Waking fresh from the long night of repeal for daylight savings 2010 Jean awakened to a sky with promise, and when it fulfilled he set out to take more repeats or “nows” for our upcoming show next spring at the Museum of History and Industry.  He will return to put here our Highway #2 parts of Washington Then & Now later with Startup Addendum #2.  Meanwhile I’ll search my collections for Stevens Pass (and routes) related illustrations, most of them what is called by their dealers and consumers, “Real Photo Postcards.”  Depending upon how rare, some of these can be precious, indeed!   My scans are mostly taken from loaned prints or from internegatives I have made from loaned prints.  I learned early on to take nearly every precaution making my internegs – cleaned prints, polarized lights and lens, tech-pan high resolution 35mm black and white film.  Consequently, what you see will be quite close to what I saw when I recorded or scanned the original.   In some instances if the original was faded or cluttered with wear I have  attempted to fix it with a little “photoshop polish.”

Showing now a slew of odd pictures identified by location, we will “startup” at Everett and stop at Wenatchee.  Some of these will relate directly to what Jean will put up with the Startup Addendum #2.   We will keep the captions short – mostly  This is a sample only.

Marysville Old & New

Thanks to the popularity of “real photo postcards” we have faithful and often detailed historical views of most communities nation-wide.  The first years of the 20th century was the time of greatest enthusiasm for this sharing and collecting and the date 1913 is postmarked on the rear of this record of the old Marysville business district on First Avenue looking west from State Street.
The three-story Marysville Hotel on the right is impressively fronted with an open veranda.  If the three women standing at its second floor were not preoccupied for the moment with the unnamed “postcard artist” they might have looked a little ways south across First Avenue to the Marysville waterfront on Ebey Slough or two blocks west to the railroad tracks that first brought trains to town in 1889.
That was the old Marysville.  Walt Taubeneck’s mother recalled for him how when the Pacific Highway first entered Marysville in the 1920s from the east on Third Avenue, “First Avenue wasn’t cutting it.  It was built for boats and the railroads not automobiles.  One by one the businesses moved north.”
Taubeneck, an expert on the history of Snohomish County logging, is one of the stalwarts of the Marysville Historical Society.  His friend Arthur Duborko is another.  In 1922 the Duborko family was living temporarily in the Marysville Hotel when it burned down.  The seven-year-old Arthur was playing a quick game of marbles on the rug with a cousin before the two planned to take off for school.  After someone started yelling “fire upstairs!” the boys dropped their marbles and started throwing furniture out the window.  The quick thinking second grader went on to become Marysville’s mayor.
Marysville was founded in the 1870s as a trading post for the Tulalip Reservation.  Now its citizens regularly shop at the Tulalip Mall.  An alternative is the Marysville Mall, whose unadorned rear wall, seen here on the right of the “now” view, fronts First Avenue west of State Street.  (The above first appeared in The Seattle Times Pacific Mag in late Sept. 2005.)

(click to enlarge)

FIREBOAT DUWAMISH & The INLAND FLYER

The fireboat Duwamish is warming up at the end of Fire Station No. 5’s short pier. Built in 1909 at Richmond Beach for the Seattle Fire Department, it was 113 feet long and weighed a relatively heavy 309 tons. This photo probably was taken a year later.

The smoke escaping the fireboat’s twin stacks partly obscures the tower of the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, on the left. The Grand Trunk Pacific was Canada’s second transcontinental railroad. After reaching its terminus Prince Rupert in 1910, it took up the steamship business as well, running a coastal feeder service from Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver to Prince Rupert.

In its time, the Grand Trunk pier was the largest wood structure of its kind on the West Coast; but its time was brief. On July 29, 1914, it was gutted by the second-largest fire in the city’s history. (The largest was the Great Fire of 1889.) Its location next door to the fire station did not save it, although the fireboats Duwamish and Snoqualmie did help contain the fire.

To the right of the Duwamish, moored at Pier 3, is the Puget Sound steamer Inland Flyer. After 11 years of running on what was called the “Navy Yard Route” to Port Orchard, Inland Flyer was sold to a Capt. R.G. Reeve, who changed its name to Mohawk. This little 106-foot wooden steamer was only 7 feet shorter than the fireboat, but at 151 tons, it was less than half the weight. In 1916, Captain Reeve stripped it of its engine and converted it into a fish barge at Neah Bay.

