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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 9, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 6, 2023

After 53 years, cozy movie house maintains its ‘Grand Illusion’

By Clay Eals

In a military war, the weapons are guns and bombs, the results often instant, destructive and unthinkable. But in an economic battle, the weapons are dollars, the results frequently incremental, insidious and no less calamitous to the societal soul.

Enter the tiny Grand Illusion Cinema in the U District. Or should we say exit?

Sharing the name of the famous 1937 anti-war film directed by Jean Renoir, the cozy 68-seat arthouse soon could face the wrecking ball. It’s nestled on the second floor of a funky 103-year-old conglomeration of low-rise retail buildings along hillside 50^th Street at its intersection with University Way,

The West Coast commercial real-estate firm Kidder Matthews is asking $2.8 million for the 4,120-square-foot site, zoned for a maximum six floors and destined for apartments. The Grand Illusion holds a two-year lease but could be bought out anytime. To survive, it could be forced to move, to whereabouts unknown.

Its footprint a former dental office, the theater took root in May 1970 as the vision of perennial University of Washington literature student Randy Finley, who wanted to show films based on great books. He called it The Movie House, he says, “because there was a little house there.”

Quickly it became the home of foreign and offbeat fare, classic and obscure, including festivals featuring Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and West Seattle-bred Frances Farmer. When attendance lagged, Finley repeatedly brought in the dependable “King of Hearts” (1966) and “A Thousand Clowns” (1965) to fill the till.

Each December starting in 1971, several years before “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) became a TV staple due to lapsed copyright, Finley screened the Christmas Eve-based classic. He publicly labeled it “the nicest film The Movie House could ever offer.” Routinely, audiences cheered when the film’s ecstatic George Bailey ran through Bedford Falls and shouted “Merry Christmas, movie house!” The annual tradition has lasted 52 years.

The brash Finley (“I know the value of being heard; I made a lot of noise”) eventually built an indie theater empire of 20 Northwest screens. He ceded The Movie House in January 1979 to milder-mannered Paul Doyle, who renamed it the Grand Illusion — not just for the Renoir film, he says, but also cannily for “the medium of movies itself and, some would say, the nature of life.”

After Doyle left in 1997, Northwest Film Forum became the owner, and the theater went non-profit. Today, the development clock is ticking. “We’re biding our time,” says Brian Alter, manager for the past 13 years. “Everybody doesn’t want to see it go away.”

Is that hope the grandest illusion of all?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Eugenia Woo, Kji Kelly, Taelore Rhoden, Evan Bue, Jessica Albano, Tracey Gurd, Jennifer Ott, Andrew Weymouth, Amy Hagopian, Betty Udesen, Jake Renn, Amanda Cowan and especially Brian Alter, Paul Doyle, Maitland Finley, Patricia Clark-Finley and Randy Finley for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are 12 additional photos and, in chronological order, 41 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(please click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 30, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 2, 2023

‘Meet me at the Pig’: A newcomer’s guide to Seattle’s quirky codes

By Jean Sherrard

Forty years ago, on our honeymoon, my girlfriend and I — oops, “wife” was still a new and foreign concept — stopped in Salisbury, England. Hiking ancient Roman roads, we encountered a friendly gent.

“Are you a local?” we asked.

“Oh no,” he confided, “I was born four miles from here.”

Today, to help relative newcomers navigate potential April Fool’s foibles, our crack “Now & Then” team shares some quirky codes and stubborn semaphores from “Then” days that persist in the “Now.” Of course, only a small subset of Seattleites can truly claim lifelong residence. For the rest, here’s a helpful cheat sheet.

Grammar and pronunciation

Telltale tyro signs include adding definite articles to freeway names. It’s never “the 5” or “the 405.” Plain I-5 and 405 suffice. And “just Puget Sound,” says writer Adam Woog. He also recommends learning to pronounce a few place names. Puyallup (rhymes with “you gallop”), Sequim (“Skwim”) and Duwamish (“Doo-WOMM-ish”) for starters. Try not to giggle when old-timers occasionally still say, “Warshington.”

