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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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(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.

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Anything to add, Paul?

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

 

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(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.”

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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.

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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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(click to enlarge photos)

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.

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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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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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WEB EXTRAS

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CIVIC CONSTRUCTION

(First appeared – in part – in Pacific on Nov. 7, 1993)

In its transformation from swale to Seattle Center, David and Louisa Denny’s donation claim never developed into a typical residential neighborhood. Rather, its uses were mixed – from the Dennys’ large garden (one of the principal sources of Seattle’s produce through the 1870s) to circuses, auto races, baseball, opera and Bumbershoots.    The contemporary photo (which I have as yet not uncovered) was recorded on Labor Day during Bumbershoot 1993. (I’ll substitute another Bumbershoot – a later one – and described within it the spot – once the intersection of Third Ave. and Harrison Street – from which this “then” was taken in 1928.)

On the right of the historical scene the city’s new auditorium is a work in progress. Built in great haste, it was dedicated Nov. 12, 1928, less than a year after this scene was photographed. The auditorium (which was later given

a new Opera House skin for the Century 21 fair in 1962) was part of a civic complex designed, as promotional material of the time put it, as the “most multipurpose auditorium group in the world,” lifting Seattle to the status of “Convention City of the Charmed Land.” Also included on the eleven-acre site were the surviving Ice Arena and Civic Field, which was replaced in the late 1950s by the Memorial Stadium.

In the distance, north of Mercer Street, Queen Anne Hill climbs to a 400-foot-plus horizon. Straight up Third, the roof line of Queen Anne High School is detectable at the center of the subject’s horizon.  Many of these residences survive in part because of the successful zoning struggle this community waged in the early 1970s to restrict the proliferation of high rises on the south slope of the hill.

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CIVIC CENTER

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 14, 1993)

This rear view of Seattle’s Civic Auditorium was photographed two short blocks from the scene shared directly above it. In the earlier scene, construction was beginning; here, nine or 10 months later, it is complete. At the time such speed was heralded as record-breaking.

The photographer looks across the freshly paved intersection of Fourth Avenue North and Harrison Street to the principal components of the new civic center: the Ice Arena, center right; the Civic Auditorium, center, and the Civic Field. The east end of its covered grandstand shows on the left. The sign above the Arena’s wide back door reads “Ice Skating Opens November 7th.” The 1928 dedication ceremonies featured an ice carnival presented by the Seattle Ice Skating and Hockey Association in benefit for Children’s Orthopedic Hospital.

The 6,500-seat auditorium had opened earlier for a Kiwanis convention. On June 20 the Kiwanis witnessed the auditorium’s first musical event, “Oriental,” with exotic dances, sets, soloists and a 50-piece orchestra. Civic Field was used for professional, amateur and high school sports. Seats (9,000) were covered, and the low “peekaboo fence” along Fourth and Harrison opened the contests to freeloaders – the “knothole gang on Deadbeat Hill.”

Included among the complex’s 655 events in 1935 were auto and dog shows, dances, operas, wrestling and boxing smokers, banquets, lectures, donkey baseball, soccer, hockey and lacrosse. But not Rita Rio and her all-girl orchestra. They were banned in 1939 by Mayor Arthur Langlie for “activities objectionable to a substantial portion of our citizens.” The Communist Party and the Jehovah Witnesses also were banned repeatedly by officials anxious to protect the public from controversial or eccentric ideas – material and spiritual.

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SEATTLE WORLD’S FAIR – 1942

First a draining and enduring Great Depression and then a world war broke the gears of these civic dreams that were first proposed in 1937.

The pamphlet above is used courtesy of Michael Maslan, and the “grabbed” Seattle Times clipping below compliments of the Times and the Seattle Public Library, and its subscription to the “key word search” service of the Times.  [Click the clip twice for reading.  Titled “Realtor Scoffs at ‘Long Faces'” it is an invigorating read.]  By good luck the March 6, 1938 clipping also includes most of C.T. Conover’s first feature for the Times that he wound up writing for the paper well into the 1950s.

