(click to enlarge photos)

I first showed this Kodachrome slide of the Rivoli Follies, Seattle’s last house of burlesque, to the Daughters of the American Revolution in the mid-1980s.   I was asked to do an illustrated lecture (we then still called them “slide shows”) on local history by the DAR’s program director, then also in her mid-eighties, but still wonderfully spry and good-humored.  I confess now to including the Rivoli in that lecture in order to ask the members – whom I imagined as more prudent than impetuous — if any of them had gone there to see a show.

The response was startling, and it came first and fast from my “sponsor.”  She exclaimed, “Oh I danced there!”  This clamors for some explanation.

Lawton Gowey date-stamped his slide April 11, 1967.  Knowing Lawton, I think it most likely that he photographed this east side of the block on First Avenue between Madison Street  – where he stood – and Marion, because it would soon be razed for architect Fred Bassetti’s Federal Office Building.   The Times theatre ad on that spring day for the Rivoli promised “Blonde, Beautiful and Buxom Maria Christy in person! Plus extra added Zsa Zsa Cortez Mexican Spitfire – plus a stage full of beauties” in “4 shows daily.” *

Of course, the DAR’s program manager appeared on stage here much earlier than Ms. Christy and Cortez – perhaps already in the teens, for she was part of a small local class of amateur dancers performing for a mixed audience – often including their parents – at a weekend matinee.

On Oct. 27, 1939 the State Movie Theatre changed its name to Rivoli and its programing to a “vaudeville policy.” Actually, stage acts had been all or part of the entertainment here since 1905 when vaudeville impresario John Considine bought and booked the corner as the Star Theatre.  Years later during the Second World War the more loving and/or libidinous urges of young soldiers moved the Rivoli to “refine” its vaudeville policy into programs that mixed B Movies with the refined arts of removing clothes.

* One browsing and perhaps blue reader has found this attachment: a web page dedicated to campy erotica including a moving duet by the Rivoli stars for April 11, 1967.  Here’s a desktop “grab” of the Ms. Christy and Ms. Cortez.  In the interest of you the reader I turned it on and discovered that about ten second and two winks into the show it stops and asks one to subscribe.  At that point I left and returned to this sober and demure blog.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  A few other past Pacific features from the neighborhood, starting with something more  on the Star Theatre.  Correction – we will start with a few recordings of the Rivoli’s destruction and then of the Burke Block as well in early 1971.  This may be the second insertion in this blog for some of these subjects, but who is keep track?  We will act as if they bear repeating with this new “cross-reference.”

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The BURKE BUILDING

(First appeared in Pacific, March 3, 1996)

Elmer Fisher was the most prolific of the batch of mostly imported architects who rebuilt Seattle after its Great Fire of 1889. He designed this well-lit red brick pile of Chicago design – modern at the time – for the city’s biggest post-fire shaker: Thomas Burke. Appropriately, Fisher dressed Burke’s namesake building in a uniform of affluence and influence, with hand-carved pilasters, molded corners and tons of marble and granite effects.

At the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Marion Street, in the heart of the city’s financial district, the Burke Building survived in its Victorian raiment well into the 20th century. Its eight stories were transcended by more modern neighbors, first across Marion Street by the 278-foot-high Art Deco Exchange Building in 1929, followed 30 years later by the modern glass-curtain Norton Building, one block south at Columbia Street.

In the mid-1960s the federal government bought the Burke Building – and everything else on its block – after studying more than 40 proposed sites for its new “branch home” in Seattle. If the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building had been clad in red brick, as its architect, Fred Bassetti, intended, the Burke Building’s usurper would have, at least, repeated the warmth of its skin. But the office building, late in construction largely because of its price tag, was finally raised without its expensive masonry.

Still, Bassetti and Richard Haag, the site’s landscape architect, did manage to preserve parts of the Burke Building’s ornamental handiwork, along the Federal Building’s Second Avenue Plaza and down the long red-brick stairway to First Avenue along the Marion Street sid

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The STAR THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 10, 1991)

The sign on the Madison Street side of the Star Theatre reads “Continuous Vaudeville.” The general-admission price of one dime bought a seat for eight acts, featuring performers such as ragtime pianists and jazz singers – AI Jolson appeared at the Star in 1907 – and lantern-slide shows illustrating ballads sung by nasal tenors.

The acts were frequently changed. When Seattle’s John Considine, who bought the Star in 1905, signed an act he liked, he could keep the artists at work for more than a year, packing costumes and instruments from coast to coast into scores of theaters he owned or booked.

In 1911, the Star was eclipsed when Considine opened the Orpheum, a grander vaudeville stage two blocks up Madison Street at Third Avenue. This, however, was not the end of theater on the east side of First Avenue between Marion and Madison streets; the Star’s space was converted for motion pictures, first as the Owl Theatre and then as the State Theatre.

In 1885, George Frye had opened his namesake opera house in this same block. It was the best stage north of San Francisco. The last performers to strut this site were strippers. During World War II the New Rivoli Garden Theatre was popular with servicemen. The closure of the Rivoli in the late 1950s marked the end of burlesque in Seattle, and the end of theater on this block.    In its place – and all others on the block – the Henry M. Jackson Office Building opened in 1974.  (Historical photo courtesy U.W. Libraries, Special Collections.)

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The PIPERS on FRONT STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 28, 1984)

Front Street couldn’t have been a more appropriate name for First Avenue before the tum of the century. The historic scene, taken in 1878 or ’79, shows Elliott Bay at high tide lapping up against the timber retaining wall that held the street high and dry above the waterfront. This, was Seattle’s first major public work – the regrading of Front Street from a stump-strewn, ravine-ridden path to a filled-in, smooth road with guardrails and a sidewalk promenade.

The photo was taken from a balcony above Maddock’s drugstore at the northeast comer of Front’s intersection with Madison Street. The ” now” shot was taken from the second floor of a brick building which replaced the drugstore after the 1889 fire. (Something we will prove only when we recover it.)

In the far right of the older photo is the balcony of the Pontius Building.  The great fire began in the basement. It and the Woodward Grain House (the building that holds the photo’s center-right) were both built on piling. In between them is a gIimpse of a Section of Henry Yesler’s wharf and mill.

Posing in the photograph’s lower left corner are A.W. Piper; his son, Wallis; and their dog, Jack. As the proprietor of the Puget Sound Candy Manufactory, Piper was very popular.  He lived in Seattle making candy and friends for 30 years. When Piper died in 1904, his obituary was an unusually good-natured one. He was remembered not only for his great candy and bakery goods, but for his artistic abilities and pranks. “He could draw true to life,” said his obituary, “could mold in clay, cut stone . . . His Christmas display was noted for its Originality, humor and beauty.”

The candy-maker also was unconventional. A religious Unitarian, he also was a socialist member of the Seattle City Council. Many remembered him for being a successful practical joker as well. Once, he mimicked Henry Yesler so convincingly at a public dance that the real Yesler ran home to construct a sign which read, “This is the only original Yesler.”  The same could have been said for Piper.

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GRANDEST STAGE NORTH of SAN FANCISCO

(First appeared in Pacific, May 5, 1987.)

Several landmarks formed Seattle’s early skyline, the effect advertising the city’s new urban confidence of the mid-I880s. The most formidable in this view is the mansard roof  line of the Frye Opera House. When it was completed in 1885, George Frye’s opera house was the grandest stage north of San Francisco.  It was modeled after the Bay City’s famed Baldwin Theater, and dominated the northeast corner of First Avenue and Marion Street.

Kitty-corner from the opera house and above a grocery store, the YMCA quarters are marked by what appears to be a banner. The Y moved into this spot in 1882 and out in October 1886, and so this scene dates from sometime in 1885 or ’86. Across the street from the Y, with its own high-minded sign, is the Golden Rule Bazaar. Just above the bazaar and behind the opera house is the Stetson Post Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street. When the Post building was built in 1882 it was the most fashionable address in Seattle.

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

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

The Great Fire in 1889, which started at the southwest corner of First and Madison in the far left of this scene, destroyed Frye’s Opera House and practically everything else showing west of Second Avenue.

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FIRE STATION No. 1

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 5, 1992)

The ornate brick façade of Seattle’s first dedicated engine house faced Columbia Street west of Second Avenue. It was built in 1883 to house the fire department’s Washington No. 1 – most likely the steam fire engine posed here with its crew.

Earlier, the department’s other engine, the smaller man-powered Washington No.2, was also housed here in a barn. In the summer of 1882, when No.2 attempted to answer an alarm on the waterfront – sans horses – the weight of the rig dragged the men holding its pole down Columbia street and into the bay. Fortunately, both the firemen and the fire engine were pulled from the water with little injury.

By the time of the city’s fire of 1889, the Seattle Fire Department had a half~ dozen pieces of apparatus, but only one, No. 1 on Columbia Street, was horse-drawn. The ornate brick station that No. 1 left on the afternoon of June 6 to fight the “Great Fire” would not welcome it home. Of the 30-some city blocks destroyed that night, all those south of Spring Street and west of Second Avenue, including this one, were razed.

The PROSPECT From the FRYE OPERA HOUSE

(First printed in Pacific, July 16, 2000.)

What this scene lacks in photographic qualities it makes up with architectural highlights. Landmark gables, towers and steeples surmount the blotches, thumb prints and dark recesses of the photographic print. The view looks south-southeast from an upper story of the Frye Opera House at the northeast comer of Front Street (First Avenue) and Marion Street.

Included here is much of Seattle’s first residential neighborhood – the area east and northeast of Pioneer Place (Square). At this time, in the late 1880s, business was still centered at the square.  It also ran through the four blocks of Commercial Street (First Avenue South) that extended south from Yesler Way as far as King Street. There, until the mid-1890s, development was stopped by tideflats.

The largest landmark showing here is the Occidental Hotel on the far right. Built in 1883 in the flatiron block (now home of the “Sinking Ship Garage”) facing Pioneer Square, it was expanded east to Second Avenue in 1887 as we see it here. One of the oldest structures – perhaps the oldest – is far left: the Methodist Episcopal Church built in 1855 near the southeast comer of Second and Columbia. In 1887, the congregation moved two blocks to a new sanctuary at Third and Marion and sold its “White Church” -Seattle’s first – to a new proprietor who moved the building two blocks to Third and Cherry and reopened it as a saloon and gambling house.

The centerpiece here (near the center) is the fire station with the bell tower and ornate brick facade facing Columbia Street between First and Second avenues. This was the home of the horses, apparatuses, and firemen who for want of water pressure proved so ineffective during the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. Everything west of Second Avenue in this scene was destroyed, including the fire station.

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Above: Most of the structures in this view up Front Street (First Ave.) north of Madison St. in 1886 would be consumed in the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  The fire started at the Southwest corner of First and Madison.   Below: The Alexis Hotel, on the left, and the 20-story Waterfront Tower, on the right, are landmarks in the six-block Waterfront Place, first developed in the early 1980s.

FRONT STREET, 1886

(First appeared in Pacific July 26, 1992.)

The landmark in this scene – the “finest theater north of San Francisco” – is implied. From its fourth-floor roof, the Frye Opera House was an obvious perch from which to look down on Front Street (First Avenue).

The opera house was opened in 1885; this view northwest across the intersection of First and Madison to the waterfront was photographed probably in the summer of 1886. This was the 10th anniversary of the city’s first major public work, which regraded Front Street north of Yesler Way.

Also in 1886, the U.S. Post Office Department reprimanded the Northern Pacific Railroad for regularly holding up (for 22 hours) Seattle mail in Tacoma, the railroad’s company town. The department awarded Seattle the southern terminus for mail collected from communities to the north of the city – a role previously Tacoma’s. Despite the Northern Pacific’s best efforts to neglect or outright inhibit use of the “orphan road” railroad line that ran between the two cities, commerce across it was increasing rapidly.

The northern end of that Seattle spur appears here. This is a rare view of the “Ram’s Horn” track that snaked along the waterfront north of King Street about as far as Pike. It was the trigger for sustained bellicosity between waterfront land owners, shippers and public officials who wanted to get around or under it.

The following year it would be surpassed by a straighter trestle of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad (SLSE), which ran north from the waterfront to Interbay and, eventually, to Canada on what is now part of the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail. Together the “Ram’s Hom” and the SLSE were the beginning of Railroad Avenue, the wide swath of timber trestles that is now our waterfront.

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FIRST AVE. North Thru MADISON STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, June 22, 1986)

Although several decades separate our “now” and “then,” not much has changed. Indeed, this First Avenue block between Madison Street (in the foreground) and Spring Street is one of the best-preserved in the city. This lucky situation is the result of some unlucky happenings.

The first of these was the Great Fire of 1889, which razed to a rubble this intersection. Then, before the elaborate post-fire rebuilding could make its way up First Avenue from Pioneer Square, the street (and the nation) suffered another setback: the economic crash of 1893.

In 1897, First Avenue finally enjoyed some fortunate attention when thousands of travelers came crashing through Seattle en route to the lavish hardships of the gold fields in the north. First Avenue was built up from the wealth of the gold rush, and it shows. The three elegant buildings on left, historically the Globe and Beebe buildings and the Hotel Cecil, are all the satisfying 1901 creations of architect Max Umbrecht. In this photo they are brand new, showplaces along what was for a bief time one of the busiest blocks in Seattle. But this elegant energy was short-lived. For all the terra cotta tiles, fluted pilasters and arched bays lavished on these facades, behind them it was primarily a strip of workingmen’s hotels serving the rougher businesses of the waterfront.

The economic crash of 1907, although not as bad as 1893’s, hit this avenue particularly hard. It never really rebounded – never, that is, until now. And the irony of First Avenue’s years of neglect is that it was thereby preserved.  (A reminder: this was written a quarter-century ago.)

It was because the Globe Building, on the left, was for years the home of a penny arcade that its savior, Cornerstone Development Co., could renovate it as the centerpiece of its six-block Waterfront Place project.

Here, between Madison and Seneca streets, Cornerstone has saved five architectural delights, including the Globe which is now the European-styled Alexis Hotel. Cornerstone’s one exception on First is its 20-story Watermark Tower at Spring Street. And this is but half an exception since the sculptured tower with its art deco touches and cream-colored tile skin emerges from within the preserved terra cotta facade of the 1915 Colman Building.

A real exception to this ornate First Avenue story is the simple two-story brick structure on the right of this week’s historical scene. Although it is one of the oldest buildings in Seattle, put up soon after the fire of 1889, its longest continuous occupant is still there. This year (1986), Warshal’s Sporting Goods celebrates its golden anniversary at First and Madison. (In that quarter-century since, Warshal’s has gone missing and the corner has been developed to greater heights.)

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The EXCHANGE BUILDING

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 10, 1999)

Architect John Graham Sr.’s Exchange Building is one of the graces of local architecture – a modest grace.  Facing Marion Street, its great front facade is not shown off as it might have been fronting Second Avenue or looking out to Elliott Bay across First Avenue.  Since the opening of the Federal Office Building in 1974 it looks demurely across Marion Street into the fed’s greater but less alluring north façade.

In his contribution on Graham for the U.W. Press book “Shaping Seattle Architecture,” Grant Hildebrand, a professor in the School of Architecture, comes to the mildly restrained conclusion that the Exchange Building is perhaps Graham’s finest work. Hildebrand finds it “an engaging play of Art Deco motifs” and delights in its “all-over massing, but especially in its street-level treatment and its lobby.”

The jewel-like arches at the entrance to the main lobby off Second Avenue are evident in this view.  (What follows was written for the clipping included directly above, and not the photograph exhibited above it.) The American flags adorning City Light’s street fixtures are grouped with signs, which read – certainly – “Exchange Building,” but also seem to read “Grand Opening.” Most likely this dates from 1931, when the landmark was new. More evidence: Most of the windows are still without shades, and many of the rooms seem empty.