The mountain

Though we are surrounded by mountains, “the mountain” refers only to Rainier. Historian Robin Walz suggests a handy conversation starter: “The mountain is out today.”

(Column partner Clay Eals notes that when he was young and the mountain was “out,” as in the above photo, and when his mother, Virginia, would drive him and his brothers across the Mercer Island floating bridge, she would point south and exclaim, “Get out your ice-cream spoons!”)

Rain

Former Port of Seattle commissioner Peter Steinbrueck observes that while many other large cities have more rainfall than Seattle, we have more words for it, including “mist, sprinkles, showers, drizzle, sleet, snowy mix and downpour.”

On the road

“We don’t know how to drive,” insists column founder Paul Dorpat’s friend Pam Heath, “particularly at four-way stops.” But she and photo archivist Ron Edge agree on jaywalking. “Just don’t walk,” demands Edge. Heath adds, “I’ve seen folks at crosswalks waiting for the light to change at 2 a.m. Did I mention it was pouring rain? And they didn’t have umbrellas.”

Umbrellas

Don’t need ’em. Stalwarts revel in “liquid sunshine.” Wags jest, “It’s a dry rain.”

Kid stuff

Carol Wilkensen (Seattle-born on April 1) suggests arrivistes seek out YouTube clips of J.P. Patches or Stan Boreson, two bright stars of local children’s TV. Boreson’s home-spun ditties include the apropos: “Zero dacus, mucho cracus / hallaballu-za bub. / That’s the secret password that we use down at the club.”

Places we visit — or don’t

“The Market” (never “Pike’s Market”) where we meet “under the clock” or “by the pig,” suggests Vanya Sandberg.  Visits to the top of “The Needle” are rare.

All preceding suggestions need be taken with a shaker of salt. And it’s time to fess up: I’m not a Seattle native. This April Fool was born miles away — in Renton!

WEB EXTRAS

No locals wait in line at the Market Starbucks–what’s more, it’s a mystery why anyone would!

Below we also add a few more helpful suggestions from our locavore correspondents. Please feel free to send in a few of your own!

ROBIN WALZ:

VANYA SANDBERG:

PAM HEATH:

There are a few words that are at least west coast local when I grew up.

ROB & CAROL WILKINSON

1. “Zero dacus, mucho cracus / hallaballu-za bub / that’s the secret password that we use down at the club/ Zero-dacus, mucho-cracus / hallaballu-za fan / means now you are a member of KING’s TV club with Stan.” And No Motion Shun” This was our go-to TV program in the fifties and sixties. Stan played the accordion – He inspired my first expression of musical interest and within minutes my parents bought me one. They said I would be popular at parties. I was. But theirs not mine. By the way No Motion Shun was the name given to Stan’s lethargic dog named after the Slow Motion IV, the hydroplane that set a speed record. No one outside of locals have ever heard of Stan or No Motion Shun. Speaking of hydroplanes…
2. Miss Thriftway, Miss Bardahl, Miss Wahoo, Miss Hawaii Ki, Miss Pay n Pak, Miss Budweiser etc. were all household names for the hydros we worshiped as kids. If you were to mention Bill Munice or Miro Slovak to anyone outside of Seattle, they would have no idea who you were talking about. Still on Hydros…
3. Thunder Boats. This was the name all hydros were given for the deafening sound they made from unmuffled Alison and Rolls Merlin 3000 hp engines. It was wonderful! If you said to an outsider “let’s meet at the Pits”  they would immediately know what you were talking about. It’s now the Stan Sayres Memorial Park. We watched the hydros from:
4. The Floating bridge (the name before the 520 bridge was built but lasted for a long time). After 520 was as built it remained The Floating Bridge for “natives” and 520 was “the toll bridge” ($.35 tolls. No one took it because it was too expensive).
5. Pill hill was, of course, the name given to the hospitals on Capitol Hill.
6. For those with money they might going to the Golden Lion for dinner. It was in the Olympic Hotel and featured décor (highly inappropriate at any time in history), of the British Colonialization of India. The waiters even wore turbans. Back to kids TV programs…
7. Wunda Wunda is my name.oh boys and girls, I’m glad you came. We’ll have fun and we’ll play games. Won’t you play with me?
8. If you owned a boat in Seattle in the olden days, Doc Freeman’s was your place to buy gear for your boat. It seemed like everyone owned a boat. “Boating Capitol of the World” we were called. Sadly, this landmark went the way of Hardwicks, Jensen Motorboat Company and many others, but long before.
9. Kalakala was the go-to ferry to Vashion Island as I remember. An awesome ride with its classic rattle and Art Deco streamline design. Outside of Seattle few would know about the Kalakala.
10. If someone today asks me where Lowe’s Store is located I tell them it’s down where Sick’s Stadium used to be, until I realize they are either too young or not from around here.
11. Let’s meet at Dag’s. Dag’s was the favorite before Dick’s and Burgermaster for a cheap burger, fried and a shake. It’s long gone but those of us of a certain age remember it well.
12. The Aqua theater at Green Lake
13. Chubby and Tubby where we bought cheap Xmas trees, shoes and jeans. It was a favorite place to go for discounted everything.
14. Boo-boo and Fifi, Duh..
    (Jean comments: Rob and Carol are recalling Bobo, our local–and beloved–gorilla. Not to be confused with Yogi Bear’s adenoidal sidekick Booboo)
15. Maynard hospital named after David Maynard, Seattle pioneer. Where Carol was born.
16. Armory now MOHAI.
    (Jean comments: Of course, R&C are referring to the Naval Reserve Armory.)
17. RH Thompson expressway. Few outside of Seattle would remember this transportation mistake, but if you lived around here this was a big deal in the 1960’s.
18. Mossback was often how my parents described what it was like living in the rainy, cold  (mossy) Pacific Northwest. Of course, it’s also what conservative, curmudgeons are called as well but I believe we defined it differently back then. Although, I’ve definitely developed some curmudgeonly qualities as time marches on –  to go along with the moss!