Pier 3 – long since renumbered Pier 54 – was constructed in 1900.  For 72 years, first as an aquarium and then as a cafe, it has been the platform for the late Ivar Haglund’s prescriptions in the “culture of clams” on how to “keep clam.” Although Ivar just missed seeing his remodeled Acres of Clams reopen, he did help choose the scores of historical waterfront photographs that now cover the restaurant’s walls. One of Ivar’s favorites was an enlargement of the historical photo discussed here. It is one of a collection of Seattle images uncovered in northern Idaho. One of Ivar’s last philanthropic acts was to help purchase the collection for the University of Washington Library’s Special Collections.

ELEGANT ENDS (above)

Prolific cityscape photographer O.T. Frasch recorded this trinity of venerable ship sterns for a postcard.  The view looks toward the city from either the end of Colman Dock or near to it.

The white terra-cotta skin of the Empire Building at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street is the dominant structure in the backdrop. Just to its right, the twin towers of Saint James Cathedral peek above the black stack of the steamer Flyer.

Next to the streamlined ferry the Kalakala, the Flyer is probably the most celebrated vessel to have regularly plied the waters of Puget Sound, and not nearly as abused as the poor Kalakala.  She consumed 24 cords of wood a day in her four round trips between Seattle and Tacoma. In 1918, after more than a quarter-century on the Sound and nearly 2 million miles, she was rebuilt as the Washington for the Puget Sound Navigation Company.

The City of Seattle – blowing steam to  the right of the Flyer – was the first ferry on the Sound, beginning her service on New Year’s Eve, 1888. A tool of the West Seattle Land and Improvement Co., it moved prospective buyers between this slip and the company’s real estate above its ferry dock on West Seattle’s Harbor Avenue. The fare was five cents, and the two-mile run took about 8 minutes.

The ferry City of Seattle was a fixture on Elliott Bay through the 1890s and until 1907, the year of West Seattle’s incorporation into Seattle when the new trolley along Spokane Street as well as a bigger ferry, the West Seattle, took over. Eventually sold to a ferry company on San Francisco Bay, City of Seattle is now a houseboat for an artist living off-shore of Sausalito, California.

The Tourist, far right, was the first vessel to regularly carry cars on Puget Sound. Beginning in 1915, it carried six autos at a time between Seattle and Bremerton.

CIRCA 1886 LANDMARKS (above)

Several artful landmarks formed Seattle’s early skyline above. The effect presented the city’s new urban confidence of the mid-l880s to those arriving at the largest city in Washington Territory by Elliott Bay, and most did.

The most formidable structure in this view, center-left, is the mansard roof line of the Frye Opera House. When it was completed in 1885, George Frye’s opera house was the grandest stage north of San Francisco. It was modeled after the Bay City’s famed Baldwin Theater, and dominated the northeast corner of First Avenue and Marion Street.

Kitty-corner from the opera house and above a grocery store, the YMCA’s functional quarters are marked by what appears to be a banner. They moved into this spot in 1882 and out of it in October 1886. That information helps us date this scene at sometime in 1885 or ’86.

Across the street from the Y, with its own high-minded sign, is the Golden Rule Bazaar. Just above the bazaar and behind the opera house is the ornate Stetson Post Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street. When the Post building was built in 1882 it was the most fashionable address in Seattle.

The mansion with tower and cupola to the right of the Stetson Post is the Stacy Mansion at Third Avenue and Marion Street. This lavish pile of Second Empire architecture lasted much longer than anything else in this scene. In the 1920s, having escaped the fire of 1889, it was pivoted 90 degrees to face Marion Street and became Maison Blanc, one of Seattle’s legendary restaurants. Unfortunately, it was injured in a lesser fire in 1960 and razed soon after.

For all its landmarks, what really sets this scene apart are the two sailboats in profile in front of Budlong’s Boathouse. They were rentals from the popular boathouse. In 1886 the Puget Sound Yacht Club was established here.

The Great Fire in 1889, which started near the corner of First and Madison in the far left of this scene, destroyed Frye’s Opera House and practically everything else showing west of Second Avenue.  The boathouse, however, survived because it could be floated from harm’s way.

POTLATCH “PORTLAND” LANDING – 1912 (above)

Across the bottom of the negative for this waterfront scene, the photographer has written, “Arrival of Sourdoughs on the Portland.” The allusion is to that legendary moment when the first ensemble of gold rushers returned from the Klondike not only with news of the big strike but with the dust itself – $700,000 of it.

This, however, is not that spontaneous moment, but a staged re-enactment of it, 15 years later to the day, for the Golden Potlatch of 1912, Seattle’s second running of its first summer festival. This waterfront assemblage of hacks and motorcars is awaiting what The Seattle Times described later that day as “a triumph of symbolism” – the Potlatch’s peculiar mix of Native American and gold rush motifs.  It is just after noon on July 17.

