We include below four displays of the same southeast corner of 46th Avenue and Corliss Street, for the years 2007 through this year, 2010, all of them photographed during the afternoon of the 8th day of March.   It is radiant evidence of our early spring after the warmest January in Seattle’s history and then a mild February following it.   One neighbor notes that his budding dogwood does not ordinarily show itself so until the time of his daughter’s birthday in early April.   These are not his dogwood but another neighbor’s cherries.  All four images involve a merging of left and right halves.  The joining is not always perfect, but close enough for these cross-references.   After three-plus years of walking the neighborhood almost every day I have many hundreds of impressions of this corner and a few hundred more.  Without a computer and digital photography this would have cost a fortune.  With them it was just a few thousand snaps and a lot of walking.

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Below are a handful of the thousands of photographs taken from the Smith Tower through its now 96 years.  The most popular prospects were north to the central business district and west to the harbor, but if Mt. Rainier was showing this southern view might be captured too.  One could look above and beyond the industrial “park” to the the national park.  (Actually, Mt. Rainier can be seen in only one of the views included here.)  The Frye Packing site can be found in all of them, although not always the same plant.  It is above the Great Northern tower – somewhere above it.   The most recent view is from 1982, and the only one I photographed.  Perhaps we can stir Jean to return to the observation tower for a “now” recording that will display the recent glories of SODO, and the enduring ones of “The Mountain That Was God.”  Watch for “Jean’s Turn in the Tower” coming to this blog soon.

HOLY NAMES on the HILL

So wholly do the names of spring

Now run like sap through everything

Oh fresh the flowers blooming

And all our being is becoming

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Top-to-Bottom, Left-to-Right: (Click to Enlarge)

Blue Angels, Blue Flower, Blue Grass, Blue Leaf, Blue Hair, Blue Madonna, Blue Moon, Blue Jays, Blue Boy (paint-by-numbers), Blues Stage, Blue Mountains, Blue Bottles

Most of the postcards shared here – and often with their messages – were published in the first years of the 20th Century.  With few exceptions they are of the “divided back” variety, meaning that the side for writing was flip to the art side, and that the writing side was divided between a message portion – usually on the left – and a portion for addressing the card and attaching the stamp.   These divided cards were first allowed in England in 1902, followed by France in 1904, Germany 1905, and the U.S. in 1907.  It will be possible to search out the postmarked date on many of the cards below.  Many perhaps most of the better cards – like these – were published in Europe, and German cards were generally thought to be the best.   I have a few hundred cards stacked in boxes and it was a delight to pull a few out for this little exhibit.  After stamps and coins, postcards are the most popular of collectibles.  The formal name for this – sometimes  mania – collecting is deltiology, a name derived from Greek word for “writing tablet.”

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THE HUMAN BRIAN: the great organ of perception. It’s brains this way and brains that way. Everywhere there are brains. Not every reader of this weblog will want to go further into the reflections of noted Morphologist-Professor John Sundsten.  As with any text in neurology this is not ordinarily easy reading.  However, for this blog only, the good professor has included revealing illustrations and most of them, thank god, are merely analogies.  Our fine anatomical explorer offers heartfelt alternatives for both new age readers and others who hope that modern brain science might offer some relief from both mankind’s anxieties of concern and its frequent stupidity.  (I for one will be studying this for any clues on how to prevent cats from peeing on the furniture.)  This compassionate lecturer also respects the early efforts of Phrenologists and their detailed study of cranial bumps, and again notes several correlations in characteristic faculties between the findings of modern neurology and those bone topographists. Our steadfast professor makes note of some other charming coincidences. You will, we feel certain, be surprised to learn that there are many fine correspondences between the overall shape of Green Lake and a cross-section of a human brain. In appreciation for this gift we will also include a few more Sundsten Snapshots from his walks around the lake.  And we will conclude with a revealing exposition of the morphologist as bird watcher titled “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blue Crane.”

For the neurology lessons that follow you may wish to draw a cup of tea – mint perhaps – and find a comfortable chair for you, your laptop and your cat, if you have one.   What follows is mostly Sundsten, unless it obviously is not.  John Sundsten’s own exposed head has been used for this illustration.

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A recent study of the effect of whole brain Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) with laser guided stimulating technology (GST)* has been proposed. It was suggested that by tracing a laser-guided stimulating magnetic beam around the Chakra patterns affixed to the head, results on behavior and or the relief of medical symptoms might be achieved. One part of the study intends to determine whether laser-guided TMS to the whole brain through the crown Chakra pattern (Skrt … Sahasrara), the round symbol at the top of the head, could expand consciousness, possibly opening awareness into a more spiritual global sense. On the other hand, TMS through the head-placed symbol of the root Chakra (Muladhara), the symbol at the top left, was proposed to test its effect on lower back pain and sciatica.  One Yoga instructor suggested that perhaps the brain itself houses the energies, initially proposed by practitioners to flow through the traditional Chakra sites at various body levels; eg, crown chakra at top of head, and root chakra at base of spine. Thus the investigators would be activating, or releasing such energies directly at deep brain sites, instead of by traditional meditative techniques. (*It will not be necessary to warn readers against trying this guided stimulating technology (GST) at home for it is not yet available – anywhere really.)

Included next for closer inspection are enlargements of examples drawn from the Accordance of Analogous Brain Faculties Matrixes (AABFM).

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Dumb Luck or Fate? Believe it or Not! Many “Faculties of the Brain” as described by the “pseudo-science” Phrenology correlate in temperament and position with brain physiology and anatomy as described by modern science!

Phrenology Chart … Real Brain Sites

combatitiveness … amygdala

amativeness … pyriform cortex

alimentiveness … hypothalamus

calculation … parietal lobe

language … superior temporal gyri

conscientiousness … prefrontal lobe

conjugal love  … cingulate gyrus

friendship (pleasure)… septal nuclei

GREEN LAKE SIMILITUDES

Look carefully and you will see both the Thalamus and Hypothalamus on a midline view of a human brain at the left, and also on the Olmsted’s 1910 Green Lake planning map at the right. You can also see intimations of the pineal (pine cone) gland at the left of the brain’s Thalamus in the bulge at the left on the map. Comes to mind something like the Sherlock Holmes case of the “purloined letters” that were not seen because they were exposed on the table for all to see, so here to the right in the center of the Thalamus sits the shining Massa Intermedia. Imagine the wonderful coincidence. On the map it is Duck Island! Quack Quack!!! It seems to shout. There are other comparisons – certainly more subtle – but we leave those to learned readers who will know that the Hypothalamus is functionally involved with what we call the “Four F’s”: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and Sex.

GREEN LAKE on the MIND

Recent details from John Sundsten’s walks around Green Lake.

BIRD WATCHING, BLUE CRANE & GREEN LAKE BE HERE NOW

With modern digital recreations – also known as “photoshop polishing” – the anatomist bird watcher has crossed the country from corner to corner and transported a Floridian cousin’s Blue Crane (and not a Heron as some might perceive) to the shores of our Green Lake. The testing required for this operation is sampled at the bottom with “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blue Crane.” As a vestige or glimmer of the Crane’s southern origins Sunsten has made no fussy effort to conform the lighting on the tall bird’s plumage with that on the Green Lake shore. A good four hours of day light had passed between them.  The gregarious professor was mostly pleased that the bird fit so well in the hole he’d reserved for it.

MASSA INTERMEDIA REVISITED

The agile professor concludes with another analogy for the Massa Intermedia – the familiar inverted psychotropic mushroom: L’Enfant Magnifique ou Terrible.  Also known here as Duck Island.

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Here on the Sunday morning after all the Halloween commotion in front of his home the night before, Phil Wells – known as Flip to his friends and sometimes mistakenly as Pflip in print – reflects on the 21^st oversize Halloween production on Wallingford’s 42^nd Street – at 2506 – just east of Eastern Avenue. In the late 1980s Marilyn and Flip moved into 2506, raised two children, a girl first and then a boy. Perfect, and while they were growing up both of them were regulars on the hurried crews for these big fall productions. Sometimes it was raining, sometimes very cold, but it always happened. Last night was teased with rain only. It too was ideal – like having a girl and then a boy.

Below is a portrait of this year’s crew without the children. (The Wells’ daughter Greta is away in college, and their son Peter was off to a party in the family car with instructions to return by 1 a.m.) I asked Flip to caption the group shot and elaborate on the evening. As you will read, this year I, who am normally merely the “recorder” of the events, was also part of the creative crew, helping with the “Forsaken Art Exhibit”. (I will return to this at the bottom.) Here is Flip’s crew followed by his own caption.  After that we will include pictures of many of the night’s spectacles that he names.

Left to right – Marilyn, Ann Yoder, Rick Yoder, Jeff Bronson, Flip Wells Jan Standaert with Paul Dorpat’s “Forsaken Art” behind.  Halloween on 42nd St 2009 detoured from our traditional theme based productions with the contribution of fifteen priceless paintings from Mr. Dorpat’s Forsaken Art collection of hundreds.  The paintings were prominently displayed on a 12 ft wall lined with thirty 3-D Archie McFee place mats.   Comments on the display ranged from “does this have something to do with a murder in the Louvre” to “I really must buy that rabbit picture”.   Alas none of the treasures were for resale having already been forsaken by their original owners.  Other displays this year included a vomiting Al Gore, 4 ft diameter Spider on a zip line, 10 ft long worm with rope light intestines, a plain face with trunk like nose, gory campsite scene, and blacklit cave of phosphorescent creatures all highlighted by sometime functioning smoke machines.  Thanks in part to agreeable weather a good time was had by our 350 or neighbors roughly half of which were young trick or treaters.