(click to enlarge photos)

For posing before the decorative backdrop in Rasmus Rothi’s Imperial Studio, why, we wonder, did this sturdy woman hang dolls low on her theatrical dress? We will call it our April’s Fool question for we have no bright answer on this first day of April.  What’s more with Jean Sherrard’s repeat we were at first fooled and confused – until he explained it.

“Shooting west, I stood with my back to the bus stop near the southwest corner of Third Ave. and Columbia Street.  While I was photographing the reflecting face on the Third Ave. side of the elegant Chamber of Commerce Building, a pedestrian crossed in front of me either mumbling to himself, I thought, or grumbling at me.  The photograph, however, reveals that while thoughtfully stooping to avoid interrupting my shoot he was talking on his cel.  Still I got the top of his head.”

Arriving from San Francisco in 1881, Julius and Louisa Bornstein, with help from sons and brothers, opened the Golden Rule Bazaar in 1882, and with good timing.  One year more and the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Tacoma, the first transcontinental to Puget Sound.  Both Tacoma and Seattle boomed, accompanied by an industrious symphony of dynamite, hammers, saws and cash registers.  The Bornstein’s registers were especially musical for their prices were often low.  They claimed to be the first store on the Pacific Coast to have 10, 15 & 25-cent counters.

Through its more than 20 years selling the essential stuff of home economics – like crockery, chambers, spectacles, nutmeg grinders, trunks, lamp chimneys, dollar watches, potato mashers, glassware, enamelware, and willow ware – the Golden Rule Bazaar prospered.  It should be noted, apropos the hanging dolls, they also sold toys.

WEB EXTRAS

Considering that the actual location of 713 3rd Ave. was one of two bays in the side of a building, I shot, as you know, Paul, two possible ‘Nows’.  The first was the mirrored window we chose to use. The second was the next bay south. Here it is:

Anything to add, Paul?

We will not disappoint you Jean – yes we do!  But not so much this time,

In part it is because of the April Fool’s “theme” – we are habitually so wise, seemingly, that this foolishness does stump us some. “I thank the lord for my humility.” said Richard III.  The other part player in our paucity is Helix.  We spent most of the day putting up the “Helix Returns” feature – with lots of help from Ron Edge – which starting tomorrow, will follow Seattle Now and Then as surely as Monday follows Sunday West of the Mississippi and, for that matter, as surely as Sunday comes before Monday East of the Mississippi.  They are easy confused.

Now we will add three – only – more features that appeared first in Pacific, and the first of these is another on the Golden Rule, consequently, we do repeat some from the one to the other.  Then we will go across the street – First Ave. aka Front Street – to the Southwest corner with Marion Street and study Seattle Hardware’s window decorations for some Christmas in the 1890s.  We will also study the window, for the reflections are also revealing.  And then, but not finally, we will reprint a feature from the last time April Fools sat hard on a Sunday, with a story about that one who was so talented in making us feel – ordinarily – happily fooled by his hoaxes.  Ivar.  We have one.

After a few foolish interludes we will conclude with an art quiz, which is, in its “art is anything you can get away with” way, quite appropriate for April Fools, like you and I and the readers, Jean.  We will ask “How was this art made?”  It is a question about artistic technique – sort of.  We will wait first for readers to offer their conclusions on these aesthetics, and then next Sunday we will describe the technique in detail in case anyone would like to use it.

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THE GOLDEN RULE BAZAAR

( First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 11, 1991)

One of Seattle’s first department stores, the Golden Rule Bazaar, was founded by a man who failed in the gold fields. Down and out in Comstock, Nev., Julius Bornstein chose Seattle over Portland and Walla Walla to begin again. He brought his family here in 1882, and within three years the Bornsteins had their own storefront on First Avenue, at Marion Street.  Eighty years later Julius and Louisa’s son, Sam, recited for Seattle Times writer Lucille McDonald some of the pioneer staples the Bornsteins sold here: “Lamp chimneys and wicks, dollar watches, chamber pots, spectacles, clothes hampers, market baskets, wooden potato smashers, . nutmeg grinders, luggage … telescopes and toys at Christmas.”

Sam Bornstein recalled a brisk business in baskets that his father purchased from the natives in exchange for cooking utensils. Sam also claimed that the Golden Rule Bazaar was the first store on the Pacific Coast to have counters devoted exclusively to cut-rate items priced at a nickel, a dime, 15 cents and a quarter.