For this ritual arrival, the Portland is” carrying the Potlatch’s big chief or Hyas Tyee, dressed, the Post-Intelligencer reported, in his “barbaric headdress and gorgeous blanket,” leading his hybrid court of shamans (medicine men in togas) and “flannel-shirted high-booted sourdoughs” sweating under the weight of their obese gold pokes.

The photographer sights north from near Marion Street and is most likely perched atop a boxcar, a favorite prospect for watching waterfront events when Alaskan Way was still Railroad Avenue. This scene does not wait for the chief and his ersatz band of natives and miners but catches instead the waiting crowd – or part of it. The local pulp’s boast of 100,000 witnesses was, perhaps, not so inflated when we remember that the obstructing Alaskan Way Viaduct was not yet intruding on the view of the many thousands who leaned from the windows and crowded the roofs of the buildings in the business district.

Once on shore, the chief relaxed his “haughty mien and stony gaze” with a most happy decree. “All is as it should be. There is no thought but to find joy, to give and receive happiness and that is Potlatch.”

The BLACK BOX (above)

From Elliott Bay and looking up Madison Street – as we do here – it is still possible to see the “Big Black Box” that on its own in 1968 lifted the first shaft for a new Seattle super-skyline.  From most other prospects the thicket of often-taller skyscrapers that have given Seattle its own version of the modern and generally typical cityscape has long since obscured what was originally the headquarters for Seattle First National Bank, R.I.P.

Lawton Gowey photographed the older view of it from a ferry on March 1, 1970.  The long-time accountant for the Seattle Water Department was good about recording the dates for the many thousands of pictures he took of his hometown and lifetime study.

A sense of the untoward size of the “Big Ugly” – another unkind name for it – can be easily had by comparing it to the Seattle Tower, the gracefully stepped dark scraper on the left.  In the “now” it is more than hidden behind the 770 foot Washington Mutual Tower (1988).  After its lift to 318 feet above 3rd and University in 1928 this Art Deco landmark was the second highest structure in Seattle – following the 1914 Smith Tower.  The 1961 lifting of the “splendid” 600-plus foot tall Space Needle moved both down a notch, and inspired the now old joke that we happily repeat.  Soon after the SeaFirst tower reached its routine shape in 1968 it was described to visitors as “the box the Space Needle came in.”  And at 630 feet it was just big and square enough.

Many of Seattle’s nostalgic old timers (50 years old or older) consider the SeaFirst Tower as the beginning of the end for their cherished “old Seattle.”  For the more resentful among them the Central Business District is now congested with oversized boxes that have obscured the articulated charms of smaller and older landmarks like the Smith and Seattle Towers.  Some find solace in the waterfront where a few of the railroad finger piers survive – like Ivar’s Pier 54 seen on the far left in both views.

But Ivar’s has grown too.  In 1970 Ivar Haglund employed about 260 for his then three restaurants including the “flagship” Acres of Clams here at Pier 54.  Now in its 68th year Ivar’s Inc serves in 63 locations.  (This first appears in Pacific early in 2005.)  This summer it will employ more than 1000 persons to handle the busy season’s share of an expected 7 million customers in 2006.  Every one of them – not considering tourists for the moment — will be an “Old Settler” with refined and yet unpretentious good taste – and so says Ivar’s CEO Bob Donegan.

We will say that there are three subjects here: the steel one, floating at the center, and to either side of it two dark structures, both made of wood: the Oriental Pier on the right and the Bell Street trestle on the left.

The date for this look north on the waterfront from the Virginia Street Pier is probably 1910.  That was the last year for the temporary Bell St. trestle, which was extended into the bay to carry thru a flume most of Denny Hill.  By aiming powerful water canons at the hill it was transformed into flowing mud and carried far off shore.

The almost two-block long Orient Pier was built parallel to Railroad Avenue because Elliott Bay was too deep here to sink piles for finger piers. It was replaced in the 1920s with the also wide-bodied Lenora Street pier, which in the 1990s gave way to the Bell Harbor Marina in the “now.”

The U.S. Army Transport Burnside was war-happy America’s first big booty from the Spanish American war.  Built in 1882 at Newcastle on the Tyne, it was sold in 1891 to a Spanish company that named it the Rita.  With its capture off the coast of Cuba in 1898 it was renamed the Burnside and outfitted by the army for laying cable communications, first in the Philippines and then Alaska.  For instance, in 1903 it strung underwater cable between Sitka and Juneau and the following year continued laying it to Seattle.  With a breath of 36.7 feet the Burnside was about one-third the width of the cruise ship taking its place and much more in the “now.”