With neighbor Doug Wilson – sometimes referred to as Wallingford’s mayor by his nearby neighbors – holding a bottle of root beer,  Marilyn waves from the front steps. Below her momentarily rests the basket filled with candy.  This year these steps were easily sighted from the sidewalk.  Some years they have been hidden behind labyrinthine passages that trick and treaters were required to negotiate – most often with the help of their parents – to reach the steps and the candy.

Before the rest of the crew arrived Phil started constructing the basic forms for this year’s sensations.

The American Elm supporting the Lean-2 is also used as a post for this year’s “headline” of masks.

A brief introduction to the FORSAKEN ART EXPOSITION

As noted in Flip’s caption to his crew’s portrait near the top, this year we hauled forth part of my Forsaken Art Collection, as one of the last ditch additions to Production #21.  Many things were still needed.  This was needed – sort of.  Flip was away on business and unable to return until the day before.  So I answered the all-points plea with Forsaken Art.

Over the past dozen years or more I have collected a few hundred examples of it, and most of these objects have video interviews “attached” to them.  That is, I have bought them all in yard sales and video-interviewed the persons who sold them to me, usually for nothing more than 4 dollars, my limit – unless it is stretched.   This small Exhibit on 42nd Street in Wallingford is a prelude for what will be a large covered exhibition with the video production that matches the art to the interviews along with reviews by local critics – critics who may owe me something, and so will give this art some intelligent, sensitive, creative, and above all encouraging review and thereby perhaps rescue these canvases and many others from their forsaken situation.

All my video interviews conclude with this question.  “Before we complete this transaction would you like to change your mind and hold on to this art, which you are about to forsake?”  Only one of many hundreds has agreed to turn back the sale and keep the painting, and it was much the greater job for me to get her to change her mind again and let me have it.  I had the interview and needed the painting to support it.

Note the spirit of his exhibition is indicated by its sign above, which reads, in part . . .”BEWARE Look Aside Look Askance The Critics Knows Forsaken Art Danger to Taste . . .”

The shown art included “Harvey and Friend” the only painting requested for sale.  Something about the would-be buyer’s husband wearing a rabbit outfit for some Halloween and handing out carrots to the kids.  Unfortunately, we had to explain to her about the video interview and our need to hold onto the painting for the greater show and production.  She was sympathetic.  Perhaps her interest in the painting was influenced by the bottle of wine she was carrying, and we were acting prudent for her.

Of all the art exposed this was perhaps the most appropriate.  Jan hung a sign from it reading “Available to Qualified Buyers Only.”  The original yard sale price remains fixed to a small tab stuck to the painting (in the black door to the bleachers).  It reads “50 cents”.

If you were raised on Spokane’s South Hill in the 1940s, as was I, you would have been taught that Gainsborough’s  “Blue Boy” was one of the greatest of masterpieces.  But like me you may have known nothing of his “Pinky.”  Below are paint-by-numbers versions (or variations) of both accompanied by smaller copies of the original – for comparison.  Somewhere there will be a kind critic who will find the paint-by-numbers examples the better, just what the originals needed, more robust and to the essential points of their subjects, the lovely Blue Boy and the lovely Pinky.

We conclude by noting, again, that there are hundreds more where Pinky came from, and she and the rest of these were merely taken from one accessible side of this collection – with very little selection.  As they lay.  Might it be that this little Halloween exposition at Flip and Marilyns will someday be remembered like the French Impressionist’s Armory Show, as the start of another great movement in the history of Western Art, the Forsaken Art Movement, supported and even promoted by a new CWC: Critics With Compassion.   And finally for this trick or treat of Halloween 21, does anyone recall what was the old CWC?

We welcome John Sundsten and his eye for fine lines.  The emeritus associate professor in the U.W. Department of Biological Structure took the “snaps” below while on a walk around Green Lake on Monday last – Oct. 26, 2009 – after dropping his daughter off at Garfield High School.   John is a neuroanatomist who’s interests extend well beyond grey matter. He is also a carver, an oyster harvester (on Hood Canal shoreline  that has long been in the Sundsten family) and a contrabass flute player.  He lives in Wallingford and we sometimes walk the ‘hood together.  It occurs to me now that John’s Green Lake recordings may also serve as a challenge to Jean Sherrard, of this blog, to again go down to the lake with his Nikon, and for you readers an encouragement to walk the lake this fall.

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You see above the “young hero” of CINEMA PENITENTIARY grown a bit older but still dashing.  Below him is Georgianna Carter, an early influence on White who appears in the excerpt below.  I took Bill White’s portrait at last year’s University District Fair, but he was not new to me.  I’ve known Bill since he was a teenager in the late 60s, but I did not know then about his enthusiasm for film.  Recently a movie and music reviewer for the Post-Intelligencer, this energetic “young” critic, poet, novelist and singer-songwriter has some time to give to reminiscing about his life with film since the P-I failed, and CINEMA PENITENTIARY is one issue of his new-found “idleness” that is still issuing.   Bill White knows whereof he writes.  His memory of the thousands of movies he has watched and studied since he first slipped milk money through the windows of box offices is extraordinary.  Many of his stories connected with Seattle theatres and the movies they show will flip readers, even those who did not spend the greater part of their summer vacations from primary school watching films first in Renton and then in downtown Seattle theatres.   Here follows an early issue from Bill White’s CINEMA PENITENTIARY.  For those who have not yet found it, a sample of Bill White’s reviewing appears below with the blog insertion that precedes this one.  There Bill reviews Forever Amber, which in 1949 appeared at the Colonial Theatre on 4th Avenue between Pike and Pine Streets.  Our critic also winds up in and out of the Colonial at the conclusion of this excerpt from . . .

Bill White’s CINEMA PENITENTIARY.

In 1958, I was seven years old and lived in Bryn Mawr,  a small community outside of Renton, Washington. My street  was originally named  after John Keats, but  after a year got the number 85. Somebody must have thought it  easier for a kid to find his way home  through numbered streets than named ones. In Renton, on Third Street, there were three movie theatres. On one side  The Roxy catered to adults but sometimes showed movies for the whole family.  The Renton, which was right across the street, had movies for normal teenagers, while The Rainier, at the end of the block, offered unsavory fare for the budding delinquents who passed weekend nights there. The Rainier was my favorite of the three theaters.

Since I went to the movies all the time, a kid in my class at school tried to impress me with the boast that he got to see movies on Saturday afternoons at the downtown YMCA for two cents. I convinced my mom to get me a membership and let me make the twelve-mile trip into downtown Seattle every Saturday with my new friend. For a while, I enjoyed the trampoline, the swimming pool, the wrestling matches and the pool table as much as the two cent movies.  Then I met a kid about three years older than myself who convinced me to forego the athletics and follow him to a real movie theater that was  five blocks away.

The Embassy showed a different kind of movie on each day of the week, and Saturday it was science fiction and horror.  That first Saturday, I saw “Invasion of the Saucer Men,”   pygmies with giant heads and long fingernails who stabbed lethal doses of alcohol into  the bloodstreams of teenagers, “The Devil Girl From Mars,” an alien bombshell who walked along deserted mountain roads in a sexy black costume on her way to destroy the human race, and “Night of the Blood Beast,” who  impregnated an astronaut with a litter of alien parasites and then stopped the male mother’s heart without destabilizing his blood pressure.

The Embassy was a masterpiece of spatial disorientation, due to its having two entrances, one on the corner of Third Avenue, next to the G.O.Guy drug store, and the other around the corner on Union, across from a pool hall that I did not discover until some years later.  The floor plan of the theater seemed to vary in accordance with the angle through which it was entered.  Finding one’s way out was even more difficult, and I was never sure from which exit I would emerge.

When I left that theater, having seen those movies, while Russian satellites spied on us from Earth’s outer orbit, in a year in which we practiced the duck and cover techniques of surviving a nuclear attack, at a time when our drunken fathers were beating our promiscuous mothers, when schoolmates would tell you the toilets were broken just to see if you would try to hold it in after lunch and shit your pants in class, in those times the titles of these  movies were poetry that I rolled over my tongue like the soft drool of melted salt-water taffy.

Had the movies existed only in the spatial time of their unreeling, they might have been forgotten.  They lived, however, in my lingering isolation from the real world.  I had searched the ordered and disordered faces on the screen for some familiar human expression, but found only odd approximations. And the oddest face belonged to Georgianna Carter, who posed throughout “Night of the Blood Beast” like a burlesque dancer on an archeological dig. Four years later, at the same theater, I would see her again, recognizing her right away, in a Jack Nicholson biker movie that was the only other thing in her life she ever did.