PETER STEINBRUECK
Hmmm giving some thought to this, I can easily identify non-Seattle natives by a number of traits, behaviors such as those impersonal footwalkers who never look at you, let alone give a friendly “hello” as they pass by and are the same people who like to complain about the so-called “Seattle Freeze,” which we real natives know as a unusual cold wind that blew in from somewhere else!

Another dead giveaway is “Pike’s Market,” which of course is confused with “Pike’s Peak,” and has nothing to do with the Pike Place Market.

And our neighbor state to the south of Washington is mis-pronounced “Ore-gone.”

People not from here are under another big delusion that it rains alot in Seattle. In fact, many other large cities such as New York City, Boston and Washington DC receive more rainfall than Seattle does, which just have more names for than most other places, including “sprinkles, showers, drizzle, sleet, snowy mix, and downpour.” People from the east and other cold places usually like to wear scarves,  heavy wool button down overcoats in winter, which are unnecessary, impractical for drizzle, and can make you too hot in our mild climate even in winter.

Then there’s the Seattle hipsters, so into the “lumberjack metro“ look, beards and all, particularly popular among high income techies who can afford $350 flannel shirts from Filson’s, once the working man’s Alaskan outfitter established in Seattle in 1897 during the pioneering days of the Klondike Gold Rush.

COLLEEN CHARTIER

From Feb. 13, 2024, an update:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 23, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 26, 2023

The ‘happy airs’ of Orcas waft from Robert Moran’s Rosario Resort

By Clay Eals

Early on a Sunday 102 years ago, “strains of wonderful music” awoke newspaper writer Dolly Madison as she stayed at the Orcas Island mansion of retired Seattle mayor, shipbuilder and philanthropist Robert Moran.

“Hazy visions of heaven, with its choirs of sweet singers and golden harps, arose,” she wrote. “Near and nearer the sound traveled. The faint notes of a pipe organ became discernible. The music grew louder; then louder. Phrases were recognized. Suddenly an avalanche of sound pealed forth; low, deep notes; the warbling of birds; then the snatches of happy airs.”

Her senses didn’t deceive her. Routinely, Moran manipulated player rolls to create sunrise sounds on his 1,972-pipe German organ — an Aeolian (after the god of wind). The 1913 instrument still weaves magic in the five-floor, 117-year-old “Shangri-La” that Moran named Rosario, for the nearby strait.