Seattle’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 was made considerably less spectacular by the 12-year-old Sam. News of the fire reached his school soon after it started about one block north of the family business. Sam bolted, commandeered an idle wagon and two horses, and hauled away three truckloads of fireworks that his father had recently purchased for a Fourth of July promotion. The fireworks and a few blackened pieces of china were all the Bornsteins saved from the flames, which soon overran’ the entire business district. They did, however, hold their Independence Day sale in a tent.

The family’s business prospered again. During the gold rush Sam recalled that “the miners were nuts. They just took the stuff away from us. We didn’t have to do any selling.” By 1910 the firm of J. Bornstein and Sons was operating exclusively wholesale, a business that in 1927 was favorably sold to the Dohrman Hotel Supply Company.

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The reader may wonder – with the writer – if the molding just above the sidewalk in the ca. 1900 record of the Seattle Hardware storefront at 823 First Avenue is – in spite of the obvious changes here – the same as that in front of Starbucks – this Starbucks – in the Colman Building at the southwest corner of Marion Street and First Avenue. (History photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

MERRY CHRISTMAS

(First appears in Pacific for Christmas, 2005)

Considering the mix of reflections and fancy stuff emitting from this elegant window the reader may miss the “Merry Christmas” that is written with fur sprigs.  The letters are attached to a wide white ribbon that arches from two posts of presents, left and right.  And in the center is a third pile of gifts including a few dolls and a cluster of oil lanterns just below the banner bearing the company name, Seattle Hardware Co.

Once a stalwart of local home improvements Seattle Hardware tempted shoppers through these plate glass windows at First and Marion beginning in 1890 when the Colman Building was new.   Like the clapboard structure John Colman lost here to the “Great Fire” of 1889, he prudently kept his post-fire brick replacement at two stories until it proved itself.  Eventually with both Seattle Hardware and the popular grocer Louch and Augustine (predecessor to Augustine and Kyer) at the street level this was one of the busiest sidewalks in town.

When Colman was preparing to crown the success of his two floors by adding four more to his namesake building Seattle Hardware built and moved to its own brick pile at King Street and First Ave. South in the fall of 1905.  The elegant post-fire neighborhood you see reflected in Seattle Hardware’s big sidewalk windows, of course, stayed put.  The Burke Building at Second and Marion and the Stevens Hotel – seen here back-to-back on the right – were razed in the early 1970s for the lifting of the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building.  (The reader can get a correct reading of these reflections just below.  We have flipped the picture.)

In the century since Seattle Hardware moved out and the building grew to six floors this storefront has been home for a parade of purveyors beginning with Wells Fargo.  More recently Bartells Drugs, and Dalton Books held the corner and now Starbucks.  In the “now” photograph a second promoter stands near the door to the coffee magnet and holds a sign that reads, “Disabled. Will Work. Navy Vet 78/82 Thanks.”  This thankful modeling cost the photographer five dollars.  Merry Christmas.

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THE MADRONA SEA MONSTER

(A smaller version of this appeared in Pacific the last time April Fools fell on a Sunday – surely within the last ten years.  This is a longer version – a rough draft for the part this story will play in “Keep Clam,” the book I am still writing about Ivar and Ivar’s.  I certainly do hope to finish it this year!)

It was a late February afternoon, 1947, and Ivar was still riding the tail of international excitement over the spilled syrup.  A gardener named Thomas (no first name given) saw it first.  While trimming a hedge beside the A.B. Barrie home above Madrona Beach, Thomas looked out over a placid Lake Washington and saw “the hump.”  Almost immediately his employer, Mrs. Barrie, saw it too, the “large crinkly-backed object” swimming south towards Leschi.  “It was about 100 feet long but I could only see the middle which was about 25 feet . . . I thought its tail and head were submerged.”  In the excitement both still reasonably assumed that the tale was probably forked and that the head resembled the face of a dragon.   The experience shook Mrs. Barrie’s gardener.  “He paled and left. I haven’t seen him since.”