On this first Saturday, coming out of the Third Avenue doors while Miss Carter wondered if humanity had been right in killing the  blood beast, I spied the marquee, two blocks up the street, of  another theater. From the outside The Garden  seemed fancier than The Embassy, if only because of its larger marquee.  Admission to The Garden was also a quarter, but you only got two movies instead of three.  And they changed twice a week instead of daily.  Since I didn’t want to worry my mother by arriving home four hours late, I waited until the next weekend to see the theater’s interior.

The Garden was like the Roxy in that it combined adult and family fare.  But instead of getting a preview of “Butterfield 8” before a Jerry Lewis movie, the kids at the Garden got to see the whole movie.  It was like trespassing on the Roxy on Parent’s Night Out.   After a double feature of “Peyton Place” and “Love in the Afternoon,” I walked up Pine Street to 4th Avenue and discovered The Colonial. It was smaller that the Garden, and also offered bi-weekly double features for a quarter.

Since “Peyton Place” had been over twice the length of two horror movies, it was already getting close to the time my bus was scheduled to leave Second and Madison, so I shouldn’t have gone in, but I paid my quarter anyway, figuring that if I just watched one movie, I would be able to catch the next bus, and wouldn’t get into much trouble.

When I went inside, “Battle Hymn” was on the screen. One of the things about going to these theaters was that you never got there at the beginning of a movie. You just went in, sat down, and started watching the movie at whatever point you walked in on it.  Then, after watching the other features, you stayed and watched the beginning of the one you walked in on the middle of.  I didn’t even stay until the end of the first one, it being a pretty boring thing with Rock Hudson as an ex-bomber who built an orphanage for Korean kids who lost their parents in the aerial attacks for which he felt guilty.

The first thing that struck me about The Colonial was the absence of a concession stand.  Even the popcorn came out of a vending machine.  No concessions also meant no authority figures in the lobby, and that gave a feeling of freedom to do whatever I wanted.

Unfortunately, it gave everybody else that same right, and four years later, during the summer I lived with my mother and sisters on Queen Anne Hill, the  summer I turned eleven years old and spent virtually every day in one or the other of these three theatres, a man changed seats several times before slipping into the seat next to mine, where he  made  a quick and clumsy  grab for my dick.

I ran out of the theater and up the street into a department store where I jumped on the escalator and rode eight floors to the restroom where I hid and panted and waited for the  fear to subside. Then I ran all the way home, not even slowing to look at the posters of future movie releases that filled the windows of a reprographics shop on Second Avenue in the near deserted area between downtown and Queen Anne Hill that came to be known as Belltown.

I never returned to The Colonial, but continued to patronize the Embassy until it started showing porno movies in the early seventies. It wasn’t that I had anything against porno; I was just afraid to go in there. I kept going to The Garden even during the porno era because they kept the place clean and ran advertisements in the daily newspapers. Sometimes the critics would even review them, which helped me pretend they were real movies, and not just smut.

Film and Music critic Bill White has kindly responded to our request that he write a review of the film showing at the Colonial Theatre in 1949, as revealed in the Kodachrome night slide feature Westlake Night Lights in the Seattle Now and Then published just below this insertion.

An historical romance set during the reign of Charles II,  “Forever Amber,”  directed by Otto Preminger in 1947, is as  dark and claustrophobic a look at society in collapse as any of the underworld-themed B-movies released during the same time. Two years later, Anthony Mann would accomplish something similar with “Reign of Terror,” although his film of the French revolution was a modest black and white production running less than 90 minutes, while “Forever Amber” was shot in Technicolor and ran nearly 2 ½ hours.

It wasn’t until Francis Coppola’s “The Godfather” that the interiors on a major studio film were underlit to such infernal effect.  Cinematographer Leon Shamroy, who took the opposite approach the year before in “Leave Her to Heaven,” in which he contrasted the dark story with a brilliantly vibrant visual palette, makes the royal court of Charles II as ghoulishly oppressive as the decaying chambers of Roderick Usher.  Although Shamroy won four Oscars for his cinematography, including one for “Leave Her to Heaven,” and was nominated for another eleven, he is largely forgotten today.

The story of Amber begins in 1644, during Cromwell’s rebellion against King Charles I, when the baby girl is discovered and taken in by one of the Puritans who later stands against the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when Amber resists her foster father’s decision to marry her off to a neighboring farmer.   He responds to her refusal by telling her that “vanity is Satan at work in the female soul.”   Paradoxically, it is the vanity of the male sex that makes Amber’s tale such a miserable one.

As Bruce Carlton, the callous privateer whose love Amber is obsessed with securing, Cornell Wilde walks atilt with surety of his superiority to every other living thing, including King Charles, who banishes him to the sea when threatened by his sexual rivalry.

George Sanders is suitably disdainful as the  king who can stop the performance of a play by his appearance in the royal box,  but relies on a revolving cast of compliant female subjects to maintain the  illusion of being  loved. In the end, when he leaves Amber’s quarters after her final rejection of him as a man, he calls “come, my children,” to a pack of faithful dogs.

It is Linda Darnell’s voluptuously cheap incarnation of Amber that gives the film its poverty row atmosphere.   She lowers the bar, just as Jennifer Jones did the previous year for David O. Selznick  in “Duel in the Sun,” on any grand aspirations producer Darryl Zanuck might have had for a prestige film.  It is because she drags the story into the gutter that gives “Forever Amber” its scent of damnation, and lifts it above the conventional drivel of those romantic melodramas commandeered by the crippling competence of a Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, or Katherine Hepburn. The screen would not again be endowed with such a fleshy heroine until Elizabeth Taylor embodied Cleopatra in 1963, a film that was also produced at 20^th Century Fox by Darryl Zanuck,

“Forever Amber” was one of the few films director Preminger didn’t produce himself, and evidence of Zanuck’s interference is all over it.  This is one of the factors that make the film such a fascinating artifact.  Although Preminger remained under contract to Fox for another five years, the name of Zanuck never again appeared on one of his films.

In helpful response to the “stubbed toe” picaresque printed yesterday (and just below) Ron Edge – more often known here for his “Edge Clippings” –  sends along the above with this note.  “This 1937 aerial has a few of the landmarks you mention on your blog posting, including a good view of the golf course.”   Surely.  Where once little white balls were hit about now gallbladders are removed.  The new addition to University Hospital was snapped by me over the hedge on monday last at the lower-right corner.  15th Avenue is far left and the next avenue to the right of it is what was in 1937 still an open section of the campus’ Stevens Way.  It passes under a Seattle Lake Shore and Easter RR (Northern Pacific) viaduct (Burke Gilman Trail) that is still there.  100 years ago that extended avenue was the promenade for the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition’s carnival side, The Pay Streak.  (The Sunday after next we will feature here a lot of AYP pictures in a “wrap-up” – a film term I think –  of the summer-long centennial.)  The big and long south campus buildings that I did not name in “stubbed toe” are the Stronghold and William H. Foege Genome Sciences buildings – if I have read the U.W. Map I have now consulted correctly.  These new health sciences buildings are east of a 15th Avenue that was freshly redirected to the southwest to make room for them.  Only a wee bit of the old residential neighborhood west of 15th shows in the aerial, but one can find that northwest corner of 41st and 15th shown in “stubbed toe”, and discover a five story apartment there in 1937.  Again, I don’t remember it.  And notice how in 1937 forty-first ave. continued directly on to the campus.  One block north the big and white Wesley student center is easily spotted at the northwest corner of 15th and 42rd, with the Methodist church just beyond it at 43th.   Two blocks more (there is no 44th St. in this section) is the old Presby church, the brick block at the southeast corner of 47th and 15th.  (It is hard to make out but it is there.) The new red brick Gothic structure that took its place and more dates from the early 50s.  Turning west on 47th and continuing on to Wallingford there is no Baptist church to be seen.  It is hidden behind the Meany Hotel and General Insurance Co. (Safeco) buildings. The aerial looks as far north as the reservoirs around 75th.  The green belt of the Ravenna and Cowen Parks ravine intercedes.  Calvary Cemetery is upper right and below it are the nursery fields in the rich soil of what is now the concrete spread of University Village.  Below that at the curve where Montlake Blvd NE turns into NE 45th Street one can glimpse a tiny (very) early example of the fill work on the old Lake bottom (dropped 9 feet in 1916 for the opening of the ship canal) that will eventually turn those acres to driving more golf balls, parking, and playing games of many kinds.  Thanks Ron.

In our “Seattle Now and Then” feature in Pacific Northwest, Jean ordinarily takes the “repeat” or “now” photographs for historical views I find and we discuss, but this week was different. Because of a stubbed toe Jean was lying flat with his foot elevated for relief. I took the opportunity of Jean’s suffering toe to go off on my own and see if I still remembered how to “repeat.” The subject is the Arboretum viaduct. In about a month that feature will be printed in The Times and here as well. I have driven under this bridge many times in the last 45 years but never have I stopped to either study it from below or walk over this brick adorned reinforced concrete span of six arches. Listed on the National Register of Historic Place, it is appreciated. W. R. B. Willcock, a Seattle architect who later led the University of Oregon’s department of architecture, designed the viaduct. His task was to build a picturesque span that would complement the park and be used for both pedestrians and sewerage. The former walk on top of the latter. Below the paving runs a pipeline, a connector in the North Trunk Sewer line, which was built early in the 20^th Century to move wastewater from the western shore of Lake Washington to Puget Sound where it could be released into, it was still thought, the eternal flushing of the tides.

