black and white posters shot includes a date: Freak Show at the Central 6-2-91, flyers in the clerestory of the storefront. I also note the mass of posters lower down is very weathered with no fresh flyers. I would guess that this then dates from the first year or so of the poster ban, around 1993. The color pic [near the bottom] looks to be around 1982. Three alternative market bands are featured: The Stranglers (UK based), Romeo Void (LA) and Echo and the Bunnymen. Romeo Void had the shortest half life of these bands so I say about 1981-1982.”]
Things will stay dormant for about two weeks more – until Bill gets settled in Peru. We say farewell Bill. But we wait to hear from you. (He has sent a few lines from Chicago and a few more while rolling through Washington D.C. via Amtrak. They were understandable complaints about the price of train food, the difficulties of sleeping in a coach, the state of North Dakota and the state of national politics. But soon comes relief, for Bill by now must be approaching dangling Florida. There on its western shore he will join a cruise ship filled with tourists. On my trip across the Atlantic long ago I quickly developed a fondness for tourists and the deck shuffleboard and swimming we shared high above the ocean. Bill’s journey with take him and his tourists through the Panama Canal, in the direction of the new world. Fifty seven years ago I too went through it in the opposite direction landing in the old world at Tilbury on the Thames.
Here's some hide and seek for you Bill. You will, of course, be in the other locks on the left - the ones heading for the Pacific, still perhaps you can keep an eye out for this place, either from the stern or some high open deck. Study the hillocks on that wet horizon and shoot. We will print!
Bill intends to send reports by land and sea and with pictures. Once he is comfortably at home in Lima we will figure out how to resume these weekly offerings with our partnered commentaries, by means of SKYPE and some recording program we have yet to install. And we hope that a few thousand miles, Skype and the cameras on our respective screens will help us get better at reading Helix.
The trip from Seattle to Lima, which takes a few hours by air, will last a little under three weeks for Bill – a luxury for a writer as prolific as he. We shall wait to read him. A century ago Bill could have easily booked steamer service to South America directly from Seattle. And there was a boat operating as early as the 1870s named for the City of Panama, on the isthmus that by then had the first transcontinental railroad in any hemisphere crossing it. For one crossing over from the the Old to the New, adding to the coastwise-steaming on two oceans, the rattling of less than a day by train, made this Western Migration something like tolerable. And there was less chance of catching Malaria on the little train than on a hired wagon though that steaming jungle.
An Edge Clipping from a 1878 Post-Intelligencer. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)
Bill has moved more north-south than east-west. But he has gotten older. Pizarro, the tough Spaniard who founded Lima, called it the “City of Kings.” That was in 1535 – by now time enough the grow a layered culture. Bill will add to it with his singing and writing – even in English. Wallingford will not be the same without him, although the neighborhood is also changing. Tully’s, the bigger espresso shop on the northeast corner of 45th and Meridian folded. It figures. Tully’s was a place we used to go for meetings but with minimal consuming. At the same time the west wall of the place has been painted with a sampler of Wallingford’s destinations. It is mildly charming if one is feeling good but pathetic when not. Ron Edge snapped it from his driver’s window. Bill print this and hang it on a north wall in Lima.
Now a snapshot of Bill on his last day in Wallingford and the Northwest. I’m helping him pack some primitive essentials – although he later refused them. (Until inserting this, I had not noticed that the right pocket on my temperate winter coat is torn. I inherited it from my oldest brother Ted, now six years beyond. I’ll leave it alone.)
Returning – in conclusion for this week – to a more colorful Helix this time in Kodachrome. This slide is not dated, but Bill can probably figure it out from the names on the posters. Now what will happen to all the familiarity that is part of him? Losing White to South America is like burning a library with a smolder. Bill we await your reports – by Land and by Sea – and books both real and magical from the “land of crosses.”
This No. 10 comparison on Boulevard East parallels the No. 9 on Boulevard West from yesterday. Both of the unidentified photographers are looking north with their backs near Thomas, although nearer here than there.
The Armory/Food Circus/Center House on the right. (It is the big No. 11 on the map at the bottom.) The Armory was nearly a quarter-century old when it was renamed the Food Circus for the fair when it opened in 1962. It was modern enough to imagine in the twenty-first century - and it made it! As did we!! Two blocks north at Republican Street you will find the uplifting plywood creations of the Home of Living Light, the part of Century 21 that we touched with our No. 7. Remember to CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE. Also, perhaps, consult Ron Edge's Double Exposure below: the helpful sandwich that superimposes a map of the '62 fair over a ca. 2007 vertical aerial of Seattle Center from space.
CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
By now this should be nearly self-evident. We are standing near the southwest corner of the Food Circus - again, the big No. 11 - and looking north on Boulevard East to No. 22.
Much of where Second Avenue extends gently downhill from Thomas Street thru Harrison and on to Republican where it levels out preparing to soon climb Queen Anne Hill has been used by many Bumbershoots as a Food and Craft Way. During Century 21 this stretch was called Boulevard West and much of it was sided by a colorful array of consumables and cosmopolitan exhibits with price tags squeezed into tight quarters.
(Click TWICE to Enlarge)
Looking north on Second Avenue aka Boulevard West of the Boulevards of the World at Century 21.Fifty years later at Bumbershoot 2012 - still looking north on Second Ave. towards Harrison Street. (A Reminder: All the 'now' repeats in this fair/festival series were recorded by Jean, unless otherwise noted.)
Judging from the Space Needle's shadow, the unnamed photographer for this look west over the "Washington State Coliseum" into the Lower Queen Anne business district was an early bird visitor to the fair on a sunny day. Boulevard West runs through the scene from Thomas Street on the left to mid-block between Harrison and Republican on the right. On the left the shadow crosses what we called the Flag Plaza Pavilion not so long ago - until it was more recently replaced with the grander Fisher Pavilion. The fence at the left of the pavilion at the intersection of Thomas and Second Ave. reminds us that Century 21 was ticketed.
CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
Leaning again on Ron Edge's superimposed map of Century 21 with a Space Shot from NASA, most likely, and using the Space Needle inspection inserted just above and some common sense we should all readily find the Boulevard of the West. It is also listed on the map's table - at the bottom - twice. The first listing "7" is misleading. Search for the second and generous last listing.
Something like the Pay Streak of nickle and dime amusements at Seattle’s first big fair, the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Expo. on a U.W. Campus remade for it, Century 21’s Gayway was given to cheap thrills and gaudy sensations, and so was popular. Checking Ron Edge’s double-vision map directly below, the Gayway – section No. 7 – is found sprawling east from the Food Circus between the Monorail terminus and Memorial Stadium. It was filled with the kind of modular constructions that could be brought in big pieces on big trucks and assembled quickly on the spot. Its most eastern and southern parts are now covered by the Experience Music Project (EMP). North of the Gayway, the fair’s most erotic sensations – the intended ones – picked up at the fairgrounds northeast corner, a site we’ll visit later.
(Click the blow – and all else – TWICE to Enlarge.)
Ron Edge's contrivance superimposed a map outlining the major attractions of Century 21 over a recent shot from space, but not recent enough to include the addition of the - or yet another - glass museum.
Remembering that Jean used his ten-foot pole to peek over the southeast corner of the Memorial Stadium to repeat the now-then we featured earlier today, for the repeat below he kept his camera high on the pole and turned about 140 degrees clockwise to the southeast to look over what was the Gayway to the EMP, thereby repeating Frank Shaw’s nearly same prospect to the southeast entrance to the Fair.