Expanded and run as a resort under several owners since 1960, it’s again for sale. The Barto family of Anacortes seeks an entity to implement a 10-year, Seabrook/Suncadia-like redevelopment while retaining Moran’s vision and integrity.

Moran (1857-1943) forged an impressive if improbable existence. Born in New York slums, he arrived at Yesler’s wharf in Seattle at age 17 with only a dime. Seven years hence, the entrepreneurial machinist founded Moran Brothers drydock, which over two decades built steamers, barges and the USS Nebraska, a battleship active from 1904 to 1923.

Along the way, Moran won two one-year terms as Seattle mayor, straddling the city’s devastating Great Fire in 1889. Though lauded for swift recovery measures, Moran later deflected such praise:

“The fire simply cleared the ground and made it possible to build what is today one of the most beautiful cities in the United States,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1909. “It did more than that, however. As the electrical engineer would say, it put the ‘peak’ load on its citizens, morally and physically.”

Moran was facing his own challenge of destiny. Told by doctors at age 47 that he had six months to live, he left his Seattle empire and in 1906 decamped to peaceful Orcas, “the gem of the San Juans.” There, he bought thousands of acres and carefully built his waterfront Rosario estate in the new landscape amid family and frequent guests, living to age 86.

Guiding him were the hand-hewn Arts & Crafts movement, his long-held shipbuilding sensibilities and a deep respect for nature, which inspired his donation of what became next-door Moran State Park, including the breathtaking 2,400-foot Mount Constitution.

Who will carry on Moran’s life-enhancing showpiece? Perhaps they only will need to experience its music.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Patty Johnson, Scott Cameron, Meg Eals and especially Christopher Peacock for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals’ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are 5 additional photos and, in chronological order, 63 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 16, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 19, 2023

Colonnade of continuity lights up Portage Bay in Montlake

By Jean Sherrard

In 2019, photographer Colleen Chartier and urban planner Rob Wilkinson, neighbors in an elongated oval that divides the Montlake Cut from the SR-520 corridor, learned that their street’s beloved but decrepit 100-year-old lampposts were soon to be removed and replaced with modern counterparts.

For the two, the pending loss was personal. With their spouses, both had raised children in the neighborhood, and each of the 14 columns — though dinged, rusty and layered in peeling paint — was a repository of community memory.

What’s more, the gently tapered, cast-iron lampposts, installed circa 1920, were identical to those still lighting the Olmsted Brothers-designed Volunteer Park on nearby Capitol Hill. Destined for the scrap heap, these historic artifacts just had to be saved.

Former partners in Art-on-File, a small photography business, Chartier and Wilkinson had traveled the world for decades, documenting public art and architecture and changing cityscapes. From their explorations, the two understood that the colonnades (literally, rows of columns) of ancient Greece potently symbolize strength, endurance and importance.

Brainstorming a rescue plan, they recalled the colonnades in the disparate cities of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Moline, Illinois. “These,” Chartier says, “are urban spaces where land and water meet, enhanced by necklaces of lampposts.”

Erecting a similar colonnade in nearby West Montlake Park, fronting Portage Bay, appealed to them both. “The idea was beautiful and simple,” Wilkinson says. “Elegantly laid out, we thought it would be irresistible.”

Seattle City Light, however, was hesitant, citing legal liability. But Wilkinson persisted, eventually tracking down Dan Peters, the contractor tasked with disposing of the old fixtures. After hearing the pitch, Peters responded, “No problem, dude. Where do you want them?”

But where to temporarily cache 14 lampposts, 600 pounds each? Nearby Seattle Yacht Club offered storage for six months, which became an even more generous three years. The rest of the neighborhood was equally supportive, many enthusiastically underwriting restoration of the columns and erection of the colonnade.

More hurdles followed, some bureaucratic, others pandemic-related. Progress slowed. Wilkinson and Chartier prepared an exactingly illustrated 40-page proposal that kept inspiration alive while shepherding the project from permitting through bidding and construction.

Today, after 3-1/2 years and hundreds of hours of donated labor, the colonnade stands. Was it worth the trouble? Without a doubt, asserts the pair.