The viaduct crosses the Lake Washington Boulevard east-west in line with Lynn Street, and on Lynn is how I approached it from the West. After completing my contemplative stroll across the 180-foot long span, I turned around and took the above view looking back at it to the West. Then I did another about face to look east again and into the arboretum for the forest view below where two paths lead away, but I took neither. You may remember that Monday Oct. 6 was an exhilarating example of an Indian Summer day. Depending upon whether you stood in the sun or shade, the temperature swayed between warm and crisp, and out of a cloudless sky sunlight scattered through the first leaves of fall.

I next found the proper place to make a faithful repeat of the historical view of the viaduct I carried with me and, as noted above, both the “then and now” will appear here in about one month. While standing beside the boulevard I photographed this charming detail of the span’s lighting standard and the moss that is a rustic cosmetic for its decorative brickwork. Such make-up takes time and is hard to convincingly copy or fabricate in a factory. By now enjoying my little camera I continued snapping through the open driver’s window at mostly familiar subjects as I drove home from the arboretum to Wallingford. I will next print a few of them here with brief comments.

I first visited Seattle from Spokane in the early 1950s to attend my oldest brother Ted’s graduation from the University’s then nearly new Medical School. The health sciences campus was then routinely modern but dull. Here over a hedge on the north approach to the Montlake Bridge I glimpsed a recent addition to the hospital, one that plays “boxes and balls” with its masses.

Most of the University’s “south campus” that is east of 15^th Avenue has been in the caring hands of the health sciences so long that it is difficult to remember what was or might have been there earlier. I know, although I don’t remember it, that before WW2 much of it, including the original hospital location, was a golf course where the school’s faculty could escape students, except those with clubs. But west of 15^th, along the north shore of Portage Bay and extending from there north into the commercial heart of “Univercity” – once a proposed name for the University District – was a neighborhood of small homes and maritime enterprises of many sorts. The latter, of course, kept close to the bay. Some readers may remember how the movement to save this community from University expansion began in the late 1960s but was soon overwhelmed by a University District version of “manifest destiny.” The growing university overwhelmed all protests for it had no growth alternatives so attractive as this “Lower Ave” neighborhood, and the U.W. was our gorilla. The buildings snapped above are examples of the sometimes tasteful and oversize constructions that now dapple the blocks that were once nicely stuffed with modest homes, often vine-covered and sometimes rotting.

The gorilla, we know, also moved west across 15^th Avenue and into the University District when opportunities allowed. I no longer remember what was once on the northwest corner of 41^st Street and 15^th Avenue, but the school-related structure that now holds that corner is, like the latest additions to the hospital, another example of recent architectural style. Here the mixing of angles and curves is for me at least both satisfying and comical. The structure appears something like an allusion to a cathedral – in miniature – but also a homage to Katzenjamer Kastle where masses of different shapes and materials are hinged together.

My next going home snap was a block north at 42nd and 15^th – again the northwest corner. For nearly 35 years – up until this past spring – this point of view looked across a parking lot to the Café Allegro in the alley north of 42nd. The Allegro considers itself the oldest surviving espresso bar in Seattle. Sitting inside or on the benches that line the alley or even on the traffic dividers of the parking lot has been the habit of many regulars – myself included in the 80s. (Here I get out of the car to print a snapshot at the Allegro counter from 1987 of barista Mary Anne Schroeder on the right, and I. H. F. Hername on the left. Well Hername really has her name, but I Have Forgotten it.)

For 34 years of espresso ingestion when one lifted their eyes above the asphalt lot, the view across 15^th to the tall trees on campus was a calming antidote for caffeine and the stresses of study and/or the discomforts of carping roommates. About 1969 (The actual date is in old notes somewhere.) the parking lot, which was built mostly for overflow University Book Store use, took the place of the stately white frame Wesley House, the big student center for the adjoining Methodist Church. The church tower is seen two photographs above on the right. Then followed the parking and the Allegro’s 35 years of anxiety about loosing to some other big thing the mostly clear view to the green campus. And now they have it. The 6-story George F. Russell Jr. Hall is another Wesley Foundation production, so that in some part the renters of the new halls will be help the church’s student ministry. Seen here and “now leasing” the new hall includes near the top of its promotions some unintended ironies.  “You’ll love the views and abundant light from the large office windows . . . You can see downtown Seattle, Lake Union, Portage Bay, University Campus, and the U. District.” Nathaniel Jackson, an old friend and Café Allegro’s owner, has learned to put the best construction on this construction. “The Turner Company made a huge effort and I respect them for reaching out to us and doing everything that they could to make the pill go down with a little sugar. I even got a hard hat out of it with ‘honorary superintendent’ written on it. Allow me to wax eloquent through my tears of joy. This is a new beginning for Cafe Allegro. And think of it. (And her Nathanial cannot help laughing.) They have cut down the trees!” Well not all the trees but noticeably three or four on what was known for a while as “Hippy Hill,” the just on campus safe retreat for both town and gown to avoid the local constabulary and indulge in their own tears of joy and calming antidotes. Nathanial adds, “They did a fine job on the alley. Because of the fight we made, they made an effort to improve it.” The two imperfectly merged snapshots below of the Allegro interior shows through the plate glass some of the alley work when it was still a work in progress earlier this year.

Less then two blocks north of corner mates Café Allegro and George Russell Jr. is University Presbyterian. On the east side of 15^th I photographed it through the windshield while on the move. This century-old congregation is easily the biggest congregation in the University District, and more. It is one of the largest on the West Coast. With several ministers, scores of staff, a big organ, a professional choir, and a power list of political parishioners, University Presbyterian is always being tested by the biblical epigram, “He that is last shall be first.”

Only three blocks west of the Presbyterians and yet polar to it is a kind of tentative “last” – the latest District church to publicly wonder how to keep going, here in its now 70 year old sanctuary on the southeast corner of 47^th Street and 12^th Avenue N.E. Again I have snapped it from the driver’s window. Some will remember this congregation from the 1980s when it was the second church in the U.S.A. to declare “sanctuary” for Central Americans in flight from the American supplied violence there. Since then it has also become a “sanctuary” for gays who still cherish the church. Here’s a quote from the church’s description of itself. “Sanctuary has echoed in many commitments here: welcome to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people; support for conscientious objectors; a kitchen for hungry folks; a haven for women in transition from shelters to permanent housing; and safe and affordable childcare for children from a diversity of families and ethnicities. It all sounds like ‘sanctuary’ after awhile. Sanctuary is, in that sense, a place – this whole place – filled with a commitment to welcome and witness. Don’t be surprised if you are confused by the word when it is used here. It reverberates all over the place.”

Midway between the triumphant Presbyterians and the humble Baptists is University Seafood and Poultry at 1317 NE 47^th Street. This wonderfully gleaming specialty retailer is like an import from a Paris sidewalk except that University Seafood may have fresher salmon than any Parisian fishmonger. Perhaps. The truth is the only thing I know about fish sales is Ivar’s antics of long ago. University Seafood is a survivor and must have a long list of customers that cherish the place. It has been around the corner from The Ave as long as I can remember.

Two blocks west on 47^th from the Baptists, a left turn on Roosevelt Way and a long half block south, on the right is the entrance to Trader Joe’s parking lot. It is a wonder of the collective driving skills of its mostly liberal clientele. It may be that college graduates also drive better. Here they need to. The slots for cars in this lot are absurdly tight, the corners sharp, and the place is almost always packed. Although the deepest parts of this covered garage are dark indeed, muggers are not a threat for they prefer the large open parking lots surrounding suburban malls. Also if someone yells “Help!” in this lot it is likely that a dozen heroes will appear in an instant.  At Northgate they may run for the mall.  The above photo was snapped at the entrance. It is a both a fine example of how creeping ivy and a few low bushes can soften a concrete wall and a contrast to the hard responsibilities of parking at Trader Joe’s that will soon follow.

Back home in time to walk about the neighborhood I snapped first this natural demonstration of the “solitary effect,” a principle of aesthetics that I remember from the 1940 Magnus opus “The Arts and the Art of Criticism” by Theodore Meyer Greene. Greene might have written his chapter on the “solitary effect” about that red flower. His big book had staying power. It was still read in the late 50s when I was in college and I have my copy yet. But what would Greene make of the below, an example of what I refer to as my UFOs, or unidentified flattened objects. This UFO was photographed again on Monday last, off the curb and lying in the street at the southwest corner of Sunnyside Avenue and 42^nd Street. Fallen needles decorate I don’t know what, except that the traffic has flattened it. And yet it still has “depth.” I checked in passing. It was still there today. For identification of the location only, on the lawn behind this UFO is the red maple at the bottom of this post.

This is placed to elaborate our essay of Aug. 15, 2009 titled “First Hill Exceptions.”  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 last Aug. 15, 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.

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, from Madison to Spring Streets, along the west side of Second.

