[CLICK – sometimes double-click – to ENLARGE the IMAGES]

Most likely the photographer for this record of dilapidation was James Lee who worked with his cameras (both still and moving) for the city’s public works department.  Both the Municipal Archive and the University of Washington archive include helpful examples of Lee’s field recordings, some as old as 1910.

This subject was used in the 1930s as evidence in favor of slum clearing for the then new Seattle Housing Authority’s plans for Yesler Terrace, the city’s first low-income housing project.  Once built, Yesler Terrace came close to this site, missing it by a block.  Lee looks north down the alley to James Street in the short 500-block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.  His back is to Jefferson Street.

Perhaps the man standing in the shadows of the alley, bottom left, is Andrew Knudsen, who is listed in the 1938 Polk City Directory as living at 511&1/2, the likely address for one of these alley houses.  A 72-year-old Knudsen is still there in 1948 when this newspaper reported that he was hit by a car driven negligently by Ken C. Johnson.  Fortunately Harborview Hospital was nearby.  Knudsen was treated and soon released, but Johnson, most likely, surrendered his license.  Four years more when John W. Pearson is found dead at the same address, the city published a notice – again in The Times – asking anyone who knew him or off him to contact the Johnson and Sons Mortuary.

These little homes date from the 1890s – perhaps one or more may have been built already in the late 1880s when the slope up First Hill began its rapid development.   And they were survivors.  It was only the building of the Seattle Freeway – not Yesler Terrace – that brought them down.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   We will stay near “our alley” for the most part Jean – perhaps every part.

(click to enlarge photos)

From the roof, but more often from his second-floor window of Wedgewood Court, a comely lower Queen Anne apartment house, Frank Owen Shaw watched Seattle’s Century 21 take shape, especially the largest part of it: the Washington State Coliseum.  It was directly kitty-corner from his flat.

In 1957 the life-long bachelor moved into one of what the Wedgwood Court appropriately advertised then as its “nicely furnished bachelor apartments.”   From his privileged prospect, the Boeing quality control inspector, could also watch the Space Needle rise like a barometer of the fair’s heated construction, and he kept photographing this great pubic work both on site and from his window above the northwest corner of First Ave. N. and Republican Street.

Before Shaw moved out one month before the fair opened on April 21, 1962, he carefully framed his last 2×2” color slide from his second floor flat with his curtained window, and meticulously captioned it “Last shot from former Apt., March 20, 1962, 5:30 p.m.”   It showed the shining Coliseum topped by what I remember a friend’s daughter – a 6-year-old promoter-poet – describing for me then as “our splendid Space Needle.”

On the evidence of his carefully ordered negatives, one of Frank Shaw’s last photographs is of Bob Geigle posing at the top of the Needle in April, 1985.  For Geigle, a young employee then also at Boeing, Frank O. Shaw was “Frankoshaw” with the accent on the first syllable.  Bob remembers Frank’s dry wit as “sort of English old school.  And he was quite prim and proper too.  He loved to travel and climb mountains.  He took lots of pictures while climbing and some were published.  As he explained it, when he got too old to climb he started walking the city with his camera taking picture of what he called ‘what is.’”  Leaving lots of exquisitely real pictures, Frank died on Nov. 1, 1985, age 76.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Jean, we will begin with a short stack of other 2×2 colored reversals that Frank Shaw took from his apartment at the northwest corner of First N. and Republican Street of work-in-progress on the Coliseum.  If there is time left we’ll pull a past feature or two from the neighborhood, as well – if time allows – some other fair photography by Shaw.

Leaving the ambiguity of the above slide’s caption, ordinarily Frank Shaw kept his slides and negatives in good order and well marked with captions that included place names and dates and sometimes even the hour of the day.   These tidy habits are also evident in the two recordings that follow of the living room in his new apartment after nearly 15 years of use.  They were photographed on June 10, 1977

DECATUR TERRACE:  On May 31, 1961 Frank Shaw – still from his apartment window above Republican Street – turned his camera to the west and recorded the old David and Louisa Denny home, known as Decatur Terrace in its grander days, holding to its second footprint, the one at the southeast corner of Queen Anne Ave. and Republican.  It was originally built on a terrace that was near the center of the Shaw’s block – the block between First Ave. N. and Queen Anne Ave., Mercer Street and Republican.

Follows now a two-column copy of the text for this Pacific feature as it was printed in the second of the three “Seattle Now and Then” books.  (All three can be called forth and read in Ron Edge’s scan of their every page.  You will find them under the “history books” button on the front page of this blog.

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WARREN AVENUE SCHOOL

In the mid-1880s, the patriarchs of North Seattle – David Denny and George Kinnear included – urged settlers aboard a horse-drawn railway to their relatively inexpensive lots north of Denny Way.  Their efforts were rewarded as the flood of immigration, which increased steadily after the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883, pushed settlement into the land between Denny and Queen Anne hills.

By the turn of the century, this crowd of newcomers had established a neighborhood full of large families.  And beginning in 1902 more than 400 of the neighborhood children attended primary school on Block 35 of David and Louisa Denny’s Home Addition.

Warren Avenue School (on Warren Ave.) was built in 1902 and abandoned in 1959.  This view of the school is an early one.  The school’s demise came when the site was chosen first for an expanded civic center and soon after for a world’s fair: Century 21.  By closing time, the neighborhood around the school had long since stopped swelling with families.

The siting of the contemporary photograph was adjusted to make a comparison of the Key Arena’s and the school’s west walls.  The school’s fine-tuned position would put the children posing near its front door on the Key Arena’s floor beneath the rim of its north end backboard (if there is still a backboard around since the flight of the Sonics.)

(click to enlarge photos)

Early this autumn Jean Sherrard and I stood on the roof – as it were – of the home standing here at the northeast corner of 4th Avenue and Columbia Street.

We were presenting one of our “repeat photography” programs to the Seattle Surgical Society for its September meeting and banquet in the Rainier Club.  Timing our show with the desert, we included this apt subject, which includes part of the clubhouse, as a sweet surprise. We were fortunate that the banquet’s location – the large dining hall at the south end of the club’s second floor – hit the spot. While projecting this subject on the screen, we explained, “Here we stand above – or very near – this pioneer home site, which later the Rainier Club first razed and then built upon with its 1929 enlargement.

During our time with the surgeons we could not reveal the history of this modest home. We didn’t know.  But now with the help of our frequent contributor Ron Edge we discover that three generations of Burnetts lived there.  The subject appeared in the Seattle Times for June 2, 1918 and was headlined “It’s Seattle’s Oldest Home Built 53 years ago.”

[Best to click the below TWICE!  At least that makes a difference on this MAC.]

After Port Ludlow mill man Hiram Burnett built this six-room home during the winter of 1865, he and his wife Elizabeth moved to Seattle that spring so that their two children would be near the University.  When their son Charles graduated from the University and married, “he took his bride to live in the little house.”  The couple’s own son, Charles Jr. served a term on the Seattle City Council, and recalled his grandfather Hiram explaining that all the wood for the Seattle home – including the spruce siding – was first cut at his Port Ludlow mill and that he then “sent the pieces up here and merely put them together.”

[BEST TO CLICK twice.]

During his visit to the “oldest home” in 1918, the unnamed Times reporter was pleased to note that for a rental of $12.50 a month it “houses a force of industrious Italians who turn out plaster of paris reproductions of the famous art works of their native land.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Surely Jean.  First congratulations to MOHAI with the opening of its newly fitted home in the old Naval Armory at the south end of Lake Union.  As you know while we attended the new MOHAI for the opening arranged for members, a winter sunset broke through the clouds in the west and bathed the south Lake Union campus in a most auspicious golden light.   Here’s a merge of six snaps, and thanks to Ron Edge for fitting the pieces together.  [Click it TWICE to enlarge]

And praise be to thee Jean and  your part in the array of new exhibits.  Here’s a snap of you in front of the montage of “repeats” you did covering the curators chosen collection of historic – what else? – Seattle Theatres.  Visitors will find it and film clips galore on the first mezzanine.

As is our practice by now, we will add a few more features from the neighborhood, but first introduce them with a few aerials of the neighborhood.  Most – maybe all – come courtesy of Ron Edge.

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COLUMBIA STREET West from Second Avenue

(First appeared in Pacific, May 15, 1983)

The Great Fire of 1889 encouraged the city to rebuild bigger and in brick. But its first response was a huge hotel which was constructed quick and cheap, and entirely of wood. The Rainier was ready for occupancy only 80 days after the first lumber was unloaded at the building site. This effort was the kind of manic community labor we associate with instant barn raisings. The result was the somewhat barn-like fortress we see filling the center horizon of our historical scene and the entire block between Columbia and Marion Streets, and Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

While flattening the city’s business district, the June 6 fire also consumed most of its halls and hotels. The thousands of “floating strangers” who began flooding these “ashes of opportunity” to help rebuild the city and themselves often had to sleep in tents or under trees. Since the grand brick hotels of the 1890s, including the Denny, Seattle, and Butler, took time to build, the Rainier was put up in a flash by a collection of the “moneymen of Seattle” led by Judge “He Built Seattle” Thomas Burke.  The Seattle Press-Times reported that “its construction was made possible by public spirited capitalists stepping forward regardless of whether it would be a paying institution or not.” It wasn’t.

In its five years as a showy hotel with a breezy view of the bay from a wrap-around veranda, the Rainier lost $100,000. The Great Crash of 1893 had its sad effect. On August 16, 1894 the Press-Times reported “In all probability the handsome Rainier Hotel will be closed in the near future . . . What will be done with the Rainier Building is not known.” The gold rush of 1897 came too late to save the Rainier. Then the miners, coming and going, dropped their tired bodies into the beds of hotels down by the waterfront. These included the Rainier Grand Hotel at First and Madison, whose furnishings – included – were moved in from the abandoned and bankrupt Rainier up on the hill.

The scene (on top) was photographed not in the hard times of 1893-94 but in 1891-92: good times still for both the Rainier and the Seattle-Press Times. The newspaper was published in its offices at 214 Columbia Street, mid-block between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenues. (The top of the newspaper’s sign can be seen at the lower left-hand corner of the photograph.)

Arthur Churchill Warner took this photograph, which includes other landmarks as well. The James Colman mansion survived at the southeast corner of Fourth and Columbia for the 55 years between 1883 and 1939. Its boxish cupola just barely breaks the horizon line on the far right.  (There’s more on the Colman home below.)

Another tower is seen just above and to the left of the Colmans. Standing six stories at the corner of Ninth and Columbia, Coppin’s Water Works supported a holding tank for water drawn by an adjoining windmill from springs beneath Charles Coppin’s combined home and business. Throughout the 1880s his water works supplied users down the hill, the Colman’s included. The water was delivered through bored logs, some of which were uncovered during the early 1960s excavation of Interstate-5.

Eisenhower’s Seattle Freeway also cut through the site which for 59 years supported the brick towers of Central School. Kitty-corner across Sixth and Marion from the Rainier, the school was also completed in 1889. However, it was made of brick, more than two million of them. Central School was Seattle’s only high school until 1902 when Broadway High was built “way out on Capitol Hill.” The Central’s weakened towers were prudently razed after the 1949 earthquake. The rest of the main building was leveled in 1953. Alumni – or by now their children – still display their souvenir bricks atop fireplace mantels.

The Warner photograph is dappled with many other lesser landmarks. The Eureka Bakery, just left of center, was for years run by the pioneer Meydenbauer family. They are remembered by their namesake bay on Lake Washington and their creek which runs under Bellevue. Today, the Meydenbauer property on Columbia Street is filled by the old Central Building. Kitty-corner across Third Avenue, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce occupies the spot that in 1892 housed Bonney and Watson, the city’s oldest mortuary.

The Rainier Hotel was converted into apartments and survived until 1910. In 1896 the Seattle Press-Times became the Seattle Times and has – still as of this re-writing – survived.

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The RAINIER CLUB

(First appeared in Pacific, April 17, 1988)

In 1988 the Rainier Club celebrated its own centennial, one year before the state’s. Appropriately, it memorialized its century with a book history of the club. The author, Walter Crowley, concludes ” … as the wheel turns and future generations regard this curious mansion nestled at the feet of skyscrapers, the Rainier Club will still serve as a reminder of the remarkable individuals who shaped Seattle out of forests and mudflats . . .”It was only in 1986 that this “curious mansion” was officially recognized for what it has been since it was first constructed in 1904: a historical landmark. Wishing to keep its options, the club itself resisted the description for a time because the landmark designation restricts a structure’s future to those that preserve its historical integrity.

However, Seattle’s central business district would surely be more severe than it already is, were it not for the gracious relief of this well-wrought clubhouse. Modeled after the English example, this men’s club held its first meeting on Feb.23, 1888. The next day’s Seattle Daily Press reported that “the object of the club is like that of a hundred other kindred bands scattered over the face of the civilized world, the pursuit of pleasure among congenial conductors.” These convivial male circuits were lubricated by coffee, “freshened” with tobacco, and, no doubt, loosened some by spirits – very good spirits.

Of course, the Rainier is no longer a men ‘ s club. In 1977 the club’s bylaws were amended to admit women, and by 1988, as Crowley’s history records, over 40 of the 1200 resident members were women. The former entrance for women “guests” shows on the left of the historical photograph at the rear of the Marion Street side of the club.

This top view of the club (their third home) looks across Fourth Avenue and dates from about 1909 or soon after the 1908 regrading of Fourth Avenue. Of the Rainier Club’s Jacobean style, the work of Spokane-based architect Kirtland K. Cutter, Crowley notes, “However antiquated the Club was designed to appear on the outside, the trustees spared no expense for modem luxuries on the inside, including telephones in every room.” The club’s style was preserved when its size was nearly doubled in 1929 with the south extension, the work of Seattle architects Charles Bebb and Carl Gould.

Within these landmark walls many a landmark project has been planned, including Metro, Forward Thrust and both of Seattle’s world’s fairs – the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition and the 1962 Century 2l. This meritocracy of, in the beginning, men included familiar names like Thomas Burke, Horace McCurdy, William Allen, Clarence Blethen, Emil Sick and Ed Carlson.

Crowley quotes Carlson, “It used to be that if you had an important civic or political issue, you could get 25 or so people in a room at the Rainier Club and get a go or no-go decision.” Walter Crowley adds, “Those days are gone, for the leadership of Seattle has not merely shifted, it has fragmented, and with it the consensus from which the community’s establishment drew its tacit authority.”

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The MEYDENBAUER HOME – 3^rd & Columbia

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 1, 1987)

Before the rapid redevelopment of Third Avenue following its regrade of 1906-7, its sides were graced with old homes and churches. One home – the one shown here – belonged to William Meydenbauer, the town confectioner.

Meydenbauer was 18 when he headed for the United States in 1850 after an apprenticeship with a candy maker in Prussia. He made his way to San Francisco bu 1854, where after a nearly ruinous try at gold mining, and a short experiment with teamstering, he returned to the small but sweet rewards of confections.

The Meydenbauers, William and Thelka, moved to the Northwest in 1868 when Seattle had less than 1,000 cash-poor residents expecting growth for their 16-year-old village, but mostly waiting for it. Those post-civil-war years were sour, so the confectioner was welcome. The candy man built a home on Third Avenue at Columbia Street around 1880. Before that there may have been a crude shack on the property but little else. At the time, Seattle’s idea of refreshments for fancy public receptions was sliced apples and gingerbread.

The Meydenbauers bought the Eureka Bakery on Commercial Street (now

First Avenue South) and soon added to the town’s sweet offerings with a selection of well-dressed candies and sweets, including celebrated Yule cakes. Soon enough they and the town prospered and in the mid-188Os, the couple moved their business into a bigger bakery they had built behind the family home. The rear of that plant is pictured behind the tree and to the left of their home in this week’s “Then” photo.

By employing several helping hands and running two delivery wagons, Meydenbauer was efficient enough to sell wholesale. No doubt it helped that they raised eight children.  A son, Albert, continued in his father’s profession after the latter’s death in 19O6. After the 1007 regrading of Third Avenue, the Meydenbauer home, and much else on the block, was replaced by the Central Building, which is still , standing.

Long since this family is not remembered for its sweets but rather its waterway. In 1868 Meydenbauer rowed across Lake Washington and set a claim beside the Bellevue bay which still bears the family name.

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The FOUR FORMS of FOURTH

(First appeared in Pacific, May 8, 1983)

Every few decades with the help of earthquakes, fires, nervous engineers, and metropolitan dreamers, west coast cities like San Francisco, Vancouver, and Seattle are “made over.”  Seattle’s Fourth Avenue – the one in its Central Business District – has had four transformations.

Our historical photograph shows it passing into its third form, as Fourth Avenue is losing its residential emphasis. The sides of the street are being furnished with institutions, like the Carnegie Library and Rainier Club in the scene’s center, and hotels, like the Stander and Lincoln on the left.  This avenue have become Seattle’s deepest urban canyon with its sides of glass and polished metal.

The historical photograph was taken about 1905 by Arthur Warner a short time after the library, club, and hotels were built. By then the street had already lived through its first two forms. In the early 1860s Fourth Avenue was cut out of the virgin forest, some of which returned from Yes1er’s mill as planks for building the few modest homes that soon irregularly lined the sides of this stump-strewn path. Fourth ran from the tideflats on the south to as far north as Denny’s Knoll (not Hill) as Seneca Street. There it stopped at a white picket fence – a small swinging gate counterbalanced by horseshoes opened to the grounds of Washington Territory’s university, for years the city’s and Fourth Avenue’s most distinguished landmark.

Fourth Avenue’s second form was also residential, but with more lavish homes that faced a street which although unpaved was given a regular width, curbed against sidewalks, lined with utility poles, and lit at the intersections. The duplex on the right of the view above counts as one of these classier second-stage residences. The tower behind it is attached to one of this street’s distinguished mansions, the home of pioneers Agnes and James Colman. Like the McNaught mansion, whose tower is seen in the distance beyond the library, the Colmans’ spacious Latinate-Victorian showpiece was built in 1883 and remained through the turn of the century, a symbol of Fourth Avenue’s domestic elegance.

Already on entering their third decade these grand homes became vestiges of an earlier urbanity. In 1903 the imposing McNaught mansion was moved across Spring Street to make room for the Carnegie Library.   And in 1907-08 a metamorphosis occurred to the street itself which dramatically fashioned it into its third form. The Fourth Avenue regrade resulted in some casualties and many alterations. Denny’s Knoll was cut through and the old landmark university first moved and then leveled. Practically every structure along the new grade required either new steps to the old front doors, as with the library, or new front doors into their old basements, as with the hotels.

The city engineer’s longing to make “the crooked straight and the rough places plane” resulted in some very deep cuts. For instance, a contemporary photograph at Cherry Street (We truly have more than one but cannot at this alarming moment find them.) would be taken some two stories below Arthur Warner’s location in the historical view. The 4^th Ave. cut at this intersection was 24 feet. By 1911 a bricked-over avenue showed the same unruffled grade that made it the preferred course for the bed races of the 1970s.

Agnes Colman continued to live in her towering home until her death in 1934. By then her mansion, the last sign of the elegant eighties and alternately depressed and roaring nineties, was thoroughly surrounded by retailers and restaurants. Today that era of conservative cosmopolitan taste is recalled only by the Rainier Club, the single structure which survives from the “then.”  The five-story Rainier Club houses 57,000 square feet of plush sitting rooms, coat-and-tie dining rooms, and other elite areas only its restricted membership – and their guests –  know.

When the Columbia Center was completed as the crowning touch to Fourth Avenue’s fourth form, it filled the old Colman mansion site with more than a million and and a half square feet of office space stacked 76 stories high. In some future decade or century when the Columbia Center’s 954 feet are dismantled – or imploded – by God, man, or nature, Fourth Avenue Will be passing into its fifth form.

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THE HOTEL STANDER

(First appeared in Pacific, May 29, 2001)

[BEST to click the below TWICE]

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Photographed when the building was new, the Hotel Pennington Apartments facing Marion Street west of 4th Avenue promoted itself as “a home away from home. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)  Little – if anything? –  has changed on the south side of Marion Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in the about 80 years between this “now and then.” [I have a feeling that we included this feature with an earlier assembly of past essays.]

A LANDMARK ROW

(First appeared in Pacific,  Nov. 29, 2006)

Set aside for the moment the looming skyscrapers and note how little has changed between this “then” and “now.”  For ambitious Seattle this is rare, especially outside the city’s designated historic districts, like Pioneer Square.

The centerpiece here is the Pacific hotel, facing Marion Street between the alley and east to 4th Avenue.  The work of architect W. R. B. Willcox, it was completed in 1916 – or may have been.  Both the county tax records and U.W. architect Norman J. Johnston’s chapter on Willcox in the UW Press’ ever revealing book “Shaping Seattle Architecture” give the 1916 date.

However, in the 1918 Polk City Directory a full-page advertisement (facing Page 2004) for the “Hotel Pennington Apartments” as it was then called, includes an etching of the same front façade seen here but with the terra cotta tile work of the right (south) half continued to the corner of 4th Avenue as one consistent presentation.  Was the less ornate half of mostly burlap bricks at the corner a late compromise for time and/or economy?  Or was the “half-truth” of the elegant etching too appealing to either correct or leave out of the advertisement?

The other surviving landmarks here include, far right, a corner of the Central Building (1907) and far left, the familiar Jacobean grace of the Rainier Club (1904) across 4th Avenue.   And above the club is the current celebrity among landmarks – or the dome of it: the First Methodist Church at 5th and Marion (1907) which now seems saved for its second century.

When the non-profit Plymouth group purchased the Pacific Hotel – its name since the 1930s – for low-income housing it took care to preserve the building’s heritage and in 1996 was awarded the state’s Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in Historic Rehabilitation.  Tom English, Plymouth’s facilities director, is fond of revealing that although hidden from Marion Street the hotel is U-shaped, and so embraces its own “beautifully landscaped courtyard and Kol-Pond.”  The 1918 advertisement also makes note of it as the hotel’s “spacious court garden.”

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COLMAN MANSION

(First appeared in Pacific, August,28, 1994)

In 1915 a photographer from the Curtis and Miller studio recorded this view of the nearly new Oakland Inn from a rear window of the Central Building at Third and Marion. The scene may have been shot speculatively or at the request of the Oakland’s owners. Whichever, as seen from this prospect the Oakland appears as a platform or stage for the performance of the ornate Colman mansion. Agnes and James Colman built their Italianate Victorian home in 1883. They moved in soon after returning from a tour of Europe. This long vacation was the reward for years of prodigious pioneer labor. By then, the Colmans had created sawmills, machine shops, railroads, sailing vessels, coal mines and many buildings, including their stylish new mansion. The Colmans themselves, however, were never very stylish. When they returned, James Colman went back to work. As their granddaughter Isobel would recall, the Colmans were “never a society family. My father was too busy to become involved in leisure life.”

James Colman died in 1906. Five years later the wide front lawn in front of the family home was excavated for the Oakland Inn. Its sidewalk businesses here include, right to left, Imperial Coffee; Benjamin Rosenthal, tailor; the Cash Grocery (vacant); and, at the comer, the offices of the Pyreen Manufacturing Company. The entrance to the Oakland Inn was up Columbia Street.

Agnes Colman lived in her mansion behind the Oakland until 1936. As an elderly woman -she lived to be 94 – Agnes would come down from her home to hand out meal tickets to the audience of homeless or out-of-work indigents waiting for her on Fourth Avenue. There were, of course, many drunks among them and all were first required to listen to her familiar brief lecture on temperance.

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Two more scenes from HISTORYLINK’S 2008 fund raiser lunch at the Rainier Club.   I recently had lunch with a precocious social media programmer who suggested that for the entertainment of this blog’s readers we should offer some prizes.  He mentioned leaving “blanks to be filled.”   So be it.  The first two readers who can identify the characters depicted in these two snaps will win . . .  something.   “We will make it worth your while.”  Jean especially is a fine gift-giver.

(click to enlarge photos)

Hopefully a few trainloads of Pacific readers will remember Warren Wing, our recently deceased rail fan extraordinaire who after retiring as a postman started chasing trains and the pictorial history of Northwest rails full time.  Long ago Warren shared with the Ballard News Tribune this prized photo of a Great Northern passenger train nearly completing its crossing of the GN’s bascule bridge over the tidewater western end of Chittenden Locks.  The subject appears on page 82 the Tribute’s 1988 centennial history of their community, “Passport to Ballard.” Warren Wing has captioned it, “Great Northern Morning train to Vancouver B.C. passing Ballard Station.”  This carrier would have also stopped in Everett, Mt. Vernon, Bellingham and at the border but not, apparently, at the little Ballard Station obscured here in the shadow of the engine’s exhaust.

Rails first reach Ballard in 1890 with West Street Electric Company’s trolley service from downtown Seattle.  Three years later the Great Northern completed its transcontinental service to Seattle directly along the Ballard waterfront and beside the many mills that made it then the “shingle capitol of the world.”  This new route over the GN’s lift bridge was made necessary by the construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the flooding of Salmon Bay behind its locks.  On June 29, 1913 this paper reported on the progress of the canal and the “spectacular form” of this “mammoth bridge,” which it measured at 1,140 long and 26 feet wide “to accommodate a double-track system.”

In the pursuit of his “repeat” Jean Sherrard was soon inhibited by decades of changes. He recounts, “The overpass on 57^th Street that we had hopes for was too distant from our subject, and the corrected prospect was both too steep and covered with foliage.  This left me in the rail bed just left of the tracks. To approximate the elevation of the original photographer, I hoisted my camera atop my ten-foot pole.  Walking back to my car, however, I did make one discovery. The original depot had been moved a hundred feet or so west, providing a spectacular view of the water – it had also been converted into a home, while retaining its distinctive gables. A neighbor confirmed that the former depot was now a residence.”  It would have been ideal Ballard home for Warren Wing.

WEB EXTRAS

Paul, I’m adding a couple of thumbnails of the old Ballard depot in its new location, transformed into a home:

Anything else to add, Paul?

A few related features Jean, beginning with two details of the once charming Ballard station followed by an early look north through the bridge from the Magnolia side..

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SALMON BAY BRIDGE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 26, 1986)

James A. Turner, who shot these pleasing views of the Salmon Bay Bridge, was one amateur who managed to put his photographic passion – railroads – on track with his vocation. During the 1930s, before the city got rid of its trolleys, Turner was a motorman on the Ballard line of the city’s transit system. During the weekdays he rode above the municipal rails, and then, judging from the size of his production, James Turner spent a good many evenings and weekends chasing trains or waiting for them.

For these subjects, Turner set himself off-shore on a Shilshole Bay dock below the Great Northern’s Salmon Bay Bascule Bridge, and so just west of the Chittenden Locks.

The Great Northern’s popu­larity among rail fans is a combination of its magnificent mainline through the Cascades and the Rockies, its safe and sturdy construction, its long Cascade tunnel, and the dashing green and black color scheme of its locomotives. And, perhaps, most of all the line is respected for its symbol, the mountain goat. Its dignity was totemic. A monumental rendering of this goat logo was painted on the Ballard end of the bridge’s massive counterweight.

As noted above with illustrations illustrating this week’s primary feature, the old mainline of the G.N. used to cross from Interbay into Ballard on a long curving bridge which spanned Salmon Bay near where the 15th Avenue auto bridge now crosses the ship canal. The bascule bridge was built in 1913-14 in part to avoid that trip along the shingle mill-congested Ballard waterfront. But it was also constructed to meet the inevitable demands of the Hiram S. Chittenden Government Locks. This was a bridge you could quickly open to let the big ships in and out of the new, in 1916, fresh water harbor behind the locks.  The bridge was left open for the convenience of shipping, for it could be quickly closed for any train.

Turner’s photographs are but two of his many picturesque records of this Salmon Bay passage. He lived in Ballard nearby the locks on 24th Ave­nue NW.  If I remember correctly (close enough) these and three other James A. Turner perspectives on the Salmon Bay bridge appeared originally in Warren Wing’s book, A Northwest Rail Pictorial.

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A contemporary photograph of the Chittenden Locks taken from the same prospect as the historical would have required a roost in one of the upper limbs of the trees that landscape the terraced hill that ascends from the locks to the English Gardens. (Historical photo courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers)

“DEWATERED”

(First appeared in Pacific, June 27, 2004))

In the descriptive and yet homely parlance of hydraulics the historical photograph reveals what Army Corp of Engineers called the “dewatered pit” of the ship canal locks at Ballard. In the six years required to build the locks – from breaking the ground in 1911 to the dedication in 1917 – this photograph was taken near the end of the first year, in the fall of 1912.

That the historical photographer from the Curtis and Miller studio stood on higher ground than I did for the “now” is evident from the elevation of the Magnolia side on the right. The “then” looks both across and down on the locks, the “now” merely across it. Why?

The dry pit is considerably wider than the combined big and small locks because the excavation cut well into the bank on the north side of the locks. Much of the mechanicals for opening the big lock’s gates are hidden in the hill that was reconstituted and shaped with terraces in the summer of 1915 once the concrete forms for the locks took their now familiar shape at what is by someone’s calculation the second most popular tourist destination in Seattle. (What then is first?)

Most of the temporary dirt cofferdam, upper-right, that separated the construction site from the temporary channel was removed in the fall of 1915 after the greats gates to the locks were closed. Next, on the second of February 1916 the locks were deliberately flooded and the doors opened to permit commuters to make emergency commutes to downtown Seattle by boat when the “Big Snow” (the second deepest in the history of the city) shut down the trolleys.

The locks were left open for tides and traffic while the damn was constructed to join the locks to the Magnolia side. With the link completed the doors were again shut and Salmon Bay was allowed to fill with fresh water to the level of Lake Union in July 1916. The small lock began working later in the month and on Aug 3, 1916 the first vessels (both from the Army Corp fleet) were lifted in the big lock. The formal opening followed months later on July 4, 1917.

In preparation for the 1916 flooding of Salmon Bay behind the locks Ballard’s waterfront of mostly mills and boat works was measured for the changes.

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Above and below: After considering Shilsholia, which sounds similar to the native name for this waterway and means “threading the bead,” Lawtonwood got its name by vote of its residents in 1925. (Historical view courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry) In order to see over the well-packed “East Lawtonwood” Jean Sherrard took his “now” from near the north end of 42nd Ave. Northwest, about 100 feet above the waterway.  Behind him in “West Lawtonwood” the homes are often much larger and the lawns too.

“Threading the Bead” Between Magnolia and Ballard

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec.19, 2010)

Carolyn Marr, the librarian at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) and an authority of the photographer Anders Wilse’s years in Seattle, thinks that this his look east through the entrance to Salmon Bay – from Shilshole Bay – was probably taken in 1900.  That was Wilse’s last busy year in Seattle before he returned to Norway.  During his few years here Wilse received many commissions from businesses and the City of Seattle to do photographic surveys.  But why did he record this bucolic view over a Lawtonwood pasture with seven cows?

It was not long after Wilse recorded this view of the channel that the Army Corps started dredging it in preparation for the ship canal.  Throughout the 1890s smaller “lightening ships” hauled cut lumber from the many Ballard mills on Salmon Bay to the schooners anchored in deep water off of Shilshole Bay.  No vessels here, however.  The channel is near low tide.  You can make out the sand bars.

The home of Salmon Bay Charlie, a half-century resident here, can be found to the far right.  With irregular roof boards it may be mistaken for part of the shoreline.  Charley was one of the principal suppliers of salmon and clams to the resident pioneers on both sides of this channel.  Wilse gives us a good look across the tidewaters into a west Ballard that while clear-cut is still sparsely developed.  The Bryggers settled and developed that part of Ballard, and the few structures seen there may belong to them.

Librarian Marr finds two other related views in MOHAI’s Wilse collection. One looks in the opposite direction across the channel from Ballard, and the other is a close-up of Salmon Bay Charlie’s cedar-plank home.  Marr adds, “Wilse was interested in boats and waterways, as well as Indians.”

One last note: those may be Scheuerman cows.  The German immigrant Christian Scheuerman and his native wife Rebecca were Lawtonwood pioneers.  Settling here in 1870 they multiplied with 10 children.

(click to enlarge photos – sometimes TWICE!)

The 1922-23 construction of the Olympic Hotel lured photographers to First Hill to record its grand dimensions while also capturing the central business district’s north end.  By then it had assembled an impressive jumble of brick and terra cotta clad business blocks, much of it retail.  (There was no Smith Tower and no need for one.)

On the far right, at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Stewart Street, the darker bricks of the New Washington Hotel (1908), top the cluster of business blocks at the southern border of the Denny Regrade. Far left, the Olympic, “Seattle’s first elegant hotel” is getting topped-off sometime in the more verdant months of 1923.

Seattle’s “grand hotel” opened on Dec. 7th of that year, a Christmas gift to the city, and only a few weeks following the dedication on Sunday Sept. 23, of the glimmering terra cotta tiled Fourth Church of Christian Science. That classic sanctuary shows here far left – directly below the Olympic.  It was built one hundred and ten feet square, with 1300 seats in curving mahogany pews, and topped by a copper-covered dome, which helped with its great acoustics.

For his or her recording the historical photographer visited an upper floor of the then nearly new Virginia Mason Hospital (1920). For his “now,” Jean Sherrard went to the hospital’s roof and discovered that the church could be found – a mere corner of its dome. (We encourage you to keep looking for it.)

In 1999 Fourth Church received its new calling as Town Hall, which returns us to Jean Sherrard, our weekly “repeater.”

For seven years Jean has been hosting Act Theatre and Town Hall’s Christmas edition of the by now honored series titled Short Stories Live. The Hall started Jean out in the slightly smaller lower level hall, but his productions became so popular that he and his players were moved upstairs into Town Hall’s Great Hall, beneath the high dome.  And on this very Sunday afternoon beginning at 4pm, Jean and three others (including myself invited to represent amateurs) will be reading with a little ham, humbug and Ho-ho-ho, the program of short stories and music that Jean has titled (Another) Rogue’s Christmas.

WEB EXTRAS

A couple of years ago, in preparation for another of our Town Hall Christmas Follies, we took the following photo:

Before I ask Paul our ritual WebExtras question, let me hasten to invite one and all to join us for what promises to be a delightful afternoon. The Seattle actress (and legend) Megan Cole will be joining us; along with our musical guests, the amazing Pineola (Leslie Braly, John Owen, and Josh Woods). For more info, please visit Town Hall’s own website.

And now, Paul, back to blogland with my perennial question – anything to add?

Yes Jean, a few more attractions/features from the neighborhood beginning with one put up on this blog in 2009 and now repeated with some additions.

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Art Critic Sheila Farr describes George Tsutakawa’s fountain at 6th and Seneca as showing a “style that lends modernism with philosophical and formal elements of traditional Asian art, a combination that became emblematic of the Northwest school.” (Photo by Frank Shaw) 

NOW: The original hope that the Naramore Fountain would soften the environment of the Interstate-5 Freeway was later greatly extended with the construction of its neighbor, Freeway Park. For reference, the Exeter Apartments at 8th and Seneca can be seen upper-right in both the “now and then.” (Photo by Jean Sherrard) 

The “Fountain of Wisdom” is the name for the first fountain that Japanese-American sculptor George Tsutakawa built a half-century ago. The name was and still is appropriate for the fountain was sited beside swinging doors into Seattle Public Library’s main downtown branch.  In 1959 it was on the 5th Avenue side of the modern public library that replaced a half-century old stone Carnegie Library on the same block.  Five years ago this “first fountain” was moved one block to the new 4th Avenue entrance of the even “more modern” Koolhouse Library.

As the sculptor’s fortunes developed after 1959 his work at the library door might have also been called “ Tsutakawa’s fountain of fountains” for in the following 40 years he built about 70 more of them including the one shown here at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue and Seneca Street.  Named for Floyd Naramore, the architect who commissioned it, this fountain site was picked in part to soften the “edge of the freeway” especially here at Seneca where northbound traffic spilled into the Central Business District.

Photographer Frank Shaw was very good about dating his slides, and this record of late installation on the fountain, was snapped on June 10, 1967.  Tsutakawa is easily identified as the man steadying the ladder on the right.  Not knowing the others, I showed the slide to sculptor and friend Gerard Tsutakawa, George’s son, who identified the man on the ladder as Jack Uchida, the mechanical engineer “who did the hydraulics and structural engineering for every one of my fathers’ fountains.”

Gerard could not name the younger man with the hush puppies standing on one of the fountain’s petal-like pieces made sturdy from silicon bronze.  However, now after this “story” has been “up” for two days, Pat Lind has written to identify the slender helper on the left. Lind writes, “The young man in the ‘then’ photo is Neil Lind, a UW student of Professor George Tsutakawa at the time, who helped install the fountain.  Neil Lind graduated from the  UW and taught art for 32 years at Mercer Island Junior High and Mercer Island Hight School until his retirement.  His favorite professor was George Tsutakawa.”

When shown Jean Sherrard’s contemporary recording of the working fountain Gerard smiled but then looked to the top and frowned.   He discovered that the tallest points of its sculptured crown had been bent down.  A vandal had climbed the fountain.  Gerard noted, “That’s got to be corrected.”

WEB EXTRAS

Jean writes: It is nigh impossible to capture the visual effects of a fountain in a photograph. I took the THEN photo used by The Times with a nearly two-second shutter speed to approximate the creamy flow of white water over the black metal of the sculpture.  But there’s another view, shot at 1/300s of a second, that freezes the individual drips and drops.

More particles than waves 

The actual fountain must lie somewhere between the two.

A wider view with on-ramp and red umbrella 

A FEW FRANK SHAW COLOR SLIDES – SEATTLE ART

We have made a quick search of the Frank Shaw collection – staying for now with the color – and come up with a few transparencies that record local “art in public places” most of it intended, but some of it found.  Most of these are early recordings of subjects that we suspect most readers know.  We will keep almost entirely to Shaw’s own terse captions written on the sides of these slides.  He wrote these for himself and consequently often he did not make note of the obvious.   He also typically wrote on the side of his Hasselblad slides the time of day, and both the F-stop and shutter speed he used in making the transparency.  He was disciplined in recording all this in the first moment after he snapped his shot.  Anything that we add to his notes we will “isolate” with brackets.  The first is Shaw’s own repeat of the Naramore fountain at 6th and Seneca.

The look into this neighborhood printed directly below looks northwest from a vacant lot in the block bounded by 6th and 7th Avenues and bordered on the north by Seneca Street.   That put the photographer somewhere near the center of the block seen above, from above.

THE VAN SICLEN APARTMENTS

(First appeared in Pacific, March 7, 1999)

Since the construction of Interstate 5 in the mid-1960s, the Van Siclen aka Jensonia Apartment House has been hidden behind the Eighth Avenue overpass. North of Seneca Street there are now two Eighth Avenues: the overpass and a portion of the original lower Eighth Avenue that still descends sharply to the front entrance of the Jensonia Apartments. That building’s name was changed in 1931. In the older view, the original name, Van Siclen Apartments, is signed across the top of its otherwise featureless south wall.

Architect William Doty Van Siclen left his practice in San Jose, Calif., in 1901 for a 10-year career in Seattle. Working both for others and on his own, he left a variety of structures that have survived. These include two prominent office buildings on Pike Street: the Seaboard Building at Fourth Avenue and the Eitel Building at the northwest corner of Second Avenue. Van Siclen also designed the San Remo apartments on Capitol Hill and the Paul C. Murphy residence in Laurelhurst.

Although Van Siden was also the developer, his apartment complex may have been his last Seattle undertaking. The Van Siclen first appears in the 1911 city directory, the year William, his wife Ida and their daughter Rena moved north again, this time to Vancouver, B.C.

In the 10 years that Van Siclen worked here, the city’s population more than doubled, making the construction of apartment houses a prudent thing to do. The 1911 city directory lists more than 350 apartment buildings; six years earlier it had listed only eight. Of the 70 names in the 1939 Jensonian directory, only three – the stenographer Elise Thornton; Mary Crager, a department manager for the Creditors Association; and Daisy Brunt, listed as a “singer” – lived there 10 years earlier. Only two of the 70 from 1938 (and none of the three from 1929) lived there in 1949.

OHAVETH SHOLEM SYNAGOGUE

(First appeared in Pacific, March 1, 1992)

Sometime in the Winter of 1906 an photographer visited the construction site of St. James Cathedral and recorded this rare panorama of the modest swell of Denny Hill. From this point the doomed hill seems to be intact, but actually its western slope, hidden here, has already been cut away to the east side of Second Avenue. Within a year the landmark Washington Hotel, which here dominates the horizon, upper left, will be razed, and this pleasing variation in the city’s topography will be much further along on its transformation from hill to regrade.

Of the scattering of turn-of-the-century landmarks seen in this wide-angle record, the onion-shaped tops of the two towers of Seattle’s first synagogue appear near the scene’s center. At the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street, Ohaveth Sholem, or Lovers of Peace, is only three blocks from the photographer’s roost at Ninth and Marion.

Ohaveth Sholem’s new sanctuary was dedicated Sept. 18, 1892. Bach’s preludes, played on the synagogue’s new organ, accompanied the ceremony. It was a sign of the congregation’s reformed tendencies – Orthodoxy would no have allowed the organ.

Although several of Seattle’s most capable citizens, including the banker Jacob Furth and once Seattle Mayor Bailey Gatzert, were members, the congregation was short-lived. The combination of economic difficulties lingering after the market crash of 1893 and the friction between newly arrived immigrants, who were often considerably more traditional than the more well-to-do and established members, spurred the congregation’s first rabbi, Aaron “Brown, to leave in 1896. Two weeks later the synagogue closed for good. Soon after, however, in 1899, many of the more liberal Ohaveth Sholem members formed Temple De Hirsch.

We will now conclude – nearly – with two more panoramas from First Hill that include within glimpses of Four Church aka Town Hall.  We leave it to you to figure out from what prospect they were recorded.  (Well . . . which one was shot from the Sorrento?)

 

(click to enlarge photos – often CLICK TWICE)

On Monday May 12, 1941 a brass band leading at least three floats moved from Jackson Street south on Maynard Avenue into Chinatown with a parade that trumpeted the life of Dong On Long, the then recently deceased president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Dong, who had lived and worked in the neighborhood for more than a half-century, was famed for his wisdom as an arbitrator in what the Times called “the Chinese colony.”

Here the first float in Dong’s parade, with the beloved citizen’s portrait framed by a memorial wreath and inscribed, “Father” in flowers, passes in front of the Atlas Theatre. Running inside are either “Men Without Souls,” a prison movie with a young Glenn Ford, or “Ebb Tide,” a south-seas adventure staring Seattle’s Francis Farmer.  The welcoming marquee allows that smoking is permitted and that the Atlas never closes.  When it first opened in 1918, Seisabura Mukai, advertised his Atlas as “the finest in the south district . . .Large Capacity, Clean and Cozy, catering a First-Class patronage.” By the year of Dong on Long’s parade it was as likely used as a dark retreat.

Early in 1942 S. Mukai learned that he would be interned with other Japanese Aliens, and so soon leased his Atlas to Burrell C. Johnson, who with second-run double features, kept the Atlas running and warm.  That December Johnson was booked for operating a crowded fire hazard.  On, we assume, a cold Jan 3, 1944, the police routed “scores” of sleepers from the Atlas at 5 in the morning.  The Times reported, “twenty were held for investigation of their draft status.”

James Matsuoka, president of the neighborhood’s community council, advised the city in 1950 that the Atlas created as “atmosphere” that promoted crime, and that its license should not be renewed.  The police described “trouble with pickpockets, some strong arm robberies . . . and prostitutes.”  Johnson pleaded that “It’s a difficult theatre to run – perhaps the hardest in the whole city . . . I’ve been trying to do the best I can.”  He then promptly remodeled the Atlas with new seats, lighting, and candy bar and painted it in mulberry and chartreuse.  That summer the theatre continued its atonement during the International District’s Seafair Carnival.  For the citywide celebration the Atlas showed films with all Filipino and Chinese casts.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Some and not none – but not much.  Sometimes – like this time – our weekend efforts will run out of time.  We will plop in only a few additions, some clippings, and some photographs but neither, I think, supported with former features – merely with whatever captions we can string from them now.  [It is almost one in the morning and we mean to be to bed by 3am.]

OTHER CLIPS

A FEW NEW OLD STREETSCAPES FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD

[The location and date are ordinarily typed and attached – with tape –  along the bottom of the negative.  CLICK TWICE to enlarge.]

MEANWHILE, on Long Beach . . .

(click to enlarge photos)

My hunch is that this smartly named Central Seattle Service Station opened in 1925.  It does not appear in the 1924 Polk City Directory – not as a garage or service station, both of which it was a year later.

One lot south of Marion Street on the east side of 6th Avenue – and now part of the I-5 pit – the station appears in a promotional photograph taken in the spring of 1925. The unidentified photographer aimed east from 5th Avenue through a block empty except for at a covey – or perhaps bevy – of white-uniformed nurses pointing at a big billboard that makes the hopeful, but as it turned out mistaken, claim that “On this Site will be Built Seattle General Hospital.”

Directly above the billboard the gleaming white service station appears at 812 Sixth Avenue, one lot south of Marion Street.  Its own covey of signs offer Associated Oil Products, Motormates Official Brake Service, Cycol products, parking, storage, repairs, cars washed and polished and free crank case service.  Located on the side of First Hill the incline was handy for coasting and starting cars with bad starters – a common problem then – on compression.)

My second hunch is that the close-up of the by then Standard Oil station printed here – and beside it the Crescent Apartments, a tenement row facing Columbia Street – was recorded sometime during the 1930s.  Cars were in need of more service then because so few new ones were being bought during the Great Depression.