Graham was born in Liverpool, England, in 1873 and came to Seattle in 1901. A few of his other works are the Frederick and Nelson Building, The Bon Marche, the Dexter Horton Building and, immediately south of the Exchange Building on Second Avenue, the Bank of California. A small portion of its classical front shows here. To quote Hildebrand once more, Graham’s “work was significant . . . because in playing a major role in the making of downtown Seattle, it was invariably executed with a sure and sensitive hand.”

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The GARDEN OF ALLAH

(Appeared in Pacific first on Feb. 1, 1998)

Although these two scenes (if we had the “now” in hand, which we don’t for now) were not figured with a surveyor’s chain, a bet that they were photographed from within a few feet of one another is as good as the likelihood that this organist could accompany Jackie Starr, right, in her dosing number. The sheet music, with the title “Oh! What It Seemed To Be,” shows between organist Jimmy Baker and drummer Earl Steves.

The historical scene was photographed a half-century ago on – to use the full title of the book from which the photo was taken – “An Evening At The Garden of Allah, A Gay Cabaret in Seattle.” So, as her closing number perhaps suggests, the elegantly dressed and coifed Starr is not a she but a he.

The Garden began as a Prohibition speakeasy in the basement of the old Arlington Hotel. In 1946 it reopened primarily for the postwar, high-camp performances of mostly female impersonators who, like Starr, learned their art in vaudeville. Resembling Gypsy Rose Lee, Starr once filled in for her so convincingly in a Music Hall performance that the sophisticated New York audience was fooled.

The Garden, which lasted 10 years, was also a sanctuary for Seattle’s gay population. First Amendment rights to comedy, love songs and bawdy routines (tame by today’s standards) were “guaranteed” by police payoffs.

The contemporary scene was shot in the library of Harbor Steps’ new high-rise apartments on First Avenue. Skippy LaRue was a friend to whom Jackie Starr left the photographs used throughout Don Paulson’s remarkable book. With University of Washington associate professor Roger Simpson’s creative help, Paulson shaped his hundred-plus interviews with Garden performers and regulars – including LaRue – into a Columbia University Press publication, which won the Governor’s Writers Award for 1997.

(click to enlarge photos)

On a recent visit to Mt. St. Helens with his family, Jean Sherrard stopped off in both Centralia and Chehalis to photograph their railroad depots.  Of course, for these “repeat” purposes Jean carried with him historical photographs of the “twin cities” stations.  While in Centralia he was blessed with good “now and then luck.” Picking up and letting go passengers, Amtrak’s Coast Starlight packet was also waiting and posing for him.

Both depots are splendid examples of brick depot architecture and next year both will celebrate their centennials.  While making preparations for the birthdays, the Lewis County Historical Society and its museum are fittingly sited.  Both have a home in the landmark Chehalis depot.

The Centralia Depot was completed quickly in 1912.  Many of the estimated 500 workers were, of course, specialists.  The floor was made of terrazzo, the roof tiled, the windows leaded, and hardwood oak was used extensively. Anticipating a booming population the station was also built big.  It reaches will over three hundred feet, with five sections separated by breezeways.   The restoration took much longer – eight years.  It was completed in 2002.

Even before railroads were laid thru them, the Lewis County twins served as halfway destinations between the Columbia River and Puget Sound.  Now the railroad line between Portland and Seattle – or with its greatest reach, between Eugene and Vancouver B.C. – is Amtrak’s eighth-busies route, carrying the most passengers of any railroads outside of the Northeastern U.S. or California.

For one dollar the state purchased the station from the Burlington Northern Railroad in 1994 and promptly gave it over to the city of Centralia.  The depot is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

WEB EXTRAS

This time round, I’ve got a few things to add myself, Paul. Several cribbed from our 2007 book, Washington Then and Now:

First, THE CHEHALIS DEPOT:

Now the Lewis County Historical Museum.

THE CHEHALIS STREET DANCE:

The popular Chautauqua movement began in the east in the 1870s with a mixture of Bible studies and lectures on self-improvement.  Here on Market Boulevard in Chehalis the movement has them dancing in the street.  The Lewis County Historical Museum figures that this invigorated scene dates from about 1914, and the Chautauqua dances were held at this location until 1918 when the turreted St. Helens Hotel in the background was replaced with the current masonry building.  In the right background is the Chehalis City Hall, built in 1912 and still in service, although minus its ornate trim, damaged in the 1949 earthquake that was generally cruel to the region’s cornices.   In my repeat, City Hall is barely visible through the trees.

Next, TWO PIONEER SANCTUARIES ON HIGHWAY 6:

Two landmark pioneer churches – at Francis and Claquato – stand above State Highway No. 6 between Chehalis and South Bend.  The later (on the right), about three miles west of Chehalis is also distinguished as the oldest standing church in the state.  Built in 1858 with a crown of thorns topping its tower the parish lost its parishioners after Chehalis took the county seat from Claquato in the 1870s.  Although empty when it was photographed in 1891 it survived for a full restoration in the 1950s.  Holy Family Catholic Church in Francis dates from 1892 when the Northern Pacific Railroad was approaching this largely Swiss settlement.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes, a few subjects Jean, but not the usual horde.  Ahh but the above reminds me of what a pleasing time we had building our book “Washington Then and Now,” you traveling the state and me sitting in my basement – for the most – talking with you on the phone.

Here a small back of subjects that are either of Centralia or Chehalis, or they are in the greater neighborhood, like the churches above.  I’ll keep the captions brief.

Follow THREE of WINLOCK (“most likely”)

Jean and I have learned that the Museum of History and Industry is worried about our upcoming talk about our “Repeat Photography” show that is hanging at MOHAI until next June.  Then everything comes down for the move to the new home that the Museum is now preparing at the south end of Lake Union.

We have been told that not enough tickets are getting sold.  We conclude that either we are not worth the ticket price – ten dollars – or the word about the Oct 13 (next Thursday evening) show has not circulated well.  Please study the attached literature promoting the lecture, reflect and, perhaps, check your budget.  If you come we will encourage you to ask questions.
–Paul and Jean
(and Berangere too, who, if she can make it here from Paris, will get in free.)

(click to enlarge photos)

In 1940 Seattle Municipal Railways started to abandon its trollies before pulling up their rails, and the old orange-colored cars became increasingly photogenic, especially to Seattle’s rail fans.  Lawton Gowey, a rail fan extraordinaire but now, alas, long gone, shared this photo with me many years ago.

The intentions of the photographer – perhaps Lawton’s father – might have been to make another 11th hour recording of a cherished common carrier.  Lawton would have known that car No.702, which is stopping for a rider here on 45th Street at Meridian Avenue, was manufactured in 1913 in Cincinnati, Ohio for the then still privately owned Seattle Electric Company.  No. 702 was one of twenty-two cars built to the same long design – from headlight to tail light cars 701 to 722 extended 49 feet and 2 inches. Trollies on the Meridian Line were abandoned on May 5,1940 and scrapped soon after.

This trolley portrait was photographed sometime between its May ‘40 abandonment and March 11, 1938, the day the A&P Super Market, here at the northeast corner of 45th and Meridian, and another in Ballard had their grand openings.  They promised “always one low price and no specials . . . You will know that you shopped by wisely and profitably at the A&P super market.”

The meeting of 45th Street and Meridian Ave began in the forest, when federal surveyors carrying their Gunter Chains described – and marked – the future streets as the west (Meridian) and north (45th) borders for the 640 acres of federal land section number seventeen.  That done the settlers could identify their claims with some precision.

A&P’s brick and tile corner was built in 1929, just in time for the Great Depression.  From 1935 thru 1937, at least, the well-ornamented corner was vacant until A&P opened it to “wise” shoppers in ’38 and stayed until 1942 when it too moved on.  The northeast corner then went dark again.  (Many thanks here to Jeannette Voiland, Seattle Room librarian-historian at the Seattle Public Library’s Central Branch, for helping with the A&P chronology.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

SURE Jean, and Ron will start out by making some picture-triggered  links to a few other and related features that have appeared on this blog.   Then I’ll grab a few past features from Pacific that visit the neighborhood (it’s Wallingford) and whatever else comes forward that seems fit to fit.

FIRST,  a few random looks at the same intersection of 45th and Meridian, including another look at A&P MARKET and a sample of its newsprint ads.

Three of four of the hundreds of records I made of this corner between 2006 and 2010 when I walked a Wallingford Walk that – on a full day – include repeating more than 400 sites for animation (or time lapse).   About 25 examples of these TIMELAPSES are the Wallingford part of the REPEAT PHOTO show that is now on exhibit at the MUSEUM of HISTORY and INDUSTRY.  (Come early to the lecture this coming THURSDAY and watch them – and Paris Now-Then too!)

Follows now a reprint of The Seattle Times full-page photo montage on Wallingford’s 45th Street for the Oct. 25, 1925 issue.   Using the same framing I repeated these in early December of 1992.  The long Times report that accompanied their montage is on display with many other Wallingford images at the Blue Star Cafe at 46th and Stone Way.  Before I could put captions up for the exhibit there, the owner lost interest in the cafe and sold it to the present owner.  The pictures are still without captions, except for this S.Times feature.  A quick study will reveal that there have been both business and physical changes in the nineteen years since.   (Click and click again to enlarge you may be able to read the captions.)

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Then Caption:  Neighbors pose on the front steps of photographer Lawrence Lindsley’s Wallingford home sometime in October 1918 when the city was “dark” and closed-down during the Spanish Flu’s Seattle visit.  The masks were required although the law was rarely enforced.  (Picture courtesy of Dan Eskenazi)

Now Caption:  Wallingford neighbor’s repeat the 1918 flu shot behind masks pulled from one of the group’s mask collection.   Only one among the seven is neither hidden nor unnamed: the Chihuahua Sparky.   (now photo by Jean Sherrard)

LAGRIPPE in WALLINGFORD

Dan Eskenazi, Seattle photo collector and old friend of mine, first shared with me these masked ladies posing with masked cats on the unlikely chance that I might know the porch.  Had the snapshot revealed a street number the choices would have been narrowed city-wide to a few hundred front steps.  But Dan’s little 3×4 inch print does better.  The names of the women are penciled on the back.  The flipside caption reads,  “Top row, Anna Kilgore, E. K. Barr, Ms Anna S. Shaw.  Lower row, Penelope and Tommy, Mrs Shaw and Golly.”

So seven creatures including the cats Tommy and Golly and all of them wearing masks by order of the mayor.  By the time the 1918 flu epidemic reached Seattle at the end of September la Grippe had caused more deaths world-wide than the First World War. When the rule about masks was lifted for good on Armistice Day, Nov. 11 the streets were quickly filled with bare-faced revelers.  Still Dr. T. D. Tuttle, the state’s commissioner of health, warned that “people who have influenza are in the crowds that are celebrating victory.  They will be in the street cars, in the theaters, in the stores.” Tuttle also confessed, “the order had been more or less a farce as far as the masks are concerned.”  (This explains, perhaps, why there are so few mask photos extant.)

Returning to the snapshot’s penciled caption, four of the five women are listed in the 1918 city directory living at 108 E. 43rd Street, in Wallingford.  Since that address is about 100 steps from my own I was soon face to face with Dan’s unidentified porch, except that it was one house west of 108.  But this slight move presented an opportunity.  It hints, at least, of the photographer.

104 E. 43rd Street was built in 1918, the year that the photographer Lawrence Denny Lindsley, the grandson of city founders David and Louisa Denny, moved in.  Perhaps Lindsley took the snapshot of his neighbors sitting on his new front steps soon after he took possession with his bride Pearl.  Married on September 20, 1918, tragedy soon followed.  Both Pearl and their only child Abbie died in 1920.  Lindsley married again in 1944 and continue to live at 104 into the 1970s.   When he died in 1974, this son of the pioneers was in his 90s and still taking photographs.

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Above:  Identified as a scene on the east shore of Lake Union the narrow passage between the photographer and the far shore suggests that the photograph was taken from somewhere near the west side of the University Bridge.   (Courtesy, Mike Maslan.)

Below: Photographed from the north shore of Lake Union, at the small waterfront park that borders Ivar’s Salmon House on its west side.  At the bottom of the featured text is a look east towards the south end of the University Bridge and thru the lumber mill that once held the lots now holding the Salmon House.

“EAST SIDE OF LAKE UNION”

(First appeared in Pacific about five years ago.)

For the first time in a quarter-century of writing this little weekly feature I am, I admit, tempted to not include a “now” photograph to repeat the historical scene.

In the original Lowman family photo album from which it is lifted the roughly 3×4 inch print is clearly titled, “East side Lake Union, 1887.”  We may have a general confidence in the caption, for there are many other photographs in the album that are accurately described.   But with this caption we are left hanging and asking, “But where on the east side?”

The earliest photographs of Lake Union are a few panoramas photographed from the since razed Denny Hill in the mid-1880s.  None of those, however, help in identifying this extremely rare detail of the lakeshore from such an early date as 1887.  We can see that there has been some clearing of the forest back from the far shoreline, and in the immediate foreground a sawed-off stump nestles near a still standing cedar.

1887 was the year in which the Seattle Lakeshore and Eastern Railroad was laid along the north shore of Lake Union through the future neighborhoods of Fremont, Edgewater (near Stone Way), Wallingford/Latona and the University District.  Perhaps the photographer hitched a ride on the railroad and took this snapshot looking southeast from near the little north shore park that is now at the foot of 4th Ave. NE (just west of Ivar’s Salmon House).  By 1887 Lowman, Yesler’s relative and his business manager, was one of Seattle’s primary capitalists, and could have easily persuaded the engineer to stop anywhere along the line.)

This conjecture may also help account for the how in the 1887 scene the shoreline draws closer to the photographer on the left side of the cedar.  Historical maps of the undeveloped east shoreline of Lake Union show such an irregularity just south of where the 1-5 Freeway Bridge sinks its piers on the east shore of the lake.

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Above & Below: The assorted littered of shingles, coal, and railroad cars are scattered to the side of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Right of way. The photo dates most likely from the day following the “Great Latona Train Wreck” of August 20, 1894.  On the far left a crane has begun the clean up.  Boys from the neighborhood sit on the roof of the tiled boxcar at the center.   The house on the horizon survives at 3808 Eastern Avenue north.  Built in 1890 it is easily one of the oldest north end homes. The railroad right-of-way also survives, sans tracks, as the Burke Gilman Recreation Trail. (Historical photo courtesy of Roy Nielsen)

The GREAT LATONA TRAIN WRECK

At 5pm on the Monday afternoon of Aug. 20, 1894 a west bound freight of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern entered the curve at Latona on the north shore of Lake Union.  Engineer Osborn looked up and saw several cattle jousting near the track. In an instant a cow was gored and fell directly in front of the train lifting the engine off the track.  Osborn cut the steam, threw the reverse lever and held on before he was thrown from the cab.  (He survived the ejection well enough to frantically run to Fremont to stop the northbound passenger train.)

Within seconds of the derailment the ten cars filled with tons of coal, logs and shingles telescoped, propelling the coal tender beyond the engine.  In the process it sheered the left side of the engine’s cab.  When two shingle weavers from a nearby Latona mill first reached the wreck they saw through the still swirling steam and dust the horrific sight of brakeman Frank Parrot’s decapitated body propped against the boiler with his head lying between his legs.  The mutilated fireman Thomas Black lay nearby.  Black had been anxious to complete the trip and pick up his pay check, for his wife was waiting at home penniless and alone with their two children.  She was also eight months pregnant.

To the side of the engine the shingle weavers laid the bodies of the two victims and covered them with green brush. Within an hour the coroner arrived aboard a special train that also carried railroad officials and a wrecking crew of 30 men.