Frank Shaw stood very near where Jean poked his camera 50 years later, which is from the roof of the "lip" above the Memorial Stadium's southeast gate. In the foreground he includes most of the Gayway's Hot-Rods, a ride suitable for all ages but doing its greatest service, we suspect, to the awakening glands of adolescents. That's the intersection of 5th Avenue and Harrison Street on the distant left. Capitol Hill, left, and First Hill, on the right, meld the horizon.Jean used a lens considerably wider than Frank Shaw's. Still the meeting of Harrison Street and 5th Avenue can be detected here directly left of the EMP's shining north facade. I am included in Jean's pole shot. See me descending some steel stairs to a dumpster. While not diving there I did snap the squid that appears behind the banner at the bottom-left corner of Jean's repeat. It follows.Like a revolving ball of small mirrors hung above a ballroom floor the eccentrically curving sides of the Experience Music Project seem to scatter strange reflections about the neighborhood. That, at least, is my first interpretation of the strange warm light in the shadows of the landscape on the right behind the bike rack. The wall behind it is part of the Memorial Stadium. Or was that light scattered by the dumpster or a squid on a late Indian Summer afternoon?A fair fair-time reveal of much of the Gayway, Memorial Stadium and, upper-right, some of the fair's sexiest corner as well. Compare, if you will, the forms of these objects of art and entertainment with those in the Edge-Map. Note, for instance, the familiar Hot-Rod attraction's figure-8, right-of-center. From this we can easily imagine where on the stadium wall Frank Shaw stood and where below him a half-century later Jean held his pole. The running track in the stadium is fitted with water for the fair's water-skiing show, evidence for what was then tooted as "the pleasure boat capitol of the world." See the boat run and see the small harbor at the circle's southeast (lower-right) corner.Dipping the Space Needle camera south some to show the monorail leaving the fair, and 5th Avenue on the right. The red construction at center-bottom is the south terminus of the fair's flybye, the Union 76 Skyride. One-half of Hot-Rods' figure-8 is showing in the upper-left corner. And for later reference note the fair's "Giant Wheel" - No. 97 on the map - at the bottom-right corner. Dipping still lower, but now thru the Needle's protective bars, most the Monorail terminus is included, and even the last - most easterly - articulation of the roof on Ivar's fish bar is evident far left just above the bottom-most protective bar. Borrowed - or lifted - from a popular bit of fair ephemera, a slim book with "pictorial panorama" in the title, if memory serves me as well as the book. This look east from an upper floor in the Food Circus shows the night lights of my of the sensational structures seen from the Space Needle shots just shown. Hot-Rod shows, again, above-left. The Memorial Stadium's southeast wall looms in the shadows beside it. On the left, the Calypso is blurred by its speed. The three circles of the Monster, right-of-center at the bottom, may be resting. And there is that Giant Wheel down the Gayway on the right horizon. With neither fanfare nor huckster, the dark rectangle at the center is listed "67-68 Concessions."Still in the heirloom panorama chapbook, but on the ground and with No. 67-68 Concessions on the left. (Apparently the unnamed photographer did not use a tripod. The focus is soft.)A ferris-wheel of sorts beside the Monorail but not, I think, the Big Wheel. It shall be revealed - hopefully by a reader.Returning with Jean to the old Gayway acres, here home for the Experience Music Project and several attractions, which yet have not attracted throngs on this Bumbershoot Sunday. All of this is outside the Bumbershoot gates. Two children or three ride the revolving swings above the painted labyrinth while a puzzled old man in a Hawaiian print shirt looks on holding, perhaps, his life-support in a dark bag.Nearby and still outside the Bumbershoot gate.Looking northwest through the brand new Civic Center from the corner of 4th Ave. and Harrison Street in 1928. The "then" featured at the top of this Sunday Nov. 21, 2012 feature was taken kitty-corner from this prospect, and as noted there just before the green acres of David and Louisa Denny's claim were developed for what we see here. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)
The clipping from the Nov. 14, 1993 printing of Pacific. And by the way, the video history of Seattle promoted at the bottom of the clipping is still available – now on DVD. See the “store” connected to this blog for instructions on how to order its sublime story of the “Seattle Spirit.” Although I lived off such huckstering in ’93, this documentary is cheaper now, as am I. (Click to Enlarge)
FINALLY and from the same prospect, there goes the sun.
From the same perspective - looking northwest over 4th and Harrison - this sketch appeared in the April 1, 1951 edition of The Seattle Times. The picture's caption reads in whole, "STADIUM ROOF PROPOSED: The High School Memorial Stadium would resemble this architect's sketch under a proposal by the Greater Seattle Gospel Crusade, Inc. The proposed high, arching wooden roof would cost about $100,000. The gospel group is prepared to spend $30,000 for a canvas cover for use during next summer's appearance in the stadium of Billy Graham, evangelist, and would contribute the $30,000 toward construction of a permanent roof, representatives told the School Board. The board indicated no objections to the project, but pointed out that no school funds were available." We note that this proposal was printed on April Fools Day, but discount it as a coincidence. Still the GSGC may have expected a miracle. Better, perhaps, to pray - but not for rain - before spending thirty thousand on a big tent to turn down the sun.
Here looking northeast over Freedom Way, aka Republican Street, this eccentric home's full name was more revealing: the Century 21 Plywood Home of Living Light. It sat on a Center site that has been variously used during the now 40-plus years of Bumbershoot, most often for one of the festival's smaller stages. Sometimes this lawn immediately south of the Exhibition Hall and contiguous to one of the fairs food fairs was free for sprawled eating serenaded by buskers and jamers. Jean's Bumbershoot 2012 repeat reveals an unusually quiet setting on this lawn directly south of the Exhibition Hall. At some point - not remembered here - the covered promenade on Third Avenue (running north-south between the International Fountain and the west end of the Memorial Stadium) was extended thru the site where once shown "living light."
A better photograph of this plywood construction that suggests that it warrants the name is printed on page 247 of The Future Remembered, historylink and the Seattle Center Foundation’s well-wrought book on both Century 21 and Seattle. For its caption the book’s authors, Paula Becker and Alan J. Stein, explain the intentions of this manipulatable construction – and its name too. “In response to projected overpopulation in the future, the Home of Living Light was designed to provide private refuge on small, scarce building lots. Walls of wood paneling, rigid in one direction and flexible in the other, could take any shape while supporting the required roof loads. Four conical skylights located over each major area of the house and could be turned toward or away from the sun to adjust the level of natural lighting.” Hence Living Light!
Although soft on focus this Kodachrome loom east on Freedom Way (Republican Street) from Boulevard West (Second Ave.) puts the Home of Living Light at home, one block east at Boulevard East (Third Ave.) Also showing is the roof-line stage architecture of both the Playhouse, far left, and the Opera House, at the center,
This leaves only the hide-and-seek securer – Ron Edge’s map sandwich – for the reader to peg the Century 21 location for the Plywood Home of Living Light. HINT: Look for the smugged “60” that reads more like “80.”
Ivar’s Century 21 fish and chips bar – or stand with Hamburgers! – was nestled to the north side of the Monorail terminal. It opened directly onto the southwest corner of the carni’ part of the fair called the Breezeway. Here below – and again – is Ron Edge’s superimposition of a recent space shot of Seattle Center over the 1962 Century 21 map, which both names and numbers its primary parts – but not Ivar’s, as such. DOUBLE CLICK this for your hide-and-seek. (Clue: No. 63)
A recent space shot of Seattle Center superimposed on a 1962 map of Century 21, numbering and naming its parts. (Constructed by and courtesy of Ron Edge)A chummy note from the boss to his staff as they prepared for the fair. Looking south to the full Needle soaring above Ivar's Century 21 Fish Bar (with hamburgers and shakes). The bar with a breeze, designed by architect Howard A. Kinney, using bamboo trellises and fitted exposed timbers with both modern and rustic properties - somewhat like the Polynesian Restaurant on Pier 52. Jean's repeat from this year's Bumbershoot reveals that the "Next 50 Pavilion" is the latest holder on Ivar's footprint. The futurism of this "next 50" years included lots of minimalism, recognizing that we are wearing out the planet and so the Center and Seattle too. Next 50 has none of the forward thrust of Century 21. In this light the decision to put another ticketed glass museum nearby rather than, for instance, the Native American Center promoted by a different cadre of regional sensitives, suggests a "oh what the hell - lets sink with the glass and enjoy the colors along the way - the the money too" fatalism. The use of Seattle Center for a Native American center may have well been without cash register and ticket takers. Appropriately too, for the meadow was once used for native potlatches, those rituals of being admired and thanked for giving gifts and not for selling tickets or trinkets.