Still there were lots of cars.  While the population of the previously booming Seattle slowed to a mere 22 percent in the 15 years between 1922 and 1937, the number of motor vehicle increased then by 211 percent.  Then in 1941 more than 50,000 new residents migrated to Seattle’s busy home front for the USA’s first official year in the Second World War.  Boeing built a parking lot near its new Flying Fortress Plant 2 for 5,000 cars.  By then and back here in Central Seattle – and as just noted –  the block once hoping for a hospital had been parking cars for years.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

We shall try Jean, again with a few past  features from the neighborhood.  And we will lead with a detail from our helpful Baist Real Estate Map of 1912.

Then above: The city’s regarding forces reached 6th and Marion in 1914.  A municipal photographer recorded this view on June 24.  Soon after, the two structures left high here were lowered to the street. (courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)  Now below: The corner’s final “humiliation” came as a ditch dug and concrete-lined in the early 1960s for the Seattle Freeway section of Interstate-5. (Photo by Jean Sherrard)

JAMES & VIRGINIA McNAUGHT’S PROMINENCE

(First appeared recently in Pacific and here too, May 2, 2010)

In 1880 or 81 Joseph and Virginia McNaught began building their home at the southeast corner of Marion Street and Sixth Avenue. It sat on a high point – a knoll – that made it stand alone against the sky when viewed from the waterfront. The couple took some kidding about having moved so far east of town.

Soon after following his brother James to Seattle in 1875, Joseph drove a herd of cattle from the Willamette Valley to a beef-poor Seattle. With the profits he then returned east for a law degree and marriage to the good-humored Virginia.  She was known for her wit.  Returning to Seattle the McNaughts became one the city’s most entrepreneurial couples with investments in transportation, mining, shipbuilding, Palouse homesteads, and stockyards.

For much of the two square blocks between 6th and 7th, and Marion and Cherry – all of it part of the I-5 ditch now – First Hill was mostly no hill.  Parts of it even lost altitude before joining again the often steep climb east of 7th Avenue.  With the grading of 6th Avenue, first in 1890, the home was lowered a few feet.  That year it was also pivoted 90 degrees clockwise.  So what is seen here facing north at 603 Marion previously was facing west at 818 Sixth Ave.  The regrade of 1914, seen here, lowered the sites old prominence about two stories to the grade of this freshly bricked intersection.

By then the McNaughts were off in Oregon raising alfalfa hay and living in Hermiston, one of the two town sites they developed.  The other was Anacortes.  Virginia named Hermiston, and it includes a Joseph Avenue.

Following this 1914 regrade the old McNaught mansion was modified and expanded into the porches for eight apartments.  All the Victorian trim was either removed or lost behind new siding.  Through its last years it was joined with its big box neighbor on Marion as part of a sprawling Marion Hotel until sacrificed for the freeway.

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MADISON POPLARS – LOOKING EAST from SIXTH Ave.

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 17, 1985)

In 1910, Madison Street, where it climbs First Hill, was a fashionable strip bordered by better brick apartments and hotels. This stretch of Madison was also lined by what Sophie Frye Bass described as “the pride of Madison Street . . . the stately poplar trees made it the most attractive place in town.” She wrote this in her still engaging book “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.”

The strip was not only popular but populated. Madison was evolving into a vital city link. The two cable cars pictured in this early-century view up Madison from Sixth Avenue started running there in 1890 when the Madison Street Cable Railway first opened service up First Hill and Second Hill and through the forest to Madison Park on Lake Washington. The white sign hanging from the front of the closest car reads, “White City, Madison Park, Cool Place, Refreshments, Amusements.” White City was a short-lived promotion designed by the cable railway’s owners to attract riders onto the cars and out to the lake. White City failed in 1912, but by then the top attraction at the lake end of the line was not the park but the ferry slip and the ferry named after the 16th president of the United States: Lincoln.

Madison’s popular poplars did not survive into the 1930s, according to author Bass. The granddaughter of pioneer Arthur Denny lamented in her book that by then, the endearing trees “had given way protestingly to business.”

In 1940, Madison lamented another loss when its cable cars gave way to gasoline-powered buses. Then, 20 years later, the entire block pictured in the foreground of the historical scene gave way to the interstate freeway built in the early 1960s.

Madison Street was named for the county’s fifth president. Arthur Denny, while platting Seattle’s streets in alliterative pairs, named the street one block south of Madison “Marion” after a young brother, James Marion Denny. Arthur needed another “M.”

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Then Caption above:  Looking northwest across a bench in the rise of First Hill, ca. 1887. The photographer was probably one of three. George Moore, David Judkins or Theodore Peiser, were the local professionals then most likely to leave their studios and portrait work to point a camera northwest from near the corner of Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)   Jean’s repeat, below, looks from the western border of the Harborview Hospital campus near what was once the steep intersection of Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.

THE BENCH ON FIRST HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Independence Day, July 4th 2010)

Long ago when first I studied this look northwest across First Hill I was startled by its revelations of the hill’s topography.   The hill does not – or did not – as we imagine steadily climb from the waterfront to the east.  For instance, here Cherry Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues – the white picket fence that runs across the scene’s center marks the north side of that block – keeps a fairly flat grade and then where it intersects with Sixth Ave. defies all our modern expectations and dips to the east.

James Street, on the left, climbs First Hill between 5th and 6th Streets on an exposed timber trestle.  To the lower other (north) side of that bridge there was an about four-block pause between James and Columbia, Fifth and Seventh, in (or from) the steady climbing we expect of First Hill.  Now in these blocks the flat Seattle Freeway repeats this feature ironically.

There are enough clews here to pull an approximate date for this unsigned cityscape, which looks northwest from near Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.  It is most likely sometime during the winter of 1887-88.  The best clew is the Gothic spire atop the Methodist Episcopal Church far left of center. There is still construction scaffolding on the south side of the sanctuary, which was completed at the southeast corner of Marion and Third Ave. early in 1888.  On the far right horizon is the big box of Central School – it burned down in the Spring of 1888 – and to this side of it the McNaught big home sits at its original grade on the southeast corner of Marion and Sixth.

In its details this panorama is strewn with other pioneer landmarks including the Western House (the name is on the roof – see the market detail below) at the southeast corner of 6th and James.  It is the large L-shaped box below the scene’s center.  Built in 1881, it was finally named the Kalmar House after a new owner’s hometown in Sweden.  It survived until 1962 when, in what architect-preservationist Victor Steinbrueck called “an act of esthetic idiocy on the part of the city,” it was razed for the Freeway.

The above detail shows the roof crest sign reading “Western House” marked in red.  The view below, while similar to the one above is later – ca. 1890.   It is also photographed from a distance further south on Seventh Avenue.  The Western House, however, has stayed place, holding to its same footprint at the southeast corner of 6th and James, and it has added a new top story.  It appears right-of-center.  Above the Kalmar is the grand bulk of the Rainier Hotel, which is directly across 6th Avenue from the McNaught home.  It appears far right.  The photographer here was F.J. Haynes, the Northern Pacific Railroad’s official photographer (he had his own RR-car) during his first visit to Seattle following its “Great Fire of 1889.”

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KALMAR INN – Southeast Corner of JAMES & 6^th Avenue.

(First appeared in Pacific, April 13, 1986)

In 1962, when Seattle showed the world Century 21, the fair with a “forward thrust,” the late Victor Steinbrueck first published “Seattle Cityscape,” the sketchbook that was to become a local classic. One of Its most lovingly rendered pen-and-ink drawings was of the Hotel Kalmar. In the caption, Steinbrueck wrote: “The only remaining example of an early pioneer hotel is the old Kalmar Hotel at Sixth Avenue and James Street. With Its pumpkin· colored wooden siding end hand-sawn details, It has been e picturesque pert of Seattle’s personality.  Built In 1881, much of Seattle’s history has been viewed from Its wide veranda, but now It is being destroyed to make room for the freeway.”

And destroyed It was, in April of 1962, despite efforts of local preservationists. It was razed “In a rumble of wreckers, derricks end c1amshell loaders,” The Seattle Times reported. For more then 70 years the Kalmar had lived intimately next to a different rumble, one that was regular – the c1anglng struggle of the James Street cable cars as they gripped their way up and down the steep side of First Hill.

Leonard Brand, who with his sister Viola were the last managers and residents of the Kalmar, grew up with the constant noise. In fact, the cable cars had rocked young Leonard to sleep. He was only three months old when his parents moved into the old Michigan Hotel after purchasing and renaming it after his mother s hometown In Sweden.

This week’s scene was probably photographed for the Brands, who are seen posing on the veranda. Leonard is in his mother’s arms and Viola stands by. The Kalmar was the only home these children knew until they were forced by the Freeway to retire to West Seattle.

All attempts failed to save the landmark. Steinbrueck lamented in an article at the time: “When I go back now to many of these places, nothing is left . . . I have only my pictures.” And for now, all attempts to find Victor’s sketch of the Kalmar, have failed. We will either insert it or add an addendum later.  We have promised a few of those in the past – promises we may still keep when the objects of our desire fall into our laps.  Meanwhile, here follows Lawton Gowey’s 11th hour record of the Kalmar, photographed on Jan. 17, 1961.

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NOW and THEN Captions together. 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

(First featured in Pacific, Dec. 5, 2004)

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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A RON EDGE CODA

This from Ron, and most fitting.  Another aerial that looks directly onto the block and showing most of the landmarks of concern this week, including a still spiffy service station on 6th, the McNaught home, Central School and its annex and part of the row homes on Columbia too – those that anchor at its northeast corner with Sixth Ave.

We may use it again when we soon respond with “extras” to our Town Hall feature – on the 16th of this month – where, among other uses, we give a last minute reminder that that Sunday Jean’s Town Hall Christmas Stories are being produced – by Jean as “A Rogue’s Christmas” – its his seven year.  Now you know two weeks in advance – thanks to Ron and his aerial.   The show begins at 4pm Dec. the 16th – yes that Sunday!

We might also use Ron’s aerial again for our feature on the Rainier Club’s expansion, for there it is – the club – near the lower left corner.   And so on and thanks to Ron.   (Really click this one to enlarge.)

WEB EXTRAS

(click to enlarge photos)

Nancy Ishii (bottom row second from the left in Jean’s “now”) figures that this portrait of her family’s farm beside the Duwamish River dates from 1934 or ’35.  Appearing in both the “now” and “then” are one uncle, Masao, two aunts, Michi and Sally, and her father, Nobi Ishii.  In cap and tie, the about twelve-year-old Nobi stands at the center of the group of seven in the “then.”  About seventy-two years later he gets to sit – again at the center – in Jean’s repeat.  (We position them all in the captions.)

What seems like magic is what does NOT appear in either subject – the sprawling 1,776,000 square feet of Boeing Plant 2, nor any sign of the nearly 7000 B-17 bombers that were built there.   The Flying Fortress factory’s first 60,000 feet were covered in 1936, a year or so after the Japanese American farmers were posed standing in their carrot patch by Henry Miyake of the International District’s Takano Studio.  Recently, the Wing Luke Museum called on the community to help identify the subjects in their Miyake collection, and many startling discoveries, like this one, followed.

Nancy, a friend, called for some help in “refining” the location of the farm.  With the help of aerial photographs (see below), the Duwamish Waterway bridge to South Park – seen in both subjects – and some fine tuning from Boeing historian Michael Lombardi, Boeing site server, Mike Prittie and Boeing communicator, Kathleen Spicer, we managed to confidently return some of the extended Ishii family to their farm for Jean’s repeat.  Imagine, if you will, Michael, Mike, Kathleen and I, all huddled behind Jean and his camera on the asphalt tarmac that was once Boeing Plant 2, near its southwest corner, and in the Ishii carrot patch.

The Ishii’s rented their acres from Joe Desimone, the South Park Neapolitan immigrant farmer who was also the Pike Place Public Market’s benevolent landlord.  In 1940 with the Boeing factory sprawling towards the farm, Desimone helped the family keep their planted rows beside the Duwamish River, although relocated about one mile upstream.  However, their kindly landlord could not, we know, keep them farming after the shock of Pearl Harbor.

The fate of the Ishii family and their farm during World War Two and after is an often distressing story, but still one with many happy moments and helpful lessons.  If you like, you may follow more of this on dorpatsherrardlomont, the blog noted each week at the bottom of this feature.  This week both Nancy Ishii and I will elaborate.  Just as likely, we will add an addendum later following more gathering of family photos.

BLOG EXTRAS

Below, a few more photos of the Ishii family at Boeing field; the first being a portrait of the Ishii elders who appeared in the original THEN:

Hey Paul, I hear that you and Nancy have a lot to add – tell me it’s so!

Jean, I think so – ultimately.  While I’m adding a few related features from nearly ancient Pacifics, Nancy is also pulling and scanning a few photos of her dad mostly from the 40s and 50s.  They will be the last items I’ll add to this blog, although they will be placed here when we get them.

Nancy suggests that we also show some of the research photos that we arranged in our earliest attempts to place the farm.  She knew that it was somewhere south of – but near – Boeing Plant #2, the one at the east side of the bridge over the Duwamish River to South Park.  Since the farm came first, the plant was a surprise to the family.  As noted above, it was “near” indeed, for the B17 factory eventually took over their garden, farm house, and barn. Here then are a few of the photos that helped us fine-tune the farm.

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(Remembering now that this was composed in 1992.) Six of the surviving seven of Tameno Habu Kobata’s children revisited the site of the family’s flower shop, now spanned by the Interstate 5 freeway.  They are, below and from the left, Kimi Ishii, Louise Sakuma, Mary Shinbo, Rose Harrell, Jack Nabu and John Habu.  Two of the Tameno’s 22 grandchildren are also included – Linda Ishii, far left, and Nancy Ishii, kneeling.  Nancy Ishii is responsible for researching the family history.

CHERRY LAND FLORISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 2, 1992)

In the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, Cherry Land Florists grew from a small grocery store into one of the largest retail flower shops in the International District. These views were photographed in 1941.

Ten years earlier Tameno Kobata, her husband John, and their eight children – six from her first and deceased husband, Teiji Habu – moved into the storefront at 905 Jackson St. The flowers, which at first were kept behind the fruits and vegetables, eventually took over, and the Kobatas’ little food store became their Cherry Land.

The business was mostly the mother’s doing – the father helped support the enterprise by working a second job as a waiter at the Seattle Tennis Club. The family lived in cramped and often chaotic quarters behind a partition in the rear of the store. A barrel with water heated on a wood stove by fuel scrounged from the neighborhood was the family bath, and the living quarters’ few beds were shared with privacy provided only by blankets hung for partitions.

The oldest girls, Kako and Mary, soon became skilled flower arrangers, and the younger children helped de-thorn roses, fold corsage boxes and prepare ferns for wreaths – after they had completed their homework.

In the sidewalk scene (on top) Tameno Habu Kobata and her second son, John Habu, pose between the flower boxes. John, who left home in 1935 at the age of 14 to make his own way in Chicago, returned “amazed” in 1940 to find his family’s flower shop flourishing. Within a year, with his help knocking away walls, Cherry Land expanded to the entire building.

After Pearl Harbor, the business instantly withered. The fear and hysteria of the early days of World War II brought internment for the Habu-Kobata family and 125,000 other Japanese Americans.

At war’s end most of the family was back in Seattle. When their industrious mother, Tameno, died unexpectedly in 1948, sons John and Jack returned to Seattle for her funeral and stayed. In the years after her death Tameno’s many children started a variety of local businesses, including three flower shops – among them a Cherry Land Two.

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Above: The Japanese Buddhist Temple on the north side of Main Street east of 10th Ave.  The “now” scene below was scanned from the clipping used in Pacific when the feature was first published in 1992.  Like many other “now” scenes not shown with these repeats, it is somewhere nearby in “stacks of decades” but not near enough to be easily found.  The temple site, like much of this Profanity Hill neighborhood was developed into Yesler Terrace in 1940.  Although now 20-years past I remember well the anticipation of the children as they waited for me to shoot the picture.  Although Jean Sherrard was not there in 1992, he was many years earlier a resident of Yesler Terrace when he was a tot.  Many doctors-in-training, like Jean’s dad Don, moved with their families into Yesler Terrace during, at least, part of medical school.  For teaching purposes it was close to King County(now Harborview) Hospital.

JAPANESE BUDDHIST TEMPLE on MAIN STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, July 12, 1992)

When the Japanese Buddhists dedicated their first Seattle temple in 1908, the congregation was seven years old and yet there were nearly 500 members. Meeting at first in a rented house on Main Street, east of Sixth Avenue, the congregation built their temple four blocks east, on Main just east of Tenth.

The title for the property and the charter for the church were signed by two trusted Caucasian citizens because racist federal laws then prohibited citizenship and ownership of real property by Asian immigrants. This discrimination was compounded by the Alien Exclusion Act of 1924, which barred Japanese immigration to this country. The congregation continued to grow, however, with the families that were its members.

The temple was included in the old Profanity Hill neighborhood that was ultimately condemned to enable the construction of Yesler Terrace. The congregation then again built on Main Street – further east. In its last years, the wood-frame temple was regularly vandalized by patriots who mistook a Buddhist symbol over the temple’s front porch for the Nazi swastika.  (You can find the ancient design in the top photo used for this feature.  It is above the Temple front door.)

The congregation dedicated its present temple at 1427 S. Main on Oct. 4, 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor came two months later. Within hours, the congregation’s leaders were detained and the church plunged into turmoil. With the infamous Executive Order 9066, the temple was shut down as the West Coast Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese ancestry were interned. During the war, the temple basement was used for storage of the interns’ belongings; after the war, the church helped to resettle its members.

One temple event well-known to the greater community is the ·Bon Odori Festival. Printed directly above, the night scene of the costumed celebrants in front of the temple is from the 1932 Bon Odori, the first held at the temple. Since 1955 the community event has been included in Seafair. The public is invited to this year’s [1992] Bon Odori at the temple next weekend, July 18 and 19.

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COLLINS PLAYGROUND – 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, May 31, 1992)

The American playground movement reached Seattle in 1907 with the  development of a three-acre site between Washington and Main streets and 14th and 16th avenues. It was named Collins Playground, after John Collins, a former city mayor who died in 1903.

The site was chosen because of its surrounding rainbow of races, nationalities, and religions. Progressives of the time believed supervised play in well-appointed playgrounds would encourage creative and peaceful recreation among the races and sexes. The movement’s advocates were assertive about providing girls equal opportunities for physical culture.

The sloping Collins site was divided into three terraces. The lower level was dedicated to field athletics such as baseball, and the upper to basketball, tennis, handball and gymnastics. The middle level was reserved for younger children, and had a wading pool, swings, teeter-totters and sand boxes .

For nine days in the month of August 1909, Collins Playground was made a deposit station for the Seattle Public Library. Of the 465 books involved, 1,409 loans were made and the librarian, Gertrude Andrus, made sure that the children read them. She also read stories to a total of 340 children – in the sandbox. This, most likely, is Andrus with her back to the camera. The experiment was a success and the service continued.

In 1976 the Seattle Buddhist Church, which since 1941 has been directly across Main Street from this sandbox, purchased the playground and developed its middle level into Wisteria Plaza. The elegantly landscaped terrace features an arching bridge above a rock garden and, shown here at the sandbox site, a Tsurigane Doh or, roughly translated, a bell pergola.  [If I am not able to readably find my negative for this repeat from 1992, I will, again, scan the Pacific clipping and insert it.]

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With the construction of Interstate 5, Maynard Avenue north of Main Street was abandoned. Kobe Terrace Park, named for Seattle’s Japanese sister city, and the Danny Woo Community Garden have since been developed on the site. In the contemporary photo (copied, again, from the Times clipping), the athletic 82-year-old Lulu Kashiwagi has climbed upon the park’s gazebo or observation tower, which looks down the center of Maynard Street into the International District.

JAPANESE BAPTISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, May 24, 1992)

The Wing Luke Museum, 25 years old this year [1992], has mounted its most ambitious exhibit ever. Named for the decree that interned 120,000 mostly West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, Executive Order 9066 is an eloquent survey of a century of Japanese settlement on Puget Sound.

The view printed here of the Japanese Baptist Sunday School appears near the beginning of the museum’s fluently ordered space. Most of these children are Nisei (second-generation Japanese), U.S. citizens born here to immigrants. Many, perhaps most, of them will have had their own families when they were forced into internment 32 years after this scene was photographed.

This is the Sunday school class of 1910, or so speculates Lulu Kashiwagi, historian for the Japanese Baptist Church. Lulu’s mother, Misa Sakura, sits at far left. The baby propped on her lap is most likely Lulu – born that year. Lulu’s older sister Ruth is behind her, held in the arms of a family friend, Mrs. Mimbu. Three of Lulu’s brothers are also in the scene.

Seattle’s Japanese Baptists trace their origins to a night school conducted by their first pastor, Fukumatsu Okazaki, in the community’s first Japanese lodging house, and then in the basement of its first restaurant. This industry soon developed into a Japanese YMCA and in 1899 incorporated as a church. The Rev. Okazaki is pictured here, top center, holding the “J” card.

Churches were the most effective hosts for Japanese workers fresh off the boats. They helped the understandably anxious sojourners find lodging, steered them to suitable employment, conducted English-language classes and offered both the warmth and security of a caring group for immigrants who had left their traditionally strong family support behind them.

Here the Baptist’s Sunday School is posed on Maynard Street. The tower of the King County Courthouse on First Hill tops the Scene. In 1908 the Baptists were forced from their sanctuary at Jackson and Maynard Avenue by the Jackson Street regrade. Within two years they” moved into a second home, again off Maynard at 661 Washington St. This part of the International District is still predominantly Japanese.

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EVACUATION – MARCH 30, 1942

(First appeared in Pacific Sept. 5, 1999)

On Dec. 10, 1942 the Associated Press released a story headlined “Arrows of Fires Point to Seattle.” Later reports, either buried or not printed, noted that white farmers clearing land near Port Angeles started the fires. The result of this and other hysterical news stories following the bombing of Pearl Harbor was an incendiary to the imaginations of West Coast locals, many of whom fully expected Japanese planes to appear suddenly over Duwamish Head.

The bombs were dropped instead on the families of Japanese Americans, both aliens living here (Issei), often for decades, and their children born into American citizenship (Nisei). In “Seattle Transformed,” Richard Berner’s recently published history of Seattle in the 1940s, the author’s unadorned telling of these routinely tragic stories reveals their exceptionally personal dimension. Berner also details the “administrative” side of this moral collapse: the general abdication of democratic courage by public leaders in the name of “military necessity.”

Because of their proximity to the Bremerton Naval Yard, the 54 Japanese-American families farming on Bainbridge Island were the first local group uprooted. Here on March 30, 1942, their guarded line is led across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) to the train waiting to carry them to the arid isolation of Manzanar, Calif. (Camp Minidoka in southern Idaho – the eventual destination for the majority of the interned families from the Seattle area – was not yet ready.) Of course, neither the Italian nor German populations living along the Atlantic seaboard were evacuated en masse to whatever deserts might have been prepared for them in Ohio or Indiana.

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(click to enlarge photos)

For this week’s especially convivial “repeat” Jean Sherrard and I persuaded our friends, artists Joe Max Emminger and Julie Paschkis, to walk a block.  In what Jean described then as the “pearl-like light” of that late September Sunday, the married couple, with a few friends, stand side-by-side on 3^rd Ave. S. holding examples of their art taken moments earlier from the walls of the nearby Grover Thurston Gallery.  Julie and Joe had just concluded their joint show at the gallery with a potluck. Appropriately, the month-long exhibit was named “Feast.”

About 93 years earlier Grace Loudon McAdams posed with a few happy friends on the same 3^rd Ave sidewalk mid-block between Washington and Main Streets.  The storefronts are the same.  Her older brother Max took the photo, and Grace, third from the right, steadies Max’s cycle with her hand on its seat. While that ca.1919 day was equally sunny it was surely not as warm as our recent Indian summer – although the motorcycle is an Indian.

I first met Grace about thirty years ago.  She shared with me her brother’s albums, and the sportsman Max took lots of revealing photographs.  His camera recorded some of the best snapshots of his hometown’s sporting life: park visits, horse racing, circus parades, beach-life, back stage vaudeville and the semi-pro baseball team he managed. (If you care to visit, we have posted more of Max’s subjects on our blog, dorpatsherrardlomont.)

Returning to our friends on the sidewalk.  Everyone attending the Feast’s last day potluck choose their own piece of “Salty Dough Sculpture” hung from one of the gallery’s walls.  Two examples can be found in Jean’s “repeat.” Jean and I also picked our pieces of artful hardtack for we have long been delighted by the imaginative adventures shared in both Joe’s and Julie’s art. You can read about the show and see all the work – including the wall of “salty dough” – and even get a recipe for making the bread pieces on the show’s own blog.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes, again, Jean.  But may your first find some snaps of Joe and Julie’s show, or in that line of any show of theirs you have in your art horde (or mine).   Then I’ll pick up with three or four additional features from the neighborhood or to the “theme.”

Jean here again. I’ll add in a few thumbnails from several of Julie and Joe’s previous gallery shows starting in 2006.

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THE FLU – 1918

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 18, 1984)

During the last month of World War I, Seattle was under siege by a global force more deadly than bombers and tanks. The city was in the grip of la Grippe, or Spanish Flu. The 1918 global pandemic took twice as many lives as the Great War.

In Seattle, a young man at the University of Washington’s naval training station was the first to die. That was Wednesday, Oct. 2. By Saturday, Oct. 5 the alarming rise of disease and death prompted the city’s sometimes hysterical mayor, Ole Hanson, to react. According to a daily newspaper, the mayor “placed in effect the most drastic regulations to which the city has ever been subjected . . . the city forbids every form of public assemblage.”

On Saturday night the dance halls were closed, the theaters dark. On Sunday morning, church services were suspended and on Monday the school bells were silent. The front page of the Monday Post-Intelligencer announced, “Gloomy Sunday is Result of the Influenza Ban.” The law against assembling had had its ironic reversals. “There were aimless, peevish crowds that strolled up and down Second and Third avenues Sunday afternoon, sat in hotel lobbies and collected in doorways and on street comers. They talked about the war . . . but mostly they lambasted the mayor.”

Sunday’s toll was four dead; Monday’s eight. On Tuesday 401 new cases were reported; on Wednesday that tally climbed to 424. The siege continued and citizens were ordered to wear masks. Newspapers reported on a possible connection between the war and the disease: “Mrs. A.B. Priest says that the pandemic is the result of a wicked suggestion sent out by the Kaiser’s psychologists . . . it is German propaganda in its most subtle form.” On Oct. 21, 30 deaths were reported. The toll had peaked, the grip loosened.

On Armistice Day, Nov. 11, the ban of public gatherings and the order to wear masks were lifted. “Seattle need be masked no longer,” the P-I reported and added that “the order has been more or less of a farce as far as the masks are concerned.” That afternoon and evening, Seattle was one parading public assemblage of unmasked revelers celebrating the double victory over death by war and death by disease. Mrs. A.B. Priest no doubt noted the connection and felt confirmed.

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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.   Here Jean has handed the camera to me and taken one of the seven places on the porch.  At the bottom, all is revealed.

LAGRIPPE in WALLINGFORD

(First appeared in Pacific during the spring of 2007)

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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THE BACHELOR LIFE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 19, 1997)

The bachelor life of Max Loudon is revealed in the albums he carefully filled with snapshots he took of his many adventures. Included are records of joyful events: the spontaneous November 1918 Armistice Day celebrations on the streets of downtown, the arrival of the circus to the lower Queen Anne fields (now Seattle Center), and skating on Green Lake during the long freeze of 1916.

Born in Nebraska in 1881, Loudon dropped out of Omaha High School at the age of 15 and headed west to Seattle. Here his personable intelligence (aka charm) carried him through an assortment of vocational adventures including manager of a semi-professional baseball team, traveling superintendent for a grocery wholesaler in Montana, manager of the general store for a logging company in Yacolt, Wash., and a trip north to Nome, Alaska, seeking – what else? – gold. As revealed in his letters home, this last adventure soon turned hellishly cold when his steamer stuck in the ice for two weeks.

Here in Seattle, the young Loudon cut his commercial teeth working nine years for Schwabacher Bros. Wholesale Grocers. He became warehouse superintendent for the Grocetaria Stores, in charge of all departments. His salary – whopping for the time – was $150 a month. Enough, perhaps, to support his sporting life as an amateur boxer for the Seattle Athletic Club, an expert fencer, a medalist marksman and – at least from the evidence of his albums – a womanizer.

Loudon’s subjects here are two of a dozen or more Stewart and Holmes Drugstore employees he posed on the alley trestle that runs above the railroad tracks entering the southern end of the city’s railroad tunnel, below Fourth Avenue and Washington Street. Of all the distaff subjects gathered for his alley shoot, these were most preferred; he took several snapshots of both, together and separate. Loudon did not, unfortunately, identify either of them.

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5-CLUSTER STANDARDS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 9, 1994)

The most likely subject for this official photograph of the city’s Public Works Department is the street light. “Seattle’s cluster lighting system is one of the finest in existence,” the lighting department’s 1911 report said. “This design gives a beautiful effect of festoons of decorative lights along the sidewalks . . . The illumination, which is ample, is produced by using 50-watt tungsten lamps fed from a small transformer in the pole base.”

This pole transformer, a Seattle City Light innovation, was quickly adopted nationwide. It allowed use of low-voltage lamps that gave over 2,000 hours’ life. At the time of the 1911 report there were 1,631 poles lighting 25 miles of city streets; more than two-thirds were five-ball clusters like this one.

This view along Third Avenue South looks north across Main Street. The Seattle Fire Department’s headquarters is at the northwest corner, far left. The station’s third story was added in 1912, dating this photograph between that year and 1914, when construction began on the here not yet apparent City County building at Third and Jefferson.  (You will find it in many of the posing shots on third, at and near the top.)

The slice of the five-story sign just beyond the fire station is painted on the brick south wall of Stewart and Holmes Drug Company’s manufacturing headquarters, advertising its products and services, which roamed well beyond drugs to laundry and cannery supplies.

One block north on Third, on the southeast corner of its intersection with Washington Street, is the Union Hotel. This four-story structure has been recently renovated by the Downtown Emergency Service Center.

In 1928 the Third Avenue sidewalk south of Main Street was replaced by the pavement of Second Avenue, which was extended then to connect with the train depots on Jackson Street. (An displace of those changes recorded from the Smith Tower follows below.) The regrade also destroyed the fire department’s headquarters, which that year moved to its present location one block west on Main Street.

TWO VIEWS LOOKING SOUTH FROM THE SMITH TOWER – SHOWING THE CHANGES MADE FOR THE SECOND AVENUE EXTENSION, 1928-29.

[NOTE: Both views include – by arrangement – far left a glimpse of our sidewalk on the east side of 3rd Ave. S. between Washington and Main streets.  CLICK to ENLARGE!]

(click to enlarge photos)

Ten years before its speedy 1924 conversion into the Hollywood Tavern, this “English chateau restaurant and apartment hotel” opened in as the Northold Inn.  Sitting before their $1.00 table d’hote (a set menu with a fixed price) dinners, the guests attending its 1914 opening New Years Eve party were serenaded by George Hagstrom’s orchestra, and fussed over by the Inn’s gregarious manager, C.S. Colegrove.

The Northold and its English teatime environment was Colegrove’s inspiration.  He was also the manager of the Fraser-Paterson Department Store’s Tea Room. (It was next door, to the right, at the corner of University and Second Ave.) Judging by its own promotions, the new department store’s “refined luncheon resort” quickly became the favorite of Seattle women.”  Encouraged by the popularity of his tearoom, and with the “mind of an idealist,” Colegrove built this deceptively big English ringer in an “early craftsman style” and then “flooded it with good cheer, the warmth of a massive fireplace, big black leather settees and deep carpets.”  And more tea.

The quick change of ‘24 from Northold to Hollywood was done with the founder Colegrove’s blessings.  “It will be continued along exactly the same lines.” (Curiously, the tavern was but one part of a “greater Hollywood” that included Hollywood Farm, which claimed “one of the greatest herds of pure-bred Holstein cows in the country.”) The tavern’s advertised prices crashed with the Great Depression. A 1932 ad promises “Talk of the town full course dinners served every day – for 50 cents.”  Neil McMillan, the tavern’s owner, died early in 1937, the year of our W.P.A. tax photo.  A “for rent” sign is posted above the scrawl of the photograph’s tax information.  Hollywood Tavern has gone dark.

During WW2 the persevering landmark was mobilized first as a U.S.O. girls dormitory and then after the war as the American Legion’s 40 et 8 Club headquarters. As such it served the Legion for more years than it was an Inn and Tavern combined.  In 1975 food service returned with a feudal plan.  In an unwitting parody of founder C.S. Colegrove’s English tea-room, the new Mediaeval Inn resembled a feudal banqueting hall in which costumed “wenches” served mead (honey wine), Cornish game hens, potatoes and crusty bread while minstrels sang ballads and told bawdy jokes. The presiding Lord allowed customers to eat with a knife only, unless they sang for a fork.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, beside the few clips and adverts sprinkled about the main text above, a few neighborly subjects used in past Pacific features.   First the Walker Building, which was on the same block as the Northold Inn, at Second Ave., its west end.

The streaked lights from the headlights of passing cars in the exquisite night shot of Benaroya Hall by photographer James Fred Housel seem to repeat the trolley tracks in the 1904 photograph of the Walker Building at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and University Street. (Historical photo courtesy of MUSEUM of HISTORY and INDUSTRY / Contemporary photo by James Fred Housel, Courtesy of Seattle Symphony Orchestra.)

MUSICAL CORNER

(Appears in Pacific in 2004)

When it was razed in the late 1980s the brick and stone Walker Building at the northeast corner of University Street and 2nd Avenue was nearly as old as the 20th Century.   Named for Cyrus Walker, the famed lumberman, it was completed in 1903 so the construction noise most likely did not interrupted the first performance of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra which was late in the same year, the 29th of December.  The performance space was itself new: Christiansen Hall in the then nearly new Arcade Building directly across Second Avenue.

The first Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO) was a 24-instrument ensemble led by the violinist/conductor Harry West.  Probably most of the players also taught their instruments to enthused youth – and students were often excited to learn given the great importance then of live music.  Most likely many of the players also performed in one or more of the theatre and restaurant orchestras that then stocked the energetic Seattle music scene.  So there were certainly many good players among the first twenty-four under West and the SSO must of sounded quite fine its first night.

It is one of those most common of ironies – those of place – that the orchestra would eventually wind up in Benaroya Hall, its first permanent home directly across Second Avenue , 95 years after West first raised his baton.  This season, of course, the SSO celebrated its centennial at Benaroya Hall, but also at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, during its four-city East coast Centennial Tour this past spring.

Readers who known their downtown will remember what a strange corner this was in the few years between the razing of the Walker and the raising of Benaroya.  Plans for a 60-floor scraper as part of a proposed Marathon Block were abandoned because of the massive overbuilding of office space at the time.  In its place a wide sward was planted, and near its green center a temporary entrance to the bus tunnel resembled an opening to a civil defense bunker.  (Buried in my daily snaps are more than one recording of this – somewhere.)

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UNIVERSITY STREET – LOOKING WEST from 3^rd AVE.

(First appeared in Pacific, June 2, 1991)

There’s nothing cosmetic about this cityscape. The·photographer has recorded a candid capture of what University·Street west from Third Avenue looked like at the turn of the century. Less regard is given the architecture. (The modest homes on the north side of the street – to the right – where the Northold Inn was later raised appear in the early – penultimate – look up University Street across Second Avenue.)

While not dominating the scene, the Hotel Brooklyn, on the left, may look familiar. It is one of the few uptown (that is, north of Pioneer Square) 19th-century brick piles that survive. The hotel was completed in 1889, the year of the city’s “Great Fire.”

Construction on the Arlington Hotel also began before the tower, and its foundation helped stop the northerly spread of the flames along the waterfront.  The Arlington tower shows here just to the right of the Brooklyn and at the southwest corner of First Avenue and University Street, the site now for Harbor Steps.

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Above: Author-editor Hall Will photographed this parade scene looking south on Third Avenue from Union Street sometime between the Spring of 1947 and mid-1949 when the onset of polio forced him to put aside his photography.  (Photo courtesy of Hal and Shirley Will)  Below: The relatively recent construction of Benaroya Hall replaced a full block of mostly brick low and mid-rise commercial buildings, which in the early 20th century had taken the places of pioneer structures, including a few clapboard homes like the Charles Denny Home at the southwest corner of Third and Union, printer here at the bottom of this “now-then.”

HAL WILL’S PARADE

(Appeared in Pacific in 2008)

In February 1947, only a few months after Hal Will returned from his WW2 duty as a 20 year old army tug boat captain in the Philippines, he enrolled in the charter classes of the Northwest Institute of Photography.   The new school’s labs and classrooms were in the University Building, seen here in the “then” at the northwest corner of 3rd Avenue and University Street, left of center.

Hal took this photograph of American Legion members parading on Third Avenue sometime after enrolling and before he was inflicted in 1949 at the age of 23 with a life-long crippling case of polio.

Will’s photograph is spread over two pages in the Magnolia Historical Society’s most recent production, “Magnolia, Making More Memories.”  Hall is one of the about forty authors that were involved in the creation of this hefty nearly 400-page book.  His essay “Early Railroad Days: Interbay” shines with both his wit and his own photographs.  And his second contribution,  “Bad Judgment in Cebu”, is a wise and droll recounting of his army life in the Philippines.

In the maritime and heritage communities Hal Will is famous hereabouts as the founder and editor of the Sea Chest, a well-wrought periodical associated with the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society.  (The PSMHS was founded in 1948, or about the time Hal recorded this view with his 4×5 inch view camera.)  In the week before this last Christmas and after a short illness the erudite 81-year-old died.  Many others and I will miss his good wit, and frequent contributions to community history.

Fortunately, his fine writing – and he wrote a lot – can still be repeatedly enjoyed.  And so can our memory of him.

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DENNY HILL & HOTEL From Near 3rd & UNIVERSITY

(First appeared in Pacific, April 28, 1985.)

Luther Griffith is one of Seattle’s rarely remembered capitalists. In the 1890s he was out to sell street railways. For promotion purposes, Griffith put together a photo album featuring the work of pioneer photographer Frank LaRoche, a name that’s easy to remember because he wrote it on his negatives.  It’s not clear whether LaRoche recorded the photos on assignment for Griffith, or if the entrepreneur focused on the photographer’s work because it served his purpose so well. Griffith’s album shows off a Seattle that’s progressive, forward thinking and up to date.

The subject here is one example from the album. Taken in 1891, it flaunts one of early Seattle’s main urban symbols. There looming above the city in the distant half-haze is the elegant bulk of the Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. LaRoche must have set his tripod on the dirt of Third Avenue, one hundred yards of so south of Union Street, but he was safe. Compared to the modern race of internal combustion that is’ now Third, in 1891 it was a pleasantly relaxed but dusty grade where more than one horse and buggy (on the right) could casually park facing the wrong way on the two-way street.

The second tower in this scene (left of center) sits atop the brick Burke Block at the northwest corner of Third and Union. On the main floor the plumber and steam fitter A.F. Schlump did his business. Across Union is a mansion-sized home, a vestige of the old Single-family neighborhood. By 1891, this 1300 block of Third Avenue between University and Union streets was packed with diverse commerce. There was a dressmaker, a hairdresser, three rooming houses, a music teacher, a mustard manufacturer, a retail druggist, a wholesale confectioner, two tobacconists, a second-hand store, a restaurant, a sewing machine store and Mrs. Cox, who listed herself in the 1891 Polk Business Directory as simply, “artist.”

Also, at the Union Street end of this block was the Plummer Building, the two-story clapboard with the three gables on the photo’s right. This building housed more retailers plus a saloon and the Seattle Undertakers.

Ten years later, the progress on Third Avenue got so intense the Plummer Building was picked up and moved two blocks north to Pine Street to make way for the Federal Post Office. The post office is still on the Union Street side and pictured on the right of the “now” photo [when we once more bring it to light].

Beginning in 1906, Third Avenue’s forward-look started sighting through Denny Hill, which in the next four years would be nearly leveled as far east as 5^th Avenue allowing the street to pass through the Denny Regrade with barely a rise. The grand hotel, LaRoche’s subject and Griffith’s symbol, was razed with the hill.

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MACKINTOSH MANSE: THIRD & UNIVERSITY – Southeast Corner

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 24, 1988)

[As the first line hints, the below was first composed while Third Ave. was being tunneled for the transit.] The current commotion along and below Third Avenue is a mere inconvenience compared with the upheavals that accompanied the 1906-07 regrading on the downtown street.  Imagine having to live next door to such disarray. That was the fate Angus and Lizzie Mackintosh, who built the mansion on the right at the southeast comer of Third Avenue and University Street. Not only did the work disrupt their view and domestic quietude, it left their home perched more than twenty feet higher than the regarded street.

Angus, a native of Ontario, and Lizzie, one of the pioneering “Mercer Girls” who came here in 1866 when the male-female ratio was 9-to-l, met while Lizzie was working as the first woman enrolling clerk in the state’s House of Representatives in Olympia. Working to promote lumber mills, railroads and banks, the couple had built enough of a nest egg to finance construction of the mansion in 1887.

The stately home had seven rooms downstairs, five upstairs and three quarters for servants under the roof. In 1907, soon after the regrade was completed, Bonney-Watson funeral directors, moved into the mansion.  As a sign that death has no end, the mortician was the second-longest continuously operating business in Seattle.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was first until its own recent passing. In 1928 the Northern Life Tower (later renamed the Seattle Tower), which many still consider the most beautiful office building in Seattle, was erected at the site.

(click to enlarge photos)

The Arabian, at 7610 Aurora Ave. N., opened in 1925, with still some silent films and sometimes on stage eccentric uses that were a vestige of vaudeville.  When those performing live were also north end neighbors they could fill the seats.   For instance . . .

On October 21, 1926 W. O. Hammer, accompanied by a brass band and a motorcar parade, pushed Tom Egan, secretary of the West Green Lake Commercial Club, in a wheelbarrow up Aurora Ave to the stage of the Arabian Theatre.  Hammer had bet Egan that Jack Dempsey would keep his heavy weight crown.  He was wrong.  Gene Tunney won and Hammer paid before his neighbors.

The city’s new light standards were installed on Aurora in the spring of 1927 and celebrated with a “Light-Bearers Parade” to the Arabian Theatre.  Our subject from 1925 or ‘26 is too early to include them, and Jean’s “now” too late as well.  The Seattle Times clip, below, however shows one.  (Click it TWICE, to enlarge.)

On Jan. 15, 1928 while the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was performing on the piano for members of the Pro Music Society at the Olympic Hotel, the Patricia Perry School of the Dance was on the Arabian stage with a variety of dances as prologue to the motion picture “The Fair Co-ed.”  (I knew Patricia Perry, but not Bela Bartok.)

During the fall of 1928 the Arabian Theatre ran “beside” Clara Bow’s picture “Ladies of the Mob” an on-stage contest in the art of dancing the then popular Varsity Drag.  “Here is the drag, see how it goes, Down on the heels, up on the toes.  That’s the way to do the Varsity Drag.”  For another kind of “drag,” the following April 9 and 10, sixty “substantial business and professional men” – Masons all – dressed and deported like Broadway chorus girls on the Arabian stage for a benefit show they named “Vampin Babies Frolic.”

Mabel Randall, the Arabian’s last manager, also gave its stage to neighborhood extras, like the theatre parties and benefit style shows that were matched with appropriate films.  The Arabian screen went dark in 1954, but its stagecraft was resurrected late in 1955 when evangelist John H. Will’s Northwest Salvation and Healing Campaign, advertised its opening services for Dec. 11 at the “Old Arabian Theatre.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yes Jean as is our way a few more photos and features from the neighborhood. First a look north thru the same scene as at the top but more than a quarter century later – early in the silent 1950s – and shot from on high by a photographer from the city’s public works department.   He or she was probably perched in a cherry picker or platform made for checking utilities rather than from a big ten-footer pole, like your own.

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PAVED SPEEDWAY – AURORA at 84^th (Looking South) 1931

(First appeared in Pacific, March 31, 1991)

In 1931, Aurora Avenue was a calm thoroughfare, where cars could safely

park along its border and bakeries were more common than cut-rate motels. But the billboards (then promoting sliced bread) were a premonition of things to come for the North End street.

When state officials decided to direct a high bridge over the Lake Washington Ship Canal north toward Aurora Avenue, the byway would begin its transformation into a primary strip of highway. Its metamorphosis was assured in 1933, when the new speedway was cut through Woodland Park, despite spirited protests led by The Times.

Albert and Birdie Collier witnessed the change. They operated the Delicious Bakery  at 8320 Aurora Ave. N., left of center, and lived just across Aurora at 938 83rd St. Each year, they saw more passing cars and had to Increase their caution crossing the street.

Quickly, Aurora was becoming the busiest North End arterial. In a two-month period in 1937, more than 400 people were arrested for traffic violations on the speedway. When a meeting was called to discuss the problem, Harry Sutton, chief of the Police Department’s Traffic Violations Bureau, lamented, “Give a man a chance to drive 35 miles an hour under the law and he will drive 55 miles an hour.”

