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Especially on weekends, Frank Shaw, a retired Boeing employee with a Hasselblad camera, would often be pulled from his Lower Queen Anne apartment to the attractions of Seattle’s waterfront and its neighbor the Pike Place Market. Other popular subjects for Shaw were high school soccer matches at Seattle Center, public art works-in-progress, and community festivals, both in Seattle and its suburbs.

Here on May 25^th or 26^th Shaw found a place along the crowded railing above the landmark block where Pike Alley reaches its intersection with First Avenue, Pike Street and Pike place.  In 1975, Shaw was not yet attracted by the colorful lava-looking montage of posters and the Alley’s gum-splattered sides some of which Jean shows in his “now”.  A weekend earlier Shaw recorded a bongo jam at the University District Street Fair.  Mid-week he snapped the sternwheeler W.T. Preston Leaving Colman Dock, and Shaw also visited Westlake Mall where sculptor Rita Kepner was busy chipping away at her 3600 pound objet d’art commissioned by the city for its “The Artist in The City” program.

In the mid-1970s, Kepner and many fortunate others – myself included – were supported by the Seattle Arts Commission in the making of public art. I consider it one of the nicest things to ever happen to me.  Much of the art survives delicately scattered about the city.  Ultimately the art was funded by the Nixon Administration, in the year following Watergate and his 1974 resignation. Those of us who were funded continue to enjoy the irony of Nixon’s part in making the daily stresses of life easier for us.  Now nearly a half-century later I can still confess that “Nixon was very very good to me.”

1975 was year – or one of them – for bell bottom pants.  How many pairs can you count in the horse show of race spectators standing near the starting line?  I figure about nine.  One or more of them may have been purchased at Block’s Menswear, signed here “Block’s Bell Bottoms” on the north side of Pike Street  mid-block between First and Second Avenues.  I had three pairs which I bought not from Block but at the Wise Penny, the Junior League’s thrift store on Capitol Hill’s Broadway Avenue.

On the authority of the artist/promoter Bill King, the Pike Place Market Mayor into the 1980s, the Markets soap box races began with perhaps two boxes in the 1970s, but it rapidly expanded. Billy got the idea for a derby from Doug Payson, an architect who lived near the market in the basement of the Bay Building. Next King carried the idea to the owners of the Market’s taverns – three of them.  With their support  began thus a bacchanalian affair but with good manners protected by the prudent friends of the market and also somewhat by a complicit police department.  For his role as mayor master of ceremonies, Billy wore a tuxedo and a PA system.  The race needed a caller at its single dangerous corner, a short block west of First Avenue. Distinguished in his tux, King stood on a chair at the corner describing the progress of the several races to their two collections of spectators, those east of the corner and those south of the corner, on the longer part between the corner and Union Street.  (We share a map on the dorpatsherrardlomont blog.)

When I asked Bill King if he could identify either of the two racers about to let gravity have its way, or, for that matter, anyone in the crowd, he answered, “Nope, all the regulars were in the taverns!”  Billy had been elected by the regulars sitting on Victrola Tavern stools.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Features galore instructor Sherrard.

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MORE SOAP – MORE BOXES

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Beginning with its first Sunday in the winter of 1982, this weekly feature has always been written in Wallingford – in the basement of a vintage Wallingford bungalow.  Surely there are bungalows on every Seattle hill, but hereabouts this often modest architecture with shingle sidings, broad gables, tapered porch posts, wide windows, exterior chimneys, sun porches and more are surely associated with the neighborhood that was – after clear cutting and the persuasion of stretching it some for real estate sales – first called Wallingford Hill.

Since Jean Sherrard took on the often enough joyful responsibility of repeating the historical photographs with his own artful “nows” for this feature, we have needed to identify our productive platform as “Greater Wallingford,” for Jean lives in what we will now risk calling “Upper Wallingford.”  PacificNW students of Seattle history should know that there is a long and vigorous struggle over the names and boundaries of several of our city’s – what shall we call them? – “parts.”  The Sherrard home where Jean and Karen raised their two tall boys, Ethan at 6’4” and Noel at 6’3”, the shorter and younger, who is now 30 years old – is only a brisk three minute walk from the northeast corner of Green Lake.

The generous Jean also understands that from its beginning Wallingford’s north border has always been shaky. It was named for John N. Wallingford, who, like Jean, also lived and plotted his productions at a home near the northeast corner of Green Lake.  And now, I confess that I feel quite at home beside the lake. Many of my earliest now-and-then features were outlined first in my head  while walking briskly around the lake.  In 1982 that took me about 45 minutes, the time now often needed to get out of bed.

Today, and most likely forever, we can leave questions regarding Wallingford’s borders to the new core of enthused historiographers who have appropriately named themselves Historic Wallingford. And this coming Saturday morning, October 6^th,  they will be calling out from their sun porches primarily to home-owners – and renters – to gather together at the Good Shepherd Center on Sunnyside Avenue from 9:30am to 4pm for Wallingford’s Historic Homes Fair.  The Fair features exhibitors with tips, experts sharing information about the styles of vintage residential architecture (there are more than bungalows in Wallingford), a showing of the film “Bungalow Heaven,” which is about an honored part of Pasadena, California, that may be uncannily compared to Wallingford, without the intrusion of film stars.  The Fair’s Historic Preservation Discussion starts at 10am.

For more information including the schedule contact: www.historicwallingford.org/events/homes-fair-2018/

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mes frères?  JEAN – WATCH THE BOOKS, WATCH THE BOOKS.

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While the lead sign at the center exhorts one to follow it to the Civic Field, I have not, I confess, as yet figured out when these spry workers were marching.  The carefully dressed cadre of men – and they are all men it seems – are heading north on Second Avenue. It is mostly women watching from the curb. In the historical photo you can see the street signs for the intersecting Seneca Street holding to the comely light standards on the far left.  A Seneca sign is also gripped to the less ornate pole in the now.

It is the other parading signs that give us some clues to the year they were shown here.  Somewhat hiding behind the “follow the parade” sign is another to “Increase Dry Dock Facilities For Seattle.”  This was a popular call following WW2.  The combination of ships injured in battle and the thousand of military men returning jobless in 1945-46 to the states made labor’s promotion of dry docks beside the famously calm inland sea of Puget Sound both an easy and sensible call.

The next professionally inscribed sign reads “No More Hoovervilles!”  As many readers will know Hoovervilles were the ordinarily waterfront communities of rigged shacks politically named for the reflective Republican Herbert Hoover, the first president born west of the Mississippi (in Iowa). The life-long Quaker was inclined to peace but ineffective in battling the first months of the Great Depression that fell during his first year in office, 1929.  His successor Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs for public works and employment were followed by the employment opportunities connected with WW2 and the Puget Sound’s ship building revival. The grandest of the Seattle Hoovervilles sat beside East Marginal Way West of Seattle’s current sports palaces. It was intentionally burned to the ground in 1941.

Above the “No More Hoovervilles” poster is an illustrated sign showing uniformed men carrying a war-time coffin captioned with the popular war-time truism that soldiers had died “for our right to vote.”  For labor that referred to Vice President Henry Wallace’s “full employment” proposal that Roosevelt took to and promoted before his sudden death while on vacation in the spring of 1945.  The bill was meant to “link management, labor and government into an effort to guarantee as many jobs as necessary for full employment following the war. The new president Harry Truman’s tag along was ineffective, sand a long menu of post-war progressive bills, including national health and minimum wage rules were not to be.

Our last time clue for this photograph falls from the fate of the Civic Field itself.  Built in the late 1920s with the city’s new Civic Auditorium and Ice Arena, by 1946 the field’s roof and timber bleachers were failing.  On Jan 13, 1946 the city and its school agreed to cooperated in building a new covered concrete stadium on the same site. Ground breaking for the Memorial High School Stadium began in late June, 1946.  It seems possible (perhaps likely) that our photograph was taken sometime in 1945 after Roosevelt’s death when labor was still invigorated with the hopeful heat of the Full Employment Bill.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, ya bums?

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Above: A Seattle Times clip from Dec. 1, 1943

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The address “S.E. Cor. 6^th & Bell St.” scrawled on the driveway might alert the reader that this is yet another King County tax photo, one of the few-thousand rescued by Stan Unger from the assessor’s office trash nearly a half-century ago. When Jean and I are through scanning and using a selection among them, usually for this column, we will put them in an archival box tied with blue ribbons and guide them to the Washington State Archives, a more responsible home for the greater Works Progresses Administration (WPA) collection.

[ABOVE, 1938 & BELOW, 1946  – The rectangular roof of the SILVER INN at the southeast corner of Bell Street and Sixth Avenue can be found near the center of both the 1938 detail above and the 1946 detail, below.  The nearly vacant blocks to the north of Blanchard Street – it starts in the upper-right corners – is the result of the Great Depression and the little development that followed the market’s bust in late 1929, the years in which the last of the Denny Regrades proceeded east of Fifth Avenue.   The Silver Inn was an exception, although not without its owners struggle. The developed neighborhood west of Fifth Avenue, which crosses the lower-left corner, was built up after the Denny Regrade of 1908-1911.]

The likely date for the steady snapshot of the Silver Inn is 1937, the year that the federally funded WPA began its photo inventory of, it was hoped, all taxable structures in King County.  These first tax photos generally showed acuity and sometimes, as here, great acuity.  That sharpness is the better to read the Silver Inn’s greasy spoon credits: chicken, steaks, and hamburger at depression-time prices that were themselves delicious: “Lunch 35 cents” and “Dinner 50 cents.”

If a reader wishes, he or she will find in the Archive’s tax photos hundreds of hamburger signs hanging high, on or above, the windows of many of Seattle’s more than 800 restaurants listed in the 1938 Polk City Directory.  One may visit the Archives on the Bellevue Community College campus.  Plan for at least a week of afternoons looking through the many thousands of prints.  (We will continue to hope that some happy day they will all be online.)

Born in 1938, I was quickly indoctrinated into hamburger hysteria.  With the need for cheap food the “National Hamburger Diet” got off the grill during the Depression, and it kept frying during World War II when many families used their food coupons almost entirely for hamburger. Standing in the kitchen before our mother, my older brother David and I were a devoted duet pleading for hamburgers, but not for their weak substitute mere ground beef.  We very much also wanted the sandwich with the buns.

When the Silver Inn was built and first opened by Joe and Minnie Barmon in the early 1930sl, the neighborhood was freshly scraped free of what remained of Denny Hill – eighteen years after its regrade had stalled in 1911 at Fifth Avenue.  The new digging in 1929 was inadvertently synchronized with the Great Depression.  The Barmon’s nifty box-like cafe was one of the few structures built above the many blocks of graded dirt left by the regrade.  Soon after opening the Silver Inn was shaken by an unclaimed bomb that exploded on Bell Street.  Thereafter the couple endured several overnight robberies, and then gave up in the spring of 1939 when a beer and wine violation moved the state liquor board to cancel their license.

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During most of World War II, the Silver Inn was rented by the dancer Mary Ann Wells, who was for decades Seattle’s most celebrated dance producer.  Converted for dance classes, Wells described the transformed Silver Inn to the public and her hundreds of pupils as her “beautiful new school.” Wells was not thrilled when in 1943 the Army Corps of Engineers surrounded the school with barracks for homeless workers, newly arrived in Seattle from the Midwest. All were looking for work, expecting it, and finding it at Boeing and in the shipyards.  My second oldest brother Norman was among them.  Ted, the eldest, was far away aboard a destroyer in the Pacific.

[A REMINDER:  Comparing the two aerial details above – nearer the top of this feature – will reveal the character of the Silver Inn’s immediate neighborhood before and after the building of military housing.  Ron Edge distinguishes between the narrow men’s dorms immediately behind the Silver Inn, and the larger women’s housing above the men.]

WEB EXTRAS

On a personal note, I took the ‘now’ for this column on a day when Seattle’s air was rated worst in the world. While shooting the corner, I witnessed one asthma sufferer, bent over, trying to recover his breath before shakily crossing the street. Within a day or so of that photo, I shot another at Lapush’s First Beach, probably one of the most discombobulating sunsets I’ve ever witnessed.

In contrast, let me add in a Lapush sunset from a previous year, smoke free:

Anything to add, lads?  Alas, nothing to compare with you stirring filtered sunsets Jean.   Gosh, we do have more stuff on the neighborhood, beginning first below with with the Dog House and its Hamburgers on Denny Way near Dexter and Aurora and so not far from the Silver Inn at 6th and Bell.

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MORE TO COME LATE SUNDAY

[Now once again, we climb the stairway to the kind of Nighty-Bears we commemorate to Bill Burden, who we have heard is about to open a coffee shop in Nevada City, California and so closer to Reno than to Oakland.]

 

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We hope that it obvious to readers familiar with this weekly feature that this Sunday we offer another scene pulled from a collection of billboard subjects recorded between the late 1920s and the early 1940s.  The snapping by Foster and Kleiser of its Seattle-based billboards began near the start of the Great Depression and ended when everyone’s preoccupation with World War II was both fresh and alarming.

In the featured photo at the top, the company’s photographer has included three billboards in her or his negative taken from the east curb of 15^th Avenue NW and about twenty yards south of NW 64^th Street. The billboard at the center on the north side of the arterial NW 65^th Street tempts every motorist heading north on 15^th Ave. NW with a dream of conspicuous consumption.   In spite of the

Depression, the billboard flaunts a luxurious Lincoln Zephyr V-12.  That 1937 Lincoln reminds me how as a youngster, I was puzzled that car companies were permitted to sell automobiles, which were newer than new.  (The cars they sold were often dated for the coming year.)  Now I also wonder if it is possible that Seattle’s Lincoln dealers did some “spot advertising” and paid extra for this head-on location since a good fraction of Seattle’s most wealthy one percent commuted via 15^th Avenue NW to their homes in the gated Highlands.

The featured (at the top) billboard negative was exposed on November 1, 1936.  The Seattle Times noted, “Thousands of hunters are swarming into Eastern Washington for the opening of the deer season.”  Even more affecting, it was two days before the country would extend Franklin Delano Roosevelt into his second term as president.  He won 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 98.49 percent of the electoral votes, the highest percentage of any candidate since 1820 when James Monroe, the last candidate of the Revolutionary generation, had no major opponent.

During the 1936 campaign Roosevelt sometimes exuded the populist economics embraced by Bernie Sanders.  At Madison Square Garden, on this first of November night, Roosevelt gave his last broadcasted speech before the votes were cast.   Responding to the oft-repeated theme of his Republican opponent, he “welcomed the hatred of ‘organized money’.”  Roosevelt promised that in his second administration “those forces would meet their master.”

Returning to the pavement – the odd kink in the grid at 15^th Ave. NW and NW 65^th street was the gift of Ballard’s early development with different additions.  I remember while visiting friends in Ballard during the early 1980s, that the city’s Department of Transportation, after tabulating the crashes, promoted this intersection as Seattle’s “most dangerous intersection.”  Slow down and take care.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, pardners?  Jean I think it likely that Ron went to bed early his evening but when he does that he also gets up early in the morning, and so we expect that he will add several more old and relevant features below.   However, he will do it after feeding the wild pets that are well accustomed to his nutritious gifts offered on his deck.