This week’s historical scene shows Seattle’s first grand emporium during, or some time after, 1906. [Truthfully, this is NOT the photograph that was used in the Times 23 years ago, but it is similar.] Ordinarily, shopping at Frederick & Nelson was not like joining rampaging consumers at a big store’s big sale.  At Frederick’s, you were invited to take classes, visit an art gallery, chat with friends over tea or just ride the wonderful 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 bought but you would recall the “aura” of the experience of having really purchased something. 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” north to the main store’s modern location at 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, the then 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.”

[In searching my “lists” I discover that I have returned to Frederick and Nelson more than six times over the past 23 years, and will try to insert the others soon and in line.  This first instance was first published in Pacific on Sept. 28, 1986 and used the photograph insert directly below.   It was then still long before the big store folded for want of a suburban parking lot around it and competition from “warehouse wholesalers.”]

[First we interrupt this history to share some current events, compliments of one of our correspondents, film historian David Jeffers.  Please note.]
“The 35th Annual Seattle International Film Festival will host a week of films at West Seattle’s historic Admiral Theater, June 5-11 as part of their 2009 program.   Details regarding tickets and showtimes for the 25 scheduled films are available at http://www.siff.net.  My previews for some of the Admiral shows, as well as other SIFF films, are available at http://www.SIFFblog.com.”

When our good friend Clay Eals decided that with a little help from some other friends – well folk – Seattle’s part in Pete Seeger’s nation-wide 90th birthday party could be celebrated at West Seattle’s Admiral Theatre he had reasons to feel confident.  First his acclaimed big biography Facing the Music (now into its second printing) of folksinger Steve Goodman was issued in 2007 and ever since Clay has been traveling the county sharing the stories he gathered and polished accompanied by musicians in the cities he has visited who also loved celebrating and singing Goodman’s songs.  That then is reason one – Clay has been doing concerts steadily.  Second – and here we will with some shame use for the first time a by now tired but still woefully current expression and also pledge to then abandon it – Clay is truly a West Seattle icon.  More to the point of the Portola and Admiral Theatres, it was as president of the Seattle Historical Society in 1989 that Clay led the successful citizen action to save the Admiral.  And before that as editor of the West Seattle Herald, Clay edited and published in 1986-87 West Side Story, the oversized history of his extended neighborhood.   Again, he did it with the help of many folks and friends, because he knows them and has many.  Clay is one of the easiest persons to work with and/or just be around.  But it was during these fateful years – 86-87 – that something bad happened in the editor’s office.  Clay made a mistake.

How did we uncover this all-to-human quality in Mr. Eals?  Years ago in celebration of Clay’s efforts in saving the Admiral, I wrote a “now-and-then” about it for Pacific Northwest Magazine. With Clay’s Pete Seeger party we revived it on this blog, and also put in additional pictures that never made it into the paper.  (Pulp is costly.)   We posted all that here on May 5th last.  Soon after the Seeger concert and that blog-work I remembered a photo the West Seattle Historical Society had shared with me earlier.  It was of a theatre that, it claimed, was the predecessor of the Admiral, and even more.  It was still there – in the Admiral.  The old Portola had been transformed into the Admiral’s lobby.  Since once can add anything relevant to one’s blog whenever, I thought to join the Portola picture to our story.  But to make certain that it was what is claimed, I also thought it wise to ask some questions, especially of local theatre historian David Jeffers who is often helpful with these puzzles.  Next, David joined Jean, and Clay and me in an e-mail conversation.

Now we may with compassion describe Clay’s not-so-fateful error.  The Portola-Admiral story (and mistake) is told on pages 213-214 in West Side Story.  We have attached the relevant parts here.

The older of the two pictures identified as the Portola appears first above, on page 213.

Clay begins, “Thanks for the prod to follow through with what I know about the Portola. I’m sorry I’ve been mostly absent the past week. I’ve been (ungrammatically) laying low the past week in recovery from the Seeger event. It may not have seemed like much to undertake, but it was a month of full-bore organization and promotion, and with a full-time-and-then-some day job to maintain, I left a lot of other life on the cutting-room floor. I’ve been picking up the pieces, but rather slowly.”  Next, Clay goes to the question at hand.  “Our source for the photo was Lucille’s Photographic Salon, which was located in the mid-1980s a couple blocks north of the Junction . . . [I – that is this editor, Paul – remember the electric Lucille well. I met her at a West Seattle Historical Society function long ago.]   . . . Lucille (and husband Lincoln) Mason had saved quite a few iconic [Clay uses it too!] West Seattle images from the past, having come across them in the course of their work, and they were a credible source, which is why we trusted the identification of this photo, but can we be absolutely sure? As with many photos, I recall that this one merely had a handwritten label on the back. One way to document it is to get the original and enlarge the reader boards straddling the ticket booth and the poster beneath to see if the word ‘Portola’ appears there.  Short of that, one could identify the movie(s) being shown, find the year of release (on imdb.com,) then go to corresponding microfilm of the Times and P-I to nail down a movie ad or listing for the Portola.”  Clay also notes, “If you have ‘West Side Story’ handy, [we nearly always do] you will see that the Portola photo you are considering posting is the one on page 213 [see above], which is pretty undistinguished, but if you flip forward one page, you will see on 214 a photo of the Portola from the 1930s that is instantly recognizable as the front of the Admiral — at least the left front, into which you now enter the lobby but then entered the theater itself. The clue is the two “portholes” in what would be the second-floor level and what today is the second floor. There is a little room off the second floor where the Admiral stores old dusty stuff, and those same two portholes shine light into that room.”

However, Clay goes on to suffer doubt.  “The building in the older photo (page 213) doesn’t look a whole lot like the building in the newer 1930 photo (page 214), which suggests that it was rebuilt significantly at some point between the two years the photos were taken but retained its name of Portola. Just put the two photos side by side, and you can see they are hardly the same building. When precisely did the rebuild occur? I do not have a clue.”

David Jeffers visits with the editor following a Seattle Public Library lecture in 2007.

Come now David Jeffers describing how he demystified the impaired caption on the backside of what we will call the “Lucille print.”  He did it by establishing that Portola #2 and the questioned Lucille’s Portola #1 were two buildings and far apart.  The editor will make only the tinyest of changes to David’s often philosophical description.  It is a revealing testament to an inquiring mind.

“Much of our history is forgotten, not lost, and only awaits re-discovery.  Seattle reads more books and sees more movies than average America, and this is not a recent development.  Just as every neighborhood has a branch of the Public Library, in the years before television they all had a movie house, typically within easy walking distance.  One of these forgotten theaters stood on the Northwest corner of Queen Anne Avenue North and West Boston Street.  The Queen Anne Theatre opened for business in 1912 and closed, as did many, with the advent of sound.  City directories and insurance maps confirm this information.  Tax records list a build date of 1911 for the structure located at 2201 Queen Anne Avenue North; they also include a WPA (Works Progress Administration) era photo (post-theater) from the nineteen-thirties and indicate the brick and mortar structure survives today, an example of adaptive reuse.  [The editor suggests a visit to Google Earth to fine what holds that Queen Anne corner now.] As with many of Seattle’s neighborhood theaters from the silent era, this is all the documentation my research has found.  I have surveyed the site, but had never seen a photograph of The Queen Anne Theatre as such, until recently.

Tax cards like this one can be had for most structures in King County built before 1937.   With tax number or legal description in hand, contact Greg Lange (another sometime contributor to this page) at the Washington State Archive in Bellevue at 425-564-3942 to order photographic prints of structures of interest and/or their tax cards – like this one.  The prices are not gouging, and once you have your print in hand or on platen it is permitted to Photoshop away the white writing.

Another insertion of the shamed Portola above and the tax photo for 2201 Queen Anne Avenue, top.

As a devoted reader of Now and Then, I look forward to my weekly dose of urban archeology on the back page of Pacific Northwest Magazine. More recently, I’ve also become a follower of this web site, in part an interesting and informative elaboration of Paul’s column.  Whenever the subject strays anywhere near silent era movies, my particular area of interest, like a dog chasing a fire truck, I’m compelled to throw in my two cents. Paul, West Seattle’s Log House Museum, Clay and (bless his heart) Pete Seeger, all deserve credit for this new discovery.

The oldest photograph of West Seattle’s Portola Theater I know comes from UW Digital Collections and is dated 1930. [Again, see page 214 above.] I provided a link to that online image, posted with my comment to Paul’s Admiral Theater piece from May 5, “A Bonus Seattle Now & Then: We Shall Overcome…”  Later that week, Paul sent me the image of a theater with no marquee, purported to be The Admiral’s predecessor, The Portola (ca.1919).  I had previously seen a tiny example of this photo on The Puget Sound Theater Organ Society web site and have since learned it was published in West Side Story, a history of West Seattle, in 1987.  Significant differences in the 1919 and 1930 images immediately drew my attention.

The older photo offers a host of clues, including movie posters and an adjacent business.  Anne of Green Gables (1919) starring Mary Miles Minter is clearly identified in the largest poster. The American Film Institute online Silent Film Catalog lists the release date for Anne of Green Gables as November 23, 1919.

The business name ” C. P. Martinez” appears to the right of the theater entrance.  Polk’s City of Seattle Directory shows listings for C. P. Martinez, ” Real Estate, Rentals, Insurance and Mortgage Loans, Notary Public 2203 Queen Anne Av” from 1915 through 1944. This was Martinez’ only directory listing found in those editions and his street address is clearly visible in the original 1919 photo.  [Seen in detail near the bottom of this post.]  The Queen Anne, or Queen Anne and Boston Theatre at 2201 Queen Anne Avenue North were listed in Polk’s from 1912 to 1927.  The first listing for West Seattle’s Portola Theatre located at 2343 California Avenue was in 1920.