What was needed to corroborate this first sighting of the Madrona Sea Monster was someone who could both get a picture of it and keep clam while doing it.  Enter the historic opportunist Ivar Haglund, the steady owner then of two aquariums, one on Pier 54 beside his nearly new Acres of Clam seafood café and the other in Vancouver B.C. beside Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park.

To speed the capture Ivar offered a $5000 reward.  “While the cost of building a tank for a hundred-foot long ferocious monster would be considerable I was willing to make the sacrifice.”   Next Ivar got the picture, or a picture, which he claimed, “clearly shows an uncommon creature,” but also hid its forked tail and ferocious face.  Ivar conceded that this first evidence of the Madrona Sea Monster might be interpreted as the rumps of several ducks swimming in a line.   “Still I took a picture anyway. Five minutes later the thing submerged and didn’t come up again.”

Other sightings soon followed including confirmation from another landmark restaurateur, Ray Lichtenberger of Ray’s Boathouse in Ballard.  Ray claimed to have seen it “heading out to sea.”  A.T. Goodman, assistant lockmaster, agreed that a clever monster could have made it through the Chittenden locks by hiding beneath a vessel.  Goodman also hinted that should the monster be caught in foreign waters it may be extradited to face charges on not paying for its flight through the locks at Ballard.  Another authority confirmed that “sea monsters can survive on salt water, fresh water, or bourbon and water.”

While Ivar felt the monster hysteria rising around him he kept his wits.  For instance, he instantly caught the failure of army barge skipper Sam Wiks’ report of seeing a snake-necked creature browsing on Kelp south of Dutch Harbor.  “Sea monsters are carnivorous! What was this one doing munching on kelp?”  Ivar was certain that they favored fresh tuna.”

With every failure to catch the monster Ivar’s confidence grew.   “Madrona will probably be caught soon.  It’s getting careless.”  Confident that Madrona was headed for Vancouver, he equipped every aquarium attendant there with gill nets and sliced Tuna.  The Vancouver Sun reported that Ivar had also parked purse seiners behind his aquarium “preparing to net Madrona, the Sea Monster, which he intends to place in the aquarium for the rest of eternity.  ‘Sea monsters never die’ Ivar explained.”

In early March the United Press reported that Madrona had been sited heading for the open ocean.  Dismayed that the monster might escape, Ivar exclaimed, “I’ve spent the past 24 hours scanning the waters of Puget Sound along with every fisherman I know.  All we’ve seen is debris.  I don’t know which I saw the most of  — flotsam or jetsam.”  In the end Haglund found consolation in philosophy.  “Who are we to say that from the boundless depths of the ocean all the mysteries have been uncovered and brought to the surface?”

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A Blog Exclusive!!!

MORE EVIDENCE That DEMOCRATS HAVE MORE FUN – A WHITE HOUSE TOGA PARTY with Eleanor and Franklin.

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BLOG AESTHETICS – 4 PAINTINGS

It required three  years – or more – to complete these four paintings and several others, if they are completed.  But I like this quartet, and so will decide now  to let them go.   They are, again, part of a group that is distinguished by the technique I used to paint them.  The medium was, fortunately, not expensive or I would not have developed its techniques.   As noted above I’d like to “game” it, and ask readers – those who have got this far – to suggest what they imagine or know that the technique and media might be or are.  I’ll report on the reports next week, and then reveal all, which will either confirm what is offered from others or prove to be unique.   Frankly, it takes perhaps more than I have got to develop a new medium and/or technique, or are their new things under the sun that also continue into the dark and through it?

 

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

The third link brings back – as introduction – a story done here about the view from Harborview Hospital to the Central Business District.  It first appeared here (on the blog)  on Jan 15, 2011.

The fourth link begins with the Sprague Hotel on Yesler Way, and appeared here first on Nov. 28, 2009.

Number Five – counting Links – takes a look into Belltown from Denny Hill, and was first published in the blog on May 3, 2009..

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DUPLEX on COLUMBIA

(First appear in Pacific, Oct. 1, 1995)

Between Seattle’s “great fire” of 1889 and the First World War, the sparsely developed neighborhood between downtown and the top of First Hill was rapidly filled in. Rental homes, duplexes and wooden terraces or row houses accommodated the migration that swelled the city’s population sevenfold in 25 years.