Architect Kinney's artistic wife Ginny, decorated much of the bars' interior with collages she constructed from driftwood, shells and other beach desiderata like sand-worn glass. After the fair her panels were installed in the main house at the cattle ranch Ivar then owned near Ilwaco on the Long Beach peninsula. This subject is from Ivar on the farm. Later the panels were moved back to Seattle and some of them are still decorating a hallway at Ivar's Salmon House, as shown next/below.Some of Ginney Kinney's driftwood collages sharing a Salmon House wall with Native American portraits shared by the University of Washington's Special Collections.
Ivar’s mid-20th century band-wagoning with what’s modern was most flirtatiously expressed for the Ford Edsel – although Ivar never purchased one, nor did many others. (CLICK to ENLARGE)
CLICK TWICE to Enlarge and so to seek the intersection of interest northeast of the Coliseum, and so somewhat upper-left. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)
Most of today’s fair/festival repeat looks northwest from the corner of Republican Street and Second Avenue. The centerpiece during the fair was the northwest terminus of the fair’s Union 76 Skyride. Earlier it was the home of a long-lived apartment that, as you will learn from the short feature reprinted as a clipping near the bottom, began in the early 1890s as an ornate home/dormitory for single working women, which was converted into a hospital first and then for most of its life the apartments that were razed for Century 21. The Rep’s Bagley Wright Theatre was completed in the early 1980s, and it survives with some additions, most notably the smaller Kreielsheimer stage at the north end. Again, for a hide-and-seek prelude, we put at the top Ron Edge’s superimposition of a recent photo of Seattle Center taken from space (ca. 2007) with a map of Century 21 that numbers and names its attractions, most of them temporary.
Part of Queen Anne resident Lawton Gowey's pre-fair survey of the site. This, again, looks northwest thru the intersection of 2nd Ave. and Republican Street. The northwest corner during the fair with the Union 76 Skyride overhead and it's northwest terminus at the center. (Courtesy Ron Edge)Jean's repeat at this year's BumbershootMy empty record from last May (2012). The Union 76 Skyride terminus shows - barely - right-of-center at the top. This Century 21 shot from the Space Needle includes bottom-right a reveal of the northeast corner of Nob Hill Avenue and Harrison Street, the subject of our second fair-festival repeat. The keen eye may also find the Belgian Pancake feeder while rolling its way to the upper-right. The promised short history of the corner.As is his revealing and appealing custom, Jean has taken other looks from his prospect. This one aims west on Republican.
SEEK and YE HALL FIND – but best to DOUBLE-CLICKTOO.
Ron Edge's sandwich of a Century 21 features map with a ca.2007 shot from space.Frank Shaw's record of Century 21 construction looking south on 5th Avenue to/thru its intersection with Republican Street.Jean's repeat. (A very few of the "nows" in this fair-festival project were not recorded by Jean and/or his big ten foot pole, so we establish now the practice of attribution. Jean shot this.
This week Bill White and I pause in our commentary on this most recent issue to call Thom Gunn for an elaboration on the “party” – he calls it – that followed his victory in the late spring of 1968 as the newest U.W. Student Body Prexy. He called it “World War Three.” The school administration was not amused. As you may recall, and as Thom described on the phone from Whidbey Island, it was followed by World War Four.
Bill White is off to Peru on Thursday and there is no telling when he will return – if ever. We will try, however, to find a Skype-aided way to continue these readings and comments together. We will also put aside this piling-up of tabloids for a two week break, during which Bill will begin his new and second role on this blog as a travel writer and South American correspondent. So next week no Helix but rather our first “on the road” with Bill White – and on the train to Florida. The following week Bill will be on a cruise ship that will take him from Florida to Lima, Peru. His report will then will be on the sea.
Returning to Thomas Street from No. 2 of yesterday, we here look south from the Monorail Century 21 terminus to the base of the Space Needle. We introduce this comparison with another showing of Ron Edge’s superimposed maps: from Century 21 and ca. 2007. Seek and find the spot. (Click TWICE to enlarge.)
This comparison jumps ahead – or behind – to a future Seattle Center scene when there was a yet no Space Needle nor Breezeway nor Monorail, but only the first inklings that these civic acres might be overhauled for all humankind and their most recent and magnificent inventions; that is, for a worlds fair. The approximate date here is 1955, and the view looks west on Thomas Street past a short row of houses and sheds where a ramp to the monorail would be built. A block away Thomas intersects with Nob Hill Avenue and then continues west beside the south facade of the Armory, aka Food Circus, aka Center House. (Click TWICE to enlarge)
TOMORROW – Another look at the Monorail ramp – across it to the base of the Space Needle.
Still a bi-weekly more than a year into it. Soon, I suspect, we will discover that we have become a weekly. In this issue many revelations with reporting by Scott White, Tim Harvey, Paul Sawyer, John Bixler, Henry Erlich, another Crowley Weltschmerz and Cunnick Dump Truck Baby and my own report on the Piano Drop. For that the editor gave himself the centerfold and managed to again almost hide the text behind the split-font superimposed graphics. Three full pages given to record ads means we certainly managed to pay for this issue.
Ron Edge who has made both the weekly scans of every issue and enlivened the chosen masthead with colors copied from the paper itself notes that this week he has nothing to work with. As Bill White and I elaborate at the beginning – or “front page” – of this week’s audio commentary, the cover photo of County Joe was snapped in the SeaTac sundries store. The film was colorless Tri-X. Normally Joe would travel with the band, but this time he was alone. I drove him to the airport. For this “set up” he did his own art direction tucking bills into his shirt and tunneling his vision with a roll found somewhere. The red “Helix”at its center is the only color for Ron to borrow – tomorrow. I wonder what he will do.
In proper order and again below is the next issue of Helix, and the commentary by Bill White and myself. In this issue John Bixler makes his first appearance – on a motorcycle stopped by some plainclothes police ready to slap on him the tough charge of not having paid off a parking ticket. In that reportorial snap, the Helix office can be seen across Harvard Ave. E. (beneath the freeway). Hereafter John will be an enduring participant in our productions, except when he was away doing road work for the band The Youngbloods. In Jef Jaisun’s 1992 shot taken for the 25th anniversary of the founding of Helix – Not So Strait John Bixler appears far right with those posers who made it out of the Blue Moon and onto the sidewalk in front it. They are, right to left, John Bixler, Jacque Moitoret, Tom Robbins, Walt Crowley, Alan Lande, Paul Heald, myself, and standing in front with his own row, Maury Heald. We have printed this earlier and will probably print it again later. (Thanks again to Ron Edge in Lake City for steadfast wrestling all this Helix matter on the blog that ends with the last name of our editor in Paris.)
We searched for the date, but found none, although surely a finer search of the text may stumble on one. Sometime in March of 1968 – perhaps the First of March given that the last issue was dated Feb. 15, 1968. By this time our publishing was routine, but not for long. Soon – perhaps next week? – with the optimism of Spring HELIX will become a weekly.
The audio commentary attached is a continuous confession of my ignorance as I did not prepare for the recording but by arrangement with Bill White entered blind into that tabloid pulp as we looked at it together – I for the first time in 44 years. Bill, however, was prepared to ask me startlingly informed questions from his fresh reading of the entire issue. While not entirely fair it was fun.
(An eariier version of this first appeared in Pacific, March 26, 2001.)
Looking north on Summit Avenue, the towered Otis Hotel on the right holds much of the block between Columbia Street, in the foreground, and Marion Street. By now this historical intersection of Columbia and Summit has been vacated and covered by the Swedish Medical Center.
A 2001 "repeat" pulled with the Pacific clipping.
One might notice while driving through the First Hill neighborhood from Yesler Way to Pike Street that the hill can be divided roughly into three parts. The first section visited, south of James Street, was once known as Profanity Hill for a variety of reasons, including that it was a damn steep climb from Pioneer Square. This first third is, in places, still a little rough.