“It’s about presenting these commonplace artifacts in a way that honors their inherent beauty,” Chartier says.

“We’re battle-scarred,” Wilkinson adds with a rueful grin. “It turns out that building something so simple and lovely is really, really hard.”

WEB EXTRAS

Fascinating extras, this time round. First, check out our 360 on-site video of the column, read by Jean.

Then scroll down for some remarkable documentation of this amazing project. To begin with, the PDF of their 40-page proposal, beautifully crafted to ensure greatest impact.

More photos from Chartier and Wilkinson taken over 3 1/2 years.

Update: poster for May 23, 2023, event in Tacoma

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 9, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 12, 2023

Seattle’s midcentury rhythm-and-blues crowd flocked to Birdland

By Clay Eals

Barney Hilliard stands beside the imposing, six-floor Summit at Madison Park, a self-described boutique retail-residential complex. Signs for Safeway and Starbucks hover above while cars whiz by on the adjacent arterial, freshly paved for the pending installation of a new RapidRide G bus line.

Any visible residue of history at 22nd and East Madison seems to have vanished.

But to Hilliard, 85, a lifelong tenor-saxophonist from Renton, it still feels like home. His school buildings — Horace Mann Elementary, Edmond Meany Junior High and Garfield High — are mere blocks away, as are YMCA and YWCA branches and churches. Likewise is true for the sites of long-gone restaurants, a pharmacy and a shop that sold rhythm-and-blues records that were banned from radio airplay.

And on this very corner stood the hub. “This was the place to be,” Hilliard says. The place was Birdland, also known as Club Birdland.

Named after legendary saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker and New York’s Birdland club, the Central District incarnation drew national acts from Cal Tjader to Big Jay McNeely for 10 years. The hot spot, razed in 1965, is a focus of Peter Blecha’s new Northwest music-history book “Stomp and Shout.”

Formerly the Gala Theatre moviehouse in the silent 1920s and into the early sound era (it screened “Frankenstein” in 1932), the two-floor building later hosted Democratic and Republican rallies and other gatherings. In 1942, soon after the U.S. entry to World War II, it also was a “civil control station” to register Japanese residents for forcible evacuation from Seattle.

It became the Savoy Ballroom, then Eastside Hall, when the city council, seeking to better serve Seattle’s Black community in 1946, relaxed its “unwritten but rigid policy” forbidding cabarets east of Eighth Avenue.

By the time the $1,000 Birdland neon sign went up in 1955, Barney Hilliard and friends had formed what became the influential Dave Lewis Combo, playing teen dances “from West Seattle to Ballard and all the high schools in-between.” Because the integrated Birdland stayed open until 3:30 a.m., the versatile “covers” band could finish a gig elsewhere and return to the club to enjoy late shows. In late 1956, the Lewis troupe landed a prime perch: opening act for the house.

Hilliard left the combo in 1959. For decades, with a law degree he assumed noteworthy, Seattle-based business, nonprofit and governmental roles. But he kept soaring with his sax, retiring only 10 years ago. He traces everything back to Birdland. With a hearty smile and laugh, his emotion for the era is right in tune:

“It was labor of love, but it was mainly love. We just loved what we were doing.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Barney Hilliard, D’Vonne Lewis, Dave Lewis Jr., Molly Woolbright, Kait Heacock and Peter Blecha for their invaluable help with this installment!

Events for “Stomp and Shout” are scheduled April 19, 2023, at Town Hall Seattle, with music by the D’Vonne Lewis Combo, and May 23, 2023, at McMenamins Elks Temple in Tacoma, with music by Girl Trouble. For more info, click here.

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are an essay, a video interview and, in chronological order, 40 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 2, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 5, 2023

Fish stories come true on Ballard’s legendary Emancipator

By Jean Sherrard

Brad Buske’s earliest memories are of old salts playing pinochle, smoking cheroots and telling fish tales on the Everett waterfront, where his family runs a seafood processing company. One story consistently stood out, burnished in the retelling, and Buske knows it by heart.

