Still quite glorious in its diversity and wide appeal, Folklife is surely one of the planet’s great festivals. As Baby Gramps reflected on Sunday evening, in the Newport Folk Festivals heyday, it drew a respectable crowd of 50,000 –Folklife brings out five times that many. A few snaps from my all-too brief visit yesterday evening and this afternoon.
(as always, click to enlarge photos)
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.
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.
(Click to Enlarge)
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.
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.
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.
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)
[Click the PIXS TWICE to ENLARGE Them]
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.
(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.]
=====
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.
(Click TWICE to Enlarge)
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)
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.
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.
CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
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)
CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.”
CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
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)
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)
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.
SEEK and YE HALL FIND – but best to DOUBLE-CLICK TOO.
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.
(click to enlarge photos)
Last Labor Day Jean and I did some exploring at Seattle Center for a repeat photography project we named “Fair and Festival.” Through that three day weekend during Bumbershoot we hoped to match about 100 historical photographs, most of them from the 1962 Century 21 World’s Fair, with scenes from the 41-year old arts festival that has by now, it seems, gone largely pop.
With a half-century of changes at the Center we soon discovered that our project could be bewildering. Lucky for us collector Ron Edge joined us for two of those balmy afternoons, and with the help of Ron’s historical photographs and overlaid-maps we managed to line up – or correspond – a small horde of fair and festival subjects.
The one we chose for this feature reveals neither the futuristic nor monumental preoccupations of Century 21. We chose the waffles – the popular Belgian ones. When Paula Becker and Alan Stein hit the lecture circuit for “The Future Remembered, the 1962 Worlds’ Fair & it’s Legacy,” their Historylink book history of the fair, they confessed a small irritation over how many of their Century-21 “informants” wound up with the waffles – as did I.
My only visit to the worlds fair was from Spokane in the spring of 1962 as a member of the Whitworth College Choir. That our performance was rained out injured our artist status but we got a free day at the fair. I headed first for the dazzling Fine Arts Exhibit in Exhibition Hall, and followed it nearby to the short row of faux Flemish storefronts seen near the center of our “then.” It sat beside the fair’s Boulevards of the World, on the part named Freedom Way (Republican Street). It was there that my and perhaps your still fond waffle memories were sweetened with strawberries and whipped cream. And the secret we learn – again from Becker and Stein – was in the foundation: the big waffles themselves. The batter was yeast-leavened.
A snapshot of Paul and Ron, assiduously plotting our next photo opportunity next to the pool:
I know you must have something to add, eh, Paul?
Yes Jean I must – you surely do know. One of the embarrassments of our weekly catechism is not merely that I always do have “more” but that you may also often name it, but never do. And here you have put up Ron Edge and me sitting side-by-side and plotting our next repeat, or better your next repeat, which – do you remember? – put you in that pool up to your knees. Still we cannot show that until we can find it. As you also know the time spent at the last Bumbershoot pursuing our hide-and-seek for repeats of mostly shots taken at Century 21 fifty years earlier, we were often enough confounded by it all – even with our aids. Most import was Ron’s map, attached next, that superimposes an aerial of Seattle Center over a simple map of Century 21, which outlines it principal features and numbers and names them too. [Click TWICE] to enlarge.
And then Paula’s and Alan’s “The Future Remembered” – their historylink/Seattle Center Foundation golden anniversary book on the Fair and the Center was certainly helpful as well.
We also studied the several “aerials” of the Century 21 grounds taken from the Space Needle. Those, and much else, were found by Ron and allowed us to march on the Seattle Center campus with more locations than we could repeat. I think we managed to fulfill forty of these – perhaps – and none of the forty included those from the Needle. You – Jean – never made it up there, for we and our three afternoons were spent.
We added, you remember, to our horde several photographs that are older that Century 21. For instance, there’s one from the mid 1950s that looks west on Thomas Street to the Armory when it still was an armory. We will present or put that up tomorrow. One a day, we mean to put up as many of these 40-or-so as we can figure out with out revisiting the scene. Those that we cannot match for now we will, surely, later – perhaps much later. It was an invigorating three afternoons at Bumbershoot, and it was all made possible compliments of our press passes.
And so fairwell to Century 21 – its 50th. Today, the 14th of October 2012, is but one week from the 21st, the final day of this Golden Anniversary. Many of us will wonder that the half-century has passed so – with such “forward thrust” to quote the slogan of our municipal betterment campaign that soon followed Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair. By now we, at least, are slowing down and enjoying fond memories.
=====
We will have another fair-festival repeat up tomorrow and so on day in and day out until we run out. Tomorrow’s will look west on Thomas Street from near 4th Ave. circa 1955, and so since 1962 near the on-ramp for Seattle’s Monorail.