Skipping to the third area, that north of Madison Street, a few of the old mansions – like the Dearborn manse, now home for Historic Seattle; and the Stimson-Green Mansion; and the Stacy Mansion, long the University Club – from the 1890s still mingle with distinguished high-rise apartment houses from the teens and ’20s. Parts of this First Hill third are still a little rich.
In the middle third between James and Madison, a driver must be careful not to get lost in the maze of Swedish Medical Center. Which brings us again to this intersection, and to repeat again that it cannot be found, except in this “mirror of memory,” the historical photograph. Again, on the right, at 804 Summit Ave., the Otis Hotel stands up and out of the view north across Columbia Street. Further north on Summit, at is southwest corner with Madison Street, is the Adrian Court, a three-story apartment made in part of stone.
CLICK to ENLARGE and find the OTIS HOTEL, the Adrian Court, the Perry Hotel, the James Street Powerhouse (at James and Broadway), St. James Cathedral, and the footprints of a few of the hill's big homes. Use this detail to also explore the pan below that was taken from the south wall of the Perry Hotel.
The accompanying First Hill detail from the 1912 Baist real estate map shows the Otis, and the Adrian Court, and much else. The panorama printed below was recorded from the south wall of the Perry Hotel. It too can be found on the Baist Map detail, just above and left of the detail’s center, which is somewhat mutilated in the original by long regular use – good and bad.
The Perry Hotel as seen looking southwest on Madison Street and thru its intersection with Boren Avenue.
For all its grand asymmetrical solidity the Otis also symbolizes the volatile history of First Hill development. It has two parts. The closer part, with the frame tower, is designed like an over-sized mansion. But the smaller brick section beyond it seems ready to forsake the neighborhood of mansions for a more modest but sturdy First Hill future of resident hotels and apartment houses. And the Otis did survive into the late 1950s before Swedish, the biggest swell in the “third wave” of First Hill institutions – hospitals -swallowed both it and this intersection.
Asahel Curtis photographed this (the pan at the top) look north on Summit from Columbia. It is two recordings merged in Photoshop. As for the residents in the homes seen in the left panel, I confess that I have not taken time to identify them. Does any reader know?
(Click to Enlarge) Looking east from an upper-floor in the Perry Hotel at the southwest corner of Boren Ave. and Madison Street. The Otis appears above the subject's center, and above the Otis the Immaculate Conception sanctuary is easily identified by its twin towers. Two other Second Hill landmarks are also evident: Providence Hospital, far right, and Minor School, far left. Marion Street cuts through the scene. The Lowman Mansion, at the southeast corner of Marion and Boren is just out of frame, lower-right.
Bill White liked this issue and read it from cover-to-cover: page one to twenty. We review it below with an audio link – or two, and an “intermission.”
In this issue Helix gains four pages for twenty in all, although the tabloid is still published every other week. As Bill White notes in our discussion that is attached as an audio file, this Helix it very unlike last week’s. This one is stuffed with counter culture concerns and reports. Volume Tow Number Nine pulls Five R. Cobb cartoons from the Underground Press Syndicate, some representative Alan Watts, and five years after still more about the Kennedy assassination.
The audio attached to this issue is “new and improved.” Bill White, the editor of both the weekly audio and the Helix page on Facebook, interviews me about the issue, to more energetic effect.
Click to Enlarge
On the back cover of this odd issue – 12 pages with neither advertisements nor news – I discover that part of its art involves a snapshot line-up of the Helix staff – or a small part of it. It was printed there in negative, so I “captured” it and inverted it to positive. Still I cannot identify – yet – the three faces on the right. Otherwise the row goes so: far left Joe Caine, I think. Following Joe are Pat Churchill, Tim Harvey and either Billy Ward or Walter Crowley. Bill thinks that it is more likely himself, for he thinks that Walt would not be inclined to lay his cheek against Tim’s shoulder. Continuing: me (Dorpat), Inger Anne Hage – we lived together then – George Geise (George worked at the P-I – like Ray Collins – and was a great and steadfast help in many ways,) Scott White, and Jack Delay. And then, as just noted, I don’t know – although the middle figure could be Bill Ward “again.” Bill agrees that it could be him, although he thinks that the Billy far left – snuggling with Tim – is a more likely Bill. Insights and/or corrections welcomed.
Another flip-flop issue with pages numbered in order and forward to the center within both covers. The color on the covers is unique and the paper too. Most likely Ken Monson printed the covers on his Heidelburg flat-sheet press and then farmed out the inside to a web press. Perhaps it is our first employ of the Mount Vernon Herald and its press to print the innards of this issue.
Leaning into our first winter we wonder how the street sellers will do. We help by giving them – and our own hawking too – this surely lovely cover by Jacques Thornton Moitoret, a dashing figure who grew up, in part, on an oversized Lake Union houseboat. On the inside cover – another not coated surface of common newsprint – you will find an essay that reviews the life and success of HELIX in this its seventeenth expression. Returning to Jacques, I am not sure if the date for this is issue is Dec. 1 or Dec. 2 as rendered by his hand. Check the cover. I think it more likely the former, that is, the first.
Thanks again to Bill White for editing my rambling remarks attached as a audio file below, and thanks to Ron Edge for delivering them to post. And, just now, I notice a letter from drummer Jim Zinn (of Southern Oregon and making music), who put a classified in an early Helix looking for other musicians to form a bind. He found them. Read on . . .
Hi Paul,
I am the Jim Zinn that placed that unclassified in the Helix way back when(1967).
Thanks to the paper, I hooked up with some great guys within 2 weeks of the posting.
We never did amount to much as a band, but had a great time and formed some lasting friendships.
As a side note, One month we even sold the Helix to make rent on the band house on Capitol Hill. We made it.
Thanks again,
Jim Zinn
John Ullman, one of the founders in 1966 of the Seattle Folklore Society, often introduces his correspondence with a quote from Charles Seeger. We use it here as a fitting caption to a picture of the then 19-year-old Reed College sophomore John playing his guitar a few years past with New Mexico’s Candy Cane Cliffs a backdrop. John, I know, is very fond of the Southwest but he has lived most of his post-doctorate (yet another in genetics) here in the Northwest – for the most part in Portland and Seattle.
"To make music is the essential thing - to listen to it is accessory." Charles Seeger
There is a vibrant connection between the above photo of John Ullman and the Lightning Hopkins concert that he helped bring off with aplomb, as you will conclude from the interview. John’s guitar is the same kind of guitar – a Gibson J-50 – that Lightning Hopkins played at his concert here in 1967 and no doubt many others. John has reviewed the interview below and was somewhat surprised by the smoothness of its flow. We were not. He is well-spoken and so is is also well-constructed for more interviews, which down the line we hope to do on subjects like the Folklore Society, the University District folk clubs in the 1960s, the Piano Drop and Sky River Festivals (there he will share a stage with many) and the molecular geneticist’s take on sex, drugs and rock and roll. With his review John noted one regret. He wished that he had explained that the reason he and others drove to Portland for folk concerts was because of his alma mater. Reed College was producing them in the early 1960s – an inspiration to do the same here with Seattle’s own folk society. This will come up again in one or another interview with John.
After our visit last Monday July 9, John found the poster for the concert he described.
A day later with the help of Phil and Vivian Williams, also founders of the Seattle Folklore Society and producers of its concerts including this one with Lighting Hopkins, these two snapshots of Hopkins were found. Portland player Mike Russo is at the piano. John explained that Russo, who began the concert with his own set, came up to play piano for Lightning near the end of the Texan’s set. Another photo showing the elated condition of the ethnically mixed, sold-out crowd will be found – hopefully – later and brought on as addendum.
To conclude, here’s a before and recent after or “now” (by Jean Sherrard) of the venue where Lightning played in 1967: Washington Hall.