WOODLAND STUMPS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 31, 1993)

Looking north through the center of Woodland Park across a-field of stumps on May 17, 1932, by a photographer from the Seattle Engineering Department. Three days shy of one year later, the first traffic rolled on what its enthusiasts called the “Great Aurora Highway.”

When an ordinance permitting the park’s bifurcation was passed by the Seattle City Council over the objections of the city’s park board, a front-page battle to save the park ensued. The leading advocate of this preservation and opponent of “park vandalism” was The Seattle Times.

“It is proposed,'” The Times editors wrote, “to build an 8,800-foot speedway 106 feet wide over a hill 293 feet high, and through 2,400 feet of the central portion of Woodland Park to save 25 seconds of time required to drive the 9,850 feet by way of Stone Way.” The Times figured the difference was ‘ about the length of three city blocks, and also noted that 107 homes would be sacrificed to the thruway.

Much earlier, When the Olmstead brothers were designing the city’s boulevards and parks, they included West Green Lake Way, connected with Stone Way, as the principal route for north-south traffic to circumvent Woodland Park. The landscapers proposed that the undeveloped center of Woodland Park be saved for, among other things, the expansion of the park’s zoological garden. In the meantime the Olmsteads recommended the old-growth forest in the park’s undeveloped interior be preserved.

Here are the stumps. Obviously, the campaign to save the park failed. The highway was approved by public vote. Answering an imaginary commuter’s question, “What will I get out of the Aurora thruway?” The Times answered, “A reminder at least twice a day that you sacrificed Woodland Park.”

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TWIN T-P’s 70th

[The feature that follows were first published in 2007 and made note then of its 70th birthday]

In the spring of 1937 the shining steel towers of the Twin T-Ps were lifted above Aurora Avenue.  They were strategically set across this speedway section of Highway 99 from the east shore of Green Lake. The Teepee, of course, is a form etched in the imagination of every American child and so this fanciful architectural corn (or maize) could be expected to lure a few matured kids called motorists off the highway.

Once inside the shiny example of Native American housing – the pointed and portable type used by the plains Indians – visitors were suddenly transported to the Northwest coast, for the decorations were done not on plains motifs but rather on designs like those we associate with totem poles, long houses, masks and spirit boxes.

Let’s imagine that almost everyone has eaten some of the regular American food at the T-Ps.  I did once and ran into my old friends Walt Crowley and Marie McGaffrey who live nearby.  If memory serves, they were enjoying prime rib.  Walt would later write twice about the Twin T-P’s for historylink.org, the web site of state history he directs.  The first essay (#2890) is a good summary of the exceptional story of this symmetrical piece of nutritious kitsch.  Walt’s second essay (#3719) is a lament following the July 31, 2001 early morning bulldozing of the landmark.   (If you so use the computer do it now – please.)

Jean has a more recent recording of this corner fill with what seems to be a new Condo.  I’ll urge him to find and insert it.  My black-white look dates from 2007.

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GREEN LAKE’S NORTHWEST SWIMMING BEACH

In 1921, Seattle’s health department closed Green Lake to swimmers. The seven-foot lowering of the lake 10 years earlier had accelerated its natural tendency to become a swamp. In 1922, runoff from the nearby Green Lake and Maple Leaf reservoirs was diverted into the lake to freshen it. The south end of the lake became especially stagnant with aromatic algae. So, also in 1922, the Seattle Parks Department carefully disassembled its bathhouse and moved it from the southwest (Woodland Park) corner of the lake one mile north to the crowded beach scene recorded here by Asahel Curtis.

The new beach was sanded and made sporting with a couple of large off-shore rafts, one with a high-dive platform. With this, the park department created a decent beach for swimmers. The more-or-less unisex swim gear of the time did not encourage sunbathing and, anyway, a “good tan” was a carcinogenic desire not yet widely cultivated.

Soon after the swimmers moved north, however, their end of the lake developed the same algae soup that gave the lake its name. By 1925 the beach was closed again, and Dr. E.T. Hanley of the city’s health department made the radical proposal that Green Lake be drained so that the muck on its 20,000-year-old bottom might be scraped away. After three years of tests and debates, Hanley’s plan was abandoned, as well as another drastic proposal that would have transformed Green Lake into a salt lake, with water pumped in from Elliott Bay.

Rather, in 1928, temporary relief was engineered by a combination of chlorinating the Licton Springs water that fed the lake; sprinkling the lake’s surface with copper sulfate, an algae retardant, and increasing the feed of fresh water from the Green Lake reservoir’s runoff.

At this beach, 1928 was also a big year for changes ashore. With the 1927-to-1928 construction of the brick bathhouse the shoreline was terraced with a long line of gracefully curving concrete steps. The same modern mores that exposed the skin disposed of the need for bathhouses. The bathhouse, which in its first year, 1928, serviced 53,000 people, was converted in 1970 into a 130-seat theater. Now bathers come to the beach in their swim suits.  Given the recurring restraint of the “Green Lake Itch,” many of them stay on the beach.

Above: a look at the beach showing raft with diving tower and Green Lake Primary School on the far shore.  Below: a look back to shore from the diving tower.

The view looks south from near the northwest “corner” of the lake. The still impressive timber of Woodland Park marks most of the horizon. On the far left is the profile of Lincoln High School and its tall chimney. This is another Price photo.

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McAllister’s Bikes where Wiwona meets Aurora.

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(click to enlarge photos)

The intended subject here is almost surely the obvious one: two blocks of grass. From the intersection of 4th Avenue, on the right, and Harrison Street (its sidewalk) on the left, the view looks north-northwest to a Queen Anne Hill horizon.

One long block away, and near the scene’s center, rests the Troy Laundry, a two-story factory of suds at the northeast corner of Nob Hill Avenue and Republican Street. For Pacific readers who remember last week’s Belgian Waffles, the laundry is only one block east (here to the right) of where that Century 21 confectionary was built in 1962.  (In the now shot the laundry would be in the high seats of the High School Stadium’s north side seating)

Fred Cruger, our reliable motorcar collector-historian, has helped us date this scene.  With the aid of a blow-up, Fred studied the Fords parked near the laundry, and recommends “1925 or 26.”  With those years in hand we imagine that the historical photographer understood that her or his record might well prove to be the last unobstructed look thru David and Louisa Denny’s swale.  It was here that those first pioneers cultivated their garden, one large enough to help feed the few hundred citizens living nearby in a village – Seattle – distinguished by Puget Sound’s first steam sawmill.

Bertha Landes, Seattle’s first and so far only women mayor, was a powerful booster of what our unnamed photographer surely knew was coming: a Civic Field, Auditorium and Arena.  Elected in 1926 before the construction started, Her Honor was out of office in 1928 weeks before her civic center was dedicated.  (Without reelection, Mayoral terms then ran a mere two years.)

In altered forms Seattle’s cultural center of 1928 survives. Civic Field got the first revision, a 1947-48 remodel into the concrete stadium for mostly high school football and soccer Jean has “peeked into” with his repeat.  Recruiting his trusty ten-foot-pole Jean shot blind over a stadium wall.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yup Jean we will take a few looks into the pasture-potlatch acres and their transformations.  We may note as well that we have visited Seattle Center in past blog contributions, and hope that readers will use the keyword search available to call them back.  For  starters try “auditorium,” “Seattle Center,” “Century 21,” “Bumbershoot,” “David Denny,” “Food Circus,” “Space Needle,” “Coliseum,” and, we expect, many other keys.

We’ll next sample three looks south from the southern slope of Queen Anne Hill to the subject. The first is dated loosely “in the 1890s,” and next with certainty 1900, and the last from late in 1960.

Next, for comparison, a 1928 look from northwest from the south stands to the west end of Civic Field as a large crew was preparing its turf, followed by a Century 21 shot by Frank Shaw, which looks in the same direction, but not from the Civic Field stands but from the south stands of Memorial Stadium during Century 21.  For Shaw the scheduled event is a high wire act.

Century 21 was anticipated by the “Festival of the West.”  This sketch below appeared in The Times for Dec. 16, 1956 with a generous foot of copy beside it.  The short caption explained that the “World Fair Commission recommend (that is) be held in Seattle in 1960 and 1961.  Festival buildings would be grouped at Seattle’s Civic Center.  In addition, a monument symbolic of the festival would be erected on Duwamish Head.  Also planned is an amusement zone on tidelands west of Duwamish Head.” Rather than a Space Needle, the lights of Alki Point will do, and they are turned on at the top of this festive fantasy.  It is curious and pleasing how often the city’s enthusiasts for festivals & fun have turned their longing eyes to Duwamish Head and the tidelands beneath it. “]

We conclude with a piece of ephemera from Ron Edge’s collection.  It is a lovely green booklet celebrating Seattle’s then new civic center – the one built on David and Louisa Denny’s pasture in 1927-28 – and so the foundation for both Century 21 in 1962 and the Seattle Center campus that followed it.

(Mouse the Green Cover to call forth the full booklet.)

(please click to enlarge photos)

Opened in 1925 with 42 units – a mix of two and three room apartments, all of them appointed with Murphy In-A-Dor Beds – the Pontius Court Apartments were named for the pioneer family that first platted and sold most of the land that ascends from the lowlands of the Cascade neighborhood to the highlands of Capitol Hill.

Built with six floors on the side of the hill, the Eastlake Improvement Company noted that most of the 98 rooms in its new brick apartment building came with views.  Besides the sunsets over the Olympic Mountains, the renters looked down upon a blue-collar neighborhood accompanied by the recurring chorus of children at play.  Of its many churches at least three were Lutheran, and these steeples were mixed with laundries around the neighborhood’s one big primary school after which it was somewhat puzzlingly named.  With Capitol Hill in the way, even from the top floor of the Cascade School, one could not see its eponymous mountains to the east.

The grandest and most invigorating way to move between these contrasting neighborhoods was by way of the Republican Hill Climb, showing itself here on the right.  Built in 1910, the climb went through three artfully designed half-block sections that complimented the distinguished homes to its sides.  A half-century later two-thirds of the stairway – the part between Eastlake and Melrose Avenues – was demolished for the Seattle Freeway, effectively breaking in two the greater Pontius neighborhood.

Of course the freeway took the Pontius Court too.  For its last listing in the Times classifieds, the apartment repeated some of its old sales song about a brick building with an elevator and “nicely furnished 2 room apartments” with views for – at the end – $65 a month.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes JEAN, beginning with the first three photos directly below.  Each is a link to former stories printed here that include subjects related to the Cascade neighborhood.  Ron Edge did the linking and he also pulled for us the most relevant of the several ca. 1960-61 aerials he has of the future path of the Seattle I-5 Freeway.   The part included here – after the three links – centers on the future freeway route north of Denny Way, which is at the bottom of the aerial.  Ron’s aerial presents a challenge to the reader to find – save for one – ALL of the “extra” features we will put up below it.  (Actually, some of these features also show up in the links above the aerial.)  We have limited our extra subjects to the eight number next.  See if you can find seven of them in the aerial. Again, they are all there except for one which just barely misses being included! Remember to double-click the aerial to search it in detail.

1. The charmed alley named Melrose Place North

2. The Republic Hill Climb

3. The Victorian vestige at the northwest corner of Republican and Eastlake.

4. The Moscow Restaurant

5. St. Demetrios Parish

6. St. Spiridon Parish

7. Immanuel Lutheran Church

8. Cascade School

(We might have put up a score more, except that we anticipate those “nightybears.”  But these eight we may get up by 3 A.M.)

Remember to double or triple click RON’S AERIAL for your search.

DIVE INTO the Aerial below by CLICKING it TWICE

TAKE the CASCADE CHALLENGE!!!

Fine the Subjects Featured Above and Below.

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When Werner Lenggenhager recorded the above view of Melrose Place North in 1955 he, no doubt, knew of its then likely fate – witnessed below.   (Historical pix courtesy of Seattle Public Library and the “now” recorded by our Jean.)

“COUNTRY ROAD”

The naturalists among you may be able to figure whether these are the leaves of summer or fall.  The photographer, Werner Lenggenhager, made his print in October 1955.  It is so stamped.  However, he may have recorded the photograph weeks or even months earlier.

On the back Lenggenhager has also titled his print “County Road.”  It was this photographer’s calling to record the doomed present, that is the old parts of the cityscape that were equally dilapidated and cherished.  It was that poignant combination that got his attention.   Almost certainly Lenggenhager understood the irony of his title.

By 1955 this “County Road” was already marked for the preferred path of the Seattle Freeway.  That year the state passed a toll road act intending to have drivers pay directly for the expressways for which they were increasingly clamoring.  One year later Dwight D. Eisenhower made every driver nation-wide pay for it.  For the new highway system Ike committed the federal government to paying a whopping 90 percent with an increase in gas taxes — not piecemeal penny-a-mile tolls.

This is Melrose Place North, the charming alley that ran north from Denny Way two blocks to Thomas Street between Melrose and Eastlake Avenues.   After an admittedly quick inquiry at the municipal records “morgue” I was able to find for this street only a 1910 plan for a proposed sewer that was evidently installed, for it is recorded in the 1912 Baist’s Real Estate Atlas for Seattle.  The 1910 plan indicates that grade changes to the alley as deep as 12 feet would be required for the laying of the sewer.  So this “Country Road” has been “improved.”

By my thinking Werner Lenggenhager gave our community one of its greatest gifts.  He gave his photographs to the libraries.  Examples of his work are collected at the University of Washington Northwest Collection, the Museum of History and Industry Library, and the central branch of the Seattle Public Library.  This last – the SPL – has thousands of examples of his sensitive exploration of this city from the early 1950s into the 1980s. They are all prints – so far as I have been able to determine no one seems to know what happened to the negatives.

Let Werner Lenggenhager be an example to other intrepid recorders.  Before your relatives sell your work – whether it is ten examples or ten thousand – in a yard sale get it into an archive or library.  It is time we started collecting images like this one for public use.

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REPUBLICAN HILL CLIMB

(First appeared in Pacific on Oct. 14, 1984.)

Included on our imagined list of lost places is the Republican Hill Climb. This elegant stairway was designed to reach higher than the hill. Its grand qualities were meant to be enjoyed for their own sake. And for half-a-century they were. The climb’s design involved three half-block sections. Each was comprised of two single stairways and one double, or branching staircase that circumvented a curving wall.

This view looks east from Eastlake Ave. N. The two men in the scene have apparently chosen to take the northern side of the hill climb’s first set of branching stairs. They might then have continued on another half block to Melrose Ave., which is just beyond the second curving wall. The very top of the steps is a half block beyond that, and, on the horizon, a third wall that marks it can be seen, barely, just above the second wall. (This top one-third of the Republican Hill Climb is still intact and in use.)

The Republican Hill Climb was approved “as built” by the Board of Public Works on February 25, 1910. This photograph was probably taken soon after that. The landscaping here is still nascent. Fifty years later, the Times published a different photo (not included here). It reveals that in its last days this Republican Hill Climb was pleasantly crowded by tall trees and bushes. The Times caption stated simply, “This stairway will be torn out when the freeway grading begins.”

Of course, that “dream road” not only ended the steps from Eastlake but also sacrificed a very invigorating connection between two neighborhoods, Cascade below and Capitol Hill above. But, as City Engineer R. W. Finke explained in 1952, soon after this freeway route was proposed, “Freeway traffic moves at relatively high speed without interference from cross-movements…Pedestrians, who are a constant hazard to city driving, are entirely removed.”  Pedestrians and much else.

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At the northwest corner of Eastlake Ave. and Republican Street this delightful but mildly anachronistic residence survived until 1961 when big changes across Eastlake – the construction of the Seattle Freeway – razed it for a three story commercial structure that was for years home to the Fishing and Hunting News.

VICTORIAN VESTIGE

When it was built in 1890 this steep-roofed Victorian was but one of the 2160 structures raised in Seattle during that first full boom year following the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.  Far to the north of the burned business district the Cascade Neighborhood home was “already somewhat retardataire for its time.”   That description is from Dennis Andersen, one of Seattle’s more productive architectural historians.

Andersen first discovered this photograph in the 1970s when the then still young scholar took care of the University of Washington Library’s collections of historical photography and architectural ephemera.  It is one of several photographs held there that were recorded (ca.1911) along Eastlake Avenue by James P. Lee — for many years the Seattle Department of Public Works photographer of choice.

The historian’s “retardataire” remark refers principally to the ornamental parts of the structure, it fanciful roof crest and the beautified bargeboards of its steep corner gable.  (We see from the photo below taken of its rear façade as late as the 1950s that those wheels with spokes were attached there as well.)

Andersen both reflects and laments. “It looks like a pattern book house to me and really more at home in the 1870s or early 1880s.  Also the protruding corner bay is an unusual feature that may have been added to enliven the design a bit.  It’s a great photograph of a house that we are sorry to see is gone.”

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Werner Leggenhager took his photograph of the Moscow Restaurant at 7365 Lakeview Blvd. E. in the mid-1950s. He looks to the west. With the construction of the Seattle Freeway (I-5) here in the early 1960s, Lakeview Blvd was routed on a high bridge that crosses above I-5 and offers one of the few accesses to Capitol Hill.

The MOSCOW RESTAURANT on LAKEVIEW

For more than 35 years the Moscow Restaurant was a fixture for the Russian-American community that settled in the Cascade and Eastlake corridor on the western slope of Capitol Hill. In 1923 it opened to the aromas of borsht, beef stroganoff, jellied pigs’ feet, Turkish coffee and Russian pancakes.

In 1923 and 1924 a tide of White Russians who had fought the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian revolution landed on the West Coast of the United States. Among them was Prince Riza Kuli Mirza, who painted a fresco of a Russian winter on a wall in the restaurant. Jacob Elshin, another soldier artist connected with the Imperial Russian Guard, designed the fanciful exterior as a candy house from a popular Russian fairy tale. Elshin soon opened a studio by producing hand-painted greeting cards, stage scenery, religious icons and an occasional oil painting. In the late 1930s while Elshin was painting murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration for libraries in Renton and the University District, the original owners of the restaurant sold it to Nicholas and Marie Gorn.

In 1958 Seattle Times columnist John Reddin visited the restaurant to share in the Gorns’ plight: the coming Seattle freeway. Nicholas Gorn asked, “How can we ever replace this atmosphere which is so vital to our business?” Of course, they could not. By the time Gorn and Elshin lost their candy house to the freeway, the artist was one of the better known painters in Seattle.

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SAINT DEMETRIOS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 12, 1986)

The Cascade neighborhood, squeezed in between Fairview Avenue North and -Interstate 5, is not the quiet, working-class district it once was. Neither is one of its most distinctive landmarks – the St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church at the southeast corner of Yale Avenue and Thomas Street – the stately structure it used to be.

Dedicated on Nov. 21, 1921, around the time the historic photo was taken, St. Demetrios was built partly with donations by communicants who worked in nearby Greek restaurants. The sanctuary cost around $50,000 – about the same amount the Overall Laundry Service paid for the building in 1963 when the congregation moved to its dazzlingly modern Byzantine house of worship on Boyer Street. The Cascade neighborhood’s fortunes have fared little better. Light industry and businesses have encroached on the community, filling it with warehouses, parking lots and truck traffic.

Although the church survives today, it has long since been stripped of its twin octagonal cupolas, and its stained glass has been boarded up. The building is now used as a warehouse.  There is growing interest within the Greek community to retrieve St. Demetrios for renovation and use as a Greek museum.

[Written in 1988, the above text’s hopes for preservation was trumped by R.E.I. Recreation Equipment Coop purchased most of the block and the southeast corner of Thomas and Yale is now fit with its parking lot. The structure should not be confused with the Russian Orthodox St. Spiridon Cathedral, still used for worship just one block north on Yale Avenue, and next in line for its own feature.]

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SAINT SPIRIDON

(First appeared in Pacific, May 286, 1991)

The nine crosses of St. Spiridon were ritually raised to the church’s now-familiar nine domes in the summer of 1938. A few weeks later the new Orthodox sanctuary was dedicated. Each member – nearly all were Russians – rang the new church’s bell.

Today, as in 1895 when the St. Spiridon parishioners moved into their first church on Lakeview Boulevard, the congregation is more ethnically diverse. Then the congregation included Greeks, Russians, Serbians, Syrians, Bulgarians and Gypsies. Now, by way of marriage and conversion, more than a handful of Anglo-Saxons worship at the church on 400Yale Avenue North.

In 1916 the Greek community. Departed to found Saint Demetrios, also on Yale Avenue, one block south of St. Spiridon.  [See the feature directly above this one.] In the years following this friendly separation, St. Spiridon became a magnet for immigrants fleeing the Russian Revolution. In 1923 as many as 6,000 immigrants passed through this parish, most intending to settle in America.

Ivan M. Palmov, architect for the new St. Spiridon, was a Russian immigrant who graduated from the University of Washington’s School of Ardiitecture. This view of the work-in-progress on Palmov’s design is one snapshot among many included in a montage constructed by Isabel and John Kovtunovich, the latter a St. Spiridon member since his migration from Manchuria as a teenager in 1923. The montage is on display in artist Elizabeth Conner’s window installation at 911 Media Arts Center, three blocks south of St. Spiridon on 117 Yale Ave. North.   Conner’s work, titled “Cascade: Elusive Neighborhood,” will be on display until June 3. [A reminder that this was true only in 1991 when this feature first appeared.]

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IMMANUEL LUTHERAN

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 11, 1988)

Unlike most of Seattle’s first churches, Immanuel Lutheran did not follow its parishioners out to the neighborhoods as the inner city turned to business. This sanctuary survives and still serves the Cascade neighborhood, which transformed from a community of modest homes to a neighborhood of warehouses, light industry, and small businesses.

Immanuel was founded in the early 1890s by Norwegian immigrants who remained faithful to their .Lutheran traditions. When the present sanctuary was· dedicated in 1912, prominent clergy from Norway participated in the ceremony. Since then this church has been the site for thousands of baptisms, weddings and funerals. And most of them were officiated by the Pastor Hans Andreas Stub. Stub arrived in 1903 and stayed until 1957. The pastor and his wife, the church organist, were so bound to their church that ultimately they moved into it. When the gymnasium was added to the rear of the sanctuary in the early 1930s, the Stubs took an apartment above it.

Contemporary architectural historian, Dennis Andersen (himself a Lutheran minister) speculates that Stub probably had the church’s architect, Watson Vernon, prescribe wood rather than stone for the sanctuary to make it easier to attach future additions. As Stub joined his evangelistic urge to “preach the Gospel as wide as all outdoors” with a community activism, (during World War I, Immanuel Lutheran was a factory for both souls and bandages) his congregation grew to 2,000 by the late 1920s.

By then many of Stub’s parishioners, who were strung out between Richmond Beach and Federal Way, began turning to churches nearer home. That, combined with the steady conversion of the Cascade community into a business district, initiated Immanuel’s decline as the regional center of ministerial acts for orthodox Norwegian Lutherans.

Now [in 1988] the Immanuel congregation numbers about 200.  Their work focuses on helping the inner-city hungry and homeless.

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CASCADE SCHOOL

(First printed in Pacific January 28, 1990)

Cascade School rarely looked like this. The absence of children would have seemed strange to anyone living in the hubbub of the early-century Cascade neighborhood.

The school’s first classes began on Jan. 6, 1894, with 200 students, and Cascade School soon spread like the neighborhood. In 1898 the center section of 10 rooms was opened and in 1904 the north wing, here on the left, was added, bringing the number of the landmark’s spacious high-ceiling rooms to 24.  It still was not enough, so portables were added. By 1908, 26 teachers were busy instructing the neighborhood’s scholars.

Apparently the school’s most beloved instructor was its third principal, Charles Fagan. As described in the school district’s 1950 history, Fagan approached the ideal type of teacher. “A man of sterling character, a keen sense of humor and an understanding of children, beloved by pupils and associates . . . led the school for 33 years . . . ever searching for and adopting that which was good in the new, yet cherishing and holding to that which was good in the old.”

Fagan died in 1932. By then the school’s – and neighborhood’s – decline already had begun, as occupant-owned working-family homes gave way to warehouses, factories and apartment houses serving the nearby central business district.

Cascade School was closed in the spring of 1949, before the end of the school year. The earthquake that year struck on April 13, thankfully during spring vacation. The school was so weakened by the quake that its students were not allowed to re-enter the building. By then only seven rooms were in use, anyway. Eventually, the old school was tom down and replaced by a school-district warehouse.

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CONCLUDING with the puzzling pioneer PONTIUS RESIDENCE – before the mansion.

 

 

Times Aug 17, 1940 p14

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In a Seattle Times Classified Ad for August 1913, C.W. Latham, a dealer of West Seattle real estate, asks “Don’t you think it is a good time to come over and select that home site by the seaside?”  Latham’s list of reasons for moving to Alki was its new “$200,000 bathing beach, $60,000 lighthouse, and $75,000 new school.”  And it was easy to reach the beach. Direct 5-cent trolley service from Seattle began in 1908.  The dealer gave no address for his office.  His instruction that it was “near the Schmitz Park Arch” was good enough.

The arch may have been better named the Schmitz Boulevard Arch for it was not in the park but rather faced the beach.  In 1908, one year after West Seattle was incorporated into Seattle, the 2,700 foot long boulevard was graded to the park proper, which was then first described as a 40 acre “cathedral” of old growth forest.  In 1908 the German immigrant-philanthropists Emma and Henry Schmitz donated both the park and the boulevard to the city.

A stripped log spans the arch’s columns made rustic with a facing of river rocks.  The construction is here still a work in progress, for the two additional posts to the sides have not yet been topped with their keg-sized stone flowerpots.  The new Alki School, seen here far left across Alki Field, is partially hidden behind one of these incomplete shorter columns.  The school’s primary classes opened in 1913, also the likely year for this pubic works photograph, which we first discovered in “West Side Story,” the 1987 history of West Seattle edited by author Clay Eals.

Clay, by now an old friend, along with David Eskenazi, Seattle’s baseball historian, lured Jean Sherrard and I to their annual summer softball game at Alki Field.  Jean and I, in turn, lured their players off the baseball field and onto 59th Avenue West.  Jean explains.

“Herding the two dozen or so cool cats that comprised Clay and David’s annual baseball game/gathering was an amiable chore. We ambled from the diamond to 59th and SW Lander during the seventh-inning stretch, following rousing choruses of “Take me out to the ballgame,” the National Anthem and unanimous sighs of regret at Ichiro’s loss. On this glorious July day, the amenable players, on command and between passing cars, spread themselves across the avenue with one caveat from the photographer: ‘If you can’t see me, I can’t see you’.”  Both David and Clay can be seen.  (They can be seen again below in a manly embrace in the 11th of Jean’s snapshots of the Alki Players.)

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I’m posting a few thumbnails of the annual game, Paul. These include Lil Eskenazi, the team mascot, the oldest and youngest players, mighty Clay Eals at bat, pitcher Dave Eskenazi, T-shirt prizes, and a few more highlights.

And here’s the group portrait – enough players for two teams with more than three outfielders for each:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few related features from the past, and we may be repeating some of them – even from this blog.  Remember, rather than check we promote a policy of benign redundancy in which every story or feature or photo is made fresh by context.  We use the musical analogy of a leitmotif.   First, here’s another “artist’s league” group portrait from long ago – ca. 1976 – in Cascade Park or playfield, about two blocks east of The Seattle Times.  Remarkably, one of the players in this group has made it – with a borrowed glove – into Jean’s 2012 portrait straddling 59th Ave. SW at Lander Street. (Possibly this fond bit of local softball ephemera has also appeared here earlier.)

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Spud began on Alki Beach in 1935 as a seasonal sidewalk service in a clapboard shack.  Here in the late fall of 1938 it is boarded up until spring.  Now Spud is a year-round two-floored emporium that seats 80-plus lovers of deep-fried fish served with both tradition and a view of Puget Sound. [Historical view courtesy Washington State Archive, Bellevue Community College branch.]

SPUD on ALKI

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 16, 2003)

Brothers Jack and Frank Alger opened The SPUD on Alki Beach in June of 1935.  It was the beginning of summer but also the dead of the depression. At 10 Cent for a cardboard boat stuffed with fries and two big pieces of breaded ling cod the English-born Alger’s fish and chips serving was affordable, delicious and filling – but only in the warmer months.   In late fall the stand was closed and looked as it does here in this Works Progress Administration tax inventory photo recorded on Oct. 14, 1938.

To either side of SPUD in 1938 was a line of small beach homes, a few small apartments, Turner’s Shell station, Sea Home Grocery, Seaside Pharmacy, Alki Bakery, two groceries, a barber, a cobbler, a plumber, a tailor and four other eateries — two serving hamburgers and hot dogs and the other two fish and chips.  Most commonly on Alki Ave. s.w. were the vacancies but most importantly for the life of the beach was the Alki Natatorium Swimming Pool built across from Spud on pilings over the tides.

Following the war the shanty seen here was replaced with a nifty modern plant featuring portholes, and SPUD written in big bas-relief block letters over the front door.  Sheltered inside was a counter with four stools.   By then there were Spuds at Green Lake and Juanita as well.   The family continued to run the Alki Spud until Frank’s son Rick decided prudently at the age of 55 that he needed “to slow down and enjoy life more.”   Recently retiring to build their “dream home” on Hood Canal Rick and Terry Alger sold Spud to Ivar’s.

It was a both sensitive and poetic choice for also in 1938 when Ivar Haglund opened his first café – a fish and chips stand at the entrance to his aquarium on Pier 54 — the Alger brothers helped him.   Roy Buckley, Ivar’s first employee, learned his fish and chips while working at Spud.  All of them, Frank, Jack, Ivar and Roy were West Seattle lads.

While both Spud and Ivar’s survive in 2003, we may conclude by listing a few popular restaurants of 1938 that do not.  All are still savored in memory only.  Manca’s and the swank Maison Blanc; The Green Apple (home of the Green Apple Pie); The Jolly Rogers, The Dolly Madison Dining Room, and Mannings Coffee (several of them); the Moscow Restaurant and the Russian Samovar; Ben Paris downtown and Jules Maes in Georgetown; the Mystic Tea Cup, and the Twin T-P’s, Seattle’s Aurora strip landmark most recently lost to a (w)reckless midnight wrecker.

Two Examples of the Alki Ave now-then repeats, follow.

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In 1910 the city purchased much of the Alki Beach waterfront for the development of a groomed park and the seawall showing on the far right of the “now” scene.  Both views look east on Alki Beach from near 64th Avenue SW. About one century separates them. (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey – Contemporary photo by Jean, now nearly eight years past.)

ALKI BEACH BATHING

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 10, 2004)

This beach party scene comes from that most popular and yet unknown source: somewhere.   The beach is familiar enough – at the scene’s center is Duwamish Head marking the entrance to Elliott Bay – but neither the year nor the group nor the photographer whose back is to Alki Point are identified.

Depending upon who is throwing it this scene is a stone throw or two from the site where the Denny Party landed on Nov. 13, 1851.  Judging from the costumes and the development  (or rather lack of it) on the beach it was photographed about a half century later.  Most likely then if this is not a group from the neighborhood its members came to their picnic by boat for the electric trolley did not reach the beach until 1907, the year that West Seattle incorporated into Seattle.

By the time this driftwood tableau was photographed the attraction of Alki Beach as a summer retreat was already commonplace.  After regular steamer service was launched across Elliott Bay in 1877 the Daily Intelligencer advised “Now is a good time for picnics on the beach at Alki Point, so it will pay some of our new settlers to go over and see the spot where Messrs. Denny, Maynard and others lived during the ‘times that tried men’s souls.’” (I found this reference in “The West Side Story”, the big book of West Seattle history.)  We can only imagine what pains those we see frolicking and lounging here gave to the hardships of the founders.

There is a revealing similarity between the beach visitors in the “now” and the “then” scene: how few of them there are.  Alki Beach was frequented by throngs after the arrival of the trolley and the 1911 opening of Alki Beach Park with its oversized bathing and recreation pavilion  – 73,000 of them in 1913.  By comparison Jean Sherrard took this week’s “now” photograph last July 24, one of the hottest days of the summer.  While there are surely many more offshore attractions in 2004 then in 1913 when it comes to chilling dips we may also have become less robust.

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About 80 years separate the two later afternoon views on Alki Beach Park. Both look to the southwest from near the foot of 61st Avenue Southwest. (Historical photo courtesy of Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma, and, again, the contemporary one by Jean.)

ALKI BEACH PARK MAKE OVER

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 17, 2004)

Last week’s “then” looked northeast on Alki Beach.  This week’s record surveys the same stretch of sand but in the opposite direction.  Why spend two weeks on one beach?  Because about a quarter century separates the two historical photographs – last week’s and this one – and the changes are revealing.

As shown seven days ago a picturesque litter of driftwood distinguished the ca. 1900 West Seattle waterfront.  Here a quarter-century later the same waterfront is littered instead with bathers in wool suits and separated from a wide planked promenade by a seawall.   Actually the change from the irregular strand landed on by the founding settlers of 1851 to a groomed shoreline occurred very rapidly after the city condemned and purchased in 1910 the nearly 2500 feet of this shoreline between 57th and 65th Avenues Southwest.

In quick order the city built a large bathing pavilion (the historical photo is photographed from its roof) and the wide walk protected by the sturdy wall.  This radical makeover was dedicated on Independence Day 1911 and the following year the covered bandstand was extended over the tides.  That first year the city’s Parks Department estimated that 103,000 persons were attracted to the 75 concerts performed from its octagonal stage.

In 1925 the wooden seawall was replaced with a concrete one that was designed to protect the beach with a concave profile that inhibited the undertow of high tides.  In five years more the seawall was extended in the other direction (to the northeast) to within 150 feet of Duwamish Head.  At last in 1945 this gap was also acquired and improved to make a continuous recreational shore between the Head and the string of homes that lie between the public park and the closed – since 911 – Alki Point lighthouse (1913).

This chronology was gleaned from the book “West Side Story” and Don Sherwood’s unpublished (but often photocopied) manuscript history on local parks. (You can find it all on the Seattle Park Department’s web page – the history part of it.)  Much on Alki Beach history is featured in the exhibits and publications of the Log House Museum (one block from the beach at the corner of Stevens St. and 61st Avenue) and – as noted and shown above –  also in permanent display on the walls of the by now venerable SPUDS fish and chips on Alki Avenue.

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For the 19 years that the Alki Natatorium covered the beach it was closed and or in disrepair about as much as it was open to plungers and other recreations. The sprawling facility was camped on the tides side of Alki Avenue between 58th and Marine Avenues Southwest. Historical Pix courtesy of Don Myers.

ALKI “NAT”

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 6, 2005)

If we could but read the license plate on the bumper of the car (that looks very much like the one my dad drove the family west in from North Dakota in 1946) we could date this stark portrait of the Alki Natatorium.  Since much of the glass along the Alki Avenue façade is busted out we know that this scene was photographed sometime when the fitful entertainment center was not serving.

But when jumping there was more than swimming here.  For instance, the neon sign with the diving swimmer also advertises dining and dancing at the Shore Café.  And at least during the late 1930s when the Premier Amusement Company was running it, the “Nat” was also a skating rink.

This natatorium was the last of three built along the beach.  The first opened near Alki Point in 1905, but quietly closed while planning an “Oriental-styled” enlargement complete with “real Geisha Girls” serving tea and the “world’s largest swimming pool.”  The second opened in 1907 with Luna Park at Duwamish Head.  And although the amusement park was soon closed for introducing “lewd and disorderly behavior” the big indoor natatorium stayed open until 1931 when it was one of many targets torched by an arsonist that year.

Three years later this “Nat” opened a short distance up the beach from the Municipal Bath House towards the Head not the Point.  The “Nat” managed to survive the Great Depression but not a lawsuit by an injured swimmer in 1939.  In 1942 the Seattle Park’s Department renovated and reopened it in time for the preoccupations and parsimony of the war, and the place again closed.  Especially when dark, its great expanse of roof glass was pelted by naughty children (read boys) with rocks borrowed from the beach.  Several moves by the Parks Department and City Council to restore it following the war turned out to be good intentions only and in 1953 the Alki Natatorium was razed to the beach.

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Looking up the front steps of Seattle University’s McHugh Hall (the name and address are painted on the steps) we count nine coeds waving to a Seattle Times photographer.   The subject was first published in this paper on April 12, 1959, along side a second photo of the dorm’s oversized bathtub, both used to illustrate a feature written by Frances “Fran” Farrell and titled “It’s HOME to Seattle U. Co Ed’s”  Fran’s SU instructor in journalism advised her to write something for publication and the Times liked her story on McHugh Hall – her school dorm converted from the Anderson Mansion on First Hill  – so well that they gave it a full page.

In Jean Sherrard’s “repeat,” Fran, on the left, stands on newer Swedish Hospital steps beside Lois Crow.  With two others they shared a dorm room on the top floor – here upper right in the “then.”  Barbara Owen, one their upper-class quartet, waves from the open window.  Fran Farrell chose her subject with enthusiasm.  “Living in McHugh was a complete delight! As upper classmen we wanted someplace with more independence and camaraderie and we got it at McHugh.”  Freshmen and sophomores were housed in Marycrest, a new six-story dormitory.  It held none of the ornate charms of a lumber baron’s mansion.

Jean suggests that I ask readers if this week’s “now” is familiar.  He knows that it is.  As the “repeat” for a different story, we used this location recently – last May 19^th.  And there I – but not Jean – made a big mistake.  What I had learned years earlier – and earnestly believed until the Saturday before the Sunday publication – was that our May subject was Mrs. Anderson posing in her celebrated coach in front of her mansion here near the southeast corner of Minor and Columbia.  But – and alas – it was instead Mrs. Burke posing in her coach in front of her First Hill Manse, but three blocks away.  (If it helps, they remain short blocks.)  When Lois Crow, already an acquaintance of mine, discovered my mistake and shared it with me that Sunday morning, I was at least able to tell her that I too had discovered it a day earlier, but that it was too late to stop the presses.

We encourage you to read Fran Farrell Vitulli’s Times feature on the Anderson manse.  You can access it readily through the Time’s older archive (1900 to 1984) serviced on the Seattle Public Library web page.  It is a service that also offers what we may call the “joys of the key word search.”  You can also find a facsimile of Fran’s feature printed in Jean and my blog noted at the base of this writing.  And there, if you will, you may study my full confession, at once contrite and illustrated.

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Anything to add to this moving mea culpa, Paul?

Yes indeed, Jean!

As explained in this week’s feature, but more elaborately last May in this blog’s 11th hour anticipation or “catch” for the mistaken feature published in Pacific then – the one proposing to be about Mrs. Anderson and her famous First Hill carriage but actually showing Mrs. Burke and her’s, also on First Hill – here is the link to that May 17th feature.  It repeats, again, my full confession.  It also includes – perhaps as compensation Ron Edge suggests – a long list of other features having to do with First Hill and a few other large Seattle homes.   Thanks for your compassion.   To get to this replete repeat either CLICK THIS LINK or the picture below.  The picture is of another Anderson: Anderson Hall on the U.W. Campus.  After her lumberman husband’s death, Mrs. Anderson paid for its construction as a warm and useful tribute to him.   It was appropriately built for the school’s Dept of Forestry.

(Click to enlarge photos)

Dazzled – we hope – last week by a musical pig dancing above the sidewalk on Second Avenue north of Madison Street, we made promises to visit this week another attraction on that block.  By the time the Pig ‘N Whistle opened in 1919, its neighbor the Palace Hip Theatre, across Second at its southeast corner with Spring, had been showing animal acts and much more on stage for ten years.

The name blazoned here on and above the theatre’s boisterous corner marquee was its third.   The theatre opened as the Majestic on August 30, 1909, changed to Empress less than two years later and in 1916 with a remodel turned over again into the Palace Hip (short for Hippodrome.)

Soon after the summer opening this newspaper surveyed its wonderful construction.  “The entire designing and constructing of the Majestic Theatre in somewhat over five months from the date of John W. Considine’s order is an apt illustration of the Seattle Spirit.” Considine was the super-impresario and Edwin W. Houghton the happy if frantic architect, who proudly revealed to the Times reporter, “I was fortunate enough to have a client that had good enough judgment to select an architect whom he thought was capable and then leave him to do it.”

While the theatre’s dog acts were often splendid, they were but one of ordinarily six or seven acts that took the stage twice a day.  By some accounts it was Seattle’s “greatest house of vaudeville.” Of the hundreds upon hundreds of acts – comedy, song & dance, animal – that landed here for a run of a week or two, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel (later of Laurel and Hardy) are the most abiding names.  David Jeffers, Seattle’s historian of silent film, confesses, “I dream about this place.  A Greco-Byzantine interior of ivory and gold and 1500 seats!”

Thru its two decades the Palace Hip ran vaudeville, showed films, and staged plays.  For all of these a theatre-goer’s visit to the confectionary across Second was often a capper to any show.

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Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few past features from the neighborhood, some of which has already appeared here, still we put them forward again following thereby a kind of Wagnerian formula of motifs repeated in new settings.  Since five of these features include theatres we have a second motif.  We’ll begin though with BUCK JONES in the BIG PUNCH, the Fox film advertized on the marquee and in broadsides pasted to the Palace Hip’s  exposed walls at the corner and near the ticket window.

PANTAGES VAUDEVILLE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 20, 1990)

Alexander Pantages built his namesake vaudeville house at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Seneca Street in 1904. It was “the little Greek’s” second theater. The first, “The Crystal,” also on Second Avenue, was a converted storefront that Pantages opened when he landed in Seattle with a small fortune finagled in the Alaska gold rush. As Murray Morgan describes Pantages’ gold-field strategy in his Seattle history “Skid Road”: “He abandoned his dream of finding gold in the creek beds and concentrated on removing it from the men who had already found it.”

Pantages sold the sourdoughs vaudeville, at $25 a seat in his Orpheum theater in Nome. The price of admission to his first Seattle shows was a dime for a mixture of stage acts and short, jerky films. Pantages (or his legend) was illiterate, but having roamed the world before landing here he could converse in several languages. His English, it was said, was as bad as any. But he knew what the public wanted.

Pantages built a vaudeville empire that ultimately surpassed all others. Somewhat like royalty, his daughter Carmen married John Considine Jr., son of his chief competitor. At its peak the Pantages circuit included 30 playhouses he owned outright and 42 others he controlled. To an act he liked, he could offer more than a year of steady employment. Pantages sold his kingdom for $24 million in 1929 – before the crash.

To Pantages the best act he ever booked was the violinist he married. Lois Pantages always played the first act whenever her husband opened a new house. The first of these was across Seneca Street from the Pantages. He named it after his wife, and until it was destroyed by fire in 1911, the Lois was a successful theater. Also in 1911 Pantages purchased Plymouth Congregational’s old church grounds at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and University Street, and built his New Pantages Theatre, designed by architect B. Marcus Priteca, between 1915 and 1918. Later renamed the Palomar, it was a showplace many Seattleites will remember.  (This Pantages/Palomar is a subject that has been treated on this blog.  Please try the search box for it – if you will.)

This enchanting tableau looks across Spring Street to the early construction scene for the Baillargeon Building at the northeast corner of Spring with Second. Note at the top the Savoy Hotel is getting some added stories. The date, 1907, is evident at the bottom-right corner.  This is pulled from an album having mostly to do with the construction of the Seattle Gas Company’s facilities at what is now Gas Works Park.  (Courtesy Michael Maslan)

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In 1919, the California candy maker Pig’N Whistle opened in Seattle what it advertised in the Times as “the largest investment in a confectionary business which has ever been made anywhere in the world.” A year after Frederick and Nelson moved out, the block-long Rialto Building was ready for its new tenants, and the Pig got what had been the department store’s grand entrance on the west side of Second Avenue, centered between Madison and Spring Streets.

The elegant pig above the sidewalk was surely both big and dear.  And it moved.  Outlined in lights, two of its three hind legs were alternately lit to keep the animated leg kicking to the whistling flute the musical swine held to its snout with its hoofs.  For thirteen years, and through the full length of Seattle’s “urban canyon” from the Smith Tower to the Washington Hotel, the dancing pig could be seen kicking time to its music.

The Pig N’ Whistle was packed from the start.  Many of the stores nearby, like Meves Cafeteria, Rochester’s Men’s store, and Millers Luggage, promoted the pig as the landmark to find for their own services as well.  Repeated society and club reports of lunch and dinner meetings at the Pig’N Whistle gave this maker of Viennese candies and “dainty sandwiches” frequent and free promotions in the local dailies.

Days after the California confectionary opened, King Bros. Co., another men’s store nearby, described the pig as “a thing of beauty, and we trust will be a joy forever to the people of our growing city.”  Many years after it closed, Margaret Young, in a 1966 Times feature on the nostalgic lure of old Post Cards, professed to loving neon and wishing there were more of it, “but even more we miss something we never saw.”  She meant this dancing pig.  A victim of the Great Depression, the last listings for the Pig’N Whistle are from 1932.

Next week we will cross Second Avenue to the Palace Hip Theatre a half block north at Spring Street.  The theatre, of course, treated the pig well, with many among it’s audiences consuming the Pig’N Whistle’s confections and dancing to its live music before and after the Hip’s shows.

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Anything to add, Paul?

Merely two related features Jean – one from long ago, 1986, and the other nearly new from 2009 and so here its encore.

Looking northwest through the intersection of Madison Street (left to right) and Second Avenue to the Frederick and Nelson Department Store filling the half block on the west side of Second between Madison and Spring.  Note above the cable car heading for the waterfront on the far left.

FREDERICK & NELSON DEPARTMENT STORE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 28, 1986)

D. E. Frederick and Nels Nelson opened a second-hand store in Seattle in 1890. Soon they found it easier to buy unused merchandise than ferret out the old. So they discarded the nearly new trade, and in time their store became the largest and finest department store west of the Mississippi and north of San Francisco.