It happened in the late summer of 1958 after a robust season for sockeye in Puget Sound. Of 400 local purse-seiners vying for salmon, the Emancipator, a sleek 65-foot wooden boat built in 1918 by the Skansi Bros. of Gig Harbor, had finished among the top 10 boats for gross stock. In 28 consecutive days, its nets had hauled in a respectable 25,000 fish.

When the state fish commission offered a last-minute extension, declaring a one-day open season on Fraser River sockeyes, Emancipator owner and skipper Nick Barhanovich jumped at the chance. “And if we happened to catch a few fish,” recalls crew member Ray Fadich in his 2020 book “The Big Run,” that would be “icing on our cake.”

Joining a flotilla of competing boats near Point Roberts, the Emancipator initiated a set and then began pulling in its seines. What happened next was mind-boggling.

Within the enclosed circle of nets, Fadich describes a “frenzy” of teeming fish, “water boiling as if in a huge cooking pot.” The delighted crew filled the hold to the brim, then loaded the deck gunnel-deep till the stern was almost awash. Fadich worked the bilge pumps till he was “blue in the face” just to keep the vessel above water.

That single set comprised 15,000 fish — nearly 80,000 pounds. It was one of the largest single catches in Puget Sound history.

Today, Brad Buske, 36, is the proud owner of the Emancipator, which he bought for a dollar in 2013. “By that time, the boat was basically floating dirt,” he says. “We removed the old fish hold with a shovel.”

The Emancipator was transferred to Port Townsend, where Buske says master shipwrights rebuilt it beam by beam: “We did our best to keep all the lines as original as possible, trying to preserve its history — not to create a dead replica but a working boat with a purpose.”

Buske views himself a caretaker of that history. “To me,” he says, “this boat is a living thing. There’s oil and sweat and fish juice soaked into its timbers.”

Several months a year, with Buske at the helm, the Emancipator continues to ply Puget Sound as a tender, transporting fish between the today’s salmon fleet and his family’s cannery, adding salty chapters to its ongoing story.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 video of this column, narrated by Jean, please join us at  Fisherman’s Terminal.

More photos of the Emancipator included below:

Passing through the Ballard Locks:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 23, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 26, 2023

Documentary launches up-Hill quest to honor the ‘Empire Builder’

By Clay Eals

When I routinely rode with my dad to his downtown office in the late 1950s, he drove north along Fourth Avenue. Looming as we approached the nexus of Olive and Stewart, Seattle’s version of Times Square, was an enormous, elevated sign featuring a scaffolded Great Northern mountain goat atop a showy slogan: “EMPIRE BUILDER.” Through the windshield, I and countless others were absorbing a layered message.

“Empire Builder” referenced the passenger train from St. Paul that had crucially connected our city to the rest of the country in 1893, post-Great Fire. The catchphrase also echoed the sobriquet for the railway’s indefatigable founder, who helped turn Seattle into a metropolis — yet whose name is little seen or celebrated today.

Seasoned West Seattle documentarian Stephen Sadis seeks to change that, in a manner as audacious as his subject. His new “The Empire Builder: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway,” is a four-hour tour de force, the result of on-and-off research for 20-plus years, summoning 5,000-plus images, maps and film clips and dozens of interviews to tell its larger-than-life story.

Hill (1838-1916) was a town speculator, agriculturalist, shipping magnate, banker, collector, philanthropist, longtime husband and the father of 10, but his legacy rides with the “Iron Horse” and its inescapable impact, which inspired Sadis’ fascination.

“If I told you,” he says, “that tomorrow when you wake up you could travel from Seattle to New York in 10 minutes, that’s the kind of change that occurred in the mid-19th century, from a six-month wagon trek across the country to a four-day train ride. That transformation is the key.”

Through Hill’s saga, Sadis and producing partner Kyle Kegley weave the personal (Hill’s right-eye blindness from a bow-and-arrow accident as a child) with the enterprising (Hill’s insistence on fashioning efficient and enduring rail lines) while repeatedly giving voice to the trains’ displacement of Native Americans.