Postscript: The above interview is in “fulfillment” for it was promised in one of our earlier weekly blog postings of HELIX. Thanks to Bill White for editing the John Ullman tape (digits rather), although it did not require much cutting. Soon I hope to interview John about something he has written about recently as a reporter; which is the fate of all those writers who once, like he, were published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Last week we noted our intentions of finding and interviewing John Ullman about the Lightning Hopkins concert he and others in the Seattle Folklore Society produced in Oct. 1967. And we did, but are holding back offering it here until John attempts to resurrect a photograph taken during the concert, which he described as wonderfully expressive of it. So we wait. We had hoped that a review of the concert might have been found in the HELIX Vol.2 No. 4, attached below, but we found no blues reviews there, only Ed Varney’s review of SAM’s annual Northwest exhibit.
This issue is the first to use two front covers and the internal flip-flop required to have both act like the “beginning.” Why did we do it? Perhaps, because we could.
Not flummoxed and yet not certain, I ask an old friend, Bill Burden, for his take on a full-page “proposal” that appears on page 10 of this HELIX Vol. 2 No. 2. His recorded response is included in the audio commentary below. Below is a police surveillance photo of Bill taken during his testimony regarding police behavior on the Ave. He had been gassed while at the time – or nearly – working for the mayor’s office promoting a summer youth program.
It seems that for this moment at least the BLOG has been restored, and we will go forward with adding the rest of the Issaquah-related subjects with this addendum. We begin where the fidgeting first treatment (last Sunday’s) left off, with a full frame version of Tacoma photographer U.P. Hadley’s of militia posing in 1891 in line before their tents on what is now Issaquah’s Sunset Way.
All these Hadley photographs come courtesy of Mike Cirelli.
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For the contemporary “repeat” photographer-thespian Jean Sherrard returned to a scene of his former teen “triumph” when Issaquah Historical Society Museum Director Erica Maniez suggested that the best roost from which to take a ‘now’ approximation of the 1888 photograph was from the roof of the Village Theatre. In 1973, the senior at Bellevue’s Hillside School took the stage there as the too endearing and dimwitted giant Lennie in Steinbeck’s play “Of Mice and Men.” Persons familiar with the play, the novel or any of the five movies will remember the last moment as Lenny’s pathetic execution with a bullet to the back of the head administered by his best friend and benefactor George. In Sherrard’s performance the gun refused to fire and the play ended not with gasps and groans but laughter when Sherrard – as Lennie – fell dead after George was forced to say “bang.” Historical view courtesy Michael Maslan
NAME IT GILMAN (for eleven years)
(First appeared in Pacific, March 12, 2006)
When a capitalist laid a railroad to their front door, opened a coal mine nearby and built a home in town as well the citizens of Squak agreed to change the name of their hometown. In 1887 Daniel Gilman’s (with Thomas Burke) Seattle Lake Shore and Easter Railroad began laying track from the waterfront foot of Seattle’s Columbia Street into the King County hinterland with the heroic explanation that it was heading for Spokane (over Snoqualmie Pass) but the modest expectation that it would soon reach Gilman’s coal mine in – yes – Gilman.
And here is Gilman, as captioned for us at the lower-right corner of the photo. With the help of Erica Maniez, Museum Director for the Issaquah Historical Society, we can date it from the spring of 1888. Maniez notes that Mary and Tom Francis’s Bellevue Hotel, with the sign on the far left, opened in May. In this scene a scaffold is still attached to the east (left) side of the hotel and the second floor windows are not yet in place.
The hotel faces Mill Street (Now Sunset Street) and the raised railroad spur that runs to Gilman’s mill. Kitty-corner and across the spur is Isaac Cooper’s saloon (or Cooper’s Roost) and its flagpole facing what is still Front Street. Maniez notes that after her husband Tom died Mary Francis married Isaac Cooper — a kind of cross-intersection embrace at Sunset and Front.
On the far right is another bar on Front, the Scandinavian Saloon. According to the short history of Issaquah on the historical society’s website (http://issaquahhistory.org/historyarticles.htm) the patrons there were most likely lumberjacks, for Northern Europeans generally liked to work above ground, while the English, Italians, Yugoslavians and Czechs were just as inclined to be down in the mines.
By 1899 the citizens of Gilman were generally more alienated than admiring of their absentee namesake and changed the town’s name to a more mellifluous version of the Squak they once intoned. They named it Issaquah.
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Ron Edge returns with two of his EDGE CLIPPINGS, both related to pioneer Issaquah.
Front page of the Daily Intelligencer from Sept. 20, 1878 (click twice)Also from Sept 20, 1878. After reading of Tibbet's discovery we are left wondering where it is. If by Squak Creek he means the connector between Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish then these fertile bottom land would be in or near the business district of today's Redmond, at least so it seems to us. Perhaps a reader will refine our guess or discard it in favor of the "facts." Ron - of this clipping and others - points out that the Honorable George Tibbets was not so honorable during the race-riots and killings of the mid-1880s when Chinese laborers were driven (as in whipped) out of Issaquah (and Tacoma and for the most part Seattle too.)The Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern engine Gilman posing in front of the Gilman (Issaquah) station. (Courtesy Michael Maslan)Another relevant Edge Clipping. Dates from Aug. 5, 1888.
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Until the original negative is uncovered this copy from Seattle Now and Then Vol. 2 page 220 will have to do.The Issaquah Depot now - pulled from the Issaquah Historical Society's web page.
ISSAQUAH DEPOT
(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 17, 1986)
[Please note – this text is now a quarter-century old. The Issaquah depot is now home to the Issaquah Historical Society.]
There’s a restoration going on in Issaquah that will make the past a little more real. A group of enthusiastic fixers wants to renovate the old depot in time for the town’s and the state’s centennial celebration in 1989. The Northern Pacific station became the town’s lifeline to the world in 1888 with the arrival of what was called the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway. It provided Squak (Issaquah’s first name) with a way to ship the locally-mined coal.
The Issaquah depot some time after the name was changed from Gilman to Issaquah.Burke and Gilman, left and right
Seattle railroad promoters Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman were behind the move to transport the coal and even renamed the town after Gilman. In fact, the town was called Gilman until 1899 when Issaquah (a version of the native word Squak) was adopted. Sixty years later, long after the railroad’s departure, Northern Pacific was considering demolition of the sad old depot. But nothing came of it and it was left alone, serving for a long time as a warehouse.
Enter Greg Spranger, an air conditioner salesman from California who became so intrigued with the old building he moved to Issaquah and became the energetic member and driving force of the Issaquah Historical Society, the group behind the building’s renovation. The next project for the society members – bring back the train.
Above: The S.L.S.E.R engine McDonald posed in front of the Gilman depot.
Below: The McDonald posing on the off-shore trestle at the north end of Lake Union, circa 1887-88, off Northlake Way near Interlaken Ave.
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NORTH BEND – 1909
(First appeared in Pacific July 3, 1988 – Jean’s “now” repeat dates from ca. 2005. He recorded it for our book Washington Then and Now)
E.J. Siegrist left no explanation for why he shot a 1909 photograph of his native North Bend’s main intersection, but it may be the first recorded version of a traffic jam there. Although the first automobile had worked its way through the area four years earlier, Siegrist’s subjects were the more conventional means of transportation of the time. It wasn’t till the era of the automobile was firmly entrenched that North Bend’s traffic tie-ups became legendary.
North Bend was platted in 1889, the year Washington became a state. The town’s “father,” Will Taylor, did the planning and named many of the streets, like Bendego, after Australian towns he found in an atlas.
Siegrist records his own North Bend storefront, right of center, in 1907.
In 1915 the Sunset Highway tied the east side of Lake Washington to North Bend and Snoqualmie Pass. After the Lake Washington Floating Bridge made the link to Seattle in 1940, it was only a matter of time before weekend traffic began piling up. When the Highway Department announced plans to reroute around North Bend, townspeople compromised by moving 28 structures back from the roadway and widening it by 30 feet.
North Bend in the mid-1940s.
By the mid-’50s, though, traffic was so heavy that a red light had to be installed to permit residents to walk from one side of the street to the other. For years the fabled intersection had the only stoplight on I-90 between Seattle and Wallace, Idaho.