The trail of grease left by the dragged cow was used later to determined the distance the engine bumped along the ties before it veered to the right and buried its nose in the small trees and bushes that lined the embankment.  The Press-Times reported on Tuesday that the trail ran “about 200 feet.”  The stack of the engine peeks above the upset boxcar, just left of center.

Follow another now-then of the Seattle Lake  Shore and Eastern right-of-way, but many years later for the running of the Casey Jones Excursion, the last passenger train to use the tracks on June 29, 1957.    Lawton Gowey, rail Fan and photographer, got up early to chase Casey Jones with his camera.

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Above: The pile trestle of the Seattle Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad was built along Lake Union’s north shore during the summer of 1887.  This scene of the passenger train was photographed a year or two later.  (Courtesy University of Washington Library, Special Collections)

SEATTLE LAKE SHORE & EASTERN RAILROAD in WALLINGFORD/EDGEWATER

(First appeared in Pacific August 28, 1984)

Photographer David Judkins and the lumberman J.R. McDonald both came to Seattle in 1883. This week’s view of the train posing on the pile trestle on Lake Union’s northern shore was photographed by Judkins in 1888 or 1889. The name of the steam engine, painted on the coal bin at its rear, is the J.R. McDonald. In 1887, McDonald was named president of this railroad, the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern.

This is probably the oldest view of Lake Union shot from what is now, part of Wallingford. The familiar ridge of Capitol Hill runs across the entire scene – clear cut on the right, but still forested on the left. The darker firs in the middle distance on the far left are on the peninsular tip of what is now Gas Works Park.

Judkins probably got off the train to take its portrait. He set his tripod a short distance east of the present intersection of Stone Way North and North Northgate Way.

In Judkins’ scene, passengers are leaning out of the windows and doors, from between the cars, and that may be the fireman posing atop the engine’s cowcatcher. The train is pointed toward Seattle, and is possibly returning from its popular Sunday excursion run to Snoqualmie Falls.

Perhaps SLS & E president McDonald arranged with Judkins to have this photo taken of his railroad and his namesake engine. The January 1890 issue of West Shore Magazine featured McDonald as a Northwestern paragon of how “brains, energy and enterprise” had made for the “wonderful development of the west.”

But it really wasn’t McDonald’s engine or his railroad. One month after the West Shore’s praises, McDonald resigned his presidency and sued the railroad for the $6,000 annual salary he claimed was owed him. McDonald had been a regional figurehead for a company financed with eastern capital and managed by easterners. Not needed, he returned to his lumber and his name was retired from the SLS & E’s rolling stock.

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Above: The Buhtz family’s barrel factory was one of the first manufacturers to put Lake Union to work.  Below:  This “now” was recorded today – Oct. 8, 2011 – which is to say (and write) yesterday.

WESTERN COOPERAGE

(First appeared in Pacific March 25, 1990)

When the partnership of Albert Buhtz Sr. and Albert Buhtz Jr. started hand manufacturing barrels on the north shore of Lake Union in 1896, they could make 10 of them in a day. Twenty years later, with more than 50 coopers laboring under their roof, their output had increased a hundredfold. All of the Buhtzes’ barrels were made from Douglas Fir felled at the company’s forest reserve on Young’s Bay near Astoria, Ore., and by 1916 Western Cooperage was also manufacturing barrels in Portland.

This historkal view of the Buhtz factory was photographed about 1910, or not long after the Buhtzes changed their business name from Fremont Barrel Company to Western Cooperage. As the scene reveals, Lake Union then reached in as far as the present Northlake Way. To the left of the factory a Northern Pacific boxcar has been switched from the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern right-of-way (now the Burke-Gilman Trail) to the shoreside apron, perhaps to unload the bundles of Douglas Fir staves first prepared at the company’s Oregon mill and here stacked neatly on the timber quay.

Some of the company’s biggest consumers of their Lake Union containers were Alaskan fisherman. Other common products wrapped in a Western barrel were pickles and Washington State berries – although not together. The German immigrant Buhtz Senior was no doubt pleased that his barrels were also used regularly to store sauerkraut.

This factory on Northlake Way kept producing barrels long after the Buhtzes had left the scene. The last assembler was active here into the 1970s.  Next a protected home for vessels, the elaborately remodeled barrel factory is now (in 2011) in part home for the Marine Diver’s Institute of Technology.

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LATONA BOATHOUSE

(First appeared in Pacific Oct. 6,1996)

Faded considerably from when it was first exposed in the unnamed postcard photographer’s darkroom, this view is a one-of-a-kind record of the Latona waterfront, circa 1911, or at least that part of it east of the Latona Bridge, from which it was photographed.

This captioned commercial view was included in a packet of snapshots, postmarked 1911, which depicted a summer day of canoeing and courting – judging from the messages written on their flip side – on Lake Union, Portage Bay and through the old Montlake log canal. Perhap’s the couple’s canoe was rented from the Latona Boat House.

In 1911 Orick and Florence Huntosh were proprietors there. The listing from the city directory that year reads in part, “Fishing boats and tackle in season, storage and boats to let, Latona Station, 651 Northlake Ave, Phone No. 148.”

Other landmarks include the faded roof line of the University of Washington’s Parrington Hall (upper right), and the Cascade Coal Company’s bunkers and spur (upper left) off the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad (Burke-Gilman Trail) right-of-way. Cutting through most of the view, the black line of the city water department’s 32-inch wood-stave pipeline completes its bridging of Portage Bay and goes underground again at Seventh Avenue Northeast.

By 1911 it was known that Latona’s trolley and pipeline bridges would need to be removed for the Lake Washington Ship Canal. In 1912 water superintendent L.B. Youngs recommended that a tunnel replace the pipeline bridge – one big enough to also carry streetcar lines and other traffic. Young’s ambitious solution to cross-canal traffic would have precluded the need for countless motorists to wait on the University Bridge, since it replaced the Latona Bridge in 1919. Three years earlier, the water department’s tunnel carrying a 42-inch steel pipe replaced the old timber trestle seen, in part, here.

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Above:  Swanson’s Shoe Repair in Wallingford is one of those few specialist shops that has survived in a consumer culture that is increasingly inclined to throw things away rather than fix them.     Photo Courtesy of  Swanson Shoe Repair.

Below:  The lighting fixture hanging from the ceiling and much of Swanson Shoe Repair’s sanders, buffers and stitcher’s survive from the store’s post World War 2 move from downtown to Wallingford’s 45th Street.

“If George Can’t Fix ‘Em, Skip ‘Em”

(dates from 2007)

When Swedish immigrant George Swanson Sr. moved his shoe repair from downtown to Wallingford in 1946 he counted seven cobblers in the neighborhood.  Sixty years later the shop’s motto “If George can’t fix ‘em, skip ‘em” seems certified.  His is the only cobbler still cutting it on 45thStreet, Wallingford’s “Main Street.”

The historical interior view is easily dated by the Norman Rockwell calendar on the back wall.  It shows January, 1950.  From the middle of the scene George Sr. peers above a counter-top sign that is still in the shop and even in place although now half hidden beneath a higher counter. Ten years more and George Sr. passed the business on to George Jr., here left of center, allowing “grandpa” to retire to a corner of the shop and concentrate on handcrafting the traditional wooden clogs he first learned to make as a teenager in Sweden.  Grandma Hannah Swason is on the right.

Now George Jr’s. son Danny and his sister Patty Mayhle do the cobbling while protecting the shop from unwanted glitz.  They appear in the “now”  with Danny’s 12 year old daughter  Hannah (standing on a stool) and 15 year old son Daniel  to the right.

A visit to 2305 North 45th Street, (next to Al’s neighborhood tavern) begins at the windows with its permanent exhibit of cobbler artifacts collected by the three generations of Swansons.  Once inside the collection continues throughout the shop to such a depth as to seem archeological. Swanson’s is one of the “stations” on my “Wallingford Walk” and I visit the shop almost daily.

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Above: St. Benedict Catholic Church’s original sanctuary was at the southeast corner of North 48^th Street and Densmore Avenue North.  (Courtesy, Old Seattle Paperworks)  Below:  A generous panorama of Wurstfest 2008 looks north thru the original site of the parish church.

SOULS & SAUSAGES

The contemporary record was photographed looking thru the site of the old parish – now part of St. Benedict School’s playground – in the embrace of Wallingford annual Wurstfest.  The panorama looks north towards North 48th Street with the parish school on the right and the very rear of the modern church that is already 53 years old. (in 2008)  It sits at the northwest corner of 48^th and Wallingford Avenue.

St. Benedict is one of the oldest North End Catholic parishes; construction began in 1906. The congregation celebrated its first Mass in the basement the following April and continued there until the church’s September dedication. In 1908 the structure’s basement and first floor were busy weekdays serving the parish school, where children entered through the side door, here on the left. Mass was held on the third floor in a sanctuary approached from the front door on Densmore Avenue, here on the right.

By the mid-1930s the congregation left its top-floor sanctuary to celebrate Mass in its new school auditorium and stayed there until the modern church was dedicated in 1955. Soon after the new schoolhouse was dedicated in 1924, the Catholic Progress described it as the “largest and finest Catholic school in the diocese.” Its student body of nearly 400 swelled by the early ’60s to nearly 700. One of its instructors then, Blanch LeBlanc, developed a program for learning disabilities that was copied in Seattle’s schools, where LeBlanc became assistant superintendent.

Historically, Wallingford was a neighborhood of working-class souls -and therefore many sausage eaters. Begun in 1983 as a means of raising money for the parish school, “The Great Wallingford Wurst Festival” has become a community event, attended by an estimated 40,000 – a few more than the 900 families that now belong to the parish.

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Built in 1913 in a “shake style” that fit its neighborhood, the Wallingford firehouse was, from the beginning, a joint home for firefighters and police.  It stands at the southwest corner of Densmore Ave. N. and 45^th Street.  The “now” (below) was photograph today! – Oct. 8, 2011.

WALLINGFORD FIRE STATION

(First appeared in Pacific Nov. 11, 1992)

Wallingford’s Firehouse No. 11, was built in 1913. Horse-drawn apparatuses charged from the station’s unique accordion-style doors until 1921, when the animals were replaced by a motor pumper.

Station No. 11 was designed by city architect D.R. Huntington to complement the surge of bungalow-style homes then ascending above Wallingford’s modest properties. The station’s drying tower topped the lot and the immediate neighborhood.

Firefighters shared this cedar-shake station with the police until they left it to them in 1965. The forces stayed on until 1984, when health providers moved in. A year earlier, when the station was first listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the neighborhood’s “re-use task force” determined that a health clinic was No. 11 ‘s most appropriate use, and the landmark fire station became the 45th Street Community Clinic. It is the only community health clinic north of the Lake Washington Ship canal.  (Or at least “was” when I first wrote this in 1992.) The clinic’s large Latino clientele is served by a staff bilingual in Spanish.

Part of the old firehouse ground floor is also home for the Wallingford-Wilmot branch of the Seattle Public Library. (No more. The library has moved a block west on 45^th.)

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Above: When constructed in 1904 Interlake Elementary was literally in the sticks.  Below: Since 1985 the classic old schoolhouse has been known as the Wallingford Center.

INTERLAKE SCHOOL

(First appeared in Pacific Oct. 21, 1990)

In 1904, the year the Seattle school board opened Interlake School, the intersection of Wallingford Avenue and N.E. 45th Street was still a mess of stumps and street work. This unkempt isolation was short-lived. Only three years later Lincoln High School was opened three blocks to the west, and trolley tracks were laid from the University District along 45th Street as far as Meridian Avenue, two blocks east of the school. The Wallingford neighborhood was soon full of children, and, in time, Interlake became one of the largest elementary schools in Seattle.

Interlake was an architectural echo of its neighbor to the north, Green Lake Elementary. Both schools, and several others in the system, were concretions of school-district architect James Stephen’s 1902 master plan for outfitting the city with well-lit classically styled frame schoolhouses. That Interlake was not razed (the eventual fate of Green Lake Elementary) after closing in 1981 was the result of a happy wedding of circumstances, including its prime location, its landmark status and the initiative of developer Lorig Associates.

Wallingford Center, opened in 1985, includes 24 top-floor apartments and 38,000 square feet of mixed commercial uses, including two restaurants, a bookstore and a bagel factory.  (First written in 1990 the tenants have since changed.) It has developed into the retail focus of the Wallingford community, and this year (again, 1990) was awarded the Seattle Design Commission’s “Neighborhood Design That Works” award.

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Above:  Carnival rides begin to take shape on the parking lot of Interlake School (The Wallingford Center) circa 1953.  The view looks north and a little east from N. 44th Street to Burke Ave. N.  The now 103 year old Interlake School – since 1985 Wallingford Center — is just out of the scene to the left.   Below:  This season since May 16th last, the Wallingford Center parking lot has been a Wednesday destination where families meet farmers, many of them organic growers.  (Historical picture courtesy of Stan Stapp.)

WEEKEND CARNI’ – WEDNESDAY MARKET  (Carousels & Cauliflowers)

(First appeared in 2007.)

Pacific Northwest readers old enough to remember the post-World War Two years may find sufficient clues in the accompanying photograph to figure out what is being constructed.  With the flamboyant font typical of circus broadsides, the purveyor, Earl O. Douglas, has written his namesake company’s tag, “Douglas Greater Shows”, on the sides of the big trucks that carry all the gear needed to assemble a week-end carnival.

Here on the rear parking lot of Wallingford’s Interlake School – since 1985 Wallingford Center — Douglas will soon accept dimes from kids in the neighborhood for admittance to his several thrill rides and some cotton candy.

The historical photos came from Stan Stapp, longtime editor of the North Central Outlook, a weekly tabloid that served Wallingford and adjacent neighborhoods for several decades.  This old friend, recently deceased, was known for his vivid memory and could, no doubt, have told me when these pictures appeared in his paper.   I made an admittedly too rapid search of Outlook issues from 1949 through 1952 and failed to find this construction scene or any of the other carnival shots that Stan shared with me years ago.  (One of the scenes in that small collection included a gleaming 1949 Dodge sedan.)

We don’t need the exact year for Douglas’s visit to Wallingford to make the point how tastes have changed in the ensuing half-century – at least those tastes involved in the innovative use of school parking lots.   The cotton candy has been replaced with a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, confections and some crafts.  They are barely restrained beneath by the rows of tents pitched every Wednesday during the warm months beside Wallingford Center.  (The Wallingford Farmers Market has since moved off Wallingford Center’s parking lot to the grasses of Meridian Park. I think the move had something to do with Wallingford Center residents complaints about parking, or general commotion to the, for them, himby parking lot.)

The Wallingford Center Farmers Market is the latest creation of the non-profit Seattle Farmers Market Association.  It first opened last June and is by now and by habit my favorite Wednesday afternoon destination.  (This was true when I first wrote it a few years past.  Now I need to concentrate on making it to the new location.  Yes the parking is not so convenient and neither are these old legs so steadfast.)

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Above & Below:  Looking southeast from the corner of N. Allen Place and Interlake Avenue North the circa 1914 view of Lincoln High and its new North Wing looks very much like the contemporary record.  The original 1907 symmetrical section faces Interlaken Avenue on the far right and in the “now” view only the 1930 south wing is mostly hidden behind the landscaping. (Historical Photo courtesy Lawton Gowey)

LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL

This little sketch of Lincoln High School history began by consulting Nile Thompson and Carolyn M. Marr’s “Building for Learning, Seattle Public School Histories, 1862-2000.”  And within this nearly new book we learn that although Lincoln High closed its doors to Wallingford teens in 1981 the now nearly century old story of the school on Interlake Avenue is far from over.