The tale hits a peak with Hill’s opening-day speech for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition at the University of Washington. For an industrialist, the bent is surprising, as bold and prescient as its source — and certainly relevant today:

“Will you realize what this country will become when stripped of its forests — the washing away of the soil, the inevitable changes in climate when the forests have gone? …

“You have but to raise your eyes and be in the presence of some of the grandest works of God. Soil, climate, resources, all favor you. You will never again know isolation. The spaces once separating you from the rest of the country have been conquered. Remain as you have been, the architects of your own fortunes.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Stephen Sadis and Kyle Kegley for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are an additional photo, a video interview and, in chronological order, 12 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 16, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 19, 2023

Coming to our late-night rescue for 69 years: Dick’s Drive-In

By Jean Sherrard

“You don’t know where I’ve been!” the angry guy repeated.

“You don’t know where he’s been!” chimed in his sidekick.

The muzzle of a gun he pointed at me seemed as enormous as a Kalakala ferry porthole on a night crossing.

“I, I don’t know where you’ve been,” I agreed, quaking, my hands raised. What to do? Should I meet his eyes or not? I was fixated on the deadly weapon.

It was the early 1980s. I had just finished performing in an Empty Space Theatre play on Capitol Hill. After a convivial beer or two at the Comet Tavern, I stopped off at Dick’s Drive-In on Broadway. Just as I joined the line to order, a parking-lot scene was coming to a climax.

A young mixed-race couple (black guy, white gal) in a convertible sipped on milkshakes while two white guys in fatigue jackets circled them in a lather, hurling racial epithets.

“C’mon, cut it out,” I called, fortified by Redhook and youth.

That’s when the gun appeared.

The line parted around me like the Red Sea, but someone shouted, “Leave him alone!” Moments later, customers and servers behind the windows took up the refrain: “Leave him alone!”

The gun barrel wavered indecisively, then lowered. The guy and his sidekick hopped in their car and peeled out of the lot. The Dick’s crowd had come to my rescue.

My Deluxe and Fries were particularly tasty that night. In the immortal words of the Bard, all’s well that ends well.

Richard Spady (1923-2016), eponymous co-founder of Dick’s, whose family still owns the small chain of drive-ins, opened his first restaurant in 1954 in Wallingford. He and his partners adopted simple principles: quality ingredients and quick service. They found almost instant success and stuck with the formula.

Sixty-nine years later, long lines continue well past midnight. The oldest fast-food joint in town is still one of its most popular, repeatedly topping polls for the region’s favorite eatery. Afficionados include songsters Sir Mix-a-Lot and Macklemore. Both immortalized Dick’s in rap.

The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also was a customer. So, still, is his partner Bill Gates, who, legend has it, once flamboyantly tried to pay for a cheeseburger with a $1,000 bill. But times have moderated the local billionaire, who now seems to prefer anonymity.

Ten years ago, late one weekday evening, Gates and I approached separate windows at the Wallingford Dick’s and coincidentally called out the same order: a Deluxe, Fries and a Coke. He was alone and unassuming, wearing the same sweater he’d worn on “The Daily Show” the night before.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video featuring this column, please head over in this direction.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 9, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 12, 2023

The legacy of Seattle’s streetcar mindset isn’t black-and-white

By Clay Eals

In the beloved “Calvin & Hobbes” comic strip, Calvin asks his dad on Oct. 29, 1989, “How come old photographs are always black and white?” His dad’s classic response: “The world was black and white then.”

The jest underscores how hand-tinted images — like this week’s “Then” photo, circa 1924 — can let the color-habituated among us better envision city life a century ago.

Looking north and slightly east, we hover above East Jefferson Street in an impressive “bird’s eye view” of the Seattle Electric Company’s centrally located, all-wood streetcar barn and yard between 13th and 14th avenues on First Hill.

Erected on former pro-baseball grounds and replacing a barn at Sixth & Olive downtown, the storage and maintenance complex was to have been opened for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but its launch came shortly afterward. At its north side, a tower stored water for potential fires while the city completed its fire-hydrant network.

With electrified streetcars continually rolling in and out, the unfenced facility became a busy community landmark, referenced for decades as a locator in classified ads for nearby apartment and room rentals and cafes. It hosted various meetings and even served as a draft-registration site in 1940.