In 1897, in the first flush of the Klondike gold rush, the store was moved into the two center storefronts of the new Rialto building at Second Avenue and Madison streets. In 1906 the partners bought out the block, and Frederick & Nelson stretched their name the length of an entire city block – the Rialto block. This week’s historical scene shows Seattle’s first grand emporium during, or some time after, 1906.

Shopping at Frederick & Nelson was a different experience from today’s sometimes mad-rush shopping. At Frederick’s, you were invited to take classes, visit an art gallery, chat with friends over tea or just ride the hydraulic elevator. A big center room with a high ceiling for hanging tapestries and Persian rugs was a kind of sanctuary for consumption. Years later, you might not remember what was purchased but you would recall the experience of having really bought something significant – its aura.

Above and below, scenes from a Golden Potlatch summer celebration (1911-1914).

This touch of class also was found in the elaborately decorated show windows along Second Avenue, and even in the street itself. Every morning, Frederick and Nelson’s 16 heavy teams of horses paraded from their stables down the length of Second Avenue.

Nelson died in 1906, but Frederick continued to make the right moves, including the one in 1918 that took him “out of town” – all the way north to Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.  In 1929, Frederick retired to his home in the Highlands and sold his grand emporium to Marshall Field & Co. of Chicago. After his death 20 years later, his old golfing crony, 95-year-old Seattle Times columnist C.T. Conover, recalled Frederick as a kind of heroic capitalist saint who “left a record of straight shooting, fair play, honorable dealing, enlightened vision, common sense, civic enterprise, noble spirit and generous support of every worthy cause.”

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Above: A century ago – roughly – Engineer Leo Snow took this candid photograph of a single Native vendor set up at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street.  Thanks much to Dale and Eric Cooley for sharing this view.  Below: Appropriately, for the contemporary repeat Jean Sherrard recorded Cassie Phillips, a Real Change salesperson, showing her fare at the same corner.

SIDEWALK SALES

(First appeared in Pacific,  June 21, 2009)

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

As confirmed by many other less lively photographs, including a 1911 postcard printed in “Native Seattle,” historian Col Thrush’s nearly new book from U.W. Press, this was a popular corner for both selling Native crafts and recording them doing it. Thrush’s postcard shows not one but three of what the postcard’s printed caption calls “Indian Basket Sellers” huddled at this corner.

When I began giving illustrated talks on Seattle history long ago I often included a native vendor slide in my show. Many were the times seniors in the audience would recall having been with their mother while buying a basket from Chief Seattle’s daughter, and often off this very sidewalk.  Since the 86 year-old Princess Angeline died in 1896, this “princess claim” was more than unlikely, it was impossible – I gently explained.  Still, however slanted, the memory of sidewalk meetings with Native Americans was still cherished in 1975.  Do any readers still retain such memories in 2009?

Sometime after the farm boy Leo Snow got an engineering degree from Ohio University in 1902, he carefully folded a 3-piece suit in his duffle bag and hopped a freight train to Seattle.  Scrubbed, adorned and qualified he was soon on the streets of this city looking for a job.  In 1945 Leo D. Snow retired after working 37 years for Puget Power, and along the way took many more sparkling snapshots with his foldout Kodak.

(click to enlarge photos)

Surely we know what every one is up to in this Granite Falls tableau.  They are thinking about the fire and what to do.  Four men have carried a glass showcase from the drugstore to East Stanley Street and while the other men at the corner seem to be standing idle most likely they are not.  The commotion inside the drug store’s open door must be both frantic and dreadful – grabbing and hauling the drugs and sundries while knowing that the roof overhead is on fire. As yet there seems to be no relief although we see that the volunteer fire brigade has unrolled a hose along S. Granite Avenue and may soon be shooting it’s April shower at the roof.

Judging by the shadows and the smoke the fire started in the morning and in the roof of the Cascade Hotel.  The hotel sign on the crest is engulfed.  Fred Cruger of the Granite Falls Historical Museum suggests that the town’s weekly, the Snohomish County Forum for April 27, 1933, most likely gave detailed front page coverage of the fire.  Unfortunately what was probably the report has long since been clipped away from the otherwise surviving issue.  You can examine this unfortunate “mutilation” in the Granite Falls Historical Society’s Newspaper archive at http://gfp.stparchive.com.  You can also explore the society’s thousands of pictures and documents online at www.gfhistory.org .   This society is a recognized model of effective heritage care and activism.

Granite Falls was first platted in 1891 in anticipation of the 1892 arrival of the Everett to Monte Cristo Railroad.  One year more, in 1893, this 22-room hostelry over a restaurant opened as the Mountain View Hotel.  The name kept to mountaineering when it was later changed to Cascade by a new owner.  By 1933 Granite Falls was an important destination in what was promoted especially during “the touring season” as our “Charmed land.”  The Big Four Inn and the Canyon Creek Lodge were both nearby, the latter with a six hole golf course that featured flowing water hazards. [This coming week we hope to enter here a short addendum on the both the Big Four Inn and the Canyon Creek Lodge.]

A week after the fire we are heartened to learn from the Forum’s May 4^th issue that the destruction was kept to the hotel. “The second story will be cut off and the lower floor will be repaired.”  Depression-time concerns were also addressed.  “Only Granite Falls labor is being used on the repair work, and all materials are being purchased locally.”  Cascade Drugs survived, and this sturdy pioneer of 1893 continues to serve mixed uses and hold to its footprint on the northeast corner of Granite and Stanley.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes  Jean beginning with the several other photographs of the fated hotel that we have inserted in the text above.  These too are among the special gifts we give to the text as originally composed and illustrated for Pacific – bless them.

Below we will add this time as “straight” extras (not half-hidden behind a link) the few more now-then comparisons that you visited and recorded recently with the guidance of Fred Cruger, a Granite Fall historian/archivist who often appears in this blog as our primary vintage auto expert.   Fred has also composed several interpretations/captions for the photo you repeated while in Granite Falls as well as short descriptions of the several records you made of the Grant Falls Historical Museum, for whose appointments, and interpretations he is also an admirable steward.   So here follows you and Fred.

The earliest photo, taken in the 1911-12 Winter, shows a large one-cylinder engine being hauled into town to provide electricity in place of the washed-out Pilchuck River dam.  The warning tower that once held the fire bell is still in place, since the building itself had just been moved 2 1/2 blocks from its original location (as the first downtown school, built in 1893) to the location still occupied by CIty Hall today.  The photo taken in Mar 1941 shows the building with significant deterioration.  The picture with the fire truck shows Fire Chief Hiram Jewell (also the local photographer) at the front of the engine, just a month before the combination City Hall & Firehouse was razed, preparing for the City Hall still standing today (erected by the WPA in 1941-2).

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The Granite Falls Cooperative Union was built in 1905 by Fred Anderson, but it operated for many years as the Granite Falls Creamery under John Curtis, who also happened to be the back president.  It was only three years ago that the original 1904 bank safe was recovered from the Creamery building and placed in the Granite Falls Historical Museum.  The building is owned by the local Masonic Lodge, which has an impressive meeting area upstairs, and the lower floor has always housed a grocery or retail merchandise business.  The building just beyond the creamery building in the modern photo was built in the 1920s by Oscar Wicklund, a local blacksmith, and served in that role through the 1950s.  The two-story Mountain View Hotel (later the Cascade Hotel) can be seen just a short distance past the Co-op Union in the original photo, and also in the modern photo (albeit as a one-story building, having lost its top story to fire in 1933).

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Taken prior to 1910, the old photo shows the bell tower of the first downtown school on the left, 3 blocks distant.  The local fire warning tower is on the right just 1/2 block from the photographer, and marks the soon-to-be place to which the school would be moved to become City Hall.  The warning tower was located about 30 feet beyond (south) of where today’s town clock sits in front of City Hall.  The old school served as combination CIty Hall & Firehouse for 30 years, until it was razed in 1941 and replaced by the current building (built by the WPA).  The dark building at the far right was the photo studio of Hiram Jewell, Granite Falls’ local photographer for decades.  The large two story building on the left in the original photo was built as Woodmen’s Hall, and continues to serve today as the American Legion Hall, although the trees block it from view.

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If you look carefully, you can see the top of a barber pole just above the Model T Ford (car at left) and a “BATHS” sign, which was present at both Granite Falls barber shops (the other shop was directly across the street).  The large building at the right started life ca. 1900 as The Lumberman (purveyor of fine wine and cigars), but by 1918, when this picture was taken, had become Klaus Bros. market.  Unfortunately, it burned down in 1920, but Henry and William Klaus rebuilt it as the brick Klaus Bldg that still stands today on the southwest corner of Stanley St, and Granite Ave.

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This looks east on Stanley St., and Granite Ave is the next cross street.  You can see the Cascade Hotel sign at its rooftop, which – as the reader will know by now – the hotel lost along with its second floor to the 1933 fire featured at the top.

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The Falls at GRANITE FALLS

FRED sends, as well, several photographs of the falls, which Jean also visited and repeated.

Here follows two by Jean

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GRANITE FALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM

Here we join Jean as he visits the museum with Fred.   It is Fred who supplies the terse captions for each of the nine subjects.

Jean here. Spending the afternoon with Fred Cruger as my guide to Granite Falls and the many wonders of his museum was a real kick. Fred has an artist’s passion and inspiration, a historian’s curiosity, and the meticulous nature of an engineer – in short, he’s a force of nature. His focus and energy have brought the Granite Falls community together to create one of the finest small town historical museums in the country.

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We will conclude – for now – with another Granite Falls feature that appeared in Pacific last year, and for which Fred Cruger took the “repeat” besides providing the historical subject, again out of the Granite Falls Historical Museum’s store of local heritage.

The stately Granite Falls Railroad Station was built for both the Everett & Monte Cristo Railway Line, and a political payoff.   (Courtesy, Granite Falls Historical Society.) From the prospect of the unnamed historical photographer, the site of the now long gone Granite Falls station has been returned to nature.  (Now photo by Fred Cruger)

THE GRANITE FALLS RAILROAD STATION

For itinerants and pioneer town photographers there were perhaps two subjects most often used to represent an entire community: “Main Street” and the local railroad station.   Here, as an example, the Granite Falls station is part of a prosperous tableau that includes Northern Pacific engine #366, and the sweetener of a pressing crowd on the station platform.

Fred Cruger, the current vice-president of the Granite Falls Historical Society, dates this real photo postcard 1909.  Fred adds, “there was quite a political battle going on between Snohomish (the County Seat) and Everett (increasingly the County economic center), about where the County seat should actually be.  Granite Falls was told that if they voted for Everett, they’d get a really nice railroad depot.  It may be difficult now to find the actual vote count, but we did get a great railroad depot!”

This political maneuvering dates from the mid-1890s when the original use of this railroad was to carry minerals from the mountains around Monte Cristo to smelters in Everett.  This enterprise was floated by J.D. Rockefeller and eventually so was the railroad by the autumn floods of 1896 and 1897, which damaged or destroyed tunnels and large sections of track.  Ten years more and most of the mining activity was over.  Hauling lumber and later tourists kept the line going until the early 1930s when tearing out the tracks was among the few new jobs open in Snohomish County during the Great Depression.  The Mountain Loop Highway – for which Granite Falls is the “gateway” – was graded in places over the abandoned railroad bed.

Fred Cruger, also an antique car collector, has often helped us in this column with the naming and dating of old motorcars.  Now we wish to make note that he and the Granite Falls Historical Society have created “then and now” cyber tours for both their community and the Mountain Loop tour.  They are, respectively, http://www.myoncell.mobi/13606544362 and http://www.myoncell.mobi/13603553170.

Two timely opportunities to try the tours and visit Granite Falls are for Show N’ Shine, the town’s classic and antique car show and parade, held this year on Sat. August 6, and for the Railroad Days Festival and Parade, this year on Oct. 1, another Saturday.  Not surprisingly the Granite Falls Historical Museum will also be open.

(The CM railroad’s logo below is used courtesy – again – of the Granite Falls Historical Society and Museum)

(Click TWICE to ENLARGE)

ASAHEL CURTIS, The OTIS & FIRST HILL in THIRDS

(An eariier version of this first appeared in Pacific, March 26, 2001.)

Looking north on Summit Avenue, the towered Otis Hotel on the right holds much of the block between Columbia Street, in the foreground, and Marion Street.  By now this historical intersection of Columbia and Summit has been vacated and covered by the Swedish Medical Center.

One might notice while driving through the First Hill neighborhood from Yesler Way to Pike Street that the hill can be divided roughly into three parts. The first section visited, south of James Street, was once known as Profanity Hill for a variety of reasons, including that it was a damn steep climb from Pioneer Square. This first third is, in places, still a little rough.

Skipping to the third area, that north of Madison Street, a few of the old mansions – like the Dearborn manse, now home for Historic Seattle; and the Stimson-Green Mansion; and the Stacy Mansion, long the University Club – from the 1890s still mingle with distinguished high-rise apartment houses from the teens and ’20s. Parts of this First Hill third are still a little rich.

In the middle third between James and Madison, a driver must be careful not to get lost in the maze of Swedish Medical Center. Which brings us again to this intersection, and to repeat again that it cannot be found, except in this “mirror of memory,” the historical photograph. Again, on the right, at 804 Summit Ave., the Otis Hotel stands up and out of the view north across Columbia Street.  Further north on Summit, at is southwest corner with Madison Street, is the Adrian Court, a three-story apartment made in part of stone.

The accompanying First Hill detail from the 1912 Baist real estate map shows the Otis, and the Adrian Court, and much else.  The panorama printed below was recorded from the south wall of the Perry Hotel.  It too can be found on the Baist Map detail, just above and left of the detail’s center, which is somewhat mutilated in the original by long regular use – good and bad.

For all its grand asymmetrical solidity the Otis also symbolizes the volatile history of First Hill development. It has two parts. The closer part, with the frame tower, is designed like an over-sized mansion. But the smaller brick section beyond it seems ready to forsake the neighborhood of mansions for a more modest but sturdy First Hill future of resident hotels and apartment houses. And the Otis did survive into the late 1950s before Swedish, the biggest swell in the “third wave” of First Hill institutions – hospitals -swallowed both it and this intersection.

Asahel Curtis photographed this (the pan at the top) look north on Summit from Columbia.  It is two recordings merged in Photoshop.  As for the residents in the homes seen in the left panel, I confess that I have not taken time to identify them.  Does any reader know?

(click to enlarge photos.  At least on this MAC I click TWICE to enlarge the enlargement.)

This look east to Second Hill from the eastern slope of First Hill is both rare and puzzling.  The original was shared with us by Ron Edge, a frequent help to this feature, who acquired it as part of a small collection of early 20th Century Seattle subjects originally recorded or collected by a company that produced Magic Lantern shows.        We reckon, however, that the status of Second Hill development in 1905 – our speculated year for this cityscape – is an unlikely lantern subject, except, perhaps, by special order from either the Immaculate Conception parish, or Seattle College (Seattle University since 1948), for this view looks east from the campus of the latter to the new sanctuary of the former on the horizon at the southeast corner of E. Marion St. and 18th Avenue.

Forgetting for the moment the leaves on the trees, we may imagine here the Dec. 4, 1904 procession of parishioners and priests that climbed from First Hill up Second for the dedication of those two cross-topped towers and the nearly 1000 seats beneath them.  That’s enough pews for everyone that followed Wagner’s marching band.

For ten years previous to their joyful procession these Catholics had been teaching and worshiping in what still survives as the original building on the Seattle University Campus, the Garrant Building, named for the school’s founder.  It was built in 1894 by the Jesuit order for its ministry at Immaculate Conception.

If, like our study of the cleared but scarcely developed foreground, yours counts two blocks between the boardwalk near the bottom and the first street developed with houses, then this is 10th Avenue East at our toes.  We know that those homes face 12th Avenue.  We figured that out with help from eight houses on Second Hill, easily tracing them from Ron’s “then.” In Jean’s repeat they are hidden behind the imaginative mass of the campus’ somewhat new Chapel of St. Ignatius.  For our survivors we only looked on 13th and 14th Avenues between Spring Street on the far left and Marion, but there are, no doubt, many others on the hill.

Some time near its dedication on April 6, 1997, I visited the new Chapel of St. Ignatius with other members then of Allied Arts.   I recorded then the two exterior views below, but the interior record – a merge from two subjects – I took when Jean and I visited the campus recently to search and repeat the “then” at the top.  Hopefully Jean will add some of his own extras in the morning, then refreshed after his own nightybears – the soft coven to  which I will soon reach at the top of my own steps.  There is, you know, much more on the neighborhood reached below with a click.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

(for Paul’s compelling response, click HERE!)

(click to enlarge photos)

Lawton Gowey, a friend now long departed, is still a frequent contributor to this feature.  Ordinarily it has been with historical photographs from his collection but this time it is with one of his own Kodachromes, and as was his considerate habit, it is dated.  On the late morning of June 20, 1962, with his back to the landmark steel pergola (1920) at the waterfront foot of Washington Street, Lawton recorded a harbor patrol boat carefully jockeying between its float and the 27,000 tons of the Dominion Monarch.

The 682-foot-long Dominion M. was the largest of three ships parked on the Seattle waterfront during Century 21 to serve as hotel ships, aka “botels,” during the worlds fair. With the hindsight of the  “Marine History of the Pacific Northwest,” which he authored, Port Commissioner and maritime historian Gordon Newell admitted that the fair’s “predicted major housing shortage failed to develop.”  The botels were not much needed, and yet the shapely English vessel was for many a sensational attraction and during the fair Newell won the concession for leading tours aboard it.  Standing on its flying bridge, ten stories high, one looked down on the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

It is possible that Gowey also toured this big botel on the day he photographed it, for on that same June 6 Wednesday morning The Seattle Times humorist John Reddin wrote about taking the tour.  Reddin imagined or mistook his guide, Commissioner Newell, in his “white, tropical uniform,” as “Noel Coward playing the lead role in ‘In Which We Serve’”  Reddin concluded that Newell “easily could play Lieut. Pinkerton in ‘Madame Butterfly’.”

Almost certainly it was another waterfront regular E. A. “Eddie” Black who favored Newell with his tour leader’s role, for it was Black who intercepted the Dominion Monarch, then on its way to Japan for scrapping, to come to the fair first.  Black was a seasoned and savvy operator on the waterfront who escaped official leans on vessels tied to docks by making his rented cruiser a “permanent installation.”  He simply drove pilings to both the port and starboard sides of the Dominion Monarch.  This made the gangway to the ship’s lodgings and/or Newel’s dapper tours somewhat longer than if the Dominion Monarch had been tied snuggly to Pier 50.

WEB EXTRAS

One correction, Paul, to your otherwise excellent column – I was up before 6 AM to meet the SPD boat at the foot of Washington Street at 6:30 – a real sign of dedication on an early but lovely summer’s morning.

Anything to add, my friend?

To read Paul’s colorful response, click HERE!

(click to enlarge photos)

This shapely subject was uncovered long ago in a collection of unidentified negatives.  Only recently I discovered that finding its place was easy for the name of this apartment house is signed on the glass front door.  This is – or was in this early 20^th century record of it – the Wilhemina Apartments at 1413 Queen Anne Avenue.  It was then the tallest structure this high on the avenue with views to the city and the bay.  And it was conveniently set at the top of the “Queen Anne Counterbalance,” that exceptional tunnel machinery that helped pull trollies up the steep avenue and also safely govern their descent.

Historic preservationist Diana James, with her recent book “Shared Walls” our local authority on apartment houses, thinks it likely that the Wilhemina first took in renters in 1908, the first year classified ads appear in The Times describing its attractions. “Very choice 2-room apartment, nice, view, modern, high class, no children.” In a dozen years or so more the name was changed to Winona.  Rhyming with Wilhemina it was equally euphonious.  Able by now to intuit the origins of place names, the scholar James jests, “Perhaps it was renamed for the wife of a new owner.”

The Winona first indicates “no objection to children” in the 1920s. A Times classified for 1928 reads “Clean and cozy 2-room completely furnished apartments, situated in good district at the very low rental of $37.50.”  Following the market crash of 1929, the monthly rate was soon lowered to $25.  By 1955 it had doubled to a mere $52, but by then it had no musical name, only an address.

While Diana James doubts one published claim for the Wilhemina/Winona, that it was the first apartment on the hill, she admits that she has as yet found no older flat that has kept its footprint on the hill.  She adds, “I like it because it is what it is – its elegant symmetry with bay windows for light and centered balconies for fresh air visits. I could tell you that it is 12 units, with four to a floor, and probably two more in the daylight basement.”  What James could not surmise from the street, the present owner – since the mid 1970s – reveals.  There’s a detached 15^th unit in the rear.  Most likely, it was once a garage.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

(For Paul’s reply, click here!)

(click to enlarge photos)

Recently while retired U.W. Archivist Rich Berner and I sat side-by-side looking at old photos together in the now old Museum of History and Industry Library, Rich pulled from an archival box this week’s subject and turned it to me.  Instantly I felt that happy “Eureka” rush, for here, I was confident, was the Phinney Ridge Ferris wheel described to me long ago by a ridge partisan, who claimed that the big wheel stood across Phinney Ave. from the entrance to Woodland Park.

While thanking my informant for her memory, I continued to wonder if she wasn’t remembering instead the kiddie Ferris wheel and merry-go-round that were both once in the park, and not out of it.  How, I thought, could I have missed a Ferris wheel on top of that familiar ridge?  But I had, and so with Rich’s discovery I silently confessed – or thought, “Oh you of little faith.”

In the spring and early summer of 1925 George and Lucy Vincent installed first the “New Carousselle,” here generously signed above patriotic bunting at the front of their amusement center, and then “the Aristocrat,” which they described as  “one of six giant Ferris Wheels on the North American Continent.”  Both were, apparently, replacements for the smaller wheels they opened with in 1919 over considerable neighborhood resistance.  George’s father Robert C. Vincent, age 76, died after a short illness early in 1920, not knowing if his top of the ridge amusements would survive.

The son and executor, George, using then a mix of licenses and zoning, the sympathy of friendly neighbors who liked living near these revolving excitements, the clout of free enterprise, the favors of club life, and one restraining order kept the Vincent business in place until the night of August 26-27, 1934 when it caught fire.   Consumed was the Carousselle, the 62 hand-carved animals, the one thousand electric lights and the reflecting mirrors.  Gone were the skating rink, two lunch rooms, and the transcendent Aristocrat.  A few of the neighbors nearest to the ashes of the Carousselle’s mighty Wurlitzer Organ may have given thanks.

WEB EXTRAS

Click HERE to read more!

(click to enlarge photos)

Imagine asking the famous – and stuffed – gorilla named Bobo what were the two most popular artifacts on show at what since early June of this year has been the old Museum of History and Industry in Montlake.  Bobo – being a modest gorilla who thru many years kept a steady eye on the museum’s exhibits from his own glass case – would, I think, choose the “Founding of Seattle” diorama with its puppet pioneers and the Great Seattle Fire mural. I would agree with the western lowland primate.

The mural is shown here with its artist, Ruddy Zallinger, in a press photo that was first published in this newspaper on Dec. 5, 1952.  The then 34-year old Zallinger explained that he’d been working on the 10-by-24-foot mural for four months and hoped to complete it by Christmas.  For rendering the pioneer buildings the “scientific muralist” studied old photographs kept by the Seattle Historical Society.  For the flames he studied fires nearby at the Montlake landfill.

Raised in Seattle and taught at Cornish School, Zallinger was still fresh from winning a 1949 Pulitzer Prize for a much larger mural “The Age of Reptiles” that took five years to complete for the Peabody Museum of Natural History on the Yale University Campus, where Zalinger was also an instructor.

Zallinger’s Great Seattle Fire mural was dedicated on Feb. 15, 1953, the first anniversary of the museum’s opening.  A band playing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” accompanied the unveiling.  Those attending included at least fifty persons who were surviving eye-witnesses of the Great Fire of June 6, 1889, and some of their stories were told in a recorded program that followed the unveiling.  For the occasion of the mural’s 50th anniversary rededication on Feb. 15, 2003, there were, of course, no first hand witnesses attending.  Bobo, however, was there.

WEB EXTRAS

Click HERE to read more!

(click to enlarge photos)

The lawn just north of Seattle Center’s International Fountain has a sundry history that is unlike your own neighborhood.  David and Louisa Denny, the youngest of Seattle’s first pioneers who were not children, picked their claim here in the early 1850s, and “proved” it, in part, with a “North Seattle” garden that became an important source of produce for Seattle.

The Denny farmhouse was at 3rd and Republican which is about one long horseshoe’s throw to the north from where respectively in this “then” and “now” government horses are corralled and youth mingle.  The land east from here to the south end of Lake Union was mostly open, and so helpful for farming.  It was also dotted by willows, had some swampy edges and thereby provided both water for cabbages and beets and attracted ducks for hunting.

After the growing family built a larger home, also on Republican but nearer Lake Union, their farm was tended by Chinese immigrants and was then popularly known as China Gardens.  The army took possession in 1898 with a short-lived corral meant to supply horses and mules to the then glorified wars with Spain first and then the Philippine Insurrection.

In 1903 the Denny claim was outfitted with Recreation Park, the first stadium for the Pacific Coast Baseball League’s Seattle Siwashes, a name meaning Indians that was lifted from the Chinook trade jargon.  Most likely the Siwashes did not know that they were playing ball on grounds that long before bats swung at balls were used by the local Duwamish Indians for potlatches, their gregarious ritual for gaining prestige by giving gifts.

Somewhat similarly, Civic Auditorium, the first modern addition to the Potlatch Meadows and the Denny garden, was born of Pioneer Square saloon-keeper James Osborne’s $20,000 gift to the city in 1881.  Osborne stipulated a “civic hall” and with 50 years interest, his bequest both gave him posthumous prestige and Seattle its Civic Auditorium.  It was Seattle’s 1930 start on both Century 21 and a City Center on a unique neighborhood now long given to planting, performing and play.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

(To read Paul’s detailed response, please click HERE!)

 

WEB EXTRAS

(click to enlarge photos)

In 1875 Isaac and James Buzby opened the Starr Mills at the waterfront foot of Seneca Street.  The city’s 1876 directory compliments the mill for supplying a “need long felt.”  Here we see – we presume – five employees posing for a typical business portrait.  Four are neatly posed in the mill’s two stories of open doorways and the fifth one is riding the wagon with the team on the left.

The 1879 directory notes the Starr Mills “Extra Family Flour” – a surely comforting brand name – and describes the mill as also offering “constantly for sale, and at liberal rates, feed, cracked wheat, corn meal bran, shorts, middlings and chicken feed.”  In a 1950 feature from his long-lived “Just Cogitating” column, C.T. Conover, the Times pioneer reporter with the “heritage beat,” notes that “after a few years” of trying the Buzbys dropped their Family Flour and kept to milling “only feed for stock as Puget Sound wheat was too soft for successful flour making.”

This subject was grouped with several other historical Seattle scenes in a March 11, 1934 Times feature titled “WAY BACK – When Seattle Was But Youngster.”   The caption identified C. M. McComb as the man riding the wagon.  He was also the Times reader who loaned the paper the original photograph for inclusion in its popular “Way Back” series. Along with all else on the waterfront south of University Street, the Starr Mill was consumed by the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.

Jean Sherrard used the occasion of his contemporary “repeat” to explore Seattle history with his class of 5th and 6th graders from Hillside School.  Jean recalls, “Pouring over the old photographs, and maps, we walked the footprint of the mill and imagined the waters of Elliott Bay lapping at our feet.  After posing for a “now” photo beneath the viaduct’s looming exit ramp at Seneca we climbed the steps to First Ave., a site where a ravine once harbored a scatter of graves – a native cemetery.  When one of the students was convinced he could sense unhappy spirits, we headed for the Pike Place Market where we divvied up a pound of Turkish delight in Victor Steinbrueck Park.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Jean, when you arise on Sunday morning will you iunsert the first addition by returning and repeating your “now and then” that features another Hillside class, the one visiting Snoqualmie Falls with you two or three years past?   Following that I’ll find a few more features and photos touching on Busby’s Mill and the neighborhood near Seneca at the waterfront, or near it.

Here it is, Paul:

SNOQUALMIE FALLS – Seattle Now & Then, July 13th, 2008

Whidbey Island resident Teresa Pate sent this abundant view of Snoqualmie Falls to Jean Sherrard in response to Jean’s handling of other photos of this 270-foot cataract that appear in Sherrard’s and my book, “Washington Then and Now.” Pate explains, “The picture has probably been in the family 75 to 100 years.” Embossed directly on the photograph is the name “Evans,” perhaps the studio signature of David and Francis Evans who, in the early 20th century, ran Evans Photo and Art Shop in downtown Seattle.

Of the falls’ many thousand recordings this view is wonderfully appealing for putting the cascade “in full force” behind the delicate profiles of a fallen forest snag and two men, we imagine, in the grip of the sublime. To repeat this mildly telescopic effect, Jean used his 80mm lens for the “now.”

Above the roar of the falls Jean got the attention of his subjects by waving his arms. (His subjects, by the way, are also his students at Bellevue’s Hillside Student Community, a private school founded by Sherrard’s parents in 1969.

Readers will note that on the right of both views the same rock shows in the pool below the falls. Sherrard explains: “After triangulating the iron-shaped boulder evident in both photos, I surmised that the original photographer was standing well out into the river, probably on a log, as there’s no structure today that would bring me near that perspective. Usually the rocks below the falls are slick from the misting water, but on this day the wind blew up the canyon toward the falls, leaving the approach safe and dry.”

Several more remarkable older photos from the archive:

And a few more NOW pix to illustrate our trip down to the river:

Four years ago – how time flies….

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Above: Looking north in the mid-1880s from the Frye Opera House (1885) at First and Marion.  From an upper story the view looks over Madison Street.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey.) Below; With the help of a long (but not long enough) pole the “now” scene was recorded from an exterior stairway at the northwest corner of the Jackson Federal Building.

FRONT STREET NORTH OVER MADISON, ca. 1886

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 30, 2007)

More than a few publishers and local historians have silently thanked Fred Dorsaz and/or Edward Schwerin for carrying their studio’s camera to the top floor of the nearly new Frye Opera House to record this local classic, a birdseye into North Seattle.  The scene looks over Madison Street, up Front Street  (First Avenue), across the distant rooftops of Belltown and far beyond to the still hardly marked Magnolia Peninsula.

There was a touch of opportunism and pride in the partner’s climb and recording.  The original photo card has “Souvenir Art Studio” printed across the bottom, and if one looks hard, their business name is written again on the banner, which stands-out against the dark trees near the center of their photograph.

The Souvenir banner is strung over Front Street between the Pacific Drug Store building, bottom right, and the Kenyon Block, bottom left.  The Souvenir Art Studio rent quarters in “capitalist J. Gardner Kenyon’s” namesake commercial building.  Taking clues from the few signs attached to its sides so was the Globe Printing Company (one of the then only four job printers listed in the 1885-86 City Directory), William P. Stanley’s books, stationary, and wall paper store, and Robert Aberenethy’s “boots and shoes” store.  Like its owner Kenyon, Abernethy, it seems, also conveniently lived in the Kenyon Block.

On page 431 of the first volume of the three volume King County History by Clarence Bagley, the pioneer historian dates this view “about 1887.”    Given the absence in this scene of important 1887 additions and the presence of structures not around in 1885, the likely date is 1886 — although I’ll hedge with my own “about 1886.”   The small flags and bunting strung across Front Street, and the temporary fir trees decorating the sidewalks hint that this may be Independence Day, 1886.

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NORTH WATERFRONT 1889 FIRE RUINS

(First appeared in Pacific, 8-30-1998)

In this comparison the historical photographer’s back is to University Street, a little more than one week after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. A contemporary repeat would have put my back to the Alaskan Way Viaduct for an blocked view against the northwest corner of the Immunex headquarters.  (By now in 2012 they may have moved away or mutated.)

The larger ruin here is the dark brick skeleton of the Northwestern Cracker factory, center-right, one lot south of the southwest corner of Front (First Avenue) and Seneca streets. To its left and across First Avenue is the pointed facade of Annie and Amos Brown’s Carpenter Gothic home. It was one of the fire’s “heroic structures,” for the bucket brigade that saved it from all but blistered paint and burst windows also saved the neighborhood behind it, including the big-roofed skating rink, top center, and Plymouth Congregational Church, facing Second Avenue above the temporary white tents at far right.

On this west side of First Avenue the fire destroyed some of the 1876 retaining wall that held this bluff. Below the church and the tents, First Avenue is suspended above a ravine that once cut through the bluff at Seneca Street.

The wall below the bluff at far left is another savior. The brickwork on the foundation of the Arlington Hotel (Bay Building), begun before the fire, stopped the fire’s advance north. Behind the historical photographer was another impediment: a section of open water not covered with the timber trestle work we see in the foreground. Only the tracks of the Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad crossed this waterfront gap. There, at about 8:30 in the evening, another bucket line stopped the advance of a fire that had begun three blocks south around 3 p.m. that day.

Some of the structures on the left of the top of the two scenes above can be found also on the right of the scene directly above it.  The subject just above this caption shows, far left, the Arlington Hotel foundation at the southwest corner of First Ave. and University Street.  The full pan of this destruction is next – below.  There Beacon Hill spans much of the horizon and part of the Arthur and Mary Denny home at the southeast corner of Union Street and First Avenue is on the far left.   Note how the lines of both the “Rams Horne” track and the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Track move across the rubble and rebuilding efforts on the off-shore “trestle-town.”   Here, however, it is obvious that they will not longer “nearly” meet – as they do in photos shown above – because a new warehouse (far right) has been built directly over the “Rams Horne” right-of-way or, rather, lack of right-of-way.  That waterfront railroad was exceedingly resented by the locals and once destroyed by the fire had little chance of being fully restored.

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Above: The scene looks west on Seneca to its northwest corner with Second Avenue, where, depending upon the date stands either the Suffern residence or Holy Names Academy, the city’s first sectarian school.   (Pix courtesy of Michael Cirelli)  Below: With the economic confidence gained by the Yukon and Alaska gold rushes of the late 1890s, most of Seattle pioneer residences then still surviving in the central business district were replaced with brick commercial blocks.

HOLY NAMES ACADEMY – FIRST HOME

(First appeared in Pacific, June 17, 2007)

Sometime in the 1870s John Suffern  built a sizeable home at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Seneca Street.  We see it here but not knowing the date of the photograph cannot say if the Sufferens are still living there or if it is in the learned hands of the Roman Catholic Sisterhood of the Holy Names.

Suffern is first known hereabouts for his iron works and second for both building and captaining steamboats on Puget Sound.  After Issaquah pioneer Lyman Andrews stumbled upon some exposed coal on his claim in 1863 he carried a few lumps of it in a sack to Seattle where Sufferen tested it in his kiln and found the Issaquah coal excellent for firing.  In another ten years east side coal became Seattle’s principal export – most of it to California railroads.   By 1879 Suffern had turned to drugs.  That year’s directory adds an “e” to him name and lists him simply, “Sufferen, J. A. druggist, cor. Second and Seneca.”

The following year, 1880, the Sisters of Holy Names bought his property for $6,800 and arranged the home for their first Seattle school.  The Holy Names official history explains, “The building consists of two stories and a basement.  In the latter are the kitchen, cellar and pantry.  The parlor, music room, office and Sister’s refectory are on the first floor, the chapel, community room and a small apartment for the Superioress are on the second floor.”

Also in 1880 the Sisters of Holy Names built a second and larger structure on their property to the north of this white (we assume) house.  The addition included two large classrooms and a second floor dormitory for the city’s first sectarian school.  It opened in January 1881 with 25 pupils, and grew so rapidly with the community that in 1884 the sisters built another and grander plant with a landmark spire at 7th and Jackson Street.   The not so old Suffern home survived the city’s “great fire” of 1889, but was replaced in the late 1890s with the surviving brick structure, now the comely home for a Washington Liquor Store, and a custom tailor.

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The COLONIAL BLOCK

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 21, 1999)

The COLONIAL BLOCK, or building, at the southwest comer of First Avenue and Seneca Street is a local gem whose architectural shine saved it from destruction. “Colonial” is written in stone relief at the center of the building’s balustrade. It’s just below the colonial ornament of facing scrolls that hold between them the platform for a ball that crests the building.

The Colonial was designed in 1901-02 by the New York architect Max Umbrecht soon after he was transplanted to Seattle by the industrialist Lyman C. Smith of Syracuse – the Smith of typewriters, guns and, later, Seattle’s Smith Tower. With the commercial street level given to glass for light and window display, Umbrecht was left to arrange his restrained art through the upper three floors. A few of its  pleasures are the second-floor doors, which open to wrought-iron mini-balconies, and the central arched window, with bas-relief of garlands, torches and horns that fall from the windowsill like a banner.

The Colonial was one of several structures restored in the early 1980s for Waterfront Place, a mixed-use development directed by Mayor Paul Schell [Remembering here that Schell was still His Honor in 1999.] It was Schell’s rebound from losing his first mayoral race against television pundit Charles Royer in 1978. As past dean of the University of Washington’s School of Architecture, Hizzoner knows his architecture.

When pioneer Arthur Denny and friends first extended First Avenue north from Pioneer Square, they were stopped at Seneca Street by a ravine too deep to fill, so they bridged it here at this intersection. Later, Denny’s granddaughter, Sophie Frye Bass, identified the “high bluff on the south side” of this ravine – later the site of the Colonial -as “an Indian burial ground.”

Frank Shaw continues – Nine months later, and a few days, Shaw returns to the pit and records the work-in-progress of filling it with trees.  The date for the first two photos below is Nov. 21, 1975.

(click to enlarge photos)

As far as I can figure from studying many photographs of Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, this line of commercial sheds was a unique response to the conflagration. Tents, not sheds, were the primary answer to the needs of a community that lost practically its entire business district.

The inferno ignited about 2 p.m. at the southwest corner of Madison Street and Front Street (First Avenue) and by sunrise the next morning, the flames had consumed about 32 blocks — but not this one.

In 1883, Seattle’s first pioneer industrialists, Henry and Sara Yesler, began building their mansion on this block. Here, they had nurtured an orchard, the village’s largest. Even with the new big home (part of it shows upper-left) the couple kept a few fruit trees on the side lawns. However, if there were any trees left on the mansion’s front lawn, they were removed after the big fire.

Along the Third Avenue side of the Yesler block, between James and Jefferson streets, Yesler and James Lowman, his manager and relative, nailed together temporary quarters for a few of the businesses that were flattened. For his burned-out stationary and printing company, the venerable Lowman and Hanford, Lowman picked the corner shed here at James and Third.

King County’s courthouse (its tower appears here far right at Third and Jefferson) is now City Hall Park. The 1882 courthouse was saved when soaked blankets were applied to the roof, and bureaucrats, litigants, judges and prisoners repeatedly splashed buckets of water against its clapboard walls.

Sara Yesler had died in 1887. Henry and his second cousin, Minnie Gagle, were living in the mansion at the time of the fire. Five months later they were married; she was 54 years his junior.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean – more features related to the “Great Fire” and in the neighborhood.  We should note that some of the stories may have been used previously in other equally apt contexts.  They perform like leitmotifs in this 0n-going Seattle Symph0ny.

FIRST, the ill-fated Seattle birdseye prepared shortly before the June 6 fire and then made mostly irrelevant except as a detailed memory of a business district that was lost to the fire.  I know of no other copy than this one – sometimes hand-colored – in which the burned area has been given a border crude enough, perhaps, to suggest destruction or even a struggling sign for smoke.

NEXT  black and white and color variations of the periodical Western Shore’s Sept. 21, 1889 coverage of the rebuilding underway following the June 6 fire.  (Click TWICE to enlarge)

The West Shore birdseyes look northeast from an imagined position mid-block between First Avenue (It reaches the lower-right corner), the waterfront (off-frame to the left), Washington Street (it runs across the bottom of the sketch) and Main Street (behind the artist).  The structure left of center on the north side of Washington is the Dexter Horton bank.  With some mending it managed to reuse the burned-out shell of its quarters for a few months following the fire.  On the center-horizon are the Central School at 6th and Madison (with the t0wers) and to the right of the school the Rainier Hotel on 5th between Marion and Columbia.  This big hotel was rushed together – of timber – to serve a city that lost most of its hostelries to the fire.  On the far right City Hall – aka the Katzenjammer Kastle – here still the County Courthouse – with its central tower faces the artist over Third Avenue between Jefferson and Terrace Streets.  The Katzenjammer appears in the principal feature (on top) one block south of the photographer.  To the left of the City Hall/ Court House we discover the Yesler Mansion and even a few of the temporary units built on its front lawn.  In the second photograph below the colored rendering of the West Shore birdseye we get a look back through this scene from the front porch of the Katzenjammer, but at an earlier date, sometime perhaps in July, or a few weeks after the fire.

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YESLER MANSION & PUBLIC LIBRARY

(First appeared in Pacific, August 22, 1982)

In 1882, Seattle pioneer Henry Yesler made the national news. The Harper’s Weekly story was about the mob lynching of three accused but untried murderers. The hanging was done from a stanchion braced between the forks of two maple trees on the James Street side of Yesler’s backyard. The Harper’s reporter either interviewed Henry or overheard him say, “that was the first fruit them trees ever bore, but it was the finest.” The artist’s sketch accompanying the article shows the outlaws hanging between Yesler’s maples, and beneath them in the crowd stands Henry Yesler busy at his favorite avocation: whittling.

Yesler continues to whittle in this week’s smaller historical photograph (above). His wife Sara poses with him in front of their home at First Avenue and James Street, the present site of the Pioneer Building. To their left (our right) are the hanging maples. Although hidden by the leaves, the stanchion is still in the picture, left as a morbid warning to visiting hoodlums. The year is 1883, and the street is decked out in lanterns, bunting and bordered with evergreens. Whatever the festive occasion, the Yeslers were also celebrating their good fortune of being the largest taxpayers in King County, and having survived in prosperity nearly 30 years in their little home in the center of town. The $92,000 assessment of Yesler’s King County properties in 1881, had risen to $318,000 by 1883.

So Henry and Sara Yesler decided on a larger extravagance, and hired an architect named Bowman to design it. In place of their modest one-story, five-room corner home they would have a three story, 40-room mansion which with its surrounding grounds would fill an entire city block between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue at James Street.

Construction began on the Yesler Mansion in 1883, but later that year so did the Depression. Both Henry’s prosperity and his home building faltered. By 1885 the Yeslers were nearly bankrupt. When, at last, in July 1886 they moved into their showpiece, it was still not finished. The planned ornate white oak, ash and redwood paneling was missing. Most of the rooms were-empty, so Henry promptly leased many of them as unfurnished office spaces.

By accounts Sara and Henry were a robust couple, with an exuberant habit of dancing into the late hours at public balls. When Sara died suddenly on Aug. 28, 1887, of a “gastric fever” she was only 65. Flags in the city and on ships in the sound were hung at half-mast, many businesses closed and the great house could not hold all the mourners. When the funeral services were over Henry was alone in his home with 40 rooms and a few renters.

Soon, and wisely, Henry decided to leave town. Ten days after his wife’s death, in company with James Lowman, his nephew who since 1886 had been managing Yesler’s business affairs, Henry headed east on the Northern Pacific. He carried two lists: one of friends and relatives to visit, and the other a shopping list of furnishings for his mansion. The 77-year-old Yesler was an intrepid traveler, and soon exhausted his 33-year-old nephew who returned home in October. Yesler kept going until Nov. 26 when he returned to his mansion with the flu and a badly sprained ankle. The injury, illness and memory of his whirlwind tour were, perhaps, enough stimulation to fill the void in his big house left by Sara.

It is also possible that Henry’s mourning was diverted by his second cousin, Minnie Gagle, a “good-looking girl with expressive gray eyes” and 56 years Henry’s junior. Minnie lived in Leitersburg, Maryland, Henry’s birthplace and one of the spots on his tour. In 1888 the Gagles moved to Seattle, by 1889 Minnie was living in the Yesler mansion, and on Sept. 29, 1889 she and Henry were married in Philadelphia, while on another trip east. Returning home, Henry now more than ever stayed in his mansion. But, his marriage seemed either so scandalous or bizarre to his old cronies “that many were alienated and stayed away.”

In 1892, at the age of 82, Henry Yesler, accompanied by Minnie, left his mansion for the last time on a tour to both Alaska and Yellowstone Park. Soon after his return his robust health slipped away. In the early Friday morning of Dec. 16, in the company of two doctors, two nurses, his nephew, his wife and the entire family, the bedridden Yesler wondered aloud if he was about to die. Millie answered, “Are you afraid of dying?” He replied, “No, I don’t care anything about it. The mere dying I don’t like, but the rest I don’t care anything about.” Then, after some nourishment, he added, “That’s all I care for.”

More than 3,000 mourners crowded the Yesler mansion and its grounds for the largest funeral the city had ever been part of.  A scandal as big as his estate ensued. Henry’s young nephew accused his young wife of destroying the will. And the city was involved because it was claimed that this “father of Seattle,” who had built the Puget Sound’s first steam sawmill, been mayor twice, paid the most taxes, had left the bulk of his estate, including the $100,000 mansion, to his city. Now the citizen’s repressed resentment for the scandalously young interloping Minnie broke loose. However, neither this prejudice nor the charges were supported by evidence sufficient to convict her.