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Without a crashing piano, there would have been no Sky River Rock Festival over Labor Day weekend 1968 on Betty Nelson’s raspberry farm. Or  was it strawberries? Certainly, there were no oranges.

Four months before that weekend, about 2,000 people paid to enjoy the surreal thrill of watching an old, tightly strung piano fall from a rented helicopter scarcely powerful enough to lift it. The exceedingly hip Berkeley, Calif., band, Country Joe and the Fish, provided the music. They had played at the Eagles Auditorium the two nights before, and donated their services for The Drop.

By our request, the pilot aimed to release the 500-pound, swaying instrument from an altitude of more than 100 feet above a large woodpile. A mix of antsy and artsy celebrants had packed into a grand horseshoe around the pile. Using Country Joe’s microphone, I pleaded with them (but with little faith) to step back.

As the piano fell, my heart took hold of my stomach, and both leapt to my throat. Fortunately, the renta-pilot missed. The piano plopped onto mud that pop doctrine ever-after believed was earlier divinely tamped between the woodpile and the half-built Duvall home of our host and fellow conspirator, Larry Van Over. All flesh was saved from woodpile shrapnel, and only a few piano strings were broken with the crash.

A half-century later, the salvaged piano was given to me by the wife of the recently passed strong man who, on the afternoon of The Piano Drop, had lifted the piano into his pickup and driven away. Now, the still-sturdy relic is silently and secretly kept in a locked garage.

The resounding but mud-muted success of The Piano Drop inspired us to do something bigger, longer and sometimes louder. A notice in the weekly tabloid Helix (we were the editors) searched for a farm or field on which to stage a three-day music festival.

Betty Nelson promptly answered with an invitation to use her fruit farm. We thought that appropriate. Betty’s available acres were suitably inclined on a sloping open grade next to the Skykomish River, about 3 miles south of Sultan. That summer on Betty’s farm, we rapidly squeezed out a campground facing a grand stage with light towers. Skilled volunteers prepared lighted rows for porta-potties, a food circus, space for arts and crafts, and a light-show projection booth.

We gathered four months later with about two dozen bands, including Country Joe and the Fish; Santana; The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band; and, for the last act, the Grateful Dead. The benefactors — aka ticket-buyers — gave “for American Indians and Black People.”

Attendance reached many thousands more than for The Piano Drop. However, we have no ticket count, for the long farm fence between the festival and the highway soon gave way to freeloaders who, no doubt, thought they were entitled to hear “their music” while also helping us lift the sky at the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair.

The price was $6 for three days of round-the-clock music, theater and comedy. (My stage contribution included setting the microphone for comedian Richard Pryor, about whom I then knew nothing.)

The Sultan-based Sky River Festival, the first of three annual events, all on different pastures, has often been extolled as the first multiday outdoor music festival on a rural site, ordinarily on a converted farm, that was prepared for it.

The first Sky River was staged and played a year before Woodstock. Within three years, there were about a dozen more multiday rock-jazz-folk festivals in the Northwest alone. Worldwide, wherever hippies hitchhiked, there were probably hundreds more.

I remember well the evening meeting in a Wallingford home when we easily chose the nearly self-evident name, “Sky River Rock,” for the historical festival. The Lighter Than Air part was a kind of a payoff to Van Over, The Piano Drop host, who hoped to fill the sky with tethered balloons lifting riders above the festival. As one of the larger riders in his hopeful balloon, I easily demonstrated its failings. I was too heavy to lift.

The photographs collected here are all from that first festival, the first Sky River. In the shot with the two fashion plates, the uncombed fellow in the saffron Buddhist robe is me. I remember thinking that the first Sky River would be an appropriate opportunity to abdicate my ordinarily nondescript dress for something eccentric. By the end of the day I had somehow lost the robe — probably intentionally.

Standing with me is my friend — now for more than half a century — novelist Tom Robbins. In 1968, we were both in our prime, already beginning our slide into somatic decline. I first met Tom in 1966, five years before the publication of his first novel, “Another Roadside Attraction.” (I suspect and/or hope that most of our readers have followed its whimsical search of the historical Jesus.)

We first met during a Free University course in experimental drama for which Tom staged a “happening” with the help of George, a nearly retired high school art instructor, who carefully covered a spotlighted dining table with a white tablecloth pressed flat for an elaborate setting of dinnerware for six. The happening’s climax came with Tom’s attempt to pull the tablecloth free from the table without upsetting the china. Of course, he failed. However, with Tom’s North Carolinian splash, it was an elegant crash. Above the scattered glass on the floor there stood a comic genius.

Tom remembers the morning this portrait of the two of us was recorded. After spending most of that summer night writing at the Post-Intelligencer, he visited the Dog House, then the newspaper neighborhood’s most popular all-night greasy spoon, before driving to the Sky River encampment for its second day.

While wearing my saffron Buddhist smock, it was easy to be both found and avoided. Obviously, Tom found me, although I do not know whether he was looking for me.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean.  Here’s another of Tom, and Inger and I and several other friends taken by the same (now a half-century later) forgotten photographer.  May he or she will come forward – if they can still walk.  Gary Eagle, far lefdt, was one of the most productive and gifted on the artists that helped illustrated Helix.  Far right is Stretch.  We lived together first during my Artist in Residency at Fairhaven College in 1969 and then in a fisherman’s cottage on the west shore of Lummi Island.  I am embarrassed that I no longer remember the name of the woman sitting to Randy’s right, although I SAW her as recently as my 70th Birthday party.   As you can see I am still in my buddhist robe in the photo below, but I am also reaching for what might be a shirt or light coat.  The person standing to my left was Randy’s “girl friend” at the time.  She later moved to Colorado to study Buddhism and changed her name because of it.  (And so I have not named her here.)  Only now It occurs to me that she may have taken my robe for which she will have long ago asked forgiveness of the Buddha and I grant it as well.

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Like our recent visit to London’s Big Ben, this look north into Paris’ Place de la Concord is one of the rare photos snapped by me for the historical half of this weekly feature. Both were recorded on a Leica I borrowed during the adventurous summer of 1955.  I was an exhilarated sixteen-year-old snapping my way through Europe, heading with about thirty other Northwest teenagers for a conference at the Cite Universitaire de Paris. (It was hot that summer, too.)

Most of the ten ‘older students’ posing this summer for their combined teacher-tour guide, Jean Sherrard, are also fifteen and sixteen.  But not Kael Sherrard, Jean’s smiling brother in the checkered blue shirt on the right.  Kael is the school’s principal.  Probably every one of these Hillside students carries her or his own camera (in their phones) and are regularly sending pictures home to their parents, siblings and friends.  In 1955 we were not equipped to be that smart.

Place de la Concord is as elegantly packed with landmarks as those surrounding London’s Parliament Square.  Posing at the north end of the Pont de la Concorde, the Hillside students are standing above the River Seine. Centered above them, the most distant classical structure with its tall columns, is the eglise de la Madeleine. It was conceived as a pantheon in honor of Napoleon’s armies.  The two long and nearly twin classics on the distant side of Place de la

Concord were completed in the 1770s. Through their two centuries-plus served many purposes including serving as a warehouse for the King’s extra furniture.  The Hotel de la Marine, on the right, with the temporary gray blanket, reminds me how soot-shrouded were the landmarks of Europe when we visited them in the 1950s.

The Luxor Obelisk that stands tall above the Hillside students, was not stolen from the Egyptians but rather given to the French in the nineteenth century.  Removed from its place at the entrance to the Luxor Temple on the Nile, it arrived in Paris on December 21, 1833.  Three years later the 75-ft column was set at the center of Place de la Concord, near where in the 1790s the execution ‘theatre’ of the French Revolution excited the hordes with its efficient guillotine.  Renamed the Place de la Revolution, its blades cut off the heads of hundreds of aristocrats, along with the people’s terrorist Maximilien Robespierre, the King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette.  By 1795 the square had settled down and was renamed the Place de la Concorde.

WEB EXTRAS

Berangere sent us these spectacular repeats just this morning:

And a special series, thanks to BB, her repeats of a number of Paul’s 1955 photos.

Anything to add, mes compères?  More Paris from 1955 Jean.

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Through Seattle’s so far brief history (when compared to Jerusalem), one of the most flamboyant invasions of this well-defended city of about seventy-seven hills came in late July 1925 when 30,000 “members and families” of – and the name is long – “The United Religious, Military and Masonic Orders of the Temple and of St John of Jerusalem, Palestine, Rhodes and Malta of England and Wales and Its Provinces Overseas.“

These Masons were better known as the Knights Templar, named for the medieval crusading Christians who attempted to break the Moslem grip on Jerusalem and most of the eastern Mediterranean.   These twentieth-century marching Protestants –mostly – reached Seattle by land and sea (but not quite yet by sky) for the “conclave of the grand encampment of the United States of America for the 36^th Triennial of the Knights Templar.”

Surely the most enduring vestiges of these warriors –preachers, super-salesmen, educators, disciplined clerks, meat-packers, and other ambitious protestants – were their uniforms, which they took care to keep brushed.  Make a quick on-line visit with “Masonic Knights Templar” and you will be treated with a polished flood of fraternal regalia, most of it for sale.  The on-line show includes, but is not limited to, shoulder boards, sleeve and collar crosses, swords, pins of many sorts, stars centered with crosses, and chapeaux.

These chapeaux are the fancy plumed caps we see here heading east up Yesler Way from Second Avenue like a disciplined flock of low-flying ostriches. Here the marching is in order, and you will not find any mason out of line or step. They are moving up First Hill to their fort.  I imagine them singing the still popular, uniquely militant, hymn that goes, in part “Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

A cross is hanging over Yesler Way center-right, nearly lost in the shadows of First Hill.  It is but one of scores of crosses the Templars raised in Seattle during their July visit.  The largest sat atop the grand-sized welcome arch that covered the intersection of Second Avenue and Marion Street.  (See above)  The cross mounted on the roof of the then brand new Olympic Hotel competed with the cross on the welcome arch for dominance on the cityscape.

It is likely that the warriors in our featured photo are headed to their faux fort and headquarters constructed for their visit on City Hall Park, seen at the center of the photograph below. The fort’s drawbridge on Terrace Street was “manned” by Boy Scouts, some of them, most likely, future knights.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lodge members? 

Jean, do you remember when we lectured to a Masonic group at its home in Greenwood and had a good time?  With the new NOW-THEN book scheduled for release in late October we should start calling the lodges and clubs and schools and churches about putting on our show and selling books – books which we both will sign.  Of course the value of the book is thereby increased by our estimate – and we have noted this often when lecturing and signing – 20 Cents.   We could reconsider this.  Normally the value of one of our books inflates a dime when we sign it.  With two signatures it seems to me that the value is doubled.  What do you think – if you have read this far? 

(Howz about putting up an inquiry of interests (for illustrated lectures) and such on this BLOG?  Show our interested readers some of the pages.)

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              TO BE CONTINUED …

 

 

 

 

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Through its thirty-seven years, this is surely the furthest from First and Yesler that our weekly feature, ordinarily about regional heritage, has ventured. Reaching 443-feet above the River Thames is the Elizabeth Tower.  On both our “now and then” occasions this neo-Gothic landmark has been exceptionally dressed for make-overs.  Two of the four faces for its tenants, the Great Clock and Big Ben, perhaps the world’s most famous chiming and yet cracked bell, can be seen through the restoration scaffolding of 1955. That was one year before the creation of London’s Clean Air Act.

I remember well pointing my borrowed Leica to record this London landmark sixty-three years ago.  I was touring Europe with sixteen rolls of Kodachrome slide film, donated by a Spokane drugstore merchant, and about thirty-five other Northwest teens, “donated” by their parents.  We were all delegates headed for a ten-day YMCA-YWCA conference in Paris.  We were selected by discerning adults who were especially encouraged by other adults: those who could afford to send us, our parents.  The conference responsibilities were preluded by a five-week tour of Europe that began here in London.

Jean Sherrard sent me his Westminster/London repeat a mere two days after he served for family and friends one or two of his exceptionally tender rotisserie chickens at teh Sherrard family home near the north shore of Green Lake.  Dodging some overhanging foliage Jean recorded his splendid portrait of Great Britain’s Big Ben from nearly the same spot where I also photographed that chiming clock sixty-three years earlier.

If memory serves, in 1955 it took us twenty-one days aboard the Orsova, flagship for the Orient Lines, to reach London from Vancouver B.C. via the Panama Canal.  I remember well the two on-deck swimming pools. Also, any passenger could enjoy both teatime tables slathered with pastries and the sometimes splashing tables of the captain’s cocktail hours.  The freedom and frivolity of this drinking was entirely new to us Northwest innocents, who were more likely to find our guarding chaperones in attendance than the Orsova’s smiling Captain.

The Paris Conference itself was often neglected by an inexpensive attraction: walking the streets of Paris.  Jean will be carrying with him one or more of my Paris pictures from 1955 for possible repetition.  (Assuredly these other “thens” will not be of conference subjects.) However, Jean’s Paris “now” will, no doubt, include the same entourage of the Hillside Students he has posed in this London “now.”

BELOW: A Few of the Stock LONDON subjects I took in 1955.

I am thinking of their luggage. I remember what a limited wardrobe we carried with and on us in 1955. By the time we reached Paris, many of us were committed to the Lederhosen, or leather shorts we had purchased in Germany. In Paris Jean’s Hillside students may use a Parisian runway for a showing of their Northwest wardrobe.

WEB EXTRAS

A few things to add, I’m thinking. Some more shots from Paul’s 1955 trip (above), and I’ll include a few photos taken on our school trip.

We discovered upon our arrival in London that Rodin’s magnificent ‘Burghers of Calais’ sculpture, usually in Victoria Tower Park next to Westminster, had been temporarily moved for a special Rodin exhibition. Hillside students attempted a repeat on the empty plinth:

And now a selection from the rest of our trip…

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It may be fitting that a bluff on Gatewood Hill in West Seattle, close to Seattle’s highest point, gave birth to a mountainous retail giant that helped put our city on the map – the co-op we all know as REI. The firm took shape on the west face of that bluff inside a modest, wood-frame home erected at the beginning of the Depression, perhaps teaching us that good things (or successful businesses) can sprout from small packages.

The dwelling, at 4326 S.W. Southern St., just west of California Avenue, was the only “improvement” on its otherwise forested block when built by just-married transit worker Lloyd Anderson and teacher Mary Anderson in 1932.

That decade, as thousands fell into relief or took government jobs and others unionized and leaned left, the thrifty Lloyd, a “pocket socialist,” avid climber and leader of the 30-year organization called the Mountaineers, took a seemingly inconsequential step. Aided by Mary’s knowledge of German and frustrated by middleman-inflated stateside prices of up to $20, he ordered an ice axe directly from Austria. By mail from the other hemisphere, the storied tool cost a mere $3.50.

