Here at DorpatSherrardLomont there’s always room for improvement, even long after the fact.  On occasion, we will make discoveries related to previous columns – buried treasures usually overlooked in the rush to find supporting materials for Seattle Now & Then.

Last August, Paul related how he had misplaced slides of the Palomar Theatre’s demise.  He has now found them and, as promised, they are posted below.  To view the original column – now amended – click HERE.

[Click to ENLARGE]

[Click to Enlarge photos]

From LCCE to AYP

Normal
0
0
1
386
2205
18
4
2707
11.1282

0

0
0

A few days more than one hundred years ago the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition concluded its four-and-one-half-month run on a University of Washington Campus that was landscaped for it and arranged with sublime edifices in the classical style, most of them temporary plaster-on-wood creations, but splendid and convincing. The state legislature agreed to help fund the AYP (for short) if at least three of the new buildings were made to stay put following the exposition for use by the school, which the politicians had long made a habit of neglecting.

Throughout our recent summer – now in flight to California – Seattle has celebrated the memory of that “first worlds fair’ with elaborate exhibits, symposiums, special events, web pages, reenactments, and publications. (This centennial got considerably more attention than the city’s own sesquicentennial of a few years back.) Who could have expected a show of such wonderful energy and insight? You may have devoted your warm months to just tracking it all. If you missed it altogether, you must have stayed in the basement.

Seattle’s AYP was “motivated” more than inspired by Portland’s Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (LCCE), of 1905, part of which we see here. Godfrey Chelander, a Seattle exhibitor for his Arctic Brotherhood, returned to Seattle from the LCCE with the desire to make a permanent Alaska exhibit here. James A. Woods, then city editor for The Seattle Times, turned the permanent exhibit into a summer-long worlds fair, partly as a way to show-up Seattle’s principal cultural and economic rival, Portland. And it did with rough statistics. AYP had more exhibits and with 3,770,000 visitors twice the gate.

But could the AYP have been more sublime than this LCCE setting to the sides of Portland’s Guild’s Lake. The site was conveniently near the business district, two trolley lines and the Willamette River and looked towards Mt. St. Helens, which was then still sublime on its own. And Guild Lake was manageable. In summertime it was but 2.5 feet deep. It required no extraordinary engineering to build the 1000 foot long Bridge of Nations, left of center, from the Expo’s main campus, mostly out-of-frame, to its US. Government Buildings beyond.

[The summer-long and more AYPE centennial is in hibernation, perhaps until its sesquicentennial in 2059. But we will not let it go entirely. We are attaching a hamper of AYP related pictures with captions that we will pull from our nearly 40-year stock as we can. That is, this hamper will continue to grow and always in this place – hanging from Portland and its own fair of 1905.]

REST in PEACE – An AYP HAMPER

No. 1 The AYP Bird’s Eye, Some Maps & Panoramas

The official AYPE Bird’s Eye was, of course, drawn from plans a few months before the fair opened to help promote it.  In the interim the fair changed but the drawing did not.  So there are a few mistakes, which wishing to be fair we will not point out, because we do not know all of them.  (This Bird’s Eye is another Edge Clipping, and thanks to Ron Edge for helping with it.)

Normal
0
0
1
25
143
1
1
175
11.1282

0

0
0

Quickly built, used and dismantled – except for those few “permanent buildings’” – the Expo, by some headine maker’s decree, became “Seattle’s forgotten worlds fair.”  At least most of the structures and appointments were soon cleared from the campus.  The exceptions were the few permanent buildings intended for school use following the fair.  The juxtaposition below of the UW section from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map and part of the AYP birdseye printed just above shows how drastic was the razing of AYP.  But the inserted map is stingy.  It shows in red the permanent campus brick facilities but also omits survivors from the fair, including the extremely wooded Forestry Building which hung around campus for many years after the fair serving at times both as a museum and as home for the school’s school of forestry.

This “temple of timber” was, it seems, the most popular building at the fair.  It is number 20 in the expo’s official map below.   The reader may wish to try a game of referencing other numbered structures in the map to those appearing in the bird’s eye.  In this the map is also good evidence for what is awry with the premature bird’s eye.

Ron Edge here contributes another of his “clippings”.  This one an earlier map of the Expo from 1906, which looks both familiar and strange.

The Expo was also recorded from on high.

Photographed from the Expo’s “captive air balloon” this aerial appeared on the front page of a local daily.  It was an early use of an oversized half-tone and the captions told a half truth about how the pilot was lost in clouds until they opened to reveal the above.   The clouds included at the top of this aerial are almost certainly a pre-photoshop invention.  The balloon was also used to take one of the masterpieces of local historical photography, a panorama of about 180 degrees that, however, showed little of the fair but much the neighborhood including Union Bay, Madison Park, Capitol Hill, all of Portage Bay, and wrapping as far to the northwest as Latona and part of Wallingford beyond it.

[Click TWICE to Enlarege the Enlargement]

The panorama is not attributed.  Original prints were part of a small archive of University District materials kept by a neighborhood bank.  When it was sold to a California “financial institution” I helped persuade the last manager of the community bank to donate the collection to the Northwest Collection at the University of Washington.  Somewhere there the five parts of this pan – here only crudely welded together and retouched – are kept in an archival folder waiting for someone to have high-resolution scans done from them with the intention of joining them together and giving this treasure the care and study is deserves. Two trolleys can be found on 40th Street heading for the fair, although portions of the Pay Streak seem unfinished suggesting that the pan was recorded some little time before the Expos opened. The balloon from which the above panorama was shot in five pieces shows in the pan below.  It hovers over the end of the Pay Streak, the position it held to take the above pan.

The two-part pan above (here melded at the center to either side of the tree) is one of the sharpest and most revealing of the many panoramas of the Expo that were taken from Capitol Hill.  Later we may attach close-ups of a number of the buildings that can be seen in the pan either with numbers to cross-reference them or with a challenge to the reader to figure it out on their own.  (In that event we could arrange them so that the first building shown is the farthest to the left and the last one included the farthest to the right and so on inbetween – perhaps.)

Next we will show a few more pans from Capitol Hill, the first from when construction expo construction was in its mid-stages.  The future Pay Streak (the Carnival side of AYP) is merely a cleared path leading north from the photographs bottom right corner where the Portage Bay waterfront has been prepared with pilings for the many attractions that appear there in the balloon pan above.  Meany Hall, one of the intended permanent buildings, shows left of center, and to the left of it is the AYP’s administration building.

Another an much wider view of the Expo from Capitol Hill extends far to the west – as far as Seventh Avenue and just beyond it a portion of the low ridge that still rises west of the I-5 Freeway.  The Avenues below, right to left, are Seventh, Eigth, Ninth, Roosevelt Way, 11th, 12th, Brooklyn, University Way and 15th Avenue.

Follow now two more pans from Capitol Hill, the first by Asahel Curtis and the other from a few years after the fair – cira 1915 – when most the imposing structures that appear in the Curtis view and the others above it were remembered with pictures like these.

Now we will conclude with a few photographs of the Arctic Circle, which was the sublime Beaux Arts center of the fair.  The Drumheller Fountain AKA Frosh Pond is a survivor of this grand hydraulics.   Now we sing a lullaby to the fair so that it may sleep better while waiting for its sesquicentennial in 2069, and the likelihood that again by then many will be clueless about “Seattle’s forgotten world’s fair”.

Next follows two photographs of the Hawaii Building both, like the illuminated Cascade directly above, recorded by Phillip Hughet.  The Hawaii building was the next structure up the Cascades from the Manufacturers Building on the northeast side of the Cascades.

The next scene was recorded sometimes after the fair and most of its temporary structures are removed.  Meany Hall appears on the left horizon, and the once cascading steps above the fountain are evident on the right.   Right-of-center, Parrington Hall (built as Science Hall) appears, and unlike Meany Hall, which was weakened by an earthquake and removed, Parrington Hall survives.

In Jean Sherrard’s and my book Washington Then and Now we featured the Arctic Circle with the “then and now” that follows.

Finally – perhaps – a uncrowded scene to help us reflect on the AYPE for fifty years more.

MORE BLOGADDENDA

It is rare to catch such a cherished scholar-author as Portland’s Richard Engeman on the roof of a large Portland warehouse smiling.   Richard explains the unique recreation of the jumbo sign behind him.   “Did Claire or I send you a pic of the wonderful sign on the top of the Montgomery Park building? It was recycled from when it was the regional warehouse for Montgomery Ward–changing the sign meant changing only two letters.”  Claire Sykes took the portrait.  This, of course, is also the prospect from which Claire and Richard recorded the “now” repeat of this blog’s recent report on the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition campus.

(click to enlarge photos)

[Here follows the main body of text.]

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

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

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

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

I have often used both Gowey and Bradley’s recordings to better understand the modern changes of Seattle.  And now at last at 70 I am also exploring the west with the enchanted Horace.    I include now directly below an example of a Horace Sykes Kodachrome landscape.  Most of his slide are not identified, but that will make more the adventure of studying them – a Sykes Hide and Seek.  (For instance I for now speculate that the blow “burning bush” photo is of a scene on the Yakima River.)  We intend to eventually give Horace and his art is own picturesque “button” here at dorpatsherrardlomont.

WEB EXTRAS

To illustrate the point above about Jean’s street lights reiterating the radiant Christmas star that once the Bon and now Macy’s hangs from its corner at 4th and Pine here’s two snapshots of it by an old friend, Lawton Gowey. (As with the survival of Bon-Macy’s Christmas Star above, I was wrong in this as well, first identifying the two Kodachromes as by Robert Bradley, a friend of Lawton’s too. ) The second also shows the Colonial.  The oldish car in the foreground in both belies the year.  The original Gowey slides are dated, Dec. 22, 1965.  Note that except for the Great Northern RR’s neon goat the transportation being promoted here is by air not rail.   Below the two Gowey recordings is Jean standing in the street with his gear and either preparing to take or taking his long exposure photograph of the intersection that appears above with its fortuitous stars.

The almost unique – for Seattle – flatiron block bordered by 4th Ave., Pine St., and Westlake Ave., was formed in 1906 when Westlake was cut through the neighborhood from Pike and 4th to join Westlake at Denny Way.  In the below photo the Plaza Hotel, which took that pie-shaped block first, is under construction, and on the left 4th Avenue still climbs the southeast corner of Denny Hill.   The photo of the same intersection below this construction scene was recorded in 1908-9, when 4th still climbed the hill.

The area-wide mass transit proposed during the teens was only partially fulfilled here on Westlake with the building of the Century 21 Monorail.

We will conclude this “web extra” with two more postcards.  The top one is from 1938 – at least that is how I have marked the date.  Besides the fire engines it show both a trackless trolley heading south on 4th and a trolley heading west on its Pine Street tracks.   The postcard below it dates from after WW2 and can be compared in detail with Bradley’s Kodachrome slide used at the top.

(click to enlarge photos)

The whereabouts of Seattle’s first Auto Row is easily figured by counting the locations listed in the 1911 Polk City Directory under the simple heading “Automobiles.”  Of the forty-one sellers named, thirty-one are either on Broadway Avenue or Pike Street, with 17 and 14 dealers respectively. “Auto Row,” then, was two rows intersecting.

In 1903 there was but one dealer listing for automobiles, and it was not on Capitol Hill, but on “Bike Row,” or on Second Avenue, near Madison Street.   There Fred Harrell’s Cycle Company sold motorcars as an alternative to bikes and trolleys for a very few well heeled customers.  Our first auto, a Wood’s Electric, arrived here in the summer of 1900.  Another twenty years of improvements in machines and roads were needed for the motorcar to become commonplace following World War One.

The historical scene here is from 1909 when this garage and showroom at the northeast corner of Belmont and Pike was brand new, and owners Arthur Nute and J. Trafton Keena had set their joined initials, “N & K,” in tiles at the top of buildings supporting columns.  We may imagine the urge to drive away with one of the luxury Packards twice on display: in the show room and on the street.

A century later luxury cars are still sold at this corner and the dapper and gregarious Phil Smart, standing near the front door, is celebrating both his golden anniversary here with Mercedes, and this September his own 90th birthday as well.  “Senior,” Smart’s popular name, is the neighborhood’s good-humored stalwart.

Also this year the Seattle City Council under the leadership of councilman Tom Rasmussen, gave its unanimous decision to designate this now old “Auto Row” neighborhood as a conservation district with incentives to restore or incorporate old buildings, like this one, into future plans.

WEB-ONLY EXTRA

Jean writes:

Phil Smart Senior, affectionately known around the dealership he founded as “Senior”, gamely posed for our repeat, even renting a bowler from Brocklind’s for the occasion. He welcomed me into his office with the genuine charm and affability of a great salesman – in the best sense and perhaps the rarest, that of a man who knows and perhaps fosters a simple truth: it’s not just about the car, it’s about you and me.

He told me about his hero Patton – a rare portrait of whom hangs on his office wall – in whose motorized unit he served during the war, thereby missing the birth of Phil Smart Junior. About his long marriage to his wife and sweetheart. About his forthcoming 9oth birthday, at which I expressed genuine amazement – really, some are blessed with damn fine genes.

Senior still comes into the office several times a week, and he hasn’t lost the touch. During our session for the repeat photo above, wearing the bowler, and leaning casually up against the brick wall, he bantered easily with every passerby, offering them a sweet deal. And as I left, even I felt the pull – and I write as someone who has a built-in resistance to a sales pitch – but I really wanted to buy a car from that man.

(click to enlarge photos)

The “monster impromptu parade” began when the early shift in the shipyards was let go to celebrate. By ten a.m. thirty thousand shipyard workers, joined clerks, trolley conductors, teachers, doctors, bankers, and bakers in a parade that circled the business district accompanied by sirens, horns, the back-firing explosions of opened mufflers and a percussive orchestra of garbage cans “borrowed” from every alley.

It was an “ecstasy of joy,” an “orderly disorder,” “a spontaneous combustion of Seattle’s heart and soul.” And there were, The Times noted, “autos and trucks crowded with flag-waving pretty girls” like we see here crossing Madison Street southbound on Second Avenue.

This snapshot by grocer Max Loudon is but one of about two hundred captioned photographs included in the new illustrated version of Richard Berner’s local classic “Seattle 1900 – 1920 From Boomtown, Through Urban Turbulence, to Restoration.” The book appears now on dorpatsherrardlomont, the blog-webpage routinely noted at the end of this feature. Take a moment to examine this important part of the “Seattle Canon” and you may read it all.

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 20^th 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.

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.” …

(Read Paul’s complete introduction)

The well-windowed Fremont factory surviving here is located on Bowdoin Place a few blocks west of “The Center of the Universe,” the other name for Fremont’s business district at the south end of its namesake bascule bridge.

Here Bulgarian immigrant Peter Ivanoff compared himself with Newton and Edison. (See Ivanoff’s obit at the bottom.) With floors polished smooth enough for ballet and potted plants decorating every lathe, Ivanoff built in his bright factory what he called his Co-Motional Motion Power Engine. His invention, he claimed, could run anything from a wristwatch to an ocean liner. After a minimal assisted start-up, his CMMPE would be forever on its own producing more power than it used. That is, it kept itself running and much more.

Here enters the Outlook, the long-lived newspaper the Stapp family ran out of their Wallingford home. Son Arthur, the paper’s reporter, learned from The Fremont Times, a rival weekly, about Ivanoff’s upcoming April 1, 1931 factory presentation of his machine. An enthusiast for both science and technology, Art attended the opening acting as a potential investor, and in the following day’s Outlook gave Ivanoff’s machine the name the inventor himself was, perhaps, careful not to use. The CMMPE was that impossibility, another “perpetual motion machine.” Stapp warned readers that investors were “april fools.”

But was Ivanoff also the “fake” that Art Stapp called his machine? The Seattle Times picked up the Stapp story; Ivanoff was investigated by the state and audited too. He lost investors and returned to unextraordinary machine work including making parts for Boeing during World War Two. When he died in1946 he left a trust for research into “co-motional power.” Peter Ivanoff, it would seem, was both industrious and a self-deceived true believer.

Darius Kinsey took the photographs used here of Ivanoff’s Fremont factory in 1940.  The now-then factory interior repeat above is an “approximation.”  You can see the beams in both and the camera’s are aimed in the same direction.  That’s it.

Ivanoff died in 1946 and his Seattle Times obituary follows.  It gently touches on the perpetual motion episode.  It is followed by a short clip on the direction of his estate, in part, to continue his research.  Although we have no idea what became of it, $200,000 to continue research in “co-motional power” could be given desk space for quite a long time, although not perpetually.

(click to enlarge photos)

Probing “greater Seattle” became regular in the 1870s when it was first possible to walk directly through the woods to Lake Union along a narrow gauge railroad bed and also out to Lake Washington by worn and wide paths along Madison and Yesler Way.

Commercial sightseeing arrived in the 1890s with the development of a network of public transportation that reached scenic retreats on the same lakes.  The Seattle Electric Company promoted its cable cars and trolleys for both getting places and seeing them.

While it often took a generation for working families to afford motorcars, by 1907, the year this “Seeing Seattle” carrier posed along the new Lake Washington Blvd, all the necessary materials were in place to invest capital in a sightseeing venture that required neither tracks nor propellers.  Many streets were graded, some of them paved, tires were better, and powerful chain driven “auto cars” could manage Seattle’s hills.

Probably more than tourists the generally car-less but booming population paid the dollar to take the exhilarating ride.  It was not cheap and a souvenir photo was extra.  In 1907 a trolley worker made two dollars a day.  Of course, during the year of AYPE, 1909, many exploring choices were available, by rail, rubber and rudder.  And it has never – during peacetime – stopped.

In 1996 I “instructed” television producer Brian Tracy in the historical sites he hoped recycled amphibious “buses” would soon visit once he got his raucous “Ride the Ducks” tours clapping and singing through the core of this town.  Brian is especially proud of the Coast Guard certified Sea Captains that drive his web-footed fleet of dripping ducks. A friend, and sympathetic spouse of one of these talented captains, enlightened me, “Drive a 26,000-pound machine that gets very, very hot and makes incredible noises while trying to avoid traffic and humans swarming all around and oh yes, be hilarious, tell jokes and sing and clap while you are at it! – It is harder than it looks!”

THINGS having to do with SEEING SEATTLE

Unidentified thespians play for a joke that is not explained, circa 1915.

In 1909, the year of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, owning one’s own motorcar was still a rarity.  This booth at the Expo allowed persons to have their photographs taken at the wheel.  Judging by the several examples that survive, it was an attractive Pay Streak offering.

An advertisement for the Gray Line tour of Seattle during the 1909 AYP.   To distinguishes their service they coined the expression “See Seattle With Us.”

The AYP bug or logo is printed on the side of the open-bus above.

The competing Green Line promotes its service with a company history.  The ornamental symmetrical design is a water stain.  [Thanks to Ron Edge for introducing this piece of ephemera. and not attempting to clean it.]

A safe way to fly over Seattle and its waterfront.  The Golden Potlatch, 1911-1913, was Seattle’s first summer festival.

Another way to fly – in Soper’s photo studio.

A photographer’s set designed to parody Seeing Seattle tours, including those run by the local trolley company.

The Seeing Seattle car run by the Seattle Electric Company circa 1908.  The pergola does not seem to be yet in place.   One of this specially-marked trolley’s destinations was the track that circled Green Lake.  It began its return downtown by passing over and under the rustic bridges of Woodland Park.  Here it waits for passengers in Pioneer Square.