As with these duplexes on Columbia Street just west of Fifth Avenue, there was great variety among them. Strip the Victorian rooming house in the center of this scene of its ornaments – the balusters, posts, extended eaves, trusses and the decorated terra-cotta tiles at the peak of its roofline – and a large shed would remain. But their owners seemed required to give their renters, however transitory, some touches of architectural grace. Here these concerns end at the roof, which is covered minimally with what appears to be unrolled tar-paper. To the right of the telephone pole a front porch sign reads “The Home Light Housekeeping Furnished Rooms.” The two white dots below it are milk bottles.

The duplex on the left is upscale from its neighbor, with a roof of cedar shingles and a brick foundation. (The center structure is most likely built on posts hidden behind wooden skirts.) All these residences use horizontal clapboards, but the house on the left frames its siding at other angles below and above the windows in the building’s front bays. The popular Victorian ornament of fish-scale shingles appears where the bay window swells between the first and second floors.

A glimpse of the brick south wall of the new First United Methodist Church is evident just above the gable, upper right, of the center duplex. The congregation still worships there. In 1951, they dedicated their new Parish House on the site of these old duplexes.

With a little searching the row on Columbia can be found in both the above photo from circa 1891-2 and the view below taken from the Hoge building at Second and Cherry when it was topped-off in 1911 or soon after.  The landmarks on the horizon above are, to the left, the Central School on the south side of Madison between Sixth and Seventh Aves. (now the freeway) and, center, the Rainier Hotel between Columbia, the street that runs up through the scene, and Marion, 5th and 6th Avenue.  It is seen also in the “featured” photo for today – the row on 5th and Madison.  In the view below the hotel has been scraped away in preparation for a mess of smaller buildings.  St. James has been added to the horizon (1907) and still with its dome, which it lost to the “Big Snow” of 1916.  Also filling the bottom-left quarter of the format is the Central Building on the east side of Third between Columbia and Madison.   If you are still searching for the row on Columbia’s north side and west of 5th Ave. you will find them in both images some distance above and to the right of the scene’s centers.

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The triplex at Spring and Boren is an example of the distinguished and yet affordable Victorian housing that was typical of Seattle during its boom decades between 1880 and 1910.  Although both sturdy and stately many of these structures were short-lived, replaced with larger brick structures like the apartment house that took the place of 1017, 1019 and 1021 Spring Street.     Historical photo courtesy of John E. Kelly III.

STAR-CROSSED ON SPRING STREET

Barely detectable, John E. Kelly Jr., the youngest of the then nine Kelly kids, here sits on the lowest of the steps that lead up to 1019 Spring Street, the center address for this triplex of Victorian row houses.   It is a short row and compared to some it displays only a modest face of ornaments, latticework, shingle styles and recessed balconies.  (However, it may have been quite colorful – a “painted lady.”)

Taking the Northern Pacific Route in only its tenth year as a transcontinental, the Kellys moved here from Waterford, New York in 1893 — just in time for the national depression beginning that year.  Still the Kelly’s continued to prosper and multiply with John Senior opening a popular dry goods store downtown.  And John Jr. soon rose from these steps on Spring Street to nurture a Seattle career as an architect.

Next the architect’s son John E. Kelly III continued the family’s talent for professional handiwork with a long career as a naval architect, and a valued activist for heritage with the Sea Scouts, the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society and, thankfully, Kelly-Gailey family history as well.

John “the third’s” mother Eileen, was the daughter of another First Hill household, the David and Elisabeth Gailey family.  While Eileen was attending Broadway High School the Gailey’s bought a hotel, the Knickerbocker at 7^th and Madison, and moved in.  The maturing Eileen’s creative calendar included piano lessons with Nellie Cornish and courtship with John E. Kelly Jr. the lad on the steps.

It was during their dating that the couple shared a moment of unforeseen amusement – a brush of domestic kismet — when they determined that four years after the Kelly family moved out of 1019 Spring Street in 1896 the Gaileys moved in and kept it for eleven years before they left to care for their big hotel.

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“Bridal Row” at the northeast corner of Pike and 6th.