In seclusion and guarded by her family, Minnie continued to live in the mansion until 1899 when the Seattle Public Library moved in. Sara Yesler, as the library’s first librarian in 1868, would have approved the change. Now it was librarian Smith who had his office in one of the bedrooms, the bindery in the kitchen, another room for periodicals, which left more than 30 rooms for stacks and storage. Our view of the Yesler Mansion as Public Library was taken in either 1899 or 1900. On New Year’s Day, 1901, it burned down taking 25,000 volumes with it.

In 1903, the Coliseum, a barn-sized theater “the largest west of Chicago seating 2,600” was built on the ruins. Then on May 4, 1916, an “immense pile of granite and terra cotta” was dedicated. Our view of the King County Courthouse, as of the library, is from Third Avenue. A plaque honoring Henry Vesler is at the entrance.

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In 1883 the city’s first industrialists Henry and Sarah Yesler rewarded themselves by building a 40-room mansion in their orchard facing Third Avenue between Jefferson and James Streets.  After its destruction by fire in 1901, the site was temporarily filled with the Coliseum Theatre (“The largest west of Chicago, seating 2600.”) until the first floors of the King County Courthouse – aka the City-County Building – replaced it in 1916.  This comparison looks east across Third Avenue.   Historical photo courtesy Plymouth Congregational Church.

UNRED RUINS

(Most of this feature is a reworking of what appears in the earlier feature directly above this one.  The clever “Unred Ruins” title is courtesy of a Times editor.  As a rule none of the titles we submit with our stories are used by the Times.  This is an old pulp tradition – there are headline specialists.  Sometimes – like this one – they come forward with pretty good headers.)

Henry and Sarah Yesler’s mansion was not yet twenty when it burned down early in the morning of New Years Day, 1901.  Actually, from this view of the ruins it is clear that while the big home was gutted by fire neither the corner tower (facing 3rd and Jefferson) nor the front porch – including the library sign over the front stairs – were more than blistered by it.

The Yesler landmark had a somewhat smoky history.  Although completed in 1883 Sara and Henry did not move in, and instead continued to live in their little home facing Pioneer Place for three years more.  When Sarah died in the late summer of 1887 it was in the mansion, which was then opened for the viewing of both Sarah – she was “resting” in its north parlor – and the big home too.

Soon after Sarah’s death Henry and James Lowman, Yesler’s younger nephew who was by then managing his affairs, took a long trip east to visit relatives, buy furnishings for the still largely empty mansion and, as it turned out, find a second wife for Henry.  It was a local sensation when next the not-long-for-this-world octogenarian married in his 20-year-old (she may have been 19) cousin Minnie Gagler.  (I have neither found nor made any special search for a portrait of Minnie.)

After Henry died in the master bedroom in1892 no will could be found. While Minnie was suspected of having destroyed it this could not be proved.  Consequently, the home was not — as Lowman and others expected — given to the city for use as a city hall.  Instead Minnie stayed on secluded in it until 1899 when she moved out and the Seattle Public Library moved in.

Instead of partying on New Years Eve 1900 Librarian Charles Wesley Smith worked until midnight completing the annual inventory of books that only hours later would make an impressive fire.  Except for the books that were checked out, the Seattle Public Library lost about 25 thousand volumes to the pyre.  (The charge that Smith had started the fire was never proven.)

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Facing Third Avenue, the Yesler Mansion and City Hall were photographed together in 1900, the last year they would stand side by side. In 1903, the over-sized but short-lived Coliseum Theater was built in the place o/the mansion. In 1916, the lower floors o/the surviving City County Building were dedicated there. Across Jefferson Street, the site 0/the rambling clapboard City Hall that was destroyed in 1909 was ultimately developed into City Hall Park.

PIONEER PAIR

(First appeared in Pacific, March 24, 2002)

So far as I can recall, this is the only photograph that shows, side by side, two of the more significant structures in our pioneer history. On the left facing Third Avenue is the Yesler Mansion; on the right, Seattle City Hall. From this look at City Hall you cannot tell it, but in its lifetime the hall grew into such a heterodox structure that it was popularly called “the Katzenjammer Castle.” (We will include a wider and later shot below that makes the point.) The nickname was drawn from a comic strip featuring the two mischievous Katzenjammer Kids, whose adventures took place in a cityscape stuffed with clumsy structures resembling Rube Goldberg inventions.

In its own, ornate way, the 40-room Yesler Mansion was also clumsy. In “Shaping Seattle Architecture,” Jeffrey Karl Ochsner of the University of Washington Department of Architecture notes its “highly agitated forms . . . irregular bays, picturesque profile and varied details . . . are typical of American High Victorian architecture.” I, for one, fall for this kind of clumsiness.

When construction began on the mansion in 1883 in time for the depression or “Panic of 1883,” its municipal neighbor was already standing for two years as the King County Courthouse. When, in 1886, Henry and Sara Yesler moved two blocks from their home in Pioneer Place (Square) to their big home, it was barely furnished. After Sara died the following year, Henry and his nephew James Lowman went east to visit relatives and buy furniture. Henry died in late 1892.

Seven years later, the Seattle Public Library moved in. The stay was short. On New Year’s Day 1901, fire destroyed the Yesler Mansion and 25,000 books. Twelve years earlier both buildings just escaped the city’s “Great Fire.”

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What we now refer to as the King County Courthouse was first known as the City-County Building when Seattle’s mayor George Cotterill and the King County Commissioners agreed to build and share the new building both needed.  Construction began in June 1914.  This view looks east across 3rd Avenue to where the building’s south side faces what is now called City Hall Park.

CITY-COUNTY BUILDING

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 2006)

For fifteen tiring years litigants negotiated First Hill to meet with bureaucrats at the King County Courthouse at 7th Avenue and Alder Street.   Consequently, that part of the hill overlooking Pioneer Square was often called “Profanity Hill.”  But on May 4, 1916 the new courthouse was dedicated, and it suited the Central Business District well, for it looked more like an office building than a courthouse.

The architect of its first five floors, the commandingly named Augustus Warren Gould, was censured by his peers and kicked out of the American Institute of Architects. In the book “Shaping Seattle Architect,” Dennis Anderson explains with his essay on Gould that the architect “violated professional ethics to secure this commission siding with Pioneer Square property holders who fought relocation of city-county offices to the [Denny] regrade area.”  Still Gould kept the commission and this is the result.

Six more sympathetic stories were added in 1929-31.  Unfortunately in the early 1960s, as Lawrence Kreisman (a familiar name to Pacific Northwest readers) notes in “Made to Last” his book on historic preservation, “A major remodeling [that] was intended to capture the spirit of urban renewal and cosmetically disguise the building’s true age destroyed many original features of the elegant marble-clad lobbies, windows and entrance portals.”

The U.S. Food Administration’s sign “Food Will Win the War” certainly dates this view from sometime during the First World War.   In addition to soldiers and munitions the nation was also sending food to Europe and homemakers were signed up as “kitchen soldiers.”   School children recited this rhyming pledge.  “At table I’ll not leave a scrap of food upon my plate.  And I’ll not eat between meals but for supper time I’ll wait.”  These were the years when horse steaks were sold at the Pike Place Market, President Wilson turned the white house law into a pasture for sheep, and the country’s 20th century long march to obesity was temporarily impeded.

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The “GREAT FIRE” of JUNE 6, 1889

(First appeared in Pacific, March 14, 1982)

The Wednesday, June 5, edition of The Times ran beneath its masthead an enthusiastic advertisement for a sale on summer parasols. It had been an unseasonably hot spring and the sun that lay on the city also fanned forest fires in the Cascades. Burning unchecked, they glowed by night and sprinkled ash on Seattle by day. The Times also reported front page that across the continent wetter weather continued on the ruins of Johnstown, Pa., where cold and heavy rains helped spread diphtheria. Six days earlier, May 31, a dam that spanned the Conemaugh River burst and in the time it takes a wall of water to rush 12 miles downstream devastated Johnstown, killing 2,200.

The Wednesday Times also printed an ad for Frye’s Opera House, and its “coming Friday night only appearance of the Cecilian Opera Co. . . .” also would feature “. . . new scenery and magnificent stage effects.”

A story inside continued the compliments. “Theater-goers during the past few weeks have observed a wonderful change in the stage settings at Frye’s Opera House . . . Since the first of the year Frye has put in ten new sets, including one fancy Gothic city, one chamber, a very elegant garden setting, a woods scene.”  Frye’s theater (at the present site of the Federal Building) was when built in 1883 the grandest local landmark with its mansard roof, 1,400 seats and a stage with seven trapdoors. The feature article concluded with assurances that “there are five large exits which provide against any danger of a panic in case of fire or an accident.”

Soon enough the fire came. There would be no Thursday Tunes, no summer parasols, no “elegant garden setting,” no “fancy Gothic city” and no Seattle business district.

The principal photograph looks south down Front Street (First Avenue) from Spring St. towards Madison and the intersection where the “Great Fire of June 6, 1889,” first ignited in a basement wood shop across the street from the Opera House. The crowd stands well back from the heat.  There was no defending the theater, which although brick, is still ablaze and would soon be consumed. The scene was shot around 3 o’clock in the afternoon shortly after the fire began. It is one of the few images of the fire itself. Most local photographers were busy saving their equipment.  We may imagine that many thousands of prints and negatives of the pre-fire city were lost to the flames. Within two hours the fire reached Pioneer Place (or Square) and by 7 o’clock the fire had eaten ‘its way to Main Street and would continue on through the evening past King Street to a wet death in the tideftats where the Kingdome now stands (once stood).

The Great Fire moved north as well. By sunset the spot from which the photograph was taken, near Spring, and all of the picture’s subjects, including the Minneapolis Art Studio, would be consumed. And in that direction another casualty is noted in Murray Morgan’s classic of local history, Skid Road.

“It climbed east up the hill toward Second Avenue from the Opera House. So great was the heat that the fire pushed backward against the wind across Madison Street and into the Kenyon block which housed, in addition to stores, the press of The Seattle Times.”

And The Times was stunned until Monday, the 10th, when its first post-fire edition would announce: “The Times is still on earth. It is slightly disfigured but still in the ring . . .The Times office went up in flames . . . nothing being saved except the reporters, the files and a few other implements of the trade.” This dauntless report was preceded by a rhyming headline which read:  “SEATTLE DISFIGURED, but still in the ring” this is the song Seattle will sing, New buildings, New hopes, New streets, New town, there’s nothing that can throw Seattle down. She goes thru adversity, fire and flame but the Queen City gets there just the same.”

This Queen City – named so earlier by a Portland developer – also got a lot of press attention nationally. But it wasn’t the leveling of 30 central city blocks that was news as much as the human interest it discovered in this frontier town’s steadfast generosity. Before the fire, citizens had pledged $576 in relief to the Johnstown disaster. After their own catastrophe, they decided still to keep the faith and send that pledge along to the flood Victims_

The Monday Times reported: “Everywhere confidence in the future of this city is maintained . . . The heaviest losers are the most cheerful.”  This booming optimism was encouraged in the eventual finding that no human lives were lost.  However, thousands of rats and at least one horse died that day.  As the Monday Times reported: “The men who left a head horse in a vacant lot off Madison near Broadway on the day of the Fire: If they do not removed the carcass, they will be reported to the police as the stench arising from the animal is sickening.”

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The off-shore reach of Yesler’s Wharf is impressive even after it was destroyed during the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.  The contemporary scene steps back perhaps two hundred feet to catch the ramps that serve the passenger ferries at the foot of Yesler Way.

YESLER WHARF RUINS – 1889

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 2003)

By a contemporary’s description Yesler’s Wharf and the rest of the waterfront was “transformed to charcoal” by the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.  The fire began around 2:45 in the afternoon at Front Street (First Avenue) and Madison Street.  Pushed by an unseasonably hot wind out of the north it skittered south along the waterfront reaching and engulfing Yesler Wharf by 5:30.

Stripped by the fire of its structures and planking the wharf revealed a substantial foundation of fill and debris gathered through nearly a half-century of serving as the community’s industrial center at the foot of Mill Street (Yesler Way).  This view looks east from near the wharf’s outer end to the still standing ruins of the ornate brick buildings that formed a show-strip along the west side of First Avenue for the two blocks between Columbia Street, on the far left and Yesler Way, on the far right.

Here perhaps three or four days after the fire (parts of the rubble are still smoldering) the wharf is already being rebuilt.  The new beams at the bottom of the scene have been attached to what is left of the pilings at the southern edge of the fill.  The fire obviously could not burn below the water line, and at low tide the best of the surviving stubs were capped and extended.  The fire has surely contributed to some of the fill showing between the beams.  The size of this scene can be gauged by the single worker standing on a beam right of center.

Barely visible left of center is a Lilliputian party of citizens in suits and dresses visiting the site.  They are probably carrying the passes that were required until the eleventh of June. That day a local daily reported that the “district was opened to the public and immediately invaded by a heterogeneous crowd of the curious, relic hunters, vagrants and thieves . . .  Riff raff and land pirates set about digging . . .  All articles of value that could be found in the ruins were seized upon and many disgraceful scenes enacted . . .  The military returned and drove the vagrants out.”

By the end of June nearly all the ruins had been razed, the debris removed and the fire district dappled with temporary tents for businesses.  At summer’s end the waterfront was almost entirely planked over, extended, and rebuilt with many more piers and warehouses larger than those destroyed by the fire.

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When its first ornate section was built in 1883 the Occidental hotel was perhaps the principal architectural sign of Seattle’s then recent ascendancy as the most populated community in Washington Territory.  With its 1887 additions the hotel covered the entire flatiron block between Second, Yesler and James.  Destroyed by the “Great Fire” of June 5,1889, the Occidental was replaced by the Seattle Hotel whose unfortunate destruction in 1961 by many reckonings mobilized Seattle’s “forces of preservation.”  A small section of its dismal replacement, the “Sinking Ship Garage,” appears in the contemporary photograph right of center between the Pioneer Building and the trees of Pioneer Square.

“HIDEOUS REMAINS”

(First appeared in Pacific, June 6, 2004)

One hundred and sixteen years ago this morning on June 6, 1889 that part of Seattle’s excited population that tired of watching the flames through the night and had surviving beds to drop into awoke to these ruins and thirty-plus blocks of more ruins and ashes.  The Occidental Hotel’s three-story monoliths — perhaps the grandest wreckage — held above the still smoking district like illustrations for the purple and red prose of that morning’s Seattle Daily Press. (It is printed above.)

“The forked tongues of a pierce pitiless holocaust have licked up with greedy rapacity the business portion of Seattle . . . It was a catastrophe sudden and terrific. Besides the smoking tomb-like ruins of a few standing walls . . . people are left living to endure with sheer despair . . . blackness, gloom, bereavement, suffering, poverty, the hideous remains of a feast of fire.”

Predictably, the reporter’s hideous remains were also fantastic and the city’s photographers were soon making sidewalk sales of scenes like this one.  If the best of these ruins had been allowed to stand it would have become both romantic and revered, but it was not.  The Occidental’s  “towers” were blown up on the evening of the eighth.  (Most likely it was either late on the 7th or 8th that this record of their silhouette was captured for the district was still generally ablaze on the sixth.)

The fire started at about 2:30 in the afternoon of June 5 at the southwest corner of Front Street (First Ave.) and Madison.  It took a little less than four hours for it to reach and jump James Street and ignite the north wall of the hotel.  In another dozen minutes the fire passed through the distinguished landmark and jumped Yesler Way to spread through the firetrap frame structures between Yesler and the tideflats that were then still south of King Street.

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Then caption: Looking north on an unpaved Second Avenue in July 1889.  The nearly new tracks on the left served the first electric trolley on the Pacific Coast when the conversion was made from horses to dynamos earlier in March.  Second was paved in the mid-1890s and thereafter quickly became Seattle’s “Bicycle Row” with many brands to choose from sold mostly out of small one story storefronts, especially in this block between Spring and Seneca Streets.  (Pix courtesy of Michael Maslan)  Now caption:  The widened Second north of Spring Street was half quiet when photographed on a late Sunday afternoon.

THE CANVAS RECOVERY

The city’s “great fire” of June 6, 1889 consumed most of the business district – more than 30 blocks – but not this block, the first part of Second Avenue that was not in some part scorched.  After the disaster it quickly served in the rebuilding that turned practically every available lot and lawn on Second into a sewn strip of temporary tents.  The Times for June 10 reported that while “the slabs and sawdust piles are still burning and sending clouds of smoke back over the town” over 100 permits had been issued to put up tents.

Judging by the canvas signs, the large tent on the far left, at the southwest corner of Second and Seneca Street, is shared by two firms: Doheny and Marum Dry Goods and the “manufacturers agents”, Avery, Kirk and Lansing.  Before they were for the most part wiped out by the fire the two businesses were already neighbors at the northwest corner of Columbia and Front (First Avenue).

Around two o’clock on the afternoon of June 6, or bout a half-hour before the fire started, Avery and his partners were suddenly $2,500 richer, when W.A. Gordon, a young man recently arrived from Maine, invested that amount, “everything he had” the papers reported, in the business.  The sudden cash most likely helped with the construction of the big tent.  Still we do not see Gordon’s name stitched to it.

We know from a Times article of August 2, titled “A Tent Occupant’s News” that a firm doing business on Second just north of Seneca had paid $2 a month per running foot for space to construct the framework for a tent and cover it with canvas “at the expense of several hundred dollars.”  Now less than two months later the landlord was asking the city to remove the tent for the construction of a building.  The threatened residents appealed, “We do not want to be thrown into the street.”

A few tents did business for a year before the city council decided there were “buildings enough for all” and ordered the last of them removed.

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Then Caption: Looking west on Cherry Street from Third Avenue into part of the “brand new” Seattle built after the “Great Fire” of 1889.    (photo courtesy Lawton Gowey) Now Caption: Within twenty years of the ’89 fire much of the new city was being rebuilt bigger.  Here the Dexter Horton Building on the right, the Hoge building, left-of-center and across 2nd Ave, and the Alaska Building, at the southeast corner also of Second and Cherry are surviving landmarks of that enlargement.  (by Jean Sherrard)

A STURDY CHERRY

(First published in Pacific March, 2008)

In 1890 the photographers William Boyd and George Braas formed a partnership seeing, perhaps, in the new city being built above the ashes of the old one destroyed in the “great fire’ of 1889 an opportunity to put their “mirror” to the great changes and prosper with them.  The partnership lasted barely two years and this example of their work most likely dates from 1892, although without a blade or leaf of landscaping we get no hints of the season.

The partners have titled it, lower-left, “Cherry St. Seattle” and given it the number “141.”  The view looks west on Cherry through its intersection with Third Avenue, and everything within their frame, excepting the old clapboards on the far left, is nearly new.  One can sense in this sturdy cityscape of brick, sandstone, and fine lines what an elegant city Seattle was after the fire — and almost instantly.

Right of center are the New York Block at Second Avenue and, far right, the Occidental Building, then home for the Albemarle Hotel.  Both structures were designed by the by then already venerable Seattle architect William E. Boone who sometimes topped his sensitive posture with a skull cap.  On the smoldering heels of the fire the Occidental Building was built quickly in three months and a few days.  The New York block was the opposite.  First designs were ready in 1889 but the building was not completed until 1892.  Both structures were later sacrificed for the grand terra cotta tiled Dexter Horton building, which occupies most of the “now” scene.

The Bailey Block at the southwest corner of Second and Cherry, far left, survives although most of its stone clad skin is hidden in the “now” behind the Alaska Building, which when it was added in 1904 was the Seattle’s first “absolutely fireproof all steel frame” skyscraper.

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Then Caption:  Looking west down a planked Columbia Street to the waterfront from Third Avenue, circa 1900.   [Photo courtesy Larry Hamilton]  Now Caption:  The Colman Building is the only survivor from the “then” but it can barely be detected, right-of-center, with added stories at the northwest corner of First Ave. and Columbia Street.  It is directly across First from the Norton Building, in 1959 one of Seattle’s first glass curtain wall skyscrapers.  [Now by Jean Sherrard]

COLUMBIA STREET WEST of THIRD AVE. Ca. 1900

Last week we looked west on Cherry Street from Third Ave. in 1892 and here a few years later we move one block north and look west again on Columbia to Elliot Bay.   In the foreground worn planking gives a texture to Columbia but at Second Avenue it runs into brick.

Behind the pole on the right, stands the stately little classic that was Seattle’s post office for most of the 1890s.   When it moved to new quarters in 1899, the sidewalk news depot and stationary store survived.  A few of the periodicals offered are hung in display beneath the large sidewalk awning.

At the corner with 2nd Avenue, the ornate two story Colonial Building was built by Harvard graduate Herman Chapin who also raised the plain four-story brick Boston Block directly across Columbia at its southeast corner with Second.  Constructed in 1887-88, their timing and locations were most fortunate for both buildings just escaped the city’s Great Fire of 1889 (although it cracked their windows) and following the fire they were temporarily stuffed with businesses displaced by it.

The broad-shoulder Haller Building holds the northwest corner of Second and Columbia, right of center. Built directly after the fire from a design by the prolific architect Elmer Fisher, its principal tenant here is the Seattle National Bank, one of whose directors was the “capitalist” Theodore Haller.

Just by the signs evident here in this first block on Columbia one can buy a sewing machine, photograph supplies, a haircut, a Turkish bath, a newspaper, and a meal at the Alley Restaurant, sensibly in the alley north of Columbia.  At the waterfront it is still a tall ship with two masts that rests in the slip between the Yesler and Colman docks.

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Historical Caption:  In the shadow of the Haller Building at Columbia Street an unnamed photographer looks south on Second and into what was then still the city’s primary financial district.  (Courtesy Michael Cirelli.) Now Caption; Second Avenue has been elaborately altered in the century between this now and then.  Still the Alaska building can be detected in both.  (Jean Sherrard)

FINANCIAL DISTRICT CA. 1908

This is the third week in a row that we have featured looks into Second Avenue’s financial district or here down it during Seattle’s greatest boom years, the two decades following the “Great Fire” of 1889 when the City grew from about 40 thousand to almost that many more than 200 thousand.

Two weeks ago we looked west on Cherry toward Second from Third, ca. 1892.  Last week Columbia Street was the subject, again looking west from Third to Second, ca. 1900.  And here about another eight years later an unnamed photographer records Second Avenue looking south from mid-block between Marion and Columbia, which is being crossed by a lonely motorcar and an electric trolley on the Lake Union line.

What stands out and up in this view is at is center: the Alaska Building (1904) at the southeast corner of Cherry, Seattle’s first skyscraper.

The banner strung across Second Avenue mid-block above the trolley reads, in part, “Old Time 4th at Pleasant Beach (on Bainbridge Island), Boats Leave on the Hour, 50 cents.  Including Dancing and Sports.”  So the photograph was recorded early in the summer.  Since there is no evidence of the citywide promotions connected with the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Expo, we choose 1908 – a century ago – as a likely date.

The Hinkley Block, far right, dates from 1892 and here it is filled with lawyers, dentists, and even some artists. The brick paving on Second is about 12 years old.  The oldest structures in this scene are the two on the left: the Colonial or Chapin Block on the northeast corner of Columbia and the Boston Block south across Columbia.  As noted last week both were built before the fire of 1889 and provided great service to businesses following it.  Post-fire photographs from 1889 show these two buildings standing along above the burned-out business district.

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The three blocks between Cherry and Madison Street have almost completely changed in the century since the historical photo was recorded looking north on First Avenue from Cherry Street.  The Colman Building (beyond the trees in the “now”) is the big exception.   If the year of the historical scene is not 1907, it is close to it. HISTORICAL PHOTO courtesy of Greg Lange

FIRST AVENUE NORTH of CHERRY STREET

(First appeared in Pacific Sept. 2006)

Somehow the historical photographer managed to carry his or her camera to a temporary perch and look north on First Avenue and above the Kenneth Hotel sign at the foot of Cherry Street. With a bustling sidewalk and street scene – including seven trolleys – this elevated portrait of First was favored with its own colorized post card.

In the 1850s this was still the site of a knoll on which the locals built the North Block House that protected them during the one-day “Battle of Seattle’ of Jan 26. 1856.  The Indians small arms fire from the woods beyond Third Avenue barely penetrated the logs of the fort although one local was hit and killed while peeking out the temporarily open door.  That casualty stood close to our photographer’s mysterious prospect.

James Clemmer, a young theatre man from Spokane, first managed the Kenneth Hotel in 1907, and lived there too.  Within a year he converted the hotel lobby into the Dream Theatre, the first Seattle theatre to treat films “seriously” by regularly mixing “one-reelers” with vaudeville acts.  The theatre was deep but narrow, for although seven stories high the Kenneth was built on one lot.  As such it was Seattle’s best reminder of Amsterdam.  From this prospect we cannot tell if the theatre is as yet below the hotel sign.

I raised my camera with a pole (or monopod).  Directly behind me is Pioneer Square and its official historic district most of which was built soon after the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.   Of course, most of the buildings showing north of Cherry Street in the older view were also built in the first decade following the fire but with few exceptions that they have been razed and replaced – in a few instances (like across First at its southeast corner with Columbia Street) with stock parking lots.

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Above, pioneer photographer LaRoche’s circa 1892 panorama of the restored business district looks down from the front lawn of the then new King County Courthouse over 7th Avenue.  The Yesler mansion appears far left.  Jean’s approximate repeat was taken recently from the roof of Harborview Hospital.  (Click these TWICE – please)

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It seems that for this moment at least the BLOG has been restored, and we will go forward with adding the rest of the Issaquah-related subjects with this addendum.   We begin where the fidgeting first treatment (last Sunday’s) left off, with a full frame version of Tacoma photographer U.P. Hadley’s of militia posing in 1891 in line before their tents on what is now Issaquah’s Sunset Way.

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For the contemporary “repeat” photographer-thespian Jean Sherrard returned to a scene of his former teen “triumph” when Issaquah Historical Society Museum Director Erica Maniez suggested that the best roost from which to take a ‘now’ approximation of the 1888 photograph was from the roof of the Village Theatre.  In 1973, the senior at Bellevue’s Hillside School took the stage there as the too endearing and dimwitted giant Lennie in Steinbeck’s play “Of Mice and Men.”   Persons familiar with the play, the novel or any of the five movies will remember the last moment as Lenny’s pathetic execution with a bullet to the back of the head administered by his best friend and benefactor George.  In Sherrard’s performance the gun refused to fire and the play ended not with gasps and groans but laughter when Sherrard – as Lennie – fell dead after George was forced to say “bang.” Historical view courtesy Michael Maslan

NAME IT GILMAN (for eleven years)

(First appeared in Pacific, March 12, 2006)

When a capitalist laid a railroad to their front door, opened a coal mine nearby and built a home in town as well the citizens of Squak agreed to change the name of their hometown.  In 1887 Daniel Gilman’s (with Thomas Burke) Seattle Lake Shore and Easter Railroad began laying track from the waterfront foot of Seattle’s Columbia Street into the King County hinterland with the heroic explanation that it was heading for Spokane (over Snoqualmie Pass) but the modest expectation that it would soon reach Gilman’s coal mine in – yes – Gilman.

And here is Gilman, as captioned for us at the lower-right corner of the photo.   With the help of Erica Maniez, Museum Director for the Issaquah Historical Society, we can date it from the spring of 1888.  Maniez notes that Mary and Tom Francis’s Bellevue Hotel, with the sign on the far left, opened in May.  In this scene a scaffold is still attached to the east (left) side of the hotel and the second floor windows are not yet in place.

The hotel faces Mill Street (Now Sunset Street) and the raised railroad spur that runs to Gilman’s mill.   Kitty-corner and across the spur is Isaac Cooper’s saloon (or Cooper’s Roost) and its flagpole facing what is still Front Street.  Maniez notes that after her husband Tom died Mary Francis married Isaac Cooper — a kind of cross-intersection embrace at Sunset and Front.

On the far right is another bar on Front, the Scandinavian Saloon.  According to the short history of Issaquah on the historical society’s website (http://issaquahhistory.org/historyarticles.htm) the patrons there were most likely lumberjacks, for Northern Europeans generally liked to work above ground, while the English, Italians, Yugoslavians and Czechs were just as inclined to be down in the mines.

By 1899 the citizens of Gilman were generally more alienated than admiring of their absentee namesake and changed the town’s name to a more mellifluous version of the Squak they once intoned.  They named it Issaquah.

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Ron Edge returns with two of his EDGE CLIPPINGS, both related to pioneer Issaquah.

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ISSAQUAH DEPOT

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 17, 1986)

[Please note – this text is now a quarter-century old.  The Issaquah depot is now home to the Issaquah Historical Society.]

There’s a restoration going on in Issaquah that will make the past a little more real. A group of enthusiastic fixers wants to renovate the old depot in time for the town’s and the state’s centennial celebration in 1989. The Northern Pacific station became the town’s lifeline to the world in 1888 with the arrival of what was called the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway. It provided Squak (Issaquah’s first name) with a way to ship the locally-mined coal.

Seattle railroad promoters Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman were behind the move to transport the coal and even renamed the town after Gilman. In fact, the town was called Gilman until 1899 when Issaquah (a version of the native word Squak) was adopted. Sixty years later, long after the railroad’s departure, Northern Pacific was considering demolition of the sad old depot. But nothing came of it and it was left alone, serving for a long time as a warehouse.

Enter Greg Spranger, an air conditioner salesman from California who became so intrigued with the old building he moved to Issaquah and became the energetic member and driving force of the Issaquah Historical Society, the group behind the building’s renovation.  The next project for the society members – bring back the train.

Above: The S.L.S.E.R engine McDonald posed in front of the Gilman depot.

Below: The McDonald posing on the off-shore trestle at the north end of Lake Union, circa 1887-88, off Northlake Way near Interlaken Ave.

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NORTH BEND – 1909

(First appeared in Pacific July 3, 1988 – Jean’s “now” repeat dates from ca. 2005.  He recorded it for our book Washington Then and Now)

E.J. Siegrist left no explanation for why he shot a 1909 photograph of his native North Bend’s main intersection, but it may be the first recorded version of a traffic jam there.  Although the first automobile had worked its way through the area four years earlier, Siegrist’s subjects were the more conventional means of transportation of the time. It wasn’t till the era of the automobile was firmly entrenched that North Bend’s traffic tie-ups became legendary.

North Bend was platted in 1889, the year Washington became a state. The town’s “father,” Will Taylor, did the planning and named many of the streets, like Bendego, after Australian towns he found in an atlas.

In 1915 the Sunset Highway tied the east side of Lake Washington to North Bend and Snoqualmie Pass. After the Lake Washington Floating Bridge made the link to Seattle in 1940, it was only a matter of time before weekend traffic began piling up. When the Highway Department announced plans to reroute around North Bend, townspeople compromised by moving 28 structures back from the roadway and widening it by 30 feet.

By the mid-’50s, though, traffic was so heavy that a red light had to be installed to permit residents to walk from one side of the street to the other. For years the fabled intersection had the only stoplight on I-90 between Seattle and Wallace, Idaho.

In 1979 the interstate was routed around the town. Although uncongested, the intersection still has a signal, in part to allow locals time to pause and reflect on its storied past.

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Looking east on Cleveland Street towards Redmond’s historic crossroads of Leary Way and Cleveland.  Soon after this photograph was taken by the Redmond photographer Winfred Wallace many of these structures were replaced with more substantial ones – like the surviving brick bank building at the northwest corner (hidden here behind the trees in the contemporary photo) of Leary and Cleveland.

HISTORIC REDMOND

(First appeared in Pacific, March 19, 2006)

“What a great picture!” is Nao Hardy’s  confident description of this week’s “then.”  But then as one of Redmond’s enthusiasts for community heritage Nao is well stocked with articulate affection for her hometown – especially this part of it. “And I can date it accurately.  It is 1910 and the photographer,  Winfred Wallace, was a local fellow with a keen eye and a good camera who never married and died young.”  The view looks east on Cleveland Street one half block to its intersection with Leary Way NE, historically “the community’s main crossroads.”

In 1910 the two two-story frame livery stables far left and right in the historic scene still have a few years of service in them before a horse power not fed by oats marks the dirt of Cleveland Street with the wider ruts of motorcars and trucks.

At the center of Wallace’s record another two-story frame structure appears at the southeast corner of Leary Way.  It is half hidden by the big tree.  Two signs are attached: “Restaurant and Chop House” and  “Olympia Beer.”  Historian Hardy explains that this is, or was, Bill Brown’s place and that Brown would soon “replace his popular wooden saloon with a two-story brick building that bears his name  today, as much for the handsome public buildings he erected as for his having served as Redmond’s mayor for an amazing 30 years.”

And Brown has a street named for him as well. It is one block long and intersects with Cleveland one-half block to the rear of the contemporary photographer Jean Sherrard who took his “repeat” obviously in a warmer month than this one.

We will wrap this glimpse into Redmond’s historic district with another Hardy observation.   “Some hundred years later, Cleveland and Brown streets are witnessing a gentrification with mixed use upscale buildings of condos and new businesses . . . As none of the historical significant buildings with structural integrity in this district have been destroyed, the changes occurring now are seen as improvements by locals.”

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THE CASEY JONES SPECIAL

(First appear in Pacific, August 30, 1987)

In a summer morning in 1957, Lawton Gowey got up early to do some train chasing. The occasion was the running of the Casey Jones Special. Heading out from the downtown station at 6:45 a.m., Northern Pacific engine No. 1372 rolled north over the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern R.R. route (now in part the Burke-Gilman Trail) and around the north end of Lake Washington.

Gowey and other train chasers dogged along the city streets and country roads trying to stay near the steam all the way to its North Bend destination. The train cooperated, taking a scheduled 3 hours and 50 minutes to steam-power its 12 cars to North Bend and a decidedly ironic celebration for train lovers: the dedication of Washington State’s first 3-mile section of a 4-lane freeway from North Bend to Snoqualmie Pass.

On his chase, Gowey took several photos. This one looks across Northeast Pacific Street to the University of Washington campus.

The first Casey Jones Special pulled its rail fans to North Bend in December 1956. The rail excursions were the brain-child of Carol Cornish. Retired herself, she figured these rides would be an enjoyable exercise in fond memories for senior citizens. In fact, the excursions attracted rail fans of all ages. There were 470 passengers aboard this special.

Diesel engines were first introduced into this area in 1952, making steam-powered trains obsolete. So when the steaming Casey Jones Special puffed and hooted into North Bend that June morning in 1957, it was a nostalgic occasion.

This Casey Jones run was one of Gowey’s last opportunities to chase a steam locomotive. Soon after, even Cornish had to give in to having the stronger diesel engines pull her popular excursions to depots in every direction – Cle Elum, South Bend, Sumas, Centralia, Hoquiam, Buckley, Lake Whatcom.  According to Tom Baker, Cornish’s assistant, the excursions went on for a decade. Toward the end, the elderly Cornish was ailing and unable to make the trips. The last run on June 9,1968 was, again, to North Bend. It was also the day Carol Cornish died.

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We shall finish up with a few more rifles and some tents too.

Then Caption: When the Oregon Cadets raised their tents on the Denny Hall lawn in 1909 they were almost venerable.  Founded in 1873, the Cadets survive today as Oregon State University’s ROTC. Geneticist Linus C. Pauling, twice Nobel laureate, is surely the school’s most famous cadet corporal.  (courtesy, University of Washington Libraries.)  Now Caption: I used old maps and current satellite photographs to determine that the historical view was photographed from Lewis Hall or very near it.  Jean Sherrard was busy directing a play with his students at Hillside School in Bellevue, so in lieu of Jean and his “ten-footer” I used my four-foot monopod to hold the camera high above my head but not as high.

DISCIPLINE at AYPE

The Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition’s official photographer, Frank H. Nowell, was not the only commercial camera working the fair grounds and – in this week’s subject – its perimeter.  Here with the useful caption “O.A.C. Cadets in camp – A.Y.P. Expo. – Seattle June 5^th 9 – 09” the unidentified photographer has named the part of her or his subject that might pay for the effort of recording it: the cadets themselves.

The Oregon Agricultural College Cadets’ tents have been pitched just outside the fair grounds in the wide lawn northeast of the Administration Building, the first building raised on the new “Interlaken campus” in 1894-95.  In 1909 it was still one year short of being renamed Denny Hall.

Thanks now to Jennifer Ott who helped research historylink’s new “timeline history” of the AYPE.  I asked Jennifer if she had come upon any description of the part played in the Exposition by what Paula Becker, our go-between and one of the authors of the timeline, capsulated for us as “those farmin’ Oregon boys.”   Ott thought it likely that the cadets participated in the “military athletic tournament” which was underway on June 5, the date in our caption.   Perhaps with this camp on the Denny lawn they were also at practice, for one of the tournament’s exhibitions featured “shelter camp pitching.”

Jennifer Ott also pulled “a great quote” from this paper, the Times, for June 12.  It is titled “Hostile Cadets in Adjoining Camps,” and features the Washington and Idaho cadets, but not Oregon’s.  Between the Idaho and Washington camps the “strictest picket duty was maintained and no one was admitted until word was sent to the colonel in command, who was nowhere to be found. This meant that no one was admitted, except the fair sex, the guards having been instructed to admit women and girls without passes from the absent colonel.”  Now that is discipline!

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Finally, wrapping this package with one more Hadley from his visit to Issaquah with the troops from his hometown, Tacoma.

(click to enlarge photos)

California’s intrepid and prolific pioneer photographer, Carleton Watkins, titled this subject “Suburban Residence, Seattle W.T.”   Watkins visited Seattle late in the summer of 1882 while adding Puget Sound subjects to his eponymous “New Series” of marketable views he recorded from Alaska to Mexico.   He numbered this one 5230.  It was Ron Edge, a frequent help in this feature, who first directed me to Watkins’ suburban home posing with its unidentified family.  We wondered together “But where near Seattle?”

The answer came quickly when intuition led us to another Seattle view from 1882, one that I used for this column on Oct. 3rd 1982.   An exquisite and revealing panorama of Seattle from Beacon Hill, it too was photographed by Watkins during his ’82 visit, although I did not know it a century later when I used it during my first year between Pacific’s covers.

My intuition, I speculated with Ron, put the home “somewhere on Beacon Hill” because of the site’s slope to a waterway crossed by a line of pilings (above the roof far right), and a distant horizon suggestive of West Seattle across Elliott Bay.  Ron soon answered with Watkins’ panorama revealing that our suburban home was in it as well – and the abandoned pilings too.  We figured that it may have taken Watkins three minutes to get from one prospect to the other. *

Finally, nearly, Ron remembered journalist-historian Thomas Prosch’s early caption for the Watkins’ pan, which the pioneer included in one of his helpful albums about Seattle history.  Prosch writes, in part, “Seattle in 1882 from Dearborn Street and 12th Avenue south looking northwest.”   His siting is supported by other recordings of the home and its neighborhood, included in photographs that look back from the waterfront and First Hill to Beacon Hill in the 1880s and 90s.

We have placed the home near what was once the elevated intersection of 10th Avenue South and Dearborn Street, but now – since the Dearborn Cut of 1909-1912 – a paved ditch through Beacon Hill. So far we have not determined who lives in this tidy home, but we have hope.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yup, including more on the labors – joyful ones –  of identifying and locating the Watkins views, a selection of a few other looks into “Gas Cove” and the city from Beacon Hill, and a few looks back at it and up the waterfront from the King Street Wharf, which Watkins also visited during his 1882 tour of Puget Sound.

(Double Click this to enlarge)

Thanks again to Ron Edge for helping search out the answers for the “suburban” Seattle subject on the top and to Jean for reflecting on our reflections and testing them again our evidences.  We will continue with another Edge discovery, one of the first that he introduced to us, now already years ago.  This panorama, and the detail from it above it, were photographed from the King Street Coal Wharf looking east towards Beacon Hill.  The original print has been dated Oct. 15, 1880 – almost two years before Watkins’ visit.  Note the ragged condition of the forest in the vicinity of the “Suburban” home (marked with the red arrow in the detail). The panorama – below the detail – shows two curving trestles heading east and south from the King Street Wharf.  The one that heads more-or-less directly for the shore is the newer one, built to replace the one that heads out on its curve across the tideflats.  Soon after it was built the wood-boring worms – about which Ivar Haglund sung so eloquently – began to ruin it. (We will include the lyrics at the bottom.)  So the trestle on the left was constructed to replace it and at least some of its difficulties with worms and their appetite for wood by reaching land above the tides sooner.   The curving and abandoned trestle on the right is already beginning to lose sections.  Can you find the gap(s)?  It is that broken trestle that was our first clue for where the “suburban” photo was taken.  The trestle appears in that view on its right side.  (Click to Enlarge)

Here follows a few more aids – constructions – used by Ron, Jean and I for identifying the location of Watkin’s “suburbs.”

Here we return to Watkins more familiar view – the one from Beacon Hill over “suburbia” to the city, and also from his visit in Sept. 1882. The feature that follows it was first printed in Pacific Magazine now thirty years ago!   It makes not of several landmarks that appear in the pan, and we will insert close-ups of a few of them, although for the most part from later years and so not 1882.  (Please Click TWICE to ENLARGE)

1882 VIEW FROM BEACON HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct 3, 1982)

Early in the 20^th Century, Thomas Prosch, a retired newspaper publisher, assembled and captioned three photo albums now preserved in the University of Washington Special Collections.  The Prosch volumes are, of course, helpful for identifying the earliest pictorial records of Seattle.  For instance, Prosch’s caption for the accompanying panorama from Beacon Hill reads, “Seattle in 1882 from Dearborn Street and Twelfth Avenue South looking northwest.  Among the buildings are the Stetson and Post Sawmill, County Courthouse, Catholic, Episcopal and Methodist churches, Squire’s Opera House, Post Building and Yesler’s Mill Co.”

The city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 destroyed almost all the landmarks included in this panorama.  And since Prosch’s caption means little to all but a few 21^st Century viewers – you perhaps included – readers will need to take a careful look to see what is there to see.

Easiest to locate is the Stetson and Post Sawmill – the daring intrusion onto the tideflats at the far left.  The mill was built in 1882 at the present location of First Ave. South, between King and Weller Streets.  During the next year its crew of 117 men would cut some 14 million feet of lumber.   The city’s pioneer Yesler Mill was left in its scattered chips.

Next, look for the Catholic Church, Our Lady of Good Help.  It’s the large white Gothic structure on the right.  Like the mill the church was also new in 1882.  Its new pipe organ was the second in town.   The first pipe organ was installed in Trinity Episcopal Church in July of the same year.  A visiting organist from New York christened it with a well-attended grand opening.  Trinity is the white sanctuary with tower just to the right and a little above the Catholics.  Dedicated in 1871, Trinity stood at the northwest corner of Third Ave. and Jefferson Street, and was the only major structure on Third Avenue north of Yesler Way (Mill Street then) destroyed by the 1889 fire.

To the right of Trinity Church is the County Courthouse Prosch noted.  Also new in 1882, the large white and boxish structure (with a box-tower too), shows seven windows on its south façade at the southeast corner of Jefferson and Third Ave., now the site of City Hall Park. Unlike the nearby church, the Courthouse survived the fire as jurors and witnesses anxiously adjourned from a murder trail to spread wet blankets across the roof.  In 1891 after the county moved to a new home on top of First Hill, the city moved in and through its seventeen-year residency kept enlarging the frame structure in a floundering attempt to keep up with the growing boomtown it tried to govern.  The odd additions soon gave city hall a new name in allusion to a then popular screw-ball comic strip.  It was called Seattle’s Katzenjammer Kastle.

The slender pointed spire of the Methodist Church is just to the left of the Courthouse.  When it was built in 1855 at Second Ave. and Columbia Street, it was the town’s first church.

Squire’s Opera House is the dominant dark structure near the center of the photograph.  It stood on the east side of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) closer to Main Street than to Washington Street.   In 1882 it was still the largest auditorium in town.

In 1880 the view from Beacon Hill was still obscured by old growth forest in places.  But by 1882 it had been clear-cut and at night the city glowed (in places) with 30 gas lamps lining the busiest streets.   The Gas Company building can be seen in the crook of the bay, which may also be called “Gas Cove.”

1882 was a boom years for Seattle.  In the Nov. election 1,274 votes were cast, the most for any community in the territory, and for the first time more than were counted in Walla Walla – sixty more.   New buildings with stone and iron facades were on the drawing boards, many modeled after the Post Building on Mill Street between Pioneer Place and Yesler’s Wharf and mill.

In the photo directly above Prosch is the bearded figure standing at the base of the steps of the Post Building at Yesler Way and Post Street.  In 1882 he was editor and part owner of the Post-Intelligencer, which had been formed the year before by merging his Daily Intelligencer with the Daily Post. Thomas Prosch died on March 30, 1915, while crossing the Duwamish River in a chauffer-driven motorcar.  He was returning from a meeting of the Tacoma Historical Society.  (For now 97-years – in 2012 – the industrious editor has been resting in peace, and if memory serves within a few headstones from Walt Crowley’s place in Capitol Hill’s Lakeview Cemetery.  Walt, along with his wife Marie McCaffrey, and myself, helped found historylink.org. where more can be read about Thomas Prosch and much else.)

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Although both the “now and then” views look east at the waterfront towards King Street the historical scene was photographed many yards further to the west from the top of the King Street Coal Wharf.  The adjustment allows the “now” to avoid the obstruction of a building and get closer to the site of the “native land” that still shows in the “then” scene.  The site of that historic shoreline with the little bluff is now a few feet east of the Alaska Way Viaduct on the north side of King.  Historical photo courtesy Seattle Public Library.