STRANGE ENCOUNTERS OF THE WATSON

On the morning of Sept. 29, 1915 the steam schooner Paraiso lost in fog tore an 18-foot long hole in the starboard side of the 253-foot long Admiral Watson along the south side of the Port of Seattle’s original Bell Street terminal.  The Watson’s master Capt. M.M. Jensen saved the ship from slipping into the unusually deep water there by quickly ordering its stern lines cast off and its bowlines winched to pull the ship closer to shore.  Jensen was the hero of the day that saw hundreds of locals catch trolleys and jitneys to visit the sunken Admiral – or at least the top of the steamship so recently refurbished that it was known at the “yacht of the Admiral Line.”

Launched in the east in 1901 the Watson was brought around in 1905 and worked the West Coast on various packets between Puget Sound and San Francisco and also to Alaska until it was sold to Japanese shipbreakers in 1934.  Except for this 1915 accident and a temporary stranding in 1910 on Waada Island off Neah Bay the Admiral Watson with its 135 first-class accommodations, six deluxe suites, and 150 beds in steerage was a very safe and serviceable passenger steamer.

Its greatest encounter was with the legendary “giant seagull” off Willapa Bay. The famous bird landed on the Watson’s wireless antenna when the ship was transmitting the latest ball scores.  Instantly electrocuted, the profound gull fell to the deck.  The sailors quickly measured its wingspan at “six feet three inches tip to tip” and the bird weighed 28 pounds.  For twenty years sailors had reported on the tinkling bell sound the giant made as it circled their ships, and the source for this mysterious music was revealed with the birds demise.  Attached to one of its legs was a silver band and to the band a swinging metal tag. (For those who wish to learn more, this story is told in detail on p. 156 of the McCurdy Marine History of the Pac. Northwest.)

Another view of the Watson above, not to be confused with Emmett Watson, below left, conversing with Murray Morgan, the “dean of Northwest historians,” at the re-opening of the Ivar’s Acres of Clams on Pier 54 “at the foot of Madison” in 1987 – I believe.  I snapped the bottom shot.

COSMOPOLITAN BEACH TOWN BELOW BELLTOWN

In the 1890s the waterfront from Pike Street north to Broad Street was developed into a community of shacks made from scrounged materials, including those deposited by the tides.  There was only one break in the bluff separating this squatter’s strip from their Denny Hill & Belltown neighbors above them.  The north entrance to this “Belltown ravine” shows on the far left of a scene recorded from the Great Northern RR trestle in 1898 or 99 by the Norwegian photographer, Anders Wilse.  North of Bell Street a lower bluff resumed and petered away by Broad Street.  Here the entrance to the ravine is crowded with the waterfront’s most ambitious grouping of shacks, appointed with their own seawall and flagpole.

A Post-Intelligencer reporter who visited this “strange beachcombers village” in 1891 noted, “you can hear a dozen languages and dialects.  Heavy-faced Indians, black-eyed Greeks, swarthy-Italians, red-haired Irishmen and Danes, Swedes and Norwegians with flaxen locks are mingled in this cosmopolitan settlement.  The men fish, do longshore jobs, pick up driftwood and lounge in the sun; while the women stand at their doors and gossip, and the children, too young to know social or race distinctions, dig holes in the cliff and the beach, make houses of pebbles and launch boats in the waves.”

Beginning in 1903, however, construction of the north approach to the Great Northern tunnel beneath the city uprooted this beach community, replacing it with more tracks and fill.  Soon the ravine was also filled with Denny Hill dirt that included at least one native skeleton that was discovered at this site during foundation work on the Port of Seattle’s World Trade Center.

FISH DOCKS

Following the extended commotion surrounding the gold rush of the late 1890s the Seattle waterfront settled into vocational routines that located much of the fish-processing north from and including the Pike Street.   South of the Pike Street dock as far as King Street the central waterfront was used generally for transportation and shipping of all sorts.  Not surprisingly many of the longer finger piers there – between piers 46 and 58 – were owned by railroads.

Both these “now & then” look north from the second floor of Pier 59 (at the foot of Pike Street).  In the early 20^th century scene Pier 62 – the Gaffney Dock – blocks the view beyond Pine Street.   The short pier of the San Juan Fish Company is on the far right and berthed beside it are the company halibut steamers the Grant, at the center of the photograph, and the San Juan.  The name was borrowed from the islands where James E. Davis, one of the company’s partners, was born in 1871, the first child born to any settler on Lopez Island it was claimed.