BRIDAL ROW, 6^TH and PIKE

(Appeared first in Pacific, Feb. 23, 1983)

 

In 1888 young Dr. Frantz Coe came west from Michigan looking for a practice and found one in Seattle when ex-mayor Gideon Weed, who was also one of the oldest and most respected physicians in town, invited Coe to share his offices. So the 32-year-old doctor sent for his wife, Carrie, and soon they were settled into 606 Pike Street – one of the six newly built and joined abodes that together were called “Bridal Row.”

The Coes, however, were not on an extended honeymoon, for Carrie had brought with her their three children, Frantzel, Harry and their first-born Herbert. Within a year the Great Fire of 1889 would destroy the Weed and Coe medical offices but not the domestic peace along Bridal Row, which was described by Sophie Fry Bass in her book Pigtail Days in Old Seattle as “an attractive place with flowers in the garden and birds singing in the windows.”

Sophie also lived on Pike Street with her pioneer parents, George and Louisa Frye, just across Sixth Avenue from the Coes. The Fryes had moved there many years before when Pike was a path and their back door opened to the forest. In 1890 the corner of Sixth and Pike was no longer at the edge of town, but it was still largely residential. While the central city was loud with the noises escaping from its booming efforts to rebuild itself after the fire, the residents along Pike were still listening to birds sing, sniffing flowers, and some of them like the Fryes were even milking their own cows and gathering eggs.

Around 9:30 on the Saturday morning of September 20, this settled peace was interrupted by what the next day’s Post-Intelligencer called the “Panic on Pike Street.” Both Sophie Fry and young Herbert Coe were witnesses to a wild event that had “passers-by scattering in terror and women relieving themselves with piercing screams.” Sophie Fry Bass recalled how “I heard the chickens cackle loudly and . . .  I shuddered when I saw the cougar cross Sixth A venue; I could hardly believe my eyes.” The cat had killed a chicken in the Kentucky stables a short distance from the Frye home. There it was also shot in its behind and, quoting the newspaper’s account, “enraged and uttering a terrific yell, it bounded the sidewalk and rushed down Sixth Avenue.” It turned up Pike Street and as “the panic spread to the thronged thoroughfare and all pedestrians made a rush for safety, with two great bounds the cougar landed in the yard of Dr. E.H. Coe’s residence.” Nine-year-old Herbert, who was playing on the porch, heard the warning shots and fled inside behind the fragile safety of the front room window. The big cat went to the window and looked back at him with his claws upon the pane. For one long transfixed moment they stared at one another until a man with a 44-caliber revolver emptied it into the cougar. Eight feet and 160 pounds of wild cat lay still in the flowers along Bridal Row.

In this view of the “Row,” Herbert sits atop the fence post. Behind him is the window that kept the cat from him. In front of him is the wooden planking across Pike Street, which Sophie Frye Bass remembered as at times “mighty smelly like a stable, owing to the horses . . . In summer the water wagon went down the dusty planks each day. There was a street sweeper too, and when it came, all would rush frantically to close the windows.”

By 1895 with the encouragement of a very good practice and the steady conversion of Pike Street into a commercial thoroughfare, Frantz Coe and his wife Carrie left Bridal Row and took their children up to a bigger home on First Hill. There an older Herbert recalled he no longer needed to check under his bed each night for the lurking cougar. By 1902 they moved again to Washington Park and into a new home with a view out over the lake.

In 1903 Pike Street was regraded all the way to Broadway Avenue, and Bridal Row was put up on stilts and a new story of storefronts moved in beneath.

Dr. Frantz Coe died suddenly in 1904, two years before his son Herbert graduated from his father’s alma mater, the University of Michigan Medical School. On July 15, 1962 the Seattle Times published a feature article titled “Seattle’s Four Grand Old Men.” One of these was the “beloved” Dr. Herbert Coe who by then had for 54 years been an essential part of the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, including 30 years as its chief of surgical services and ten years as chief of staff.

Herbert Coe died in 1968 at the age of 87. He is survived by his two sons and widow Lucy Campbell Coe, daughter of pioneer hardware man James Campbell. Mrs. Coe recalled for us the details of young Herbert’s confrontation with the cougar and supplied the photograph of Bridal Row. She was born here in 1887 or one year before her future husband’s family settled into Bridal Row.  (Remembering that it is now nearly 30 years since this feature first appeared in Pacific.)