Here follows a “now and then” from Pacific Northwest Mag. for Dec. 18, 1988.  Until I find the negative for the “now” photo and/or until Jean returns to town to repeat the 1932 view, the scan from the Pacific clipping will have to do for a “now.”  “Speedway” was then ordinarily used as a general name for the oval tracks with bleachers attached that were used for racing mostly open cockpit motorcars.  We will conclude this selection with a piece of Aurora-appropriate ephemera sent by Ron Edge, our generous “Edge Clippings” provider.   The use of the term here on Aurora north from Denny Way was, then, more by analogy to those commercial racing urges and tracks.

(Click to Enlarge)

This stretch of new highway was what the Dog House and the Igloo correctly expected would bring them a steady line of customers.  Again, the now below is a crude clipping scan from the 1988 repeat I took for the Pacific printing.

Now we have got a up-to-date  NOW for the look north on Aurora thru its intersection with Mercer and Broad – before their grades were seperated.  David Jeffers send this today and notes, “My two cents are offered here for Paul’s benefit, with apologies to Jean for jumping in with an approximation of the “Now”.  Looks like I’m back and down a bit in my angle, but this is a terrifying spot on a weekday afternoon.”  This is most welcome and hopefully a sign of what’s to be too.  We hope to have more friends like David risking limb to get shots like this one and shots of all sorts.  Thanks much David.  It is most wonderful how the landscape siding “old dirty” Aurora has grown so since I snapped that “now” in 1988.   I am not yet familiar with Facebook but probably should be.  David says that this blog is linked to his facebook page.  Thanks again David. Here follows the 1988 “main story” on the historical view.

The historical view (top) north from Broad Street on Aurora Avenue was photographed in the first moments of the future strip’s transformation from a neighborhood byway into the city’s first speedway. One clue to the street’s widening is the double row of high poles. Old ones line the avenue’s original curb and new ones signal its new eastern border. Also look at the Sanitary Laundry Co. at the northeast corner of Aurora and Mercer Street (behind the Standard Station on the right). The business has cut away enough of its one-story brick plant to lop the “Sanit” from Sanitary on the laundry’s Mercer Street sign.

A photographer from the city’s Engineering Department recorded this view on the morning of June 10, 1932, nearly five months after the dedication of the Aurora Bridge. The widened Aurora speedway between the bridge and Broad Street was not opened until May 1933. Once opened, the speed limit on Aurora was set at a then-liberal 30 mph. Traffic lights were installed at both Mercer and Broad streets, and a visiting highway expert from Chicago declared the new Aurora “the best express highway in the U.S.” It also soon proved to be one of the most deadly.

By 1937, three years after safety islands were installed to help pedestrians scamper across the widened speedway, the city coroner counted 37deaths on Aurora since the bridge dedication in 1932. Twenty of these were pedestrians, and 11 more were motorists who crashed into these “concrete forts” or “islands of destruction.” For a decade, these well-intentioned but tragically clumsy devices dominated the news on Aurora. In 1944 the city removed those that motorists had not already destroyed.

On April 22, 1953, the city’s traffic engineer confirmed what commuters must have suspected, that this intersection was the busiest in the city. Traffic from the recently completed Alaskan Way Viaduct entered the intersection from both Aurora and Broad. (There was as yet no Battery Street tunnel.) Five years later this congestion was eliminated with the opening of the Broad and Mercer Street underpasses. The Standard gasoline station, on the right, was one of the many business eliminated in this public work.

Now pedestrians can safely pass under Aurora, although many still prefer living dangerously with an occasional scramble across the strip. Since 1973 they have had to also hurdle the “Jersey barrier” — the concrete divider (first developed in New Jersey) that has made the dangerous Aurora somewhat safer for motorists if not for pedestrians.

A more pleasant connotation – than safety island death and/or mutilation –  for the speed and convenience of Aurora is registered on the billboard for this mid 1950s Aurora Avenue service station that clung to the eastern slope of Queen Anne Hill and served northbound traffic only.  The image was photographed by Roger Dudley, a celebrated name in commercial photography hereabouts for many years.  It comes from the collection of my by now old friend Dreamland and Lamar Harrington’s (the band Lamar not the person) own Dan Eskenazi.  The clouds are so in line and spaced that they might be all plopped in theatre seats enjoying the presentation of the new Ford Edsel.  Note the Edsel’s briefly familiar grill on the right.  To aid inspection of the Edsel’s features we drop in her an Ivar’s advertisement from 1957.  It seems with the failure of Ivar’s hopes that an atomic submarine would take the place of the ferries on Puget Sound, he turned his affections to the then new Edsel.  It has been noted that the new Ford product was a disappointment for many because it was not as great a departure from regular Fords as was generally expected.  Still the Edsel did have a curious front end that some remarked resembled a submarine or could be easily imagined diving.

And as promised, this feature is for now concluded with a photograph from Ron Edge carrying its own hand-written caption,  “Aurora Speed Bowl, 1934.” [I confess to NOT finding the Aurora Bowl in any of my four city directories for the 1930s.  Ron?  This might make a good feature for Pacific.  Jean?

(click to enlarge photos)

When it became certain that Aurora Avenue would be chosen for the city’s principal speedway north from the business district, the neighborhood around its southern origin at Denny Way began to fill in with automotive enterprise: car parts, gas, beer and hamburgers.

Bob Murray sited his new highway Dog House on the best short block available, on the north side of Denny Way between Aurora, where a driver would soon be allowed to reach speeds of 30 mph, and Dexter Avenue, which was also wide and strait and almost as convenient as Aurora for reaching the new – in 1932 – George Washington AKA Aurora Bridge over the ship canal.

Throughout its length the Aurora speedway profoundly affected not only this neighborhood but also whatever it cut through, like Queen Anne Hill, or flew over and cut through, like Fremont.  With the opening of the Aurora cantilever bridge in 1932, northbound traffic switched nearly en masse from the Fremont bascule bridge.  Already floundering from the Great Depression Fremon then lost its traffic too.

But not the Dog House.  It survived with comfort food, a comforting name and its convenient location.  In 1940 it was joined, one block to the west by another eccentric, the Igloo. Together they flourished until their gateway to the Aurora speed way was bypassed in the mid-1950s with the opening of the Battery Street tunnel.  “All roads (still) lead to the Dog House” but would you stop?  Traffic heading north then through this tunnel-connector between the new – in 1953 – Alaska Way Viaduct on the waterfront and Aurora passed under Denny Way at a speed inconvenient for circling back to either the Dog House or the Igloo.

While the Igloo closed, the Dog House moved nearby to 7th and Bell and survived until the last whiskey was served to the sing-along organist on Jan. 31 1994.  It was still a workingman’s and workingwomen’s bar filled with tough sentimentality even on that last night.  The bartender’s closing hour instructions are quoted in Floyd Waterson’s historylink reminiscence, article #3472,   “It’s time folks – get the X out of my bar.  I wanna go home; they quite paying me.”

DOG HOUSE EXTRAS

Here, for your kind canine consideration, we include more dog (and one cat) photos.

Reuben and Richard Odman moved their namesake “fine food” restaurant into the Dog House once Bob Murray moved out to his new and nearby location on 7th Avenue.  Murray made certain that former customers kept with him by lifting a billboard shouting – seen here on the right –  “The Dog House has MOVED” with a big arrow pointing towards 7th avenue.   From the east the sign blocked any easy view of Odman’s.  It must have peeved the brothers.  The Odman’s Westernaire Room was one of only thirty-three cocktail lounges listed in the City Director for 1955.  This tax photo dates from 1953, and it is clear that the art of taking snapshots for the county assessors office has continued to slip significantly since the late 1930s WPA survey.

I snapped this repeat of the old Dog House site in 2001, safely from my car, keeping well away from the lure of the posted banner that indicated I could “Make Big $$$, Earn $1,000 or More a Week” while the Déjà vu (which seems to have been there for decades but could not have been) was “contracting entertainers.”  Most of the cash promised would have been in very loose change.

In the late 1930s when Ivar Haglund first opened his waterfront aquarium (Then on pier 3, which was renamed pier 54 during WW2, and this might be a reminder to consult this DSB site’s generously illustrated history of the Seattle Waterfront.) his star baby seal Patsy went moody and refused to feed.  As with almost every turn or happenstance in his professional life as a fish monger (both swimming and cooked) Ivar turned the problem into an opportunity for promotion.  Here a generous dog owner has pulled his generous dog from her pups for Patsy’s nutrition.  Did it work?  The answer to that requires more research.

From Dog House to dog in house with a cat.  This peaceable kingdom was photographed by Horace Sykes, long-time Magnolia resident and a “master of the picturesque” with his landscape Kodachromes, which we will soon feature on DSB.  Horace took this snapshot sometime in the 1940s or early 50s.  He rarely either dated or named his subjects. Horace passed in late 1956 at the age of 70.  Too young for such an artist and Mutual Insurance Company Inspector – retired.

Another and rare snapshot by Horace perhaps while on an insurance investigation.  Typically, he neither named nor dated the scene. But from internal evidence we know that this is the town of Okanogan and that’s the local high school band coming on.  To keep to our dog motif, the man in logger’s wear parading nearly alone in the foreground presents, with the help of a dog, his allusion to a real parade commonplace, posts: like marching veterans from local VFW posts and marching bands from posts too.  Here his dog carries a sign that reads, “Any Old Post.”  And that is brilliant parody on the sometimes smug military variety.  The broad rope required to handle this “float” is a nice touch too.

I took an extended pause before choosing this snapshot over another of the once popular Igloo.  (That last was written for the Pacific Magazine of March 27, 2005.  Here we may show both views of the Igloo, and one of Irene, an Igloo employee, as well.)  The view looks north across Aurora Avenue in 1942; a long and prosperous year after construction began on this roadside attraction in the fall of 1940.  Unlike the second and sharper view, here the focus is a little soft, indicating perhaps the compromises a taxman must make rushing with his or her camera through the day’s list for needed snapshots of new taxable structures.

The Igloo (actually two igloos with the conventional ice tunnel door between them) was made of steel sheeting, and their texture and “knitting” are evident in the second photo.  Also in the 1954 photo two oversized penguins on the roof seem to be running for the “good food” advertised also on the roof.  An awning has been attached above the windows with a transforming effect.  With the overhanging and circling shades the icehouse resembles two nesting eggs with eyelashes.  It is more surreal than Eskimo.

Like its longer-lived neighbor the Dog House, the Igloo was set at the Denny Way gateway to the Aurora Speedway section of the Coast Highway expecting to lure motorists while becoming a Mecca for locals as well.  Still the Igloo closed about the time that the Battery Street Tunnel opened in the mid-1950s connecting Aurora with the Alaska Way Viaduct and bypassing Denny Way and the penguins.

Readers interested in some of the humanity attached to this architectural fantasy will enjoy a visit to historylink.org.  One delight is Heather MacIntosh’s interview with Irene Wilson who found work and a new family at the Igloo in 1941 after the petite teenager fled a difficult step mom in North Dakota.  After this first appeared in 2005 I got a fine letter from Kim Douglas, Irene’s granddaughter.

Here follows most of that letter, and the snapshot of its shy – in some ways – subject, which Kim explains.

I’m writing this as a personal (and rather belated) thank-you to you for your March 27 “Now and Then” article on the Igloo Drive-In. I’ve enjoyed your photos and writings for years, but this one was personal, as you made mention of Irene Wilson and her historylink.org interview; Irene was my grandmother.

Irene passed away in October of 2001, and she’s sorely missed by many…but she was always the same fierce, funny (sometimes inadvertently so!) woman who emerged in her historylink interview profile. I was really delighted to have the opportunity to share her with Seattle again, for a moment.

I’m attaching a photograph we found after her death–Irene in full Igloo uniform! She is, unfortunately, hiding her face, as she continued to do for the next 60 years…

We have a multitude of pictures of Grandma’s hand, or the back of Grandma’s head, or Grandma holding up a hat or a baby to obscure herself. But this is the only one of her in her carhop days that survived…hair-bow, tassled boots, and all.

Thank you again, and best wishes,
Kim Douglas

The Igloo, the once popular provider of Husky Burgers and ice-cold Boeing Bombers, was a lure to both motorists on Aurora and locals.   The older view of it looks north across Denny Way to the block between 6th and Aurora Avenues.  It is used courtesy of the Washington State Archive, the Bellevue branch of it where the tax photos are kept.  I took the repeat in color but divested it of it for the Times grayscale purposes.  The newer view of the Igloo is from 1954, and was recorded from the parking lot.  It is used courtesy of the Seattle Public Library.   No “now” is included of this later recording.

(click to enlarge)

At the northeast corner of 3rd Ave. and University Street, Alexander Pantages opened this terra-cotta landmark in 1915, a likely date for this view of it during late construction.  The tall “Pantages” sign has not yet been attached to the corner.  “Benny” Marcus Priteca was a mere 23 when he took on the assignment to design the theatre.  He was so admired by Pantages that he created scores more of the “vaudeville king’s” theatres across the continent.

Like this Seattle Pantages, and the surviving Pantages in Tacoma, many of the bigger theatres were fronted with office blocks.  Because this was also the anchor for Pantages’ chain of theatres the grand promoter himself took many of these offices facing Third Avenue.  By 1926 there were 72 theatres in the Pantages circuit, which meant that traveling stage acts could be contracted for over a year of work and deals could be made.

The standard faire was a mix of vaudeville and film, and some more famous performers like Al Jolson, Buster Keaton, and Sophie Tucker appeared at the Pantages in both, although not at the same time.  After the Pantages became the Palomar in 1936 and then owned and operated by John Danz and his Sterling Theatre Company, film continued in a mix with stage acts, and Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Peggy Lee, and a fresh Frank Sinatra climbed to this stage.

The “Singing MC” Jerry Ross managed the Palomar from 1937 to 45, and for more years than those ran a theatrical booking agency out of the 6th floor.  By famed restaurateur John Franco’s recounting, four flights down on the second floor a different “bookie” was running “horse book” – or race gambling – during the late depression when pay offs reached as far as the mayor – through the police.

Jerry Ross was MC for the Pantages-Palomar’s “Last Curtain Party” on May 2 1965.  The then locally popular Jackie Souders band played for the dancing.  A year later the finishing touches were being bolted to the University Properties parking garage that took the place – sort of – of the then merely 50-year-old but lost classy landmark.

WEB-ONLY EXTRAS

Plymouth Congregational Church Twice on University Street

Now follow two former now-then features that appeared first in Pacific Northwest magazine.   The first shows Plymouth Congregational Church at the northeast corner of Third and University.  It appeared in The Times on August 13, 2000 and gives a thumbnail history of the congregation – well, a clipping from that thumbnail.  But it was written for a similar  but different photograph of the sanctuary, one which I cannot for the moment uncover in my piles or files.  But this later view will do, and it also reveals work progressing on the Federal Building, AKA the Post Office, behind it.  So the date is early 20th century, say ca. 1906.  We will skip any special “now” shot for this.  We have Jean’s for the “lead” story (above) taken on the same corner.

A few other views of this corner follow this first story.  Each is briefly captioned.  When I can find them we will post two or three slides of the Palomar’s destruction for the building of the parking garage, which is still in place.

The second story is also about the influential downtown Congregationalists, and records a moment during the cornerstone laying of the church at its then new site on 6th Avenue between Seneca and University Streets, where it is still, although in a different “plant.”   This feature originally appeared in The Times on May 22, 2005.

GOTHIC PILE

The boom in building that followed the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 was not, of course, limited to the burned district.  While the ruins cooled the local economy heated up as the march of immigration into Seattle during the late 1880s quickly broke into a stampede.  Although the original sanctuary of the local Congregationalists escaped the fire it was much too small for a congregation multiplying like loaves and fishes.  The northeast corner lot at 3rd Avenue and University Street was purchased for a price considerably smaller than the $32,000 got for the sale of the original church site on Second Avenue between Seneca and Spring streets.  That pioneer property had been donated 18 years earlier by Seattle pioneers and Plymouth parishioners Arthur and Mary Denny.  From the beginning the list of Plymouth’s members was filled with local leaders.

Following the 1889 fire Seattle was well stocked with architects – most of them new in town – searching the ruins for commissions.   The Congregationalist’s, however, chose William E. Boone, an architect already responsible for many of the city’s pre-fire landmarks including Henry and Sara Yesler’s mansion also on Third Avenue.  About the time he got the job in 1890 Boone formed a partnership with William H. Willcox, who brought with him considerable experience in building churches in the Midwest.  Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, of the University of Washington’s School of Architecture, speculates that it may have been the experienced Wilcox who served as primary designer for this soaring brick pile done in the then still popular Gothic Revival style.

The cornerstone for the new church was laid on July 31, 1891.   A half year later the The Plymouth Church Herald announced to a congregation, which for the past year had been worshiping nearby in the Armory on Union Street, that although their new church was completed the pews were late in arriving and “inasmuch as the floor of the auditorium slopes, it will not be comfortable to attempt seating it with chairs.”  While not elegant the parishioners response to this set back was direct — they shortened the back legs of the church’s chairs so that services in the new sanctuary could begin almost at once.

In 1910 after briefly considering developing their Third Avenue corner with a new combination church, office and business building, the congregation decided to build a new church three blocks east at 6th Avenue.  Vaudeville impresario Alexander Pantages purchased the old corner and replaced this church will his namesake theater.  As a sign of those booming times, Pantages paid the church $325,000, or a little more than ten times what the Congregationalist’s received 20 years earlier for their original site on Second Avenue.

PLYMOUTH CORNERSTONE

Here on the Sunday afternoon of July 30, 1911 at the southwest corner of University Street and Sixth Avenue the members of Plymouth Congregational Church are laying the cornerstone for their third sanctuary. A mere three blocks from their second home at the northeast corner of Third and University, Plymouth picked it after Alexander Pantages, the great theatre impresario, made the  congregation an offer that was convincing.

In a passage from the 1937 parish history The Path We Came By this scene is described. “The shabby old frame tenements of the neighborhood, gray with dust from regrade steam shovels, must have looked down in amazement at the crowd gathered there that Sunday afternoon, women in silks and enormous beflowered hats, men in their sober best.” From the scene’s evidence, bottom-center, we may add one barefoot boy with his pants rolled up.

While the surrounding tenements were really not so old they were certainly dusty for the lots and streets of this Denny Knoll (not hill) neighborhood were still being scraped with regrades. Less than ten months following this ceremony the completed church was dedicated on Sunday May 12,1912. On Monday an open house featured “music, refreshments and athletics” and also “130 doors – all open.”

Fifty years later Plymouth’s interim senior minister, Dr. Vere Loper, described another dusty scene. “Wrecking equipment has leveled off buildings by the wholesale around us. The new freeway under construction is tearing up the earth in front of us, and the half bock behind us is being cleared for the beautiful IBM Building.” Plymouth’s answer was to stay put and rebuild. Opened in 1967, the new sanctuary was white and gleaming like its neighbor the IBM tower and seemed like a set with it, in part, because the same architectural firm, NBBJ, designed both.

THE BLOGADDENDUM

In 1933 the Pike Street Theatre opened with a fine Art Deco façade topped, incongruously, with clumsy roof supports for a grand sign.  It closed as the Town Theatre in 1986, but for most of its life it was, as the sign says, the Roosevelt. Hanging inside to either side of the stage were large portraits of Franklin and Teddy – the presidential Roosevelts.