One of the venerable old plows on Puget Sound is on the left – the 154-ft. side-wheeler Geo. E. Starr.  When launched near the foot of Cherry Street in 1879 she was the largest vessel built on Puget Sound.  When she retired in 1911 the Starr was tied off shore to a buoy in Elliott Bay to store dynamite.

Following World War 2, Port Commissioner E. H. Savage described the central waterfront as “absolutely obsolete. It belongs to the Gold Rush period.”  As a corrective the Port proposed to build long piers paralleling the waterfront to berth freighters of lengths that would dwarf the Starr.  And in December 1945 the Port started in on this plan by buying up Piers 60 and 61, the home then of two fish companies called Whiz and Palace.  Savage explained, “This property is too expensive for birthing fishing craft.”

When the “container revolution” revised the Port’s post-war vision the old working central waterfront turned increasingly to play.  In 1975 Pier 60 was demolished for construction of the Seattle Aquarium.  In the 1980s the pier sheds on the Gaffney dock and its neighbor the Virginia Street pier were razed to make room eventually for summer concerts.  And in the 1990s a long quay was at last built.  North – not south — of Lenora Street it was designed primarily for tour ships.

ARMORY ON WESTERN

From this prospect on the bluff below its battlements the military lines and slotted towers of the old National Guard Armory on the slope of Denny Hill stood out like the bastion it was not.  The architectural style was strictly high military kitsch.  It stood on the west side of Western Avenue and filled most of the block between Virginia and Lenora Streets. Now (top-right) from directly below, the site is hidden behind the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the railroad’s retaining wall that leads to the RR Tunnel’s north portal.  Through the Armory’s 59 years the honeycomb of about 150 rooms within its 3-foot thick brick – about one million of them – walls saw more auto shows, conventions, athletics (in its own pool), and community services than it did military drills and standing guard in defense of Seattle.

Built just north of the Pike Place Market on Western Avenue the armory was dedicated on April 1, 1909 or two years after the market opened.  Hence, our 1908 view, bottom-left does not show it, while our 1910 view, bottom-middle, does.  A month later during an indoor Seattle Athletic Club meet an overcrowded gallery collapsed maiming many and killing a few.

The armory was outfitted with showers and free food services during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and during the ensuing Second World War it was used by both the Greater Seattle Defense Chest as a hospitality center for servicemen and by the Seattle General Depot as a warehouse.   Earlier, in 1939, most of the military uses were transferred to the then new steam lined armory that survives as the Seattle Center Centerhouse.

Following WW2 the state’s unemployment compensation offices were housed within these red walls.  In April 1947 a fire that began in the basement furnace room swept through the state offices postponing the payment of nearly 2000 checks to the unemployed and veterans.  With only two exits the building had already in 1927 been tagged as a firetrap, still it was repaired following the ’47 fire, but not following the larger fire of 1962 after which it was merely shored up.  In the January 7, ’62 blaze much of the west wall fell on the northbound lanes of the Alaskan Way Viaduct knocking holes in its deck and cracking its supports.

While asking to purchase the armory from the National Guard the Seattle City Council described its 1959 vision of the armory site that featured some combination of lookout park and garage but without the brick battlements.   Nine years later when demolition expert John McFarland began tearing it down local preservationists, including architects Victor Steinbreuck, Fred Bassetti and Laurie Olin, put a temporary stop to it.  The proposals that quickly followed featured either restoring what was left of the Armory for small shops or saving its “symbolic parts” including a surviving south wall turret for a lookout tower connected with the proposed park.  Revealing a preservationist stripe of his own the contractor McFarland offered to save the armory’s grand arched entrance at his own expense.   In this instance, however, the City Council turned a cold cheek to preservation from all quarters and instructed the wrecker to resume his wrecking.

(Principal historical photo, upper-left, used courtesy of Chris Jacobsen)

ABOVE:  Three looks south on Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way), before, during and after the mid 1930s construction of the seawall between Madison and Bay Streets.   The top “before” view dates from June 22, 1934.  The bottom “after” scene from 1936.   Note the Lenora Street Pier on the right, and the Virginia Street Dock, right-of-center.  The three were taken from the Lenora Street Viaduct or overpass.  (Courtesy Municipal Archive)

[This Clipping has now returned – but not yet Warren posing with the repeat.  Here, at least, is the text, and surprisingly it named the man holding the bundle of newspapers in the pix above.]