NATIVE LAND & URBAN LEGENDS

(First appeared in Pacific, May 29, 2005)

Between 1877 and 1903 the King Street Coal wharf was probably the most popular platform from which to study the city.  Fortunately a few photographers took the opportunity to record panoramas stitched from several shots.  This view is one of several stitched together (below).  It was photographed in Sept. 1882 by the itinerant Californian named Carleton Watkins.

The scene (two and three subjects above)  looks east towards the block between Jackson Street on the far left and King Street on the right. King was then still a railroad trestle built above the tides and all the structures that appear on the right side of this view – the railroad shops and a lumber mill – are also set above the tideflats.  The white hotel on the far left with the wrapping porch, shutters, and shade trees is the Felker House, the first Seattle structure built of finished lumber.  (In the stereo above, the Felker House is on the far right.)

Two of what we may kindly call the hotel’s “urban legends” survive its destruction in the “Great Fire” of 1889.  First, that it was the town’s first whorehouse.  Second, that its overseer Mary Ann Conklin — aka “Mother Damnable” — turned to solid stone sometimes between her death in 1873 and difficult resurrection in 1884 when her body was hauled to a second grave.  Believe it or not, her features we in tact.

Two more solid points – both about the “native land” shown here (“Here” and in the photos now a few above.)  First, it is still a quarter-century before the ridge on the horizon would be lowered 90 feet with the Jackson Street regrade.  Second, the tide is out and the small bluff above the beach is the same on which the Duwamish built their longhouse.  There from its comfort they looked out on the bay probably for centuries before Captain Felker substituted whitewashed clapboard for cedar slabs.

For linking to the pix above we will provide-print again the Watkins pan already offered five images up.  There may well be another Watkins part to this pan – one that looks left to the northwest.  The stereo of Jackson Street, four photos up, identifies it as “No. 7.”  Watkins recorded many more than seven images in Seattle, so does the “7” refer to his sequence from the King Street pier?  Counting all we have here (but not that the stereo is framed differently) we have, it seems, five parts to the pan.

Follows several looks down upon the city from Beacon Hill from different – slightly – prospects.

We will conclude this week’s now-then contribution – nearly – with a visit to a later Beacon Hill home up on the hill that is – or was – no longer part of suburbia.

BEACON HILL VICTORIAN

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 19, 1995)

The Beacon Hill home that Gertrude and George Spencer built soon after their wedding in 1901 is one of those Victorian fancies that divide tastes. Some love these ornate testaments to the woodworking arts; others regard all this craft as functionless clutter. I like it.

George Spencer was a Pennsylvania-trained teacher who arrived in Washington in 1890 and was hired by Lewis County to teach and later serve as superintendent of its public schools. With his marriage, George moved to Gertrude’s hometown and, after a stint as deputy superintendent of King County schools, became principal of lower Queen Anne’s Mercer School. In 1907 Spencer left teaching for real estate but remained active in education as a member of the Seattle School Board.

In the mid-’20s George was chairman of the Seattle Real Estate Association. Gertrude kept up the business after his death, and for the 1946-’47 term was president of the Women’s Council of the Seattle Real Estate Board. For seven years she also chaired the Seattle Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Both Spencers were members of the Beacon Hill and Jefferson Park Improvement Clubs. They had one office downtown and another on Beacon Avenue, just two blocks from their home. The Spencers could look across their backyard fence to the rear door of the Beacon Hill Bakery on Beacon Avenue. Soon after their post-World War II arrival in Seattle from Anchorage, Eugene and Theresa Odermat bought the bakery and then the Spencer home.

Their son · Victor Odermat (later “king” of Seattle’s car washes) has warm memories of the home’s large rooms, high ceilings, ornate staircase, elegant hardwood wainscoting and clawfoot cast-iron tub. But soon after the widowed Theresa moved out in 1966, the Spencer-Odermat home was razed and replaced by the modern apartment house showing here in the “now.”

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As advised, we conclude with a printing of one of the waterfront shanties that Ivar Haglund, the aquarist, wrote in order to serenade his customers at the front door to his Pier 3 (later Pier 54 after the WW2 renumbering) Aquarium from 1938 to 1956.  His book of ballads was first published in 1953.  So far as I know Ivar never lived on Beacon Hill nor below it.

FOOTNOTES:

*(Judging from the shadows Watkins took the panorama first.)

(click to enlarge photos)

This look south on Westlake through its intersection with Thomas Street first appeared in The Seattle Times on Monday April 9^th, 1934.  It was used by the paper for it’s then popular feature based on historical photographs and titled “Way Back.”

Except for the location and the date – 1902 – the photo was apparently not “explained” by Roy Chambers, the reader who loaned it to the Times.  So the newspaper’s caption writer gave it some text, which we pass along.  “. . . no motor cars, please note that fine span o’ grays hitched to a load of lumber in front of the drug store.  Across the street was the W.D. Graves grocery store.”

I knew Nellie and William Graves daughter Katherine Graves Carlson, and wrote about her family’s grocery in Pacific in 1988, now nearly a quarter of century ago.  Her parents opened the store in 1902 and lived conveniently in the apartment above their groceries.  The frame storefront was then nearly new, built late in 1901 by F. Haydlauff who lived on Thomas in a home behind the grocery.

In the 1902 photograph there is so much of Westlake’s planked pavement showing that we may wonder if it was not the street itself that motivated the unnamed photographer.  On Jan. 17, 1902 the street department’s crew of seventeen men and eight teams began scraping an “average of 150 loads” of mud a day off of Westlake’s planks.  This, I think, is newer mud.  Later that fall City Council committed to replanking Westlake as far north as Lake Union.  We learn from a Times report of Sept. 3, 1902 that “new planking would only last about two years.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yes – a selection of past features and photos  from the neighborhood as time allows, beginning with the earlier feature showing the Graves grocery at the southwest corner of Thomas and Westlake.

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GRAVES GROCERY – SOUTHWEST CORNER, WESTLAKE & THOMAS

(First appeared in Pacific March 23, 1988)

Often the subject for this column is the result of readers sharing a picture from their past. This week Katherine Graves Carlson, daughter of the late grocer William Dwight Graves, loaned us a view of her parents’ store at Westlake Avenue North and Thomas Street. The year is 1903 and shows Carlson’s parents, William and Nellie Graves, standing just to the left of the grocery’s front door. The family lived in an apartment above the store but in 1905 moved to a new home on Minor Avenue.

Owning a grocery store in this working-class Cascade neighborhood was a struggle. Credited home deliveries were a common feature of the competitive retail-grocery business then, and Carlson remembers the family giving up the store because her father “was too generous” to those unable to pay for groceries.  (It seems that “Cascade” is a name now rarely used for this strip along Westlake, although one still hears and uses it two blocks east on the plateau or bench of higher land that once was home to the Cascade Primary School – at Pontius and Thomas – that gave its name to the neighborhood.)

The Graves family lived in the neighborhood until young Katherine reached the sixth grade in Cascade School. They moved to the Green Lake area, where her father went to work for another grocer, Charles Gerrish.

In the “now” photo (when we find it), Carlson stands to the left of the telephone pole in what she believes is her first visit to the site since the family left the neighborhood in 1914. The clapboard store with its wood-frame windows, sun awning and second-floor front bays, has been replaced by a nondescript commercial property, typical of today’s Cascade neighborhood. A comparison of the two views also shows the radical effects of the Ninth Avenue Regrade project. In 1903, the grade on Thomas Street between Westlake and Ninth Avenue North (to the right of the store) was quite steep. Now the climb is barely an incline.

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Before laying out a few more past Pacific features, we will put up a potpourri of maps, photos, and such with captions. (For these maps and clippings it is best to CLICK them TWICE.)

We look next into the Big Funnel from the side and about forty years later – in the late 1920s.  A photographer – probably James Lee – from the Seattle Department of Public Works took this panorama of the Westlake Valley with his back to Boren Avenue near John Street.   The pan was taken in preparation for the last of the Denny Regrades, the excavation between 1929 and 1931 that continued razing the hill to the east of 5th Avenue and also at lower grades to the north of Denny Way.  In that last effort, for instance, it lowered Denny Park, which appears on the far side of Westlake and 9th Avenues at its original grade. (click this pan twice.)

NINTH AVENUE REGRADE

(First appeared in Pacific, July 20, 2003)

This is a rare look into the regrade upheaval at the northeast corner of the by now long lost Denny Hill.  To either side of the digging on 9th Avenue the slope of the doomed hill can be followed as it descends to Westlake Avenue off the photograph on the right.  Denny Park is at the top of the bluff on the left.

Part of the technique for this street work is revealed in the picture itself.  While the workers, bottom-right, extend the rails for the narrow gauged train on a new bed, the dark steam shovel is removing dirt from the elevated old rail bed.  The old line of railroad ties runs up from near the center of the bottom border of the photograph where seven or eight of the timbers have not yet been moved to the new bed.

This circa 1911 public work was done for territory and from momentum.  First the momentum.  One of a few odd jobs done in the general neighborhood of the hill, this 9th Avenue Regrade was separated by several blocks from the Denny Regrade’s grander reductions.  In 1911 a dozen years of cutting away Denny Hill came to a stop on the east side of 5th Avenue, and left a cliff there that was considerably higher than the one seen forming here on the left or west side of 9th Avenue.  The territorial motive here was to widen the Westlake Business Strip to a width of at least two relatively flat blocks between 9th and Terry Avenues.

Like the cliff along 5th Avenue this one survived until the rest of hill was scraped away between 1929 and 1931 when the Denny Hill neighborhood from Pine Street north past Thomas Street was at last set at the present elevations of the extended Denny Regrade.   But for twenty years between 1911 and 1931 the cliff on the left separated 9th Avenue from the grass of Denny Park above it and closed off Denny Way at 9th Avenue as well.

Short of hiring a cherry picker or climbing a light pole there was no way to faithfully repeat this historical scene with the contemporary photograph (as will be evident after we find and attached it.)  Although both views looks south on 9th Avenue from Denny Way – or near it — the “now” shot looks north across Denny Way while the historical photographer is either standing on Denny Way or has his or her back to it. (Historical Photo courtesy Municipal Archives.)

Next, for the most part in the interests of street work, we will take a few looks into the three Westlake Blocks south from Denny Way thru John and Thomas to Harrison Street.

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HOME BAKING at DEXTER & HARRISON, 1911

(First appeared in Pacific, 3-16, 1986)

In the early part of the 20^th-century, city government hired free-lance photographers to document local streets.  From 1909 to 1911, a professional named Lee shot an impressive series on small businesses including pharmacies, car dealers, grocers and bakers. All of Lee’s storefronts had one thing in common: He shot them from across the street, revealing the sorry state of repairs of early roadways as well as detail of the storefronts. In the above early photo, for example, he turned his camera on its side so that he could include the full height of this clapboard grocery at the northwest corner of Dexter Avenue and Harrison Street. This was dated April 12, 1911.

The store went through a series of owners. At the time the photo was taken, Charles and Martha Snyder owned the store and lived upstairs. Martha continued to live there even after her husband died, and the store was operated by a brother-in-law.

The store might have stayed in business had the highly publicized Plan of Seattle been approved by voters. It called for Dexter to become a widened, tree-lined boulevard anchored on the south by a new Civic Center and on the north by a monumental train depot at the southwest shore of Lake Union. The plan failed at the polls, but one legacy was left. Dexter is still one of the wider streets in Seattle.

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The two Seattle Gas tanks behind the Pioneer Denny home were constructed in 1907 when some of the Denny’s fruit trees were still producing.  Built in 1871, the here, in 1911, abandoned and soon to be razed home faced Republican Street, on its north side between Dexter and Eighth Avenues.   Courtesy, Lawton Gowey. Now Caption:  Looking northeast across to a Republican Street between Dexter and 8th Avenues that was lowered considerably during the 1911 regrade.

A DRY REPUBLICAN HOME

(First appeared in Pacific, early 2007)

I first stumbled upon the accompanying photograph of David and Louisa Denny’s home in a Seattle Times clipping dated Sept 7, 1911.  The typical stack of headlines to the story is instructive but also melodramatic, and their bark is mildly silly.  They read . . . “Pioneer Home Makes Way to Onward Rush of Busy Metropolis.  Ruthless Steam Shovel Encroaches on Site of Old House Built by Late David T. Denny in 1871. Dwelling was pride of Little Village.  Landmark, Which Falls Latest Victim to Progress, Was Scene of Many Social Gatherings in Days Long Past.”

Louise and David Denny’s home faced Republican Street at the north end of Denny Hill.  The pioneer couple, of course, named it “Republican” for obvious reasons.  Here the street is being lowered about twenty feet below its old grade.  This was their first big home and with its extensive garden both were typically described as “overlooking Lake Union.”  The front door, however, looks south in the direction of the city, although in 1871 it was still far from town and nearly surrounded by a forest that this original pioneer family continued to harvest for many years more.  After 1882 the family could see the largest lumber mill in King County at the south end of Lake Union, and they owned it.

The Denny’s lived here until 1890 when they moved a few blocks west to an ornate pattern-book mansion at Mercer Street and Temperance Street, another Denny street name.  The Republican Denny was also a tea-totaler and by the time of his death in 1903 his political preoccupations were better served, he explained, by the Prohibition Party.  Certainly, the “many social gatherings” in all their homes – beginning with the log cabin near the waterfront foot of the Denny Way – were consistently dry.  (click the below – twice)

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CLUB STABLES on BOREN

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 17, 2002)

In 1909, when Alfred W. Clark moved his Club Stables from 2109 Western Ave. to this brick building at 415 Boren Ave. N., he brought his best client with him: Frederick & Nelson. The now failed department store’s own history, “More Than A Store,” describes “a fleet of 28 shiny delivery wagons and 61 prize-wining horses” needed in the early 1900s. Here are most of them.

When it was built, the Club Stables was one of the very few brick buildings north of Denny Way. The Seattle Times reported in a large headline over a picture, “Club Stables Now In Finest Quarters in West.” The Sept. 26,1909, article describes it as standing “in the very heart of the city . . .These up-to-date stables contain ample accommodations for 250 horses, with every safeguard and comfort in the way of ventilation, cleanliness etc. that modern sanitary science can provide . . . An elaborate sprinkler system of the most approved and efficient type . . . is practically an absolute guarantee against serious-damage by fire. The management solicits an inspection at any time.”

I answered the solicitation 93 years later and found the sturdy brick shell tightly closed except for the many broken windows at the rear. A faded sign on the front of the building reads “C.B. Van Vorst Co.” The name has been associated with the structure since at least the late 1930s. Actually, the building’s role as a livery stable cannot have lasted very long after it was built. By 1909 trucks were beginning to take the place of wagons, especially on the increasingly paved city streets. For a time, teams were left to the tougher deliveries over rutted dirt streets and outlying roads.

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Finally – for it closing fast again on “Nightybears Time,” – a 1944 full-page printing by The Seattle Times of Seattle’s annexation history, and some good intentions to proof this tomorrow.  (Click TWICE to enlarge)

LATER IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of SUNDAY JUNE 3, 2012

Follows four Kodachrome slides that search the “Big Funnel” aka Great Cascade neighborhood over Aurora  from the Tropics Motel balcony, May 1967.  The likely photographer was Robert Bradley.

(click to enlarge photos)

I first learned of the Wilkes Theatre from Seattle’s silent film expert David Jeffers.  Typical of David, his research on the Wilkes is thorough, and I was tempted to simply quote extensively from his recent letter.  I will, however, dwell instead on some implications of this Webster and Stevens studio photograph that looks south over Pine Street at the Wilkes’ full-facade at the southwest corner with 5^th Avenue.  It was Jean Sherrard, my cohort in this feature, who first showed it to me.

This photograph is one of about forty of historic movie theatre locations that Jean has repeated this Spring for what will be the Museum of History and Industry’s first “temporary exhibit” when it opens later this year in the museum’s new home, the Naval Armory that is still being converted for MOHAI at the south end of Lake Union.  The exhibit’s title will be “Celluloid Seattle – A City at the Movies.”

Let us remember that another collection of Jean’s photography of contemporary Seattle is still up as part of the last “temporary exhibit” at the now soon to be old MOHAI.  In case you have forgotten – or not visited it yet – its name is “Repeat Photography” and it was first curated early last year by Jean, Beranger Lomont and myself.  It will be waiting for your visit until the fifth of June.

Returning to the Wilkes, for such a grand presentation, it was relatively short-lived.  Built of concrete as the Alhambra in 1909 with 1600 fireproof seats, it tried vaudeville, musical comedy, melodrama, and photoplays (films) sometimes mixed and other times as committed specialties.  This view of it appeared in The Seattle Times on April 10, 1921 with an explanation that it was soon “to become a motion picture house.”  That week was its last for scheduling still live acting on stage with the Wilkes Stock Company in a romantic comedy named “That Girl Patsy.”

In the summer of 1922 the Wilkes became a venue not for film or theater but for political rallies and other temporary uses like worship for the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist. Next, in 1923 the corner began its long history of selling women’s finery.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean and most of it nearby, beginning with a feature on Westlake’s 5-star corner that was the first now-then feature I wrote – and assembled – for Pacific.  It appeared first on January 17, 1982.  Frankly, it seems like that long ago too.

WESTLAKE & FOURTH – March 12 1919

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 17, 1982)

The day is Wednesday, March 12, 1919. The silent film “The Forbidden Room” is in the last day of a four-day run at the Colonial Theater on Fourth Avenue between Pike and Pine Streets. The film stars Gladys Brockwell who plays a “girl stenographer saving a big city from looters and plotters.” Brockwell’s performance, however, probably will be missed and the theater empty for tonight the city itself will be the show as it celebrates the homecoming of “Seattle’s own regiment, the 63rd Coast Artillery.”

The photograph was taken in mid-afternoon and the parade of local heroes through downtown has just ended. Uniformed men and celebrating citizens are mingling in the streets and rehearsing, perhaps, for the night’s street dance in Times Square. At 8 p.m. fireworks will be set off from the roof of the Times Building and the newspaper’s next-day reporting of the celebration will continue these pyrotechnics: “Nothing in the successions of explosions that made the day the 63rd came home a day to be remembered with such historical red letter days as Armistice Day (and night), the Great Fire, the first Klondike gold ship, and the opening of the Exposition was more characteristic of the atmosphere of benevolent and jubilant dynamite than the merry street carnival and pavement dance last night that made Times Square a mass of swaying, noisemaking, exuberant humanity . . . ”

Fireworks at the Times Building represented literally the figurative fireworks that found expression in every other event of the dizzy program which piled sensation on sensation until the city’s homecoming soldier sons admitted they scarcely knew whether they were coming or going . . .  “From the roof of the Times Building rockets soared screamingly upward and flared out in fantastic shapes and lights and showers of fire . . .  Meanwhile bands – four of them – were making the night melodious with war tunes and the jazziest of jazz music – and throngs were dancing, looking skyward as they danced, and not bothering to apologize for bumps.” It is doubtful that even Gladys Brockwell’s melodramatic heroics could soar so high.

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WESTLAKE HISTORY

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 13, 1983)

Both this “now” and “then” look north up Westlake Ave. from the southwest corner of Fourth Ave. and Pike Street. Great things have been expected of this five-star hub since its creation in 1906 when the odd but bold intrusion of Westlake Ave. was at last cut through from Denny Way. (As of this writing [1983] the city is still waiting.)

Our historical setting dates from 1909. All of the larger structures are new and seem to elegantly promise that this unique hub will develop into Seattle’s 20th-century civic center. On the right is the Seaboard Building, which now, with another five stories added, still fills that comer. Just beyond it is the American Hotel, and across Westlake, the Hotel Plaza. The flatiron Plaza stood there until 1931 when it was razed to the first floor level and rebuilt more modestly for Bartell Drugs, which remained a tenant for over 50 years. During the prohibition years a cabaret in the Plaza’s basement was one of the town’s more popular speakeasys.

In our 1909 scene (on top) only a few horses, hacks, and three or four automobiles are at play. The streetcars and people actually own the street, and the former are outfitted with cowcatchers to mercifully ensnare the latter. In 1909 if you stayed off the tracks (and stepped about what the horses left) you were usually free to safely jaywalk or even stand about and converse in the street – like the two men on the right of our scene.

To contemporary eyes the oddest feature of this cityscape is surely Fourth Ave.’s ascent up the southeast flank of Denny Hill. There is a grade difference of 85 feet between our “now” and “then” at Fourth’s intersection with Virginia St. –  point we almost see on the photograph’s far left. Within a year and a half this hill would be leveled to the non-descript elevation we are now used to.

But it is Westlake that is the centerpiece of this scene. If its sweeping line were continued on south through the central business district (behind the photographer), it would at last meet First Ave. at Marion St. And that was the route for a Lake Union-bound boulevard proposed in 1876 by Seattle doctor and Mayor Gideon Weed. Although the citizens disagreed with Weed’s proposal, they were familiar with this part of the route north of Pike Street for in 1872 a narrow-gauge railroad was cut through the forest here to carry coal from scows on Lake Union to bunkers at the foot of Pike St. The coal cars ran up this draw until 1878 when the route was abandoned for a new coal road to Newcastle that went around the south end of Lake Washington. Then this old railway line, and future Westlake Ave., grew into a shrub-sided path popularly travelled for family picnics at Lake Union. It was called “Down the Grade.”

In 1882 a narrow boardwalk to the lake was built along the old line and David Denny’s Western Mill first started Lake Union “working.” By the late 1880s the sides of this little valley between Denny and Capitol hills were cleared; however, the streets which were cut across this gentle ravine did not conform to the lay of the land. The district of clapboard apartments and working men’s homes which developed here was one of Seattle’s more obvious examples of the tendency of promoters’ town plats to disregard the real topography. In 1890 Luther Griffith, Seattle’s young wizard of electric trolleys, realized this mistake in city planning. After buying up 53 lots along the old coal road’s grade, he proposed to cut a multi-use boulevard through to Lake Union. The city council disagreed.

By the early 1900s the city’s businesses had begun to move north out of Pioneer Square. A new city center was desired, and the city engineers went back to the old Westlake proposals. The old route was surveyed in January 1905, and by November of the next year the 90-ft-wide street was paved and completed. This was 30 years since Mayor Weed’s original 1876 proposal.

If this Westlake precedent holds true, then the Westlake Mall, which was first proposed in 1958 and has since been a frustration for five mayors – Clinton, Braman, Miller, Uhlman, and Royer – should be completed in 1988 to the glory of the reelected fifth.

(As it developed Royer was reelected but the more splendid visions for this five-star corner and its “run” to the north were compromised to contingencies of the usual sort, like traffic on Pine Street and commercial urges.)

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PIKE & FOURTH – JULY 25, 1938

(First appeared in Pacific, 1-8-1989)

Although the date for this Fourth and Pike scene is recorded on neither the original negative nor on its protective envelope, uncovering it was not difficult. The newsstand at the center of this view includes face-out copies of both The Seattle Times and The Post-Intelligencer. Although we can’t read the date, we can, with the aid of magnification, make out a few of the headlines in the original negative. With those generous clues and a little fast-forward searching through the Seattle Public Library’s microfilms, the date for this scene is soon discovered. It is Monday, July 25, 1938.

The P.I., just above the dealer’s head, announces “A New Forest Fire Rages at Sol Duc.” A week-and-a-half of record heat had not only encouraged fires but also filled the beaches. And this Monday, Seattle was even hotter with the anticipation of a Tuesday night fight. Jack Dempsy’s photograph is on the front page of the P.I. The “Mighty Manassa Mauler” was in town to referee one of the great sporting events in the history of the city: the Freddie Steele vs. Al Hostak fight for the middle-weight title.

About 30 hours after this photograph was taken, hometown-tough Hostak, in front of 35,000 sweating fans at Civic Field (now site of the Seattle Center stadium), made quick work of the champion Steele. The P.I.’s purple-penned sports reporter, Royal Brougham, reported “Four times the twenty-two-year-old Seattle boy’s steel-tempered knuckles sent the champion reeling into the rosin.” Hostak brought the belt to Seattle by a knockout in the first minute of the first round.

The day ‘s super-heated condition was also encouraged at the Colonial Theatre (one-half block up Fourth) where the Times reported that “an eternal triangle’ in the heart of the African jungle brings added thrills in “Tarzan’s Revenge.” The apeman’s affection for a Miss Holms, on safari with her father, fires the resentment of her jealous fiancee, George Meeker. However, we will not reveal the ending to this hot affair, although by Wednesday the 27, Seattle had cooled off.

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Both views look north on Westlake from its origin at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street.  The Seaboard building, on the far right, has survived the about 95 years between them.

THIS PUZZLING MALL

I confess to having featured this intersection four times – that I remember – in the last 23 years.  So here’s the fifth, and I wonder what took me so long.  There are so many delightful photographs taken from this five-star corner looking north on Westlake from Forth and Pike.  But this scene with the officer probably counts as a “classic” for it has been published a number of times and he has not tired.

It is only recently that I looked closely at the policeman, and I think I have figured out what he is doing.  He is scratching his head.  Since this is a sign of deep thought – or at least puzzlement – I suggest that the officer here is wondering about the great changes have occurred in the only three years before he was sent this afternoon to help with the traffic.  (I’m figuring that this is 1909 or very near it.)  Heading north for Fremont, trolley car number 578 – to the left of the officer – is only two years old and so is the Plaza Hotel to the left of it.  If the officer returns to this beat in a few years more he’ll probably know that there is a speak-easy running it the hotel basement.

Westlake Avenue was cut through the neighborhood in 1906 along what its planners described as “a low-lying valley, fairly level, with just enough pitch to give it satisfactory drainage.”  The plan was to connect it with “a magnificent driveway around the lake.”

But then some readers will remember that there have been many magnificent plans for this part of Westlake as well.  Beginning in 1960 with the opening of the Westlake Summer Mall — that quickly had its name changed to Seafair Mall — the blocks between Pike and Stewart streets were talked and dreamed over for a quarter century as the best available site for developing a civic center with a wide broad public place for a central business district that somehow wound up without one.

In 1960 one concerned person described the Seafair Mall as “This sorry little bit of pavement with a few planter boxes.”  Forty-five years later there are many more planter boxes.

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A part of the Baillaergeon-Pacific Security Building, far right, survives into the “now” scene.   Built in 1907, it is, for Seattle, an early example of a steel-frame structure covered with terra-cotta tiles and ornaments.

THE ELEGANT STRAND THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific Oct. 14, 2007)

Here the gleaming symmetry of the Strand Theatre rises above the confused queue of a sidewalk crowd jostling for tickets to Wet Gold.   The elegant Strand opened as the Alaska Theatre in 1914.  Two years later this then overworked name was dropped for the London sophistication implied in the new name “Strand.”

Most likely this is a first run showing of J. Ernest Williamson’s 1921 hit Wet Gold, the story of a sunken ship, its gilded treasure and the passions released in finding it.  Resting nicely on the theatre’s terra-cotta skin, the film’s sensational banners are nestled between the Strand’s classical stain glass windows. Williamson became a pioneer of undersea photoplays by attaching an observation chamber to an expandable deep-sea tube invented by his sea captain father.  The younger Williamson called it his “Photosphere”.

I’ve learned from Eric Flom’s historylink.org essay on the Alaska/Strand that Frederick & Nelson Department Store was contracted to furnish and decorate the interior and that the elegance begun on the street was continued in the theatre’s lobby with onyx and marble.  Before the 1927 introduction of synchronized sound the silent films shown at the Strand were generally accompanied by its Skinner Opus No. 217 pipe organ, which later wound up in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Bellingham.

Flom also notes that this 1114 address on 2nd Avenue (the east side between Spring and Seneca Streets) was showing films years before it’s terra-cotta makeover.  The Ideal Theatre opened there in 1909 and in 1911 it too was renamed The Black Cat, which, as noted, was elegantly overhauled three years later into the Alaska/Strand.  Flom has tracked the 1,110-seat Strand “well into the 1930s.”

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More than a century separates these two looks east up Pike and across First Avenue.  In the first block before Second Avenue among the shops on the left are a tobacconist, a beer hall, a tailor, and two restaurants, the Boston Kitchen and the Junction Restaurant.  On a sidewalk sign the latter offers “Mocha Java Coffee.”    Historical photo courtesy Lawton Gowey.

THE RUMBLE ON PIKE

Standing at the entrance to the public market in the crosswalk on the west side of First Avenue and looking east up the centerline of Pike Street – like in this week’s “now and then” — you may imagine trains rolling directly through you and also under you.  And while you may no longer see them they can still be felt.

The once popular Seattle historian-journalist J. Willis Sayre explains why in “This City of Ours” his entertaining book of Seattle trivia that was published for Seattle Schools in 1936.  Describing a tour on First Avenue he writes, “Now lets go down to Pike Street.  Here you are directly above the Great Northern tunnel built under the city in 1904.”  Today, if you are sensitive and wear wooden shoes (preferably) you can still feel the rumble below.  The choo-choo-coming-at-you through most of the 1870s was Seattle’s first railroad, the narrow gauged train that carried coal cars transferred from scows on Lake Union to bunkers at the waterfront foot of Pike Street.

This historical view east on Pike was recorded a few years before the tunnel was built beneath it – sometime between 1897 and 1900.   One block away the trolley turning west off of Second Avenue onto Pike carries a roof banner advertising the sale of Gold Rush outfits at Cooper and Levi’s in Pioneer Square.  That national hysteria began in ’97, and in 1901 the rails for the Front Street (First Ave.) Cable Cars were removed. Here on the right they still take a right turn to Pike from First Avenue.

In “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle,” another 1930’s classic of local history, pioneer Sophie Frye Bass recalls jumping upon the coal cars as they rumble along Pike in the ‘70s.  The Bass family home was on Pike.  She also remembers Pike before the train when it was “a blazed trail that became a road which dodged between stumps as best it could.”  Much later when Pike was planked Bass recalls how “when the street sweeper . . . came rumbling along, all would rush frantically to close the windows.”

But here in the late 1890s a momentarily silent Pike is paved with bricks, although First Avenue is still planked.  One block away when the tunnel was being built the public works department made it’s by now oft-sited traffic count at Second Avenue.   Of the 3,959 vehicles that used that intersection at Pike on Friday Dec. 23, 1904 only 14 were automobiles and 178 buggies.  More than three thirds were one or two horse express wagons.  Walking and public transportation – trolleys — were the way to get around.

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SEATTLE SYMPHONY’S GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY

(First published in Pacific, Dec. 5, 1993)

In the late summer of 1953 the officers of the Seattle Symphony began the promotion of the orchestra’s golden anniversary with a public campaign to discover “Where were you on the night of December 28, 1903?”  The night Harvey West directed the Seattle Symphony’s first concert in the ballroom of the Arcade Building at Second and Seneca.

West got his start playing second violin in pit orchestras for local theaters.  His widow was invited to the 50th anniversary concert but could not attend because of illness.  But others who were there in 1903 either as players or payers did answer the call, and were delivered beside the neon lit marquees of the Orpheum Theatre aboard the vintage autos of the local Horseless Carraige Club.  Boston Pops’ Arthur Fiedler guest conducted the Seattle Symphony for this November 3rd concert, and local virtuoso violinist Byrd Elliott was featured with Prokofieff’s Second Violin Concerto.  Fiedler’s program also included Beethoven’s First Symphony, Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music and an encore of The Stars and Stripes Forever.  Fiedler explained that he rode this old horse “for fun” because of the 50th-anniversary celebration.  Of course the Orpheum was filled to its 2600 seat capacity.

Earlier, in January of 1953, Arturo Tosconini’s assistant, the violist Milton Katims, made his first appearance as guest conductor here.   The Seattle symphony was then still playing in the Civic Auditorium, an acoustic hole which violinist Jasha Heifetz called the “barn”.  Heifetz opinion was shared by Sir Thomas Beecham — and extended.  The already famous English maestro conducted the Seattle Symphony during most of World War Two, and before leaving dropped his own bomb here remarking that Seattle was a “cultural dustbin.”

As an antidote, perhaps, the Symphony’s first post-war conductor Carl Bricken found cultural encouragement in the doomsday peace that followed Hiroshima.  Perhaps, he mused, “a new era is beginning…that people the world over…dazed by the known element of complete annihilation, are ready for a millenium of the peaceful pursuit of the sciences, arts, literatures and music.”  However, after Bricken resigned in 1948 the Symphony’s musicians soon abandoned its officers, formed their own Washington Symphony League and scheduled a season of 16 concerts at the Moore Theater with a conductor of their own choosing, Eugene Linden of the Tacoma Symphony.  This rebellion was short-lived and the following year the organization was peacefully reunited under Milton Katims the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s new resident conductor, a position he held for twenty two years.

It requires no money to love a symphony, some money to hear one live, and lots of money to make one.  In its 90th season the Seattle Symphony is quietly campaigning for a new auditorium.  You do not have to be Heifetz to figure out that a culture which although it may resent paying athletes millions to play minutes in a big barn like the Kingdome will still do it and even scream for it, may not want to pay for a new concert hall where they will be expected to shut up and listen to a sound more profound than an electric organ.   This symphony may have to resort to a technique used here during the Great Depression.  Symphony Sunday: a fund raising technique used nearly 60 years ago, was proclaimed from the pulpits of the cathedrals, synagogues and chapel city-wide.  The recording successes of the 1993 Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwartz should also help.

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Between 1914 and 1955 the Liberty Theatre held the center of the First Avenue block between Pike and Pine Streets.  Replaced by a parking lot in 1955 its neighbors survive.  To the north (left) is the Gatewood, one of the 11 downtown buildings improved by the non-profit Plymouth Housing Group for low- income housing.  To the right is one of the few survivors of the old “Flesh Avenue” that was once First Avenue.  (Historical photo courtesy Lawton Gowey)

LIBERTY THEATRE

How many Times readers can still remember the ornamental Liberty Theatre on First Avenue across from the Market?  On bright afternoons the light bounced off its terra-cotta façade illuminating the street.

It is now fifty-one years since Theatres Incorporated sent a letter to Ralph Stacy, then the King County Assessor, that the company had “demolished and removed the Liberty Theatre and accordingly request that you remove the building from your assessment rolls.”  Their intention to open a parking lot to “relieve the congestion around the Pike Place Market” was a sudden one.  Only months earlier the theatre’s managers had briefly closed the Liberty for a CinemaScope and stereophonic fitting – but for naught.

The Liberty first opened on Oct. 27, 1914, and it was built for movies.  There were only two dressing rooms, and both were in the mezzanine.  The theatre — with no pillars — was built around a 1500-pipe Wurlitzer organ that was famous in its time for special effects like birds cooing, crows cawing, and the surf pounding — an effect made within the organ by a rasping together of sandpaper blocks.  The organist also kept ready in his pocket a pistol loaded with blanks for William S. Hart shoot-em-ups.  The Organ’s largest part, a 32-foot bass pipe was removed when its soundings continued to knock plaster from the ceiling.  Throughout its 41 years the Liberty was known for splendid acoustics.

In “Household Magazine’s” review of “The Winning of Barbara Worth,” the 1926 silent film showing here at the Liberty, Gary Cooper is described as “the handsome young chap who stole the picture from Ronald Colman.”  And that’s something.  The movie was a hit and still being reviewed when the Liberty closed in December for new management and a new name. When it opened again on Jan 7, 1927 as the United Artists Theatre, Seattle Mayor Bertha Landes did the opening-honors standing beside a battery of U.S. Navy searchlights operated by uniformed sailors.  They were recruiters, it was explained.  Appropriately, the Wallace Beary vehicle “We’re in the Navy Now” was the film shown.

Two years and some bad debts later the theatre was again the Liberty and stayed so until replaced by the parking lot in 1955.

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(click to enlarge photos)

It was around 1906 that Agnes Healy Anderson started taking a carriage ride every morning around 10 o’clock and kept at it for nearly thirty years.  As motorcars took over she remained faithful to her covered brougham in the cooler months and her open carriage in the warmer ones, and also to her coachman who in full livery drove her horses.

All grew old together in their routine – with side trips for shopping downtown – until 1935 when the last of the teams – by then their names, Lord and Lady, were known in the community – was retired, and Agnes switched to a chauffeur-driven limousine.  William Gyldenfeldt, the coachman, had been given his own home next door, and in ’35 a pension, and the retired brougham too.

Agnes’ husband, Alfred H. Anderson, was a lumber baron of such size that in 1897 he raised this home with seven bedrooms lined in Honduran mahogany, rosewood and Siberian Oak, 4 onyx fireplaces and five marble toilets.  One of the five thrones was fitted with a copy of the oversized President William Howard Tafts’ bathtub, eight feet long and 40 inches wide.  A hole was cut in the side of their mansion to install the tub.  Alfred needed it; he was six feet six inches tall and weight many stones. The couple had left Shelton, Washington and their mills there in the mid 1890s to invest in the opportunities of many sorts found then in booming Seattle.

When Alfred died in 1914 in the Waldorf hotel while visiting New York, Agnes was left with one of the great fortunes of the city.  At her own passing in 1940 she was described as “the largest individual stockholder of the Seattle First National Bank.” She gave generously to many charities, and always had.  Anderson Hall, home for the U.W.’s Department of Forestry, was a gift from her in 1925.  Still it is for her eccentric rides and her husband’s bathtub that journalists, like me, still primarily exploit the couple.  (In that line, the Kaiser of Germany ordered a second copy of Taft’s tub.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul, heh heh?

MRS. ANDERSON MEET MRS BURKE

Yes Jean, and additions of such radical reach that I have renamed it all “Mrs. Anderson Please Meet Mrs. Burke.” Before joining older features to this week’s new one – as is our custom –  I need to make both a correction and confession.   I was wrong!  But you know that, for earlier this day you have returned to the soiled spot of my sins of omission and recorded it as Payday Loans – Indeed!

That is not Mrs. Anderson posing in her open carriage before her First Hill Home, although I first believed it was she and her famous team well back into the last millennium.  I have had this photograph in the wide pool of possible subjects to treat with an extended caption and your repeat Jean. Then six weeks ago (our lead time) I was thumbing thru a file of “candidates” and came upon her again.  I then embraced the patient Mrs. Anderson with my foolish confidence born of habit and some success that I knew something that I, in fact, did not know.

(Click to Enlarge)

My ignorance was first suggested when I went searching yesterday for other looks at the Anderson home to share today.  The big home behind the posing carriage and its rider were otherwise not familiar to me, but I was confident that I could probably find some distant look at it for, as indicated in the feature above, the Anderson home was both large and long-lived.   Then Ron Edge came forward with his 1950 aerial (above to the right) and it was unsettling.  Although its detail is not as sharp as desired, it is clear enough to show that the home it shows at the southeast corner of Minor and Columbia is not the same home as that one in the picture with the posing carriage. It is, however, the same home that appears in the 1957 Seattle Times clipping from a story about the old home’s use as a women’s dormitory for Seattle University.   We have put them together side-by-side. (Click to Enlarge)

Next, with these unsettling doubts I rushed to find a solution – to save face.  First I checked the 1912 Baist Real Estate map’s footprint for the Anderson home, and it remained faithful to me, showing an overall shape that feature symmetrical swelling at both the northwest and southwest corners of the structure.  But this was small consolation, for both homes – the one in the photo with the carriage and the one from space – had such extended corner features.

I next compared a newsprint portrait of Agnes Anderson copied from her obituary (above) with a magnification of the Agnes – I still hoped – in the carriage.  Although the age difference was a generation – or even two – that boxish anatomy they shared – in the face – meant that they still might be the same Agnes.

Following that slight encouragement I made a mostly fruitless try at finding the three other photographs of Mrs. Anderson and/or her carriage that I knew were in my collection. I found only one of the three.  In that one Agnes was out shopping with her livery at Frederick and Nelson Dept. Store.  Here there was some encouragement because although as Agnes begins to step into her coach she is seen mostly from the rear and in shadows the features of her driver seem similar to those in the featured photo with the posing mansion.

Still I knew my chances for redemption were slim and figured that it was time to imagine that the home with the carriage was not Mrs. Anderson’s, but another home, most likely also on First Hill, perhaps with Agnes posing during a visit.  But I was clueless as to where such a big home with towers and a metal roof might be found in the neighborhood – a neighborhood I had visited for stories many times in the past.  As is sometimes my habit, I then contrived to daydream, this time about First Hill and its appointments as I imagined floating above it.  It was when so “transcended” that I remembered that the Thomas and Caroline Burke home had a tower at last at one of its corners although not one that was, I thought, so impressive as the one with my younger Agnes and her Carriage.  After fumbling – again – this time to successfully find the photograph of the Burke’s home at the northeast corner of Madison and Boylston, all – or nearly all – was revealed.  This, indeed, was the Burke’s home and much more majestic than I remembered it from having written about it years ago.  (I include that feature below.)

[The original feature that interpreted the above now-then is printed directly below the conclusion of this confession-correction and the several poses by Caroline Burke.]

Even after this discovery I still had two strings to my old belief.  This, I put it with whatever remaining salt of self-deception I could muster, was Agnes Anderson visiting Carolyn Burke; after all they lived only four short blocks apart.  This hope was abused by comparing my Agnes in the carriage with several photographs of Carolyn.  With this I was sentenced.  The person in the carriage was surely Mrs. Carolyn Burke, wife of “He Built Seattle” Judge Thomas Burke.   But still I sputtered.  Was it possible that Agnes had brought her carriage around to take Carolyn for a ride and to also pose for her Tom in it?  Whichever – Mrs. Anderson please meet Mrs. Burke.

One consolation – it is, I think, the first such resolute mistake I have made – if we don’t count errors of direction like left-right – in the now 30 years that I have pulled these repeats from a wonderful variety of sources.

And once more MRS. ANDERSON Please Meet MRS BURKE

THE BURKES AT HOME

In the half century  – from 1875 to 1925 -that Thomas Burke made Seattle his home, he managed to so insert himself into its politics and development that the historian Robert Nesbit would stretch the truth of Burke’s effects only a little when he titled his biography of the attorney and judge, “He Built Seattle.”

The judge and his world-hopping wife Caroline moved into their First Hill home at the northeast comer of Boylston and Madison Street in 1903, a year after he retired from his legal practice. The Burkes were childless and since his wife was as fond of Paris as she was of First Hill society, he was often left alone in this big home with his library. He was an avid reader and was generally considered the town’s chief orator.

The Burkes purchased an Italianate mansion built about 10 years earlier by another judge, Julius A. Stratton. They made one substantial addition: While on an around-the-world tour their “Indian Room” was attached to the north wall.

(The south and west facades appear here.) Designed by Spokane’s society architect, Kirtland K. Cutter, and completed in 1908, the new addition was 25 feet high with a surrounding interior balcony. The addition was really an exhibition hall for the Burkes’ collection of Native American artifacts, a collection that later became the ethnographic foundation for the University of Washington’s Burke Museum.

Besides the museum, a monument in Volunteer Park and a street in Wallingford, Burke is also remembered in the Burke Gilman bike trail, which follows the line of one of the judge’s industrial efforts, The Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad. The S.L.S.E.R.R., financed largely by Easterners, was also an example of what Nesbit so thoroughly elaborates as Burke’s principal historical role in the building of Seattle; that is, as “representative for ‘pioneer’ absentee capital.”

(Click TWICE to Enlarge)

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Early members of the Seattle Historical Society pose on the front stairway to the Carkeek mansion at the southwest corner of Boren Avenue and Madison Street.  The group portrait reminds us that it was once the practice for almost any group interested in culture – the arts, heritage, and philanthropy – to have been founded, attended, and run by women.  Historical photo courtesy Lawton Gowey.

CARKEEK COSTUME PARTY

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug/Sept 2005)

Except for one man – and can you find him? (click to enlarge) – none of the costumed members of the Seattle Historical Society posing here (above) is wearing pants. (That little man in the upper-right corner seems to have snuck into the scene.)  The front porch of the Emily and Morgan Carkeek First Hill home at Boren and Madison was used more than once for such a group portrait.

The Carkeeks where English immigrants and their children Guendolen and Vivian kept the family’s Anglo-Saxon flame lit.  More than a student of the King Arthur legend, the lawyer Vivian Carkeek was a true believer and for years the national president of the Knights of the Round Table.  The daughter Guendolen was packed off to England as a teenager for an English education, although she wound up living in Paris and marrying a Russian count. Later she returned to Seattle to help revive the historical society that her mother founded in 1911.

A few of these period costumes are very likely still part of the Society’s collection at the Museum of History and Industry.  Although early, this is not the first costume party.  That was held on Founders Day, Nov. 13, 1914 and there survives a different group portrait from that occasion.  This is probably soon after.

But who are these early leaders in the celebration and study of local heritage?  The only face familiar to me here (from other photographs) is that of Emily Carkeek herself.  She looks straight into the camera at the center of the fourth row down from the top.  Two rows behind her and also at the center, the woman with the large while plume in her hat resembles the artist Harriet Foster Beecher, but it is almost certainly not she.

On March 30, 1915, Harriet Beecher along with the historian-journalist Thomas W. Prosch, pioneer Margaret Lenora (Lenora Street) Denny and Virginia McCarver Prosch all drowned when the Carkeek’s Pierce-Arrow touring car crashed off the Riverton Bridge into the Duwamish River.  Only the chauffeur and Emily Carkeek survived.

Both Virginia Prosch and Margaret Denny were involved either as officers or trustees of the historical society and neither of them appears in the cheerful group portrait at the top.