A recent survey of The Admiral Theater revealed a rear wall [above], which appears to be reinforced concrete with pour lines showing an older form construction using wooden planks.  Tax records show a build date for The Admiral of 1942, which seems to indicate The Portola was demolished entirely.  No written record should be taken as gospel however, and certainly there are folks living in the neighborhood that witnessed the construction/remodel in 1941.  Local theater owner John Danz purchased the theater, added the present-day auditorium and reopened in 1942.  Based on my research I believe the shell of The Portola survives today as the lobby and entrance of The Admiral.  A comparison of these images, the 1930 Portola, The Admiral today, the 1919 photo and the 1937 tax photo of 2201 Queen Avenue North reveal similarities in placement, construction and dimensions, confirming their identity.

Admiral Theatre from 1942 Tax Photo.

photo by David Jeffers

Finally, how was this 1919 photo misidentified?  A series of well-intended assumptions, ownership of the 1919 photo, a lack of architectural familiarity and supporting research are easy answers. Portholes were a commonly used element in theater architecture of the day.  Numerous Seattle theaters included them as second story mezzanine, office or projection room windows in their design. They are clearly seen in the photo. While their etymology is unrelated, porthole and Portola (a proper noun) sound quite similar. A list of suburban theater advertisements including Anne of Green Gables at The Portola was published on March 11, 1920 in the Seattle Daily Times. This indicates the film was shown on that date in that theater.  The Queen Anne likely screened the same print before or after and did not advertise. Neighborhood theaters drew most of their business from moviegoers who passed by daily or saw “coming attraction” announcements at earlier shows.  Someone undoubtedly found the same advertisement, which led to a persuasive misidentification of the photo.

“I See Dead Theaters.”  A part of our cultural history, neighborhood theaters have come and gone.  Many survive in anonymity today, waiting to be rediscovered.  A favorite example is 615-617 South Jackson Street.  Volume 1 of the 1916 Sanborn Digital Atlas, available through ProQuest on the Seattle Public Library web site, identifies the northwest corner of the Bush Hotel, built in 1915 as ” Moving Pictures “.  Located in the International District, this theater may have existed only briefly and may not have advertised in English language newspapers.

Another is The Mission Theater, located at 1412-1414 4th Avenue, from 1914 to 1920.  Who would suspect a stand-alone theater with a facade designed to resemble an Old Spanish mission ever existed on the east side of 4th Avenue between Pike and Union?  The Mission advertised heavily and a single head-on photo was published when the theater opened, but I’ve never come across any image showing this theater in context with the neighborhood.

Still another is West Seattle’s Alki Theater, whose address is given only as ” Alki Av btw 59th and 61st Ave SW” from 1914 to 1917 in Polk’s City Directories for those years.  The Alki does not appear on any map or advertisement I have seen.  There are many other Seattle movie theaters I am able to identify by only a single unsubstantiated reference.  The search continues… “

Finally, but hardly sounding contrite, Clay Eals also gets a look at the blow-up of the questioned Lucille photo and seems to be happy that he is on top of Queen Anne Hill. “Paul, David, Jean: What a difference a good, high-resolution scan makes. Yes, this photo can’t be from the Portola/Admiral site, for no other reason than the address number, 2203, doesn’t match today’s 2343 for the Admiral. Other cool stuff: 1. The reflection in the ticket-booth window of letters on a business across the street. Can’t fully make them out, but they appear to be LEIBLY NALL and then, below, in curved letters (and a clearer clue), STANDARD GROCERY. 2. Another feature that night, besides “Anne of Green Gables,” is “The Hall Room Boys” (with subtitles: “Nothing but Nerve,” “Ham’s Gills” and “Flanagan and Edwards.” Interesting that imdb.com says “The Hall Room Boys” was made in 1910, while “Northing but Nerve” was made in 1918. Nothing in imdb about “Ham’s Gills” or “Flanagan and Edwards.” 3. There’s a behatted guy standing inside C.P.’s office, eerily looking at the photo. Could it be C.P.? Lots of fun!”

Yes, Clay is swell to be around.

Clay Eals on the right with an open copy of the West Side Story.  He shares the stage with three commonplaces of Seattle heritage.

[We repeat]
The 35th Annual Seattle International Film Festival will host a week of films at West Seattle’s historic Admiral Theater, June 5-11 as part of their 2009 program.   Details regarding tickets and showtimes for the 25 scheduled films are available at http://www.siff.net.  My previews for some of the Admiral shows, as well as other SIFF films, are available at http://www.SIFFblog.com. ?<05:30:09.doc>

[This combines two from Pacific Northwest Magazine: features for July 10, 1988 and May 7, 1995 mixed with parts of a work-in-progress on the general subject of  the  uses of Seattle heritage.]

Remember, in all cases CLICK TWICE to Enlarge.

At least five years ago when I photographed the colored snapshot directly above, Bartell Drugs was the most recent tenant to hold the southeast corner of Madison Street and Boren Avenue where the Carkeeks built one of the first big homes (top) on First Hill in 1884. (Courtesy, Dennis Andersen)

The Carkeek mansion at the southeast corner of Boren Avenue and Madison Street survived 50 years, half a century less than its last resident, Guendolen Carkeek Plestcheeff.  Her father, Englishman Morgan Carkeek, became one of the community’s principal contractors soon after his arrival in 1870 at age 23. His credits included Seattle’s first brick structure, the Dexter Horton Bank (later SeaFirst) and the downtown Carnegie Library.  Morgan returned to England in the late 1870s to court and marry Emily Gaskill, a confident Londoner, whom he brought back to Seattle. She landed on First Hill as an immigrant but developed rapidly into an “old settler,” although a rather plush one.  And she soon became the leader of First Hill culture.  Their first child, Vivian Morgan, was born in 1879.  In 1884, the couple built the family home, using a pattern design by New York architects Palliser and Palliser. One of the original big homes on First Hill, it included fireplaces in all the principal rooms, 14-foot ceilings, abundant stained glass, and mahogany and redwood woodwork throughout.

Most like taken during the 1911 costume party at the Carkeek home.  Looking younger than in any of the other photographs feature here, Emily Carkeek sits on her plush rug, second from the right.  Courtesy, Seattle Public Library

Emily Carkeek took to the study of Seattle-area history, and she organized her women friends, mostly, to take it on as a steadfast responsibility and a club concern.  On Nov. 13, 191l, the 60th anniversary of the landing of the Denny Party at Alki Point, Emily and Morgan, by then a pioneer contractor of great account, stood side-by-side at the wide front door of their First Hill mansion.  They were only a few feet from the public sidewalk at the southeast corner of the major First Hill intersection of Boren Avenue and Madison Street.  When they built their big home a quarter-century earlier much of First Hill was their yard.  By 1911 this natural sweep had given way to a crowded cityscape. The Carkeeks welcomed guests to a costume ball where the prescribed attire was pioneer – something their forebears wore, often from the attic and redolent of mothballs.  For refreshment the guests were appropriately served clam chowder made with Puget Sound butter clams.  This clam-sustained masquerade became a nearly annual event that was sufficiently governed by pedigree, economics, and creed that it was by invitation only.   For large group portraits the Carkeek’s guests were sometimes squeezed onto the porch and front steps.

Many of those called to the earlier balls walked there, for they still lived on First Hill, which in 1911 remained exclusive in pockets.  Others traveled from the grander parts of other hills: Queen Anne, Capitol, and the ridge above Lake Washington.  Some had earlier fled the raucous encroachments of the spreading boomtown “lowlands” for the gracious privacy of the gated and guarded Highlands.   For these it was not a short haul to First Hill, even in a chauffeur-driven motorcar, and the streets were often bumpy.  But visiting First Hill was like coming home, for many of the Highlanders had lived there earlier before the apartment buildings, large and small, begin to fill the lots between big homes.  On the Carkeek’s guest list we might not expect to find anyone from Alki Point, Ballard, Denny Hill (what remained of it), Beacon Hill, Columbia City or Georgetown.  And nearly all those invited were of Northern European pedigree.  Most would have preferred churches without Stations of the Cross or scrolls.  Most likely they were worth enough to at least consider building a brick block in the business district with their family name attached.  Their wealth would have been preferably old, although new money was also appreciated.

The only natives attending would have been whoever came costumed as one.  Chief Seattle’s daughter, Princess Angeline, was a popular masquerading choice.  Later it was claimed that some of Angeline’s original duds had been recovered, cleaned and made available for impersonations.  They apparently became part of the new historical society’s collection and so worn with great privilege by a deserving or collared member in sartorial service of the princess’ memory.