The last Seattle streetcar ran in 1941, but the Jefferson hub operated for 44 years past the city’s rail-to-rubber conversion to trolley coaches. In 1984, the city sold the property to Seattle University, which 10 years later converted it to a soccer stadium, dubbed Championship Field in 1998.

Despite today’s focus on light-rail expansion and getting people out of cars, Seattle’s matrix of now-vanished streetcars produced a higher per-capita use of public transit, notes Mike Bergman, retired Sound Transit and King County Metro planner and author of “Seattle’s Streetcar Era: An Illustrated History, 1884-1941.”

“I think there was more appreciation of the system then,” he says. “The highest levels of ridership occurred during the first and second World Wars, when population densities were far less. Part of it was lower car ownership. Fewer people could afford a car. Fewer still could afford two cars.”

Gradually and relentlessly, he says, automobile and petroleum interests converted the public mindset to individualized travel. “They certainly made it easy to fill up your tank, and it was really cheap,” he says. “It also became a status symbol.”

Bergman optimistically projects another mass-transit heyday, fueled by increased urbanization: “I just don’t think all of those people will be able to get around solely in cars.”

Here we can return to the comic Calvin. In the 1989 strip’s closing panel, he tells his tiger friend Hobbes, “The world is a complicated place.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to collector Danny Eskenazi , Zachary Tartabull of the Craft Apartments and historians Dave Eskenazi, Bob Carney and Mike Bergman for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are 4 additional photos and, in chronological order, 21 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 2, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 5, 2023

Magnolia Beach offers proverbial wave of the future

By Jean Sherrard

In 1913, below Magnolia Bluff and today’s Discovery Park, a Webster & Stevens photographer captured this revealing pair of images of South Beach. In the northwesterly view, gleaming West Point Lighthouse anchors a sand spit, known to the Duwamish as Per-co-dus-chule or “thrusts far out.”

Early mariners knew the peninsula as Sandy Point and welcomed installation of the lighthouse in 1881, the first on Puget Sound, to warn of the hazardous shoal at the north end of Elliott Bay, site of many shipwrecks.

The lighthouse compound was accessible only by water until the arrival of the Army at nearby Fort Lawton in 1900, when a steep dirt road was cut from the top of the bluff down to the shoreline. Even then, lighthouse keepers and their assistants led an envied if isolated existence.

In 1984, West Point Lighthouse was one of the last stations on the West Coast to be automated. Owned and operated by Seattle Parks since 2004, its beacon continues to guide sailors safely home.

But what of nearby 300-foot Magnolia Bluff, lined with native madrona trees? Theories abound as to its misnaming. Most likely Navy Captain George Davidson erred during his 1856 survey of Puget Sound, confusing one broadleaved evergreen for another.

The beach itself also invites puzzlement. Aside from the absence of color, little seems to distinguish then from now. But Port Townsend oceanographer and coastal hazards specialist Ian Miller begs to differ.

“It’s hard to express how excited I [am] by these 110-year old photos,” he says. “We have so few historical images of these bluffs and shorelines, and I’ve never seen anything like them.”

For Miller, two elements warrant particularly close study: the size and quantity of logs on the beach and the coarsening of its sand and gravel, both of which provide vital environmental clues. Today, with much of Puget Sound “armored” by seawalls, riprap and hard surfaces, natural beach formation has been significantly disrupted.

South Beach, however, nourished by the gradual erosion of its towering bluffs, has maintained equilibrium, rebuilding itself through sedimentation over time. Its sands provide vital spawning grounds for smelt and other forage fish, prey for salmon. “From an ecological standpoint,” Miller says, “these are very important elements of the marine food web.”

What will the next 100 years bring? “As sea levels continue to rise,” Miller says, “this section of beach may provide a microcosm for Puget Sound restoration.”

In other words, reducing coastal “armor” and allowing resilient shorelines to erode and rebuild naturally may be the wave of the future.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 video version of the column, click here.

And here are four related “Now & Then” columns by Paul Dorpat, from 1984 through 1991:

• 1984 01-29 N&T
• 1985 10-13 N&T
• 1986 10-05 N&T
• 1991 03-24 N&T