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BROKEN HYDRANT AT PIKE AND SIXTH!

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 19 1997)

The occasion for this small disaster on Sixth Avenue has eluded me. Neither the records of the city’s engineering department (the photo is theirs), nor those of the fire or water department’s (a hydrant has been broken), nor a search of the daily papers for March 3, 1920 (the date captioned on the negative), has offered the slightest hint. Still, the event was significant enough to call out the city’s photographer to record it.

One flood at Sixth and Pike, however, gives me an excuse to refer to another.

In her delightful book “Pig-tail Days in Old Seattle” – a treasure of local pioneer reminiscences – Sophie Frye Bass, who grew up beside this intersection when Pike was still an ungraded wagon road, recalls how after a rain the streams that once ran across Pike “became torrents.” One stormy Christmas, Sophie took a “pretty mug” she had found in her stocking outside “to play in the water when the swift current caught it out of my hand and carried it away. Evidently it was not meant for me, for it said on it, in nice gold letters, ‘For a good girl.’ ”

Also in her book, Bass, granddaughter of Mary and Arthur Denny, recalls how on a Saturday morning in the late summer of 1890 the peace of this place was suddenly interrupted when a cougar raided a chicken coop and bounded through the intersection, scattering pedestrians along Pike. (The incident described in the feature directly above this one.)  The puma’s Pike was already a mix of residences and storefronts, and Sophie Fry Bass’ streams had by then been diverted. Still, the difference between that Sixth and Pike and this one in 1920, 30 years later, is nearly as radical as that between 1920 and 1997.  (This feature, of course, first appeared in 1997.)

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Looking east on Pike towards its intersection with 5th Avenue.

PIKE STREET “FRESHET”

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 29, 1995)

This flash flood along Pike Street did not come from above, but from below. On the morning of May 3, 1911, a contractor’s steam shovel cutting a grade for Fifth Avenue through the old University of Washington campus sunk its steel teeth into a sizable city water main. In moments the pressure within tore the pipe like a cooked noodle, releasing a geyser at Fifth Avenue’s intersection with University Street. There the flood divided, one channel moving west along University toward First Avenue and the other north on Fifth Avenue, where it split twice more, first at Union and then Pike streets.

This view – complete with wading dog – looks east on Pike toward its intersection with Fifth Avenue. “For half an hour the district between Pike and Madison streets from Third to First avenue was flooded,” reported the next morning’s Post-Intelligencer. “Improvised bridges of planks served to carry pedestrians across the rivers, horses floundered along hock-deep in the yellow waters, street cars left a swell like motor boats and the appearance of things was generally demoralized.”

Damage from this man-made freshet was minimal – a few basements were puddled. The water rarely leaped the curbs, although this sidewalk along Pike seems an exception. At the alley behind the former Seattle Times plant on Union Street, a dike was quickly constructed from bundles of news•papers, preventing the tide from spilling onto the presses. The reporter for The Times was amused by the many “funny situations” created, including the scene “where a hurrying couple avoided delay and kept the feet of a least one dry by the man picking up his companion and carrying her across the small river.”

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The diverse row above was ultimately razed for the building of the Yesler Terrace Housing.  The example of the new housing below is not, however, from the same corner at Jefferson and Eighth but from some distance to the south in the main body of the project.  But it was recorded with the project was brand new and a national model..

FIRST HILL NEIGHBORS

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 5, 1990)

Working for the Seattle Housing Authority, the photographer of this historical view was gathering evidence of an aging neighborhood that soon would be razed for the modern public housing planned by the agency. Harborview Hospital’s bright Art Deco facade offers a contrast to the weathered clapboards of the old homes, and it was the houses, not the hospital, that interested the photographer of the older scene. The professional even has decapitated the hospital’s tower at the top of the view’s original 5-by-7 -inch negative.

The house with the hanging laundry was at the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Jefferson Street. The scene was recorded around 1939, the year the city directory lists Florence Pinkerton and Herbert Curtis living in the corner house. Rinosuke Hiroshige lived next door – the home in the middle – and Bernard Brereton lived in the house on the right.