In 1979 the interstate was routed around the town. Although uncongested, the intersection still has a signal, in part to allow locals time to pause and reflect on its storied past.
Mt. Si, upper left corner, peeking over the North Bend hospital.An unidentified North Bend cabin with Mt. Si.The Milwaukee Railroad (the C.M.St.Paul & Pacific) made it over Snoqualmie pass in 1909. This, the caption indicated, is the first of its passenger trains to call at North Bend.To all side of these timber towns with their backs against the verdant and wet Cascade curtain, narrow-gauged logging railroad spurs snaked about for harvesting the virgin firs and cedars.
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Looking east on Cleveland Street towards Redmond’s historic crossroads of Leary Way and Cleveland. Soon after this photograph was taken by the Redmond photographer Winfred Wallace many of these structures were replaced with more substantial ones – like the surviving brick bank building at the northwest corner (hidden here behind the trees in the contemporary photo) of Leary and Cleveland.
HISTORIC REDMOND
(First appeared in Pacific, March 19, 2006)
“What a great picture!” is Nao Hardy’s confident description of this week’s “then.” But then as one of Redmond’s enthusiasts for community heritage Nao is well stocked with articulate affection for her hometown – especially this part of it. “And I can date it accurately. It is 1910 and the photographer, Winfred Wallace, was a local fellow with a keen eye and a good camera who never married and died young.” The view looks east on Cleveland Street one half block to its intersection with Leary Way NE, historically “the community’s main crossroads.”
In 1910 the two two-story frame livery stables far left and right in the historic scene still have a few years of service in them before a horse power not fed by oats marks the dirt of Cleveland Street with the wider ruts of motorcars and trucks.
At the center of Wallace’s record another two-story frame structure appears at the southeast corner of Leary Way. It is half hidden by the big tree. Two signs are attached: “Restaurant and Chop House” and “Olympia Beer.” Historian Hardy explains that this is, or was, Bill Brown’s place and that Brown would soon “replace his popular wooden saloon with a two-story brick building that bears his name today, as much for the handsome public buildings he erected as for his having served as Redmond’s mayor for an amazing 30 years.”
And Brown has a street named for him as well. It is one block long and intersects with Cleveland one-half block to the rear of the contemporary photographer Jean Sherrard who took his “repeat” obviously in a warmer month than this one.
We will wrap this glimpse into Redmond’s historic district with another Hardy observation. “Some hundred years later, Cleveland and Brown streets are witnessing a gentrification with mixed use upscale buildings of condos and new businesses . . . As none of the historical significant buildings with structural integrity in this district have been destroyed, the changes occurring now are seen as improvements by locals.”
The Redmond S.L.S.E.R. depot
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Looking north across Pacific St. into the University of Washington Campus to Stevens Way, one small city block east of 15th Avenue, and during the 1909 Alaskan Yukon Pacific Expo, part of the Pay Streak of carni' amusements. (Shown two and three images down.)The S.L.S.E.R viaduct appears here lower-right in Sept. 1994. The following two photographs from the 1909 AYP look north and south from the top of that viaduct.The AYP Pay Streak looking south towards Portage Bay from the top of the SLSER viaduct.The 1909 AYPE Pay Streak looking north from the SLSER trestle.
THE CASEY JONES SPECIAL
(First appear in Pacific, August 30, 1987)
In a summer morning in 1957, Lawton Gowey got up early to do some train chasing. The occasion was the running of the Casey Jones Special. Heading out from the downtown station at 6:45 a.m., Northern Pacific engine No. 1372 rolled north over the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern R.R. route (now in part the Burke-Gilman Trail) and around the north end of Lake Washington.
Gowey and other train chasers dogged along the city streets and country roads trying to stay near the steam all the way to its North Bend destination. The train cooperated, taking a scheduled 3 hours and 50 minutes to steam-power its 12 cars to North Bend and a decidedly ironic celebration for train lovers: the dedication of Washington State’s first 3-mile section of a 4-lane freeway from North Bend to Snoqualmie Pass.
On his chase, Gowey took several photos. This one looks across Northeast Pacific Street to the University of Washington campus.
The first Casey Jones Special pulled its rail fans to North Bend in December 1956. The rail excursions were the brain-child of Carol Cornish. Retired herself, she figured these rides would be an enjoyable exercise in fond memories for senior citizens. In fact, the excursions attracted rail fans of all ages. There were 470 passengers aboard this special.
Diesel engines were first introduced into this area in 1952, making steam-powered trains obsolete. So when the steaming Casey Jones Special puffed and hooted into North Bend that June morning in 1957, it was a nostalgic occasion.
This Casey Jones run was one of Gowey’s last opportunities to chase a steam locomotive. Soon after, even Cornish had to give in to having the stronger diesel engines pull her popular excursions to depots in every direction – Cle Elum, South Bend, Sumas, Centralia, Hoquiam, Buckley, Lake Whatcom. According to Tom Baker, Cornish’s assistant, the excursions went on for a decade. Toward the end, the elderly Cornish was ailing and unable to make the trips. The last run on June 9,1968 was, again, to North Bend. It was also the day Carol Cornish died.
A Casey Jones Special pauses for passengers to step off for beside the west shore of Lake Washington. This is now part of the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail.
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We shall finish up with a few more rifles and some tents too.
Then Caption: When the Oregon Cadets raised their tents on the Denny Hall lawn in 1909 they were almost venerable. Founded in 1873, the Cadets survive today as Oregon State University’s ROTC. Geneticist Linus C. Pauling, twice Nobel laureate, is surely the school’s most famous cadet corporal. (courtesy, University of Washington Libraries.) Now Caption: I used old maps and current satellite photographs to determine that the historical view was photographed from Lewis Hall or very near it. Jean Sherrard was busy directing a play with his students at Hillside School in Bellevue, so in lieu of Jean and his “ten-footer” I used my four-foot monopod to hold the camera high above my head but not as high.
DISCIPLINE at AYPE
The Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition’s official photographer, Frank H. Nowell, was not the only commercial camera working the fair grounds and – in this week’s subject – its perimeter. Here with the useful caption “O.A.C. Cadets in camp – A.Y.P. Expo. – Seattle June 5th 9 – 09” the unidentified photographer has named the part of her or his subject that might pay for the effort of recording it: the cadets themselves.
The Oregon Agricultural College Cadets’ tents have been pitched just outside the fair grounds in the wide lawn northeast of the Administration Building, the first building raised on the new “Interlaken campus” in 1894-95. In 1909 it was still one year short of being renamed Denny Hall.
Thanks now to Jennifer Ott who helped research historylink’s new “timeline history” of the AYPE. I asked Jennifer if she had come upon any description of the part played in the Exposition by what Paula Becker, our go-between and one of the authors of the timeline, capsulated for us as “those farmin’ Oregon boys.” Ott thought it likely that the cadets participated in the “military athletic tournament” which was underway on June 5, the date in our caption. Perhaps with this camp on the Denny lawn they were also at practice, for one of the tournament’s exhibitions featured “shelter camp pitching.”
Jennifer Ott also pulled “a great quote” from this paper, the Times, for June 12. It is titled “Hostile Cadets in Adjoining Camps,” and features the Washington and Idaho cadets, but not Oregon’s. Between the Idaho and Washington camps the “strictest picket duty was maintained and no one was admitted until word was sent to the colonel in command, who was nowhere to be found. This meant that no one was admitted, except the fair sex, the guards having been instructed to admit women and girls without passes from the absent colonel.” Nowthat is discipline!
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Seattle rifles standing guard beside the ruins of Seattle's June 6, 1889 "Great Fire." This was Seattle's "show strip" of elegant Victorian business blocks on the west side of Front Street (First Ave.) between Yesler Way and Columbia Street. This view looks south with the photographer's back near Columbia.The other side of Front Street (First Ave.) looking southeast from near Columbia. More in line with disciplining the coal miners in 1891 here are deputies posing their force during the non-violent General Strike of 1919. Terrace Street is to the left. Off camera to the left is City Hall, now the 400 Yesler Building. The Hotel Reynolds, upper-right, looked west across 4th Avenue to City Hall Park.