THE SEATTLE-EVERETT INTERURBAN

When the Seattle-Everett Interurban stopped running 50  years ago (Correction: it has now been 70 years, nearly.) it wasn’t with a whimper.  Car No. 53 pulled into the Seattle depot on the evening of Feb. 20, 1939, loaded with passengers feeling peeved over the trolley line’s demise.

The Interurban ran on its own tracks south of Everett until it reached Seattle’s Northwest 85th Street where it crossed onto city tracks for its final run to the terminal here at Eighth and Steward.  When the city started to pull up its trolley lines in 1939, the Interurban – its patronage increasingly depleted by new auto owners – had little choice but to call it quits.

Now on the golden anniversary (in 1989) of that forced retirement, the 30 years of the Seattle-Interurban’s service are recalled by Northwest rail enthusiast Warren Wing in his book, “To Seattle by Trolley.”  In the contemporary photo (yet to be uncovered for this printing)  Wing poses, book in hand, beside a Greyhound bound for Bellingham.  The North Coast Line’s Interurban also reached Bellingham, although a bus was required between Everett and Mount Vernon, where the passengers transferred again to rail for the last leg to Bellingham some of it over a thrilling trestle below Chuckanut Drive.  (We have n0w put up a pix of that “thrilling trestle” and you will find it “above” under “Chuckanut Drive & The Everett Interurban Trestle Below It.”)

Wing stands a few steps from the spot where in the historical scene dispatcher Delisle Manning prepares to hand over a bundle of Seattle Post-Intelligencers to Car No. 53’s motorman.  Behind Manning, the North Coast Line’s Limited Seattle is cooling after a five-hour run form Portland on old Highway 99.  Both scenes were photographed at what in 1939 was called the Central Stage Terminal and since the 40s the Greyhound Depot.  The terminal was built in 1927.

TWO ADDS FOR COLMAN DOCK & THE FERRY FLEET

[With the illustrations above and below you should  generally click you mouse TWICE  – 2-times – on them to best enlarge the image to a size most easily read.]

When the photo postcard purveyor M. L. Oakes selected this houseboat for his 667th subject in 1907 (or possibly 1908) there were many more floating homes on Seattle’s waterways than the tightly regulated 400 or so that now survive mostly on Lake Union. This charmer is one of a small community that was moored below the University of Washington on Lake Washington’s Union Bay, then still nine feet higher than Lake Union.  Nearby was the student body boathouse with a dance hall and canoes to use.

This happy shoreline of youth soon became a neverland when Lake Washington was lowered those 9 feet in 1916 and this floating retreat and many others around the lake had to either hope the new beach they were dropped to was as accommodating as the old one or find new moorage.  At Madison Park some of the houseboats – a larger community of them than this – were pulled ashore and survive today as small homes.

I do not know what became of this floating home, but I can imagine it being towed through the then new Montlake Cut and delivered to a new moorage in the large Lake Union community of houseboats.  Perhaps some Pacific reader lives in it now or another reader will find it uncannily familiar and let the rest of us know of it with a letter to the editor.

It is now 10 years since the Times wine expert (since 1967) and Pacific Northwest contributor Tom Stockley and his wife Peggy died in a plane crash.  They had been floating homers.  In 1995 Tom wrote . . .

“Moving onto a houseboat was something of an experiment for my wife, Peggy, and I. We had a year’s lease on a vivid blue Lake Union floating home (with an option to buy), rented our land home and accepted the fact that possessions had to be pared down by half.  Spring was in the air as we carried our belongings down the long dock. Greenery was popping up from window boxes, the ducks and geese were already into their mating rituals and it didn’t take long to notice that the water made reflective ripples on the ceiling. Wow.  About two weeks later, as we sat dangling our feet in the water, Peggy turned to me and said, ‘Do you think you could live here for long?’ ‘Only the rest of my life,’ I laughed, but I wasn’t kidding.”

Jean – of this blog – was off in Europe when this feature first appeared in Pacific Northwest Mag.  Consequently he has no chance here to ask “Anything to add Paul?”   But I do – have things to add.   They are what I could more easily find of the many features – relevant to Union Bay or houseboats –  I have pulled together over the last 28 years of doing now-then in the big pulp Times. A few will be pulled from features that were part of the books “Seattle Now and Then,Vol 1” and “Seattle Now and Then Vol. 2.”  Those will be obvious.  They are lifted directly as designed from the books with the help of Ron Edge – of our “Edge Clippings.”   Some wonderfully apt stories will be missing, but their time will come.  Indeed, perhaps for the 30th anniversary of this feature in January 2012 we may have all 1500 or so features up, and all of them with “extras” and some with many.