“The news spread like wildfire through the rebel ranks,” according to Harvey Manning’s detailed 1988 history REI: 50 Years of Climbing Together. Purchases of crampons, pitons, carabiners and hiking foods snowballed. The Anderson cottage took on the persona of a warehouse, leading the couple to found the mail-order Recreational Equipment Cooperative in 1938, the same year as our “then” view.

While REI later anchored storefronts downtown and on Capitol Hill, many in Seattle’s climbing community passed through the Andersons’ unassuming doors, including Jim Whittaker, who grew up nearby and in 1955 signed on as REI’s first full-time employee and ascended to CEO. As the first American to summit Mount Everest, in 1963, he became – and remains – REI’s most famous face.

After Lloyd died in 2000 at age 98, Mary sold their home to a developer who intended to raze it but pulled out after 9/11. Neighbors purchased the parcel in 2002, colorfully restoring the residence’s front end, floorboards and basement while adding reverse shed dormers and a cupola, eventually adorning the property with three more houses and a shared garden. (Mary, who died last year at age 107, spent her sunset years in a Green Lake retirement home.)

The compound that is now dubbed Anderson Gardens will host the Southwest Seattle Historical Society’s annual fundraising “If These Walls Could Talk” tour this afternoon – at noon (for VIPs) and 2 p.m. The insights to be shared by Jim Whittaker’s son, Bobby, promise a peak experience.

FOR TOUR DETAILS AND TICKETS: visit loghousemuseum.org.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Certainly Jean more features mostly from the West Seattle neighborhood, and Ron Edge and I welcome you home after your three weeks in Europe with students of Hillside.

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The unnamed photographer of this week’s snapshot had a target – the two billboards standing center-left.  With about seven hundred other 5×7 inch negatives, this exquisite record is preserved in a collection of subjects made for Foster and Kleiser, once the west coast’s biggest billboard company. The collection includes billboards raised to rented roofs, built on leased lots, and attached to buildings with sides sturdy enough to support them.  Of course most of these well-watched and exposed sites stand beside busy arterials.  The handwritten caption for this negative, not printed here, locates the two billboards, one for “Best Bet’s Buick,” and the other for Coca Cola, as standing on South Alaskan Way, “75 feet s. of Washington.”

The featured company evidence (aka billboard) was recorded on the sunny afternoon of September 26, 1939, when South Alaskan Way was one of the favored arterials for avoiding the Central Business District.  By 1939 most of Alaskan Way (aka Railroad Avenue) had been filled behind a seawall and paved with bricks or blacktop.

The well-windowed buildings along the east side of Alaskan Way have made it difficult for billboards to cover the buildings constructed there in the decade after the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  The 30-plus block conflagration destroyed the waterfront as far north as University Street and so all of this neighborhood included.  Here the fire claimed the City Dock and Ocean Dock, both of them built in the early 1880 when Seattle first took hold of its status as Washington Territory’s metropolis.  The Great Fire also took the King Street Trestle (1878) that served the coal colliers from San Francisco, which preferred Seattle’s coal to California’s, and it

consumed Yesler’s Wharf which had been the pioneer pivot for Seattle commerce and its diverse fleet of small “Mosquito Fleet” steamers.   The Coastwise dock on the far right was one of the two

long finger piers built near the foot of Yesler Way that flaunted Seattle’s prosperity following the Yukon Gold Rush in the late 1890s,  The city first outfitted the “argonaut” panhandlers with the stuff needed get the gold and then on their return happily helped them get rid of it.

We expect – and hope – that Pacific readers will remember that with this weekly feature we have already made good use of the billboard collection. I confess, that it is unlike me to purchase anything, largely because there are many free resources, but also because I rarely make anything.  This collection, however, was worth it. The cost was $700 or about a dollar a negative.  Like this one on Alaskan Way, most date from the Great Depression, the 1930s.  With a few exceptions that were shot in Everett and Bellingham, all were recorded to the sides of Seattle’s busy streets.  You may expect more.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Yes Jean as is our usual stunt we will pile on past scans from The Sunday Times “now and then” feature that appears usually on the back cover of its weekly ‘zine,  PacificNW.   This week the pile reaches 66 aka SIXTY-SIX features.  (That  is – so far – 66 out of about 1800.)  And just now!  With a phone call from Paris sent by Jean we have learned that he took a video of the historic hail storm that he and his students just ducked in Paris on one of its unseasonably hot days last week.   We will continue to encourage him to include it on the blog as our first striking weather review.

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I have lost the adolescent expertise in the names and models of Detroit-born post-war cars. Our “then” displays a Jacobean-style brick, terra-cotta tile and concrete beauty rising above five somewhat gaudy motorcars, most of them “bodies by Fisher,” the latest of which I am told is a 1958 Plymouth, parked near the now-vanished intersection of Atlantic Street and 24th Avenue South.

This is – or rather was – the Charles Colman School. (Last year we featured a Marion Street scene showing another family namesake, the Colman Building (below), soon after its completion in 1905.)

This is one of the surviving schools designed and built by James Stephen, the official and prolific architect for Seattle Public Schools in the early 20th century. The Canadian arrived in Seattle at its most opportunistic time for an architect-builder, after the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, had destroyed more than 30 city blocks.

Authorized in 1909, the 17-room, three-story Colman Primary School opened in 1910. There were, on average, 500 pupils and 15 teachers. The second principal, Miss Anna B. Kane, served from 1912 to 1940. Enrollment swelled during World War II when the feds built a large housing project nearby. With peace, enrollment dropped. Still, in the late 1940s the city bought the entire block for the school. Eventually, Atlantic and 24th were vacated to extend the school’s lawn.

Like Queen Anne High School, another Stephen creation, Colman is a fine example of how Seattle can recycle its landmarks largely intact. Though its primary program ended in 1979 and an alternative school there closed in 1985, the building survived a long-planned but scuttled north-south freeway, the ravages of a fire and next-door construction of the Mount Baker lid and tunnel for Interstate 90. This year, inside Colman, the Northwest African American Museum – with its upper floors’ 36 lower-income apartments – is experiencing a 10th anniversary.

This means, and many of us remember it, that the powers that be took a long time to support conversion of the abandoned school to a cultural center for groups that best represent the diverse community reaching from Beacon Hill to Lake Washington. This is where Seattle best shows its “unity in diversity.”

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (till 7 p.m. Thursdays). While visiting and celebrating its birthday, you also may wish to give attention to the Jacobean brick.

WEB EXTRAS

I’ve added in a lovely shot taken on the schoolhouse steps:

Anything to add, fellahs?  Surely Jean.  First a hide-and-seek quiz.  Can you find the Colman School on the first photo below?  (More than a clue: it is on the far right horizon about a quarter of the way in from the right border. )

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It took the greater part of Jean Sherrard’s 20-plus-foot extension pole to lift his camera pointing east on Marion Street from the prospect the Webster and Stevens Studio photographer used to record this week’s featured “then.”  We figure that it dates from 1905 or 1906. The top four floors of the Colman Building, the six-story brick block, right-of-center, were completed in 1905.  Facing First Avenue, the Colman survives, extending the full block between Marion and Columbia Streets.

It was James Colman, one of Seattle best-known pioneers not named Denny, who built his namesake landmark.  The brilliant engineer and Scottish immigrant is also honored with a park on Lake Washington Boulevard and Colman Dock, the long wharf that has been the center for Puget Sound transportation since the late nineteenth century.  The Dock is directly behind and over the right shoulder of the photographer of the featured photo at the top.  Here the nine tracks of Railroad Avenue separated the Colman Dock and the West Seattle Ferry Dock from the photographer and the bustling business of Marion Street.

The four-story stone building on the right (of the featured photo at the top) , the Colman Annex, is separated from the Colman Building by Post Avenue, which on some old city maps is called a street and on others an alley.  This “Colman Annex” was constructed of east coast stone. It was a lucky break for Colman: when the federal postmaster rejected its delivery – the stone was decreed as too soft for the construction of Seattle’s main post office at Third Avenue

and Union Street – Colman purchased the lot for pennies on the dollar. Many locals will best remember it as the long-time home for Society Candies.  More recently a parking lot, the Colman Annex block is now filled by a glass curtain high-rise that celebrates its location as The Post Building. It can be glimpsed through the leaves, upper-right, in Jean’s repeat.

The wagons, above and in the featured photo at the top,  most likely have something to do with the delivery of produce. This is the Commission District developed near both the railroads and the “mosquito fleet” steamers that carried fresh fruits and vegetables to the district’s large and generally homely warehouses.  They were run by middle-men who were best known as “the sharks” by both the farmers who sold to them and grocers who bought from them.  This was the gouging “Western Avenue combine” that truck farmers, home-owners and a progressive city council soon opposed in 1907 with a go-around, the Pike Place Public Market.

WEB EXTRAS

I was shooting on the waterfront for the column yesterday and came across a couple of scenes I can never get enough of. For your enjoyment, here they are:

(Thanks for your spontaneous/impetuous caress of this city Jean – in the right places.)

Anything to add, guys?   Surely Jean.

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Although certainly not obvious, the setting of the slender two-story home standing at the base of West Seattle’s Duwamish Head in our “then” is repeated in Jean Sherrard’s “now.”  It is the red and gray modern residence held in a verdant caress just this side (to the east) of California Boulevard S.W.  The home and the trees hide the Boulevard, which is the long arterial connection between the top of Duwamish Head and the shoreline parks and mostly condominiums, respectively, to the east and west sides of Harbor Avenue.

With Clay Eals, one of the most confident modern boosters of West Seattle, at his side, Jean Sherrard aimed his Nikon southwest across Harbor Avenue to one of the Head’s best known and most sentimental landmarks, Eva’s Stone Cottage. The framing of the beachside home with a marine view of Seattle was finished in the late 1920s.  Asked by a granddaughter how she would like the house finished, Eva answered, “Well, what about putting little rocks from the beach on it?”  With her family’s help, this prolific collecting we suspect continued into the Great Depression.  Now Eva’s Stone Cottage is one of the few beachside homes surviving in the increasing crush of modern condominiums.

After crossing Harbor Avenue, Jean and Clay continued around the corner of Eva’s home and climbed the length of what must be one of Seattle’s shortest streets, the half-block-long Maryland Place.  In order to save room for Eva’s Stone Cottage at the corner, we have not included Jean’s more precisely recorded repeat of our feature at 4013 Maryland Place S.W. When completed at the cusp of the Great Depression, the cottage was topped with a waving cornice made from the darker rocks that the family carried home in their wheelbarrow.

There are a few implied ‘stories’ about the featured house found in public records.  First, from its 1938 tax card, the date for construction, 1920, is years late.  In a Seattle Streets Department photo that is convincingly dated November 1916, the home is shown standing.   The tax photo attached to the card used here was recorded in 1937-38 during the Works Progress Administration’s photographic inventory of every taxable structure in King County.  The assessed value for these two lots were thirty dollars for the land and $230 for the home. Two years later the home was visited by tragedy when resident nineteen-year-old John R. Lofstad was listed in The Times “Vital Statistics” feature as having died from an automobile accident.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, kids?  Yes Jean.  Ron and I send along more features from the neighborhood – widely cast.

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Both groups posing her performed at Seattle’s by now venerable Northwest Folklife festival.  The earlier pleased posers are all members of the Love Israel religious community, living then near each other in several homes on Queen Anne hill.  They are performing from the Seattle Center stairway, between the Flag Plaza Pavilion built for Century 21 (our World’s Fair of 1962) and the Folklife visitors seated on the plaza behind photographer Frank Shaw. (You cannot see them.)  Shaw was a skilled amateur who filled several binders with his 2×2 negatives and transparencies (slides) recorded on his camera, a Hasselblad I envied then and still do.

Posing for Jean, the contemporary players have named themselves the Mad Robins, and dress appropriately. Earlier singing a cappella (without instruments), they accompanied contra dancers at this year’s Folklife Festival. By Jean’s accounting they sang very well. To prove it, Jean both recorded their performance and edited it into a youtube video that you will also find with a link below under WEB EXTRAS.. The Mad Robins’ own description of themselves is packed with joyful influences.  ”We are a group of eight contra dancers who also sing in a variety of traditions: sea shanties, barbershop quartet, Sacred Harp, pub carols from the British Isles, folk songs, Broadway show tunes, and choruses.”

Thanks to Red Robin Melissa Coffey for help with the Red Robins and to both Rachel Israel and Charles LeWarne for their help with Love Israel history. Historian LaWarne’s book, published by the University of Washington Press and sensibly named “The Love Israel Family,” is in print.

WEB EXTRAS

Jean here. I’ve added a photo of The Mad Robins in performance at this year’s Folklife:

And here’s a short video of their performance provided by member Melissa Coffey:

Anything to add, compañeros?  First, congratulations to Jean on completing the staging and directing what I’ll estimate was your 75th play with the good student-thespians of Hillside Academy.  Will you please estimate the number of productions that comprise your total Hillside opera, so far? Hillside is featured with a link at the top  of the blog’s front page, in the column directly to the right.)

Here follows a small spray of weekly links pulled from the last 37 years.   CLICK to open and CLICK to enlarge.

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 BELOW: A REMINDER TO VOTE THIS NOVEMBER

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May we note first a happy coincidence –instructive too – between this week’s “then” and “now?” Jean Sherrard has lifted his Nikon to a prospect above the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Madison Street that seems to resemble the elevation reached about a century ago by the more historical, although unnamed, photographer.  Jean has extended his pole-mounted camera into a zone of overhead wires that may resemble – for you too? –  that surreal moment when the spacecraft Cassini passed through the Rings of Saturn.

In fact, Jean’s camera has paused here for his “click” within a few inches of where the sidewalk sat 110 years ago. That was before the Third Avenue regrade cut seventeen feet from the intersection.  Before the cutting, cable cars on Madison Street climbed the third steepest grade in the cable car industry here between Second and Third Avenues.

The intersection’s rough northeast kitty-korner still shows the scars left by the deep grading along both Third and Madison about ten years before the “then” was recorded ca. 1916.  From 1890 until its destruction in 1906 by regrades, this northeast corner was the home of “polite vaudeville,” with a “family formula” featuring acts “without booze, peanuts or catcalls.” Here the scarred corner has been terraced for and signed by the Hopkins Nursery, perhaps the British-born Thomas Hopkins who with his sons later ran an award-winning and long-lived nursery in Bothell.   To this side of the terraced nursery, sits a nifty two door shed at the corner.  It promotes itself as a “union shop” that from toe to top cleans, shines, and dyes “ladies and gents shoes,” and also sells, cleans, presses and reblocks men’s hats.