The likely date here is 1941. That spring the features playing in the Roosevelt’s double bill were both released. (If you are thinking of renting the video, “The Devil and Miss Jones”, a romantic comedy with Jean Arthur, Robert Cummings, Charles Coburn, and Edmund Gwenn has got much better reviews than “Model Wife.”  Also for 1941, the Chevy’s rear end on the far left has that year’s curves.

In the 1941 city directory there are 44 motion picture theatres listed. Most of them – twenty-six – are out in the neighborhoods.  As expected most of the downtown theatres are at its north end with the big retailers.  Within three blocks of the Roosevelt, at 515 Pike Street, are nine others: the Blue Mouse, Capitol, Coliseum, Embassy, 5th Avenue, Music Box, Orpheum, Colonial, and Winter Garden theatres.  If I have figured correctly, only the 5th Avenue survives – a venue for touring stage shows.

On this south side of Pike between 5th and 6th Avenue we find in the directory’s continuous street listings nine retailers.  For “old time’s sake” we will name them starting at the 5th Avenue corner with Friedlander Jewelers and continuing east with Staider’s Delicatessen, Coast Radio, Michael and Coury Men’s Furnishing, Burt’s Jewelry Store (here just right of the Roosevelt,) Anderson’s Confections, and the once very popular Green Apple Pie Restaurant.  Like McDonalds with hamburgers The Green Apple kept updating their sidewalk sign with how many pies they had sold.  The Brewster Cigar Company completed the block.

The view below – the right half only – was first presented in Pacific Magazine on Sunday July 29, 1984. That was early in my figuring with the Times: the third year now of twenty-seven. I also included it in Seattle Now and Then, Volume Two, the second of three collections of the Times features that I self-published under Tartu Publications. (All are out of print now, although I have a few in “private” preserve.) I’ll use now most of the text from ’84, but I’ll also add some points, especially about the added left half of the pan.

First, as a bit of a tease, I challenge the reader through the course of this little essay to locate the future site of the by now long-gone Roosevelt Theatre (later the Town) on the south side of Pike Street mid-block between 5^th and 6^th. Of course, you can cheat and jump to the bottom of all this and find it in a detail pulled from the panorama.

[Please Click Twice to Enlarge.]

The pan was photographed in 1885 by I do not know whom from the southern slope of the southern summit of Denny Hill. (Roughly, Virginia Street ran between the hill’s two humps.) This is residential and academic Seattle. It includes the UW campus on Denny Knoll, left-of-center. The commercial district around Pioneer Place (or Square if you prefer) is to the photograph’s distant right and just this side of the tideflats. The tide is in and laps against the western side of Beacon Hill, the long ridge on the horizon.

It was in 1885 that Arthur Denny began referring to this prospect – his hill – not by his own name but by what he hoped for it. He called it Capitol Hill. Denny schemed to kidnap the territorial capitol from Olympia and build the state’s new political campus on his hill.

The extended rear of Arthur and Mary Denny’s home at the southeast corner of Union Street and First Avenue (then still named Front Street) appears on the far right of the pan. The lawn – the family cow’s pasture – behind their long home separates it from the family barn that sits here at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and Union Street. Continue one block north on Second (towards the hill) and you come to Pike Street. There at the northeast corner sits the barn – with the shining roof – for the city’s horse trolley. The “bobtail cars” began running in 1884. The line of the tracks can be seen extending down Second Avenue. At Pike the rails turned one block west to First and then turned north again for the final leg through Belltown and eventually as far north as lower Queen Anne. Continuing now north on Second Ave. from Pike Street, its intersection with Pine is just missed off the page to the right. Third Avenue ascends from the scene’s center.

In this neighborhood humbler homes were mixed with a few mansions. The Italianate style was popular in the 1880s and a few examples can be found in the pan.  Many of the lots were large ones with room enough for a generous garden, a few fruit trees and a lawn. Many properties were separated from their neighbors and the city’s often elevated wood plank sidewalks by picturesque picket fences. Second Avenue was graded (smoothed) in 1883, in plenty of time to lay the trolley tracks.

Of the seven churches that can be seen here, the only obvious one is the Swedish Lutheran Evangelical Gethsemane Congregation on the east side of Third and just north of Pike Street. That puts it near the center-bottom of the pan. The Lutherans are very new here. The church was dedicated on February 22, 1885 – this year. It was Seattle’s first Scandinavian and also Lutheran church and its pastor, Dr. G. A. Anderson, spent alternative Sundays here and in Seattle’s material/spiritual rival, Tacoma. (Which town would be blessed and if Dr. Anderson knew would he also tell?)

I must confess that in this panorama the church – the sanctuary – is itself split. When I merged the overlapping sides, left and right, the buildings all fit as I expected that they would. I chose to make the cut near the center of the church. But then looking above the church roof to the greenbelt on the south side of Union Street where it holds the northern border of the U.W. campus on Denny Knoll, I learned that although the two parts of the pan were photographed from same place on Denny Hill they were not taken at the same time – not even the same season. To elaborate we need to first identify the territorial campus’ main building.

It is, of course, the white box on the knoll with classic columns presented at its front door on the west façade that faces both the community and Puget Sound. On the other or east side of the school is the large leafy Maple that still had another twenty years before it was cut down. And here is a surprise. In the left half of the panorama the leaves on the maple have dropped but not on the right half.  The line or border between the part of the tree with leaves and the same tree without leaves is obvious. What’s more there are lots of leafy trees on the right half of the pan and none that I can find on the left side of it. Also the left hand side of the pan is exposed to a sun that can still light the northern sides of the buildings before its flight south, while the light on the right half of the pan is flat or flatter. These differences border on the mysterious, for how does one join a northern light with a leafless neighborhood? But we must allow it and remember that this neighborhood is not on the “true compass.” That may account for it. I will speculate that the mysterious photographer took the right hand or western panel first and later in the year returned to take the left half, thinking that a pan that included the city growing up First Hill was more marketable than one merely of the “old” city.

The university’s main structure for classes and offices was built on Denny’s Knoll in 1861 near the northeast corner of 4^th Avenue and Seneca Street. Fourth Avenue then stopped at Seneca and did not proceed north through the campus. It resumed its path north of Union Street – as it does still in the panorama. (And returning to the tease, that is a telling clue for finding the mid-block on Pike between 5^th and 6^th Avenues.) Behind and to the left of the university, is Providence Hospital, which was enlarged throughout the 1880s, as the Catholic sisters care was much the most popular in town. Here it has but one tower. Soon it will have three. The hospital faced Fifth Avenue between Madison and Spring Streets, where stands since the early 40s the federal courthouse. The grand white box to its left is Central School. It nearly fills the block bordered by Madison, Marion, 6^th and 7^th Avenues. It opened on May 7, 1883 and burned to the ground in the spring of 1888. Coming again to the photographer’s side of the university’s main building, another white box is snug in the green belt. This is the three-story home for the Young Naturalists Club. This society of scientifically curious specimen collectors was the beginning of the Washington State Museum, which in 1985 celebrated its centennial in its present modern home, the Burke Museum, on the U.W. Campus.

On the First Hill horizon of the left-hand panel are a few landmarks that in 1885 were nearly new. Coppins water tower (and works) pokes up about one-third of the way into the scene from its left border. To its left is Col. Haller’s mansion Castlemount with its own tower at the northeast corner of James and Minor.

On the far left is the green belt covered in last week’s offering, that of the steepest part of First Hill where University Street climbs – or attempts to – between 8^th and 9^th Avenues. This generous document is, of course, filled with many other identifiable landmarks but we will take mercy and exit this tour here – except to add what follows.

For all the familiar charm that entwines this mid-1880s scene, the year 1885 was remembered by pioneer historian-journalist Thomas Prosch, then the Post-Intelligencer’s editor, as characterized by “a great deal of ugly feeling . . .the times were hard and the hands of all seemed to be raised against others. Grievances were common and relief measures took violent shape.” The economic depression that followed the economic crash of 1883 kept the times dull in spite of the flood of immigration that followed the completion also that year of the Northern Pacific’s transcontinental. The new railroad brought west a hopeful flood of single men looking for work, but what they found were opportunities that required not labor but cash. Those who had the where-with-all to buy land in 1885 had golden futures – at least until the next crash in 1893. The result was a volatile split between labor and capital that erupted into race riots in both Tacoma and Seattle, which must have tested Pastor Anderson. The scapegoats of working class resentment were the Chinese and the capitalists who exploited their relatively cheap but effective labor.

[Both the panorama and its detail below, which shows the mid-block on Pike between 5th and 6th Avenues, are used courtesy of the University of Washington, Special Collections.  They are in the basement of the Allen Library.]

(click to enlarge photos)

There were only two precipitous places along the west side of what the pioneers soon learned to call First Hill where an imprudent trailblazer might have fallen to injury or worse.  These steep exceptions would be obvious once the forest was reduced to stumps.  But when the old growth was intact it was best to stay on native paths or stray with caution, especially to two future prospects on 9th Avenue – the one near Jefferson St. and the other here on University Street.

Exploring the hillside behind Jefferson Terrace at 8th one can still intimate the cliff, which Seattle Housing’s largest and probably also highest low-income facility nestles.  Eighth Ave. stops just south of James Street at that high-rise, because the cliff behind it never would allow the avenue to continue south.

The other steep exception was here on University Street where it climbed – or tried to climb – east up First Hill between 8th and 9th Avenues.  The goal is half made. On University, 9th  has two levels and only pedestrians – like the gent here descending the steps – could and can still climb between them.  All others had to approach the lower of the two intersections from below.  They could throttle their motorcar into the photographer’s point-of-view west up University from 8th Avenue, or they could make another steep climb from the north, up from Hubble Place.

The bridge is another exception.  It reached from the upper intersection of 9th and University to the top floor of the Normandie Apartments, whose south façade we see here covered in Ivy.  Thanks to Jacqueline Williams and Diana James for a helpful peek into their work-in-progress “Shared Walls: Seattle Apartments 1900-1939.”  We learn that when it was built a century ago James Schack, the Normandie’s architect, included the bridge as a convenience to the big apartment’s residents who rented 84 units, and all of them with disappearing beds.

For another view of the same location prior to Freeway Park, check out this post at Vintage Seattle.

WEB-EXTRAS

Now follows four views of our subject: the steep northwest “corner” of First Hill.   All four look to the east-southeast from Denny Hill, or with the last of the four what replaced part of it, the New Washington Hotel.   In order, the circa dates are 1882, 1890, 1903 and 1911.  With a little more study the dates could be made precise for with the last three views especially there is enough internal evidence to encourage a reader to visit the public library’s Seattle Room for some fine tuning.

I think it likely that this view of our subject was photographed mid-September 1882, by the famous California photographer Carleton Watkins.  From a platform he erected on the south or front hump of Denny Hill Carleton took an eight-part panorama, or so the Post-Intelligencer (rest in peace) claimed on Sept. 22, 1882.  “He got a very good view of Lake Union.”  Well, not so good really.  In that part of his pan the lake can barely be seen through the stumps and rejected trees of the ravaged forest.  But this view to the east-southeast is more revealing.  There is still a greenbelt of forest holding to that northwest corner of First Hill. Like Watkins’ obstructed look north to Lake Union, this is the first view of this part of First Hill – but I hope to be corrected by new discoveries.  (This photo was first shared with me by Loomis Miller.)

We hope that there survive better prints of this view, which was also taken from the south summit of Denny Hill.  The corner of Third Ave. and Pike Street shows far right.  Our subject, far left, has been stripped of its forest, but not yet developed.  Being steep it is still land avoided for construction.  The Methodist Protestant church is nearing completion in the middle-ground at the southeast corner of Pine Street and Third Avenue.  “Bagley’s Church” lost its parish at Second and Madison to the “Great Fire” of 1889, and this congregation like many others sold their pioneer property for much more than this corner lot then still on the fringe cost them.  A likely date is 1890 or early 1891.  (Picture courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

From this prospect of the old Denny/Washington Hotel atop that south summit of Denny Hill we may ascend the steeple of the Norwegian-Danish Lutheran Church at the northeast corner of 4th Avenue and Pine Street and continue to the barren hillside block bordered by 8th and 9th avenues and Seneca and University Street, our subject, or part of it.  To the left of this cleared block is the intersection of 9th and University – both levels of it.  A steep bank of spilled fill dirt separates them.  It is from the top of that formation that the bridge would lead to the upper floors of the Normandie.  Top-center is the Ohaveth Sholem Synagogue showing its rear facade.  It was built in 1892 for what was Seattle’s first Jewish congregation.  It sits close to the northwest corner of Seneca and 8th Avenue, where the Exeter is now, and across Seneca from where Christian Scientists would build what is now Town Hall at the southwest corner of Seneca and 8th.  The steeple of the Unitarian Church is far left, on the east side of 7th Avenue, north of Union Street.  Above the synagogue at the northeast corner of Minor Ave. and James Street, the tower of Castlemont, the first oversized home – or mansion – built on First Hill, punctures the horizon.  Col. Granville O. Haller was the owner.

While Otto Frasch’s “real photo postcards” cannot always be dated by their number – here #210 – that is no excuse for my uncertainty of the exact date for this scene, which was taken not from Denny Hill (or Hotel) but from the New Washington Hotel at the northeast corner of Stewart Street and Second Avenue (now the Josephinum).  There certainly is a splendor of evidence here for dating – I just have not made the effort.  Like you dear reader, I’ll wait on another reader to peg the year, and perhaps even the month – or nearly and share them with us as a comment.  Here, far right, architect William Doty Van Siclen’s Northern Bank and Trust Company Building (now the Seaboard Building) at the northeast corner of 4th Avenue and Pike Street has its full-storied 1909 addition.  And the architect-developer Van Siclen’s namesake Van Siclen apartment building also appears here above the Seaboard Building, where facing 8th Avenue from its east side and mid-block between Seneca and University Streets, it is also a key to this week’s subject-neighborhood, that steep northwest corner of First Hill.  The Van Siclen was recently torn down, and the last I looked – when accompanying Jean for his “now” view in Freeway Park, it was still a hole.  (Perhaps Jean took a photo of it and will add it here later.)  The corner bottom-center is 4th Avenue and Pine Street.  The triangular Plaza Hotel with bay windows and nice details – frame not brick or tile – was built in 1906-07 when Westlake Avenue was being cut through the neighborhood between 4th and Pike and Denny Way.  The nearly new Normandie Apartments are easy to find, right-of-center at the northwest corner (lower level, you know) of 9th Avenue and University Street.  They appear above the roof of Hotel Wilhard.

As a closing on this subject, here is photographer Robert Bradley’s 1963 look into Seattle Freeway construction through the rubble of the apartment houses that once stood on the north side of Madison between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.  The freeway ditch here is not yet dug.  First Presbyterian is far right (the penultimate sanctuary to the modern one used now).   The Beaux-Arts Christian Scientist church – now Town Hall – is next.  Exeter House, another survivor, is at the scene’s center and like the Sholum Congregation before it stands at the “gate” to the steep neighborhood shown and described this week.  The reader may wish to compare Jean’s “After Gotterdaemerung” look into the I-5 trench at night from nearly the same prospect.  It is included two contributions below.

Having printed this week’s Pacific Northwest feature on Cowen Park already last week (the third and fourth features below), we offer here a page from developer Charles Cowen’s promotional booklet with the title we have used above – with Keats and the rest.  And we have also included here his map of both the park he had then freshly donated to the city and his addition, which he hoped to sell to its citizens lot by lot – and did.

We chose the page titled, “Some of the Reasons Why Cowen’s University Park is Such Desirable Property” for its sometimes amusing “reasons.”  The proposal that Seattle would reach a census population of 500,000 by 1910 was about two times too ambitious.  Still Cowen sold his lots.

And the map.  In the booklet it is folded and attached to the back inside cover of the booklet.  The path of the stream may be a bit fanciful in its drawing, but it is probably close to the correct course the Green Lake outlet took on its way to Lake Washington’s Union Bay.  (We have “printed” this somewhat large so it may take a bit longer for some computers to load/show it.)

[click to enlarge]

(click to enlarge)

In 1941 several hundred women attended the Home of Good Shepherd’s annual open house for tea and a tour at the “summit” of Wallingford.  Among the attractions visited were the “well-stocked fruit rooms.”   Much of that fruit, of course, came from the institution’s own orchard, which here, with its gnarled trunks and matted grass, resembles a painting by Vincent Van Gough except that these trees – some of them – still bear apples in Wallingford and not olives in Saint-Remy.

The date for this wild portrait of a temporarily abandoned orchard falls between 1973, when the Home of the Good Shepherd closed and both its sisters and resident girls moved out, and 1981 when the Seattle Park Department turned the orchard into a playfield and park while saving some of the fruit trees.

It might have been used for retail. After closure the first inviting proposal for purchase came quickly to the sisters from a Los Angeles developer who wanted to rework the Good Shepherd campus into a shopping mall.  Concerned Wallingfordians – notably the Wallingford Community Council – just as quickly organized against this offer. For a mall, zoning would have needed to be changed, and the citizens made sure it was not.

The community council next successfully persuaded the city to use 1975 Forward Thrust funds to purchase the 11-acre campus.  A little more than half of it went to the Park Department.  Most of the rest became home for arts and culture non-profits with the non-park properties they used managed by Historic Seattle, the advocate of historic preservation. Urban agriculture – with Tilth and the Wallingford P-Patch – also continues to be part of the nourishing mix at home on the old Good Shepherd Campus.

Rustic constructions were common features in Seattle’s first parks. The rough-hewed twists and textures of the region’s own materials gave these generally fanciful creations — pergolas, bandstands, benches, bridges, fences, portals — a feeling of having grown with the landscape. The original gateway to Cowen Park was a sizable example.

Cowen Park was given to the city by an English immigrant who stipulated that in return for the 12 acres a marker be placed commemorating his gift. Actually, Charles Cowen’s family name was Cohen not Cowen and their wealth was made largely from the diamond mines of South Africa. Coming to America on business for the family mines Charles decided to stay and soon changed his name.

The 41-year-old Cohen-Cowen arrived in Seattle in 1900 and purchased 40 acres of cleared but not yet platted land north of the University District. It was the part of these acres that bordered Ravenna Park, which he gave to the city with his namesake provision. The remaining flatter acres he platted and sold, generally prospering from them and his other Seattle investments.

Cowen also paid for the construction of the rustic gateway at the park’s southeast corner where University Way crosses Ravenna Boulevard. Within two years of his gift the city had cleared the park of its underbrush, built a shelter house and groomed the brook which ran from Green Lake through both Cowen and Ravenna parks on its often babbling way to Lake Washington’s Union Bay. When Green Lake was lowered seven feet in 1911 the creek’s primary source was cut off and its volume restricted to park springs and runoff alone. The creek’s old meandering way between Green Lake and the Cowen-Ravenna ravine was graded over and straightened as Ravenna Boulevard.

Most likely this photograph from the Asahel Curtis studio was recorded late in 1909. The number on the original negative falls near the end of the roughly 4556 studio numbers allotted that year. For Curtis it was a record year for picture taking, in part because the summer-long Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was held in 1909 in a Seattle made photogenic for it. Although Curtis was not the fair’s official photographer, he and many other studios were able to exploit the fair thanks to both citizens and the exceptional surge of visitors who gathered their souvenirs while consuming Seattle.