First in 1997 it was the students of Ballard who used a renovated Lincoln campus while a new Ballard High School was built for them.  Next followed the kids from Latona for their two-year stint during the renovation of their campus and now Roosevelt High is harbored in these egalitarian halls while north end students get their own makeover.  (The Roosevelt visit, of course, required a special street parking study inWallingford.)  And other schools will probably be coming to Lincoln in the years ahead.

In a way the Roosevelt visit is a return of what that school took from Lincoln when it opened in 1922 capturing about half of the older school’s territory with it.

Early in 1906 an anxious school board committee scouted the Wallingford site when there were still stump fields scattered about from the original clear-cutting of the late 1880s.  The 30 room “Little Red Brick Schoolhouse” was built with speed and 900 students were enrolled the following September – many of them from Queen Anne.  Two years later Queen Anne got its own high school, which it has also since lost.   Still Lincoln kept growing.

This view dates probably from 1914, the year its new north wing (shown here) was added.  In 1930 a south wing followed and in 1959 an east side addition as well.  That year Lincoln was the largest high school in town with an enrollment of 2,800.  And yet acting like a barometer for the cultural changes of 1960s and 1970s in only another 21 years Lincoln High School, home of fighting Lynxes, would close for a rest until it would reopen again and again and most likely yet again and again.

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Above and below, looking west on 40th Street through its intersection with Bagley Ave. N.

DURN GOOD

(First appeared in Pacific Oct.8, 1989)

Since historical views off of Wallingford’s 45^th Street are rare, this week’s “then” is a lucky find. It’s one of a batch of pictures taken for the Seattle Municipal Railway in 1920-21.

Here, North 40th Street is a good example of the cragged byways that served as neighborhood streets before paving. In wet weather they were reduced to impassable quagmires, although at many intersections pedestrians were given substantial assistance in crossing the street, enjoying the use of wood planks like those seen here in line with Bagley Avenue.

For much of its life the North 40th car line was truly a Wallingford service, running a short shuttle between the old Latona Bridge and Wallingford Avenue. Around 1925, North 40th was paved with six-inch thick concrete slabs, and buses replaced electric trolleys. The streetcars had a brief revival on North 40th in the spring of 1931, but by the fall of that year they were replaced for good by buses and the overhead wires were removed.

This intersection does have its community landmark – the Durn Good Grocery on the left. The grocery at 2133 N. 40th has been around since the early part of the century. In 1912 Michael and Sara Regan ran the store. In 1927 Charles and Caroline Irwin were behind the counter, and lived upstairs. The building is still owned by an Irwin descendant.  The place was named the Durn in the 1950s by Charley and Cynthia Robbins, its proprietors at the time. In the mid-1970s, store owner Gerry Baired added the “Good” to “Durn” and soon after sold it to its present owners Suzie and Thorn Swink.

Inside the Durn Good is a collection of nearly 2,000 cut-out color portraits. About 75 percent of the faces exhibited still shop at the Durn Good.  (Or did in 1989.)

(Since this was first composed in 1989, Durn Good lost its lease and move a few blocks west on 45^th to new quarters at the northeast corner of 40^th Street and Wallingford Avenue.  For a brief and pitiful time the new owners tried to run their own small grocery store, but were avoided by the many neighbors that stood loyal to Durn Good and its ways.  The old site shown here was later converted into a comfortable Irwin’s Bakery & Neighborhood Cafe and has survived as such now for a few years.)

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Above: A rare – if not so spectacular – view into a Seattle neighborhood ca. 1906.  The then still largely rough University of Washington campus builds a dark curtain of evergreens behind the Latona skyline.  Below: A few of the homes showing in the “then” survive in the “now” although with one or two exceptions they are now hidden.  “Posing” are a few neighbors who were nearby when I visited the scene.  (Historical view courtesy Frank Harwood.)

LATONA GLIMPSE  (Looking East on 42ND STREET from 1st Ave. N.E.)

In 1906 or perhaps as late as early 1907, the photographer Frank Harwood visited the northwest corner of the Latona Addition and recorded this view looking east on 42nd Street from 1st Avenue N.E.   That the scene does not include any obvious landmarks is part of its unique appeal.  It is rare to find early views like this of “mere” residential street — rather than commercial ones.   (Perhaps Harwood who lived near Lakeview Cemetery on Capitol Hill was visiting a friend in Latona and/or Wallingford, which was directly behind.)

The 1906 date is figured from the Latona Primary School campus, which appears here right-of-center.  The white tower just to the left of the power pole (near the scene’s center) tops the first Latona School from 1891, the year that Latona and Brooklyn (University District) and Fremont (and much else in the North End) were annexed into Seattle.  To the left of the tower is the larger Latona School No. 2, which was completed in 1906.  So this year it celebrates its centennial, helped along by its 1999-2000 restoration.

The 1907 speculation is figured from the screen of trees on the horizon.  That is the part of the University District that beginning in 1907 was elaborately changed for the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition of 1909.   None of the grant fair structures are yet apparent here.  They would be in 1908.    However, at the far left border of the scene is a glimpse of the University’s nearly new Science Hall, later renamed Parrington Hall.

The Latona Addition was filed in 1889, one year before Brooklyn.  At the north end of its namesake Latona Bridge it was, at least east of Fremont, the primary business center of the North End throughout the 1890s.  In 1902, however, under protest Latona lost its federal post office to “University Station” the then “hip” name the University District.

The UW’s enrollment in 1906 was 1200 students, 65 faculty and 40 non-academic employees.  Still that year the North End’s weekly tabloid “Vicinity of University” proposed “why not name the whole of the Tenth Ward Brooklyn instead of University Station, Latona, University Heights, Ravenna, Cook’s Corners, May’s Corners.”  Latona is still remembered by its school and street.  But what became of Cook and May?

(click to enlarge photos)

Saturday, Dec. 14, 1907, a Seattle Times page two headline announced that members of Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church “Will Listen to First Sermon in Half Million Dollar Edifice Tomorrow Morning.”  The paper claimed that the new octagonal sanctuary would “seat 2,500 comfortably,” and the congregation’s principal preacher, the tall Tennessean Mark A. Matthews, explained that “there will be no pews for rent, and persons who are not identified with the church as members will be given seats the same as the oldest members of the institution.”

He might have sold tickets.  On the Monday following, the Times described the “immense audience” that swelled not only the sanctuary but the neighborhood around it.  The streets were “congested for hours” and five thousand were turned away.  The enthusiasm was predictable.  With his sensational sermons, the charismatic and suitably confident Matthews was the biggest show in town.  Since his arrival in Seattle in 1902, he had built First Presbyterian into what was routinely described as “the largest Presbyterian church in Seattle.”  Sometimes this was adjusted to “in the world.”

Monday Times coverage of the dedication was printed on page three, while on the front page was another Matthews story that was so foul – it was about two quail – that it now seems fishy.  Headlined “Divine Eats Forbidden Birds,” the story describes Matthews “quietly” asking a waiter at the Rathskeller Cafe if he might be served for lunch that same day some quail. Somehow the protracted event was witnessed by the city’s Game Warden.  After “two nice hot birds” were served and enjoyed by the cleric, Warden Rief collected the forbidden bones for evidence and arrested the waiter with the likely name John Doe.  Rief left no doubt that he thought the Divine was “equally culpable with the waiter” but, he compassionately told the Times reporter, if Mathews “acts properly in the matter I may not prosecute him.”

WEB EXTRAS

Visiting the sanctuary of First Presbyterian, my guide pointed over my shoulder at an enormous, vibrant stained glass window, located at the back of the choir loft.

It was donated anonymously by a Boeing chairman in the early 60s.

Evidence for this, I was told, lies in the red pane to the right of Jesus’ foot, which evidently sports the faint image of a Boeing jet, but eludes me.

Can you make it out, Paul?

No, Jean, I do not see it.  Perhaps it requires an even greater enlargement that the one you provide above.  If you have time and talent to blow it up real good perhaps a 707 will materialize.  Will you try it?

I will indeed, Paul.

Sadly, Paul, I still can’t see it. Even though my grandfather, Lewis G. Randal, was a Presbyterian minister, I have long-since lapsed. Can your old post-Lutheran eyes see it any better?……

BUT WAIT! I went to the wrong red pane – the plane is much more evident than I’d assumed. Even an agnostic could see it, Paul!

Something springs to mind here – faith in things unseen? The blind leading the blind? The mile high club?

Btw, anything to add?

Yes, Jean, our gracious friend and contributor Ron Edge is providing some links to other features that have appeared in these pages that relate – however remotely – to this week’s feature.  Thanks Ron.  After those I’ll gather up some other subjects that have sat in these or other pews.

DR. MARK ALLISON MATTHEWS CARICATURES

In the first years of the 20th Century three collections of caricatures of local VIPs were published, and First Presby’s principal pastor got into two of them – a local record for a “man of cloth.”   Top one is from “Men Behind the Seattle Spirit, The Argus Cartoons,” published by Argus editor W.A. Chadwick in 1906.  The Argus was a long-lived tabloid.  I remember it still from the 1970s.    The second cartoon dates from 1911 and is pulled from “The Cartoon, A Reference Book of Seattle’s Successful Men with Decorations by the Seattle Cartoonists’ Club.”  Frank Calvert was the editor, and yes there are no women represented in either collection.

(DOUBLE CLICK to read the text.)

MARK MATTHEWS SPEAKS – & WRITES

Matthews arrived in Seattle in 1902, and was soon demonstrating his talents for promotions, which included frequent insertions of his sermons and other lessons in local publications.  Here are two examples.  The first is copied from Pacific Northwest, the tabloids Nov. 1903 issue, and the second from The Seattle Mail and Herald, from May 23, 1902.

(DOUBLE CLICK to read the text.)

HIRAM GILL (right) & MARK MATTHEWS (left)

NEXT – A PARISH SAMPLER

Above:  A procession led by Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco prepares to carry the church’s relics to the altar during the Dec. 19, 1937 consecration of the then new and unfinished St. Nicolas sanctuary on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)  Below:  Jean Sherrard’s contemporary repeat looks east across Thirteenth Avenue near mid-block between Howell and Olive Streets.

ST. NICHOLAS RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL

(First appeared in Pacific Dec. 13, 2007)

When the St. Nicholas congregation consecrated their new cathedral on December 19, 1937 it was not quite completed.  The accompanying photograph of that day’s procession led by Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco reveals the tarpaper that still wraps most of the sanctuary.  Church historian Sergie Kalfov explains that the brick façade was added sometime later in 1938.  The sprightly and surviving entryway was also constructed then.

The five cupolas springing from the roof symbolized Jesus Christ and the four evangelists.  Kalfov notes that a church with seven cupolas might stand for the seven sacraments, and so on.  Ivan Palmov, the architect, was also responsible for the St. Spiridon sanctuary in the Cascade Neighborhood.

Both congregations primarily served Russian immigrants, beginning with those that fled the 1917 revolution, when the church in Russian was persecuted and the Czar Nicholas II and his family assassinated.   The Cathedral was dedicated to the memory of the Czar, but its name also refers to the fourth century “wonderworker” St. Nicholas the bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey.

What separated the members of St. Nicholas from those of St. Spiridon was, in part, the former’s continued devotion to the Russian monarchy.   This past May 17th the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russian and the Russian Church, after nearly 90 years of separation reunited in Moscow.  Kalfov explains “St. Nicholas was the first Cathedral to a host a pan Orthodox service shortly after the signing of the Act, where over 14 local Orthodox clergy served for the fist time in such a service.”

The congregation’s 75-anniversary celebration continues until May 22, another St. Nicholas Day.

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Above & Below: The obvious continuities between this week’s photographs are the monumental twin towers of St. James Cathedral, upper right, at 9th and Marion and far left the unadorned rear west wall and south sidewall of the Lee Hotel that faces 8th Avenue.  Judging from the cars, the older scene dates from near the end of World War Two. The weathered two-story frame building at the scene’s center also marks time.  It was torn down in 1950 and replaced with the parking lot seen in the “now.” (Historical photo by Werner Lenggenhager, courtesy of Seattle Public Library.)

NOSTALGIC RECORDER

In 1949 architects Naramore, Bain and Brady began construction on new offices for themselves at the northeast corner of 7th Avenue and Marion Street. Their new two-story building filled the vacant lot that shows here, in part, in the foreground of the older scene.  Consequently if I had returned to the precise prospect from which Werner Lenggenhager (the historical photographer) recorded his view ca. 1947 I would have faced the interior wall of an office that was likely large enough to have once held several draughting tables.  Instead I went to the alley between 7th and 8th and took the “now” scene about eight feet to the left of where the little boy stands near the bottom of the older view.

That little boy is still younger than many of us – myself included – and he helps me make a point about nostalgia.  The less ancient is the historical photograph used here the more likely am I to receive responses (and corrections) from readers.  Clearly for identifying photographs like the thousands that Lenggenhager recorded around Seattle there are many surviving “experts.” And more often than not they are familiar not only with his “middle-aged” subjects but also with the feelings that may hold tight to them like hosiery – Rayon hosiery.

Swiss by birth Lenggenhager arrived in Seattle in 1939, went to work for Boeing and soon started taking his pictures.  He never stopped.  Several books – including two in collaboration with long-time Seattle Times reporter Lucile McDonald – resulted and honors as well like the Seattle Historical Society’s Certificate of Merit in 1959 for building a photographic record of Seattle’s past.  The greater part of his collection is held at the Seattle Public Library. For a few years more at least Lenggenhager will be Seattle’s principle recorder of nostalgia.

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Above and Below: St. Edward’s Chapel held the northwest corner of Columbia Street and Terry Avenue between 1904 and 1912.  It served as the temporary sanctuary for the Catholic see during the development and construction of the St. James Cathedral.  Cathedral School, which took the place of St. Edward’s, still holds the corner.   Historical photo courtesy of the Archives of the Archdiocese of Seattle.

PRO-CATHEDRAL

In what may be the single surviving photograph of the two together here stand the Cathedral and the pro-Cathedral — the former towering above and behind the latter.  (The contrast is made the more impressive by the Cathedral dome which collapsed in the “big snow” of 1916.)

As its name by type suggests, the “pro-Cathedral” was built as a temporary home for worship while the new St. James Cathedral was being constructed.  It was designed by James Stephen, a Seattle architect better known for the many plans he created for public school during his term as the Official School Architect for Seattle Public School during the first years of the 20th Century.

Of course, the Catholic pro-Cathedral also had a proper name.   A centuryago – this coming Saturday, Nov. 13, 2004 – Bishop O’Dea dedicated St. Edward’s with “full rights of dedication” not typical for a sanctuary so small and short-lived.  It was named for the English King who was canonized in 1008, with the added connotation that the Bishop’s first name was Edward and the martyred monarch was his patron saint. Edward O’Dea moved his see from Vancouver to Seattle in 1903.  By then Seattle was established as the center of Washington State urbanity and the more likely site for the construction and financing of a Catholic cathedral for the region.

About 200 parishioners attended the dedication of St. Edwards pro-cathedral. Only a year later (less one day) on Nov. 12, 1905 an estimated 5000 were on hand to watch their bishop bending beside a temporary altar helping with the laying of the St. James cornerstone.  The Cathedral was itself was dedicated in 1907 and five years later the pro-Cathedral was razed and replaced with the Cathedral School seen here in the “now.”

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Above:  The landmark Epiphany Episcopal Church at 3719 Denny Way in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood was built in 1911 from designs by Ellsworth Story, a member of the parish.   Courtesy, Epiphany Episcopal Church. Below: In order to see around a tree and through the parish landscaping the contemporary photo was recorded from a position somewhat closer to the sanctuary.