The largest sign stuck in the dirt above the corner shed reads, in part, “For Lease or Owners Will Build.”  Soon the east side of Third Avenue between Madison and Spring Streets was fitted with an array of single story brick storefronts, and was popularly called “Real Estate Row.”  All the sidewalk shops were fitted with skylights of the same sort and size – at least ten of them.  Behind the retail  “row” was another of cars, parked west of an alley running the block. East of the alley and up the hill were the two landmark buildings filling much of the frame.  On the right is the Lincoln Hotel built in 1899 and destroyed by fire in 1920. Left-of-center stands the Elks Club, dedicated in 1914 and sold to Jewish Group in 1958 that sold it to the bank in 1964 for the building of their dark glass-curtain tower, dedicated in 1968. (Greg Dziekonski, a helpful fact-checking reader, tells us that “The Seattle Youth Symphony rehearsed in this building from 1958 to 1961 when it was the Jewish Community Center.”)

Far left in the featured photo – printed at the top – and facing Fourth Avenue a half-block north, the Independent Telephone Co. completed the photo’s frame on the left.  It joined the hot early twentieth century competition to wire, mostly from competing poles, the city with telephone lines.  Erected in 1902, the building’s “most interesting part,” the Times reported, was its concrete floors and partitions.  It was “a feature never before employed in the construction of any other building in Seattle.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mes braves?   Surely.   Ron may add some to what below when he arises from his late Spring-Sunday-Morning Sleep.

Meanwhile . . .

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 LINCOLN’S FATE BY FIRE

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On the flipside of the scuffed original print, the caption reads “Built in 1869 by Carson D. Boren for his mother Sarah Latimer Boren Denny – it is now the present site of main post office at Third and Union.”  Actually this tidy home was built for both Sarah and her husband John Denny, the father of Seattle founders, Arthur and David Denny.  She was John’s second Sarah, who, in 1851, with her grown son Carson, joined David and his sons for the seven-month trek on the Oregon Trail to the Willamette Valley.  (John’s first Sarah, his wife for 27 years, died in 1841 at the age of 44.)

The Dennys had been a successful farming family of exceptional industry, building successful farms in both Indiana and Illinois before together catching the “Oregon Itch” for the warmer and more lugubrious winters promised in the Willamette Valley.  There they built a third farm, while their grown children continued on to Puget Sound’s Elliott Bay to found a town they named after the helpful Duwamish headman, Seattle.  In 1858 the parents joined their pioneering children in Washington Territory.

While still in Illinois John Denny had served in the state’s legislature with his friend Abraham Lincoln.  Both were admired – and elected – as Whig wits with the gift for telling good stories.  Gordon Newell, one of Washington State’s author-solons, described John Denny as an “American pioneer and frontiersman, citizen soldier and homespun politician.”  As John’s sense of humor provoked mirth he was often chosen as speaker, or master of ceremonies for community events such as a Fourth of July celebration. In 1868, as a member of the fledgling Seattle Library Association, Denny gave what pioneer historian Thomas Prosch described as a “series of lectures on the progress of science and art,” which Prosch attended.

In her still enjoyed book “Pig-tail Days in Old Seattle,” Sophie Frye Bass remembers her great-great-grandmother Sarah and the atmosphere of her home.  (John had died in 1875, the year that Sophie started primary school.)  She writes, “Great Gramma’s place was a little white gabled house with wide porches.  It had tiny panes of glass on either side of the front paneled door and a funny bell which I loved to ring.  I recall the hit-or-miss rag carpet, the marble-topped table with the knitted cover that held the family album and stereoscope.  If I were a good girl, I was allowed to peek through the stereoscope, which seldom happened. … On the dresser in the tiny bedroom were bottles of hartshorn and camphor. The little house had the sweetest odor – indescribable – an odor of spices and old mahogany furniture and a whiff of some delicious cake backing in the oven.”

WEB EXTRAS

Just for beauty’s sake, I’ll toss in an early morning shot of Rainier, taken from the 80th St. overpass over I-5 last week:

Anything to add, ducks?  Jean, proud are Ron and I with our quackery are inserting more features from the neighborhood.  However, and frankly, we wonder if in choosing to insert this “The Mountain That Was God” testimony, had you taken note of what we think is an eagle soaring there and not a duck.  While we do not blame you, we wonder if you could have been more careful. 

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Of the roughly 150 thousand citizens living in Seattle in 1907, nine answered to Olds – their last name – and six of these lived in the Hotel Leland.  And surely all of them knew by heart the 1904 pop hit “In my Merry Oldsmobile“.  (My dad taught it to me in the 1940s.  He drove one.)

Here, in the featured photo at the top, stands the Hotel Leland at the northwest corner of Pike Street and the Post Alley, circa 1904.  There was then, as yet, neither a Pike Place nor a Public Market, nor any intimation of either.  The alley-wide arterial on the right is not a Place but an alley, Post Alley.  The building of Pike Place, between this intersection and the foot of Virginia Street at Western Avenue, came suddenly, as did the founding of its namesake public market.

Pike Place was cut thru in 1906-7 on the incentive of activist engineers and not by budget-conscious homemakers conspiring with truck-gardeners to exchange cash for produce in a public place like Pike Place. ( With the coming of the Market the farmers could get around the wholesale grocers’ gouging on Western Avenue.)  It was the transportation planners at city hall who successfully connived to cut through the neighborhood. In this public work of creating the eccentric Pike Place, they completed City Engineer Reginald Thomson’s Route No. 15, an arterial from northwest Seattle directed into the city’s new retail center to the sides of Pike Street.

Perhaps we would be right to imagine that the suited man with the watch chain standing above, and perhaps posing, at the Leland’s front door is its owner Gamaliel T. Olds. The helpful Kate Krafft, one of Seattle’s most effective activists for historic preservation, dates the construction of the Hotel Leland in 1902-3.  In the Aug. 11, 1907 classifieds for The Seattle Times – a mere week before the Pike Place Market’s grand opening – the Olds hotel was offered for sale and described as a “Lodging House, eighteen rooms; good furniture, good location.”

It was the Goodwin brothers, the market neighborhood’s first spirited developers, who purchased the hotel while keeping one of the Olds on as its manager.  Surprisingly, the democratically stressful part of the Market’s popularity soon upset M. Olds. The Times for Nov. 10, 1907 reported that he had complained that the police should “do something to prevent Socialists from attempting to hold street meetings on Pike Place . . . He complains particularly about the crowds, which he says congregate in front of his hotel much to his annoyance.”  Now after the Pike Place Public Market’s first 111 years of clamoring activism, M. Olds complaining comes across as partially prescient and partially pathetic.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mates?  Surely captain.   More from the neighborhood.

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Given its generous prospect, we might have expected that Seattle’s earliest photographers would have made many climbs up Beacon Hill for recording panoramas of the city.  If I have counted correctly, there were a mere half-dozen pans taken from the hill before the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  Carlton Watkins, the itinerant California photographer best known for his early records of the Yosemite Valley, shot the earliest one in 1882.  We featured it in this column a century later on October 3, 1982.

By comparison, local recorder George Moore made his first pan of the city aiming south from Denny Hill in 1872.  That was thirteen years after E.A. Clark, almost certainly the city’s first resident with a camera, recorded the city’s first extant photograph, a daguerreotype of Sarah and Henry Yesler’s home at the northeast corner of James Street and Front Street (First Avenue).

To repeat this week we return to Beacon Hill’s desirable prospect with Theo E. Peiser’s 1884-85 pan of the city and its tideflats. Peiser’s pan shows four rail-supporting trestles heading across Plummer’s Bay to the Beacon Hill shoreline.  The parallel quays on the left were new in 1884, and the space between them was soon filled with oversized warehouses. This was Puget Sound’s most prosperous trans-shipment harbor, “where rails meets sails.”   (And soon steamers, as well.)  This is Seattle, the “Seaport of Success,” and the booming beginning of its now 137 years as Washington State’s principal metropolis.

Seattle historian Kurt E. Armbruster is the most helpful unraveler of the sometimes snarl of Seattle’s railroading history.  The Washington State University Press recently reprinted his book “Orphan Road”.  We highly recommend it to PacificNW readers who especially want to research the “rails meet sails” part of our pioneer history.  Our readers might also wish to consult my “Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront,” available for free use on our blog dorpatsherrardlomont, in which I often quote from Armbruster’s book.

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Anything to add, compadres?  We have rummaged our files for you Jean.  May your and your student’s play go well – the one you are producing soon at Hillside School which rests in its own forest wonderland near the top of Bellevue’s Cougar Mountain. (Which means if there is a heavy snow, the students generally stay home.)  Interested, dear reader, in Hillside’s offerings for your children or the children of others? 

You will find near the top of this blog a bug or icon to click, which will take you to the school’s web page.  A good advertisement for a Hillside education is Jean himself.   Now 60 years old (oh my!) Jean was its first student, and now teaches drama and writing there, and produces the plays his students perform.   [Sincerely Signed, Paul Dorpat]

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Penned across the bottom-right corner of this week’s featured photo, is its location: Second and Spring Streets.  The caption is easily confirmed by both landmarks and signs. For instance, the street name, ”Second,” is nailed to the power pole on the left.  This view looks east up Spring Street from Second Avenue.   (We have also posted below Jean’s “now” the flip-side of the featured subject,) which is kept in the Museum of History and Industry’s collection of historical photographs.)

Most historical photographs taken in the central business district record the relatively long avenues that run north and south along the western slope of First Hill.  The streets climbing the hill are wonderfully revealed from Elliott Bay but not up close.  With Seattle streets, pioneer photographers gave some interest to Mill Street (Yesler Way), Madison Street, and Pike Street.  The others were given less regard.

The featured photograph’s  look up and through the regrade upheaval on Spring Street includes small parts of structures that in their time were proudly considered landmarks.  Also unsparingly revealed here, upper-right, is one big landmark: the Lincoln Hotel,  Covered with white bricks and stone, it stood for twenty years at the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue and Madison Street. Opened in 1900, its inaugural name, the Knickenbacher, was later dropped for

reasons not explained in the boasting advertisements and press releases that described it as “Seattle’s first apartment hotel.”  For the generally upscale tenants it came with a lavish pleasure garden on the roof.  For its last tenants the Lincoln left with tragedy: a sudden fire that killed four including a father and daughter who jumped together from their sixth floor apartment to the alley.

We will use the hotel to find parts to three more landmarks.  First Seattle’s central library, the largest of the Seattle libraries built with a Andrew Carnegie endowment.  We can find most of its roofline, but not much else, to the left of the Lincoln. Like today’s library it faces west from the east side of Fourth Avenue, between Madison and Spring Street. The Carnegie library was dedicated on December 19, 1906, where that public guardian of the vox populi still stands two plants later.  Its northwest corner shines near the center of Jean’s repeat.

The cross rising here (in the featured photo) seemingly from the roof of the library, topped Providence Hospital, another pioneer landmark. The construction began in 1882 on the east side of Fifth Avenue. Fifty-seven years later the site was fitted with the surviving Federal Court House.

With some help from the what remains of the Third Avenue Theatre at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Madison Street, we have pulled circa dates of late 1906 or early 1907 for the featured photograph. The barn-like rear of the theatre partially hides the west façade of the Lincoln Hotel.  The regrade’s deep cuts at Third and Madison left the theatre’s front door stranded high above the new grade.  Russel and Drew, the theatre’s managers explained in a caption to another photo of the threatened theatre that “The work (of razing the theatre) will be started at once, and in a few days a vacant lot will greet the eye where once stood one of the most popular and successful playhouses in all the West.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, goslings?

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This week PacificNW readers are asked to figure on their own the date of this Georgetown street scene, perhaps from the motorcars that are parked on it.  Whatever the year, and I’m speculating ca. 1920, the spread of businesses in the three contiguous business blocks snugly grouped here on the west side of 12^th Avenue South, south of Vale Street (on the far right) is downright inviting.

Starting at the sidewalk on the left, at the corner with S. Harney Street, are “Roma Imported,” mostly hiding behind the open delivery van, and a market of fresh produce sharing the first floor of the smallest of the three two-story buildings grouped here.  One can imagine vegetables in the boxes shining through the plate glass window. Most likely there are a few rented apartments upstairs.

The bigger building at the center is “The Hamilton.”  It is prominently and appropriately signed in relief with more bricks carefully set on its all-brick façade.  We have learned from John Bennett, one of Georgetown’s contemporary freeholders, that it is actually a concrete box covered on the street side with a layer of decorative brick.  More than a century of rains have seeped between the box and its covering, staining some of the latter. The construction date, 1907, has been artfully split to either side of the hotel’s name.

The structure’s three sidewalk shops are, left-to-right, first a shoe repair, neighbor next to the Working Man’s Store, which features both clothes and shoes.  (Perhaps one could purchase both new and used shoes here, although we will note that this glass negative was recorded by the Webster and Stevens Photography Studio years before the Great Depression when used shoes were in greater demand.)  The third of the merchants busy at the sidewalk is the White Front Restaurant.  It is neatly signed on the window.

The Seattle Times for January 3, 1908, reports that “The Georgetown post office and the Georgetown pharmacy have been moved into new quarters in The Hamilton Building, a brick structure.” These are nearly the building’s first tenants for the Hamilton was then barely a year old.  Also in 1908, The Hamilton welcomed as a tenant John Mueller, the manager of Georgetown’s new and huge Rainier Brewery.  Mueller opened an office in The Hamilton for his mayoral campaign, which he easily won.  The Times explained that George Brown, his opponent, “is not making an active fight.”

Marcus and Martha Hamilton and their family lived behind their namesake hotel and hall. They owned the block.  Marcus served many mostly uncontroversial years as a King County Commissioner.  When the first five floors of the City-County Building at 4^th and Jefferson were dedicated on May 4, 1916, Marcus was the keynote speaker along with Hi Gill, Seattle’s exceedingly controversial mayor.

With its big room and high ceiling on the second floor, Hamilton Hall served a wealth of patrons for campaign rallies, dances, secret society meetings and such and such.  Its rooftop sign radiates like the sunrises it faced over Beacon Hill between 1903, the year of its construction, and 1972, the year of its tear-down.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Sure Jean, sometimes we aim to please.   Other times we need to sneeze.  It is one still step after another.  Keep on trucking.  Tragedy/Comedy.   Here’s more from the neighborhood widely conceived

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Chuck Reisch, KRAB archivist and multifarious luminary, offers the following link to a fascinating audio excerpt.

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I first read Kit Bakke’s ‘Protest on Trial’ as a work-in-progress. The book’s publisher, Washington State University Press, shared a copy of the manuscript with me for comment, and as I read through it I increasingly responded with recommendations.  This week’s edited excerpt of the book’s brilliant late chapter on courtroom mayhem should, I hope, inspire many PacificNW readers to read it all.