Most of the greater University District was retouched for AYP including Cowen Park although obviously the hard surface paving on University Way did not make it as far north as the entrance to the park here at Ravenna Boulevard.

Looking here beyond the woman standing with the child and through the original rustic gate it is clear that neither shall man leave the land alone. On the north side of the gate the park drops away into what in 1909 would for only two more years be a babbling ravine. Since the early 1960s it has been a more-or-less level playfield made from one hundred thousand yards of “free fill” scooped away during the creation nearby of the 1-5 Freeway. At the time, to quote from Don Sherwood’s hand-written history of Seattle parks, “Many residents and the Mountaineers Club were appalled.”

Still the fill has had its uses. The hip community’s first Human Be-in was held at Cowen Park in the spring of 1967. Later in August 1971 the Second Annual Frisbee for Peace Intergalactic Memorial Thermogleep U.F.O. Frisbee Festival was held on the settled playfield. However, a proposal from the event’s sponsors, the University District Center to make it an official Seafair event was rejected. At the time future historylink founder, Walt Crowley, directed the Center.

Here on a sunny winter day a young family, most likely from the neighborhood, visits the swings of Cowen Park. Judging from the long shadows and the direction of the flow in the vigorous Ravenna Creek it is an afternoon outing. While several photographs of the creek’s passage through Ravenna Park survive, this is only the second example I can recall of it flowing through Cowen Park.

Its namesake developer Charles Cowen donated the park to the city in 1906 in part to help sell lots in his University Park addition.  All but three of its 14 blocks border the park to the north.

Among the “desirable” reason’s Cowen named for buying a lot were “pure atmosphere, moral environment, proximity to the University – the literary atmosphere will be the best in the world – and no objectionable noises or sights to contend with.”   Except for the overhead flight path to SeaTac, the trucks on 12th and 15th Avenues Northeast, and television in every home, this is still largely true.

Like all the scenes in the family album from which this one was copied, the date is sometime between 1908 and 191l, but not deep into 1911 for that spring the level of Green Lake, the source of Ravenna Creek, was dropped seven feet. The loss of both the lake’s original shoreline and the natural outflow of its creek to Lake Washington’s Union Bay were controversial at that time and are still annoying at this time.   After the 1911 lowering the only babbling in the Cowen-Ravenna ravine was from a few springs and run-off.

(click to enlarge photos)

It is very rare for this little weekly feature to get its present before its past, and yet for this comparison I photographed the “now” view of the water end of Pier 70 before I found the “then.”  Aboard an Argosy tour boat I prudently recorded everything along the waterfront.  That was in 2006 – about.  A sign for the law firm Graham and Dunn, the pier’s principal tenant since 2003, shares the west wall with the pier number.  Although it is not a perfect match with the “then,” it will do for studying the latest remodel of this big wharf at the foot of Broad Street.

Constructed in 1901-2 for the salmon packers Ainsworth and Dunn, at 570 x 175 feet it was the first large pier at the north end of the waterfront. Here nearly new, it seems still in need of paint and shows no signs of signs and few of work.  On the left, Broad Street makes a steep climb to what is now Seattle Center. The northern slope of Denny Hill draws the horizon on the right.  (It is still several years before that hill was razed for the regrade.)

Besides Salmon, through its first 70 years Pier 70 was the Puget Sound port for several steamship companies including the English Blue Funnel and the German Hamburg American lines.  Among the imports handled here were cotton, tea, rubber, liquor (It was a warehouse for the state’s Liquor Control Board during Word War 2.) and soybeans.  The beans were processed across Alaska Way from Pier 70 in what is now the Old Spaghetti Works, although not for a nutritious gluten free noodle but for glue used in the making of plywood.

Joining the general central waterfront tide from work to play, Pier 70 was converted to retail in 1970.  Still far from the central waterfront, it was no immediate success.  There was then no waterfront trolley, no Sculpture Garden, and, next door, no new Port of Seattle.  By now both the Belltown and Seattle Center neighborhoods above the pier are piling high with condo constructions and conversions and the waterfront foot of Broad is quite lively.

WEB EXTRA

Until the numbers were changed by the military along the entire shoreline of Elliott Bay during World War Two, Pier 70 was numbered Pier 14 – as we see it here, again from off-shore.  The roofline of some structures on the horizon are the same as those that appear in the earlier scene.  The signs that faced shipping broadcast names that were long familiar ones for Pier 14/70 – Ainsworth and Dunn (barely readable at the top of this west facade), the Blue Funnel Line, and the Dodwell Dock and Warehouse Company.

Many of these names appear also on the Railroad Avenue side of Pier 70 in this view of it sent this way by Ron Edge, who appears in this blog not infrequently as a contributor, often with a “button” we have named “Edge Clippings.”

Certainly the local enthusiasm directed to this year’s centennial celebration for Seattle’s “first world’s fair,” the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition, exceeds that demonstrated for Seattle’s 150th anniversary: its sesquicentennial of only a few years past.  The exhibits, web sites, and publications interpreting AYP are a big basket, and it is filling.

An early example is enthusiast-collector-scholar Dan Kerlee’s site aype.com.  Dan also gave generous help toward the publishing of historylink’s “timeline history” of the AYPE.  Vintage Seattle is another community website that is attending this centennial.  Visit www.vintageseattle.org/2008/05/28/hoo-are-you-hoo-hoo and you will discover undated snapshots of the AYP’s Hoo-Hoo building – here on the left – when it was still used by the University of Washington’s Faculty Club.

Ellsworth Storey, the northwest architect admired for his variations on the Craftsman style, designed it for the Hoo-Hoos, not a club for retired Santas but a lumbermen’s fraternity, which used it throughout the fair for banquets and parties in which their love for cats and the number 9 always played some part.  Nine house cats helped run the place, curling up at night on any piece of mission-style furniture they preferred.  Sculpted black cats with electric green eyes met visitors near the front door.

The more rustic structure on the right was a facsimile of the Hudson Bay Company’s blockhouse at Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.  In 1909 the original was a mere 56 years old and a century later it survives as one of the oldest buildings in British Columbia.  The AYP facsimile was commissioned by and served as fair headquarters for the Vancouver B.C. Daily World newspaper.

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 the Seattle 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.”  And that is discipline!

WEB-ONLY EXTRAS

LEWIS AND CLARK HALLS

When the University of Washington’s first dormitories on the new campus were constructed in 1899, they were arranged to give students inspiring views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains.  Most of the university presidents that UW president Frank Graves canvassed for recommendations on dormitories advised against them, usually on the grounds of hormones.. They would be hard to control.  A minority, however, saw the spiritual side of students staying on campus.  Because students had to endure long and overcrowded trolley rides between the school and the city, there was  – both students and regents agreed – “a remarkable lack of college spirit.”

Graves estimated that in 1899 there were, at most, accommodations for 30 students in the homes of Brooklyn (the name then for the U District).  Graves’ hopes that neighborhood churches might set up dorms came to nothing.  Truth was, Brooklyn had more cows than citizens, and their free-ranging habits were so annoying that the school fenced the campus with barbed wire.  When the students moved into their new Lewis (for men) and Clark (for women) halls in January 1900, they had their own cows corralled behind the dorms.  The 130 men and women shared a dining room – and the milk – in the basement of the women’s dorm.

The president advised his married faculty to follow his example and invite students home so they might “ become acquainted with good homes and learn the usages of the best society.” But when Graves made an unannounced inspection of the women’s dorm while investigating charges of lax discipline, he found their rooms generally “unkempt.”  The coeds responded by marching around campus and singing a parody of their president to the tune of “We Kept the Pig in the Parlor.”

Werner Lenggenhager, Seattle’s splendidly active post-war photographer of streets and landmarks, whom I have used in this feature several times, recorded the historical Seattle Center scene during the ‘little snow” of November 19, 1978.  I took the “now” while wandering through the generally happy press of humanity at Folklife this past Sunday May 24.  It felt like the first nearly hot day of 2009.

I had just left helping MC a Folklife tribute to a friend, the Seattle folk artist Stan James, who died last October. Since Stan’s survivors both loved him and like to sing together, it was the third wake or tribute for Stan many of us had attended. Soon after gently pushing through the press of “folkies’ I learned that only hours earlier another old friend and musician had died.  The day before at Folklife Jack Hansen led another sing along as a member of The Seatles, “Seattle’s Premier Fab-4 Sing-Along Band.”  It was the last “gig” of a creative life that I remember well already in the mid-60s when Jack played lead guitar in the blues and psychedelic band Fat Jack, a name Jack later shed.

Jack Hansen could play and teach anything: blues, jazz, folk, Hawaiian, strait rock, and again psychedelic.  Stan James kept to singing folk music with his wonderful baritone (or second tenor, for he had range) and creating “folk opportunities,” beginning in the early 60s with the Corroboree, one of the area’s first espresso cafes with live music – folk music.  He performed at Century 21 in 1962 and after that his contributions go on and on.

Both Jack and Stan were also known for their humor and story telling.  Although neither died young, they still passed too early. They played for the forces of happiness.

(As ever, click on photos to enlarge)

We would imagine that it was Gilbert LaBerge and/or Fred Barnier who arranged for their Mount Vernon ferry to be photographed with the burgeoning Skagit County Seat on the far shore, except that one of them is cut off at the knees – either Gilbert or Fred.  The ferry proprietors are both listed in the 1889-90 Washington State Gazetteer as are all the Mt. Vernon hotels whose signs may be read on the far shore – three of them.

The original photo in the Skagit Valley Historical Society’s research library has a caption scrawled on the border: “Mt. Vernon before the fire of 1891.”   The fire destroyed most of the business district shown here and so a new commercial strip was built two blocks to the east, or further from the river.  With the arrival also that year of the Seattle and Northern Railroad, the Skagit River and its steamers got competition in moving the valley’s produce, lumber and citizens to markets.

Two years later in 1893 the first bridge across the river – a wooden truss with a draw span – was built here.  Although more convenient, the bridge was still not much faster than the ferry.  Signs on either side warned, “$25 fine for riding or driving over this bridge faster than a walk.”

The 1889-90 Gazetteer includes an impressive list of Mount Vernon concerns, including two banks, four churches, a skating rink, two music teachers, a cornet band, a sawmill, stores for all the necessities and a few luxuries like jewelry and a billiard hall.

In 1890 the Skagit News (also a book store and job printer) was already six years old and today’s Skagit Valley Herald is its descendent.  (For a great illustrated horde of  “Northwest Corner” history just visit yet another publication, the skagitriverjournal.)

WEB-ONLY EXTRAS

Let’s begin with Jean’s eerie/lovely view from the bridge, just a little bon-bon for all you Mount Vernon lovers.

And now, more of the historical:

Of the three sternwheelers pointing upstream on the Skagit River at Mt. Vernon, the middle one, the Black Prince, can be identified by its nameplate.  A quick survey of citations in the McCurdy Maritime History for Puget Sound reveals that this 92 foot long freight and passenger steamer was built in Everett in 1901 by Robert Houston for service on both the Skagit and Snohomish Rivers.  Beginning in 1923 it was kept around the Everett harbor for use in towing, and then oddly stayed in Everett after it was dismantled in 1936.  The upperworks were carried off by the Everett Yacht Club for a clubhouse until 1956 when the members wanted something new.  What parts of the Black Prince club members did not carry home for souvenirs became kindling, perhaps, for a Port Gardner incinerator.

The bend in the river seen from the hill is the same as that seen from the bridge in the panoramas – then and now – of Mt. Vernon’s waterfront.  It is our speculation – waiting for correction by some Skagit River historian (Noel?) – that this view was taken from a point that now would be suspended over the I-5 Freeway that passes between the business district and the residential hill to the east.  By these impressions the timber trestle is where South Second Street still rises from the business district, although now on a concrete span over the freeway.   And so our hunch also has it that the street on the far left is South Third Street.  (Noel? We mean, of course, Noel Bourasaw founder and nurturer of the on-line publication, the skagitriverjournal.)

(If the Then and Now images directly above seem familiar, you may be the proud owner of the Dorpat/Sherrard tome Washington Then and Now.)

Built in 1892-93 at Mt. Vernon’s First and Pine, southeast corner, the old Skagit County Courthouse survives there as the Matheson Building, but without its playful top story.

Mount Vernon, Second Street and looking north to the trestle that figures in the earlier “Mt. Vernon from the Hill” photo, included with this posting.  Judging from the motorcars, this view dates from circa 1920 (some car-sensitive reader can probably nail the date), while the “hill” picture is from about 1900.  Note that the wooden John Deere building on the left remains today, although obscured by trees.

Before the bridges, and even after them at some crossings, ferries like this one on the Skagit, were ready for a fee to take one and much more to the other side.

(click to enlarge)

Clearly, the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street was good for sales both inside and out. In 1906, the Frederick & Nelson department store expanded from its mid-block quarters in the block-long Rialto building to both corners, at Madison and Spring streets. While the corner sign does not promote baskets, it does list carpets, and its sidewalk “competitor,” the basket vendor recorded here by amateur Leo Snow, also offers mats. Snow’s snapshot is wonderfully unique for its bright-eyed candor.

As confirmed by many other photographs, including a 1911 postcard printed in “Native Seattle,” historian Coll Thrush’s nearly new book from UW Press, this was a popular corner for both selling Native crafts and recording them doing it. Thrush’s postcard shows three of what the postcard’s caption calls “Indian Basket Sellers” huddled at this corner.

When I began giving illustrated talks on Seattle history long ago, I often included a slide of Native American vendors in my show. Many were the times that seniors in the audience would recall having been with their mothers while buying a basket from Chief Seattle’s daughter, and often off this very sidewalk. Since the 86-year-old Princess Angeline died in 1896, this “princess claim” was impossible, I gently explained. Still, however slanted, the memory of sidewalk meetings with Native Americans was still cherished in 1975. Sometime after the farm boy Snow got an engineering degree from Ohio University in 1902, he folded a three-piece suit in his duffle bag and hopped a freight train to Seattle. He was soon on the streets looking for a job. In 1945, Snow retired after working 37 years for Puget Power, and along the way took many more sparkling snapshots with his foldout Kodak.

[ Below is another example of sidewalk sales at the northwest corner of Madison Street and Second Avenue sometime after Frederick and Nelson moved there in 1906.  This view is numbered.  Unlike Snow’s candid recording this was shot with commercial hopes – hopes that were probaby fulfilled for I have seen prints of this scene in different collections.]

This is an addition to a feature that appears six stories below this one, the “Seattle Now and Then” about the 1911 visit of the steamer Suveric at Pier 56 (Or Pier 5 before the renumbering during WW2.  For more on this renaming  check out Part One of the Waterfront History posted on this blog-web.)  That posting also recalled the Seattle Marine Aquarium that opened on the pier for Century 21 in 1962 and carried on into the ’70s.   The walking photographer Frank Shaw is also responsbile for this slide taken on the sidewalk beside the pier in 1970.  There are two causes getting broadside attention here.  Behind the woman with the poodle someone is protesting the aquarium whale show at the other end of the pier.  The woman in blue inspecting the photographer is demanding the release of the Seattle Seven, most of whom were University of Washington students (and one professor) whose protests over the Vietnam War put them in court and ultimately in or on a prison farm for a few months for contempt of court.  The students that is.  The professor never served any time.  You can read Walt Crowley’s summary of this on historylink.  For even more, Google Seattle Seven, but don’t be mislead by that other “Seattle Seven” – some group of businesses that would never have been cast into or onto a prison farm.

[Please CLICK to ENLARGE]

This aerial of the First Hill neighborhood around a nearly new Harborview Hospital is included here because it also shows the Seattle Day Nursery at the northeast corner of Broadway and Boren and Alder.   This Sunday’s “now-and-then” features Childhaven and is printed here directly below this short description of the aerial photograph. The nursery appears far into the upper-left corner.  I confess that so far I do not know the year the aerial was taken.  I am, however, confident that there is enough “information” in it to determine the year.  Hopefully a reader will figure it out before I do.  I will note a few of things only.

Harborview was dedicated in February 1931; one month after the King County Courthouse was razed with the help of 200 sticks of dynamite.  The courthouse held the brink of First Hill facing Seventh Avenue between Terrace and Alder Streets.  That is the cleared and seemingly groomed block just right of center.  Now covered with a helicopter pad, one of Harborview’s lidded parking lots hides in much of that block.  (Perhaps this aerial is from as early as the late spring of 1931.  The Hospital and the ground certainly seem new – hardly disturbed.  The sun is far to the north, judging from those shadows.)

Trinity Episcopal Church shows at the bottom left corner – at the northwest corner of James Street and Eighth Avenue.  On the far right is the fanciful architecture of Seattle City Light’s first substation, located near what would have been the northwest corner of Yesler Way and Seventh Avenue, had Seventh been graded through that steep portion of First Hill.  City Light’s competitor, Puget Power, appears bottom center with the big dark roof and “forest” of power poles.  The Seattle Freeway runs over it now.

The steepest part of the hill appears as a white scar between Trinity Church and Harborview.  This was a cliff.  The aerial’s upper-right corner includes a short stretch of Jackson Street around Ninth Avenue.  Between 1907 and 1909 this section and much else endured the Jackson Street Regrade, which both lowered and raised parts of the neighborhood now variously called Chinatown and the International District.

Of course, this aerial – looking to the southeast – includes many surviving structures that I have not pointed out.  But, again, neither have I conclusively dated it.  The first 700 units of Yesler Terrace were funded in 1939.  A repeat aerial – a “now” – would show their pattern covering much of the right side of this aerial, which is here still variously crowded with Carpenter Gothic classics and a few cheaply built homes that during the Great Depression turned to shacks.

(Please click to enlarge)

In 1942 a Post-Intelligencer photographer visited what were the three centers for a charitable institution then still called Seattle Day Nursery.  The two branches opened in 1925 in West Seattle and in the Cascade Neighborhood, the latter on a lot later razed for the Seattle Freeway.  The main branch was housed in a pleasing brick home built for it in 1921 here at the six star corner of Boren, Broadway and Alder on Capitol Hill.

The children tipping their cups in the historical view are all “clients,” some – maybe most – of them from homes where father is off to war and mother working on the home front, perhaps at Boeing.  In ’42 Seattle Day Nursery was 33 years old and still run by volunteers until 1959 when a professional staff was hired.  All the children in Jean’s “repeat” belong to staff members of Childhaven, the name for the day nursery since 1985.

This is the institution’s Centennial year.  It began in 1909 in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church as a way of helping mostly single mothers who needed to do paying work during the day.  It developed into an activist advocate for the youngest among us who were born to abusive parents who themselves were often repeating a cycle of abuse put on them by their parents.

The philosophical, inventive, persuasive, and dogged Patrick L. Gogerty became the institution’s director in 1973, and used his own abused childhood as a source of both wisdom and compassion in guiding Childhaven into its new mission of “breaking the cycle of abuse and neglect.”  For Childhaven’s next one hundred years Goberty advices “Support it. Nurture it. Love it. Just like you do with kids.”

WEB EXTRAS

Brand new in 1921, landscaping for the Seattle Day Nursery is far from finished.  And yet the nursery is in use.  Children appear to be looking back at the photographer across Broadway Avenue from behind the metal fence on the front porch.  Among the signs leaning against the classy brick home on the right is one for Harry Bittman who is described as both architect and engineer for the new building.   This charity began in 1909 and so is celebrating its centennial and still at this First Hill intersection of Boren and Broadway and Alder, but as Childhaven, the nursery’s “modern” name.  