EPIPHANY EPISCOPAL CENTENNIAL

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 15, 2007)

The city’s boom years of the early 20th century was accompanied by a proliferation of services and institutions into Seattle’s new neighborhoods.   This included the churches and this example, the Episcopalians in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood.

Often the idea for a new church was seeded by members of an older or pioneer parish that was founded in the central business district.  As Mary Henry, Epiphany Episcopal’s church archivist explains in her historylink.org essay on the parish, the idea for this congregation was promoted when “Bishop F. W. Keator took a group of Episcopalian men from St. Mark’s Episcopal (later St. Mark’s Cathedral) on a yachting trip in Lake Washington and as they passed the Madrona area, he commented on the need for a church in the neighborhood.”

The date for this waterborne inspiration was August 1907, which makes this the Centennial year for the parish.  The rustic English Gothic chapel printed here took four years more to build and another sixty-seven years to become an early pick for Seattle’s official registry of landmarks in 1978.

The natural charm of this wood and brick sanctuary was created to compliment the style of the “city beautiful” Denny-Blaine Addition, which is appointed with streets that do not march through the neighborhood on a grid but rather curve through the natural topography as it descends to the shores of Lake Washington.  Many of the Denny-Blaine homes are also landmarks, whether listed or not, and a few are by one of Seattle’s most cherished architects Ellsworth Story (1897-1960).  Story was both a member of Epiphany Episcopal and the architect of this its first parish.

Mary Henry’s thumbnail history of the parish is, as noted, on historylink.org. and easy to find.  (It is Essay 7825.)  Later in this its centennial year Epiphany heritage will also get another and longer account with a book history by Barbara Spaeth that is now still a work-in-progress.

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Above: Unidentified members of Holy Angels softball team wait and take their turns at bat in this 1937 playground scenes at Ballard’s St. Alphonsus Parish.   Perhaps a reader will recognize one or more of these players. Below: The members of the contemporary St. Alphonsus community posing in the “now” scene are named in the accompanying story. (photo courtesy St. Alphonsus School)

‘HOLY ANGELS” AT BAT

(First appeared in Pacific Oct. 11, 2007)

Thankfully centennials will often stimulate an archival rigor in whatever is celebrating its first 100 years.   Gloria Kruzner, designated parent-historian for Ballard’s St. Alphonsus Parish School, collected boxes and sacks filled with school ephemera including what she describes as “wonderful and historically significant photos” while preparing her history for the school, which Dominican Sisters first opened as the Holy Angels Academy in 1907, the year Ballard was annexed into Seattle.

This snapshot of eleven members of the 1936-37 Holy Angels softball team is, we agree, a wonderful example.  Kruzner has determined that this is a scene from that school term’s “Play Day” program.  But who are the players and might a reader know?

1937 graduate Elizabeth Crisman Morrow holds the bat in the contemporary “repeat” photograph.  She played shortstop on the 1937 team, but doubts that she is included in this bunch of out-of-uniform players, with the slim chance, she notes, that she is the batter in the historical scene as well.

Behind the players both views show the same three-story brick schoolhouse that opened in 1923 for what was by then with more than 600 students the largest Catholic school in the state.   The third floor was reserved for the high school.  From the late 1920s on, only girls were admitted to the Holy Angels Academy, which survived until 1972 when it was closed for want of both funds and students.   The coeducational St. Alphonsus School carried on with lay instructors and since 2004 with the help of new sisters from the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, (SOLT).

In the “now” reenactment SOLT Sister Mirium James convincingly acts the role of catcher on the far left.  Besides the batter-alum, Elizabeth Crisman Morrow, the other members of the Alphonsus community include, left to right, Kathi Abendroth, class of 1955, Maggie Kruzner (daughter of the school historian), Joseph Chamberlin, Megan Chamberlin, Joseph Bentley and Emmiline Nordale who is half hidden beyond the batter. School principal Bob Rutledge is on the right, and climbing the fence, third grader Hanna Nordale takes the part of the “Holy Angel” peering over the fence in the 1937 scene.

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Above:  Dedicated in 1926 the Seventh Church of Christ Scientists has survived on the roof of Queen Anne Hill as one of Seattle’s finest creations. (Historic photo Courtesy Special Collections Division, U. W. Libraries.  Negative no:  26935)   Below: Sturdy, intact and wrapped in its own landscape the landmark is yet threatened with destruction for the building of three or four more homes in a neighborhood primarily of homes.  Many of the sanctuary’s neighbors are fighting alongside the Queen Anne Historical Society to keep their unique landmark.

QUEEN ANNE LANDMARK – EXQUISITE & SECRETED

On the late morning of Tuesday, May 22nd last (2007), the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation held a press conference intended to turn the fate of one of Seattle’s most exquisite landmarks away from its planned destruction and towards something else – something “adaptive” like another church, a community center or even a home – a big home.

The Trust not only included the Seventh Church of Christ Scientist on its 2007 list of the Washington State’s “most endangered historic properties.”   It then also used the front steps of this Queen Anne landmark as the place to circle the wagons for statewide preservation.  It was an especially strong sign by the Trust and for its extended family of historians, architects, citizens – including sensitive neighbors of the church – of how cherished is the Seventh Church.

Seattle architect and painter Harlan Thomas (1870 – 1953) created the unique sanctuary for the then energetic congregation of Christ Scientists on Seattle’ Queen Ann Hill in 1926.  It was the year he was also made head of the Architecture Department at the University of Washington, a position he held until 1940.

Although a local architectural marvel this sanctuary is not well know because of its almost secreted location.  The address is 2555 8th Ave. W. — at the Avenue’s northwest corner with West Halladay Street.  Except to live near it or to visit someone living near it there are few extraordinary reasons to visit this peaceful neighborhood, except to enjoy this fine melding of architectural features from the Byzantine, Mission, Spanish Colonial and other traditions.

Since the Trust created it in 1992 the “Endangered List” has not been an immoderate tool in the service of state heritage.  Less than 100 sites have made this register, which is really the Trust’s emergency broadside for historic preservation.

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Above & Below:  For a few years in the 1920s a cross revolved fitfully above the corner of the University Methodist Temple.  Since the Methodists moved three blocks to their present home in 1927, the surviving 1907 sanctuary at 42nd and Brooklyn has been used for a variety of sacred and secular enterprises — sometimes together   The Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Seattle purchased the building 1991.  Fellowship offices in the 1902 chapel receive the rising redolence of the popular Thai restaurant in the basement.

CHURCH of the REVOLVING CROSS

(Appeared in Pacific first in the spring – sometime – of 2007)

For a few years after its remodel in the early 1920s the University Methodist Temple at the southeast corner of Brooklyn Ave. N.E. and 42nd Street was known as “The Church of the Revolving Cross.”   The slender spire that had topped the 1907 sanctuary at its corner leaked and was replaced during the remodel with a motorized cross.   The mechanism, however, was less than miraculous.  It frequently broke down and the cross, seen here, was soon removed.

North end Methodists first met in Latona (now part of Wallingford) in the locally vigorous year of 1891.  Seattle annexed new territory as far north as 85th Street in 1891; the first electric trolley crossed the then new Latona Bridge that year.   Also in ‘91 the state chose the northeast shore of Lake Union at Brooklyn for a new university campus, although the school waited four years more to make the move.  By the time the Methodists built their first small chapel here on 42nd beside the alley in 1902 Brooklyn was just as likely to be called the University District.

The larger corner sanctuary was added in 1907, a year made repeatedly noisy by the dynamite used to shape the nearby campus for the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition.  Besides replacing the spire with the cross, the 20’s remodel also expanded the sanctuary, joining it to the chapel – as seen here.  Still in 1927 the Methodists left this clapboard sanctuary for a bigger brick one on 43rd Street, across 15th Avenue from the campus.

Although born in 1927 church historian David Van Zandt was too young to march with the congregation and its preacher Dr. James Crowther the three blocks to its new home.  According to Van Zandt, Warren Kraft Jr. is the only surviving church member who walked in that Sunday parade.   Kraft was then a two-year-old toddler whose wandering distinguished him at the dedication ceremony.  The first words spoken by Crowther from his new pulpit were “Has anyone seen Warren Kraft Jr.”

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Above & Below:  And official local landmark since 1977, in 2004 the Immaculate Conception Parish at 18^th and Marion celebrated its centennial.  (Historical photo courtesy Loomis Miller.)

IMMACULATE CENTENNIAL

The twin Italianate towers of the Immaculate Conception Church have distinguished Seattle’s skyline from their pedestal on Seattle’s Second Hill (AKA Renton Hill) for nearly 100 years.  The ground was broken for Seattle’s oldest surviving Roman Catholic sanctuary (used continuously for services) in April 1904, and the first ceremonial opportunity that followed was the traditional laying of the corner stone.

The May 15^th procession up the hill from the interim parish (in what has since been renamed the surviving Gerrard Building on the campus of Seattle University) to the foundation work for the new parish at18^th Avenue and Marion Street was given historical perspective on the spot by diocese Bishop Edward O’Dea.  “It is a pleasure to look back into the history of Seattle . . . Twenty years ago one small church sufficed for the needs or our limited membership and now we have four churches and fourteen priests.”

Remarkably, in less than seven months Seattle’s Catholics were ready to march up the hill again for the dedication on the 4^th of December.  The eight-block procession between the two parishes was led by a platoon of local police and Wagner’s Band, the traditional accompanists for Seattle celebrations.  Behind the band marched the Hibernian Knights, the Knights of Columbus, and the Catholic Foresters of Seattle, Tacoma and Ballard — Ballard was then still its own town.  Bishop O’Dea and ranked clergy were fit in carriages to elegantly cap but not conclude the procession. “Following them and lining the route” to quote now from an early history of the parish, “was a motley but magnificent parade of priests, sisters and local gentry all in a jovial spirit.”

For the dedicatory High Mass Father Prefontaine, Seattle’s pioneer priest who arrived here in 1867, assisted Bishop O’Dea.  The day’s celebrants filled what the local press advised was “the city’s largest seating auditorium.”  (The 950 seat record, however,  was temporary.  It was surpassed by more than one of the large theatres that would soon be built downtown.)

(click to enlarge photos)

The Pike Street Dock (or pier or wharf), here on the right, welcomed Pacific Net and Twine as its primary renter in 1916, and so began the pier’s preoccupation with fisherman and their needs.  The wharf in its enduring landmark size was built in 1903-4.  The new dock’s principal tenants then were diverse and included, fish merchants, grain dealers and shipping companies.

With Pacific Net and Twine in residence, the dock became the central waterfront headquarters for the fishing fleet which often – as here – packed the slip between itself and the Schwabacher Pier, to the south and here on the left. Many of the fishermen’s voluntary groups like the Fishing Vessel Owners Association and the Purse Seiners’ Association took residence on the Pike Dock and a variety of sail-makers, fish brokers, and other specialists in supplies for the fisheries had offices there as well.

The Schwabacher wharf was the older pier.  It was in this slip that the gold ship the S.S.Portland made its historic call in July 1897 with a “ton of gold” and thereby launched the gold rush north to the Yukon and Alaska.  An older and smaller version of the Schwabacher pier just escaped the city’s “great fire” of 1889, and for weeks following it most of the materials for rebuilding the business district entered the city across its then mostly uncovered deck.

Recent history of this slip begins, we will say, with the destruction of what remained of the old Schwabacher Dock in 1967.  The city purchased – without condemnation – the Pike Pier in 1973 for a bargain of $585,000.  Two years earlier Mayor Wes Uhlman switched his advocacy for building a Forward Thrust (1968) funded Aquarium in Ballard to the Pike Street Pier.  Construction on Waterfront Park (seen, in part, in the “now”) began in the fall of 1973. By the late 1970s both the park’s promenades and the aquarium’s tanks served a, by then, mostly playful central waterfront.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean there are a few items clinging to the sides of the Pike Pier we will put up.   Much else has by now appeared in other stories – or their extras – so I’ll lean on Ron Edge to put them up next as hot-links (do you call them?).  After that I’ll do some sampling.  Much of what follows and more can be found in the Illustrated Waterfront History included in the “books” part of this blog.

Ron has found three primary links, and each features a string of stories and illustrations.  Click on the picture (three of them) directly below and you will be carried to them.

Next we’ll lay in three photographs taken of, to me, an inscrutable life-saving demonstration on a low platform in the slip north of the Pike Pier.  These look innocent enough and harmless too, and may most likely be tried at home without injury.  The most heroic part in this is the performers willingness to appear in swim wear on the central waterfront when all others are bundled against the cold – or at least the rain.  Note the stairway to the Pike Street trestle that after 1912 crossed high above both Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) and Western Ave and reached the Pike Place Public Market.

The above detail from a 1911 map of the waterfront shows both the Schwabacher and Pike Street piers, and also to the proposed site for a power boat dock, which was never built.  There is as yet no 1912 Pike Street trestle spanning Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) here.

The Bogue Plan map (1912) above includes the then new Pike Street trestle as well as two novelties that were never built.  The proposed line for the Union Pacific Tunnel meant, like the 1905 Great Northern Tunnel nearby, to move trains under the city between the new Union Pacific Depot on Jackson Street and the waterfront below Belltown.  The map also shows an incline on Virginia Street that would have moved teams and their wagons up the steep hill from the waterfront to First Avenue.

First a detail and the below it a “now-then” of the Pike Street Coal Wharf, which was the first of many docks built at the foot of Pike Street.  The photograph dates from the 1870s and was taken from the back porch or window of the Peterson & Bros photography studio on Front Street (First Avenue) at the foot of Cherry Street.  The contemporary scene (from ca. 1990) was recorded from the parking garage that extends a block south on the west side of  First from Columbia.  The “now” prospect is much higher than Peterson’s, whose view was not obstructed my structures on Post Alley.

WEB EXTRAS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continuing on, here follows a sampler of Third Avenue subjects.

MADISON TRESTLE OVER 3^rd Ave. REGRADE

(First appeared in Pacific May 16, 1999)

The intended subject here is the apparatus of the Madison Street cable line, exposed during the 1906-07 regrade of Third Avenue. We can see the cable beneath the center slots for both tracks, and the supporting architecture is extraordinary – stacked 6-by-6-inch timbers hold the cable car on the westbound track while Third Avenue is lowered beneath it.

It seems that car No. 37 of the Lake Washington and Madison Street cable line has paused at Third Avenue (let loose of the moving cable) to pose for the photographer.  The conductor is posing as well, a coin dispenser wrapped about his waist. The man on the tracks just left of the westbound cable car flaunts the commands of the banner strung over Madison Street, far right, one block east at Fourth Avenue. It reads “ALL PERSONS ARE· FORBIDDEN To Walk On Street Car Tracks.”

The original Asahel Curtis print is dated Jan. 25, 1907. On this Friday, The Seattle Times carried a photograph of the Third Avenue Theatre, showing here in the full sun•

light behind the cable car. When the regrade on Third Avenue reached a level where theatergoers could no longer reach the front door, the theater went dark. The caption to The Times’ photo reveals that the theater’s managers, Russell and Drew, are about to tear it down.

Russell and Drew use their doomed theater’s billboard to advertise the play “Yon Yonson,” running the previous week nearby at their Seattle Theatre. George Thompson played the title role of a young immigrant Swede who managed to negotiate through every American “vicissitude . . . owing to his sterling honesty and bland-like innocence, which wins him many friends,” said the Post-Intelligencer’s review. The advertisement claims that Thompson is simply “the greatest of all Swedish comedians. A huge scream. A laugh in every line, and the lines are close together.”

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THE THIRD AVENUE THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific April 16, 1989)

The Native Americans posing in front of the Third Avenue Theater are Yakimas who performed on the theater’s stage Sunday, June 6, 1897. The montage of posters on the Madison Street side of the theater give the day and month, and Eugene Elliott’s “A History of Variety Vaudeville in Seattle” gives the year in its appendix of performances.