Doyal Gudgel Sr. snapped the two “more” historical photographs printed here in 1970 at the front door of the Federal Court House, directly across Fifth Avenue from the Seattle Public Library.  The oldest one, with the phalanx of helmeted Seattle police guarding the courthouse’s broken front door, was photographed on Feb. 17, 1970.  That was TDA or “The Day After”, a one Winter day of protest.  (Again, I’m confident that readers will be enlivened to learn more about the TDA and the many political shenanigans surrounding it by reading the book.)  Besides smashing the front door, angrier TDA protesters also threw paint, and some of it can be seen in long drippings above the front door.

It seems (at least) that in the second Gudgel snapshot (at the top) the running paint survives as a smear above the same door on April 17, 1970 when it was time for another organized protest.  (Read the book, OK?) As a “stringer” providing both still shots like these and 16mm film for media clients and law enforcement investigations, Gudgel responded to opportunities he first discovered on the police radio reports he listened to while tending his store, Burien Radio and Television.

The photographer most likely arrived somewhat late for the April recording at the Courthouse.  The day started with a protest march in morning rain, while here the afternoon sun casts long afternoon shadows.  To these eyes Gudgel’s April recording resembles a designed tableau.  The man on the far left seems to be drawn, at least in profile, from a central casting for tough investigators.

The sunlit April photograph is aiming at one of the Seattle Seven: Jeffrey Alan Dowd, who at 20-years-old carried a mop of curly hair above a still cherubic face.  Now decades later Dowd, living in Southern California, is better known as “The Dude” an eccentric pop creation from Hollywood.  Here the pre-dude Dowd is cradled by admirers of his political courage, some of them showing fists and one of them slim arms reaching, it seems, in reverence.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, troublemakers?  Yes Jean we will stir a few more column inches below with more features.

 

 

 

 

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Pioneer photographs of any Seattle street other than Mill Street (Yesler Way), Commercial Street (First Ave. S.), and Front Street (First Ave. north of Mill Street) are rare.  Here are two exceptions.  Both are on Second Avenue and both were recorded from the same prospect – within inches of one another.

In the 1880s pioneer photographers Theodore E. Peiser and David Judkins set up studios a block apart on the west side of Second Avenue.  They were competitors and almost certainly did not plan this propinquity.   Peiser’s studio was on the second lot south of Marion Street and Judkins’ on the southwest corner with Columbia Street.  The two professionals photographed parades of different sorts near their studios on Second Avenue, and only about six weeks apart.

I am long familiar with Peiser’s May 13, 1886 record of parading members of the secret society Knights of Pythias pausing for his professional snap. As a pioneer classic it has appeared often in publications and exhibits.  We used it for its own “now and then” in PacificNW on January 17, 1999. (see above)  Judkin’s photo, (2nd from the top) however, I had never seen before last week.  I was thrilled.

The alert Ron Edge discovered it while helping the Museum of History and Industry scan some of its oldest prints. The print of Judkins’ line-up of primary school children – about 200 of them on the east side of Second Avenue filling the block between Columbia and Marion Streets, and more – is dated June 23, 1886.

Handwriting on the back makes a claim for Emma Blocksom.  It is her “school picture” and Emma is probably one of the posing 200 or so.  The Blocksoms are listed once in the 1886 city directory, below,  living on Washington Street.  The promising family lead stops there. (And for us, now, as well.)

Seattle opened Central School in 1883 four blocks up First Hill from here. Central School was big enough to handle as many scholars, and more, as those lined up. Perhaps this late June day is the last before summer vacation for these students, and taking one school picture is certainly more efficient than several.  (In 1886 Seattle’s population of school-age citizens between four and twenty-one years old was 2,591.)

What is not explained for either of these pros is how did they lift or carry their heavy cameras so high above the boardwalk?  Here I am again thankful for help from Ron Edge. In the MOHAI collection off older prints, Ron found an 1887 panoramic look from Denny Hill that includes an unobstructed sighting down Second Avenue. While it is soft on focus, it still shows many of the landmarks included here.  Most importantly, the leafy tree near the northwest corner of Second and Columbia, on the left in both of the featured photos, is standing in the panorama, a welcomed help for our ‘hide-and-seek’ after the photographer’s prospect.  About a third-of-a-block south of Columbia Street a two-story residence stands at the curb and over the sidewalk that uniquely runs below it. The residence, we suspect, was constructed before Second Avenue was developed from a path into a street.  Most likely both photographers were invited by this neighbor to shoot their parades from the this second floor veranda.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, cherubs?

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When classes first began Sept. 4, 1895, on the University of Washington’s new Interlaken campus, the students were greeted by  the school bell, carried from the old campus to the new, but hanging in the Denny Hall belfry.  Denny Hall is out-of-frame up the paved path that runs through the columns to the right.  The bell soon became annoyingly familiar after sunrise when the bell ringer took, it seemed, cruel pleasures in waking not only students but also the citizens of Brooklyn. (Brooklyn was the University District’s first popular name.) If the weather were right, the bell could be heard in Renton.

The twenty-foot tall hand-carved columns were examples of the Greek Ionic order. Inevitably, perhaps, they also became iconic, and for some the University’s most representative symbol. Each weighing about one-thousand pounds, they were originally grouped along the façade of the school’s first structure on the original 1861 campus, near what is long since the northeast corner of Seneca

Street and Fourth Avenue.  When the classic quartet was detached and moved to the new campus, student preservation activists continued to hope that the entire building would follow them to be reunited in time for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition.  It was not to be.  Instead, selected remains of the University’s first home were carved into commemorative canes. The four surviving columns were consigned to this position in the then still future Quad. They were named, “Loyalty”, “Industry”, “Faith”, and “Efficiency.”  Neither Jean nor I know which is which.

In 1915 the school’s Board of Regents embraced architect Carl F. Gould’s “Revised General Plan of the University of Washington,” which included the Quad and prescribed that the architectural style to be used in its several buildings should be Collegiate Gothic.  Commerce Hall, the brick and tile example on the right of the featured photo at the top, was completed in 1917.  Work on Philosophy Hall, on the left, was delayed by the material needs of the First World War, and completed late in the fall of 1920. By 1972 the names of both halls were changed to Savery, in honor of William Savery, the head of the University’s Department of Philosophy for more than forty years.

With the completion of Commerce and Philosophy Halls, the quartet of columns was moved in 1921 to the Sylvan Theatre, which had been prepared for them. The Seattle Times noted that “It was the first time that the traditional pillars have been tampered with without some sort of ceremony.”  Since then the “ancient pillars” have witnessed a good share of pomp and circumstance during school’s graduation exercises.

WEB EXTRAS

As per your request, Paul, I’ll toss in a few just for fun:  They make us better Jean.

Anything to add, blossoms?

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ANOTHER IONICICONIC – MOVED&SAVED

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MORE of MAHLER AND WAGNER

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Four weeks ago, Jean Sherrard stood at what is known as the front door to the Pike Place Market, the intersection of First Avenue and Pike Street. Hoisting a pole that extended as tall as the base of the market’s clock, he pointed his heavy Nikon eastward, up the center of Pike Street.  From a similar perch about 88 years earlier, a Webster and Stevens Studio photographer also looked east on Pike and recorded this week’s “then.” We are dating this photo as circa 1931, based not on the automotive license plates, which are hard to read, but rather the five-story construction under way for the J.C. Penney department store at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and Pike Street, here right-of-center and still without windows.

Later branded as JCPenney but known by one and all as Penney’s, the store opened Thursday, Aug. 13, 1931. In contrast to the uncertainties and outright failures of the Great Depression, Penney’s placed an advertisement in this daily five days later claiming that a “staggering” and “conservative” estimate of 125,000 had visited since the store’s opening. Some were “curious,” others “skeptical,” but many left with “arms loaded, satisfied that regardless of business conditions, people will buy when prices are right.”

NOW IS THE TIME to INTRODUCE ROBERT HAHN

Ten years later, Seattle traded financial troubles for the anxieties and orders of World War II. By then, the Hahn family had been associated with the intersection of First and Pike for more than 60 years. Robert Ernest Hahn, a German immigrant from Saxony, arrived in Seattle in the late 1860s and soon purchased the southeast corner when First Avenue (then named Front Street) and Pike Street were mere paths. Their neighbors included Seattle pioneers Arthur and Mary Denny and the lesser-known C. B. Shattuck.

Shattuck managed the Seattle Coal and Transportation Company that from 1871 to 1878 moved coal from their mine at Newcastle by a route that required both barges on the lakes and trains including one that crossed back-and-forth through this intersection from the company’s bunkers and wharf at the foot of Pike Street to their wharf at the south end of Lake Union. We imagine that Hahn chose not to get soiled by working for his neighbor.  Instead, he thrived as a painter and interior decorator, continuing to buy property and, with his wife, Amelia, raise a family of five children including Ernie who gained some local celebrity as a sportsman.   A Salmon Derby trophy was named for him.

By the time of Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889, the Hahn corner was a popular summer retreat from the heat with a beer garden, which real-estate maps indicate was approached from Pike Street. In 1909, the Hahns completed what survives as First and Pike’s southeast corner post, the three-story brick Hahn Building, also long known as the Elliott Hotel and seen above in our “now” as the Green Tortoise Hostel. The recent proposal that it be razed for a high-rise is rousing the market’s many friends to protect this “humble hundred-year old guardian structure” from the wages of plastic and glass.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads? Another mix from the neighborhood considered, which also reveals our love for it.

 

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This week I wish to lead with Jean Sherrard’s “now.”  It is a noon-hour streetscape graced by a morning downpour.  The clean puddle on Yesler Way reflects the dappled clouds that fringe the 40-plus story Smith Tower, which is mirrored in this small flood nearly as brilliantly as the landmark’s terra-cotta tiles shine in the noon-hour sky.  Sunlight escaping across Yesler Way from the alley between First Avenue and Occidental Street draws a warm path through the scene’s center.

The featured “then” at the top we have picked to ponder with Jean’s now is not “on spot.”  Rather, it was recorded a half-block west on Yesler Way.  I chose this “then” for a list of reasons, including repeat photography.   At the photograph’s center stand two of the landmarks that Seattle rapidly raised in 1883-84, early boom years for the growing town that in 1881 first took the prize for numbered citizens in Washington Territory.  This developing strip of Victorian landmarks on Mill Street (Yesler Way) continues south from this intersection on Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) and especially north on Front Street (First Ave.)  (If you wish to explore the blog dorpatsherrardlomont you will find many opportunities to keyword-explore all with the help of past now-and-then features and books compiled from them.)

This look into Pioneer Square, or Pioneer Place as it was first named, shows the photographer W.F. Boyd’s stamp on its flip side. Boyd arrived in Seattle not long before he recorded this view.  Beside his centered stamp there are additional messages written by other hands on the back, including “Photo taken day before fire,” meaning the Great Fire of June 6 1889.  But it cannot be. Instead we have chosen to date this circa 1887, largely on a lead from Ron Edge, who pointed out the work-in-progress extending the Occidental Hotel (with the flagpole and mansard roof) to fill the entire flatiron block bordered by Mill Street, James Street and Second Avenue.

Another grand construction stands center-left: the Yesler-Leary Building, with its showplace tower topped by a weather vane, at the northwest corner of Front and Mill Streets.  One of our “other reasons” for picking this “then” on Mill Street is the brick building in the shadows on the scene’s far right.  We ask readers smarter than we to name this three-story pre-fire landmark.  [Soon after we made this request, Ron Edge, a frequent contributor to this blog, came forward – or up – with the answer.  Continue on for both his correct identification and his evidence.]

While I have never seen any face-on photograph of this south side of Mill Street, west of First Ave., it does appear in a Seattle1884 birdseye map and in that year’s Sanborn map as well.  But neither of these early sources give it a name or address.  Perhaps it is the Villard House*, listed in the 1884 city directory at 15 Mill Street and “near the Steamboat Wharf,” aka Yesler’s Wharf.  C.S. Plough, the proprietor, dauntlessly advertised it with a mondo boast, “The Villard is the best and cheapest hotel in the city.”

• RON EDGE’S 11TH HOUR DISCOVERY:  NOPE – NOT THE VILLARD HOUSE, BUT RATHER THE SCHWABACHER BUILDING.   

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JEAN ASKS – ANYTHING TO ADD LADS.

Anything to add, lads?   Beyond what is revealed just above, Ron Edge’s 11th hour identification of the three-story brick building on the far of the week’s feature, we have more of our weekly same, which is more past feature’s from the neighborhood.

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Once cameras could be used comfortably out-of-doors, one of the sustaining services promoted by commercial photographers was portraits for families posing on the porch or front yard and businesses that grouped owners with their employees in front of the shop or factory that supported them.   This week’s feature has both, with a variation.

The man in the dark suit nearest the camera is probably Syvert Stray, proprietor of the Seattle Dairy. He is standing beside, we assume, his wife Lillian, while holding onto the high wagon chair where his daughter poses for the professional photographer.  Down the line are the horses and drivers for Stray’s five milk wagons. The twist in this group portrait is that the subjects here are not posing beside the

company’s office and/or livery on Eighth Avenue. Rather they are around the corner from it on Union Street.  The reason is obvious.  They are sharing the splendor of a new and magnificent neighbor.  This is the showy south façade of Dreamland, a hall that filled the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Union Street.

This ornate landmark could have held a hundred horses but never did.  Rather, it was made for entertainments and engagements. From its arching roof to the hardwood floor this big room was made for dancing, skating, conventions, banquets and shows of many sorts.  It was often decorated with streamers hanging from the ceiling.  Dreamland was also the political platform of choice for progressives, labor unions, and political campaigning.  The dances thrown here were big ones. And the sweating populist spectator sports of boxing and wrestling could fill the place.

From its beginning, Dreamland was promoted primarily as a roller skating rink. The opening was “by invitation” on October 14, 1906, for the Monday Night Skating Club.  The following night it was promoted in The Times as “the ideal rink for discriminating skaters… with Prof. Chas L. Franks and his daughter Lillian “performing as Champion Fancy Skaters.”  Stray, Dreamland’s dairyman neighbor, was also into roller skating, sponsoring a competitive team in the Seattle Roller Hockey League.

In 1915, after Stray bought a Rothweiler truck, an illustrated advertisement of the purchase appeared in The Times.  Like the milk wagons Stray was replacing, his new truck was partially covered with a sign naming his dairy. Stray’s spirit for internal combustion developed into his second entrepreneurial passion, as director of McKale’s Inc., a small chain of stylish service stations.  The number one McKale’s was on the northwest corner of Union Street and Eighth Avenue, two doors from Stray’s Seattle Dairy.

Born in Christiansun, Norway, in 1871, the seventeen-year-old Syvert reached the U.S. in 1888 and Seattle in 1902.  Prior to his death in 1934 Stray was a life member in The Fraternal Order of Eagles, whose elegant aerie replaced Dreamland at Seventh Avenue and Union Street in 1925.  Since 1997, it is a corner where the play has continued with ACT Theatre.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, dreamers?  Yup Jean, Ron Edge is now laying upon us a few recent and relevant features and I’ll follow them with some older ones

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CALL CODA COLLECT

 

 

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The arch standing here at the southeast corner of Union Street and Third Avenue was short-lived, like every other ceremonial ornament contrived for the Seattle Street Fair and Carnival, assembled and produced by the Seattle Elks Lodge for thirteen sunny days in August 1902.  This arch, the only rustic one, was the odd one of four built for the fair. It was a vernacular showpiece with a somewhat exotic shape, covered overall with cedar shakes, making it regional, while wrapping it with electric lights made it modern.