Another of the Post-Intelligencer’s 1942 records of the nursery, although here of exercising children recessed from its branch in the Cascade neighborhood to show their simian skills for the photographer.  The view looks east from the Cascade playfield.  Cascade school is on the right facing Pontius Avenue and Harrison Street is on the left to the far side of the high steel fence.  The fence and a playfield are still in service, but the nursery and school are both gone from the Cascade neighborhood, which began it steady loss of “residential stock” and families following the Second World War, as it became increasingly a neighborhood of warehouses and light manufacturing.

Most often we choose to retrieve these older now-then features when they dove tale by theme or location with a story that appears now – on a contemporary Sunday – in Pacific Northwest Magazine.  In the past two weeks – or so – we have included three features that relate to the main intersection of First Hill, which is where Boren Avenue and Madison Avenue cross.  We have given touchstone descriptions of the Perry Hotel, the Carkeek Mansion, the Seattle Tennis Club and we also included with the last a second glimpse of the Stacy Mansion and the University Club.  We will visit those again, but later.  Nearby is a high-rise neighbor to these big First Hill homes, the elegant Gainsborough.

Built for class the high-rise apartment at 1017 Minor Avenue on First Hill was named after the English King George III’s favorite painter, Thomas Gainsborough.  As a witness to the place’s status, Colin Radford, president of the Gainsborough Investment Co. that built it, was also the new apartments’ first live-in manager.  And the apartments were large, four to a floor, fifty in all including Radford’s (if I have counted correctly).  What the developer-manager could not see coming when his distinguished apartment house was being built and taking applications was the “Great Depression.”

The Gainsborough was completed in 1930 a few months after the economic crash of late 1929.   This timing was almost commonplace for the building boom of the late 1920s continued well into the early 1930s.   The quality of these apartments meant that the Gainsborough’s affluent residents were not going to wind up in any 1930s  “alternative housing” like the shacks of “Hooverville” although the “up and in” residents in the new apartment’s highest floors could probably see some of those improvised homes “down and out” on the tideflats south of King Street. (We intend to soon post some of our features on Hooverville, in celebration of these apparently, by comparison for most, more mildly deprived times.)

Through its first 78 years the Gainsborough has been home to members of Seattle families whom might well have lived earlier in one of the many mansions on First Hill. Two examples: Ethel Hoge moved from Sunnycrest, her home in the Highlands, to the Gainsborough after her husband, the banker James Doster Hoge, died in 1929.  Before their marriage in 1894 Ethel lived with her parents on the hill near Terry and Marion.  Eleven years ago (in 1998 if memory serves) the philanthropist-activist Patsy Collins summoned Walt Crowley and I to the Gainsborough.  After explaining to her our hopes for historylink.org she gave us the seed money to launch the site that year.  Earlier Patsy was instrumental in preserving the Stimson-Green mansion, also on Minor Avenue, a home that her grandparents, the C.D. Stimsons, built in 1900. (Most likely – according to our nurtured habit – we will soon post our feature from a few years past on the Stimson-Green mansion.)

Then Caption:  The Gainsborough at 1017 Minor Avenue was one of large   handful of distinguished apartment buildings built or planned in the late 1920s.  The picture was given courtesy of Michael Maslan.  Well preserved, the elegant Gainsborough continues to distinguish the First Hill neighborhood. (The now photo was taken by Jean of this blog-webpage.)

John Cooper, our friend and often source for historical imagery for one project or another, on reading the recent posting here on the Perry Hotel sent along a few hand-colored postcards, mostly of its sumptuous interior.  (click twice – not once – to enlarge.)

The next three postcards from John are concluded with a general  exterior view that was most likely rendered before the building was completed and available to be photographed.   Note the caption at the top of the last postcard.  It reads, in part, “Only families and children admitted.”   Well beyond childhood, the then barely nascent airplane manufacturer, William Boeing, was one of the Perry’s early residents.  We learned this from historian Paul Spitzer, one of whose keen interests is Boeing History having been years past the company’s historian-archivist.

Finally – for now – John Cooper also brought by a snapshot he took perhaps ten years ago of a sign promoting the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart’s first plans for developing their razed Perry Hotel/Columbia Hospital plant.  I remember this well.  The promotional company hired to market these “Luxury Apartment Homes” enlisted me to help them do some neighborhood selling by scheduling me to give a lecture on First Hill history to prospective luxury buyers and thereby also to help me pay the mortgage on my non-luxury but comfortable Forsaken Art House in Wallingford.  It never happened, for the project fell through for want, it would seem, of luxury buyers.  The sisters second plans – now in place – involved a much greater component of non-luxury living.

John Cooper has sent along yet another view of the Perry Hotel, this time as the Columbus Hospital.  John is almost certainly the greatest collector hereabouts of the thousands of postcards produced by Ellis, an Arlington based photographer who criss-crossed the state many times over several decades recording landmarks of every sort.   This view – judging from the motorcars in it – dates from about 1950.  I was then 12 years old and knew every model and how they differed from the year before, but by the time I was sixteen I lost interest in car designs and bodies by Fisher or whomever and  I have long since forgotten these distinctions.  So perhaps some reader who has retained a senstivity for all this will come up with a date.  John Cooper has learned the Ellis is not reliable, using the same number more than once and in different years.

[As ever, CLICK to ENLARGE – and then click again.]

Every summer the Olympic Tennis Club on First Hill would stage a grand tennis tournament between its men members. But on the contest’s opening day in July 1895, the net crowd was able for the first time to watch women in a skilled volley.

An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer predicted, “What is likely to prove the most successful, as it certainly is the largest, tennis tournament ever held in the Northwest began yesterday noon on the grounds of the Olympic Tennis Club at the corner of 12th Avenue (now Minor Avenue) and Madison Street . . . The crowd was of the right sort and the number of pretty girls in summer costume did much to stimulate the spirit with which the matches were played.” [Does any reader have any clear understanding of what is meant by this “stimulate the spirit with which the matches were played?”] This was the club’s fifth year of tournament play on its clay courts behind the Martin and Elizabeth Van Buren Stacy Mansion on Madison. But 1895 was the first time “pretty girls” took to the courts themselves in singles and doubles matches.

The historical photo of a women’s doubles play is one of two 1895 tournament scenes recently uncovered by the local collector Michael Maslan in a First Hill family album.  (Well not so recently.  This was first printed in the Times nearly a quarter-century ago on August 18, 1985.)  We include them both here: the women’s doubles above and the men’s singles below.  (That’s the Carkeek mansion on the left with the tower at the southeast corner of Madison and Boren.)

If this is the women’s doubles championship match, then the winners, Miss Anderson and Miss Known of Tacoma, will defeat Miss Riley and Miss Gazzam of Seattle and win a pair of silver scissors with a thimble in a case as well as a cut-glass silver-mounted ink stand.  (Are they now more likely to get something crass, like cash?)

The clubs courts were located behind the Stacy mansion and on what has more recently been developed for super-sizing and French frying.  This is the parking lot for First Hill food that is never cracked crab.  I have taken slides of this McDonalds lot three times, I think, but I have failed to mark the date on this one.  I believe that Jean has also visited this place and not to eat, and if I am correct in this he’ll soon date his recording and post it beside this undated shot.  Perhaps some reader with a special sensitivity to motorcar models will by studying the several examples in this lot be able to determine the year. Unfortunately, the photograph is not sharp enough to read the date on a license plate.  [Remember, click to enlarge.]

The following year, 1896, the Olympic Tennis Cub changed its name to the Seattle Tennis Club. In 1903 the crowded club built additional courts up Madison Street at Summit Avenue, and in 1919 it migrated far up Madison to its new and present home on the shores of Lake Washington.

The Stacy Mansion – seen here looking kitty-corner across Madison and Boren and to the northeast – is preserved at the northeast corner of Madison and Boren. It is one of the few remaining remnants of the old and often elegant wealth that was once First Hill society. For more than a century it has been the home of the University Club for men. The members all have some association to the University of Washington or its several boards or extra-academic enterprises.  Many years ago I was invited into this sanctum as the evening’s speaker for an annual membership banquet.  Every table was crowded for a crab feast and the members and their wives were all fitted with billowing bibs of such size that a stranger entering that dining room and not knowing what was being served might have wondered for a moment if they had stumbled by mistake into a maternity ward. This was not likely to happen for it would be hard for a stranger to get into that club. At the “speakers table” and directly across from me sat Charles E. Odegaard – someone certainly related to the University.  Odegaard crack crab with the rest of us. After the comforting and filling dinner the lights were lowered, I began my slide-illustrated talk on First Hill history and the former president of the University of Washington promptly went to sleep.  I have had this effect on other occasions; still I take strength in the confidence that most stay awake, and a few even ask questions.   (Of course my “now” view of the University Club was a “while” ago.  It is also unmarked, and for the moment I cannot date it.)

(Please click to enlarge)

Judging from the posters tacked to the railing, the S. S. Suveric visited the Seattle waterfront sometime in the late spring of 1911. The broadsides for several popular Seattle venues: the Pantages Theatre, Dreamland, the Majestic Theatre, the Grand Opera House, the Orpheum, Luna Park (at Duwamish Head), and the Lois Theatre all promote programs that date sometime between June 10 and July 1 of that year.

Its unique “fingerprint” also easily identifies the place.  The windows atop the pier peeking around the bow of the Suveric are five panes wide and three high.  It is Pier 56, also long known as the Arlington Dock.  From the time of the Alaska gold rush in the 1890s to the First World War, Frank Waterhouse, an English stenographer turned shipping magnate, ran steamships in every direction from this slip for himself and also for the United Sates Shipping Board.

The seemingly aimless “waterfront watchers” standing near the rail – especially on the far right – may wish to “go down to the sea again.”  They are held above the tides on a wooden trestle.  The concrete and steel seawall was not constructed here for another 24 years.

Probably the S.S. Suveric’s most famous journey came soon after it was launched at Glasgow in 1906.  For 52 days the 460-foot steamship carried 1328 Portuguese immigrants – 459 men, 283 women and 582 children – from Madeira to Honolulu.  Thirteen children died at sea and eight more were born.  F.P. Sargent, the U.S. Immigration Inspector at Honolulu, noted, “They are a good, strong, clean and fine looking lot of people. I have seen many, many shiploads of immigrants, but must say these are the brightest and best appearing lot I have every helped inspect.”  And many of the immigrants carried violins.

(click photos to enlarge)

While supervising the construction of the prestigious St. James Cathedral, architects Marbury Somervell and Joseph S. Cote, both new to Seattle, became inevitably known to new clients.  Their two largest “spin-off” commissions were for Providence Hospital and these Perry Apartments.  The Perry was built on the old Judge Hanford family home site while the Cathedral was still a work-in-progress two blocks away.  St. James was dedicated in 1907 and the ornate seven-story apartment was also completed that year for its “first life” at the southwest corner of Madison and Boren.

What the partners could not have known was that they were actually building two hospitals. The Perry was purchased in 1916/17 by Sister Frances Xavier Cabrini – not then yet a saint – and converted into the Columbus Sanatorium and later the Cabrini Hospital, and thereby became the Catholic contributor to the make-over of First Hill – or much of it – into Seattle’s preferred “Pill Hill.”

In this view the new Perry is still eight floors of distinguished flats for high-end renters who expect to be part of the more-or-less exclusive neighborhood. Neighbors close enough to ask for a cup of sugar include many second generation Dennys, the Lowmans, Hallers, Minors, Dearborns, Burkes, Stimsons, Rankes, and many more of Seattle’s nabobs.

Most importantly class-wise were the Carkeeks.  In the mid 1880s the English couple, Morgan and Emily Carkeek, built their mansion directly across Boren Avenue from the future Perry when the neighborhood was still fresh stumps and a few paths winding between them.   The Carkeek home became the clubhouse for First Hill culture and no doubt a few Perry residents were welcomed to its card and masquerade parties.

WEB-ONLY EXTRAS

Aside from the trolleys that ran between a waterfront turntable on Western Avenue and Madison Park, Madison Street was ordinarily quiet.  Most citizens either walked or used the trolley.  The motorcar, far right, is a rarity in this ca. 1909 scene.  The view looks west towards the Perry Hotel on the far side of  Boren Avenue.

The next postcard scene looks in the opposite direction from the hotel’s corner, east on Madison Street.  The Stacy Mansion – later the University Club – is on the far left.  The wrought iron fence on the right closes the grounds of Morgan and Emily Carkeek’s Mansion from the sidewalk.

With the Perry’s sale to the Catholic order the hotel became first the Columbus Sanatorium and later the Cabrini Hospital.  Below are six posing Cabrini nurses and below them is a late 1930’s tax photo of the hospital, used compliments of the Washington State Archive.

(Please click to enlarge photos)

To make our historical photo, Frank Harwood took a position on Northeast 40th Street and looked across 14th Avenue (University Way) to the grand entrance of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition (A-Y-P), on the University of Washington campus. The photograph was taken sometime during the world’s fair’s long run from June 1 to Oct. 16, 1909.

On the evening of the first day of the A-Y-P, June 1, a rain squall immersed the fairgrounds, shorted off the lights and sent opening-day crowds stampeding for the trolleys on University Way, knocking over several refreshment stands here on 40th in the rush. The Post-Intelligencer reported that “women fainted, children cried and some passengers paid several fares in an attempt to get on board the cars.”

Since the newspapers and other sources were filled with descriptions of every event, exhibit and feature of the fair, it can be wonderfully replayed in this, its centennial year. And that is what historian-authors Paula Becker and Alan Stein have done, with a lot of help from the historylink.org staff, in producing The “Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washington’s First World’s Fair,” a book packed with photographs and engaging trivia of all sorts: anecdotes, ironies, pithy quotes, sensational and joyful turns, and tragic ones, too. The authors visit the expo day-after-day like “kids at a fair” — bright kids.

This, you may know, is the “launch week” for the city’s centennial celebrations. The book, which is a most impressive expression of our community’s interest in that elaborate spectacular of 100 years ago, is now available in stores.

A NOTE FROM PAUL:

As indicated a few days past, we intend to plant a few Alaska Yukon and Pacific stories in this site through the coming weeks.  We know of more than thirty direct AYP features, or related stories, that I have written for Pacific Northwest Magazine over that past 27 years and we intend to include them all.  We will also pull a few more AYP strings attached to parts of our collections, including some of Ron Edge’s clippings from local 1909 newspapers.  Through the years I have made copies of photographs in many odd collections and it will be a pleasure reviewing and sharing many of them.

We start with this most recent feature – the one that appears in Pacific on May 24, 2009.  Appropriately, this views looks from outside AYP towards the main gate and so beyond it to what we will be visiting in the weeks ahead.

The story to follow that look-in will be the feature on the AYP’s official “lookers,” the fair’s photographers: the one’s allowed to use professional gear and to market the results with a percentage going to the Expo’s management.  There were, of course, also scores of unofficial photographers for by 1909 cameras were almost commonplace.  Many of these also managed to sell some of their unofficial impressions.

Finally we will repeat the story that first appeared in Pacific on March, 26, 2006 of Dan Kerlee, our representative master collector of AYP stuff and student of what it all meant.  We show Dan standing with an AYP pennant near where Otto Frasch, the unofficial but prolific postcard photographer, stood to take his exhilarating recording of a crowd outside the Expos’ loudest gesture to military history, the Battle of Gettysburg.  You had to pay extra to see it.  We refer you there to Dan’s webpage on the AYP, which he has forthrightly named AYPE.COM.  Again, there will be much more to come through the spring and summer – for as long as the AYP lasts, only a century later.

[What follows appeared first in Pacific Magazine on February 12, 2006.]

Sometime after the 30-year-old Frank Nowell married Elizabeth Davis in 1894 the couple moved to California where Frank became an agent for his father Thomas Nowell’s Alaskan mining interests.  More fatefully Frank then took a hobbyist’s interest in photography.   When he joined his father in 1900, Elizabeth soon followed, bringing Frank’s camera with her.  In the next few years Nowell created a photographic record of Alaska that he is still famous for.

In the Northwest Nowell’s admirable record gets a second boost when after being named the “Official Photographer” of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition he began his meticulous work of recording first the AYP’s construction and then in 1909 the six month world’s fair itself as it was sumptuously outfitted on a University of Washington campus picturesquely re-shaped for it.   The size of Nowell’s official endeavor can be grasped from the accompanying photograph of his AYP headquarters and the crew of sixteen photographers fronting it with their tripods and by any standard – especially digital — oversized cameras.

About 660 of Nowell’s AYP images “returned” to campus about forty years ago and most of them can now be enjoyed on the University Libraries webpage.   But Nowell and his crew made many thousand of images at AYP and so the nosey mystery recurs: what became of them and the negatives?  With mild complaint, AYP collector and student Dan Kerlee notes, “The complexity of the AYP is stunning, and we get just glimpses of it.”

Increasingly, in the next three years Seattle citizens will be getting many more glimpses, and not just Nowell’s.  Walt Crowley, director of historylink.org and Leonard Garfield, director of the Museum of History and Industry, as co-chairs of the Mayor’s AYP task force hope by next year to have conceived and scheduled, as Garfield explains it,  “the events and activities that commemorate Seattle’s first grand civic celebration, distinguished by its spirit of innovation and internationalism.”

Besides the library link noted above hinstorylink.org is already a fine introduction to the AYP.   Dan Kerlee’s now nascent site aype.com already delivers a unique visit to the 1909 expo as shared by an enthused collector.  For instance, Kerlee includes a copy of the permit that visitors with cameras were required to purchase and hang on their gear.  Howell’s commercial exclusivity was protected by the rule displayed on the permit that visitor’s were restricted to cameras “not exceeding in size 4×5 inches.”

[What follows appeared first in Pacific Magazine on March 26, 2006.]

As noted a few weeks past in these pages we are entering a time of exploration into a lavish event that happened now 97 years ago – the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition or AYP for short.

In the contemporary photo Dan Kerlee holds a typical memento pennant from the 1909 exposition: “Seattle’s First Worlds Fair.”   These were sold at least by the hundreds along what was then called the Pay Streak.  It was the carnival strip of amusements and concessions that ran along what is now Stevens Way and beyond it to Portage Bay.

Consulting an AYP map that Kerlee has superimposed with a contemporary map of the UW campus he stands beside Stevens Way and within a few feet of where in the historical photograph the man in the “boater” straw hat looks south towards the Pay Streak.   With its own caption the historical photo by Otto Frasch reveals what this impressive crowd awaits — the unveiling of the James Hill monument. (Hill, the Empire Builder behind the Great Northern Railroad, also visited the AYP in the flesh.).

Much more than the draped Hill bust the Frasch photo shows the Battle of Gettysburg, a cyclorama where inside one could watch the “reenactment” of the turning point in the Civil War – for a fee.  As it’s exterior sign promises, “War War War Replete With the Rush, Roar and Rumble of Battle.”

For more AYP insights from Dan Kerlee, readers are advised to visit his AYPE.COM where this Frasch “wonder” and many more photographs and examples of expo ephemera and artifacts can be found pithily described by Dan.   Generally, as he puts it, “The complexity of the AYP is stunning, and we get just glimpses of it.”  And now as we approach the fair’s centennial he and other Expo enthusiasts will be revealing old glimpses and certainly finding many new ones.