Finally, wrapping this package with one more Hadley from his visit to Issaquah with the troops from his hometown, Tacoma.
This HELIX – Vol. 2, No. 1 – comes with a small surprise. We are evicted – or were. I was expecting this, but not so soon. Also within- Robbie Stern, Alan Watts, Black candidates for City Council 1967, Yakima’s “Bitter Harvest,” Don Scott . . .
I conducted this interview with Jon Gallant in the late afternoon of June 7, 2012 with a tiny Olympus recorder yet run on digits and cushioned in a small box of rubber bands and set in a cat mattress propped on my lap. We used no other devices, no prompters and no baton. Jon and I sat side-by-side on a Wallingford sofa. Following the interview Genevieve McCoy snapped the accompanying photograph. (I don’t remember feeling as stunned as we seem.) The interview runs about 30 minutes. I suspect that once negotiated you will want more of Dr. Phage, and we give it to you. Below are five links to other essays written by the Doctor – or doctors, really, because Phage is also an Emeritus Prof of the U.W. Dept. of Genetics. Also down there is a printing of his contributions to the then still bi-weekly Helix for May 16, 1967. It is titled “A Few Modest Proposals.” Surely Jon’s inspiration for his proposals was, at least in part, Jonathon Swift’s own “A Modest Proposal” of 1729 for solving another of those Irish famines. The interview itself reveals the origins of Dr. Phage, his part in the founding and early programing of KRAB (listener-supported) RADIO, and his role in the 1968 Richard Green candidacy for Washington State Land Commissioner, and much else that is at once Swiftian and devouringly screwball.
A FEW MODEST PROPOSALS
By John Gallant / first published in Helix Vol.1 No. 4, May 16, 1967
A number of months ago, I offered the City of Seattle a few modest proposals, including the idea of establishing a professional garbage team. That proposal would have neatly solved two urgent problems in one blow, but I received no call from the mayor’s office, even though I stayed glued to the phone for minutes at a time awaiting the summons. I suppose that some jealous functionary prevented my brilliant suggestions from being relayed to the upper echelons. So, tonight I will give the city another chance. Here are a few modest proposals for a progressive, up-to-the-minute Seattle.
1. The R. H. Thompson Expressway, which has for years been only a gleam in the highway commission’s eye, has reached a terminal planning stage and may start under construction later this year. Let us remember, however, that long-range planning is the essence of progress, so Seattle’s long-range planners should bear in mind that the expressway is only a temporary stage. The next step in the foreseeable future is clearly the removal of expressways, as the proposed removal of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway demonstrates. So Seattle’s planners should immediately embark on a study of the removal of the R.H. Thompson Expressway. Seattle would certainly move into the forefront of progressive city management if it were studying simultaneously the construction and the removal of the same expressway. Perhaps the master plan could coordinate the two activities, so that the demolition crew moved closely behind the construction crew, tearing down each section of the expressway as soon as it was built. That would be progress with a capital P.
2. The planners are already considering the location of the fifth Lake Washington Floating Bridge, or it is the fifteenth? In either case, this approach is lamentably backward. What they should be considering is the economics of covering up the lake entirely with floating concrete pontoons. Floating bridges are, after all, old hat as tourist attractions; but the world’s first floating parking lot would attract people from all over the country in droves, if only to find a parking space. Real estate developers could throw up instant suburban communities right on top of the lake, which six-inch gaps between pontoons to afford each and every home-owner a view of authentic Lake Washington water. Apartment houses would follow, with names like “The Pontoon Arms”, and, “Concrete Vista”. The hundreds of acres of Lake Washington, formerly squandered on sheer, undeveloped, profitless water, would at last yield up revenue. Free enterprise with a capital F.
3. The city government has been alert to the menace of simulated psychedelic experiences such as light shows, but the authorities must reckon with a host of other psychedelic substitutes. Polaroid sunglasses, for example. People wearing polaroid shades can see a twinkling deep indigo effect when bright sunlight is plane polarized by reflection from the surface of Lake Union. And sunlight passing through glass or plastic – motorcycle windshields are especially fine – produces marvelous spectral patterns along lines of stress, which are visible only through Polaroid shades. Shocking report, these private light shows can be enjoyed, without license from the police department, by anyone wearing Polaroids. Meanwhile, drug substitutes are cropping up like mushrooms; mushrooms, in particular, have been cropping up like mushrooms. And researchers working under filtered banana peels report that copies of HELIX, ground up very fine, produced remarkable effects when smoked. Underground laboratories, staffed by hippies with the proverbial high school dropout’s knowledge of chemistry, have been trying to modify the chemical structure of peanut butter so that it can be mainlined without its sticking to the veins.
4. Effective thought-control has been limited by a certain other-worldliness in city government. For example, city officials at first agreed to rent the Opera House to Timothy Leary because they had no idea who he was (he was using the assumed name of Timothy Leary.) Although Leary’s nefarious doings have been reported all over Time, Life, and Newsweek, the press of public affairs evidently keep the City Fathers from keeping up with recent developments, which go unreported in the funny papers. Accordingly, I propose that a special commission be established to keep abreast of the great outside world and filter information about it into the minds of the city council members. The commission could present the city council with concise reports. In very simple language, on such recent developments as the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, the deposition of King Louis XVI of France, and the advent of talking moving pictures . . .
Gracious, we have completed the first Volume of Helix and are heading for its first winter. Sometime this week we also expect to put up a new Helix feature we are titling HELIX REDUX. It will be numbered as well, and feature interviews, photographs, reminiscences, confessions, links, etc. We hope to encourage you and yours to participate in this, by recording your own reflections and memories and interviews (too) about subjects related to Helix and its times. In this we will – in some way – be making together another journal filled with oddly related features. Bill White – Seattle critic, musician, novelist, poet, pundit of everything – will be the principal editor. Bill was a mere teen with a hammer in the late 60s. He helped construct the stage at the first Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair in 1968. That is certainly a qualification.
Finding the date for this issue was easy; it is printed on the cover: August 16, 1967, the hottest part of the “summer of love” and a Wednesday. No. 9 continues the 12-page bi-weekly size and schedule, and by now (or then) a kind of Helix style is evident. (You will “know it when you see it.”) Tap the cover below to reach the pdf presentation of the entire issue and if you like there is also a link to an audio review of the issue, which, you can follow while moving through the issue. (Thanks to Ron Edge, again, for scanning and “putting up” this issue and the rest of them too, and thanks again and as well to Bill White for editing away some of the stumbles in the audio commentary.)
The dates we have attached to both No. 7 and No. 8 may be skewered by a day or two or three. We have yet to crack their dates, for neither issue confesses such. The audio below – by Dorpat – is another revelation – for Dorpat – as he reads this issue No. 8, like the rest, for the first time in 45 years, and confesses his own inadequacies in remembering in detail its subjects. To read thru the issue either with the commentary or without it just click the cover.
It seems that Tuesday – not Monday – will become the more likely day of the week these Helix Redux offerings will appear here. (But don’t necessarily count on it. We will still aim for “Wash Day” to hang these sheets.) Here’s another 12-pager. It includes many delights, and I took the opportunity of the attached audio to read one of them: an early Dump Truck Baby feature by John Cunnick in which he reflects on the meanings surrounding having ones own newspaper in its eighth week and still learning. Inside is also an adver for the OCS concert with The Grateful Dead at Eagle Auditorium, and in that line we will attach several snapshots from that bright blue Sunday afternoon picnic with power at the north end of the Golden Gardens parking lot. You will recognize the Dead faces, surely, but also some others I suspect in the rapt listeners. There are a few snaps of other musicians performing as well including one of Larry “Jug” Vanover who will be delighted to see his own slim self in 1967 with jug in hand – I expect.