The other three arches, by contrast, were all-white, reminders of the also temporary Beaux Arts architecture of Chicago’s 1893 Columbia Exposition.  The two largest spanned First and Second Avenues widely enough to permit electric trolleys to pass through. With their ornamental splendor, the three classical arches were also unwitting

premonitions of Seattle’s own World’s Fair, its 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.  One of the three crossed Union Street about a half-block behind – west – of the unnamed photographer.  With two booths asking for the ten-cent admission, it served the fair as the main ticket gate to the fenced celebration.

The dime paid for everything that was spread about on the acres selected from the former University of Washington campus. The off-campus Third Avenue block between Union and University Streets was also lined with booths, and Union Street as well, from

the ticket booth east into the old campus that was covered with tents such as the one seen on the far right of this week’s ‘then’ photograph.  And nearly everything was enveloped in strings of electric lights.  The Elks promised that the grounds at night would be “almost as light as day.”  Some of the exotic thrills inside the fenced tents were an “Arabian trainer in a den of lions,” a “cage of leopards,” “Jabour’s Oriental Carnival and Menageries Company,” and “a troupe of 160 Orientals, Turks, Assyrians, Egyptians, East Indians, Japanese,” in addition to “dozens of unusual things.” The Elks fair was also distinguished and promoted by daily parades through the city streets.  One of the attractions was a “ladies band with eighteen pieces.”

Although exceptionally civic-minded, the Plymouth Congregational Church, on the far right at University Street, was not inside the fenced fair grounds.  The Armory, the structure with the long roof half-hidden behind the arch, was.  Among its many well-promoted events was a contest in the “pretty booth” with prizes for the prettiest girl and the handsomest boy and also “the largest and fattest baby 16 months old.”  The judge was a local doctor who prudently fled the Armory following the contests.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lodge members?  Yes Jean, and we remain faithful to your designs.  Before putting forward Ron’s links we will add three more illustrations of the southeast corner of Third Ave. and Union Street: from top-to-bottom, the corner cleared, building the Post Office, the modern class-curtain post office proposed by its architects.   Their rendering looks considerably better than the thing itself, however, we recall the Latin aphorism on taste (that we may have misspelled).    “De gustibus non desputandum est. ” or “taste is not debatable” except that is surely is debated.

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STATE-WIDE ELKS

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Jean and I first used this Pioneer Square classic years ago on the back cover of our now long out-of-print book, Washington State Then and Now (2007).  We described the crowded scene as a celebration connected with Seattle’s summer-long 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYP).  It seemed like a reasonable claim at the time, but it was wrong.  We missed both the subject’s evidence and lack of it.  There are no AYP signs or flags anywhere to be found.  But there is lots of patriotic bunting, especially American flags.

The best clue for identifying the occasion is spelled out in the line of pennants hanging near the top, showing the last five letters for “WELCOME.” The location is Pioneer Square, when it was still more popularly called Pioneer Place, during the four-day visit of Pres. Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet.  Leaving the east coast in December 1907, it required fourteen months to circumnavigate the world with its military parade. Most likely the scene was photographed on May 26, 1908, following the completion of the Grand Parade for the welcomed visitors,  It started that morning, but in the photo the pedestrian celebrants cast afternoon shadows.

The popularity of what Seattle called its “Fleet Week” was both overflowing and depleting. Crowd counters estimated that 400,000 watched the parade.  Downtown businesses were more than willing to decorate their facades with flags and patriotic festoons; many of the decorations were stunning. Five days before the parade The Seattle Times announced “Seattle Has A Bunting Famine.  Merchants were unable to supply another yard of acceptable decorating material to patriotic customers (and) Tacoma and Portland were unable to help.”

Most of the fleet’s admirers came from Puget Sound, and extra Mosquito Fleet steamers and passenger trains were enlisted to bring the eager hordes to witness “the largest sea-fighting machines in the world.”  The trains were often stuffed beyond standing room, and many seekers from distant communities were left standing on depot platforms.  Visitors who managed to reach Seattle often had to camp in the parks.  The temporary tent, showing left-of-center in the photograph, tries to help.  Its sign reads: “Free Information Bureau, Strangers Directed to Furnished Rooms.”

On Monday, May 25, The Times headlined “Thousands Visit Ships … With every detail outlined by the bright sunshine which followed the dreary rain of yesterday, the eleven huge, white fighting machines now at anchor in the harbor lay in stately majesty in a wide crescent that stretched from Smith’s Cove to the south end of the harbor.” Earlier, when the fleet headed north from their California visits, they inspired thousands of Oregon citizens to sortie to their coast expecting to see the dozen dreadnaughts steam by.  However as brilliant as the big ships could be reflecting the fleet’s “peacetime color, white,” the Oregonians saw nothing of the distant White Fleet, except its smoke darkening the horizon.

We’ve attached a direct closing here for the Fleet Week feature above with another below, a scene on Second Avenue , or beside it showing some of the crowd that paid for their bleachers seats here at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and Virginia Street.  (The prospect looks to the northwest.)  This added feature includes an array of Fleet Week images including photos of the fleet itself both on the way and in the bay.

WEB EXTRAS

Just for fun, on this lovely near-Spring day, let’s jump across town for a few cherry blossoms, seen from on high with my 21-foot pole. ‘Tis the season for Asian wedding photos – there were five or six sessions going on with tuxedoed grooms and blushing brides through the cherry trees! Enjoy! (A version of one of these shots will appear in a future column):

Anything to add, lads?  Fall to the Bottom for Seasonal Salubrious advice Jean.

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HOSPITAL ZONE – QUIET PLEASE

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EXTRA: SSS A SPRING SKIN WARNING for ERUPTIONS OF EVERY CONCEIVABLE KIND

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Heading south on The Ave (University Way N.E.), Seattle Municipal Railway car no. 511 was recorded mid-block between N.E. 43^rd and N.E. 45^th, very possibly by a rail fan, perhaps James Turner or Lawton Gowey.  Both started waiting for and/or chasing trains and trolleys with cameras before World War II.  They knew and admired each other and shared their well-wrought snapshots.  (Much later Lawton and I did the same.)

Running on route 15, car no. 511 is heading for Capitol Hill’s commercial arterial, Broadway, as seen printed on the reader board above the center window. The “double-ender” was one of twenty-five trolleys (500 – 524) manufactured in 1906 in St. Louis for use on the already roaring streets of this then (and now) booming city.  All were one inch longer than forty feet, and all were scrapped in either 1940 or 1941.

The Varsity Theatre opened across the street from the University Book Store in 1940.  Perhaps the theatre is hidden behind the cars on the left, or, perhaps, is not there. We prefer to think this photograph was recorded a year earlier, sometime in 1939.  Note the American flags flapping above the southbound rails.  They could be in celebration for that year’s Independence Day, but not for the 1940 Fourth of July, by which time the Broadway trolley line had been abandoned. The tracks were soon pulled, and The Ave’s pavement then resembled the wartime rubble often printed in the city’s then three dailies: The Times, The P-I and The Star.

On the right of the featured photo at the top, the popular Lun Ting Café opened sometime in 1938.  It did not make it into that year’s Polk City Directory. The chop suey and chow mein provider appears here adorned with roof tiles. Roy Nielsen, the author of UniverCity, the Story of the University District, fondly reflects that Ray Chinn, the café’s manager and, like Nielsen, a long-time member of the neighborhood Rotary Club, “was very popular in the District.”  In 1970 when the University Book Store expanded into his café, the Rotarians held a mock wake in the café on its closing night.  They called it a “Chinese Smorgasbord Inside Picnic”.  Chinn reopened nearby on 12^th Avenue as a Chinese drive-in.

In 1925 the Associated Students’ University Book Store (UBS) moved to The Ave from its campus home in the basement of Meany Hall. The 1970 expansion was one of its many remodels.  In the featured photo,  ca. 1939, the Book Store is the gorilla on The Ave’s 4300 hundred block, which was then Seattle’s busiest book block.  Nestled near it were also the Washington Book Store, Dearle’s Book Store, and the Bookery and Lending Library. The UBS celebrated its centennial in 2000.  A year earlier, I had a fine time in the store’s employ writing and illustrating its centennial history.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Sure Jean – lots more features.  As friend Gavin MacDougall works his and his scanner’s way through the opera of features we will have a growing horde of stories to share.

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With the number 677 inked, lower-right, on the original glass negative, this is an early exposure from the Webster and Stevens Studio. Loomis Miller was the last owner of this magnum opus (about 40,000 mostly glass negatives) which PEMCO purchased for the Museum of History and Industry in 1983.  The low number of this subject in MOHAI’S “PEMCO Collection” dates it very early in the twentieth century.  (I’m choosing a circa 1903 date until corrected.)

The photographer – perhaps one of the partners, either Ira Webster or Nelson Stevens – focuses east on Pike Street through its intersection with Third Avenue.  While I have just speculated with some confidence on the date, I have no idea what the purpose of the triangular contraption (a kind of designed street clutter on the left) is for.  (You will need to enlarge the scan to see this detail. ) With the aid of magnification one discovers that the wood frame holds two gears that may be connected to the large coil of rope partially hidden behind the second man from the left.  He is looking in the direction of the “SIGNS” sign attached to the corner of the ornate Heussy Building. Meanwhile, directly below him, another man, smoking his pipe, has improvised the coil as a chair, a modern-looking one.

Looking east on Pike (not in the photo directly above, which looks south on Third Ave, but in the featured photo at the top) we can make out, in the half-haze, the Capitol Hill horizon about a mile away.  The tracks in the foreground were a feeder to three Capitol Hill trolley lines: one that did not reach the summit, another that did on 15^th Avenue and a third that went over it.  In the early 1900s tracks were not new on Pike Street.  In 1872, there was the narrow-gauge railroad that ran between the Pike

Street coal wharf and the south end of Lake Union. There coal from the east side of Lake Washington reached its last leg on prosperous trips to the fleet of coal-schooners that kept California stoked with our own Newcastle nuggets.  The coal was transferred from barges on Lake Union to the coal hoppers waiting at the railroad’s lake terminus, about a block east of where Westlake now crosses Mercer Street. In 1884 the horse cars from the Pioneer Square

neighborhood on Second Avenue first turned on to Pike on their zig-zag route to Lake Union.  In 1889 the four-legged horsepower was forsaken for electric trollies, which were scrapped in the early 1940s when replaced with gas and rubber.

Both the Heussy Block on the left and the Hotel Abbott on the right of the featured photograph were prestigious three-story brick additions to Pike Street in the early 1890s.  The timing of their construction was one part fortuitous and the rest self-evident.  The booming of Seattle in the 1880s continued into the teens, and the city’s Great Fire of 1889, which was blocks away in the oldest neighborhoods and on the central waterfront, helped quicken the development of this the North End.

We find no motor vehicles on Pike in the featured photo because they were still rare.  On December 23, 1904;, the city’s Public Works Department counted the vehicular visits through Pike Street’s intersection with Second Avenue.  Nearly lost in the total count of 3,959, a mere fourteen were not pulled by horses.

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s a serendipitous, if unrelated, treat of local restoration. As I was strolling down 1st Avenue and Washington Street this afternoon, I caught a glimpse of an old friend, the harbor pergola back in its rightful spot.

Anything to add, fellahs?  It is a swell surprise, your pergola.  I did not know that it was saved and probably restored for its next century – even.  I wrote more about this in The Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront – I think we named it.  You will find that – or can find it – among the list of books we have published and then also scanned for this blog.

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BELOW:

THIRD AVE ON THE OTHER – NORTH – SIDE OF THE DENNY AKA WASHINGTON HOTEL – Looking south across Blanchard Street.

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ANOTHER and probably DIFFERENT HEUSSY and ABBOTT looking across this feature column at each other.  One of the primary delights got with doing these Sunday features is the odd matter picked up with research, especially reading old newspapers.  Here are TWO EXAMPLES both pulled or picked from The Seattle Times archive.  The first is dated Feb 19, 1897 and reveals with the reflections of Dr. Lyman Abbott how far forward Darwin and his “truth of evolution”  have ‘evolved’  through the then still lingering 19th Century.  The second celebrates the decision of Dr. C.W. Heussy, a young medical doctor, to locate his practice in Seattle.

DR. ABBOTT

DR. HEUSSY (or is is Henssy or Heusey?)

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In 2001, Paul Dorpat, Catherine Wadley and I worked for many months creating a 1-hour documentary history of Bumbershoot. We called it BumberChronicles. Commissioned by One Reel, it aired on KCTS-9 and for several years on The Seattle Channel. Click through to remember (and mourn) the extraordinary arts festival that once was….

(click to enlarge photos)

When portraits of classes or entire student bodies became increasingly commonplace in the 1880s, a variation arose that required more work in the darkroom.  Some professionals offered a montage presentation in which the group portrait included, most often in a corner of the photograph or at other times stretched across the sky, a portrait of the school as well. (An example of such a montage with a pan is attached at the bottom of the blog.)  Our corner example in the week’s featured photo was recorded by one of the best photographers to have ever worked in Seattle, Anders Beer Wilse.

The nineteen-year-old Norwegian emigrated to the U.S. in 1884, first working with the United States Geological Survey, much of it in the mountains of the Northwest.  In 1897, the first year of the Yukon Gold Rush, Wilse did not ship north but instead opened his studio in Seattle. He was soon garnering prestigious jobs, such as photographing the construction of Seattle’s community water system that delivered fresh water to the city from the Cedar River.

The 1908 BAIST MAP detail above shows St. Francis Hall in purple-red, upper-right, with its last name “Woodman Hall.”   Across Spring Street from Providence Hospital it was also one block east of the then new Seattle Public Library.   In the 1912 BAIST MAP detail below the hall is gone, a victim of upheaval connected with street regrades on Spring Street and 6th Avenue.  

For this week’s feature, Wilse’s Seattle contacts took him to Rev. F.X. Prefontaine’s St. Francis Hall.  For the group shot, the photographer stood on the unpaved Spring Street a half-block west of Sixth Avenue.  That the students are generally divided by gender may be by Wilse’s or the teacher’s direction, or by the students’ own proclivity for herding.  The portrait is inscribed “class St. Francis School Seattle, Jan. 11, 1900.” The adult on the porch may be Elsie, which the 1901 Polk City Directory names the school’s teacher.