Meanwhile the James Hill bust is still on campus, although it has been moved.  The reader is also invited to go look for it.

The AYP is upon us – its Centennial.  “As time allows” Jean and I will use moments early in its next 100 years to fill its very own “button” on this site with images and stories collected and written over the past 30 years – many of them from Pacific Northwest Magazine, but not all.   Perhaps Berangere may also contributed something  – architecturally or ceremonially similar – from Paris, the “City of Fairs.”  Here we begin with the Expo’s charming litho-birdseye, which because it was painted and published while the AYP was still under construction is not always faithful to what was actually fabricated (although it usually is) for what is rightfully called “Seattle’s First Worlds Fair.”    Much more to come.  Note the artist’s creative rendering of Capitol Hill below the expo’s popular airship, and the Latona Bridge, far right, that carried most visitors from the city to the expo.  And that is the surviving Denny Hall bottom right.  Except for a very few other structures everything else in this “white city” was temporary – like an oversized model train set made from enchanted wood and plaster.

[As nearly always CLICK to ENLARGE]

[much thanks, again, to RON EDGE, for sharing the AYP BIRDSEYE]

[A version of this feature first appeared in Pacific Northwest Magazine for August 13, 2006.  I suggested two titles: “First Day Open” and/or  “Be Prepared to Wait” for this story on the original opening of the Fremont Bascule Bridge.  The latter title referred to the upcoming – in 2006 – scheduled repairs on the bridge .  The article ends with a web-link to a Seattle.Gov site dedicated to the repair.  We have left it in as an artifact from that summer.  When it appeared in The Times, the title chosen was “Drawing A Crowd,” which used a clever pun on “draw bridge” and a reference to some of the crowded events connected with the first year of the bridge – like its dedication – and the thousands of times it has opened to yaughts while sometimes hundreds of cars wait, and finally to the frequent delays that were part of the many months of bridge repairs.  This time the mysterious Times’ Title Writer’s creation was better than either of mine.]

(as always, click to enlarge)

Judging from the lean shadows it was about lunchtime when a photographer from the city’s department of streets recorded this look north towards Fremont and thru the new Fremont Bridge.  It may be the by now venerable draw bridge’s first portrait – formal or informal – for the beautiful bascule opened that day, June 15, 1917, at a little after midnight.

At first it was only the “Owl Cars” or last street cars of the night that were permitted to cross the span, and City Engineer A.H.  Dimock stayed up to catch the excitement in the wee morning hours of June 15.  But later at five in the morning of its first day, a little after sunrise, the bridge was opened also to pedestrians and vehicles of all sorts.  No doubt the drivers and riders of all those shown here  – including the Seattle-Everett Interurban car – understood the significance of this day’s passage.  Mayor Hi Gill also showed up in the afternoon for a little ceremony.

The truth is that the bridge inaugural – like practically anything else that did not have something to do with the First World War – got less attention than it would have had there been no war fever.   Woodrow Wilson – formerly the president who “kept us out of war” – spent much of the first half of 1917 promoting entering it.  At last on May 6th Wilson declared war against the “Huns” and suddenly Americans of German decent were either suspicious or downright suspect.  In the days to either side of the bridge’s opening the Red Cross drive to raise 300 thousand dollars in Seattle was given several front pages in the local dailies while the Fremont Bridge got only a few inches of copy.  [We follow this story with a Post-Intelligencer clip that features side-by-side both the illustrated Red Cross drive and the bridge opening – barren of our picture or any other.]

At a construction price of about $400,000 the bridge cost only a hundred thousand more than the Red Cross kitty, which was promoted as needed for “ministering” to the potential frontline needs of Seattle recruits.

(If I have followed the inflation charts correctly the bridge’s cost would be about $5 million today.  Curiously that is only about one-eighth of the projected $41.9 million that it will be expended to complete the current bridge repair.  Go ye and figure.)

Readers interested in the bridge repair may learn more about it and the Fremont Bridge on-line here.

(click to enlarge)

Many Seattle churches got started in the 1890s in what were then Seattle’s suburbs with help from their “mother churches.”  For Fremont Baptist that was Seattle First Baptist. These Baptists of Fremont also got help from a railroad car.

The Evangel, a Baptist “Chapel Car,” arrived in the late winter of 1892 and was switched onto a spur near the Bryant Lumber Mill, Fremont’s big employer then. With 26 northend Baptists meeting on board, the church was organized on March 20.

The congregation’s first frame sanctuary overlooked Fremont from 36th Street, and its replacement, the brick church did too. It was built in 1924 – in eight months – and was distinguished by two big signs.  First, in large block letters “Fremont Baptist” was painted on its exposed south façade facing Seattle, and in 1950 the roof began to glow with what the church history describes as a “large, dignified neon sign.”

Fremont Baptist was also distinguished by its music.  Still neither the date nor most of the members of the church orchestra shown here are identified.  An exception is the postman-cellist Jesse Willits, posing far right and three seats to his right (your left) his violinist wife Rowena, in white.  In the “now” photo far right, Jesse and Rowena’s granddaughter Mary Allen holds in the place of her forebear’s cello a photo blow-up of the historical scene.

Next Sunday, May 17, from 2 to 5 p.m. Fremont Baptist and the Fremont Historical Society are co-sponsoring an Open House of the church at 717 N. 36th St. Tours and an exhibit of church and neighborhood photographs will be musically accompanied by the church’s Estey pipe organ, which started life as a theater organ in Bremerton.

(click photos to enlarge)

On a windy summer afternoon (can you see the bush shaking?) Robert Moran loaded his camera with a glass negative and exposed this look down – way down – from the summit of Denny Hill into the heart of Belltown.  The 37-year old ship builder and former mayor was one of Seattle’s best expressions of the post civil war Horatio Alger ideal of a guileless young man who by dint of energy and ambition turns a dime into a fortune.  Moran steadied himself against the wind in the back yard of his neighbor to the west, hardware dealer Percy Polson, whose home like Moran’s also looked south over Lenora Street between Second and Third Avenues.

This is one of the rare intimate views of the old “North Seattle” neighborhood before it was razed for the commercial convenience of flatter land. The Denny Regrade was completed just in time for the automotive age when it was no longer needed.

Most of the many surviving photographs of the neighborhood are of that dramatic regrading which began on First Avenue in 1899 and, after a pause, resumed here along Second Avenue in 1903. A small portion of the pre-regrade Second Avenue directly north of Blanchard Street is evident bottom-left.  By 1906 the not-so-old house, shown here in 1895 with the distinguished bay window looking west to Elliot Bay, was either moved or destroyed – most likely the later – as a steep bluff along the east side of Second Avenue was formed with the lowering of Second Avenue to its existing grade.

For the contemporary repeat of Moran’s recording Jean Sherrard and I underestimated Denny Hill.  Returning to the prospect of Polson’s back yard was not possible without a hook and ladder.  But across Lenora the roof of the new six-story apartment building awaited Jean.  From there he could look directly across or thru Moran’s point-of-view – or nearly.  That rooftop is also lower than the hill by about twenty feet.

(And from this point on, Paul’s web-only additions:)

THE MORAN HOME

Sharing new evidence of the old Denny Hill neighborhood is always a treat.  That his home at 216 Lenora Street was also the domestic retreat for the industrious Moran clan lets us imagine what magnitude of zest must have been regularly played out here.
As its own caption indicates this photograph was taken in 1895.  That was five years after Robert Moran concluded his second term as Seattle Mayor and only twenty years since with one dime in his pocket he was on a dark November morning – in his own words – “dumped on Yesler’s wharf at the foot of Yesler way at the age of seventeen, without a friend or relative nearer than New York.”

The hungry teenager’s nose led him to the café run on the wharf by Bill Gross, whom he remembered as a “fine five hundred weight colored man who operated what he named ‘Our House.’ Well, it certainly proved to be my house. I got my breakfast on credit. Bill was a fine cook.”

After seven years of working on steamboats, Robert Moran opened his own marine repair shop on Yesler’s wharf in 1882 and sent for his mother and four younger siblings to join him from New York.  Five years later he was elected to the city council and in two years more mayor.  The city’s Great Fire of 1889 came on his watch and the talented machinist helped engineer the rebuilding of Seattle.

In the year Robert Moran shot the above photograph of his Denny Hill home, he added steel-hulled shipbuilding to his ever-growing business.  In nine years more he launched the Battleship Nebraska from his shipyard south of Pioneer Square.  Also in 1904 he retired with his wife and five children to Rosaria, the lavish country estate he was then building on Orcas Island.

In the 1960s another industrialist, John Fluke, discovered this view and many more glass negatives tucked in the Rosaria attic.  Fluke Foreman Hal Will printed them up and it is Will — founder and long-time editor of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society publication SeaChest — who shares with us this new glimpse into the lost neighborhood of Denny Hill.

AN EXPRESSIVE DUPLEX

Homes with ornaments, especially ones like this Victorian number, are described by architects as having “expressive vocabularies.”   This duplex could talk to itself.  The porches are like portraits with perfectly round eyes, large arching noses and steps for lips.   The chitchat between them would be well stocked with puns, playful arguments by analogy, florid and yet controlled digressions and the occasional spontaneous rhyme.

During the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s the hills of booming Seattle were quickly developed with many fanciful residences like these.   Working variations on the Victorian home style then popular, Seattle builders were well stocked with relatively cheap lumber and an army of Scandinavian carpenters who knew how to use a scroll saw, read a pattern book with imagination, and paint these ladies with three, four, or five sympathetic hues.

Between its skirt and the combed cresting and finial points on its roof this duplex is plenty expressive.  With bands of fish scale shingles and patterned trim, paneled doors, spindle work and sunburst gables above those expressive front porches, this is the type of architecture that would soon repel modernity. Consequently, very few homes like this one survive.

The likely date for this view of 217 Lenora Street is 1895, the year given a photograph of Mayor Robert Moran’s home across the street at 216 Lenora Street.  That scene – like this one also from the Moran collection of large glass negatives — appeared here about three months ago.   “The Willard’s home” is written on the negative holder.

In 1890 Lot Sabin Willard moved into this duplex.   Soon after this photograph was recorded and captioned, Willard left this duplex on Denny Hill for a home on First Hill.  Willard was a deputy county clerk and Miss May Willard – most likely his daughter – who also lived here, was a teacher at Central School.  (Since first writing this piece in 2001 we have discovered with help from our “clip master” Ron Edge, that the “Musical Institute” with Mrs. Willard, principal, was soliciting students to this address in the classified advertisements for the Seattle Press for the first of December, 1890.  We include, then, another edge clipping.)

If and when I find the “now” photographs I took years ago for the historical photo of the Willard’s ornate duplex, and also of the Moran home across the street (Lenora) the difference between them would be, as I wrote in 2001, a little more than 100 years and a little less than 100 feet.  Now it is, of course, a few years more than a century, but the change in elevation is still roughly 100 feet.  The Moran Home and the duplex at 217 Lenora Street were parts of the Denny Hill neighborhood and so razed with the hill in the early 20th Century.  To repeat, perhaps for your slack-jaw amazement, the Denny Regrade block on Lenora between Second and Third Avenues sits now nearly 100 feet below the old street grade.  Jean has some views of Lenora between Second and Third Avenues that will do the trick of showing it off “now.”

(please click to enlarge)

Both Jean and I confess to some disappointment that this week’s repeat did not quite give what we thought it would.

These views look east from the Delmar Drive E. overpass above Highway 520 where it makes its approach or withdrawal from the Evergreen Floating Bridge.  An enthusiastic amateur named Horace Sykes photographed the historical scene on the Monday afternoon of February 24, 1964, which was only a half-year after “the longest floating bridge in the world” first opened on August 28, 1963.  Jean repeated it 45 years later to the day – on a Tuesday.

For estimating when in the afternoon Sykes recorded his Kodachrome slide, Jean and I studied the shadows cast on the pavement from the sturdy post, far right, supporting the sign. Agreeing on an estimate – sometime between 4 and 4:30 pm – we smiled and rubbed our hands with satisfaction.  We expected that the solitary pickup heading west in Sykes photo would by now be joined by a commuter pack hurrying home like bumper cars in a carnival.

Jean arrived at four and waited – and waited.  He recounts, “After standing at the railing for about twenty minutes I got a call from Susan Rohrer, of the State Capitol Museum in Olympia.  I told her of my surprise that the traffic was so light and not as I expected it.  She told me that her husband, who commutes to Seattle about three times a week, thinks the traffic has thinned as well, and wonders if the recession may be the cause of it all.  Feeling consoled I snapped what was given and soon left the overpass a moment short of 4:30pm.”

(We continue with a fascinating and related column about the Montlake Isthmus from August 8th, 1982.  From Paul’s first year at the Times, when he was just a kid with a crazy dream.)

Perhaps, no strip of regional real estate has engineered more dreams of empire than the isthmus that used to separate Lake Union from Lake Washington. From the beginning of white settlement it inspired local boosters to imagine the cornucopia of raw materials that would come spilling out of Lake Washington right to the back door of Seattle, once the cut could be made through that little ribbon of land.

The line of the first cut can be faintly see in in our turn-of-the-century panorama. (It was recorded from near where the photographs were taken for the linked story about the freeway in 1964 when it was nearly new.) The first cut diagonally passes through the isthmus at the center of the photograph. The Lake Washington side ingress is just right of the four small and two tall trees. Built in 1883 by Chinese labor under the pay of local promoters David Denny, Thomas Burke and others, it was designed for scooting logs from the big lake into the millpond on Portage Bay, and eventually on to the mills of Lake Union, David Denny’s Western Mill at the south end of the lake included.

Our view continues east across that dividing land, part of today’s Montlake neighborhood, to Lake Washington’s Union Bay, which was then considerably larger than today and would stay so until the big lake was dropped 9 feet in 1916. Just beyond rises the largely denuded Laurelhurst peninsula, and in the distance, Kirkland can be seen across the lake.

Although this setting has its pastoral touches, the signs of development are almost everywhere. Not seen, but to the left of the photograph, is the town of Yesler. There, in the late 1880s, near the present site of the University’s horticulture center, pioneer Henry Yesler put up a namesake mill. Most of Laurelhurst was possibly first clear-cut by Yesler’s saws, then milled and finally shipped to market on the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad. (That railroad’s bed was later transformed into the Burke Gilman Recreational Path.) By 1887, Thomas Burke’s railroad had reached both Ravenna and Yesler at the north end of Union Bay.

The lakes were first joined by name only on July 4, 1854. Most of Seattle gathered then to celebrate Independence Day on Thomas Mercer’s claim near the southern end of a lake the Indians called “little water.” Mercer proposed that the “big water” to the east be named “Washington,” and that the little water on whose refreshing shores they were gathered be called “union.” Someday, Mercer proclaimed, it would surely be the connection for an even greater union between that big lake and Puget Sound. The locals agreed, and from that moment on there was a recurrent agitation to consummate that union.

The first person to actually try it was Harvey Pike. He followed his father John Henry Pike to town in 1861. The elder Pike was employed to help design and build the then new Territorial University at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Seneca Street. His son was given the job of painting the new school and his wage was a deed to part of this isthmus in present-day Montlake.

Harvey Pike actually tried to split his land in two with a simple pick, shovel and wheelbarrow. This, in the way of tools, was only a little more than Moses used to divide the Red Sea. But Harvey Pike had none of the divine aid, or in his case, federal subsidy, and so he had to give it up. The subsidy wouldn’t come in large amounts until 1910 when a Rivers and Harbors Act passed by Congress included $2,750,000 for the construction of locks down at Shilshole, so long as King County agreed to finance and build the canal that would run from the locks to the “big lake,” and the county consented.

When the channel between the two lakes was opened in 1916 the greatest change was not the opening of the hinterland to the opportunity and exploitation of military and industrial steamers, but rather the lowering of the lake and thereby exposing thousands of acres of fresh bottomland. When the contemporary canal from salt water to fresh was completed in 1917 its Montlake Cut was a few hundred feet north of Harvey Pike’s strip of opportunity. And its primary traffic was, and still is, not ocean-going steamers but pleasure craft.

[Click to Enlarge]
Here’s another revealing addition from Ron Edge’s collection.  It may be compared to the ca. World War Two aerial of Union Bay we published on the 20th of this month.  This is also a photo from the sky, but one recorded to read like a map.  In the almost illegible box lower-right it is identified as recorded in June of 1939 for the U.W.’s building department.  Note that the war time housing that would be upper-right  is not yet developed, and neither has the future site of the golf driving range (top-center) been spread with sanitary fill.  These are changes that both appear in the aerial published April 20.

A few things to Look for
* Old Meany Hall (1909) on campus
* The campus lawn between Meany and Suzzallo Library is still not bricked and yes there is no garage beneath it.
* AYP circle on Stevens Way south of Architecture Hall, which was built for the fair to show art.
* Stevens way still continues south under the railroad overpass and into Pacific Street.  This is the line of the old Pay Streak or carnival part of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP).
* Showboat Theatre, foot of 15th Ave.
* No University Hospital / Yes golf course.
* No parking on Campus, upper-left and no new Burke Museum. (Although old Burke does show to the right of the Suzzallo Library.)
* Construction work on the 45th Street overpass, top-center.
* No new development “of note” along the eastern edge of the Main Campus above the railroad bed and behind Lewis and Clark halls.
* No upper (north) end of Stevens Way loop to Memorial Way.
* Smith Hall construction on the U.W.’s Quad.
* Southeast access to campus  from Montlake Bridge
* Baseball diamond still – no Intramural Bldg.
* No HUB – Student Union Building
* Some fill work (or dumping) leads into wetland above the baseball diamond and further north where Montlake Blvd begins its turn to join with 45th Street.
* and much more . . . (Remember to CLICK and enlarge.)

First released on VHS in 1992, ‘SEATTLE CHRONICLE,’ Paul’s acclaimed video tour through the first 90 years of Seattle history has been re-released with a new introduction on DVD.

A real bargain (we think) – originally $29.95, now $20 + $3.50 S&H (lovingly handled by Paul himself).

HIMSELF INTRUDES

Here “himself” recounts the curious history of this production. Under the cover art included just below we have also inserted a scan of the formerly two sided flier that was folded in with the VHS tape. (You can still detect the fold creases.)   This was introduced with the second “printing” or run of the tape, and includes some corrections  – errata – that a few sensitive friends suggested.  If I remember correctly those mistakes were the efficient or practical cause for including also an index.  And I do enjoy making indexes because they are so bountiful.  The introduction in the flier below also suggests that after many itinerate years of giving slide shows hither-thither it was time to gather my stones and build a presentable and secure fort: an illustated history of Seattle.   Actually, the “time” was a telephone call from a teacher who taught teachers.  The instructor at Seattle Pacific University wanted a teaching aid – other than a book – on local history and asked “Do you have one.”  I anwsered, “No but I could make one quick enough.”   The result was this two-hour production, which I can thankfully note was very popular for a time – before YouTube and cell phones and digital cameras and many other recreations.