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Built in 1883, the Haller Mansion filled the block on the north side of James Street between Minor and Broadway Avenues.  The homes was replaced with federally leased housing during the Second World War, and was later developed with the modest glass curtain Swedish Hospital Annex showing in the “now.”

A WARRIOR’S REWARD – Castlemount

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 2005)

To a retirement of writing memories about his battles, Col. Granville O. Haller blazed his last trail.  With wife Henrietta and their four children the five Hallers built the first mansion on First Hill.  There were as yet no streets so the home, at the future northeast corner of Minor and James, was approached by path.

“Castlemount” – their name for it – stood so high that at night the light in its tower could be seen from the end of Yesler’s wharf.   It helped that by then Yesler had clear-cut First Hill and also that no exotic urban landscape had yet taken its place to shroud the new mansion’s singularity on the Seattle horizon.   Still Henrietta soon went to work draping this naked landscape with flowers.  Known for her gardening she was also generous with her bulbs helping neighbors – all of them, of course, new – plant their own flower beds.   Behind the home – although not seen here – was a barn and on the far (north) side an orchard.

Henrietta’s talents were also applied inside.  At night by candle light she made the hooked rugs that helped warm the high-ceilinged rooms that were often in the cold months penetrated by drafts.  Some, no doubt, came from the crawl space below the first floor where in shallow ground Indian sculls had been found when the foundation for the big home was being prepared.

These bleached body parts were on permanent exhibition at Castlemount beside the oil portraits of several of Henrietta’s distinguished 17th century English ancestors.  The Colonel who had fought in several Indian wars — besides the war with Mexico, the Civil War and the exceptionally bloodless “Pig War” in the San Juans – may have found inspiration in them for his writing.

(Most of these tidbits of Haller history were recycled from Margaret Pitcairn Strachan’s always-helpful series on Seattle Mansions published weekly in the Seattle Times in 1944-45.)

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When Norval Latimer (in the front seat) married Margaret Moore (in the back seat) in 1890 he was the manager of the pioneer Dexter Horton bank.  When they posed with three of their children for this 1907 view on Terry Street with the family home behind them, Norval was still managing the bank and would soon be made both president and director as well.

THE LATIMERS of First Hill

(First appeared in Pacific, 2006)

There are certainly two artifacts that have survived the 99 years since the historical view was recorded of the Latimer family – or part of it  – posing in the family car and in front of the family home on First Hill.

The scene was almost certainly recorded in 1907 because a slightly wider version of the same photograph shows construction scaffolding still attached to the north side of St. James Cathedral’s south tower, far right.  The Cathedral is the most obvious survivor.  By the time of the church’s dedication on Dec. 22, 1907 the scaffolding was removed.   The second artifact is the stonewall that once restrained the Latimer lawn and now separates the Blood Bank parking lot from the sidewalks that meet at the southwest corner of Terry and Columbia.

In the “now” Margaret Latimer Callahan stands about two feet into Terry Street and near where her banker father Norval sits behind the wheel in the family Locomobile.   Born on July 22, 1906, Margaret is the youngest of Norval and Margaret Latimer’s children.

For a while, Margaret, it was thought, might be a third visible link between the then and now — although certainly no artifact.  The evidentiary question is this.  Who is sitting on papa Norval’s lap?  Is it his only daughter or his youngest son Vernon?  After polling about – yes – 100 discerning friends and Latimer descendents the great consensus is that this is Vernon under the white bonnet.   And Margaret agrees.  “I was probably inside with a nurse while three of my brothers posed with my parents.”

Margaret also notes that her father is truly a poser behind the wheel, for he was never a driver.   Sitting next to him is Gus the family’s chauffeur with whom he has traded seats for the moment. (See Margaret’s explanation at the bottom of this feature.)

The clever reader has already concluded that Margaret Latimer Callahan will be celebrating her centennial in a few days.   Happy 100th Margaret.  [This, of course, was first published in 2006.]

[Margaret suggests, “The Locomobile used the English configuration for the driver’s position (to the right) until about 1912.  Gus (I think his name was Gus.) the normal driver or (that French word) Chauffeur is closest to the camera.  He is a big guy with either a lantern jaw or a weak jaw as I remember.  On the other side of Gus is Norval.  He is all suited up with gloves and riding gear and behind the wheel with his child on his lap.  Yes this is Norval and so father is further from the camera than is the big-guy-gus-that-is-not-behind-the-wheel but would normally be because Norval was not a driver and he is only posing like one here.”]

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The Ranke home at the southeast corner of Terry Avenue and Madison Street was once one of the great mansions of First Hill.  Built in 1890-91 it was razed in 1957 for an extension of the Columbus Hospital.  Presently [in 2004] the home and hospital site are owned by the Cabrini Sisters and are being prepared by the Low Income Housing Institute in two stages for a mix-use development that will feature for the most part low income housing. (Historical view courtesy Lawton Gowey)

RANKE HOME

(First appeared in Pacific, 2004)

When new in 1891 Dora and Otto Ranke’s First Hill home was appropriately baronial for a family of six and one of the Seattle’s most prosperous pioneer contractors.   The mansion was lavishly appointed with carved hardwoods, painted tiles, stained glass, and deep Persian rugs.  On the first landing of the grand stairway was a conservatory of exotic plants including oversize palms that grew to envelope the place.

Also inside were the family’s famous traditions of performance and fun. The Rankes were married in Germany and immigrated together.  Dora was a dancer and Otto a tenor.  Together they supported and performed in the local productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas.  The couple also helped found the Seattle Juvenile Opera Company giving it rehearsal space in their home and instructions from an imported coach.

Perhaps the most surprising moment of Ranke family theatre was the informal one noted by Margaret Pitcairn Strachan in her 1944-45 Seattle Times series on Seattle Mansions.  After Dora confounded Otto by declining to accompany him to a masquerade ball at Yesler’s Hall, she sneaked down in a baby costume with baby mask, and baby bottle.  Dora danced with many men and sat on the laps of many more – including her husband’s although he did not know it was she – offering them a drink.  Near the end of the evening with the judging of the costumes, Otto, who was one of the judges, “was chagrined to find he had awarded a prize to his wife.”

Most of the Ranke’s playful life was centered in their home at Fifth and Pike.  Otto had little time to enjoy this their third Seattle home.  He died in 1892.  The family stayed on until1901 when the house was sold to Moritz Thomsen.  The last occupants were student nurses training at Columbus Hospital that much earlier had been converted from what was originally the Perry Apartments, the large structure seen here directly behind the Ranke Mansion.

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The Furth family followed the procession of the Seattle’s movers and shakers to First Hill in the late 1880s and built this mansion at the northeast corner of 9th Avenue and Terrace Street.  By the early 1900s they had move again, a few blocks to Summit Avenue, and for a few years thereafter their first mansion was home for the Seattle Boys Club.  With the building of Harborview Hospital in 1930 Terrace at Ninth was vacated and bricked over as part of the hospital campus.  (Historical View courtesy Museum of History and Industry.)

CITIZEN FURTH

(First appeared in Pacific, 2006)

When the Furths moved to Seattle in 1882 their new hometown was enjoying its first buoyant year as the largest community in Washington Territory.  (It stepped ahead of Walla Walla in 1881.)  In the next 30 years Seattle would roar, its population expanding from about five thousand to nearly 240 thousand, and much of this prosperous noise was Furth’s contribution, the ringing of his wealth and the rattle of his trolleys.

Born in Bohemia in 1840 – the eighth of twelve children – at the age of 16 Jacob immigrated to San Francisco, and managed during his quarter-century in California to express his turns as both a brilliant manager and caring citizen.  In 1865 Jacob married Lucy Dunton, a Californian, and with her had three daughters.   Once in Seattle with the help of San Francisco friends he founded the Puget Sound National Bank, and was in the beginning its only employee.  After Furth built this substantial family home on First Hill he continued to list himself as the “cashier” for the bank.  But he was effectively the bank’s president long before he was named such in 1893.

After the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 Furth is quoted as cautioning his own board of directors to restrain their urge to take advantage of the ruined by calling in their loans.  “Gentleman . . . what you propose may be good banking, but it is not human.”

When the 74-year-old capitalist died in 1914 he was probably Seattle’s most influential citizen, president of its big bank, its private power and streetcar company, a large iron works – fittingly named Vulcan – and much else.  But it was his thoughtful kindnesses that were memorialized.  His First Hill neighbor Thomas Burke noted how Jacob Furth’s “faculty for placing himself in another’s situation gave him insight . . . [and] he always found time to express understanding of and sympathy for the motives of even those who were against him.”  (Click to Enlarge)

(Jacob Furth would have surely have had his life story told in detail had Seattle historian Bill Speidel managed to live a year to two more than his seventy-six.  With his death in 1988 the creator of the Seattle Underground Tours was not able to complete the biography of Furth he was then preparing.)

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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.)

LENGGENHAGER – NOSTALGIC RECORDER

(First appeared in Pacific, 2004)

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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From 1894 to their deaths in 1928 Henry and Kate Holmes raised their family in the ornate Victorian mansion seen here in part at the center of the historical scene.  The residence in the foreground that survives in the “now” view was for many years the home of one of the Holmes daughters; Ruth Huntoon and her lawyer husband Richard. The historical photo is used courtesy of their grandson, also an attorney, Peter Buck.

THE HOLMES HOMES

(First appeared in Pacific, 2005)

In 1894 the retail-wholesale druggist Henry and his wife Kate Holmes followed the increasingly fashionable move to the ridge overlooking Lake Washington. Their grand home was three houses north of Jackson Street on 30th Avenue S and consequently conveniently close to the Yesler Way Cable Railway.  When the Holmes moved in the Leschi neighborhood was already clear-cut and the view east unimpeded.  Now the lofty greenbelt of Frink Park partially obscures it.

From whomever the couple bought the well detailed and mansion-sized Victorian – (the tower rises here at the center of the scene) they may have got it at a good price from an owner injured by the nation-wide financial crash of the year before.  And the purchase may have also been speculative for it was expected by many of their neighbors that one day the ridge would be lined with hotels and apartments.

But the Holmes stayed put and raised a family of daughters.  As each grew to maturity they stayed on the block building homes beside their parents and creating thereby a kind of Holmes family compound.  The larger modern bungalow in the foreground was built in 1910 (if you believe the tax records) for Ruth Holmes Huntoon and her lawyer husband Richard W. Huntoon, and they lived there for many decades.  After the druggist and his wife both died in 1928 none of their children wanted to live in the ornate mansion of high ceilings and winter drafts. So it was razed in 1929.

A stand alone showing of the old Holmes home is featured on page 116 of “Leschi Snaps”, the third of Wade Vaughn’s books on the neighborhood.  Of the three, this photo essay is the best evocation of Vaughn’s sensitive eye for his surrounds and like the first two it can only be purchased at the Leschi Food Mart.  The proceeds all go to the Leschi Public Grade School Children’s Choir.

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This two-story office building with the First Hill address, 613 Ninth Avenue, is one of the oldest and also distinguished structures in Seattle.  The “Victorian” was built in 1886 by the hard-working historian-journalist Thomas Prosch with an inclination here also for dalliance.   He included a ballroom.  In 1898 the feds took control of it for the U.S. Assay Office and stayed until they moved in 1932 to a government building.  The landmark next returned to play when it became the German House in 1935.  The building is still owned by the German Heritage Society.

ASSAY OFFICE

(First appeared in Pacific, 2006)

If I have counted correctly there are here nineteen men posing before the U.S. Assay Office.   Most likely they are all federal employees.  Those in aprons had the direct and semi-sacred duty of testing the gold and silver brought then to this First Hill address from all directions.   Of course, in 1898 the year the office opened, most of it came across the waterfront.

After the Yukon-Alaska gold rush erupted in the summer of 1897 Seattle quickly established itself as the “outfitter” of choice.  Most of the “traveling men” bought their gear here before heading north aboard one or another vessel in the flotilla of steamers that went back and forth between Seattle and Alaska.  The importance of the Assay Office was to make sure that when the few of these “latter-day Argonauts” who returned actually burdened with gold that they would be able to readily convert it to cash here in Seattle, for by far the biggest purchaser of these minerals was the U.S. Treasury.

In the competition with its northwest neighbors by 1898 Seattle was getting pretty much anything it wanted it and so it also got this office and these “alchemists.”  Still the anxious Seattle lobby worked especially hard on this for locals understood that having the assayers here considerably improved the chances that the lucky few might well spend their winnings here as well.

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In 1883 the city’s first industrialists Henry and Sarah Yesler rewarded themselves by building a 40-room mansion in their orchard facing Third Avenue between Jefferson and James Streets.  After its destruction by fire in 1901, the site was temporarily filled with the Coliseum Theatre (“The largest west of Chicago, seating 2600.”) until the first floors of the King County Courthouse – aka the City-County Building – replaced it in 1916.  This comparison looks east across Third Avenue. (Historical photo courtesy Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Henry and Sarah Yesler’s mansion was not yet twenty when it burned down early in the morning of New Years Day, 1901.  Actually, from this view of the ruins it is clear that while the big home was gutted by fire neither the corner tower (facing 3rd and Jefferson) nor the front porch – including the library sign over the front stairs – were more than blistered by it.

The Yesler landmark had a somewhat smoky history.  Although completed in 1883 Sara and Henry did not move in, and instead continued to live in their little home facing Pioneer Place for three years more.  When Sarah died in the late summer of 1887 it was in the mansion, which was then opened for the viewing of both Sarah – she was “resting” in its north parlor – and the big home too.

Soon after Sarah’s death Henry and James Lowman, Yesler’s younger nephew who was by then managing his affairs, took a long trip east to visit relatives, buy furnishings for the still largely empty mansion and, as it turned out, find a second wife for Henry.  It was a local sensation when next the not-long-for-this-world octogenarian married in his 20-year-old (she may have been 19) cousin Minnie Gagler.

After Henry died in the master bedroom in1892 no will could be found. While Minnie was suspected of having destroyed it this could not be proved.  Consequently, the home was not — as Lowman and others expected — given to the city for use as a city hall.  Instead Minnie stayed on secluded in it until 1899 when she moved out and the Seattle Public Library moved in.

Instead of partying on New Years Eve 1900 Librarian Charles Wesley Smith worked until midnight completing the annual inventory of books that only hours later would make an impressive fire.  Except for the books that were checked out, the Seattle Public Library lost about 25 thousand volumes to the pyre.  (The charge that Smith had started the fire was never proven.)

(click to enlarge photos)

Launched in Portland in 1871, the slender sternwheeler Emma Hayward gave her first eleven years on the lower Columbia River dashing between Portland and Astoria.  She was, the McCurdy Marine history claims, the favorite passenger boat on that packet.

Anticipating the 1883 completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s transcontinental to Puget Sound, the sternwheeler’s owner, the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, sent her across the Columbia Bar en route to her new Puget Sound service.  She reached Seattle on Oct. 24, 1882, and soon after began her daily round trips between Seattle and Olympia, with the most important stop at Tacoma for connecting passengers with the Puget Sound terminus there of the Northern Pacific.

Here she rests in the slip between Seattle’s Ocean dock on the right, for the larger ocean-going vessels, and its City Dock on the left, for the Puget Sound “mosquito fleet” of buzzing smaller steamers.  Most of the latter were home ported in Seattle in spite of Tacoma’s alluring railroad.

These Oregon Improvement Co. docks were added to the waterfront in 1882-83.  Taking notice of the dainty tower on the Ocean Dock, here to the far right, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for Dec. 9, 1883, included it in its list of then recent waterfront improvements. “Not the least of these is the placing of the fog bell above the Ocean Dock warehouse.  The neat little cupola erected for this bell enhances the fine appearance of the building considerably.

The Emma Hayward returned to the Columbia in 1891 where she was repaired a year later to serve as a river towboat until 1900 when – quoting McCurdy once more – she was abandoned.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly Jean.   Anyone who is especially keen on this subject of waterfront history might like to browse our Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront.  It can be found with its own cover (for clicking) here on the far right.  Next we will include a few waterfront features from past printings in Pacific-plus.   But first we will begin with another recording of the Emma Haywood, this time after the 1889 fire destroyed most of the waterfront, and now bobbinh between the post-fire Pier A and the much larger side-wheeler, the T.J. Potter.

NORTH PACIFIC & The T.J. POTTER

(First appeared in Pacific, April 23, 1989)

If Puget Sound organized a maritime hall of fame, the sidewheelers North Pacific and T.J. Potter would be promptly included. They won most of their races and made their fortunes. In today’s historical photo they are moored beside the Oregon Improvement Company’s “B” dock at the foot of Main/Jackson Street.

The smaller North Pacific was built in San Francisco in 1871 to battle the steamer Olympia for supremacy on Puget Sound. Beating the Olympia by three minutes in a mightily wagered and still famous race from Victoria to Port Townsend, the North Pacific effectively kicked its competitor off the Sound – but only after Olympia’s owners received an $18,OOO-a-year subsidy to stay away. For 32 years, the North Pacific worked Puget Sound until striking a rock in a summer fog off Marrowstone Point and sinking in the deep waters of Admiralty Inlet.

The lush sidewheeler T.J. Potter arrived on Puget Sound in 1890, and during her short time here was probably the classiest and fastest ship on these waters. But it had competition. In her first race from Tacoma with the Ballard-built Bailey Gatzert, the T.J. Potter reached Seattle first but only after the Gatzert blew the nozzle from her

Stack.  Soon after, on April 27, 1891, the Bailey Gatzert returned the favor, and after victory, flaunted it with a whistle-tooting trip around Elliott Bay. Two months later, the T.J. Potter set a record on the Tacoma run of 82&1/2 minutes.

The 230-foot T.J. Potter was built on the Columbia River in 1888. Designed for the relatively smooth waters of the Columbia, she was also good on Puget Sound when it was calm. But when the waves kicked up, the rocking Potter’s sidewheels would alternately flap in the air and dig into the saltwater, and her passengers – sometimes even her crew – would get seasick. Consequently, the Potter was sent back to the river, where she worked the Portland-Ilwaco and Astoria runs with distinction until being abandoned on the beach near Astoria 10 1921, where the remnants of her stout timbers rest still (Or at least did in 1989.)

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KING STREET TRESTLE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 29, 2005)

Between 1877 and 1903 the King Street coal wharf was probably the most popular prospect from which to study the city. Fortunately, a few photographers took the opportunity to record panoramas stitched from several shots. This view is the most southerly of four photographs that probably date from the spring or early summer of 1882. The photographer was the prolific “anonymous.”

The scene looks east toward the block between Jackson Street on the far left and King Street on the right. King was then still a railroad trestle built above the tides, and all the structures that appear on the right side of this view – the railroad shops and a lumber mill – are also set above the tideflats. The white hotel on the far left with the wrapping porch, shutters and shade trees is the Felker House, the first Seattle structure built of finished lumber.

Two of what we may kindly call the hotel’s “urban legends” survive its destruction in the “Great Fire” of 1889: First, that it was the town’s original whorehouse. Second, that its overseer – Mary Ann Conklin, aka “Mother Damnable” – turned to solid stone sometime between her death in 1873 and difficult resurrection in 1884 when her body was hauled to a second grave. Believe it or not, her features were intact.

Two more semi-solid points – both about the “native land” shown here: First, it is still a quarter-century before the ridge on the horizon would be lowered 90 feet with the Jackson Street regrade. Second, the tide is out and the small bluff above the beach is the same on which the Duwamish tribe built its longhouse. There, the Indians looked out on the bay probably for centuries before Captain Felker substituted whitewashed clapboard for cedar slabs.

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The S.S. DAKOTA

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 15, 1989)

If the present Washington Street Public Boat Landing were plopped down into this week’s historical scene, the ornate shelter would straddle the Crawford & Harrington Wharf just beyond the pile of stacked planks – about halfway between the shore and the shed at the end of the pier. This view was copied from the best of the few surviving prints of what is one of the city’s photographic classics. On a different and inferior print, photographer Theodore Peiser has inscribed his name and this caption, “Crawford & Harrington and Yesler’s Wharves with S.S. Dakota 1881.” (The absence of Peiser’s signature and caption on this clearer print suggests that he might have later added his mark to a scene left behind by another photographer, for which he had a poorer copy -a common practice among pioneer photographers.)

One year earlier when the side-wheeler Dakota was awarded the mail contract between San Francisco and Victoria, it added Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia to a West Coast packet it’d been running since 1875. Here the side-wheeler pauses at the end of Yesler’s Wharf which, until the fire of 1889 destroyed it and every other dock south of Union Street, was the principal pier on the waterfront.

Just right of center arid also tied to Yesler’s Wharf is a smaller side-wheeler, the J.B. Libby. The Libby was launched at Utsaladdy on Camano Island in 1862, and in its quarter-century of working Puget Sound, became the best known small steamer on these waterways. In November 1889 while en route from Roche Harbor to Port Townsend carrying 500 barrels of lime, the Libby lost its rudder in a storm and caught fire. It carried seven crew and seven passengers, the latter escaping on the steamer’s lifeboat and the former on rafts. All survived.

At the outer end of the Crawford & Harrington Wharf sits the pier shed for the Talbot Coal Yard, named for a San Francisco capitalist who bankrolled early mining of the Renton coal fields.  The greatest coal exporter from this waterfront was the Oregon Improvement Company’s big coal wharf and bunkers at the foot of King Street.  The company’s coal exports then to San Francisco were many times greater than its imports to Puget Sound.  Especially from 1878 to 1881 the OIC’s greatest import was ballast that it would dump in the bay before loading up on coal.  These contributions constructed our “Ballast Island” off of Washington and Main Streets.

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Recorded at the end of Yesler’s Wharf in 1875 by an unnamed photographer,  this is one of the earliest photographs of any part of Seattle.  It may also be the last surviving record of the side-wheeler Pacific, on the left. Now the historic site of Yesler’s Wharf is part of the staging grounds for Washington State Ferries.  (Historical Photo courtesy Puget Sound Maritime Society.)

FATED VESSELS at YESLER WHARF – 1875

(First appeared in Pacific, May 15, 2005)

On what is perhaps the earliest (and only) surviving print of this maritime scene an inked caption is scribble along the right border.  It reads, “Steamships Salvador [middle] and Pacific [left] and bark Harvest Home [right] at Yesler Wharf in 1875.” The bible on the subject, “Lewis and Dryden’s marine History of the Pacific Northwest” (published in 1895) describes 1875 as “The Disastrous Year.”  And of all the ill-fated vessels of that year the Pacific’s ending was by far the worst .

Here the side-wheeler leans against the outer end of a Yesler Wharf that had been lengthened considerably in the preceding year with a dogleg.  Perhaps this is her last visit. The Pacific was then involved in a rate war and the passengers who boarded her considered themselves extremely lucky to be paying a fraction of the normal thirty dollar fair to San Francisco.

After steaming from Victoria at 9:30 A. M. November 4th, and rounding Tatoosh at about 4:00 P.M. the Pacific then met stiff winds and hard going but would have easily survived the weather except that when fifteen miles off-shore she improbably collided around 10:00 P.M. with the collier Orpheus that was headed north to Nanaimo for coal. Of the about 240 passengers on the Pacific only one survived by clinging to some wreckage.  It is still a grim regional record.

Seven years later the Harvest Home was wrecked about eight miles north of Cape Disappointment but with different results.  With its chronometer broken the barkentine went aground, to quote again from Lewis and Dryden, “in thick weather . . . and the first intimation the man on watch had of danger was when he heard a rooster crowing in an adjoining barnyard . . . When day dawned all hands walked ashore without dampening their feet.”  The wreck was for years after a Long Beach attraction.

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BALLAST ISLAND by Arthur Warner

(First appeared in Pacific, April 24, 1983)

On Jan. 5,1865, the Territorial Legislature granted Seattle incorporation, and the small town of about 300 responded by quickly electing a board of trustees. The new council answered its citizens’ urge for municipal order by giving them 12 laws. The first, of course, was for taxation. There followed ordinances for promoting the public peace by prohibiting drunks, restraining swine  (the 4-legged kind) and setting a speed limit against reckless horse racing on the city’s stumpy streets.

The fifth ordinance was titled, “The Removal of Indians,” and read in part: “Be it ordained that no Indian or Indians shall be permitted to reside or locate their residence on any street, highway, lane or alley or any vacant lot in the town of Seattle.” For the Indians’ hospitality and help in teaching the settlers the ancient techniques of nurturing the abundant life on Puget Sound they were given reservations, smallpox, firewater, blankets, a kind of Christian education for their segregated young and the ” security” of the white man’s laws. In Seattle of 1865, this included that ordinance to keep them out of town.

Actually, the citizens both wanted the natives out of town and in it, and often both at the same time. For many years a kind of solution for this ambivalence was a rocky man-made peninsula called Ballast Island. At the foot of Washington Street the natives would set up camp in their canvas and mat-covered dugout canoes and sell clams and curios. From there they would venture into town to sell baskets and other artifacts on street comers, and meet employers offering odd jobs. (The locals ambivalence towards and treatment of the natives may be compared to the contemporary treatment of Mexicans.)

Ironically, Ballast Island was made from the hills of Australia, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and, in largest bulk, San Francisco. Ballast was the stabilizing deadweight of rocks and rubble that the many-masted ships would carry here and simply dump into the bay. They then would fill their empty holds with coal or lumber.

Sometime in the late1870s the captains were persuaded to unload ballast in one place: alongside the short wharf at the foot of Washington Street. The site was good, for it was between the city’s two busiest piers: Yesler’s wharf (1853) and the Oregon Improvement Co’s King Street coal bunkers (1877).  The site was also bad – at least it was so decreed by the Seattle City Council on May 7, 1880, as revealed in the accompanying clipping from the Intelligencer.  By then, however, the ballast at the foot of Madison was formidable enough to be serve as the foundation for the island, and most likely the dumping was eventually resumed for the purpose not of giving refuge and accommodations to visiting Indians, but rather to give more secure foundations to the network of wharfs that would be built there in the early 1880s.

(click TWICE to enlarge – and thanks to Ron Edge for the “Edge Clipping”)

Our look into of Ballast Island was photographed by Arthur Warner sometime in the early 1890s. After the 1889 fire destroyed the entire waterfront south of Union Street, property owners usually rebuilt, three and . four times grander than before the destruction.

The Oregon Improvement Co. filled the waterfront between its coal docks off King Street and Yesler’s wharf with two large pier sheds it designated simply as A and .B. The area between these sheds and the business district along First Avenue was neither entirely filled with ballast and rubble nor was it in every place covered with piers. Thus until the mid-1890s it still was possible for native dugouts to make their way between the Oregon piers and up under the overhead quay to Ballast Island.

During the winter of 1891 the Oregon Improvement Co., seeking to improve itself, pressured local officials to remove the “some 40 clam-selling, garbage-raking remnants of a great people” who then were living on the island. But the eviction was only temporary, and especially ineffective every fall when the island was the jumping-off spot for natives from as far north as Upper British Columbia who gathered to pick hops in the White and Snoqualmie River Valleys.

In 1895, the Oregon Improvement Co. went bankrupt. By then the native encampment had moved south toward Utah Avenue and Massachusetts Street.  The ambiguous area between the waterfront and the wharves was increasingly filled in not with ballast but the city’s construction waste and Railroad Avenue was planked over all these contributions to Ballast Island.

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DUGOUT FLEET at the FOOT of WASHINGTON STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, May 20 1984)

Today is Waterfront Day in Seattle. (To clarify: on May 20, 1984) At Pier #55, the Virginia V will toot its steam whistle at one o’clock to begin the festivities, including rowboat races, a parade of working boats off shore and a casual procession of waterfront walkers on shore. Many of the vessels in the slips between piers will be open for tours. And on the Virginia V, the last of Seattle’s century old Mosquito Fleet, there will be a photography exhibit of maritime Seattle.

Today’s historical photo is one included in the show. The view is east from the foot of Washington Street to a scene from the early 1890s. But the occasion is not known. Why should the wooden quay on the right be topped with a row of gawkers?  It seems to big a line for that popular post-pioneer pastime of Indian watching.

Below them are a dozen dugout canoes. Behind’ them, and out of the picture to the other side of the pile trestle, is Ballast Island, then a frequent camping ground for natives on their way to hop picking in the fall or canoe races in the summer.

Only on the left are the races mixing. Judging from the postures (the natives are sitting) and the costumes (the suits are standing) it is possible that some bartering for curios or clams is transpiring there.

By the 1890s, the Indians were mass-producing the items of their ritual culture – masks, totems, baskets – for sale to the white man. The Indians themselves often preferred the manufactured products of the white man’s world, with one notable exception – the ·dugouts. Myron Eels, a missionary/anthropologist, explained the enduring success of the cedar canoes.  “The canoe is light, and one person often travels as fast in one with one paddle, as the white man does with two oars. He looks forward and sees where he is going . . . True we think the boat is safer, but the Indian, accustomed to his canoe from infancy, meets with far less accidents than the white man.”

Today at 2 p.m., folks will be racing – backwards – in rowboats with two oars here at the foot of Washington Street. There may be some accidents.

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While the contemporary “repeat” photograph was recorded from within feet of where the historical photographer’s site, it pivots about 45 degrees to the left (or north).  The change was made to show both the historical plaque for Ballast Island and beyond it the Pergola at the foot of Washington Street in the “now.”  The “then” scene shows part of “Ballast Island”, a pile of rubble built for the most part during the early 1880s from the contributions of ships’ ballast.  (Historical PHOTO courtesy: Lawton Gowey)

BALLAST ISLAND (again)

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 16 2005)

The historical view looks to the northeast from a timber trestle that following the “Great Fire of 1889”was built into the bay along the south margin of Washington Street.  The site is identified by the line of minimal white posts in upper left corner of the photograph.  They are supports for the short-lived Harrington and Smith warehouse that was constructed to the west of the railroad track (upper-right) that linked this south end of the central waterfront with the Yesler’s wharf (one pier to the north) and beyond it the great swath of tracks and piers along Railroad Avenue that was then under construction following the fire.  The Great Fire had destroyed everything on the waterfront south of University Street to the waterline.  Everything, of course, except Ballast Island.

There are conflicting stories of the “island’s” origins.  By one telling captains were ordered to unload here the broken rocks and bricks they carried to give stability to otherwise empty ships.  By another friendlier account pioneer wharf owners John Webster and Robert Knipe asked that the ballast be dropped to the side of their Washington Street pier to protect the piles from wood-eating worms. Whichever, a modern core sample taken near the plaque would bring up a cosmopolitan mix of rubble from San Francisco, Hawaii Islands, Australia and many other far-flung ports.

The “foreign land” of Ballast Island, of course, is most famous as the strange terra infirma on which the region’s displaced indigene camped during hop-picking time in September.  This “foreign-native” irony seems to have been totally missed by the “Indian-watchers” of the time.  They crowded the perimeter of the imported dirt pile in the early 1890s for close-up looks (like this one) of the “exotic” Indians who came prepared to skillfully barter to the locals the baskets and other curious with which they loaded extra dugouts to the brim.

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The Langston’s Livery Stable was a busy waterfront enterprise through most of the 1880s, Seattle’s first booming decade.  After it was destroyed during the Seattle fire of 1889, the St. Charles Hotel, seen in the “now,” was quickly erected in its place facing Washington Street, and was one of the first “fireproof” brick buildings built after the “Great Fire.”

LANGSTON’S LIVERY

(First published in Pacific, July 9, 2006)

Helen and John Langston moved to Seattle from Kent in 1882 and soon opened their namesake livery stables on the waterfront at Washington Street.  Like all else in the neighborhood it was, of course, destroyed in the city’s Great Fire of 1889.   Sometime in the few years it served those who wished to park or rent a horse or buggy downtown a photographer recorded this portrait of a busy Langston’s Livery from the back of the roof of the Dexter Horton Bank at the northwest corner of Washington and Commercial Street (First Ave. S.).

In Helen’s 1937 obituary we learn from her daughter Nellie that Helen was “known for her pen and ink sketches of horses and other animals and scenic views.”  Perhaps the livery stable sign, far right, showing the dashing horse with buggy and rider is also her work.  It was Helen who saved the family’s business records from the fire and was for this heroic effort, again as recalled by her daughters, “severely burned before she left the livery stable.”  After the fire the couple quickly put up the St. Charles hotel, seen in the “now.”

Helen married the 38-year-old John in 1870, the same year he began providing ferry service across the White River at Kent and three years after he is credited with opening also in Kent “the first store in King County outside Seattle.”  During these pre-livery years in the valley the Langstons also managed to carve a model farm out of the “deep forest.”  Before they sold it in 1882 their farm was known county-wide for dairy products produced by its “75 excellent milch cows.”

After the fire the Langston’s soon opened another Livery Stable uptown beside their home at 8th and Union.  In the 1903 collection of biographies titled “Representative Citizens of Seattle and King County” John Langston is described both as “now living practically retired” and also busy “in the operation of his magnificent funeral coach, which is one of the finest in the northwest and which is drawn by a team of the best horses.” Three local undertakers kept him busy.  For the moment we may wonder – only – if when he died in 1910 the then 68-year-old pioneer took his last ride in his own coach.

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WINDJAMMERS

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 13, 2005)

Frank LaRoche was born in Philadelphia in 1853, the year that Henry Yesler got the first steam sawmill on Puget Sound operating at the foot of Mill Street (Yesler Way) in Seattle.  Thirty-seven years later LaRoche made this record of Yesler’s Wharf when the city was still rebuilding from its “Great Fire” of 1889.

Even before the fire Yesler moved his mill to Union Bay on Lake Washington.  The wharf was too valuable a commercial space to be wasted on processing logs.  The corralled timber floating here in the foreground may be logs picked for piles in the rebuilding of the waterfront.   Or this may be merely the log pond for the Stetson and Post mill that was then just off the tideflats south of King Street.

LaRoche had worked as a professional since his late teens, taking assignments from railroads and publishers (Harpers’s Bros sent him to Australia) opening studios in Salt Lake and Des Moines and teaching photography in New Orleans.  As might be expected after he arrived on Puget Sound in 1889 his work hereabouts is some of the best extant.  The University of Washington Northwest Collection has about 400 Puget Sound examples but he shot many more including several thousand as he followed the Alaska gold rush of the late 1890s.

The professional has numbered this view1080, and thankfully also dated it December 1890.  Here the LaRoche oeuvre included many of what were then our “obligatory” subjects like Chief Seattle’s daughter Princess Angeline and Mt. Rainier from several prospects.  But he also left us cityscapes of every sort – buildings, parks, streets, mills, trolleys and scenes along the waterfront like this one.

After he moved to Arlington a popular trick was cramming Snohomish County lumberjacks together atop huge cedar stumps for company portraits.   LaRoche continue to act the pro until the mid-1920s and lived until 1936.

Perhaps some member in good standing with the Puget Sound Maritime Historic Society can come up with the names of those windjammers.

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Steamer CITY OF SEATTLE

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 2, 1986)

During the thick of the Alaska gold rush, Seattle controlled more than 90 percent of shipping to and from the territory. In 1890, there were 40 steamships commuting, the fastest of which was the ship shown here, the City of Seattle. It was 244 feet long, and plush. Built in Philadelphia in 1890, it sailed through the Strait of Magellan to Puget Sound in time for its most prestigious moment. On May 6,1891, leading an armada of the Puget Sound “Mosquito fleet” of small steamers, the City of Seattle carried President Benjamin Harrison from Tacoma to Seattle.

The steamer was so well-appointed that when the crash of 1893 hit, she was too expensive to run and was laid up until the gold rush of 1897 got the economy under way again. In 1900 the fast and reliable City of Seattle returned from Alaska with real booty -three tons of gold, two tons more than the steamer Portland’s sensational 1897 haul that – at least in mind of a hysterical public – started the gold rush.

The steamer lost its crown for speed in 1902 when it raced the steamer Dolphin the 800 miles from Vancouver, B.C., to Skagway. The two were often abreast and seldom out of sight of each other. In the end the Dolphin won by a half-mile.

Seattle’s namesake worked Northwestern waters until 1921, when it returned to the East coast, this time through the Panama Canal, for a new career of hauling passengers for the Miami Steamship Co. In 1937, it was sold for scrap. But the steamer is still in fine form in the accompanying photo, which was taken about 1897. The City of Seattle leans slightly to her port side loading or unloading in a slip alongside old Pier near the foot of Washington Street.

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Then Caption:  The Victoria pulls away from the slip between Pier 2 (51) and Colman Dock sometime in the early teens.  (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)  Now Caption: The modern Colman Dock from the 1960s is without tower – except for the advertising spire near the sidewalk – and the open water slip along its south side has long since been covered for vehicular access to the Washington State Ferries.

The VENERABLE VICTORIA

(First published in Pacific, March 18, 2007)

With “clues” from the tower, upper-right, and a scribbled negative number, lower-left, it is possible to, at least, compose a general description of this crowded scene.  The clock turret, here partially shrouded in the exhaust of the disembarking steamer S. S. Victoria, replaced the Colman Dock’s original tower in late 1912.  That spring the first tower was knocked into Elliott Bay by the steel-hulled steamship Alameda during a very bad landing.  The second clue, the number “30339” penned on the original negative by the Curtis and Miller studio, dates the scene – still roughly – from 1914 or 1915.

In 1908 the by then already venerable Victoria was put to work on the Alaska Steamship Company’s San Francisco-Seattle-Nome route.  Considering how packed are both the ship and the north apron of the Northern Pacific’s Pier 2 (at the foot of Yesler way) it is more likely that the Victoria is heading out for the golden shores of Nome rather than the Golden Gate.

The 360-foot-long Victoria was built in England as the Parthia in 1870 and made her maiden voyage that year to New York as the finest ship of the British Cunnard Line, for many years the dominant North Atlantic shipper. With compound engines she required half the coal of her sister ships, and with the gained room was the first Cunnard ship to have, among other niceties, bathrooms.  Eighty-six years later the Victoria (She was renamed with a 1892 overhaul, again in England.) was sold to Japanese shipbreakers and in 1956 her still sturdy hand-wrought iron hull was salvaged for scrap in Osaka, Japan.

Most likely a few Pacific readers will still remember the Victoria from the depression years of 1936 to 1939 when she was laid up in Lake Union unable to meet the cost of U.S. fire and safety regulations.  A least a few eastside readers will recall the steamer from the summer of 1952 and following.  On Aug. 23rd of that year the then oldest steamer in the U.S.A. was tied to the old shipyard dock at Houghton (Kirkland) on Lake Washington where she waited first for an ignoble 1955 conversion into a log-carrying barge, and briefly renamed the Straits, before taking the last of her many trans-Pacific trips.  That most fateful of journeys was her first trip under tow.

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BALLAST – Yet Again

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 25, 1992)

Identifying the landmarks – including a few churches – in this 1880 view of Seattle requires a print considerably larger than that provided here. (Originally, that is, in the relatively small Pacific printing from 1992.) So, like the print, we are reduced to making some generalities regarding the scene’s features.

First, this record is but one section of a five-part panorama of the city. It was recorded from the railroad coal wharf that, beginning in 1878, extended into the bay from the foot of King Street. The panorama extended north from Beacon Hill along the waterfront to Queen Anne Hill.

This is the third section of that wide-angle cityscape and extends from Washington Street on the right to Columbia Street on the far left. On the far right, Jefferson Street climbs First Hill. To the left of Jefferson, the fruit trees in Henry and Sarah Yesler’s orchard darken the block between Third and Fourth avenues and Jefferson and James streets, since 1914 the site of the King County courthouse. The Yeslers’ orchard also silhouettes the white facade and tower of Trinity Episcopal Church at Third and Jefferson.

Pioneer Square (or Place), in the scene’s center, is as-yet undistinguished by the three-story brick-and-cast-iron landmarks that in 1883 began to surmount this cityscape.

Asserting a kind of independence from the scene is the pile of rubble in the foreground. This, I believe, is the beginning of Ballast Island, (or nearly) the mound of imported earth that was dropped here by coal colliers visiting the King Street bunkers for coal in exchange for the ballast rubble contributed here between Washington and Main streets.  The ballast was need to steady the otherwise mostly empty ships as they sailed north from San Francisco – mostly – to pick up Seattle’s coal, and/or sometimes lumber too. This “foreign” pile developed into a favorite camping ground for Native Americans – as already noted twice earlier or above.

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An active member of the Mountaineers, the photographer Frank Shaw also liked to hike Seattle with his Hasselblad camera, especially in pursuit of cityscapes and public art.  Building the Seattle Freeway was one of the subjects he followed, and at the center of this elevated look west from University Street and 9th Ave. into the Central Business District he has recorded a surreal swath of cleared lots prepared for digging the I-5 ditch.

Almost certainly Shaw followed the freeway news, which this June of 1961 was enlivened by protests against the freeway’s design. They were led by the First Hill Improvement Club and Century 21 architect Paul Thiry.  Shaw recorded this on Sunday June 4, 1961, one day before the club’s Monday protest march thru these same blocks.  With practically every public official against them, the club’s proposal to cap or lid the ditch with a green parkway was doomed.  In a city then ambitiously building a world’s fair, the political and technical tasks required to study the lid proposal were described as annoying by those charged to do them.

Once the ditch was dedicated in 1967 the artful urge to cap it was revived with some of the same public officials in line to, perhaps, atone.  The results were Freeway Park dedicated on July 4, 1976, and seen, in part, in the “now.”  The sprawling Washington State Convention Center followed in the eighties.

Most likely Frank Shaw read his Sunday Times that June morning.  Front page was news of Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s enchantment “like a smitten schoolboy when the ice thaws along the Volga in the springtime” with Jacqueline Kennedy at a Vienna banquet.  There was also news of “freedom riders” in the Jackson Miss. Jail, the decision to also name Century 21 as the Seattle World’s Fair, and arguments over Castro’s proposal to exchange 500 American tractors for 1,200 Cubans captured in that April’s failed invasion of the biggest island in the Caribbean.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

A few more features past from the neighborhood, and other to some sides of University Street Jean, and beginning with a repeat of the feature we put up in 2009, which looks back up the steep University Street clime from eighth Avenue.

FIRST HILL EXCEPTIONS

(First appeared in this blog on Aug. 15,2009)

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

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

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

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

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

The view looks northwest from the upper level of the “intersection” of University Street and 9th Avenue, ca. 1912, to the Normandie Apartments when the ivy that covers the south facade (on the left) has reached the band between the first and second floors, went counted up from 9th Avenue. In the principal photograph used above, that south wall is covered with that creeper, and probably the east wall too. Here we may note the planters on the roof and on the far left the canvas shelter open for studying the skyline in any weather without high winds.

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PIONEER GLASS at SMITH COVE

Long ago a Californian named Florence Drummond, once a “child of Finntown”, sent a friend a handful of small captioned snapshots of that “Mud Bay” community on the shores of Smith Cove, and her friend shared them with me. Many of its floating homes, and beach cottages were concentrated below the Magnolia and Queen Anne bluffs that marked, respectively, the west and east openings to what were once the tideflats of Interbay.

This 1922 Drummond print is also the most intimate record I’ve seen of the glass works impressive landmark chimney, which here rises high above the squatting neighborhood clinging with it close to the then still exposed cliff at the southeast corner of Magnolia. The wood frame factory once attached to the tower is gone, unless it hung around reconstituted in these salvaged quarters.

The glass works had a fitful history.  Researcher Ron Edge found perhaps its earliest footprint on an 1899 U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey map, where for the benefit of surveyors and navigators is it captioned “yellow chimney.” Edge notes, “At least we know its color.”

The works may have had more names – including Northwest, Puget Sound, and Pioneer – than glassware.  Whatever the moniker, the factory rarely appeared in the press, except for litigation among a string of owners, and one sizable 1903 story in which Seattle’s then super-developer James Moore (of the theatre) trumpeted his plans to get it going with new equipment.  It seems that the works were one of Moore’s few fizzle s, but still the yellow chimney survived as a helpful marker.

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In her letter Florence Drummond makes note of a Finnish necessity: the sauna or steam bath.  John Reddin, the Seattle Times humorist from the 50s and 60s, remembered several of them in Finntown, frequented mostly by Finnish bachelors, whom he described as thereby “neat and clean.”  He also lists “boisterous speakeasies” and “bootleg joints all around the Smith Cove area . . .That’s where the action was.”  By a curious contrast, included among Drummonds snapshots is one of her posing grandmother, another of a line-up of no less than thirty-one children attending five-year-old Wanda Corbett’s birthday party on a Finntown boardwalk, and a helpfully captioned snap of courting Elma Jakkaneu and Charles Ivana on a Mud Bay footbridge.  She explains, “later they married.”

WEB EXTRAS

I’ve included a few other glimpses of Smith Cove – from further south, looking towards the yacht club, and through the chain link fence of the Port of Seattle storage yard.

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly Jean.  We will start by continuing with some other examples of Florence Drummond’s snapshots in Finn Town’s 1920s. A string of 10 related features will follow concluding with another look into Finn Town – the part of it on the Queen Anne side of Smith Cove.

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SMITH COVE & HILL’S TOO

(First appeared in Pacific 4-17-1983)

Photograph number 6577 is one of the some 30,000 negatives included in the Asahel Curtis collection at the Washington State Museum and/or Historical Society in Tacoma. Asahel was the younger brother of the celebrated Edward Curtis whose romantic posed photographs of American natives will currently cost you a pretty sum. However, number 6577 cost me only a little more than four dollars (in the early 1980s) paid to the Washington Historical Society, and it is easily one of the most popular images in the history of local photography.