At the time the Third Avenue was run by impresarios Russel and Drew, who held true to the successful family formula inaugurated by showman John Cordray. Opening the theater in 1890 under his own name, Cordray offered Seattle its first “polite vaudeville,” where liquor, catcalls and the stamping of feet were forbidden.

The Third Avenue had two stages, one for variety shows – like juggling and dancing – and the other for plays usually performed by the theater’s own stock company. Occasionally, special acts such as the Yakimas (aka the Yakamas) would appear.

By the 1890s the memory of their resistance to the miners’ and settlers’ efforts to take their lands 40 years before had developed into a generally noble impression of the Yakimas’ courage, skills and loyalties. On their large reservation the Yakimas were able to resist their enculturation into the revolutionary changes occurring in the surrounding society. Exhibits of the tribe’s native skills appealed to non-native nostalgia and yearnings for a lost innocence.

The Third Avenue Theater survived till the Third Avenue Regrade, when its last stock company moved up the avenue in 1906 to Pine Street and the Methodist Protestant church remodeled for melodrama.

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THIRD AVENUE REGRADE Looking North Through MARION STREET

(First appeared in Pacific Dec. 16, 1984.)

In 1906, The Post-Intelligencer described Seattle of being regrade-mad. “The early pioneer was content to trudge up and down steep grades all day, unquestioningly, as though such things were destined to be permanent. Now any hill with a valley below it suggests a regrade.”

The historical scene looks up the Third Avenue regrade. The photograph was shot on a sunny winter day in 1907. The P-I went on to explain, “Two of the most important regrades ever undertaken in Seattle are those on Third and Fourth avenues. They are the outgrowth of the wonderful expansion of retail business. With First and Second avenues congested, the retail trade must spread . . . The cut on Third runs all the way from nothing at Cherry Street to 17 feet at Madison.”

The deepest cut was below the Madison Street cable car that passed over Third Avenue on a temporary wooden trestle shown here near the subject’s center. The pedestrian trestle in the foreground followed the line of Marion Street. The Third Avenue Theater did not survive even the Third Avenue regrade. In the historical scene, the theater is above the cable car, at the northeast comer of Third and Madison, the present site (in 1984) of the Seattle First National Bank tower.  The theatre has lost the top of its corner tower.  The home of Seattle’s first stock theatrical company, it ran its fare of farce and melodrama for 16 years until the regraded 17-foot cliff at its front door made it impossible for theatergoers to get into the show.

Up Third at University Street” the digging didn’t go so deep and Plymouth Congregational Church kept its services going beneath the tall brick tower seen above the cable car.

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VANCOUVER ARCH – AYP 1909

(First appeared in Pacific Jan. 15, 1989)

The city of Vancouver’s classical arch at Third Avenue and Marion Street holds its dignified place in the history of ceremonial monuments on Seattle streets. The Canadian monument was erected for the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition (AYP), which remade the University of Washington campus into a gleaming white city, and added a few downtown attractions, such as this, as well.

At the Aug. 21, 1909, dedication, Vancouver Mayor Douglas explained to Seattle: “The erection of this arch was not actuated merely by a mercenary motive, or a desire to advertise. It is a token of esteem to Seattle and the Exposition . . . It typifies the friendly feeling existing between two great cities of the North Pacific.”

Mayor Douglas concluded by making an ironic lesson of the 500 white-helmeted British Commonwealth troops in his entourage. “Evidences of this peaceful feeling have been made all the more pronounced today by the landing of British troops under arms on American soil.” Seattle Mayor John F. Miller accepted the arch on behalf of Seattle.

For all its monumental girth, this arch was razed with the AYP’s closing at summer’s end. Soon the demands of the motorcar would make, with few exceptions, such ceremonial obstructions a charm of the past.

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LINCOLN HOTEL ROOF GARDEN

(First appeared in Pacific June 30, 1985)

When it was built in 1899, the Lincoln was Seattle’s most elegant and prominent hotel. Reaching nine stories high, it was taller than the buildings down around Pioneer Square and taller than those along the city’s growing commercial strip – Second Avenue. The hotel’s elevated setting at Fourth Avenue and Madison Street also made it seem monumental. The Lincoln, made of white brick and stone, glowed when the sun set.

The Lincoln had a garden on its roof. The vine-snarled trellis of the was slightly visible from the street. The garden was mostly enjoyed by registered guests, although painted post cards of the garden were for sale in the lobby.

The above view looks southeast toward the top-heavy cupola of the county’s courthouse (upper right) on First Hill. There on the courthouse roof is the clue that helps date this photo. Barely showing through the haze is a giant welcome sign, set there in 1908 for the Puget Sound visit of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Atlantic fleet. The other closer and more classical dome sets atop the United Methodist Church at Sixth Avenue and Marion Street – and still does.  In1908, the sanctuary was still under construction; the congregation worshiped in the basement. Now the landmark gives some architectural soul to a neighborhood of skyscrapers.

When it opened in 1900, the Lincoln was Seattle’s first apartment-hotel. But it didn’t stay that way. The position that gave it prominence on the city’s skyline also put it too far away from the city’s commercial district. The Lincoln was soon converted into a straight commercial hotel, but faltered in this role as well. The business passed through several managers and owners. The last was the Madison Realty Company, which bought the hotel on Nov. 1, 1919 and proceeded to sink $75,000 into remodeling the rooms as well as the shops and restaurant on the main floor.

On the morning of April 7, 1920, in the first hour after midnight, Mrs. C.A. Gross, proprietor of the cigar store, and Mrs. T., Waters, owner of the beauty shop, met for a moment in the hotel lobby before leaving for home. Their chat was quickly concluded when a man rushed by crying, “Fire!”  Within the hour, the Lincoln – brick on the outside but wooden within – was a furnace. The hotel was lost including three of its guests and one firefighter. The water dumped on the fire created a river down Madison Street and Third Avenue. It was the last watering for the Lincoln’s roof garden.

LINCOLN HOTEL FIRE

(First appeared in Pacific June 8, 1997.)

First named the Knickerbocker because of its association with Dr. Rufus Lincoln, the New Yorker who financed it, the landmark hotel at Fourth and Madison opened in 1900 with elegant exterior walls of gleaming white brick trimmed with stone. Later the family name seemed more fitting for what its managers claimed was the first apartment hotel north of San Francisco.

Although the Lincoln Hotel was designed with two-and-three-room suites to attract a patronage with the means to stay a while, they did not, partly because of the struggle required to reach it. The two blocks that separated the Lincoln from the developing commercial strip, Second Avenue, were – for the cable cars that climbed them – among the steepest in the nation. The Lincoln switched to standard hotel service.

As guests discovered on the early morning of April 7, 1920, the hotel’s elegance was skin deep. It was “little more than a lumber yard with four brick walls around it ” as the fire chief later described it to a Times reporter. By the night clerk’s estimate it took only five minutes from the moment he heard an “explosive thud” in the basement for the smoke to climb the elevator shaft and make impossible his efforts to warn by telephone the nearly 300 mostly sleeping guests.

The next day’s papers were filled with heroic tales of taxicab drivers, hotel patrons and firemen saving all but three guests and one fireman. Blanch Crowe, a stenographer for the popular Chauncey Wright restaurant, died in her room. A candy maker and his daughter jumped to their deaths from the top floor of the west wall. Others wanted to jump but were persuaded to wait for the firemen’s ladders. Sgt. P.F. Looker, the first policeman to approach the burning hotel, saw “a head in every window and a din of screams and cries for help. I hurried around the building shouting not to jump.”

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Extending over the tideflats below Duwamish Head it could be seen from almost everywhere.  The lolling tidelands off the Head were too shallow for ships but not this sprawling boardwalk raised on piles for amusements.  Once the two tardy boilers were installed in its own power plant, Luna Park was its own billboard, shining across Elliot Bay and up and down Puget Sound.

With the staccato of a running headline, the Friday Seattle Times for June 23, 1907 announced “Luna Park Now Open to Public. Seattle’s Coney Island is Visited by Throngs.  New Ferry and New Car Line in Operation. Thronged with People until a Late Hour.”   Two days later Youngstown, Alki, Spring Hill and West Seattle voted 325 to 8 for annexation into Seattle.  The Times report concluded, “Georgetown is left entirely surrounded.”

Although not evident here at its grand gate, for many of Luna Parks attractions Seattle Architect James Blackwell used the exotic – for Seattle – Spanish style typical of Southern California, like the House of Alhambra, that Blackwell pasted into his picture scrapbook.  The rides and amusement were proven ones used at other amusement parks like its namesake, New York’s huge Luna Park at Coney Island.  Here to the right of the gate the “scenic railway” called the “Figure Eight” reaches 150 feet, its highest point.  From there the ride was embellished with the published claim that it “winds for nearly half a mile through the air.”

The busiest issue during the amusement’s construction was whether or not the West Seattle City Council was correct to give Luna Park a liquor license.  The developers had promised that the sale of intoxicants would be conducted properly.  This propriety ran out with bad news.  For instance, a Post-Intelligencer reporter riding a packed trolley to town after a Sunday Night Dance at the park, noted “The boisterous conduct and the indecent language of the joy-dancers disgusted the respectable patrons of the line.”  Except for its cleanest amusement, the natatorium, Luna Park was closed in 1913.

(The top comparison is one of the “now-and-then” features included in Jean Sherrard, Berangere Lomont and my exhibit titled “Repeat Photography” on show at MOHAI thru June of 2012.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Oh a few things Jean, and sticking close to Duwamish Head too – with the exception of something on Sea View Hall.

Above:  Between 1888 and 1890 the West Seattle Harbor was developed by the West Seattle Land and Improvement Company, which had residential lots to sell atop Duwamish Head.  The view looks north over Elliot Bay to a horizon of Magnolia on the left and Queen Anne Hill on the right.   (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)  Below: Trees, on the right, now obstruct the view from Ferry Avenue, on the left.  The waterfront seen in the ca. 1890 view was greatly changed with the 1913-18 reclamation and 1924 paving of Harbor Avenue.  (Now photo by Jean Sherrard)

WEST SEATTLE HARBOR, EARLY VIEW

This may be the earliest intimate birdseye of the West Seattle harbor.   I have grabbed 1890 as it’s date on the evidence of a sketch that appeared in the “Graphic,” a Chicago-based publication that this year included a fulsome article comparing West Seattle to the best that Switzerland had to offer in the way of sublimity. The Graphic’s line drawing of the harbor is in every detail the same as this photograph although it was copied from another photograph taken almost certainly within moments of this one a few feet further southeast on what was then the clear cut and exposed Duwamish Head.

The ferry “City of Seattle,” far right, is moving (it is streaked) into its slip after a run from the Seattle Waterfront.  The inaugural trip was made on Dec. 24, 1888.  The long Northern Pacific spur that runs through the scene between the ferry and the waterfront was completed in August of 1890.  And the two-mile-long cable railway that looped up Ferry Street to the West Seattle addition atop the ridge and back down California Way Southwest to the developer’s headquarters, the big boxish building far left, was formally opened on Sept 6, 1890 with much hoopla.

California Way and Ferry Street meet on the far left of the ca. 1890 view.  Neither can tracks be seen running near the center of those streets nor can we be certain that they are not. Like the N.P. spur from Seattle these cable railway tracks were also laid during the summer of 1890.

The homey titled Washington Magazine raised its own 1890 cheer for this harbor.  “The landing at West Seattle is very attractive . . . owing to the substantial character of its construction and the beauty of its surroundings . . . What more can be said about West Seattle, except that it will be to Seattle before a year passes what Brooklyn is to New York and Oakland to San Francisco.”

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HOW TO GET TO WEST SEATTLE

(First appeared in Pacific on Sept. 12, 1982)

Inquiries on how to get to west Seattle often conclude with the question of why go there. And for years, if there was no dugout canoe to be had or hired, the answer was “you can’t get there from here.”

These recurring questions of why and how to go to West Seattle were ones David Denny probably asked himself many times as he waited for his brother Arthur to find him at Alki Point. David had preceded the “Denny Party” to scout for a settlement on Puget Sound. The Denny Party finally arrived on a wet Nov. 13, 1851.

Fifty-four years later a few survivors of this damp landing, in company with a large party of supporters, returned to that West Seattle beach. There they unveiled a pylon that memorialized themselves as the “founders of Seattle.”

But many others claimed Seattle “began” in mid-September, 1851, when the area’s first settlers, including Henry Van Asselt and Luther Collins, staked claims on the Duwamish River in South Seattle, not West. Others objected that the city was more properly “founded” in 1852 when the Dennys and others abandoned Alki Point and marked new claims on the protected east shore of Elliott Bay. From this Seattle site, Alki Point was hidden behind what the Indians called Sqwudux and the settlers called Lamb’s Point. Today we call it Duwamish Head.

And there were other names. In the 1860s it was changed to Freeport, until 1877 when a Capt. Marshall spent enough buying up Freeport to call it Milton. A year later in 1878 the citizens of Milton heard Colonel Larabee sing “Suwannee River” over a telegraph wire converted for the first local demonstration of the telephone. (He might have recited a short passage from Paradise Lost, if there was one.)

Milton was first called West Seattle in the late 1880s when the questions of why and how to get there were first seriously answered by the West” Seattle Land and Improvement Company. This group of San Francisco capitalists bought a lot of land up on the bluff for marking and selling view lots; encouraged development along the waterfront with a yacht club, shipyard, boathouse and first regular ferry service from Seattle on the City of Seattle; and started the area’s first community newspaper. And the news spread.

An 1890 issue of the Chicago publication, The Graffic, featuring Washington State, exclaimed, “Hundreds of spots of rare beauty may be found in the state of Washington, but surpassing all others, West Seattle easily stands out as the most  attractive of them all.” The Graffic’s praise could not contain itself to the Western Hemisphere. “Switzerland, despite the wealth of magnificent scenery has nothing comparable . . . the wild, rugged and imposing; the soft, harmonious and sublime; the beautiful, magnificent and glorious; all are here.” These sentiments were calculated to first transport one to West Seattle rhetorically, and then physically,

Still, not enough buyers were moved. So the improvement company built a cablecar line that looped through 14 curves (the most, it was claimed, for any cable system) from the ferry dock to the top of the bluff and back. However, it ran only when the ferry arrived, and although Seattle was expanding, it was in other directions. In 1898 the capitalists abandoned their cablecars, and the few buyers they had attracted had to walk to their homes at the top of the bluff.

Our historical view – at the top –  of the City of Seattle landing and unloading ferry passengers at the West Seattle slip dates from about 1902, the year West Seattle first incorporated its 16 square miles. The new town also bought and converted the unused cable to an electric line, and proudly claimed it the first municipally owned common carrier in the country. West Seattle was still a small bedroom community for Seattle – most of the city council’s work was done on the ferry – but the boom was coming.

It arrived in 1907. The 1,200 citizens voted overwhelmingly for annexation to Seattle, because they were “plainly designated by nature to form one community.” The two were now also linked by the West Seattle, a bigger and faster ferry. However, the most encouraging connection was at last by land, or rather by trestle, along Spokane Street.

West Seattle now offered in 1907 the modem suburban dream where one could, the promoters claimed, “fully enjoy the quiet of rural life, combined with the comforts and convenience of the city, and feast on the soul-inspiring scenic charms which in matchless grandeur surround one on every side.” In 1907, at last, the bedroom community was adding a living room and raising a neighborhood – actually several of them – and answers to the questions why and how to get to West Seattle seemed self evident.

When in the mid-l960s West Seattle’s density became higher than the citywide average, the old questions returned with a congested alarm. The living room had been converted into an apartment and “where two once lived now eighty do.” Although they were not building 747s in West Seattle, the multi-unit construction reached its peak with the Boeing Boom.