Looking some years older than in the 1911 posing from the living room carpet, here Emily, second from the right, is seen in a detail pulled from a 1914 portait taken by the Webster Stevens Studio of the historical society costume ball shown whole below.  (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

Ideally, the Carkeek’s heritage balls were a theatre of community concern in which the players were asked to show interest for something greater or more extended than family history while also including it.   History was something deeper than ancestral links or comforting nostalgia, as wonderfully centering as those can be for anyone while reflecting beside one’s own hearth with a family crest or resting with one’s embroidered pillow.  Bundled in bonnets and layers of mid-Victorian fancy work, the guest were also encouraged to carry to the ball the works and widgets of history besides those they wore: the documents, artifacts, photographs that collecting societies and their museums are as a habit after.  And these First Hill balls did the trick, they led directly to the building of the Seattle Historical Society at the Carkeek home, which for the many years that Emily held sway might as well have been called the “Carkeek Cultural Center.”

Three years more and in the nip of winter, the Carkeeks played hosts again for heritage, and the formal founding of the Society.  Typically, five of the six trustees were men assigned for the formality of signing the charter.  The exception was the steadfast and affluent Margaret Lenora Denny, who in 1905 had donated the Founder’s Pylon at Alki Point, a kind of white man’s totem with none of those animal faces that might and often did offend tastes refined on European classics.  Later that Thursday afternoon of January 8, 1914 when the charter was safely put away in its envelope, the articles of incorporation were signed, and for this it was women only holding the fountain pens.   At the lead, of course, was the English born and raised Emily, the pillar of gumption who, as far as I can determine, was somehow completely neglected by Clarence Bagley everywhere in his big History of Seattle, including his chapter twenty-seven titled “Women’s Work,” even though caring for community history, like caring for orphans, was then still largely the work of women. Excepting the higher paying jobs of directorships and such where the old prejudices regarding women and employment held sway much more then than now, community heritage and culture generally have been promoted and nurtured by women more than men.  The more poignant and witty of pioneer reminiscences were, it seems to my review, more often written by women like Sophie Bass, Roberta Watts and Inez Denny. Their books share the kind of generous community concern for heritage that Clarence Bagley might have also called “Women’s Work” but did not.   Bagley included sketches of women’s vital activism for the vote, their roles as teachers, librarians, prohibitionists, and spirited philanthropists with concerns for public health, children in need, and much else, but there is no mention of history or heritage.

Published in 1916, Bagley’s grand history failed to make note of the heritage activism on First Hill.  Aside from chapter twenty-seven, women as actual subjects in Bagley’s history seem to be under veil. Men dominate as content and most of them are boss/leaders of one sort or another. In the July 1913 issue of The Washington Historical Quarterly, Miss Bessie Winsor of Seattle, the Secretary of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, notes that in the more than 200 women’s clubs then in the state, embracing about five thousand members, two-thirds of them would be studying history during the coming year.  Also in 1913 Clarence Bagley was the President of the Washington State Historical Society, and U.W. History Prof. Edmund Meany, whose steady championing of the Denny Party helped raise the Alki Point founders pylon in 1905 with men’s names only, was the Managing Editor of the Quarterly.  We may wonder what were they thinking, and yet both omissions are signs of the half-wittedness of that time regarding gender.  If I have counted them correctly, of the more than 900 biographies included in Bagley’s volume three – entirely a “vanity volume” – only six are directly about women. Consequently, they are the very few described as more than helpmates and mothers, although they were ordinarily expected to be those as well.  As aptly noted by an anonymous wit, “With marriage a wife loses more than her maidenhead; she loses her maiden name, and later she herself will be hard to find.”  One of the greatest challenges in doing public history is finding the women, and the irony is that it is women who have most often cared for it.   Of course, it is also true that the women who nurture the study of history are often enough supported by men who may do little more than work and attend to their own manly things.

Dressed in mother’s fancy work and spilling from porch to lawn for a Founders Day,  November 13, 1914 pose of the new Seattle Historical Society’s membership.  (Courtesy, MOHAI)

On the next available Founders Day, November 13, 1914, it was practically only women who stepped across the Carkeek threshold and all of them were again dressed in their mother’s and grandmothers fancy work, posing several times on both the porch and inside to show it.  Emily Carkeek appears third from the right, and looking somewhat older than she does in the living room pose shared above. The only exceptions to pioneer dress, again, were the women who took the parts of Indians.  Out of costume, it was women who attended the Historical Society’s early meetings, took on research projects, collected artifacts from their pioneer families, and still found occasions to put on old clothes.  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.

Possibly the 1915 Founder’s Day costume ball.  Looking older, Emily appears all in black just above the scene’s center.  (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)

In another costume tableau of the Seattle Historical Society (included below) – perhaps from 1915 – one man is included.  He is upper-right and may have snuck into the scene. A few of these period costumes may be included in the Society’s collection at the Museum of History and Industry. In the condition I found this group portrait the posers in it were not identified. The only face familiar to me here 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, his wife Virginia McCarver Prosch and pioneer Margaret Lenora (Lenora Street) Denny all drowned when the Carkeek’s Pierce-Arrow touring car crashed off the Riverton Bridge into the Duwamish River.  (A thorough essay on this tragedy can be found on historylink.)  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 this cheerful group portrait.

Fifteen years or less separates these two looks toward Madison Avenue.   The comparison is a good example or evidence of Seattle’s boom years following its “Great Fire” of 1889.   The older scene dates fro the early 1890s, and was taken from the southeast corner of 9th Avenue and Columbia Street where from the prospect of the tower of Coppin’s water works, the principal source of fresh water on the hill then, the photorapher looks north to the Carkeek home, left of center, at the southeast corner of Boren and Madison.  The bottom view (directly above) was photographed one block to the north from the southeast corner of Marion and 9th, the construction site for St. James Cathedral, which was dedicated in 1907.  A likely date for this view, which shows the Carkeek home on the far right, is 1906.  (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey.)

Between the crash and Emily’s own death in 1926 First Hill society had increasingly dispersed as apartment buildings and institutions filled in the hill.  The once comfortable and club-like center for heritage declined, and the society’s oldest members continued to die off.  The only “benefit” that accrued with the steady loss of “originals” was the obituaries.  Both the University of Washington’s Northwest Collection and the Seattle Public Libraries “Seattle Room” are well stocked with them.  Often as elegiac as Seattle historians Frederick James Grant’s and Clarence Bagley’s biographies were elegiac, these death notices are often stocked with good stories and on occasion even revelations.

Morgan Carkeek’s obituary of April 1931, and the other stories of his passing that soon followed, included more evidence of the Carkeek family’s keenness for history. His will included a $5,000 trust fund for the Seattle Historical Society. When the couple was still alive, a donation of land was made to the city for the building of a Carkeek Park in which they envisioned a museum dedicated to local history.  The grandest of Morgan’s bequeathals, $250,000, went to Guendolen, who was listed in the obituary as living in Paris, although at the time was a patient at Seattle’s Swedish Hospital. In the spring of 1934 and in the depths of the Great Depression she and her husband Theodore Plesthtcheeff, a decorated Russian soldier from World War One, opened the Carkeek home for its last costume ball.  The party was covered by The Seattle Times, whose reporter described the company dancing to Victorian hits such as “Under The Shade of an Old Apple Tree,” and Guendolen as “a brunette and possesses a striking individuality.”  As a reminder of the home’s roots in the 1880s when it first took on the role of the smartest destination on First Hill, Guendolen, the paper reported, wore an “exquisite yellow satin evening gown of the period of 1885.” The couple, however, made it easier on their guests, instructing them to wear Gay ‘90s attire.

The Carkeek’s boy Vivian was for a time president of the Seattle Historical Society, but took probably more interest in old world legend than in Northwest history.  He grew up enchanted by Celtic mythology, and became the keeper of the family’s Anglo-Saxon flame. When Vivian graduated with the fire class from the University of Washington’s Law School in 1901, Guendolen was but ten years old.  Soon she was packed off to England as a teenager for an English education, while Vivian stayed in Seattle, practicing law and studying old tales. More than a student of the King Arthur legend, the lawyer was a true believer and for years the national president of the Knights of the Round Table.  The stained glass in the Carkeek mansion featured depictions of these tales – not ones from Seattle history.

In 1938 the daughter assumed the mother’s roll as president of the Seattle Historical Society and held that position until the society’s Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) was dedicated at Montlake in 1952.  During the dedication she first stepped forward to honor her parents dream of a museum, and then handed the keys to a representative of municipal government.  The city already owned the Montlake neighborhood property on which the museum was constructed.

I recorded this view of the Chevron pumps standing in what was the front room of the Carkeek home. The date is about 1986.

Soon after its last costume party in 1934, the Carkeek home was razed for a Standard Oil gas station.  It was the best – or worst – sign for how this “heritage crossroads” at Boren Avenue and Madison Street in the once exclusive neighborhood had become a common place.  The symbolism continued in the 1990s when the pumps were covered with a new wing of the, it seemed, ever-expanding Swedish Hospital. A portion of the ornate wrought-iron fence that surrounded the mansion’s grounds survives, moved across Madison Street to the University Club.

Is it or is it not Guendalen peeking upper left in the detail from the 1914 Costume party?