I’ll not caption any of these Dead photos. There are nine of them and they come from the remnants of the Helix darkroom. I’ve not determined as yet who recorded them. At the bottom of this line-up are four or five shots of other players, include – at the very bottom – one of Larry Vanover with jug in hand.
While preparing the audio – below – first Bill White showed – coming down the steps – and then Jean Sherrard – calling on the phone. Both had intimate memories of one of the subjects included in this Vol. 1 No.6, and so I interview them. The subject is the Last Exit on Brooklyn, a popular cafe that opened in 1967 on Brooklyn Ave. two doors south of 40th Street on the east side. The result of these interviews is a longish (relative to the first five & 1/2 iterations) but invigorated commentary, which begins with what is by now my typical approach to this extemporaneous blabbering – beginning at the front cover and reading along as long as I last – followed by the two interviews: Bill first and Jean second. This has also given me an idea – this idea. To do more interviews on future subjects that are revealed in these issues and to post those too. This is also a lot of fun for me and an extraction from my bunker of writing – even for those interviews I might do by phone.
A brief (sort of) audio commentary is attached directly below. The disciplined listener might want to illustrate the “sound track” by opening the pdf to the paper itself – first – giving HELIX time to materialize before punching the audio button.
This fourth issue is a maturing cache of our typical subjects, which did include, yes, war, drugs, sex and rock-and-roll. Many of its parts are not signed – a frustration now – but within it appears new names that would become stalwarts of HELIX production, names we will recognize and thank, no doubt, down this 2&1/2 year line of putting up every issue and in order. And I have found a few more negatives of that first Flower Potlatch Isness-In at Volunteer Park. Once scanned I’ll attach them below.
An audio commentary is attached directly below. The disciplined listener might want to illustrate the “sound track” by opening the pdf to the paper itself – first – giving HELIX time to materialize before punching the audio button. The audio runs about ten minutes and then prudently adjourns until next week.
As noted above, we have scanned a few more scenes from the first Be-In at Volunteer Park, named, in part, the Potlatch Isness-In.
(Click to Enlarge – sometimes twice)
The grass on the big sloping lawn was just barely dry enough to sit on. Most people stood.Buttons, beads, and God's-Eyes (she holds one in her hands) make us happy.Several dancing snakes wound through the crowds.Hoping, perhaps, for a jam.A jamUnder the spread of the biggest tree on the lawn became - and perhaps already was - a traditonal spot for drum circles to jam. Youth dress with care Drum circle including beat with bongo and pipe.Late that afternoon looking west toward the stage.A band approaching the stage - most likely. The Blues Interchange, on stage.The Blues Interchange still on stage, and Gary Eagle and myself too (holding a flower) far left. I remember well that button-down sweater.Back to the circle with an example of the hip mountain man style with strong chin - or rustic viking.This big haired fellow was a mystery to me even then.
1917 Soap Lake Wash. Feby 5, 1917: Sister Am very sorry I did not get to say Good By the morning I left but I was late getting up. Milo C To Mrs. Frank Townsend, Burlington, RFD No. 1 Wash. [Postmark Feb. 6, 1917 Soap Lake WASH]
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1937 Dearl Harold, I am enjoying soap lake fine. I like the lake to Swimin too. Mary To Master Harold Wieland, Pinehurst, Washington Box 122 [Postmark Jul 20, 1937 Everett WASH]
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1950 Soap Lake Mon. May 29 Dear Phene (?), We will be Home next week – having perfect weather that I ____ let you know that I shall plan to be at the banquet. I hope you can get out a big crowd “the more the merrier” Give my love to John and keep a lot for yourself – Anna Rolleen Johnson To Mrs. Phine (?) Buckley Lowell, Washington [Postmark May 29, 1950 Soap Lake WASH]
Don Edge, once again, did the coloring of our symbolizing bug or representive logo – the masthead.
We continue to turn the screw – of Helix – reaching now the fourth issue, which is curiously numbered “3&1/2.” This will be explained in the audio link. At the bottom of it all are several snapshots scanned from Helix negatives that I wound up with after the paper folded. We will try to identify the photographer – later. Perhaps it was Gary Finholt. Gary? A few of these are also printed in the gnarly centerfold of Issue Three and One/half.
Artists Gertrude Pacific aka Trudi and Ted Jonsson. Note the issue of Helix that Ted is holding with his left hand. And Trudi is barefoot. One of a few circle dances that was launched. Our Norwegian angle-protector, perhaps, under the park's big spreading tree. Imagine bongo drums here for this was a most p0pular place - under this tree - for drum jams.Flower Isness FashionsI believe that Tim Harvey is far right, with the rolled up white sleeves. Tim was one of the stalwart-editors for Helix.Seattle Magazine - and sometimes Helix too - photographer Frank Denman is aiming on the right. Oh the paisley! bottom-right.While I remember two faces here I cannot name them.On stageThe flutist's name eludes me, but - unless I am mistaken - I once threw his cat across a set in a duplication of the Dada Moment titled "The Dali Atomicus" and photographed by Philippe Haisman in 1948, which includes several flying cats and furniture too. The cat ran up a tree and was not noticed, I believe, until later when "our subject" returned home looking for his pet. By then his somewhat abusive friends, myself included, had left unwitting and so innocent but only sort of.
And LAST for now, JOHN REYNOLDS!
This I pleasantly discovered while scanning the few Be-in negatives I could find includes John Reynolds with beads, bells, Spanish hat, thongs and comfortable clothes, the Far East scholar who named Helix "Helix." I remember the woman that's with him, but not her name.
Collector Drew Miller left three shoe boxes filled with “real photo postcards” of Washington State subjects long enough so that when he recently picked them up we hardly recognized each other. It occurred to me – unfortunately late in the routine of scanning his cards – that when there are messages attached I should ordinarily scan those as well. For instance, notice how sweet is the message for the top card below – a salmon pie left for Tressy and a cream colored casserole too. Surely, these personal greetings and reflections are often revealing, or at least suggestive, of both the subjects and the writer. And I imagined that if a large enough sample could be collected of both cards and their messages that an entertaining and often funny short film could be made of them. (Share them if you have them and if you will. Or make your own films.) Here are three without comment from Miller’s cards.
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How are the babies? Salmon pie for Tressy in the refrigerator cream colored casserole We are here just for a few minutes just 20 miles from Moses rather nice little town. Love Frank & Merle xoxox – Mr. and Mrs. Ned Hill, 10015 – 17th S.W. Seattle, WN – Postmark Ephrata Wash Oct. 12, 1943
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Dear. W.A. – This is the H.S. of which my brother in law is principal. Si was borne and raised on the Sequim prarie and is a wonderful person. I have yet to hear anyone say an unkind word about him he’s one in a million. Sequim is noted for its nice people most of Jane’s and Si’s friends are farmers and nearly all of them have had some college education, they aren’t at all like I’ve always that farmers should be, their houses are modern and they dress so much like city folk you’d never know they difference. Love J.C. – To Sgt. D.A. Peterson McClosky Gen Hosp Ward 31 A Temple Texas / Postmark: Sequim Wash, Jan 12, 1943
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Pinkie – Just a line from Seattle to a pal. Having a swell time. Hate to go home but all good things must come to an end. The weather is swell and not too hot. Will be seeing you soon. Mabel – Mr. W.E. Lomax, 508 W. 9th St. c/o Acme Typewriter Co., Los Angeles 15, Calif. / Postmark Seattle Wash July 2, 1945
This week we have made it to the third issue of Helix. (It shows a date – April 27, 1967. A few did not.) Above is Ron Edge’s coloring of the Helix masthead we have chosen to represent this two-plus year project of putting up all the issues. (Last week it was Ron’s brother Don who started this coloring. We are looking for colorists – Photoshop artists to have a go with it. Below is a link to download a blank Helix masthead for those who would like to try their hand at coloring one for use in future post.
Below is another commentary of my first reading of this issue – as with all the others – in 45 years. So far in these rough and recorded remarks my time runs out – about ten minutes – before I get to the centerfold. Let it be.