UNION BAY’S ALASKA YUKON PACIFIC EXCURSION FLEET

Before the nine-foot lowering of Lake Washington in 1916 for the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, the west shore of Union Bay and its U.W. boat house, was a popular recreation center for students. (Courtesy Pemco Webster and Stevens Collection, Museum of History and Industry)

This splendid record of life on Union Bay before its bottom was exposed with the 1916 lowering of the Lake for the ship canal was probably photographed from the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way, now the Burke Gilman Recreational Trail.

The boat house in the foreground was built by the school’s associated students in 1906.  It included a dance hall, dresser rooms, lockers, canoe racks and quarters for the keeper and his family.  For the ten years it was moored here the ASUW Boat House was easily one of the most popular campus destinations.  “Canoeing wooing” was then still a commonplace of Seattle dating and courtship.

The occasion for the unusual congestion of Lake Washington “Mosquito Fleet” steamers shown here probably has to do the commuting of visitors to the summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition on the University of Washington campus.  There are five lake steamers in the scene, but only four are readily seen.  And, if I have identified them correctly, they are, naming them counter-clockwise from the boat house, the Wildwood, the Fortuna, the Cyrene and the Triton.  All but the Wildwood belong to Capt. John L. Anderson who until his death in 1940 ran steamers and ferries on the lake for fifty years.

During the fair Capt. Anderson and his competitors ran 15 minutes commutes between the fair’s landings on Union Bay and Leschi, Madrona, and Madison Park.  An estimated 1,500,000 passengers were handled for these quick hops and for the longer excursion around Mercer Island.

Except for the Fortuna that is seen coming towards shore behind the Wildwood’s stack, all these vessels are empty.  Perhaps, then in this morning scene, the Triton, farthest left beneath Laurelhurst, is returning to Leschi empty to take on more fair goers.  The smaller Cyrene, at the scene’s center, is waiting for her chance to load up for an excursion, and the Wildwood has just left off passengers walking here towards shore along the north (left) apron of the boat house.  Perhaps.

Union Bay is now dedicated to student parking and recreation. Much of these park and play acres was reclaimed from bottom land by the Montlake Dump.  The dump closed in 1964.

(The photo below comes from the Municipal Archive.)

HUSKY STADIUM

A mix of student and alumni enthusiasm that bordered on happy hysteria campaigned for Husky Stadium in the joyful return to spectator sports following World War One.

The site was first aligned by University astronomers to set the axis of the stadium so that the sun would not shine in the eyes of the players – although almost everyone expected it to rain.  Using the same sluicing methods employed to hose gold from the hills behind Nome, Alaska and Denny Hill into Elliott Bay the stadium took only a little more than six months to complete.  The work was finished 12 hours before the inaugural game against Dartmouth College on Nov. 27, 1920.

The Tacoma photographer Chapin Bowen recorded this sweeping impression of that dark day when the University eleven lost to Dartmouth 28 to 7.   The place, of course, was packed and many of the 30,000 seats were warmed by bodies that had earlier paid for the right to sit in them by subscribing into the building fund.  The campaign copy read “Buy a Seat and Build the Stadium.”   Name plaques were also offered for fifty and one hundred dollars.

Since that first lost the Huskies have won about 75 percent of their games here, and the seats have multiplied to 75,000.   In 1968 the grass was replaced by Astro-Turf – a first for a major college.  Visiting teams then both stepped onto ersatz grass and into strange shoes.  The school had to stock an extra 200 fitting pairs for their opponents.

For those who are counting, first in 1923 and thirteen times since the Huskies have made it from here into the Rose Bowl.  Perhaps most impressively the schools’ athletic department claims that Husky Stadium is consistently voted “the most scenic football structure in the nation.”   That probably means more the view from the stadium than of it.

The historical photographer Chapin Bowen carried a heavy tripod and cumbersome panoramic camera to record the inaugural game at Husky Stadium, above.   Jean Sherrard, the contemporary photographer, carried a digital camera small enough to fit in his shirt pocket – and no tripod. The steady Sherrard took four photographs of the Sept 28, 2002 UW-Idaho game, left at half-time and spliced them together on his computer before the home team hung on in the second half to win 41 to 27.  [A mural-size printing of this Husky Stadium then-now can be seen on the north was of the Whale Maker Room in Ivar’s Salmon House on the north shore of Lake Union.  Exhibited there are many other historical photos of the neighborhoods nearby and the lake too. ]

(Given that some of the stories featured below have been lifted from my three Seattle Now and Then books they will include some repetitions of facts and points.  The stories were all written “alone” for the weekly feature with often years between them and so not intended for a book’s continuous narrative or design, although not adverse to it either as long as such a note as this explains the clumsy redundancies that crop up like too many tomatos.)