A permanent exhibit on First Hill history can be found in the lobby of the hospital’s new wing.  (At least it could be the last time I visited the place in 1995.)  Webster and Stevens Studio’s 1914 recording of the costumed posing on the Carkeek porch was included in the exhibit along with many other photographs, artifacts and ephemera of the Carkeeks and their hilltop community.  A cut out figure of Guendolen as an older child takes her place in the exhibit.  But does she also appear in the 1914 porch recording peeking far left over the last or top row of the society’s costumed founders while, we imagine, standing on her toes.  To me, at least, the young woman there looks sufficiently like Guendolen Carkeek for me to be kind to my own whimsy and imagine it is she.  However, when I put this proposition to her she replied.  “Never.  I would not be caught dead with those old fogies.”  Her answer was another amusing example of this original’s “striking individuality.”  She may have been winking when she denied it.   In 1988, the year I interview her, Guendolen Carkeek Plestcheeff was 95 years old.  Here mold was broken at 101.

Below: Part of the First Hill history permanent display in the Swedish Hospital addition that took the place of the gas station that took the place of the Carkeek Mansion.

I have patched together – crudely – four snaps taken at yesterday’s Folklife presentation ceremony for historylink’s pretty big book on the ALASKA YUKON PACIFIC EXPOSITION.  Co-author Alan Stein is front forward in profile and with a hat, and co-author Paula Becker is behind me sitting with her parents, charming Texans who now live in or near Seattle.  On the far right is ‘link Director Marie McCaffrey heading the ceremony – and leading the non-profit encyclopedia of Washington State History, which produced the book and much else.  And on the far far left in profile is Lutheran Pastor Dennis Andersen who in a former life and when we were both studying the U.W. Archives in the mid-70s was the care giver for the historical photos at the U.W. Library – Northwest Collection, we called it then.  Now he dresses often all in black – except for the collar – and so is in need of some special light like that streaming over and above his shoulders.   It was a happy event, it seemed at least, all around, and the book is in – nearly.  Only the first 150 copies arrived and the rest are due by steamers in early June.  They did a very good job at it too.

[Click and then Click again to enlarge.]

(Click photo to enlarge)

The long longed for Grand Union Depot (Great Northern RR)  opened May 9, 1906.  In place of pomp and circumstance, there was debris on the floor of the waiting room and the driveways and walks were not paved.  And the first train was hours late.  But still the depot was grand.  The St. Paul architects, Reed and Stem, may have been practicing.  Eight years later they designed New York’s Grand Central Station.  The Seattle station was built with bricks from Renton and granite from Index.  The Marble from Vermont was late in arriving – through the tunnel.  The depot tower, a tribute to the campanile in Venice’s San Marco Square, was also a wonderful new prospect from which to look in all directions.  Although the tower was not opened to the public it was to a few photographers and among the records returned is the stitched three-part panorama featured here that looks north (and west and east) to the Central Business District. To the right of the owl cigar sign and near the southwest corner of 4th Avenue and Washington Street is the south portal to the railroad tunnel.  On the far right, the dark mass of the gas standpipe at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street is fast approaching the end of the company’s more than thirty years facing a Gas Cove that by 1906 was lost in the litter of fill dropped beside it. The standpipes and manufacturing plant across Jackson were razed in 1907 for the Union Pacific and the contributions of the Jackson Street Regrade.  At its bottom right corner, the uncredited panorama includes a revealing disorder at the intersection of Jackson Street and 4th Avenue.  To the north of Jackson the freshly regraded avenue is held behind the high retaining wall built for separating the grade between it and the approach to the tunnel.  Both Jackson Street and 4th Avenue south of it are still built on trestles.

The dating for this panorama is helped on the distant horizon where the Washington Hotel is still standing on Denny Hill.  It appears just left of center. The hotel’s central tower breaks the horizon. (Did you remember to click the image to enlarge it?)  The hotel stood on the front or south summit of Denny Hill and straddled the future continuation of Third Avenue north from Pine Street once the hill was lowered.   The hotel was razed late in 1906, the year the Union Depot tower was completed.   The Denny Regrade north of Pine Street and as far east as 5th Avenue was completed by 1911.

Spot is a good dog
But too warm hearted
For his own good.
See Spot run.

For several dozen hearty souls who made their way to the 4th Floor Chapel of the Good Shepherd Center, UP THE DOWN CHIMNEY went forward as planned!

A special thanks to Stu Dempster, who brung the trombone and supplied us with his usual joy and genius.

Here’s a photo taken from above by our sound/light mastermind David Verkade (that’s Paul pontificating in his now-famous Santa suit):

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And before the show, I cracked the windows looking west and, a bit later, east across Wallingford.

On our little section of Meridian Ave, we’ve got one of those neighborhoods where tools, sugar, dvds, eggs, and garlic are shared when needed. And some nights we go for walks. Here’s a few scenes from along the snowy way.

A novel method of kid transport…

Around the snow-rimed lake..

A cheery (yet somehow terrifying) house…

Here is a small collection of more Jean Green Lake Challenges.  I think  they all date from the 1916 Big Snow and freeze, which froze a few lakes, including Green Lake, and collapsed a few roofs, including the distinguished cupola above the transcenpt at St. James Cathedral.  (They did not rebuild it.)

The ice-site where the fashionable couple pose, one heroic and the other demure, will be hard to find and even more difficult to get to.   Then an action hockey shot, which comes from the same collection as the couple, and like it  may also be hard to both figure and reach.  Best, perhaps,  to stay with and seek the classic postcard view, if you want to walk around the lake in our fresh snow.

It is the  wide angle shot of Green Lake crowded with skaters and is copied from an oft-printed postcard.  This copy is postmarked Feb. 12, 1916, and addressed to Mr Gunnar Ingman at P.O.Box 476 Juneau, Alaska.  The message reads, “This  give you some idea of the crowed that enjoyed the skating on Greek Lake.”  It is signed by Jack, Jill, or Joel.  Can’t tell which.

Here is a negative clue.  The tower on the ridge horizon, center-left, is no longer there.  It was used for drying hoses.

It was holidays  for three days, and we have been very good tourists with my Uncle Claude and my Aunt Yanick who came from Périgord. Their  dream was to go to Versailles, but we didn’t foresaw the icy wind, so we missed the poetry of the garden in winter with its wrapped sculptures, its empty pools and a fatal good cold … We enjoyed the empty castle.  It seems the more I am going there and the more I am discovering the place.

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This Friday, Dec. 5, 2008, at 9:30 Jean picked me up in Wallingford and we scooted to Olympia to sign some books in the Legislative Building’s little gift shop.  We “worked” at this over lunch time, from eleven in the morning to one in the afternoon.  On our return to Seattle I took several photographs of Mt. Rainier from the car window as it showed a most spectacular variation on the cloud cover that it often creates, it seems, for its own and our amusement .   Sometimes this cover hovers like a beret. But the beret can swell into a hard hat and/or stretch into a sombrero.  And on rare days, like this one,  the clouds above the mountain and around it are as fanciful as the hatter’s examples sold at a theatre wardrobe sale.

The first look was taken from the 1-5 bridge over the Puyallup River at about 1:45pm.  This is The Mountain that the citizens of the “City of Destiny”  ought to insist on lovingly  calling Mt. Tacoma.

The next recording looks south and a little east, again from I-5, and over Tukwilla’s Southcenter Mall – or near it around 2:10.  Now the atmosphere about the mountain is dancing, and it has temporarily created a new cap.

Around 3:00 I propped my Lummix against a signpost at the Wallingford Intersection of 42nd Street and 1st Avenue N.E..   The high hat above the mountain has moved further east. Earlier Jean noted that it seemed as massive as the mountain itself, although the reverse of it, like a wrapped Rainier standing on its head.

Next the setting sun gives its typical rose glow to the mountain behind a dead tree given new life with blue bottles lovingly hung from its branches by sensitive neighbors.

Moments later, with the sun below the Olympics, but not yet submerged in the Pacific, and with the camera wide open, the sky misses vespers for a riot.

Yesterday, returned to the scene of previous crimes on a glowering afternoon. Howard Lev drove, as usual, through the dark canyon, on the way to Sunnyside, where Mamalil’s Peppers cans.

Here I have captured for the moment Seattle’s admired torch singer Julie Cascioppo on a construction site in Wallingford.  SOON Julie is giving her last performance in Seattle before flying away to BALI.  Here are the facts.

On Sept 11 – a Thursday – from 7 to 8:30 PM she will be performing at EGAN’S BALLARD HAM HOUSE, at 1707 Market St. in Ballard, of course.   Telephone reservations can be made.   Call 206-789-4624.

Julie will be singing ORIGINAL SONGS from her recent JACK STRAW PROJECT, as well as some of her HITS.

Here’s some boiler on Julie.

“In a world of boy toys and riot girls, Julie! Stands alone.  And she also stands tall in the tradition of ‘red hot’ mamas like Sophie Tucker and Mae West.   When not on one of her globe-trotting itineraries, Julie holds court variously at the Sorrento Hotel, the Pink Door and Eagans.

“From the sultry jazz singer of her recent CD, ‘SOMETHING COOL’ to the hilarious monologist of her one-woman show, I ENJOY BEING ABROAD (Performing so far in Paris, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and New Delhi.)  Julie! Is always unpredictable.

“She can be soft as a cello or brassy as a French horn.”

Recently I snapped this photo of the Green Lake Budget Bread and Breakfast, or half of it.  The bed, I believe, is in the truck.