Francis Prefontaine was Seattle’s first Roman Catholic priest.  With aid of both parishioners and protestants, in 1870 he built Our Lady of Good Help, the city’s first Catholic Church. (In 2017 we featured Our Lady twice in PacificNW, on March 12 and 19.) The gregarious priest built St. Francis Hall in 1890-91 and named it for the Italian saint known for his loving sermons to ‘all creatures great and small.’  That the original Seattle priest’s first name was also Francis may be considered a cheerful coincidence.

As a secular priest, Prefontaine was not required to make a vow of poverty.  His uses of St. Francis Hall were diverse, and for a time in the late 1890s he lived there with his niece Maria Rose Pauze, who both edified and entertained her uncle with her piano playing.  She described him as “one to acquire property, clean it up and make a go of it.”  Other groups who rented the Hall from the priest were the Knights of Columbus, Professor Ourat (from Florence) with his dancing academy, dancing parties sponsored by the Adante Non Troppo Club, and late in the Hall’s life a fraternity, Woodmen of the World, who arranged to attach their name to the brick landmark.  One of the Hall’s last engagements is reviewed in The Times for March 10, 1908: “Knights of Columbus Make Merry at Woodmen of the World Hall . . . The crowd that attended taxed the capacity of the place.”  St. Francis Hall did not survive the nearly twenty-foot cuts that came with the 1909 Spring Street Regrade.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mortals?  We welcome Jean back from his adventures in South California so near the variously scorned, beloved and broken border.

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DENNY SCHOOL CLASS (one of them) POSING IN PORTRAIT ON SCHOOL STEPS IN MONTAGE WITH SCHOOLS FRONT NORTH FACADE on the northeast corner of BATTERY and FIFTH AVENUE. 

 

 

 

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WE INTERRUPT Here at the TOP, but BELATEDLY –   with something we promised in The Times PacificNW printing of this feature but failed to fulfill – until now.  It is a look up Fourth Avenue before its and Denny Hill’s regrade.  We insert this photo (shot from the southwest corner of Fourth and Pike)  for a comparison between it and this Sunday’s featured photo of the parade scene, now the second photo below.  The tardy and intruding photo at the top looks north on Fourth Avenue, on the left, and the nearly new Westlake shortcut to Lake Union, on the right.  Pine Street passed left-right behind the triangular HOTEL PLAZA that was wedged between Fourth and Westlake.   Therefore, the first block showing in the parade shot is the same block as the first hillside block that ascends Denny Hill behind and to the left of the Hotel.  Get it?   It once got steep north of Pine but no more since the hill was flushed away.

Here we compare Jean Sherrard’s confident and colorful farrago of the recent Women’s March with a manly marching band heading south on Fourth Avenue sixty-five years ago.  Its baton-wielding leader is entering the crosswalk of Fourth’s intersection with Pine Street. We have not found the name for this marching band, but hope that the uniforms might be clue enough for an astute PacificNW reader to let us all know.  We do know the occasion. It is the Memorial Day parade of May 30, 1953.

The block-long line of businesses on the east side of Fourth includes, right-to-left, the Ben Paris, Raff’s Shoes, the Hotel Ritz, the Up & Up Tavern, Sherman Clay Co. music store, and last, at the southeast corner of Fourth and Olive Way, the still floating Mayflower Hotel.  On the out-of-frame west side of Fourth, the Bon Marche Department Store was a block-long point of prestige for its neighbors.

Raff’s Shoes was, I think, an economy chain.  I remember purchasing a pair of Raff loafers at its Spokane branch, also in the early 1950s.  (I may still have them in storage.)  Carpenters Local No. 131 built the Hotel Ritz in 1906.  It continued to serve as a parody of the Parisian Ritz until well after WWII.  Next door to the north, the Sherman Clay Company was Seattle’s music mecca, selling not only instruments but concerts and tickets to them.  The coast-wide chain began in San Francisco around 1870.  In 1929, when the ornate home on Fourth was about to open, its Seattle manager ironically boasted – just before the Great Depression – “It will be more than a store. It will be a very real Cathedral of Music.”  Here on its marquee in 1953, more neon flash is given to radios than to pianos.  The Seattle store closed in the fall of 2013.  It was the last of the chain.

We’ll conclude this little cityscape sketch with the once very popular Ben Paris, the combo sporting goods store/restaurant on the far right.  We’ll quote from notes Seattle Time’s humorist Emmett Watson shared before his passing in 2001.  Emmett interviewed his friend Guy Williams, a wit and legend among local promoters and publicists.  Emmett asked Guy and Ivar Haglund, the fish restaurateur who sat next to him, “Where did you guys hang out in the 1930s?”  Guy answered, “Ben Paris.  Everyone was going there.  You could cash your check – if you had one.  Get your shoes shined.  Shoot snooker.  Play cards.  Get a roast beef sandwich with plenty of gravy.  I mean that was one great place . . . There’s been nothing quite like it. There wasn’t a phony thing about it. There were fighters in there, newspaper guys, politicians  Ivar answered “Oh, that was wonderful!”

WEB EXTRAS

My contribution this week, a few random shots from the Women’s March.

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Anything more to add, kids?  Sure PaPa Jean, and more of the same or similar.  By now many of these should be familiar to our readers, recalling now that “repetition is the mother of all learning. (Our mothers taught us that.”  We will include at the bottom (or near it) MORE PARADES with terse captions.   First, Ron’s pulls of nearby and recent features.

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POTLATCH PARADES SAMPLER

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PREPAREDNESS DAY PARADE, JUNE 10, 1916 (Warming for WWI)

INDEPENDENCE DAY ON PIONEER PLACE (aks Square) ca 1900

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MORE MILITARY PARADING

FAUX MILITARY PARADING

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TWO PRESIDENTS OF THESE UNITED STATES

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And NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT – A PIONEER PARADE IN RITZVILLE, WA.  Jean recorded the “now” for our book (now long out of print) of “Washington State Then and Nows”.  Jean is currently at work on a fourth volume of SEATTLE NOW AND THENs, except it wont be titled so.  Here’s Ritzville on our visit a few years back.  To catch the red-suited marching band, Jean’s NOW is a bit wider than the THEN.

 

 

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Theodore Peiser, one of pioneer Seattle’s most gifted photographers, is recorded as arriving here in “the early 1880s.”  The various accounts run from 1880 to 1883. Part of the problem of tracking his arrival is that much of his earliest work was destroyed in the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. But not this print.  For this 1882 recording, Peiser has pressed his back against the front wall of Seattle’s first bank, the Dexter Horton at the northwest corner of Commercial (First Avenue South) and Washington Streets.

On the back of the photo, the names of the five suited men are listed, four within the counter and one without. Not surprisingly, the formally attired two on the left were members of Seattle’s advantaged ‘One-Percent.’  Norval Latimer, far left, ultimately became the director of the bank.  Arthur Denny, often referred to as “the city’s founder,” stands at the center, his graying hair contrasting with the dark interior of the bank’s vault, seen through its steel-framed open door.  Denny’s position as vice-president lent the bank some status and no doubt allowed him to stay busy managing the sale of the hundreds of parcels or lots carved from his and his wife Mary’s 1852 donation claim, which included most of what is now the city’s Central Business District.

To the right of the attentive Arthur is his dark-haired son Rolland, who was the bank’s teller. He was a mere baby when his parents and their entourage of settlers, the Denny Party, first landed at Alki Point in 1851. Behind Rolland is B. J. Biggs, the bank’s clerk.  Busy with Biggs, and facing him from this side of the bank’s impressive counter is Captain Norman Penfield.  Although posed here as a customer, Penfield was a partner with Arthur Denny and Dexter Horton in the Seattle Gas Light Company, and served as its builder and superintendent.  In the “now” photo, King County Archives Reference Specialist Greg Lange sits at the Sovereign bar comfortably close to Penfield’s position at the bank’s counter.

Archivist Lange is a popular lecturer on how to do house history. He is also an expert on Pioneer Square history.  While in the featured photo he sits at the bar facing bartender Nat Mooter, Lange explained that following the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, Commercial Street was both lifted – about eight-feet at this corner – and widened from sixty-six feet to eighty-four.  Therefore, Lange is sitting at a basement elevation that is about the same as the street’s pre-fire elevation, while because of the street’s widening, his chair should be more properly moved east, somewhere under the sidewalk.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, kids?  Have we failed you yet Jean?   Or the readers – our readers Jean?

 

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Judging merely from the motorcars parked below the hanging Shell sign in J. Boyd Ellis’ real photo postcard, this is the Winslow ferry terminal about 1950.  By then, the Arlington photographer had given a quarter-century to touring the state snapping whatever it had to offer to stock his inventory of Washington landmarks and picturesque landscapes that were found in gift shops, news stands and drug stores across the state.  His son was still at it in the 1970s.

I do not wonder that passing through ferry docks make me feel downright nostalgic.  In 1950 it was still three years or four before I first came ashore at Winslow, on a trip from Seattle with my oldest brother Ted and his best friend Fred for my first hiking trip into the Olympics.  From here we drove up the island to its north end where the then new Agate Pass Bridge reached the Kitsap mainland.   After a protracted campaign, the 1,229-foot span opened in 1950.  With this new short-cut up the island. the motor traffic on State Highway No. 305 swelled.  Today 305 can remind one of traffic on Seattle’s arterials, rather than an escape from them.

Also in 1950, the Leschi, the first car ferry on Lake Washington, made its last cross-lake steam from Seattle.  (Look below for a clipping on the Leschi at her Yesler Leschi terminal.)  A decade earlier when the ribbon was cut for the opening of the popularly named Mercer Island Floating Bridge on July 2, 1940, it was increasingly believed that the ferries on Puget Sound – by then most of them purchased from California after the 1937 opening of the Golden Gate Bridge – would be replaced with bridges such as another floating between West Seattle’s Lincoln Park and Vashon Island.  It was, of course, not to be.

We continue to wait through long line-ups for tickets at Puget Sound’s many terminals, including this one at Winslow, for what can be comforting cruises across Puget Sound. Winslow’s most devoted cruiser was surely E. L. Franks, one of three partners who started in 1902 the Eagle Harbor Transportation Co., running “mosquito fleet” steamers to Seattle and other Puget Sound ports. Forty-nine years later at age 88, he was still on the Winslow dock explaining to a Times reporter “Ferry riders are easy to get along with.”

WEB EXTRAS

 

Anything to add, lads?   Surely Jean.  Ron Edge has aligned his contribution of recent and relevant features in an order that recommends a tour.   The order goes like this …..  It begins at the West Point lighthouse, an exposed prospect from which one can easily see – for the sake of relevance –  much of Bainbridge Island, From there the attentive reader will find him or her self on the southeast shore of Lake Union where deals can be had at the St. Vinnie, which is built low for a reason never explained.  Watch you head, which is exceedingly difficult to do.  Near by at the truest of southeast corners for Lake Union the reader will look back at the lake from an upper floor of what was once a Ford Manufacturing

Plant and then the home of a big printer.  (My first Seattle Now and Then book was printed therein.)  Next, the reader – if they follow our plan – will climb Capitol Hill by way of the Lakeview overpass pausing first to admire the charms of a little Gothic home on Eastlake.   Then on to Aloha and 15th pausing with a posing trolley, followed by a short walk to the nearby Volunteer Park and a climb up the curving stairway to the top of the Water Department’s brick standpipe and a look east over the neighborhood of oversized homes that are yet squeezed onto their lots.   Here’s a jump from the top of Capitol Hill to the widening of Broadway followed by a walk south to the home Seattle’s baseball team in the early 20th Century, near the top of First Hill.

And that is surely enough.   There are fifteen more links to add to the seven just noted.  When the reader comes to the end, aka Number Twenty-Three, titled “Gothic Row on Western” she or he will  have had some intimate brushings with retired cultures and landmarks through a swath that for the most runs back and forth from the north-central waterfront to the tops of Capitol and First Hills.

 

 

 

 

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One of our first now-then features for 2018 begins with a book and a town.  The chosen book is for lovers of our state and good writing.  Once in your hands or waiting in a library, you may want to open Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State for one or more of those wonderfully absorbed little reads that visit us before slumber.   The 1941 classic state guide is filled with more than 650 pages of skillfully interpreted visits to our state’s communities. Alas, it is also long out of print, but like many other cherished tomes, you may find it in a used bookstore.  Poulsbo, our town of choice, has a few.

Today, to quote from the guide, this “picturesque fishing village on Liberty Bay” has a population of about 9,000.  In the 1950 reissue (its last revision) of the WPA – funded guide, Poulsbo’s population is set at 639, an accounting done probably with the help of the 1950 federal census. Federal depression-time funds were also paying salaries to the book’s many out-of-work skilled authors.  Using well-calibrated distances traveled on state and federal highways, Poulsbo, part of Tour 9A, is first reached on page 572.

Poulsbo is introduced as stretching “along the sinuous shoreline of Liberty Bay. Substantial frame and brick buildings line the main street.”  Poulsbo’s main street is named Front, and is seen here in the 1920s looking into the long curve from its intersection with Jensen Way N.E.  (This refers to the featured photo at the top, and not the one that follows, below.)

For his repeat from the same prospect, Jean Sherrard had to settle for an early winter mist.  He missed last year’s white Christmas by one day.  A comparison of the “now” with the “then” reveals why the well-preserved Poulsbo attracts visitors to admire the old world charms of its towers, gables, rustic murals, half-timbered decorations, well-wrought balconies and flower baskets like those, we imagine hanging in Valhalla. As Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State continues, it surely presages some changes:  “Farms crowd the town from the hillsides.”  Now there are also developments.  The Guide’s demographic claim of 1950 no longer apply.  It reads, “Approximately 90 percent of the persons living at present along the bayshore are Norwegians.” Today, visitors to Poulsbo may wish to study its residents and calculate their own statistic.

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Here we will interrupt our Poulsbo anecdotes of  yore with Jean’s breaking news: his part in today’s parade from Capitol Hill to Seattle Center.   Along the way Jean managed to repeat a 1950s parade shot showing a uniformed band reaching the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Pine Street where today’s parade made its 90 degree turn to the north on its last happy leg to Seattle Center.  We will feature that repeat in an upcoming now-then.  

WEB EXTRAS

Again, we strolled amongst the marchers today to capture another Now & Then classic. We’ll drop in a few photos here from a drizzly but energized day:

Anything to add, fellahs?   Alas not much on Poulsbo.  Although we do have several kitsap-related clippings among our about 1800 features those have not yet been scanned.  (Any volunteers are welcome.)  Instead we will visit some suburbs  (including distant ones like Oregon and Dakota) and wander along the waterfront hinting at our yearning to cross the Sound.  We will also favor a Scandi tone to much of it.

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POSTSCRIPT:

“One Hot Hotel,” the last title above, is a reminder that in newspapers of size, like The Seattle Times, there are title specialists who are thought to be especially clever in dragging readers into the copy.   Sometimes these specialists are, indeed, very clever.   However, often they are mildly pathetic victims of the restraints in humor that come with any publication that runs on advertising.