In 1969 a citizen’s group lobbied for resumption of the ferry service. It failed. In the spring of 1978, when the old dream of a giant bridge seemed to be fading, another citizen’s promotion clamored for secession. Now, at least for a while, the assured completion of the new super bridge dissolves the old questions about how to get to West Seattle.  (The above first appeared in Pacific on Sept 12, 1982.  Imagine – 29 years ago!  We, with the bridge, have survived.)

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WEST SEATTLE FERRY at COLMAN DOCK

(First appeared in Pacific, June 16, 1996.)

On June 27, 1907, the new and larger ferry West Seattle took the place of Puget Sound’s first ferry, the City of Seattle, for the short hauls across Elliott Bay between the Seattle and West Seattle waterfronts. This was one of several developments that summer that drew these neighborhoods together.

Two days later, in a weekend election, the citizens of West Seattle voted for annexation to Seattle. Then came the opening of Luna Park, a gaudy illuminated pier at Duwamish Head, with sideshows, exhilarating rides, an indoor natatorium and “the longest bar in the West.”

Yet it was the opening of trolley service to West Seattle over the Spokane Street bridge that would steal away the new ferry’s passengers and dissipate the commercial joy of its first summer. Purchased by the Port of Seattle in 1913, the West Seattle ferry continued to lose money. Eventually it was given to King County, which leased it to the Kitsap County Transportation Company as a relief ferry on its Vashon Heights run.

This scene is part of a stereograph photographed by Capitol Hill resident Frank Harwood in 1908 or ’09. Its other endearing quality is the confrontation between the prop wash of the ferry as it leaves its slip at Marion Street and the audacious rowboat heading into it.

At 328 feet, the modern-day ferry Chelan is more than twice the length of the 145-foot West Seattle. (The Chelan appears in the Pacific feature for June 16, 1996, but like much else has since been squirreled in some corner of the basement studio where I do something similar to work.) One of the “Issaquah class” ferries constructed for the state in the early 1980s, the Chelan and its five sisters were plagued by glitches in their innovative computer controls. Since their overhaul in the late ’80s, however, the Chelan and the rest have been the reliable mainstays of the system. Smaller than either the jumbo or super ferries, they are able, with the help of variable-pitch props, to quickly pull in, unload, reload and pull out.

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SEA VIEW HALL

If there is truth in this naming, then the prospect of Puget Sound from Sea View Hall was most likely unobstructed when the hall was built early in the 1900s. Now that view is somewhat obscured by beachside homes and the hall’s own front-yard landscape.

Sea View Hall is one of three log-cabin survivors in the Alki Point neighborhood. (The others are the Log Cabin Museum and the now closed and threatened Homestead Restaurant.) Like the better-known but since lost Stockade Hotel, the hall was constructed in good part of wood salvaged from the beach, its logs set vertically like a fort. “Sea View Hall” was eventually spelled out in “logoglyph” style; letters shaped with big sticks and hung from the roof, or in this case the upper veranda. In this early view, the sign has not yet been shaped or placed.

John and Ella Maurer are probably among the at least 23 persons posing here. In 1954, the hall’s 50th anniversary, John was identified as its builder by his daughter-in-law. After returning from the Alaska Gold Rush, he took up construction and painting, and built this nostalgic summer cabin for his family’s recreational retreat from Seattle. The rustic theme was continued inside with, for instance, a staircase handrail constructed from a peeled log with banister supports fashioned from the same log’s twisted branches.

The Maurers moved on in the 1910s. In the 1930s, probably, a room made of beach rocks was added to the Hall’s north (left) side. According to neighborhood lore it was used as a playroom for the children living there, and the next name I can associate with the hall after the Maurers seems perfect: Rochfort Percy, listed at 4004 Chilberg Ave. in 1939. He soon moved on and Alma Kastner followed, converting Sea View Hall into a World War II boarding house. She kept the sign. Kastner stayed for about 20 years before passing on this fanciful construction to Alvin and Margaret Ross. This is still Ross Hall. (Apparently it is no longer Ross Hall.  Since this feature was printed in the Jan 23, 2000 Pacific, the rustic charmer has been sold.)

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HALIBUTS Below DUWAMISH HEAD

West Seattle’s  waterfront was once an energetic mix of shipbuilders, fish packers and yachtsmen. This beach scene, photographed a short distance south of the Duwamish Head, features all three and a few houseboats besides.

In 1913, 70 percent of the world’s halibut catch was shipped through Seattle, briefly the halibut capital of the world. Here a few of these flat fish have found their way to sorting tables. The proprietors may be Thomas King and Albert Winge, who – in addition to running cod and halibut fleets out of West Seattle – built and repaired ships at their yard here at Duwamish Head. The proud partners were so pleased by their rhyming moniker that they christened one of their halibut boats the King and Winge and another the Tom and Al.

The King and Winge firm is most likely responsible for the two beached ships at the left of the scene’s center. The partners, who joined in 1901, repaired tugs, barges and ferries, and in a quarter-century built or aided in the construction of nearly 500 vessels.

The towered structure at the center of this (top) scene was built in the early 1890s as quarters for a yacht club – a predecessor to the Seattle Yacht Club. However, the combination of northerly winds, ships’ wakes and remote quarters drove most of the membership back to the Seattle waterfront by the end of the decade. In this early century view, the yachtsmen’s abandoned quarters house a restaurant that surely had halibut on its menu.

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NOVELTY MILL

Beginning in the summer of 1890 it was possible to pass between Seattle and West Seattle without the ferry. Nonetheless, the trek over the Seattle Terminal Railway’s trestle above the Elliott Bay tide flats was a long one, and missing the last ferry to West Seattle at 7 in the evening was a mistake clearly to be avoided.

The historical scene was photographed from near the West Seattle end of that trestle probably soon after it was completed in 1890. The photographer’s subject, the Seattle Terminal Railway & Elevator Co.’s grain elevator, was believed to be the first of a system of wharves that would crowd around Duwamish Head.

Once the Southern Pacific Railroad selected West Seattle for its Puget Sound terminus, boomers like the San Franciscan, Col. Thomas Ewing, and the agents for his West Seattle Land & Improvement Co. were understandably encouraged about their coming prosperity. The regional periodical, Washington Magazine, predicted in 1890: “What more can be said about West Seattle, except that it will be to Seattle before a year passes what Brooklyn is to New York and Oakland to San Francisco.”

In the year before this (top) view was recorded, the West Seattle heights were cleared of their second-growth timber, leaving the largely barren ridge showing on the left. Ewing built a cable railway to carry his customers up the hill for an inspection of the denuded view lots. The cable line, subdivision and grain elevator were all laid out by an engineer named Richard H. Stretch.

The Southern Pacific and the string of wharves never made it to West Seattle’s harbor, but the mill lived on for many years, after 1893 known as the Novelty Mill. Ninety-nine years later a few of its original 1900 piles support Salty’s Restaurant.

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LUNA PARK BY DUWAMISH HEAD

Described by its builders as “the greatest outdoor amusement in the Pacific Northwest, Luna Park opened in 1907 below West Seattle’s Duwamish.Head, where its twelve acre timber pile platform above the tides lured Seattle to its attractions.

The park could be easily seen across Elliott Bay, especially after sunset with its 2000 electric bulbs. Getting there was easy both by ferry and by electric trolley, which began running to West Seattle the same year, across an early Spokane Avenue swing bridge.

This view by Seattle photographer O. T. Frasch, looks back at the brow of Duwamish Head from near the middle of the amusement park. Moving left from the Ice Cream Parlor at far right, signs visible are “A Day in the Alps” – probably a diorama depicting a majestic mountain scene; the Comedy Theater, in the large vaguely Egyptian-looking structure where, the billboard reads, “the Trocadero Stock Co. puts on a new comedy every week”; a three-arched façade with the sign “Lost Child’ above it; and an exhibit space over which is the large, inviting sign reading “Admission Free.”

The white bridge in the foreground crosses the splash pool to the Chute-the-Chutes Water Slide. Luna Park also had a merry-go-round, a roller coaster, a large indoor saltwater natatorium, a movie house for one-reelers and a dance hall with bar attached.  Some dances continued until dawn, when the first morning trolley returned the revelers to Seattle side-by-side wit more sober and sedate commuters.  This nearness of wild life and wage slaves ultimately closed the park in 1913, after campaigning moralists described trolley scenes where young girls sat on the laps of their drunken dates “smoking cigarettes and singing songs.”

The only Luna Park amusement that survived this zeal was the good clean but cold fun of the saltwater natatorium, which stayed open until 1931, when it ended its years with its only instance of heated water.   The pool was destroyed by an arsonist.

(click to enlarge photos)

Here facing southeast from his own little park stands this state’s second governor, John Harte McGraw — born in 1850, dead by typhoid in 1910, honored by public subscription with New York sculptor Richard Brooks’ heroic monument.

McGraw was elected governor in 1892, just in time to face the depression that followed the bank panic of 1893. Because of the weak economy he was not re-elected in 1897, the first year of the Alaska-Yukon gold rush. Instead, the former governor packed a miner’s outfit and boarded the S.S. Portland, whose arrival in Seattle days earlier had started the rush.

Although traveling first class, McGraw was peculiarly broke. It was judged that he owed the state $10,000 from some unwarranted expenses during his term. His hopes to find it in Yukon dirt did not pan out, but when he returned to Seattle, his deep connections and investments did. He wound up president of both the chamber of commerce and Seattle First National Bank.

Before his time in Olympia, McGraw had three terms as the sheriff of King County. Earlier this year, at the dedication of the McGraw Square Plaza, the governor’s great-great grandson, Scott Pattison, noted that McGraw considered his “proudest moment” his standoff as sheriff with the anti-Chinese mobs of 1886. It was also his luckiest. After the sheriff took three bullets — one through his hat, two through his coat — the vigilantes scattered.

In 1909 during ceremonies for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific exposition, McGraw was squeezed beside the rotund President W.H. Taft in a parading motorcar. McGraw also attended the expo’s unveiling of a statue honoring William Seward. Of course, he could not have known that the same sculptor (Brooks) would soon be casting his likeness in Paris for an unveiling on July 22, 1913.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Not so much this morning, Jean.   A few asides on McGraw and a few other examples of public art – that’s all.  This brings to mind a feature printed here earlier that includes a dozen or more Seattle examples of public sculpture.  It is named for the piece that was showcased at the top, The Naramore Fountain.   Now forward to McGraw and more – a little more.

Aside from his imposing statue in Times Square, McGraw is most often recalled – or rather, named –  when one uses or looks for McGraw Street.  Below is a clip copied from a Seattle Times Pacific Mag feature that shows the McGraw Street bridge on Queen Anne Hill when it was still a timber trestle.  (Click to Enlarge)

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ELK’S ARCHES, 1902

Street arches – often spectacular and always temporary  – were once almost expected of Seattle’s big events.  For its 1902 Seattle Carnival the Elks (the fraternity that started after the Civil War as a club for thespians called the Jolly Corks) raised three unique arches, all gleaming white by day and electrified at night.  The above welcome arch at Second and James was similar in size to the arch at First and Columbia, the address also for the Elk’s Seattle headquarters.

The Elk’s third arch spanned Union Street between 3rd and 4th Avenue.  It served as gateway to the old University of Washington Campus that was walled off for the event  — like Seattle Center for Bumbershoot.  Although then already seven years abandoned by the school for its “Interlaken Campus” the old campus on Denny’s green knoll (not to be confused with Denny Hill) was not yet developed and so offered a wonderful lawn on which to set up the fair that ran through the second half of August.

The Elks Carnival was really Seattle’s first experiment with an extended summer festival and so an early rehearsal for the Potlatch Days of 1911-1913 and later Seafair.  However, as far as I know neither the Potlatch nor Seafair mounted arches.

It was probably the Knight Templar who mounted the last monumental street arch hereabouts for their 1925 Seattle convocation.  Spanning Second Avenue at Marion, with its cross on top the Knight’s arch reached six stories. The first welcome arch for which there is photographic evidence was artfully constructed mostly with fir trees and mounted in Pioneer Square for the Independence Day celebrations of 1868.

Except for Sunday every day during the 13 day Elks Carnival featured a parade and, of course, the parade route was drawn to pass through the arches.  Even without parades and arches street life in 1902 was considerably different than it is now.  The automobile was then still an extreme novelty and mobility generally meant walking or for distant destinations taking a trolley.  Consequently the city streets of 1902 were stages for a cosmopolitan culture that was generally gregarious and even intimate.  And sometimes — as with the arches — it was also playfully grand.

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AYP’S “PERFECT (SALMON) VALKYRIAN GODDESS”

Of the temporary and monuments scattered about the University of Washington campus for its 1909 makeover into the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition, the Alaska monument was the most pretentious. Three draped figures symbolizing mining, hunting and fishing were set about the base of an 85-foot-high fluted classic column.

Visiting the sculptor’s studio when sculptor Finn H. Frolich’s three “perfect Valkyrian” women were still being shaped from clay, a Seattle Times reporter described the “sublime figures” as revealing the “message and underlying principle of Seattle’s big Exposition  – opportunity, glorious, almost infinite – a free offering to a world that now knows it not.”

Frolich was an old master in creating these “magnificent female figures with every line beautiful, every proportion splendid,” to continue the newspaper’s rhapsodic preview. A New Yorker trained in Paris, Frolich returned to the United States to break in big at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, for which he created his first set of monumental figures.

Thereafter Frolich was in demand at the string of expositions that followed and largely copied the classical Beaux Arts style of the Chicago fair. In Seattle he set up his studio in the old Territorial University building in downtown Seattle, where he taught classes for the local Beaux Arts academy.

Of Frolich’s three seated female figures, this one, obviously, represents fishing. With her muscular left hand, the figure holds a salmon against her knee. But hanging higher from her right hand is another of the AYP’s preoccupations: electricity. At night the fair was illuminated with 250,000 lamps to emphasize the classical lines especially of the exposition’s Arctic Circle, the “white city” for which the Alaska Monument was its symbolic centerpiece.

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PLYMOUTH’S COLUMNS

One of our more curious local landmarks is the arrange•ment of four fluted columns and their surrounding screen of trees that look over Interstate 5 from a triangular patch of park at the northwest comer· of Boren Avenue and Pike Street. This week’s “repeat” has followed these now-headless shafts from their original location near the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Seneca Street, where they were formerly united for 44 years with their classical capitals above the grand front door to Plymouth Congregational Church.

The mother church of local Congregationalists had its cornerstone laid at this location in July 1911, and ten months later opened all 136 doors of its new sanctuary to the admiring community. The architecture was sober and demure and, except for the classical portico and belfry, showed little ornament. As explained in “The Congregational Washington,” it was a “plain, chaste example of classic architecture . . . peculiarly characteristic of New England.” In “Seeking To Serve,” her history of Plymouth,  Mildred Tanner Andrews notes that plans for this church were influenced by the “practical reformist and democratic positions of many of its members.”

Demolition began the first week of March 1966. By the 20th, all that remained were the columns, and on the 29th, these were pushed and pulled down by a tractor and crane. Meanwhile, the congregation worshiped nearby at the 5th Avenue Theatre.

The four stone columns were reconstituted largely by local builder and art collector John Hauberg, influenced, perhaps, by the example of his wife, art activist Anne Gould Hauberg, and the then relatively new enthusiasm for preservation.

Plymouth’s pillars – each of their seven four-ton segments in place – were dedicated at their new location on Oct. 24, 1967. Thirty years later, the park’s trees have considerably softened the standing stone’s austere formation.  (It is an often put – mistakenly – that these columns were saved from the ruins of the Territorial University.  Those wooden columns were salvaged, but not here.  They have their own “Sylvan Theatre” on the University of Washington campus.)