Seattle Chronicle also helped put veggies on the table for quite a while.  Seventeen years ago the tape sold for $29.95 – it was a conventional price then, and the margin of profit was more than ever imagined by a free-lance community historian without the monthly support that comes with some portfolio and/or hardwood chair in a faculty lounge. (Imagine, inflation has been nearly 100% since then.)  With the help of the KCTS videographer Tom Speer, my next door neighbor then, I videotaped a specially assembled slide show run on two projectors with a dissolve “unit’ between them.  I purchased these machines used from another road show artist who was then on Jacob’s Ladder to some new technology for showing his happy Christian shows around the state.  (In this I distinguish his shows from the less happy Christian shows we assocate with historical figures like Cotton Mather and Billy Sunday – all long before our time.  Yes, I am imagining all this simply from the smiling exchange between us on my front porch – my cash for his projectors and dissolver.  I have never seen his show.)  Next, I added music (most of my own composition) and some contemporary footage (that “now-then” effect) shot with what was just good enough at the time: a Hi-8 video camera borrowed from another friend.  By contemporary high-definition standards, then, this is not as slick in either technique or special effects as even your average endowed private school media production.  But it is a pretty good story-telling and once you have taken the two hours – or however long you need to watch it all – you will have a pretty good feel for Seattle History and be better ready to read books (some of which we will also soon !!!SELL!!! here) and explore historylink.  Finally, remember times are tough and don’t spend your money needlessly – unless you have lots of it, and then buy buy buy  as if you were a digit on the providential invisiable hand that is suppose to keep this for the most part free economy in line or on track or out of the hole.

Click the art below to enlarge it – and disregard the VHS graphic at the top of the cover art.  That is merely an artifact of the old video tape.  You are getting a DVD not a tape.

To purchase, either send check for $25.30 (includes tax and S&H) to Tartu Publications, PO Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145 or use our handy-dandy Paypal button:

Not World War Two but May 2, 1958 – The Montlake Dump with Husky Stadium behind.

(click to enlarge)

After rising this Sunday spring morning, pouring some cereal, and checking the paper for any new investigative reporting that is not merely preaching or sensational, I went to dear Pacific Northwest Magazine – descendant of The Sunday Seattle Times old rotogravure section – wondering what I had written this week.  (I have a month’s lead time with those features and so will more often forget them as I move on to other stories.)  This week I was nudged instead by a brave new environment of wasted and piled cell phones and many other splendid demonstrations of consumers and their forsaken stuff.  (My stuff, your stuff, everybody’s stuff stuff.)

Then I remembered what my dear editor had told me.  After a quarter-century of appearing every week in Pacific I would be, so to speak, dumped for a special issue devoted to human waste.  In this sense, I was still part of the issue that would not include me.  At least for the moment I too was some of that stuff caste aside by the only species with the combination of a gift for language, an opposable forethumb, an erect posture, and the unique capacity for self-deception alongside a similarly unique understanding of its own mortality.  And it is worth recalling that in the end then we are all stuff.

Wanting to give the readers of this blog something in the way of then-and-now and also stay in sympathy with the Footstep theme of this special week at Pacific I searched for something appropriate to take the place here in the blog of yet another now-then article that might have appeared in the paper were there only more affordable newsprint or pulp and ink in the world.  And since I have gathered plenty of historical pictures of waste and human discharge it was not difficult to find something appropriate.

From that horde I have chosen an aerial of north end Seattle that includes some of Montlake, most of the University of Washington Campus, the southern skirt of Ravenna and the western edge of Laurelhurst.  Since Jean and I have neither wings nor the budget to fly we hope for some local pilot to repeat it and send the results to us free of charge.

The most fitting “Footstep” part of this photograph, the part that has to do with managed waste, is showing right-of-center.  It is the site now and long since of the UW’s commitment to the higher and longer education available with a golf driving range.  It is also the beginning spread of the Montlake Dump or “sanitary fill” that here brightens the Union Bay wetland of Lake Washington with a mix of garbage and dirt.  For a few decades it was the favorite home of seagulls and a great stinker of methane, “odorless” as advertised.

I declaim any exact knowledge of this aerial, like the year it was photographed, or who held the camera.  But the photo certainly owns great “internal evidences” and with study the date could be arrived at within a season – at least.  (But neither here nor yet.) We will make note below of a few landmarks and when we know their date-of-origin we will put it with them.  In those instances when some thing starts more than once, we will choose the most obvious “first.”

(click to enlarge)

Now imagine that same old clock and we will start at noon.
* At “noon” part of the extended Roanoke/Eastlake neighborhood at the north end of Capitol Hill appears at the top.
* To the right of it is the University Bridge (1919) to the University District (Founded as a platted neighborhood in 1890 but still known then as Brooklyn).
* Next, descending the right side through the University District and the north end of the U.W. Campus (1895) we come upon the 45th Street viaduct (1940-41).  To the far right there is as yet no sign of the University Village (1956).  This is the most southerly part of what was once a large acreage of truck gardens and commercial nurseries that grew up in the pocket drawn by the long curve (1887-88) of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway around the north end of the original Union Bay.  The railroad’s first “crop” was logs.
* Both those garden acres and most what shows center-right in this aerial was exposed with the lowering of Lake Washington in 1916 for the official opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1917.
* And next at the five-star intersection of NE 45th Street, NE 45th Place, Union Bay Place NE and Mary Gates Memorial Drive NE (around 3:30 on our clock) we may look in all directions – first to the south (left) and into the regimented sprawl of housing units built during the Second World War.
* Next looking northeast (to the right and down) from the same intersection up NE 45th Place to where the trestle of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad crosses it.  The curving grade of the railroad, and that of NE Blakeley Street that parallels it, are easily figured.   The railroad bed has been long since developed as the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail. (1978)
* Below the government housing are some of the oldest homes of what was developed in the late 1880s and 1890s as the town of Yesler – a mill town named for Seattle’s pioneer industrialist who moved his saws here in 1887 after his last mill on Yesler Wharf burned down.  The move was made possible by, as noted, the construction that year of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, which had a spur extend to the mill on Union Bay when the water was at its original level.  The mill was near the contemporary location of the U.W. Fire Arts building off of Mary Gates Memorial Drive.
* Two blocks east of where NE 41st originates out of Mary Gates Drive what seems to be a large wartime P-Patch is thriving.  I had first imagined this as the lumberyard for the Yesler Mill, but the mill closed for good in the early 1920s.  (But then I still may be wrong.  If not a WW2 P-Patch what is it do you know – or speculate?)
* The Union Bay that remained after the 1916 nine-foot lowering of Lake Washington was, in places, deceptively shallow.  In the early 1950s while heading with my brother Ted for the Montlake Cut in a small motor boat we turned aside to investigate an sailboat overturned in Union Bay.  Although it was yet well off shore we discovered that the sailors who were busy trying to right it were both standing on the bottom with the water still well below their shoulders.  Thinking of our outboard motor, we thought it best to get out of there.
* Upper left are the sports palaces of the University including Hec Edmundson pavilion (1927) and Husky Stadium (1920).  The Montlake Bridge (1925) is there too.
* The University’s golf course has not yet been lost to the University Medical School 1949) or stadium parking.
* Above the bridge on the south shore of Portage Bay is the (barely visible) Montlake Field House (1934) and to the right of that the shoreline routes of Boyer and Fuhrman Avenues East leading back to the University Bridge.

* Finally (near 11:30 on the clock) the four-masted schooner yacht Fantome waits out the war anchored in Portage Bay.  But then it stayed put after the war until 1952 while in litigation.  The owner, A. A. Guiness, the British maltliquor manufacturer, refused to pay personal property taxes on it to King County. Eventually, Aristotle Onassis purchased it as a wedding gift for Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco.  When the Greek shipper was not invited to the wedding, he kept the ship.  Ultimately, the Fantome wound up running luxury cruises in the Caribbean, where it was lost in 1999 to Hurricane Mitch.

The Fantome resting in Portage Bay, 1946 – with the Showboat Theatre on the far north shore “anchored” (actually locked with pilings) at the foot of 15th Avenue.   (click to enlarge)

Paul’s column has run, somewhat remarkably, without pause in the Sunday magazine since he began it in 1982. This Sunday’s paper, however, gave itself over entirely to a worthy celebration of Earth Day.  But no worries.  We will return to The Times, hopefully, next week.

Last Thursday, Paul and I headed to Tacoma to give a talk in the Washington State History Museum, which is currently hosting our ‘Washington Then and Now’ exhibit through June. Paul saw the show for the first time and called it good.

(click on photos to enlarge)

Attentive readers with a memory that holds at least one month may have turned to this week’s now-then comparison feeling a twinge of the uncanny.  Yes, you have seen it before – the older part.  Now because of a very attentive citizen-reader who signs her or his name “all the best, L. Vine,” you get to see it once again sitting side by side with a fresh “now” by Jean Sherrard.  This time, Jean looks northwest from 4th Avenue S. and King Street and not as I earlier mistakenly requested from 5th Avenue S. and King Street.

Jean’s first response to my mistake was most apt. “Perhaps you should move to Tacoma and take the train, but can you be trusted to find the right station?”  And I answer, “mea culpa,” which every altar boy knows is the Latin phrase for, “I am guilty of false pride, self-deception, inured eyes, free-lancer’s indolence, and much else.”

After 27 years plus of assembling these weekly sketches on local history, I had with much good luck made no big mistakes on the subjects themselves only those smaller “dyslexic” slip-ups of direction: north for south, left for right and all the others.  That run was upset on the Sunday morning of March 15th last.

I knew after reading two sentences of Vine’s email letter that the author was correct.  This was not the Union Pacific station under construction in 1910 but rather the Great Northern Depot in 1904.  Vine then went on to make her or his many points about shadow lines, and supporting trusses, and window ornaments.  It was – all of it – for me absorbing if embarrassing reading.  (Readers can study Vine’s full critique and a few of my excuses here.)

After 1425 weeks of this feature, I have missed only one Sunday, and that was an all wine issue arranged by my friend and then Pacific wine columnist, Tom Stockley.  Now I, or some part of me, has been away twice. Again, mea culpa.

(For more about the history of Seattle’s Great Northern Depot, please see this archived column from June 5th, 1994)

(click photos to enlarge)

Auburn was platted in 1886 and incorporated five years later, but not as Auburn.  Rather, the town was named in honor of a Lt. W.A. Slaughter, who in 1855 was slain near here in a battle with Indians during the war then between the settlers and some of the Puget Sound indigene.  For obvious reasons the name would be hard to keep.  For instance, local wits might meet visitors arriving by train with the greeting “This way to the Slaughter House.”  The proprietors of the city’s hotel, the Ohio House, turned queasy imagining the uncomfortable and unprofitable future they seemed guaranteed as Slaughterians.

The community’s arbiters of taste soon proposed a new name taken from the opening line of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village.”  It goes, “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.” When a few old-timers objected to the change, the contraction “Slauburn” was suggested.  It was a failure in the art of compromise.  So in 1893, Auburn it was and remains.  (It may be noted that Kitsap County was also originally named for Lt. Slaughter.)

Here is Auburn’s Main Street looking east from the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks in 1909.  Patricia Cosgrove, director of The White River Valley Museum, explains that the historical photo was probably taken from a boxcar.  For the centennial repeat Jean Sherrard used both a stepladder and his trusty ten-foot extension pole.  [Below this extended caption for the 1909 view we have attached another look down Main Street from some time later.  How much later, you can estimate by the cars and other clues – like the signs.  Consider it a research challenge.  A third photo from this intersection will also be included – once we can find it.  Although temporarily misplaced it was, we are confident, photographed on May 22, 1901.]

Cosgrove explains that the date on the banner – “Welcome Aug. 14” – refers to that year’s Auburn Good Old Days.  The director of “the best local history museum in the state” (at least as ranked in 2007 by the Washington State Visitor Guide) adds, “Isn’t it nice that it is an even 100 years ago.  Note how the flags still have only 46 stars.  They don’t show the addition of Arizona and New Mexico to the union in 1912. The photograph also shows Main Street with a packed earth surface.  It was paved in 1912.”

This photograph and many others are part of a community canon of images taken by Auburn pioneer Arthur Ballard – a collection that has recently come into the hands of White River Valley Museum, which is now showing them.  The exhibit title lists the three historic names for Auburn: “Ilalko, then Slaughter, now Auburn: Historic Photographs of Place by Pioneer Arthur Ballard.”  Be aware or, if you prefer, concerned.  This exhibit runs only through this coming Sunday April 12, 2009.

Jean Sherrard took his photograph recently while on a museum tour with his family that stopped at Auburn but wound up in Tacoma at the Washington State Historic Museum.  There he saw for the first time that museum’s standing exhibit of his own work with “Washington Then and Now.” It was drawn from the book of the same name that Jean and I completed in 2007.

Of all the farming towns in the White/Green River Valley, Auburn was chosen by the Northern Pacific in 1913 to be its “boxcar terminus” where freight trains were “broken down” and rejoined over the 50 miles of track laid there for that purpose.  With the 24-stall Roundhouse, or locomotive repair shop, the previously quiet farm town became an often-boisterous division point for the Northern Pacific.  Stockyards were added in 1942 and one year later the Army installed a Depot in Auburn as well.  Boeing arrived in 1965.

(As always, click on photos to enlarge)

There is really no danger that the dog crossing Belmont Avenue here will be hit by anything.  When Major John Millis recorded this photograph one could have put all the motorcars in Seattle on the front lawns of these homes with room to spare. Cars were very rare and carriages only a little less so.  One walked or took the trolley.

Another photo from Major John Millis’ album shows the same pile of construction timbers (on the left) resting on the same freshly graded but as yet unpaved Belmont Avenue. It is dated May 1901.  This view looks south from Mercer Street.  The concrete street curb on the far left is still being built.  Although all these stately homes are new,  they are also already threatened by a neighborhood trend.  In less than twenty years much of this part of Capitol Hill will be rebuilt with apartment houses.

Millis, an engineer officer with the Army Corps, lived in Seattle about five years while he directed construction on Puget Sound’s military fortifications.  But forts are not given the loving attention in his album that his home neighborhood receives.  This is most fortunate for the hill, for this work of his folding Kodak is early.  For instance, in one view looking northwest from the back of his home, probably during its construction, one block away the intersection of Summit Avenue and Mercer Street is still only a crossing of narrow paths.  (Jean and I have included that example and several more from Major Millis’ album below.)

By his grandson Walter Millis’ account, the Major graduated from West Point in 1880 at the “top of his class.” By the time he reached Seattle mid-career, he had electrified the Statue of Liberty and “devised a plan that saved New Orleans from a hurricane disaster.”

Here’s looking at the Millis home directly west across Belmont and over the same timbers  – we suspect – that show in the primary photo used in the now-then repeat. Most likely the two photographs were taken on the same outing.  And note the bonus of all the  army corps officer’s notes in the margins.   The scribbled “Hotel” in the sky on the far left is pointing in the direction of the grand Denny Hotel (aka Washington Hotel) that then still stood on top of Denny Hill, which would have still been on the southwest horizon in the “fall of 1901.”

It is rare indeed to find photographs of working Carriages on Capitol Hill or any hill.  Almost certainly this view was snapped by Major John Millis from his front porch or near it.   Walter Millis, of Long Island – the very eastern end of it – gives a caption:

The trio at the carriage are almost certainly my grandmother, Mary Raoul Millis in the center, my Uncle Ralph at the right and the darling little tyke with the long blond ringlets is almost certainly my father, Walter Millis.”

Earlier, the family’s “informant” explained,

Major John Millis (as he then was) was a distinguished officer in the United States Army Corps of Engineers (what some of us around the water on the East Coast shorten to “the Army Corps”). He graduated from West Point in 1880 at the top of his class and was commissioned into the Engineers. (Apparently it was the custom at that time for cadets who did well academically to go into the Engineers.) The Engineers are, of course, responsible for military fortifications and the like but they are also responsible for lakes, rivers, harbors and ports.  An early task, when he was still only a Lieutenant was to electrify the Statue of Liberty, which, oddly enough, was quite a big deal. He commanded levees and port facilities; and was responsible for devising a plan that saved New Orleans from a hurricane disaster. At about the midpoint of his career, he was assigned to Seattle to work on military fortifications in the Puget Sound area. For some of the five years he was there, he was accompanied by his wife and two sons, one of them my father. I assume that’s why he wanted the house.”

A MOST UNIQUE STUDY

It would be difficult to overestimate the uniqueness of this panorama snapped into two parts by Major John Millis either from the back of his Capitol Hill home at 523 Belmont or from the back of his homesite before the residence was ready for his family (I’m inclined to think it is the former).  The paths that lead out of the bottom of the image have “something to do” with Mercer Street.  Mercer between Belmont and Summit has at this point not yet been graded.  A good circa date for this is 1900, however, a thorough study of its parts – later – will make a confident date – to the year –  almost certainly possible.  And, again, it may well be 1900.

That is a Queen Anne Hill horizon, and along its shoreline with Lake Union the timber architecture of the old Westlake Trestle for trolleys, wagons, and pedestrians is evident.  Some of the Fremont neighborhood shows far right on the distant north shore of Lake Union.  Some of the details in this panorama may be detected in another photograph by Millis that he took later, also from the back of his property or home.  We shall include that view next.  (On some distant weekend I will try to convince the Pacific Northwest Editors – bless them – to let us run this comparison in the Times Sunday magazine, and with a “now” photo by Jean.  One of those will do.)

As promised, on the left, part of the Millis panorama shown directly above, and on the right, the neighborhood grown some and Queen Anne Hill too.  In the foreground several more homes are evident.  Summit Avenue is graded, although not yet paved, and graced with its own sidewalks.

The house that shows in part on the far left of the older view (also on the left) was – we can now see by consulting the later view on the right – at the northwest corner of Mercer and Summit.  You won’t find it there now, however.  A few of the structures that show up in the about a dozen Capitol Hill snapshots in the Major Millis picture album do survive.  (We will include at the bottom a challenge for one of these we have not yet identified.)

Note how Taylor Avenue has been recently graded up the east side of Queen Anne Hill in the later view on the right.  Between 1900 and 1910 the population of Seattle grew from about 90 thousand to about 230 thousand, and the differences here are evidence for that growth.  Millis, of course, had to record both these views during his about five years in Seattle at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Finally, thanks again to Rob Millis and his father Walter Millis for sharing these scenes, which we copied from a family album.

ANOTHER MYSTERY PHOTO CHALLENGE

But we haven’t tried.  So your turn first.  This is one of the dozen or so Capitol Hill (almost certainly) views that are included in Major John Millis’ photo album – a subject from his about five years in Seattle at the very beginning of the 20th Century.  But this one is dated by Millis himself.  At the bottom he has penciled, “May 1901.”  But where is it?  Tell us and Jean will shoot a “now” and repeat it here compliments of you.   This may be easier than we think.

Here’s another mystery shot from the Major.

UPDATE

Reader Ken comments:

Spectacular rare photos of old Capitol Hill. What a find. I have lived in this block for several years. There used to be 6 houses total on the west side of Belmont. This scene only shows 4 (the large white house 2nd from the left is actually on the south side of Republican. Two more are to be built at each end of the block. Note in the second photo of the Millis house, the north house (corner of Mercer and Belmont) has been built. I don’t think the timbers in the street are the same ones, as these two photos must have been taken months apart.
A couple more observations: In the first photo the dark house on the far left I believe is still standing. Could the small trees newly planted in the west parking strip be the same giant sycamores that are still there? Also, note how back in those days paving the sidewalk was a priority over paving the street. Now it is just the opposite. The curbs are still original I am sure.