Asahel’s photograph, actually, has its own variety of staged romance. Besides its pleasing composition, this scene resonates with a local industrial drama, which was staged here on Smith’s Cove in 1905, the year the younger Curtis recorded this view from Queen Anne Hill. In the foreground is the Oriental Limited rushing its passengers from St. Paul and all points west over the last few miles of trestle into Seattle. In a few months it will be trailing its white ribbon of steam under Seattle while passing through the Great Northern’s new tunnel. And soon it will exhale its last transcontinental gasps alongside the new King Street Station, which in 1905 was still under construction.

Beyond are the Great Northern docks and between them the largest steamers in the world, the railroad’s Minnesota and Dakota. They are being prepared for their trans-Pacific routine of delivering raw cotton to the orient and returning with raw silk.

The director for this industrial drama was James Jerome Hill, the Great Northern’s “empire builder.” Years before, Hill discovered that “one acre of Washington timber will furnish as many carloads of freight as 120 years of wheat from a Dakota farm.” So when the first Great Northern freight train rolled into Seattle in 1893, Hill was anxious to tum it right around and head east with carloads of lumber. This was a turn-around from the old notion that railroads to the West were built to carry people and cargo in that direction and then return east almost empty.

In 1905 J. J. Hill was moving his show onto the biggest stage. Acting like Atlas, Hill developed his double docks at Smith Cove to be the shoulders upon which the world would turn. Having moved the country around, Hill was here attempting to revolutionize international trade. For 300 years most trade with the orient had passed India and Africa. Now with the encouragement of Great Northern steam on both land and sea, the empire builder taught some of it to follow the shorter great circle route past Alaska. Here the perishable silk was unloaded from the jumbo steamers Minnesota and Dakota and sent rushing east on trains that had priority over all other service including mail, passenger, and that mainstay, lumber.

In 1853 Dr. Henry A. Smith built a log cabin at his namesake cove. Smith’s arrival was less mighty than the Minnesota’s but he stayed longer. For 63 years, Smith was easily one of the most remarkable characters on Puget Sound. Most of that time he spent at Smith Cove. Today he is best remembered as an ethnologist and linguist who “composed” Chief Seattle’s prophetic treaty speech. But Smith was also a surgeon who successfully used hypnotism as anesthesia, a psychotherapist who encouraged dream analysis for solving personal problems, a poet who published in Sunset Magazine under the pen name Paul Garland, a botanist who grafted the area’s first fruit trees, and a  universally-loved gentleman farmer of whom one of his seven daughters, lone, wrote: “Papa had a passionate love for the beauties of nature, was kind to all the farm animals and they, in turn, seemed to understand and love him.”

Henry Smith was King County’s first school superintendent and a very rare statesman who seemed to inspire absolutely no resentment. As a territorial legislator for several terms, he still “never sought office, never asked for a vote and was never defeated in an election.”

When the 22-year-old Smith first arrived at Smith Cove, the highest tides filled potholes for sun-warmed swimming farther north than today’s Galer Street. When he died here at his Interbay home in 1915 at the age of 85, it was from a chill caught while setting out tomato plants in his garden. At that time the tide flats of Smith Cove were being filled in by the cove’s new owner, the Port of Seattle. The consequences were the half-mile long piers 90 and 91 which were the longest earth-filled piers in the world. The lucrative silk trade, which J. J. Hill had originally channeled through Smith Cove, was severely torn in 1940 by a filament made from coal with characteristics of strength and elasticity called nylon.

Years later the Navy took Smith Cove from the Port of Seattle for a condemnation fee of 3 million dollars. The Port bought it back in the mid-1970s for about 15 million and added another four million in improvements, including Smith Cove Park. There in the spring of 1978 a plaque was placed honoring the remarkable Dr. Henry A. Smith.

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The DAKOTA and the OREGON

(First appeared in Pacific June 4, 2000)

This maritime scene is both delicate – afternoon light shapes the vessels and scatters upon the water – and monumental by reason of its largest subject, the steamship Dakota.

On the heels of its sister ship, the Minnesota, the Dakota was built in 1903 in Connecticut for the steamship arm of the Great Northern Railway and brought around the horn to its home port between the railroad’s long piers at Smith Cove in Elliott Bay. It began its first trip to Yokohama, Japan, in September 1905.

The steel-hulled cargo-passenger steamers were by far the largest vessels on the Pacific Ocean. Eleven decks high, they could hold the equivalent of 107 freight trains of 35 cars each. In fact, on its first voyage, the Dakota delivered more than one locomotive to Japan.

Clarence R. Langstaff, a carpenter and longtime resident of Magnolia, recorded this exquisite view in late 1905 or 1906. On the right is the 283-footsteel-hulled Oregon, oldest passenger vessel on the West Coast, built in Chester, Pa., in 1878.

Something beside this Smith Cove slip and the trail of smoke ties thes vessels. At midnight on Sept. 13,1906, while heading for Nome, Capt. Horace E. Soule ran the Oregon onto an uncharted rock near the entrance to Prince William Sound. On the clear afternoon of March 3 the next year, Capt. Emil Francke drove the Dakota onto a well-charted reef about 40 miles south Yokohama. Although the big ship was running at only 14 knots, its inertia was considerable, and the reef sliced through about a third of the Dakota’s 622 feet.

All the passengers were saved – but not the ships, most of their cargo and Francke’s job. While Soule was not held at fault, Francke lost his license and wound up working as a watchman on the San Francisco waterfront.

(Click to Enlarge)

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CITIZENS LIGHT & POWER CO.

(First appeared in Pacific, April 7, 1996)

The quality of life for the hill folk living along the sides and summit of Queen Anne Hill has periodically been threatened from below. The recent hubbub over unloading acres of foreign automobiles onto Interbay’s parking lots was preceded by more than a century of railroad racket climbing the western slope of the hill. The Great Northern laid its Seattle yard down below in 1903.

The peace, quiet and clean air were peculiarly threatened at the beginning of this century, when the Citizens Light and Power Company began to drive piles for a gas plant just offshore in Smith Cove. Since the manufacture of gas from burning coal was a notoriously foul process, the residents of Queen Anne Hill had a right to be wary. They also had the political clout to win.

The gas plant was eventually built – it appears in the “then” view – but only after the company installed the first downdraft smokeless boiler furnaces used on the West Coast. With this innovation the plant spewed neither smoke nor smell, and since its height didn’t intrude on Queen Anne’s view of the Olympics, the gas plant was a good neighbor. (Nearby, years later, the Port of Seattle’s much taller grain elevator did screen this view in spite of objections by Queen Anne residents.)

The plant’s innovations were cited by Citizens’ business rival, the Seattle Gas and Electric Company, in its attempt to stop its new competitors from laying pipe into the older company’s preserve: the Central Business District. The SGEC claimed that the new gas from Smith Cove was more lethal and thus responsible for the slew of gas suicides reported in the newspapers. In fact, investigators determined that the victims did not discriminate in their choice of gas and were taking it from both pipes.

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MAGNOLIA BRIDGE aka GARFIELD

(First appeared in Pacific, March 24, 1991)

When it was completed in 1930, the. sweep of the Magnolia Bridge as it ascends west of Pier 91 was considered a modern engineering wonder: At nearly 4,000 feet, it was the largest of only three reinforced concrete spans built anywhere. .

The big bridge was first proposed six years earlier when the West Wheeler Street Bridge was set on fire by a spark from a Great Northern locomotive passing beneath it. At first, the Seattle city council refused to build a high ridge to the bluff, since, it reasoned, only 4,000 people lived west of Interbay and south of Ballard. The city chose a humbler alternative by extending the West Garfield Street Bridge with a timber trestle that reached Magnolia at an elevation just a few feet above high tide.

Magnolians, however, organized the Garfield Bridge Club and eventually persuaded the city to replace the trestle with the soaring trusses shown here. The strewn timbers of the temporary low bridge, cluttering the base of the new span, are also evident.

The topmost view of the bridge was photographed Dec. 22, 1930, two weeks after the high bridge was dedicated with band music, the usual speeches and a procession of motorists and pedestrians. Then the tidelands of Interbay still reached far north of Garfield Street, requiring the bridge to be built above piles driven 20 to 40 feet into the ground. Now the tide basin has been reclaimed and blacktopped as a parking lot – most often for Japanese imports.

[Note: The public works destroyer earthquake of a few years back damaged the Magnolia Bridge so that it was closed for repairs, and locals had to abide the long detour over the Dravus Street viaduct several blocks to the north.]

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Looking south toward Smith Cove from the long-since destroyed Wheeler Street trestle for motorcars, the old Garfield Street trestle can be faintly detected on the horizon.  Left of center is the sign of the Portland Cordage Company written on the west side of the long factory designed to make rope from hemp.  (Historical picture courtesy of John Cox) With neither bridge nor tower to lift him as high as the plank floor of the timber trestle that once ran in line with Wheeler Street, Jean Sherrard substituted a stepladder and a ten-foot extension pole held by him high above his 6’7” frame.  He nearly made it while looking directly into the sun.

INTERBAY RAILROAD

In “Magnolia, Making More Memories,” the second volume on Magnolia history published recently by that neighborhood’s historical society, Hal Will returns to the rich story of transportation along and across the Interbay valley that separates the hills of Magnolia from those of Queen Anne.  (Note the clay cliffs on the left.)   In the first volume, “Magnolia, Memories and Milestones” Will wrote about “Magnolia’s Wooden Trestles.”  Now in the second volume he goes after its “early railroad days.”

The first railroad here was the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern whose rails first crossed the soggy length of this valley in 1887 heading north on the bed that here supports a coupled string of tank cars.  The SLSER originated on the Seattle waterfront and hoped to continue as far as both Spokane and British Columbia.  Railroad history is well stocked with ironies, and here’s one. The SLSER was Seattle’s robust answer to the neglect of the Tacoma-oriented Northern Pacific Railroad. According to Will’s caption, “at the time of this photo, the track [with the posing train] was owned and used by Northern Pacific Railroad.” The Great Northern used the tracks on the right.

At first I imagined that this photo was recorded looking south from a water tower.  The truth I discovered in Hal Will’s essay on trestles noted above.  Here the unnamed photographer stood on the Wheeler Street timber trestle that ran the width of the valley, east-west from 15th Ave. west to Thorndyke Ave. West.  The trestles one big span crossed the tracks here.  Will gives this picture a ca. 1918 date.  The trestle was a total loss to fire in 1924.

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WEST MERCER PLACE

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 6, 1985)

It was a Wednesday afternoon late in the summer of 1921 when a photographer from the Seattle Engineering Department drove out to where West Mercer Place descends from Queen Anne Hill’s Kinnear Park to the waterfront and shot this week’s historical scene.

The Mercer Place opening to the waterfront was cut through in 1890 when Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman (remembered now in the Burke-Gilman Trail) started their ambitious service on the West Street and North End Electric Railway. It was built to move workers and settlers between downtown Seattle and their new manufacturing town, Ballard. It was one of the first interurban trolley lines in America.

The historical photograph looks south from where the timber trestle, called Water Street, turned with the municipal trolley lines for its climb to the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood. For more than 30 years the six-mile trolley line ran from downtown Seattle through Belltown and Lower Queen Anne, returned to the waterfront at this Mercer Place intersection and continued on to Ballard. For much of its two mile run between this Mercer Place intersection and Salmon Bay – part of it thru the Interbay wetland – the trolleys ran atop a low trestle from 20 to 60 feet off shore. For the entire distance between Interbay and Pike Street the waterfront was often home to squatters shacks and a scatter of sawmills and boat builders.  In places, like that seen here, the waterfront was separated from the city by a dense greenbelt.

The trolley cars were powered by electricity generated in the basement of Burke’s namesake building at Second Avenue and Marion Street (now the site of the Federal Building). But the power was insufficient, and as the cars approached Ballard, their speed would decrease steadily, the lights in the Burke Building would dim and its elevators would slow to a crawl. One account of this slow ride to Ballard claims that the passengers took to carrying guns for protection against muggers who would crash from the forest along Queen Anne Hill to jump aboard the poking trolley for a stickup.

A different kind of danger and speed characterized the one hilly part of this nickel trip to Ballard. At West Mercer Place, after a speedy descent, cars occasionally would jump the track at the curve onto Water Street and, at high tide, take a bath in the bay.

By 1940, the rails had been pulled up and trackless trolleys were gliding on pneumatic tires along a concrete paved Elliott Avenue and a long way from sand, sawmills and shacks. Now only the greenbelt remains.

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FULL CIRCLE ARTISTS COOP

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 4, 1998)

You may recall writer David Berger’s feature “Site as Folk Art,” which appeared Dec. 7 in this magazine. As fate would have it, two days after we first followed Berger’s reconnoiter through the charmed land of the Full Circle Artists Coop, his subjects got their eviction notice.

The city of Seattle plans to route Elliott Avenue traffic destined for the proposed Immunex plant at Interbay up and over Elliott and the Burlington Northern railroad tracks that run between that thoroughfare and the Smith Cove piers. This overpass – called a “flyover” in the plans – would cut directly through the artists’ homes, studios and gardens now nestled against the Queen Anne Hill greenbelt.

The cottage in the foreground (on the top) of this week’s comparison is the most northerly of the structures at the site. Its materials and houseboat design suggest it may have been dragged ashore during the reclamation of Smith Cove. The legal description defacing the older view was scrawled by a Works Progress Administration photographer during the WPA’s late-1930s inventory of every taxable structure in King County. “Little Finland” was then a popular name for this tidelands neighborhood. The larger structure on the right is still home to a sauna that for many pre-Full Circle years was a commercial operation.

The real splendor of this site – the folk art – is on the far, hidden side of this scene. Gardens for flowers , vegetables, sculpture and found objects meander between studios and greenbelt. This growing collage of plants and artifacts was included last spring in the Pacific Northwest Art Council’s Artist Garden Tour.

This site has also been reviewed favorably by a number of City Council members, nourishing a hope that at least part of this charmed land will be saved by turning the flyover into a “fly-nearby.”

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FOUNDRY on ELLIOTT

(First appeared in Pacific Jan 12, 1992)

The brick shell of the N & S Foundry is one of the few early-century constructions that survives on the waterfront at the base of Queen Anne Hill. The two-story brick construction that appears on the left of the “then” scene, although similar, is not the foundry but the N ‘& S Machine Works, built in 1902. The foundry was added in 1906 on the lot to the south, or to the right and behind the construction site for the wooden boat. That means this picture was made between 1902 and 1906.  (Remembering that this was all composed first 20 years ago, I now imagine that none of this survives, but would be pleased to learn otherwise.)

After 12 years of manufacturing bricks in New Zealand, the German immigrant Robert Niedergesaess moved to Seattle in 1887 to continue making bricks at his Seattle Brick and Tile Co. His three sons, Otto, Wilhelm and Wilson, soon moved up the industrial ladder to electrical engineering. With financial help from their father, they formed the Niedergesaess and Sons Electric Co.

The Niedergesaess boys took advantage of their waterfront site to build boats. There was, as yet, no off-shore landfill – Elliott Avenue -separating them from Elliott Bay. (The historical photographer is on the Niedergesaess dock with his back to the bay,)

The sons separated their business in the early 1920s, with Otto moving to New York to manufacture propellers, Wilhelm staying put with the dynamos, and Wilson moving two blocks south on Elliott to open the Wilson Machine Works, a business now run by Wilson’s grandson, Robert D. Wilson. (Much earlier, Wilson Robert John Niedergesaess, tired of pronouncing and spelling out his last name for the tongue-tied, dropped the Niedergesaess and swung his first name, Wilson, to last.)

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(click to enlarge photos)

This week’s Capitol Hill subject is an apt example of how Diana James in choosing the one hundred local apartment buildings to feature in her book “Shared Walls” could sometimes be influenced by an illustration.  James explains,

“Everything has a context but you cannot always find it in a photograph.  Here you can.  My choice, the Beaumont Apartments hovers above the appealing Pike Street Gas Station and, in the photo’s composition, between the Ford Dealer on the northeast corner of Summit and Pike and the porch of the large dark home on the left. I was intrigued that the building has stood there forever preserved.”

In her essay on the Beaumont Apartments she reveals that after the contractor F.G. Winquist built it in 1909 he moved in with his wife, five children and three servants.  Of their apartment building’s twenty-seven three- and four-room units, the Winquists may have needed several.

The Beaumont’s architects, Elmer Ellsworth Green and William C. Aiken, are mentioned in the book “Shaping Seattle Architecture.” Aiken later helped with the design of the Yesler Terrace Housing Project, while “Green designed dozens of houses and apartment houses in Seattle neighborhoods including Capitol Hill, the Central Area, and Mount Baker.”

Two weeks ago we featured the Hermosa Apartments in Belltown (on the edge of it), another of Diana James’ 100 choices.  Overlooking Tilikum Place it also had “context.” The Beaumont is part of the city’s most generous swath of apartments that were built conveniently along the western slopes of First and Capitol Hills, a quick trolley ride to downtown.  The Beaumont was advertised in The Seattle Times for July 28, 1913 as featuring “Close-in choice apartments, 10 minutes walk to 4^th and Pike . . . strictly modern, rent reasonable.”

WEB EXTRAS

Seeing that so much of the Beaumont was obscured in the ‘Now’ photo, I walked around the corner and snapped a couple extra shots.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean.

First four links  – the four next photos below – to other past blog features on related subjects, most having to do with First and Capitol Hills.  For instance, the first of these – directly below – was featured Feb. 11 this year. It begins with a description of the First Church Christ Scientist and strings below it several other features.   Here’s the list, and in order.

– Queen Anne 7^th Church Christian Science

– Methodists at 16^th and John

– Tabernacle Baptist 15^th N.E. and Harrison

– Unitarians on Capitol Hill at Boylston

– Nels & Tekla Nelson’s home on Boylston & Olive

– Broadway H.S.

– Fire station NO. 7 15^th and Harrison

– Broadway Coach Madison and Harvard 1887

– Burke Mansion

– Cornish & Buses at Broadway and Pine

– Fire Hill Fire house No. 3 at Alder St. and Terry Ave.

– Roycroft Theatre 9^th Ave E. and Roy St.

– Garbage Collection 1918 at Belmont Ave.

– Bagley Family promenade on 12^th at Thomas, 1905

– Pike Apartments, Pike and 12th

(Again, the four photos below may be moused or clicked as links to their stories – and others.)

Jean has learned that Phil Smart’s Mercedes Dealership has been sold, and will be moved to an Airport Way location.  And so the last stalwart of the car culture on Seattle’s Auto Row (The Pike Street part of it) will be gone.

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AUTO ROW West on PIKE Thru SUMMIT

Looking west on Pike Street through its intersection with Summit Avenue we get a glimpse of what this street became once the motorcar began to reshape just about every part of our culture. On the far right is a small sign attached to a corner brick column that reads “The Ford Corner,” and across the street is a Union brand service station. The red tile roof of this fanciful Spanish-styled gas station is a sign of the prestige connected with owning a car in 1919 – the likely date of this photograph – although automobiles were then quickly becoming commonplace, especially the Model T Ford. (Note the black sedan on the right.)

In 1915, automobile licenses were issued to 6,979 people in Seattle. Five years later the number had multiplied more than six times to 44,046. By then the greatest variety of servers and sellers that supported the auto trade chose to park themselves on Seattle’s “Auto Row” along Pike Street and the connecting Broadway Avenue.

This photograph, however, was most likely recorded not to advertise Fords but to show off the Romanesque stone mass of First Covenant Church that was dedicated in 1911 at the northeast corner of Pike and Bellevue. The congregation first built a frame sanctuary there in 1901 that was soon jacked up when Pike Street was regraded in 1905 and squeezed when the street was widened two years later.

The ornate home between the church and the gas station was the residence of William and lona Maud, and their daughters, Ann and Vales. The English-born Maud moved to Seattle in 1885 and did well here in real estate. For instance, he built the surviving Maud Building at 311 First Ave. S. in 1889 over the ashes of the city’s “Great Fire” of that year.

Not long after this photograph was recorded, the Mauds moved to Los Angeles. After William’s death there in 1931, his body was shipped back to Seattle for burial. By then his distinguished Victorian home at 416 E. Pike St. had been replaced by Mill Motors, the used-car lot that grabbed motorists’ attention with a fanciful windmill tower facing Pike Street.

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TWO LANDMARKS ON SUMMIT

(First appeared in Pacific, May 10, 1987)

It was the Episcopalians of Trinity Parish who started Grace Hospital and first administered it, but most of the established Protestant power in town gathered October 18, 1885, at a stumpy slope on the edge of town, at the present comer of Summit Avenue and Union Street, for the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone.

Grace was Seattle’s second dedicated hospital (not counting a variety of doctor’s backrooms that preceded it). By comparison, Seattle’s first, the Catholic Providence, was less lavishly appointed, without the comforts that can come with capital. Actually, in this business Grace was in direct competition with Providence for local bodies more than souls. Grace Hospital was built with Protestant lumber, on Protestant ground, and endowed with Protestant beds. When it opened February 21, 1887 over 300 persons attended and were entertained with music, card playing and dancing.

This church hospital, however, did not survive the crash of 1893. The operation of Grace was then passed on to a group of doctors, but in 1899 they too abandoned it. The building stood vacant for a time, and then operated as a boarding house and hotel. In 1905 the 20-year-old Grace was demolished to make room for the site’s second landmark, Summit School.

Built in 1905 the still-standing Summit School at first served a neighborhood of large families, many of them living in homes that were nearly mansions. When the grade school closed in the mid-1960s the community around it had been transformed into a neighborhood of apartment buildings, small businesses, and – once again – hospitals.

For a brief while Summit School served as a satellite to Seattle Community College until an alternative high school took over the building and the name as well.

When Summit Alternative High School moved on in 1977 the building was sold to developers who planned to refurbish the old landmark with offices. The plan failed, and in the fall of 1980 the present occupant, Northwest School, moved in. With a faculty of nearly 40 full-and part-time instructors serving a student body of about 200, Northwest School is truly an alternative.   (Remembering that this was written a quarter-century ago, Northwest School still thrives and at the same location.)

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For the contemporary repeat I could not resist moving a bit closer to the two landmark brick apartments at Summit Ave. and Republican Street on the right.  When constructed in 1909 and 1910, from right to left respectively, they were given the romantic names the Menlo and the El Mondo.  The latter has kept its original moniker but the former (the one nearest the camera) has a new name: the Bernkastle.   Between them they added 31 units to a neighborhood that was then only beginning its conversion from single-family residences to low-rise apartments like these. (Historical Photo courtesy, Museum of History and Industry.)

THE WATER FAMINE of 1911

After seven inches of rain in two days the pipeline that supplied Seattle its Cedar River water was undermined and broke near Renton on November 19, 1911.  The week-long water famine that followed closed the schools for want of steam heat, sent whole families packing to downtown hotels where the water service was rationed but not cut off, and featured daily front page warnings to “Boil Your Water” – meaning the water one caught in a downspout or carted from one of the lakes.

There were alternatives.  One could purchase water for 5 cents a gallon or wait in line to fill a bucket from one of the 24 water wagons – like this one — that the city dispatched to residential streets.  Pioneer springs on the slopes of First Hill were also uncapped.  Pioneer historian Thomas Prosch who lived near the spring at 7th Avenue and James Street told a Seattle Times reporter,  “I went down and got a pail of it myself. I have drunk it for years and no better water exists.”

Finding the unidentified site of the historical scene with the city water wagon was mildly intuitive for I lived on Capitol Hill’s Summit Ave. for five years in the early 1970s.  I quickly drove to the spot just south of the intersection of Summit and Republican Street.

In 1911 – the date of the photograph – brick apartments like those on the right were still rare in a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes.  Eventually, however, much of this part of Capitol Hill was converted to higher densities because of its proximity to downtown and the convenient rail service.  (Note the northbound rail on the right for the trolley loop that returned to downtown southbound on Bellevue Avenue one block to the west.)

NOVEMBER 19, 1911 – FLOOD & FAMINE

At 8:30 on the Sunday morning of November 19, 1911, the church bells of Renton began to peal too early for a call to worship. Earlier that morning church services had been called off, for during the night the Cedar River that normally ran through the town began to run over it.

The bells were joined by the Renton coal mine’s siren whose shriek, as one old Rentonite remembered, “could run up and down five octaves and raise the hair on the back of your neck.” This was the signal that 28 miles upstream the Cedar River dam had burst, releasing eleven square miles of fresh mountain water impounded behind it in the City of Seattle’s reservoir.

The Monday morning Post-Intelligencer reported that “extraordinary sights ensued” as Renton “fled pell mell to the hills . . .Stampeding horses galloped along the streets, barely held in control by their struggling drivers . . . Sons carrying their old mothers on their shoulders . . . Women with bundles on their heads, dragging their children behind . . . while baggage-laden fathers followed.”

From the Renton Hills they looked back at their deserted town and waited for the disaster to suddenly drown it.  It was a false alarm. The dam had not burst, and there was no wall of water. By noon many of those who fled in the morning waded back to their homes to peer into flooded basements or to gather floating woodpiles – until 3:30 that afternoon when the siren wailed again and the scene of flight was repeated.

This time the dam did break, but those who felt its main effects were in Seattle not Renton. Only the dam’s top timbers gave way but the ensuing erosion undermined the bridge at Landsburg, a short way down stream from the dam, and with it the pipelines that fed Seattle its water. Thus, the Renton flood was followed by the Seattle water famine. Soon the warm Chinook winds that had brought seven inches of rain in two days and melted the early snows turned cold. The waters receded; but while Renton was shoveling mud from its basements, Seattle was filling its bathtubs with lake, spring and rain water-or any kind of water it could get. Private water merchants sold it for 5 cents a gallon. The mayor encouraged citizens to put washtubs under their downspouts, and when the city dispatched 24 water wagons into the streets, “they were besieged by hundreds of men and women armed with receptacles of every sort.”

It took a week to repair the pipes, and every dry day the warnings of the city’s health commissioner were quoted on front pages, “BOIL YOUR WATER!” Seattle’s schools were closed for want of steam heat, and on Wednesday 2,000 bundles of Seattle’s dirty laundry were shipped to Tacoma.

The limited supply of fresh water in the city’s reservoirs on Beacon and Capitol hills was directed to the business district. The P.I. reported, “Entire families in the dry districts have deserted their homes.” Seattle’s hotels were filled with visitors from Seattle. “Downtown cafes are feeding capacity crowds.”

At week’s end the Saturday P.I. reported, “Cedar River Pipe Ready To Shoot Water to City.” It was the last front-page story on the event. By then Renton’s flood was almost dried up, and on Sunday its citizens could, if they wanted, respond to a regular call to worship without running for the hills.

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FLATIRON at OLIVE & EIGHTH

(First appeared in Pacific, JUNE 23, 1996)

Block 28 of Sara Bell’s Second Addition is one of those pie-shaped lots that are a relief from the predictable space of the American urban grid. The buildings on them seem to put on a show – pushing their faces into the flow of traffic.

Like others of this flatiron class, what this three-story clapboard gives up in space it makes up in facades. Surely every room within is well-lit. Photographed here Nov. 18, 1910, this building also shows up in a panorama recorded from the summit of Denny Hill 20 years earlier.

This mixed-class (retail and apartment) structure sticks its forehead into the five-star comer of Olive Square. Here Howell Street, on the right, originates from the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Olive Way. After Yesler Way west of Broadway, Olive is the second odd tangent that enlivens the otherwise monotonous street configuration of Seattle’s central business district.

The scene was probably recorded by the Public Works Department’s photographer, James Lee, which may explain the photograph’s enigmatic purpose: It is a record of something having to do with public use rather than private glory or mere architectural pleasure.

Still, this vain little clapboard is a pleasure – although it may be an idle one. The bright sign taped to the front door is a real-estate broker’s inquiry card. The only other sign showing is on the left. It is for the Angelo, the residential rooms upstairs.

(click to enlarge photos)

Diana James’ new history of Seattle apartment houses has a confident clarity that shares the author’s delight in her subject.  Her scholarly results also create a template for following the developing patterns of apartment house choices – for both builders and renters – that may be applied, we suspect, everywhere.

“Shared Walls,” the inspired title for James’ book, was the gift from her friend, the Capitol Hill historian, Jacqueline Williams, who like James lives on the hill, which is well appointed with landmark apartments.  (I too lived with shared walls for several years in the 1970s on the Summit Ave. trackless trolley line.)

As one of the American West’s greatest boomtowns, Seattle was soon in need of shared walls.  Not yet thirty years old in 1880, the federal census confirmed that the Queen City – its nickname then – was the largest community in the territory and still with only 3553 counted citizens.  Twenty years later, at the turn of the century when the enumeration had swelled to 80,871, James found the first listings for apartments in the city’s 1900 Polk Directory.  There were four of them.  Forty years more and the number reached about 1400, and nearly one-fifth of all Seattle households lived in them.

From these hundreds of apartments, the trained preservationist chose 100  – including the Hermosa Apartments shown here  – to explore both by records and on foot.  The choices are illustrated with a mix of archival photos and the author’s own.  Dated 1911, the historical photo shows the Hermosa beginning to add three stories.

Too prudently, perhaps, the McFarland Publisher chose to print only a few hundred copies of Shared Walls, which they were confident would appeal to libraries.  You have the choice of checking Seattle libraries for shared copies of Shared Walls or calling bookstores first.  Yes, it is an enduring delight to visit a bookstore.

WEB EXTRAS

Of course, I had to grab a shot of Chief Seattle, framed by naked branches on a late winter day.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean – a few more Apartment Houses – following or heading a feature on Tilikum Place done a few years past – when I find it.

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ANHALT APARTMENTS – 750 Bellmont Ave.

(First appeared in Pacific March 3, 1991)

Beginning in 1926, Frederick William Anhalt spent three years building apartment buildings in Seattle – nearly 30 of them. A half-century later, many remain among Seattle’s most cherished architectural treasures.

The building at 750 Belmont Ave., shown here, was Anhalt’s first luxury apartment. How he chose its agreeable style is a story told in “Built by Anhalt,” a biography by Steve Lambert.

When a young bookseller, whom Anhalt had hired to search for books on beautiful apartments, returned instead with one on English castles, Anhalt recalled, “Well, I took one look at that book and I knew I’d found my style of building. I went through that book and picked a window I liked here, a door there, and something else over there.”

With 750 Belmont, Anhalt created a unity diverse enough to give its residents “the feeling that they were living in a house of their own.” Built on a triangular lot, the structure also showed Anhalt’s knack for using leftover building lots.

In 1929 Anhalt was planning a 150-unit luxury construction across the street from 750 Belmont when the October crash bankrupted him. It was a temporary reversal, and he was soon back constructing affordable Depression-era housing and manufacturing cedar siding .

After World War II, Anhalt went into the nursery business and prospered by raising more rhododendron varieties than anyone else west of the Mississippi. When he sold his property to the University of Washington, it made him a millionaire.

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HARDING’S LATE PARADE

(First appeared in Pacific, April 24, 1994)

In retrospect, Warren Harding’s late arrival in Seattle was ominous. The president’s naval transport, Henderson, returning from Harding’s visit to Alaska, rammed and nearly sank the destroyer Zeilin at the entrance to Puget Sound. The slowed Henderson came around West Point at 12:40 on the afternoon of July 27, 1923. Let off at the Port of Seattle’s Bell Street Terminal, the president’s motorcade took a right tum off Bell at First Avenue and promenaded south on First.

Here waving his bowler, Harding salutes the crowd a half-block south of Blanchard Street. Counting the crowds lining the motorcade, the students packed into’ Volunteer and Woodland parks to hear his brief patriotic homilies and the 40,000 enduring his nearly hour-long address about Alaska at the UW Stadium, Harding, 58, performed for more than 100,000 witnesses in his six hours here.

Yet Harding left Seattle sick. His train sped to San Francisco, where he died six days later of what his physician first diagnosed as poisoning from tainted crab and later as apoplexy (bleeding/stroke) of the brain .

In Seattle, the Harding motorcade was solemnly repeated with the same presidential vehicle, this second time empty. Proposals to rename Rainier to Mount Harding were dropped in favor of erecting a monumental speakers platform at Woodland Park. (The monument was later lost to the zoo’s African Savanna.)

Soon after Harding’s demise the rumored aspersions – including the Teapot Dome scandal – of his administration unfolded. Four years after his death, so did the confessions of Nan Britton. Her book on her long affair with Harding was convincing enough to inspire a national rumor that Harding had been poisoned not by crab but by a jealous Mrs. Harding, perhaps, it was rumored, in a sympathy twisted with apoplectic rage..

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In the roughly 93 years (dated back from 2006) that divide this now and then look up First Avenue north from Wall Street not much survives of the old “North Seattle” AKA Belltown.  The trees on the right of the contemporary view hide the New Pacific Apartments, a rare survivor. (Historical photo compliments of Seattle Municipal Archive.)

FIRST NORTH – Loose Bricks and Billboards

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 29, 2006)

For those among you who imagine that the bending bricklayer is the intended subject in this look north on First Avenue from Wall Street, bravo.   The chronically deteriorating condition of the special paving that bordered the trolley tracks at the center of Seattle’s arterials was an enduring sore point between the city and the Seattle Electric Company.  For their franchise the trolley company was obliged to maintain both the tracks and the paving.   So a photographer from Seattle Public Works recorded this photo — probably as damning evidence.

A second civic sore point is also exposed here – the billboards.  Protests against street advertising were part of the same early 20th Century liberal temper that pushed for parks, clean water (and milk), and beautiful streets.  A 1906 campaign against the many billboards in Belltown described them as “glaring and unsightly structures” that “lift their flaming fronts and tell their own story of aggressive insolence.”  A stacking of boards at 2nd and Cedar was described as “three tiers of commercialism gone mad.”

Here, on the right behind an example of City Light Director James Delmage Ross’s nearly new (and ornate) five-ball light standard is a two-tier board.  There is coffee “upstairs” and Fatima Cigarettes at the sidewalk.  At this time – about 1913 – Fatima smokers found wrapped in their packs in addition to the rewards of their sin tax sports cards of popular players and teams.

Among the products using the line of boards on the west side of First are Sunny Monday “Washday Soap”, Budweiser Beer and Adams Black Jack Chewing Gum.  By some accounts Black Jack was the first flavored gum.  (I once loved both it and the gift of a black tongue.)

Selz Chicago Shoes and Seattle’s own Burnside hats must be prospering for they are promoted with oversize murals on the first building north of Vince Street on the west side of First.  Although probably not discernible in this printing, Con Collier’s “Saloon and Family Liquor Store” is also promoted.  Perhaps the “family” part of Constant Collier’s sign is warranted because with his family he lives just above his liquor store.

Finally on the right at the northeast corner of Vine and First are the New Pacific Apartments.  Built in 1903 this neighborhood survivor is curiously marked in the 1912 real estate map as the Pacific Hospital.

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Then Caption.  “While the picture isn’t too clear” Fred Cruger, Granite Falls historian and vintage auto expert, gives his “best guess” that that is a “new Dodge coming around the corner . . . ca. 1915.”  The corner is where Warren Place, on the right, begins its one short block between First Avenue, which crosses the bottom of the photograph, and Denny Way. (Historical Photo courtesy Lawton Gowey) Now Caption:  The substantial apartment house behind the Dodge opened in March of 1910.  Built as the Raymond Apartments of brick and concrete is survives as the Daniel Apartments, an “icon” of this Belltown neighborhood.

A BELLTOWN APARTMENT

(First appeared in Pacific, July 29, 2007)

When it first opened its 37 two-room units to renters in 1910 the Raymond Apartments were touted as “the only apartment house in the cluster light district.”  The historical scene printed here includes an example of Seattle’s first ornamental street lights, the six-globe “cluster light standard” to the left of the pie-shaped Raymond’s arching front door at the corner of First Avenue and Warren Place.

The cluster lights were installed in 1909-10 and for its 1911 annual report City Light counted 1116 of them lighting 13.5 miles of the city’s busiest streets, most of them downtown.  If the new Raymond was the only apartment house on these same streets that distinction could not have lasted but a few weeks or even days.  It was this boom town’s boom time for apartment house construction.

Workers increasingly wanted their own baths, which meant for many a move from a lodging house into a private apartment.  The 1903 city directory for a Seattle of about 100,000 citizens lists only 8 apartment buildings, but more than 150 lodging houses.  Eight year later in a city of about 230,000 citizens, the 1911 directory lists over 300 apartment buildings and a mere 23 lodging houses.

Designed by the architects Thompson and Thompson, a father-son partnership, for the Monmouth Building Company, J.H. Raymond secretary, The Raymond Apartments were later sold and renamed for their new owner the William Daniels Apartments.  The name has held.  When the city’s Department of Planning and Development published its 2004 “Design Guidelines for the Belltown Urban Center Village” it listed the Daniels as one of the district’s 61 “Icon Buildings” and complimented it for its flatiron shape, and “unified design” featuring “active” and not “blank facades.”

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When it was brand new in 1910 the Ben Lomond Apartments looked down on Lake Union from the steep and clear-cut western side of Capitol Hill. A “second growth” urban landscape now often hides the apartment so the “now” view was photographed from the closest available opening. (Historical view courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

BEN LOMOND – A Fertile Prospect

(First appeared in Pacific April 11, 2004)

From its clinging prospect on the western slope of Capitol Hill the Ben Lomond Apartments look down on what its first residents may have comfortably called Lock Union for their new home was named after a 3,330 ft mountain in Scotland. While the name does not fit the five-story brick block’s architecture, which is more Mediterranean, it does resonate with the names of the nearby streets. For that matter it might have been named Ben Belmont or Ben Bellevue.

As built in 1910 the high west wall of the Ben Lomond faced Lakeview Ave (seen here at the bottom left corner). During the winter of 1961-62 the 1-5 Freeway replaced that eccentric street with an overpass and a ditch leaving the apartment house propped so precariously over the Interstate that a special cylinder retaining wall of concrete and steel was required to hold up the hill beneath it. (In the fall of 1962 a slide cracked several structures a short ways north of the Ben Lomond, so the special wall was extended.)

The Ben Lomond was distinguished enough to get its own announcement in the real estate section of the Aug 22, 1909 edition of The Seattle Times. Architect Elmer Ellsworth Green’s rendering of the structure was headlined, “Ben Lomond Apartments to Be Built for Benefit of Families With Children.” A subhead explained, “None but couples with children may enter this $75,000 New Apartment House.” The attached story made the 21 apartments with “disappearing beds” sound like a play land. One of the residents, it was announced, would be a matron employed to care for the children who would be encouraged to play on the roof and enjoy its covered sun rooms.

There was, however, a eugenics hysteria attached to this utopia. Remembering Roosevelt’s famous remarks of 1903 regarding “racial suicide”, the “couples with children only” rule was code to encourage Anglo-Saxon protestants to have more children as an answer to the greater fertility of catholic immigrants from the warm and prolific bottom of Europe.

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Werner Lenggenhager, the Swiss-born photographer of this rare look to Capitol Hill along Melrose Place, moved to Seattle in 1939 and soon got a job at Boeing.  He continued his decades-long photographic quest of a great variety of subjects all over Washington State even after he retired from Boeing in 1966. With the construction of the Seattle Freeway in the 1960s practically everything in Lenggenhager’s 1959 photograph was erased.

A LOST PLACE

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 31, 2006)

In 1953 Byron Fish, one of my all-time favorite Seattle Times columnists, wrote a feature on Werner Lenggenhager, then still a Boeing employee who spent his weekends combining, as Fish summarized it, a “hobby of photography and an interest in history.”  Many Times readers will still remember “By Fish” and how he signed his contributions with a primitive cartoon of a smiling fish placed directly above the phrase “his mark.”  Fish’s angle was often about the extraordinary in the ordinary, and Lenggenhager fit that.

Through many years of long walks with his camera – he did not drive – Lenggenhager photographed landmarks, many of them doomed, but also “ordinary” scenes like this one.  That is Melrose Place cutting through the city grid on its climb from Howell Street, in the foreground, to both Melrose Avenue proper (on the far side of apartment buildings showing top-center) and further on to Olive Street.  Like Olive, Melrose Place allowed a motorist, or walker like Werner, to avoid the steeper grade of Denny Way while climbing Capitol Hill.

Of course, practically everything here was “terminal” when Lenggenhager recorded it in 1959.   Perhaps, the coming construction of the Seattle Freeway moved him to take this photograph as an act of, at least, pictorial preservation.  He might have also been going home or coming from it for the photographer lived at the corner of Belmont Avenue and E. Olive Street, or three short blocks beyond those apartments, top-center. (With the building of the freeway the assessor’s tax records – including the photographs – for these structures were foolishly purged.  Some readers, surely, will remember Melrose Place and/or have known Werner Lenggenhager.  If either, I would surely like to hear about it.)

In the roughly 40 years he was exploring with his camera Werner Lenggenhager gave prints to the University of Washington, the Museum of History and Industry and the Seattle Public Library.  This scene was copied from the library’s collection where it is but one of more than 23,000 examples of the Swiss immigrant’s contribution to our community’s memory.

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Above: Perry Apartments is nearly new in “postcard artist” M. L. Oakes look at them south on Boren to where it intersects with Madison Street. (Courtesy John Cooper) Below: In a humble irony, the southeast corner of Madison Street and Boren Avenue which was first developed as a lordly home site for Federal Judge Cornelius Hanford, his wife Clara and their eight children is since 2006 home for 50 units of affordable senior housing developed by the Cabrini Sisters.  The Perry/Cabini structure was torn down in 1996.  (now pix by Jean Sherrard)

PERRY APARTMENTS – BOREN & MADISON

(First appears in Pacific May 31, 2009)

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

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

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

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

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Above: The Gainsborough at 1017 Minor Avenue was one of large handful of distinguished apartment buildings built or planned in the late 1920s.  (Courtesy, Michael Maslan)  Below:  Well preserved the elegant Gainsborough continues to distinguish the First Hill neighborhood.  (photo by Jean Sherrard)

The GAINSBOROUGH

(First appeared in Pacific June 22,  2008)

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

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

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

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The CAMBRIDGE

(First appeared in Pacific, August 6, 1995)

Union Street is interrupted at the front door of The Cambridge, the first of the soaring brick apartment houses built along the steep bank of First Hill. When the 10-story Cambridge opened in 1923, its restrained brick facade dominated the northwest corner of the hill, and the majority of its more than 150 studio-apartments looked down on the city or Lake Union. The rear units shared a backyard grotto set between the apartment building and the greenbelt behind it. Residents still wake to bird songs.

The Cambridge was a model of practical living, with a mix of modern space-savers (such as Murphy beds and breakfast nooks) and elegant touches (hardwood and tiled floors, a lavish lobby, full laundry, 24-hour switchboard). The Cambridge also had neighborhood identity. Three nearby businesses – a grocery, a garage and a cleaners -borrowed the name. Many of its residents walked to work downtown.

In the early 1960s Interstate 5 cut off the Cambridge -and much else. Buffeted by. the roar of the freeway, the popular apartment was neglected but not dilapidated.

The Cambridge was saved indirectly by the institution that now threatens it. Part of the $2.3 million used by the City of Seattle for the apartment’s purchase in 1987 allowed for its recent renovation into affordable housing. The resources were drawn from mitigating funds paid by the Washington State Convention Center for its effects on the neighborhood. Built atop the freeway, the landscaped convention center also dampens its noise.

Now (in the Spring of 1995)  however, this big neighbor wants to expand to the north or east. If the former, it will build primarily on parking lots; if the latter, it will destroy four buildings – including the Cambridge – and nearly 400 apartments.  (It seems to have done the latter.)

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Above: Photographed when the building was new, the Hotel Pennington Apartments, facing Marion Street west of 4th Avenue, promoted itself as “a home away from home. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)  Below: Little has changed on the south side of Marion Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in the about 80 years between this “now and then.” (Remembering that this first appears in Pacific on Nov. 29, 2006 – not so long ago.)

LANDMARK ROW on MARION STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 29, 2006)

Set aside for the moment the looming skyscrapers and note how little has changed between this “then” and “now.”  For ambitious Seattle this is rare, especially outside the city’s designated historic districts, like Pioneer Square.

The centerpiece here is the Pacific hotel, facing Marion Street between the alley and east to 4th Avenue.  The work of architect W. R. B. Willcox, it was completed in 1916 – or may have been.  Both the county tax records and U.W. architect Norman J. Johnston’s chapter on Willcox in the UW Press’ ever revealing book “Shaping Seattle Architecture” give the 1916 date.

However, in the 1918 Polk City Directory a full-page advertisement (facing Page 2004) for the “Hotel Pennington Apartments” as it was then called, includes an etching of the same front façade seen here but with the terra cotta tile work of the right (south) half continued to the corner of 4th Avenue as one consistent presentation.  Was the less ornate half of mostly burlap bricks at the corner a late compromise for time and/or economy?  Or was the “half-truth” of the elegant etching too appealing to either correct or leave out of the advertisement?

The other surviving landmarks here include, far right, a corner of the Central Building (1907) and far left, the familiar Jacobean grace of the Rainier Club (1904) across 4th Avenue.   And above the club is the current celebrity among landmarks – or the dome of it: the First Methodist Church at 5th and Marion (1907) which now seems saved for its second century.

When the non-profit Plymouth group purchased the Pacific Hotel – its name since the 1930s – for low-income housing it took care to preserve the building’s heritage and in 1996 was awarded the state’s Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in Historic Rehabilitation.  Tom English, Plymouth’s facilities director, is fond of revealing that although hidden from Marion Street the hotel is U-shaped, and so embraces its own “beautifully landscaped courtyard and Kol-Pond.”  The 1918 advertisement also makes note of it as the hotel’s “spacious court garden.”

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