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Above:  Neighbors pose on the front steps of photographer Lawrence Lindsley’s Wallingford home sometime in October 1918 when the city was “dark” and closed-down during the Spanish Flu’s Seattle visit.  The masks were required although the law was rarely enforced.  (Picture courtesy of Dan Eskenazi) Below: Wallingford neighbor’s repeat the 1918 flu shot behind masks pulled from one of the group’s mask collection.   Only one among the seven is neither hidden nor unnamed: the Chihuahua Sparky.   (now photo by Jean Sherrard)

SAVING HEALTH & APPEARANCES – LAGRIPPE in WALLINGFORD

Dan Eskenazi, Seattle photo collector and old friend of mine, first shared with me these masked ladies posing with masked cats on the unlikely chance that I might know the porch.  Had the snapshot revealed a street number the choices would have been narrowed city-wide to a few hundred front steps.  But Dan’s little 3×4 inch print does better.  The names of the women are penciled on the back.  The flipside caption reads,  “Top row, Anna Kilgore, E. K. Barr, Ms Anna S. Shaw.  Lower row, Penelope and Tommy, Mrs. Shaw and Golly.”

So seven creatures including the cats Tommy and Golly and all of them wearing masks by order of the mayor.  By the time the 1918 flu epidemic reached Seattle at the end of September la Grippe had caused more deaths world-wide than the First World War. When the rule about masks was lifted for good on Armistice Day, Nov. 11 the streets were quickly filled with bare-faced revelers.  Still Dr. T. D. Tuttle, the state’s commissioner of health, warned that “people who have influenza are in the crowds that are celebrating victory.  They will be in the street cars, in the theaters, in the stores.” Tuttle also confessed, “the order had been more or less a farce as far as the masks are concerned.”  (This explains, perhaps, why there are so few mask photos extant.)

Returning to the snapshot’s penciled caption, four of the five women are listed in the 1918 city directory living at 108 E. 43rd Street, in Wallingford.  Since that address is about 100 steps from my own I was soon face to face with Dan’s unidentified porch, except that it was one house west of 108.  But this slight move presented an opportunity.  It hints, at least, of the photographer.

104 E. 43rd Street was built in 1918, the year that the photographer Lawrence Denny Lindsley, the grandson of city founders David and Louisa Denny, moved in.  Perhaps Lindsley took the snapshot of his neighbors sitting on his new front steps soon after he took possession with his bride Pearl.  Married on September 20, 1918, tragedy soon followed.  Both Pearl and their only child Abbie died in 1920.  Lindsley married again in 1944 and continue to live at 104 into the 1970s.   When he died in 1974, this son of the pioneers was in his 90s and still taking photographs.

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ANGELINE’S HOME ON PIKE

The Indians of the West were shot twice: fIrst by the cavalry and then by touring photographers. In 1889 the Northern PacifIc Railroad capitulated in its hostility towards Seattle and began giving the city regular service at rates comparable to Tacoma’s. A year later the railroad sent out its offIcial photographer, F. Jay Haynes, in his own plush car to record Seattle’s progress. His subjects included the city’s harbor, its mansions, churches, parks, and one shack.

While she was yet alive and cameras began to proliferated, Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle’s eldest daughter, was the most photographed subject in Seattle.  In his search for the photogenic city, Haynes found her resting beside her shack in the neighborhood of what is now the Elliott Bay side of the Pike Place Market.

One year later a Post-Intelligencer reporter accompanied by a pioneer who helped him translate Angeline’s Chinook jargon into his own English journalese, visited the “humble palace of this wizened aboriginal princess.” This time Angeline was inside sleeping. While his guide stirred her, the reporter paused outside to begin his report. His paragraph and Haynes’ photograph “read” somewhat alike.

“Her cabin or shack is about 8 x 10 feet in size, with a roof of split cedar shakes. Half of one of the gable ends has the clapboards put on diagonally . . . At one comer of the house is a huge pile of driftwood, gathered from the ruins of fallen cabins in the neighborhood or picked up from the Bay near by. In the front yard are half a dozen tin and wooden buckets rusty and dirty . . . A narrow, dwarfed door, and a little dirty pane of glass constitute the means of getting into the palace. A horseshoe and mule’s shoe are nailed immediately above the entrance. The door stands open all the time.”

Apparently, the window and shoes had been added to the door since Haynes’ visit, but it was still open, and the reporter followed his guide inside, where “the only space in which the floor was visible was about three feet square. Two low bunks and a shorter one, covered with remnants of dirty blankets, a rickety little cook stove and a few rude cooking utensils and a wagon load of rags, old shoes, pans, boxes etc. were stacked upon the beds, under the beds and on the floor.  When Mr. Crawford (the guide) asked Angeline how long she had lived in her present house, she held up her two hands, spreading out her fingers to indicate ten years.”

Despite the reported attempts of “various benevolent ladies to move her to more comfortable quarters,” here Princess Angeline stayed until her death at 86 in the spring of 1896.  The door to her shack was then closed and draped in black crepe. She was moved to Lakeview Cemetery and buried in a canoe-shaped casket with a paddle resting on the stern. Princess Angeline was carried there in a black hearse drawn by a span of black horses and followed by the funereal company of what was then left of Seattle’s pioneers.

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PRINCESS ON PIKE

There are probably dozens of photographs of Chief Seattle’s daughter, but very few so candid as this one. And yet Princess Angeline probably agreed in an instant to sit for this portrait on the board•walk beside Pike Street and a half block west of Front Street (First Avenue). She was, by all descriptions, not shy. Most likely she also expected to be paid something for her modeling.  A quarter was considered equitable.

At the time Angeline was interrupted by the unnamed photographer, she may have been moving between her home near the waterfront foot of Pike Street and Charles Louch’s grocery nearby at First and Union. In the early 1890s the Board of King County Commissioners instructed the prosperous English grocer to give Angeline whatever she needed and to pass the bills on to the county. The meager $1.25 bill for November 1891 included a pack of cigarettes, probably for her grandson, Joe Foster, who then lived with her.

Angeline also moved into a new cabin in 1891 built for her by another pioneer neighbor, the lumberman Amos Brown. Two years earlier, she received her greatest celebrity with a drawing and description in the popular national magazine Harper’s Weekly. The Harper’s correspondent, Hezekiah Butterworth, seems to be imagining a caption for this photograph when he writes, “Her flat, tan-colored face, fiery black eyes and black hair are a familiar picture in the streets of the new city, where she sits down daily on some log or shoe box to marvel at all that is going on.”

Larry Hoffman, my friend and oft-times instructor, introduced me to this portrait at a gathering for his 98th birthday at Hamilton House, the senior center in the University District. Thanks, Larry.  (Larry has since passed away.)

For the “now” to Angeline’s posing on Pike you can choose from two – both taken by Jean.  The one looks into the subject from Pike Street a few feet west of First Ave.  The other looks up from the first arm of the Post Alley as it makes its descent to the waterfront.

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ANGELINE’S STONE – LAKE VIEW CEMETERY

KICK-I-SOM-LO, the name of Chief Seattle’s daughter before her pioneer friend Catherine Maynard renamed her, received a lot of whimsical attention from local newspapers in her last years. With layered clothing, unmatched shoes, “skin like the bark of a tree” and bent form, she was at once picturesque and grotesque, a figure for parody.         On March 31, 1892, the Seattle Press Times reported under the headline “A Princess Prophecies” that Angeline had visited the local police headquarters and announced that the world would end the following June. Her informant, she explained, was the spirit of Wah-Kee-Wee-Kum, legendary medicine man of her tribe. June came and went, however.

Angeline died four years later on May 31, 1896. For her June 6 requiem Mass, Our Lady of Good Help parish was packed with pioneers and draped with black crepe. The procession to Lake View Cemetery was a stately parade behind black horses and hearse. Everything was donated, including a headstone paid for with ‘pennies and nickels by the schoolchildren of Seattle (partial atonement, it was noted, for years of taunting her), a canoe-shaped casket and the little triangular part of the Henry Yesler lot, No. 111. It was Angeline’s request to be laid next to her friend Yesler, who had died in 1892.

Angeline had also requested of Catherine Maynard that a tree be planted beside her grave. The windblown young maple behind her headstone may well be it.  The photograph was recorded mostly likely in 1909. On the left is a portion of the granite curbing for the Yesler gravesite and a slice of the Carrara obelisk topping the plot of real-estate agent Phillip H. Lewis, who died in 1893.

While the dead have slept, much else has changed at Lake View. Dirt paths have been covered with grass, as have many of the old granite curbstones. With the cemetery’s great sweeping lawns, the effect is now more like a park than a pack of plots.

In 1958, the Seattle Historical Society attached a commemorative bronze plaque over the original chiseled but worn inscription on Princess Angeline’s headstone.

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Booming Seattle, looking for an open staging place north of Pioneer Square in the business district’s new retail neighborhood, found it here at this — depending on how you stretch it — five- or seven-star corner at Fifth Avenue and Stewart Street.

Two disruptions of the city grid prepared this intersection for civic celebrations. The oldest was the pioneer turn in the city’s street grid at Stewart Street. Next, in 1906, Westlake Avenue, between Pike Street and Denny Way, was cut through the grids, creating along the way pie-shaped blocks and several wide intersections, like this.

The 1915 addition of this newspaper’s elegant terra-cotta tiled Times Square Building (far right in both views) gave this civic space a stage from which to address political rallies, announce and post sports scores, and review Independence Day parades.

Jean Sherrard took advantage of the recently parading Lions on Fifth Avenue to make his repeat for the ca. 1926 American Legion-sponsored Fourth of July parade.

“My shot was taken late morning, with the sun high in the southeast,” Sherrard says. “Fifth Avenue at Stewart didn’t begin to emerge from shadow until the last few minutes of the parade. The crowd was thick enough that I stood in the crosswalk at Stewart, hoisting and lowering the camera pole without causing injury to strolling prides of Lions.

“Waves of parade participants flowed down Fifth Avenue, from the red and black banners and umbrellas of youngish German Lions to the yellow jerseys favored by exuberant marchers from both mainland China and Taiwan.

“Interestingly, American branches tended to be older and a bit more sedate than their international brethren.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, but just a few touches on Times Square.

First another parade, this one from the Great Depression, 1937. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)

Next: Twenty years earlier.

TIMES SQUARE – SEPTEMBER 19, 1917

(First appeared in Pacific, May 22, 1988)

This 1917 view of Times Square features three landmarks. One of them is moving and one survives. The survivor, of course, is the building after which the square was named: the Seattle Times Building, seen here, center-right, topped by six flags. Between 1916 and 1931, the newspaper published in this granite and terra cotta Beaux Arts temple perhaps the best memorial to the art of Carl Gould, Seattle’s most celebrated early-century architect.

Times Square was also named after New York City ‘s Times Square, which was also fronted by a newspaper, The New York Times. To complete the equation, Gould’s design also alludes to the New York paper’s plant. Also, neither of these squares is square. Seattle’s is star-shaped, formed by the chained intersection of Westlake, Fifth & Sixth Avenues, Olive and Stewart streets.

The Times Square Building is but one year old here. During World War I, the open area in front of it was a popular meeting place for wartime rallies. This quiet scene was shot on September 19, 1917, or one day before Seattle’s second “Great Recruitment Parade” was staged to send off 724 King County men to the French trenches.

The second stationary landmark in this scene is the noble little structure in the foreground, which is much too elegant to be called, simply, a bus stop. This combination waiting and rest station was built by the city in 1917 and included, below the sidewalk level, two rest rooms. The steps seen at this end lead to the men’s section. (This documenting view was photographed for the Seattle Engineering Department.)

The third and moving landmark is on the right: Car 51. This is one of the six Niles cars that the Pacific Northwest Traction Company bought from its manufacturer in Niles, Ohio for the Seattle-Everett Interurban. The purchase was made in the fall of 1910, or only a few months after the opening of the line in the spring of that year. Car 51 continued to serve until the evening of the Interurban’s last day, February 20, 1939.

Here Car 51, heading in from Everett, is about to take its last turn, onto Fifth Avenue for the two-block run to its terminus beside the Shirley Hotel on Fifth between Pike and Pine. In 1919 the depot was moved to the southeast corner of Sixth and Olive, and in 1927 to Eighth and Stewart on the site of the present Greyhound Depot.

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THE COLONEL’S MONUMENT

( First appeared in Pacific on Feb. 14,1999)

In “Raise Hell and Sell Newspapers,” Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConagy’s 1996 history of Col. Alden J. Blethen marking the centennial of the founding of The Seattle Times, the 69-year-old editor-publisher is shown in shirtsleeves vigorously scooping the first shovel for the 1914 groundbreaking of his new Time’s Square plant.

As the authors explain, this was a momentary vigor, for Blethen’s health was in steep decline. Actual construction was put off until after his death in July 1915, and resumed by his sons as a monument to their father’s uncommon life. The building of Times Square began in September 1915 and proceeded with such speed that one year later, on Sept. 25, 1916, The Times could devote an entire edition to its move north from Second Avenue and Union Street to its new terra cotta-tile palace at Fifth and Olive.

The architects, Carl F. Gould and Charles Herbert Bebb, created a monument as much to Renaissance Revival style as to the Colonel. The new partners repeated the division of labor employed so effectively by Bebb’s former Chicago employers, the famous “prophet of modern architecture,” Louis Sullivan, and his partner, Dankmar Adler. Here the practical Bebb, like Adler in Chicago, handled the business and engineering while the Harvard-educated aesthete Gould, like Sullivan, created the designs. Gould took the Gothic plans Bebb had drawn earlier with another partner and transformed them into this gleaming Beaux Arts landmark. .

This rare view of the full northern facade was photographed before much of it was hidden between its neighbors. The flatiron block was Blethen’s direct and proud allusion to the similarly styled New York Times Building, which also faced a Times Square in Gotham. The newspaper continued to publish here until 1930, when it moved north again, this time to its current offices on Fairview Avenue North.

PROTEST NOT PARADE

Here are printed two slides by Frank Shaw, which he has dated April 16, 1966.  The place, of course, is our extended Times Square intersection and the concern is the war in Vietnam.   It is not the earliest protest in Seattle, but still it is early.  The individual signs reflect a sometimes more sober rhetoric than that often used later.  One of the signs indicates support for the Buddhist – of Vietnam – criticism of the war.  I checked the Seattle Times for April 16, 1966 and April 17 too (that’s a Saturday and Sunday) and found a prominent report on the Buddhist story, but not on this Westlake protest.  Using the new on-line service for searching The Seattle Times between 1896 and 1984, I studied every page for that weekend but still I  might have missed it.*  The helpful chronology in Walt Crowley’s memoir of the Sixties, “Rites of Passage,” does not make not of it.  For that weekend of the 16th-17th of April, 1966, I did find one Vietnam protest story with a local angle, and I have attached it at the bottom.  While it holds no signs, the combined opinions of retired Army Colonel Martin T. Riley, Commander of the Catholic War Veterans, is a kind of broadside for the pro-war sentiments of the time.  I was then into my second year living in Seattle, having moved over from Spokane.  I did not attend this demo. and no longer remember if I knew about it in advance or learned about it later. If the vacuity of my search is confirmed, my chances of reading about it were diminished by the lack of coverage, at least in the Times.  I did not make it to the microfilm reader at the U.W. Library to search the Post-Intelligencer.

* You may wish to do your own “key word” search of The Seattle Times for whatever.   All you need is a Seattle Public Library card.  It shows your long bar code number, but you will also need to know your private 4-number code aka PIN number.   If it will help, mine is 1-2-3-4. Perhaps yours is too.  It is a common choice.