PLEASE CLICK YOUR MOUSE twice OVER THESE STORIES.  They will then appear big enough to read with comfort.

RUSTIC BRIDGE TO UNION BAY

When the University of Washington moved north in 1895 from downtown, the new site was commonly referred to as the Interlaken Campus. Views such as the one above confirm the name.  Most likely this scene was photo­graphed during or soon after the makeover of the campus for the 1909 Alaska­ Yukon Pacific Exposition. The unnamed photographer looks southeast across Union Bay. Madison Park is right of center, and Webster Point, the southern extremity of Laurelhurst, shows on the left just above the stairway that descends from the pedestrian trestle. Between them we look across Lake Washington to an eastside waterfront softly filtered by a morning haze that hangs over the lake on what is otherwise a bright winter day. This is Medina — or will be. In 1909 no palatial beach homes or bunkers attract our modern flotilla of gawkers.

Lake Washington is here at its old level be­fore it was slowly dropped 9 feet in 1916 for the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. At the old lake level the unnamed island right of center was still separated from Foster Island, behind the screen of trees on the far right. Now joined, they can be explored on the Arboretum Waterfront Self-Guided Trail.

We might have wished that the photographer had shown more of the trestle. It was most like­ly constructed for access to the shore, groomed as a picturesque retreat for visitors to the expo­sition. Its construction of both peeled and un­hewed logs repeats one of AYP’S lesser ar­chitectural themes — the rustic one. The trestle spans the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern, the railroad that opened the hinterland of King County in the late 1880s. It first reached this point beside Union Bay in the fall of 1887.

(WHAT FOLLOW is from the book SEATTLE NOW & THEN VOLUME 3.  Remember to CLICK TWICE to see them at a size that is comfortable to read.  Within weeks we will have the entire book – along with Volumes One and Two – up to search and read on dorpatsherrardlomont.)

The above is an example of a “clip” cut from the Pacific Northwest Mag. for – my handwritten scrawl has it – Feb. 18, 2001. (Note that the ASUM BOATHOUSE appears on the left of the above view, just right of the couple on the bench and obscured by a haze holding over the bay.) The features that follow were lifted from Seattle Now and Then Vol. Three.

THE FLOODING OF MONTLAKE CUT for the SHIP CANAL

“Roaring like a cataract, hundreds of tons of water from Lake Union, unharnessed by a cut in the cofferdam, plunged through the crumbling barrier of earth into the portage channel at 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon marking the formal opening of the eastern end of the Lake Washington canal .  .  .   A cheer went up from the several hundred persons who had gathered to witness the breaking down of the barriers that have separated Seattle’s two great lakes for unnumbered years.”  So reads The Seattle Times for Saturday, August 26, 1916.

The crowd had hoped for dynamite but got laborers with picks and shovels instead.  A shallow trench was all that was needed to release the waters for the cofferdam’s erosion. The moment recorded here is also described by the Times.  “A score or more of spectators had assembled on a large breakwater just inside the cut and were compelled to scamper to safer ground when the water reached the volume of a torrent.”

This view looks west towards the north end of Capitol Hill and above that some of the Wallingford Neighorhood.   The concrete lined Montlake Cut is behind the photographer including the temporary gates at its eastern end.  There from the following Monday August 28th forward into October the waters of Lake Washington were slowly released lowering the big lake nine feet to the level of Lake Union.

The work of dredging the two ends of the cut progressed speedily and on May 9, 1917 the navigable channel between Lake Union and Lake Washington was opened.  The formal dedication of the entire Lake Washington Ship Canal followed two months later on Independence Day.

The federal land survey reached the Seattle area in the 1850s.  This map from that survey shows the first more-or-less accurate  shoreline of Portage Bay and the Montalke Isthmus that separates it from Union Bay.  Note that Fosters Island, lower right, already has its name.  The lower of two Indian trails across the isthmus runs roughly along the path of the future log canal.  The longer trail above it cuts through the future University of Washington Campus, reaching Union Bay near the athletic department’s offices just north of Hec Ed Pavilion.  A bit of the future Laurelhurst neighborhood shows upper right.  The width of the map is a little more than 2 miles.