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The Alaskan Way Viaduct was shut-down on the afternoon of June 14, 1974 when the still standing six floor Polson Building beside it at Columbia Street, was first ignited by an arsonist (apparently) and then bathed by the heavy streams seen here shooting above Alaskan Way.  There were other spouting hoses aimed at the Paulson, those from its east façade facing Western Avenue.  The first single alarm was made at 1:32 pm and fire fighting continued until 5:50 pm.

The Fire Department keeps good records. Galen Thomaier, the department’s historian as well as the curator of the Last Resort Fire Department, an interpretive museum for retired fire-fighting artifacts, was there in 1974.  (Ron Edge has inserted at the bottom of this blog a button to Thomaier’s museum web page.) Although that day not on duty he was there and surprised by the “four throbbing three-and-one-half inch lines (hoses) that were laid across Alaskan Way.  They led to a manifold that distributed both the salt water from the bay and municipal water from the hydrants.  Thomaier followed the hoses to their source, and found the Duwamish, then still  “the world’s most powerful fire boat afloat.”

Frank Shaw, one of our favorite historic photo sources, recorded these well-composed tableaux.  Near its center, uniformed fire fighters wrestle with a 55-foot long ground extension ladder while other fighters are implied by the bright silhouette that includes three steams shooting at the smoking building.  The atmosphere of spray gives back a shower on what Thomaier describes as a  “six person crew assigned to the six person ladder.” They wear helmets. Sixteen of the day’s crew temporarily wound up in the hospital from smoke inhalation.  There is also some falling debris in this mix.  Flying embers burned two of the Polson fire’s many uncovered pedestrian gawkers. The single man in the sports coat with a camera dashing across the puddle in the featured photo at the top was, according to Thomaier, “probably media and should not have been there.”  Shaw stands as close as allowed.

Years after the 1974 Polson fire, an investigative reporter with whom internal fire department records were shared, concluded a “most plausible theory…that the blaze had been set by pull-tab manufacturers from Chicago who were fighting the Polson Buildings owner, Benjamin Mayers (of Ace Novelty) for control of the Seattle-area pull-tab gambling market.”  In 1996 another un-caught arsonist torched the Polson, again taking the top two floors: the only two by then not guarded with sprinklers.  The principle victims of the 1996 fire were artists. The Polson had become what local art pundits described as one of the largest artists’ colonies on the West Coast.  When the renters were at first not allowed into the ruins to inventory loses, they joined a protest by painting on the street.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads? Yes Jean, Ron has supplied a rugged sampler of our more recent features that apply – somehow – to this one, and I following Ron have come home from fishing for some of the older of the roughly 1800 examples of repeat photography, hereabouts, that we have stocked in our now thirty-six year old pond.

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After Seattle’s summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, many of its VIP citizens, those who could “make things happen,” longed for more of its multifarious fun.  For new excitement they got the “joyous week of July 17 through 22,” the Golden Potlatch of 1911.  It was the first of several Potlatches produced sporadically by community impresarios up until World War II when public demonstrations became limited to fairwells and welcome-home celebrations for veterans.

Most likely this featured scene on top is  from the first Potlatch’s Industrial Parade.  Judging from the printed banner attached to the roof of the float at the scene’s center, this well-knit wagon carried a loom backed on both sides by women costumed with its knitted dry goods.  Both the rug stretched for a roof and the rug on the floor are examples of this “industry on parade.”  Surely it was very colorful,

more at least than the costumes worn by those watching here (in the featured photo at the top)  as the southbound horse-powered parade takes a turn off Fourth Avenue to Olive Way.  The seemingly idle electric trolley on the left of the featured photo with “express” written on its signboard is probably parked for the duration.  It was here on Stewart Street that streetcars that used Fourth Avenue turned around by moving forward-backward-forward through a t-shaped terminus.

You will be correct to discern a vacant city block behind the rug float (in the fatured photo).  It is shaped like a flatiron or triangle. The grade is a new creation of the then work-in-progress, the Denny Regrade, before which this was the steep southeast corner of this eponymous hill.  In 1906 the intersection of Fourth and Stewart was still several stories higher.  That year Westlake Avenue was cut through from Fourth and Pike to Denny Way making the intersections along Westlake considerably more imaginative.  Here in 1911 Westlake barely touches the southeast corner of itself, Fifth

Avenue and Olive Way. In 1890, well before the regrade, St Mark’s Episcopal built it first sanctuary on the hillside triangle.   When they relocated to a larger First Hill sanctuary in 1897, the abandoned church was first converted into a livery stable and then the “We Print Everything” Cooperative Printing Company.  In 1916 the long vacant flatiron block was filled with the well-loved and still-standing Time’s Square Building, the terra-cotta confection that Jean Sherrard shows off in his repeat.

Finally, we turn right to the four-story apartment house on the south side of Olive Way.  It was the Waverly and is now a studied object of interest for preservationist and historian Diana James.  (The northwest corner of the Waverly appears in the first photo beyond this point.  It is the southeast corner of Fourth Ave. and Olive Way, and so the origin of Olive Way at its west end.) What I know of these apartments – and many others – I learned directly from Diana.  Jean and I have, in the past, featured a number of her discoveries, which PacificNW readers may also know from her book “Shared Walls”, a history of Seattle’s early apartments.  Thankfully, her research continues.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boyos?  Surely Jean, and starting, again, with the appropriate or relevant features (usually from the neighborhood) grabbed from recent features, followed by older ones presented, with few exceptions, merely as clips scanned from older Sunday Times.  So please click away.

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This week we hope to encourage our readers, and especially the Wallingfordians among them, to join our welcoming cadre at the Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., on Saturday, January 6, 2:30-4:00 o-clock for a lively introduction to the newly formed Historic Wallingford.  It’s about time.

We embrace Wallingford, the Seattle neighborhood that looks south to the Seattle skyline while sitting comfortably with its feet in the foot-bath of Lake Union.  It is a neighborhood of mostly modest homes and always has been. It’s a stable place to tenderly raise a family while still being close to almost everything.  Did you know that “surveys show” that Wallingford residents are often considered learned by reason of their proximity to “higher education.”  Having lived in Wallingford for more than thirty years, I’m counting on it. I hope to have picked up on some of the smarts regularly pushing west over Interstate-5 from the atmosphere circulating above the University of Washington.  (Note: one does not move into Wallingford from that direction without also battling the air and audio pollutants contributed by the freeway.)

The neighborhood’s first homebuilders promoted it as Wallingford Hill, and north of N. 45^th Street, it surely does rise high above its eastern border, the freeway.  But Wallingford is uncertain about its northern limits.  By now, after waves of planners, promoters and Green Lake advocates have massaged the neighborhood’s shoulders, its north end is generally set at N. 50^th Avenue.  This is mildly embarrassing, because the Wallingford Addition was first platted north of N. 50^th in the southeast Green Lake neighborhood, although Wallingford Avenue does run the entire inter-lake journey north-south from Green Lake to Lake Union.

First printed in The Times Rotogravure Pictorial Section on October 25, 1925, this week’s featured photo looks east on N. 45^th Street to Wallingford Avenue.  The still-standing apartment house at the northwest corner was blessed with tenants James and Carrie Straker. The steadfast Strakers lived in one of the eight apartments and ran their mixed hardware store and auto supply (see signs) for 45 years at the same address, 1720 N. 45^th Street.  Note, that while N. 45th is busy, the namesake arterial that crosses it is at rest, at least when compared to Stone Way, Wallingford’s next north-south arterial to the west. Stone Way is still considered by some Fremont folk as Wallingford’s western border. It largely lost this distinction to Aurora Avenue in the 1930s with the building of both the Aurora high bridge and its speedway cut through Woodland Park.

With the Good Shepherd Center, Lincoln High School, the Gas Works, and, maybe your home – perhaps a bungalow – Wallingford is landmark-rich.  There will be plenty of parking at the Good Shepherd Center on the afternoon of Saturday, January 6.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Again and again from Ron Edge and myself – Ron First with the more recently published links picked from the blog.  Some, we hope, will be familiar to you.

 

 

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Ninety-seven years have passed between these two games? The game played “then” was the first in Husky Stadium, brand new in 1920 when the Dartmouth College Indians from Hanover New Hampshire beat the Huskies 28 to 7.

Besides a few points, the most important thing missing in 1920 was a bridge, a way for fans to readily get to the new stadium from the more populated south side of its intimate neighbor, the Lake Washington Ship Canal (1916).  For the Dartmouth game the Huskies graduate manager, Dar Meisnest improvised a row of barges that would only temporarily block shipping.  Meisnest was also a leading promoter for the Gothic Montlake Bridge first opened in 1925. It is the last of the bascules to span the canal.

Husky Stadium has also hosted a few performances without footballs.  In 1923 hundreds of local pastor-led Christian thespians staged a passion play before forty thousand on a stage that filled the

west end zone.  In 1927 Charles Lindbergh buzzed the stadium in his Spirit of St. Louis, and after landing at Sandpoint took the short ride to the stadium in a yacht for a “visit” with about 30,000 admirers.

For lifting spirits on the home front, civilian-defense workers produced a mock “Bombing of Seattle” by a squadron of P-38 fighters firing blanks on faux but flammable homes and businesses built and ignited on the playing field (not by the fighters) for the spectacle of destruction.  The fake but fiery bombing of June 13, 1943 was well attended.

For his repeat Jean chose the Husky’s game with the Utah Utes on the Saturday night of November 18 last.  With the last minute victory of 33 to 30, Husky quarterback Jake Browning broke the UW career record for touchdown passes (now with seventy-seven.)  We wonder how many football games have been played on this gridiron since its 1920 loss to the Ivy League, and how many of those were won by the Pacific Northwest lads. Given the ripening now of another Husky centennial we expect that the athletic department’s public relations statisticians will to come forth with answers by 2020.

WEB EXTRAS

I took a few panoramic shots of the stadium in 2013 – back when there were day games! Here’s my fave:

Anything to add, fellahs?  Yup – more of the same: neighborhood shots of yore pulled for your Horatian pleasures by Ron Edge and myself.

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HIS MARK BY FISH REMARKS ON UW FOOTBALL SUBSTITUTIONS IN 1947 [October 12, 1947]

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A note from Jean:
Before continuing on to this week’s column, please excuse Paul and me for a shameless plug of our upcoming event. Sunday evening, we will return with our annual celebration of literature and music ‘A Rogues’ Christmas’, a part of ACT Theatre’s Short Stories Live series (usually held at Town Hall, but moved this year to the Taproot Theatre during reconstruction). 

(Now, as always, please click to enlarge photos)

For his contemporary repeat Jean Sherrard has moved a few feet north of this week’s featured “then.” The brick Google Building at the southwest corner of Fremont Avenue and 43rd Street, got in his way. While both views look west from the north end of the Fremont Bridge, the historical photographer stood a few feet south of Jean’s prospect to include, on the left, the then new double trackage of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The construction confusion on the right hides the work-in-progress on the grade separation between the railroad tracks and the line of false-front businesses on the north side of Ewing Street.

The businesses showing in this first block west of Fremont Avenue as far north as Evanston Street are from left-to-right, a dye works, a pool hall, a café, a real estate, loans and insurance office, the New York Laundry (which in a 1910 Times classified was looking for an “experienced ladies’ clothes ironer”), and the Star Plumbing and Sheet Metal Works. The plumbing store shows two small windows on its second floor with a door between them that oddly or imprudently opens to neither steps nor a balcony. This is surely a vestige of this business row when Ewing Street was at its original elevation, nearly twenty-feet lower than it stands here. Continuing to the right (east) the business lineup is stocked with more community necessities: a bar, an undertaker, a store for shoes and another for home furnishings.

Ewing Street was named for Henry Clark Ewing, a precocious real estate agent who came to Seattle with his parents as a fourteen-year-old in 1886 and was building his own real estate office within ten years. In the biographical section of Seattle and Environs, judge and pioneer historian Clarence Hanford describes Ewing as one who “has acquired a wonderfully intimate knowledge of realty values and his judgment of such carries as much significance as that of any other man’s in Seattle.” Ewing’s significance reached Fremont in the late 1880s with his own street name. However, beginning in 1923 the street remembered Ewing only south of the canal where it was kept in the mostly residential Lower Queen neighborhoods. On the industrious Fremont side of the canal Ewing and its historical connotations were surrendered for another street-grid number, North 34th Street.

I feel safe in ascribing the date for the featured view as sometime between 1910-1912. On Sept. 2, 1910, The Seattle Times reported “work was begun this morning on the new Fremont Avenue viaduct across the Lake Washington Canal site just below Lake Union.” We note that the bridge is called a viaduct in The Times report and the canal merely a site. Committed canal cutting between Lake Union and Shilshole Bay began in 1911 and continued into 1916. (Remember, we celebrated its centennial last year.) Although about two stories taller than the first bridge at Fremont, the new “viaduct” was much longer and so actually resembled a viaduct while reaching new and higher grades at both ends. Also in 1911, the north shore of Lake Union received a second temporary bridge – a lower

pile-driven viaduct that reached across the northwest corner of the lake from Westlake to the foot of Stone Way. The Stone Way Bridge was razed in 1917, soon after the viaduct on Fremont was replaced by “the busiest bridge in America”, the bascule span on Fremont Ave. that we still cross and/or wait to cross. (Note the second Edge Link below on the opening of the Fremont Bridge.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, blokes?  Yes Jean – more older neighborhood/vicinity features.

 

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REPUNZEL at the FRONT DOOR of the WEST TOWER

I snapped this while crossing the Fremont Bridge many years ago when the orange primer on the bridge was turning pink.   It was several years before Fremont glass artist Rodman Hiller convinced the powers that then were both downtown in City Hall and in Fremont,  ( perhaps then already “the center of the universe”)  to help him brighten the north facade of the west tower with shining neon tubes giving shape to a glowing likeness of Rapunzel the Teutonic beauty with blonde (or golden) hair that grew so fast and unrelenting that “before the tower” she wrapped it around herself.  She had no need for clothes, although with adolescence wore them for fear of arousing the loggers who worked for a very bad witch who owned the forest that Rapunzel and her parents lived beside.   And much else.  The hag paid well enough to keep the men chopping.  The forest surrounded a tower that was fated to move Rapunzel’s tale into it and toward tragedy if not into it.  As with most enduring tales there are versions.  With this one we need to both learn more and get some sleep.   We pause noting that at the age of about thirteen (about development one cannot be sure with fairy tales) Rapunzel was locked in a tower without doors and but one high window by a very very bad witch named Gothel who was easily one of the one percent of Bavaria and  who was owed something – Rapunzel – by Rapunzel’s parents, who were also her renters.  Rapunzel was named for the plant her mother craved when she was  pregnant.  Her father stole it at night from the only source, the witches garden, and was caught.  I have read that one does not censure the diet of a pregnant woman.   I’ll pause here back on bridge.  My capture of the blonde on the door to the north tower predates artist Hiller’s portrait installed and captured there by many years.   I’ll count them later following more study of the fable.

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