Paul responds:

I’m holding onto my timbers. I have another photo by Millis that looks north on Belmont towards the Millis family home site but for that moment sans his home. However, the two homes to either side of the future Millis home are in the picture. This includes to the south that handsome structure with the steep roof and to the north – whopee! – the home on the corner. So although that home does not show up in the primary then-now photos we put down, it is there and so, no doubt, just off the frame/format to the right. Odd thing is – and here my perception agrees with yours – that in the photo that looks west across the timbers in the street and to the Millis home and that also shows the home on the corner, it does not seem possible that given the relatively little space between the two homes – the Millis and the corner home – that it should not also show up in the principal photo. And hence you may have concluded that those timbers could not be the same otherwise they would have rested there through the entire construction of the corner home. This was also my conclusion when I was fumbling through the album – until – until I came upon the other photo that I have just described above (and it now printed just below this ramble.) Pity I cannot [but now I can] show it to you but I do not feel confident in trying to insert it, and Jean who is away producing a play at Hillside School will need to do it this evening when he returns to his Green Lake home. So for this moment please trust me [Or better now look for yourself], but not for longer than one day [or rather only as long as it takes to dip your head.]  Jean should get that evidence up tonight. [And he has.]  I’ll also send him a semi-crude snapshot I took of a detail of that block from a 1912 real estate map. In that detail I have saturated (made more dense and brilliant too) the color (yellow) of the six houses on the block as well as the one across Republican on the southwest corner of Republican and Belmont so that they will stand out. In the footprints of those homes the one on the southwest corner of Belmont and Mercer – again the neighbor of the Millis home to the north – does not reach as close to the sidewalk on Belmont, and there is another reason why it has a chance of escaping direct inclusion in the photo we primarily wrote about. By the way we will want to repeat that ca.1900 pan from the Millis site west to the Queen Anne horizon and will need to get into an apartment in the northerly most of those two big ones. I don’t think it is the Lamplighter. That is the southerly one. Do you know the manager? Or the name? … of the apartment house.

Jean adds the photos mentioned above:

In 1931 the city decided to put things straight – sort of – on Capitol Hill by not only “broadening Broadway” but by pivoting it too.  Broadway Ave. got narrow north of Thomas Street and for most of the four blocks between Thomas and Roy Street it also turned a degree or two to the east.

The four-block straightening was a fussy bow to neatness.  You can still study it in the irregular widths of the sidewalks that face those buildings on the west side of Broadway that were not pivoted with the avenue.  However, the widening of the neighborhood’s principal commercial street made some sense, although many buildings on the east side of Broadway, like the brick store fronts shown here, had to be moved several feet east.  But not Pilgrim Congregational Church.

The sanctuary, shown here at the northeast corner of Broadway and Republican, was built in 1906 on a narrow swamp long appreciated for its vocal ensemble of frogs before its chorus of Christians.  The front yard was called the church’s “sunken garden.”  It still sinks although since the avenue’s 1931 widening the garden is smaller. (Later the top of the church’s tower was removed after it was twisted by the 1949 earthquake.)

In 1906 the neighborhood around the church was filling at first with mostly single-family residences.  Pilgrim got started in the 1880s as a Sunday school. By 1931 the broadening Broadway was faced by shops and the neighborhood was known for its apartment buildings, homes for couples that were often childless and/or secular.

A Rev. Dr. Edward Lincoln Smith was hired to help develop Pilgrim into the 20th Century as a place of worship. Perhaps it was not fair for a doctor of theology to then also enter a contest meant to extol the sublime qualities of the neighborhood where he was building a congregation.  But that is was Smith did, and he won.  Mixing church and real state his victory was announced in an Oct, 1901 advertisement by super-developer and contest originator James Moore who was rapidly opening his Capitol Hill additions south and east of Volunteer Park and thereby naming the entire neighborhood.

Smith wrote in part, “The charms of no other district are so abundant with riches.  From this eminence, what is left in view to be desired?”  The clergyman was more likely writing from the tower than from the garden.

(For more on the broadening of Broadway, see one of Paul’s earliest columns from March 11, 1984. Just click here)

For the historical construction scene a staff photographer from Webster and Stevens (the studio that the Seattle Times contracted early in the 20th Century to do much of the paper’s photography) stands on a then Fifth Avenue S. trestle a few feet south of King Street to record this work-in-progress on the Union Station, the second of the big “palace stations” built facing Jackson Street and the business district.

The steel supports for the vaulted roof are being set.  The waiting lobby below it  – what is now called the “Great Hall” – gave Union Pacific and Milwaukee road riders a sublime welcome and/or good bye.  At its peak, the Washington-Oregon Station (its other name) employed more than 100 men in the baggage room providing for the almost 40 daily train arrivals and departures.

The station was built in 1910-11 at the corner of the reclaimed tideflats close to what would become the International District, or Chinatown.  Because of this location the site was a tidal collector and one of the most polluted parts of the waterfront. Had the photographer stood here three years earlier she or he would have look into the sprawling gas manufacturing plant that then still filled this pit, which was sometimes called Gas Cove.  (In 1907 the gas makers moved to Wallingford – Gas Works Park – and lower Queen Anne – the “Blue Flame Building” – to open the cove for the coming railroad.)

Standing on the same spot 29 years earlier anyone would have felt the commotion of the trains loaded with coal charging directly through this scene over a trestle and under full steam to carry them up and on to the oversized King Street wharf where California colliers lined up waiting for the coals of Newcastle and Renton.

Now much of the old cleaned-up cove between 5th Avenue and Union Station is covered with a patio, which itself only partly covers the open-air International District Station.  This is the southern terminus for the Downtown Transit Tunnel, and soon Sound Transit Central Link light rail trains will be stopping here as well.  A century ago the Union Pacific Railroad still had plans to continue north from here with their own tunnel beneath the city.

For more on Seattle’s Union Station, please see the following related Seattle Now & Thens: “The King Street Gas Yard” (originally from 1993) and “High on Labor” (from 2002)

(click on photos to enlarge)

Some of the changes here – by no means all – in the 27 years I have now scribbled this weekly feature have made me nostalgic for lost places and – well – pleasures.   But much is also the better for it – much better.  Ida Coles restoration of the Paramount Theatre is a fine example.

Another improvement is the community of scholars that has grown up in the interval to often write about heritage.  The creative – but not closed – circle at the by now familiar web encyclopedia called historylink is the most obvious example.  But there are many others, and I’ll use the apparent mutilation of this photograph of the Seattle Theatre on its opening night in 1928 as a way to introduce one of them: David Jeffers.  Jeffers is an impassioned and by now very knowledgeable student of local theatre history.  His interest in the era of silent films is such that he helps in the exhibition of them, sometimes here at what has long since been renamed the Paramount Theatre.

Ron Phillips, Seattle Symphony’s now deceased legend of the clarinet, first shared with me this fragment of a photograph.  He had both played and lived at the Paramount. (David Jeffers also once lived there.)  With a lamentation about its torn condition attached, I sent a copy of the photograph to Jeffers.

Jeffers soon answered that the “tear” was really a “designer cut.”  The photo was used in The Seattle Times’ review of the joyful grand opening.  There the “black hole,” upper-left, is artfully filled with a news photograph of uncomfortable mayoral contestants Mayor Bertha Landes and her challenger Frank B. Edwards purchasing the first tickets to the grand opening.  Almost certainly they did not sit together.

For a delightful description of the Seattle/Paramount Theatre history – including details on this opening night – you might start by reading theatre historian Eric L. Flom’s historylink essay.  Postscript: Edwards beat Landes out of a second term.  Three years later he was impeached.

Now & Then Tidbit: When the Paramount was the Seattle Theatre, Wallingford’s Guild 45th was the Paramount.

For the story behind that name change, please visit this Seattle Now & Then column from January 31, 1993.

            (click on photos and thumbnails for full size)

In 1908, some weeks before Holy Names Academy was completed on Capitol Hill, M. L. Oakes, then one of Seattle’s more prolific “real photo” postcard photographers took this distant view of the school from the water department’s nearly new Volunteer Park tower or standpipe.  The Academy’s dome tower is still without its topping cross, and scaffolding for the stone work on part of the front (west) façade is also in place, although difficult to make out at this size.

Practically all these architecturally diverse homes between the park and the school are new or nearly new.  Most of them also survive as landmarks homes of English Cottage, Bungalow, Tudor Revival, Classic Box and other styles.  Parts of three of the six Capitol Hill Additions that Seattle’s then super-builder James Moore first developed in 1901 – when he also named the hill – are included in Oakes’ postcard,

Oakes scaled the standpipe to its observatory by the protected stairway that winds between the tower’s steel tank and its clinker brick skin, as did Jean Sherrard for his repeat 101 years later.

Jean notes, “It had been several years since I’d climbed the water tower.  After completing its 106 clanging steel steps one is rewarded with enchanting views through the sixteen windows that encircle the observatory.  They attract locals and visitors alike.

On a chilly sunny Sunday, I competed for prime spots in front of the arched iron-grills, which both interrupt suicides and make wide-angle photography a challenge. The lush trees that surround the tower, I imagine, have been sensitively pruned to reveal the horizon.”

Another reward for following Oakes and Sherrard is the Olmsted Interpretive Exhibit that adorns the red brick interior walls of the tower’s observatory.

It provides an illustrated “overview” of Seattle parks’ Olmstead Bros legacy.

(Below,  a close-up of Holy Names Academy then and now)

Please visit our Now & Then archives for the full story on Holy Names…

With six red brick stories and a corner tower to lend it some picturesque power, architect Elmer Fisher’s creation at the northeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Main Street was but one of the some fifty buildings he designed and built in 1889 and 1890.   More than any other architect, Fisher determined what Seattle would look like after its “Great Fire” of 1889, in part because he was already in Seattle getting work before the business district was destroyed.  And that – any honest professional will whisper – was great “architect’s luck.”

Now I ask readers to think or look back to last week’s presentation of one of the best examples of the old pre-fire Seattle: the Pacific Block ca. 1886.  It was kitty-corner to this Occidental Hotel – at the southwest corner here at Main and Occidental. A likely date for this Frank LaRoche study of the Occidental Hotel, AKA Lebanon Building, is only five years later.  The hotel was built on the fire’s ashes and completed in 1891.  Here its namesake bar at the corner is as not yet marked with its own sign.  It also seems that windows are still being installed on the Main Street façade, far right.

When new, the Lebanon Building was also named for Jesse George, a German-American investment banker who was one of its owners.  Much earlier Jesse met his wife Cassandra at Santiam Academy in Lebanon, Oregon, and hence the name.  The couple had five children and a home at 4th and Cherry on a lot that is now part of city hall.  With Jesse’s death in 1895, Cassandra moved temporarily back to Oregon where she became superintendent of the Portland Women’s Union.  Then in 1902 she returned to Seattle and opened a rooming house for working girls in her old home at 411 Cherry.

The 13-year-old Cassandra came west on the Oregon Trail in 1853 and arrived in the Willamette Valley with one sister, one horse, one cow and two teenage boys. The sisters’ mother died before they left and their father along the way.

Remember this photo from a couple of weeks ago?

Well, for those paying attention, historylink’s Alan Stein found the exact spot using GoogleEarth. As promised, we joined Alan for a photo session on site. Here’s a shot of Alan taking his own repeat:

Watch this space for more Now and Then Challenges – soon to be a regular feature at DorpatSherrardLomont.

When these soldiers were photographed, the distinguished Pacific House behind them was nearly new.  Listed as a “commercial block,” it appears in the city’s 1884 birds-eye drawing, although those artist’s renderings were smart to include structures that were only in the planning stage.

The scene looks southwest through the intersection of Main Street and what then was still named Second Avenue (Occidental). The guard may be one of the several militia groups formed in 1884-85 by locals anxious about their boom town filling up with strangers, especially after the transcontinental Northern Pacific was completed late in 1883 and made it much easier to reach Puget Sound.

Or these may be regular soldiers from Fort Vancouver sent here twice: first briefly in November 1885 to prevent action against the about 400 Chinese living for the most part in this neighborhood, and then again in February 1886 to secure the town under martial law.  In between these visits an organized mob – variously rowdy, racist, and resentful – with the help of the city’s chief of police, rounded up the “Celestials” and pushed 197 of them on board one steamship while waiting for another to take away the remainder.

When the courts and local militias intervened, a riot followed one block west of this intersection at First and Main.  One of the mob’s leaders was shot to death. The Governor who again packed the regulars and their rifles north from Vancouver quickly locked the town down.  Some part of them was kept here into August.

A brief reminder: this revelatory story is told beautifully in Murray Morgan’s classic Skid Road, the Seattle history he left with us.

(click to enlarge)

For a complementary story, looking east on Main from 1st Avenue, please visit this Now & Then from early 2005.

Scrambling to the classical roof of Interlake School (now the Wallingford Center), a photographer from the old North Central Outlook recorded the intersection where Wallingford Ave. crosses 45th Street with a jog.  Besides a fine depiction of the game circles painted onto the blacktop of the school’s playfield, bottom-right, the photo shows above that across 45th the brand new grocery with a mighty ambitious name: Foodland.

Foodland’s grand opening – a sign is in the window – began on Nov. 17th 1950, with a spotlight and a great orchid give-away: 500 of them. However, not everything was ready including the neon sign on the roof – seen here – and Van de Kamps bakery, which took a few days to move in.   Although still medium-sized, Foodland acted like a super store.  The shelves gleamed with products.  There were 14 feet of self-defrosting food cases and 34 feet of self-service clear-wrapped meat.  You could pick it up, squeeze it, and examine it.   And most fascinating, the doors opened to electric eyes.

By the end of its first prosperous decade the shining new grocery was razed for a parking lot to service a truly “super market” directly behind it with the wonderfully silly name Food Giant.  For 40 years the big red neon block letters spelling FOOD GIANT extended nearly the length of the roof.  It and the Grandma’s Cookies sign on Wallingford’s part of 34th Street were the neighborhood’s principal pop symbols.

When QFC bought the store in the late 1990s and tried to ditch the symbol for its own, a protest from the store’s neighbors brought the compromise we see in Jean Sherrard’s “now.”  By recycling seven of the old signs big letters, a new and blue sign of equal grandeur and iconic appeal took its place.  It named the neighborhood.

(as always, click on the photos to see full size)

More from Jean:
Whenever I use the extension pole to attempt a repeat, I start with a wide angle lens. This allows for a bit more leeway in framing the shot – later, I can adjust and crop to match the ‘Then’ photo in Photoshop. Below is an example of the wider angle image I start with.

Paul goes into great detail:

‘FIRST THERE WAS WALD’S MARKET’

It is now – at this writing early in February 2009 – a decade and a few months (for those doing the calculations, that is a little more than ten years) since Wallingford’s commercial landmark, the supermarket named FOOD GIANT, was sold to QFC not only for a name change but also a polished make over. FOOD GIANT was more “funk and getting on” than polish. For a few – myself not included – it remains hard to imagine Wallingford without its ambitious FOOD GIANT.

Even now it would not be proper to print FOOD GIANT without using all caps. This is in lingering respect for the independent supermarket’s oversized neon sign, with letters that hollered “cornucopia.” Indeed the letters were so large that they are exactly the same size as those in the “Wallingford” sign put up by QFC in its place. As the reader already knows from the story at the top, QFC recycled many of the old letters while, without missing a patriotic step, changing the color of the neon gas from red to blue. To do so was something of a citizen-pressured compromise by the food corporation – surrendering its principal blandishment, the roof top sign, to the neighborhood rather than to itself. But then it is best to get along with even the most willful of those who will buy your meat.

As you also know, before there was the FOOD GIANT there was, briefly, a Foodland. But first there was Wald’s Market.

Frank Wald learned to cut his meat in North Dakota. A nasty fall there with a side of beef kept him out of World War II and landed him in Seattle, where he hauled stove oil to gun-emplacement camps at South Park, Sandpoint and Fort Lewis.  It was important to keep the guns warm. But after the war Wald returned to meat and in 1948 opened his market here at the northeast corner of 45th Street and Wallingford Avenue. His sign was about as big as his market, which he stuffed inside a converted residence. In merely two years, he moved the house off the lot and built Foodland.

In this expansion Wald partnered with a Safeway dropout named Leo Haskins and together they quickly opened three more Foodlands, which they soon divided between them. Haskin’s got Wald’s old home site here at the center of Wallingford and in the Jan 26, 1956 issue of the North Central Outlook announced his name change to Food Giant. The rest is pop-art history.

Soon Haskins was knocking on the doors of his neighbors. He offered them prices they declined to refuse. The grocer purchased more than half the block in order to expand yet again, and this time into a plant that at least approached the sized of its name. But really the stock inside the beloved GIANT was not nearly so extended as that which would later be shelved by the “invaders” from Quality Foods. Since its take over, QFC has also been sold and perhaps even resold. We stopped counting.

The accompanying photos are approximately dated. The view of Wald’s Market must be from the two years, 1948 to 1950, when it was open. The grainy snapshot of the Food Giant I took sometime in the 1980s with Tri-X film. For some reasons we liked the grain.

The first reader who knows car models and can convincingly date this photograph within 16 months wins a free portrait of themselves with the Wallingford Signs behind them, which we see in the third photograph. We will publish it in this blog – with permission, of course.

The one with the Wallingford sign I snapped this afternoon of Feb. 7, 2009.

We will also attach the free portrait prize to anyone – we mean the first dozen persons – who can identify any of those posing in the free groceries promotion near the Food Giant checking stands. We cannot date this one either, although it comes originally from Stan Stapp, the long-time editor of the North Central Outlook. If any of those in the picture step forward we will publish here in our blog a now-then of them standing at the QFC checkout stand and being handed from us a free copy of the weekly tabloid The Wallingford Journal, which we must disclose is free anyway – more the reason to enjoy the ceremony.

Finally, we include a portrait of someone who may well be Frank Wald. It accompanied the picture of the market when Stan first loaned them to us. The practice of enclosing the face in a white field was once commonplace for newspapers. Of course, the rest of the photograph was then normally clipped away. Keeping the total photo intact makes the one enclosed in the mask resemble a sinful peasant or puritan being punished in the stocks. We print this to share another side of newspaper production, which all of us know is experiencing its own restrictions.

Yes, YOU can help us solve a mystery, and be featured in Paul’s column as a Now & Then Maven!

The photo below was taken, Paul guesses, of a Capitol Hill street probably to the east and south of Volunteer Park. He suggests any search begin on 16th & 17th Avenues.

If you think you know the spot, drop Jean a line and he’ll come out and snap the repeat with you in the picture.

Since 1982, Paul has written his popular column for the Seattle Times Sunday magazine.

We will be archiving them here, starting with a handful of more recent contributions and continuing to add more as time and effort permit.  Several elements ensure this will be an intriguing feature of our blog.

First, clicking on the photos will provide viewers with a much larger size than the Times can accommodate.  Delight can be found in the details. Second, we will post our ‘Now’ photos in living color.  Lastly, it allows us to swing the camera around and show wider and alternative shots from different perspectives.

So click onward and enjoy!

Each week we will post images from the current Times’ ‘Seattle Now and Then’ article.

Just mouseclick on the photos below to see them in larger format with greater detail.

Below, here are a few more from that same snow taken on the other side of the lake. And while it didn’t freeze over this time round, it certainly provided an unusual playground.

(repeat click on photos to see full size)