In the window on the far left the afternoon sun reflects from the back of a chair and an elbow it supports. Perhaps either Herbert Curtis or Florence Pinkerton are keeping a watch on the photographer whose big camera is another indication that they will soon be moving.

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BELLTOWN BEACH TOWN –

Two kinds of row / Above the bluff and down below.

(First appears in Pacific, July 12, 1998)

In the 1890s, the waterfront from Pike Street north to Broad Street was developed into a community of shacks made from scrounged materials, including those deposited by the tides. There was only one break in the bluff separating this squatters’ strip from the Denny Hill neighbors above them. The north entrance to this “Belltown ravine” shows at far left in this scene recorded from the Great Northern Railroad trestle in 1898 or ’99 by Norwegian photographer Anders Wilse. North of Bell Street, a lower bluff resumed and petered away by Broad Street.

Photographs of this same section of waterfront recorded in the late 1880s show a native camp of tents and lean-tos. Pioneer and Native American accounts tell of the Duwamish tribe using this spring-fed site as a traditional campground. Here (referring to the top picture of this small beach group) the entrance to the ravine is crowded with the waterfront’s most ambitious grouping of shacks, appointed with their own seawall and flagpole.

A Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter who visited this “strange beachcombers’ village” in 1891 noted that “you can hear a dozen languages and dialects. Heavy-faced Indians, black-eyed Greeks, swarthy Italians, red-haired Irishmen and Danes, Swedes and Norwegians with flaxen locks are mingled in this cosmopolitan settlement. The men fish, do longshore jobs, pick up driftwood and lounge in the sun, while the women stand at their doors and gossip, and the children, too young to know social or race distinctions, dig holes in the cliff and the beach, make houses of pebbles and launch boats in the waves.” ,

Beginning in 1903, construction of the north approach to the Great Northern tunnel beneath the city uprooted this beach community, replacing it with more tracks and fill. Soon the ravine was also filled with Denny Hill dirt, which, included at least one native skeleton, discovered last February at this site during foundation work on the Port of Seattle’s World Trade Center.  (This, as noted, was written in 1998.)

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ODDS & END for OTHER ROWS & SUCH

Looking north on Third Ave. from Columbia Street. Here are at least two evidences of boomtown stresses, the regrade itself, and the juxtaposition – nearly – of the row houses facing Marion on the right and the new Stander Hotel across Marion, and the Martin Van Buren Stacy mansion at the northeast corner of Marion and Third. Eventually, the mansion would also be “stressed” by change, and turned 90 degrees to face Marion Street, where it served for decades as the home of one of Seattle’s better restaurants, the Maison Blanc.

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One of the grander early rows appears on the left of this snow scene from the 1890s with the familiar landmarks of Central School, on the right, and the Rainier Hotel, on the left.  The row faces Columbia Street from its north side between Seventh and Sixth Avenues, now part of the I-5 trench.  The same row appears below – its back side.  This subject is shot from Sixth Avenue looking to the southeast.  The age of it may be estimated by the models of the cars.   It is a Standard station.

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Two unidentified rows – above and below – printed from nitrate negatives gone bad and long ago extracted from the Municipal Archive.

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(click to enlarge photos)

The intended Seattle terminus for the Tacoma Interurban was at Pike Street but that required a climb on First Avenue too steep for the line’s heavy three-car trains.  Consequently, for the duration – the twenty-six years it served between 1902 and 1928 – the principal common carrier to Tacoma and thru the Green River valley paused here instead, on Occidental Ave. between Yesler Way and Washington Street. Soon the block was proliferated by “Interurbans” – a hotel, a grocer, a café, and perhaps inevitably the grandest structure on the block, the bank building on the left, became known as the Interurban Building, and still is.

It is a trailing dark green Parlor Car that is parked here just south of Yesler Way.  One paid an extra quarter over the 60 cent fair to ride in it, but you got pillowed seats, a white-coated porter fussing after your comfort, and status.  At one of the more vibrant corners in town, this terminus sidewalk was often crowded.  Clearly hats were required – everyone seems to wear one.  The man far left under the conductor’s hat has at his feet another commonplace of the time, packages bound with string sensibly in plain paper.  At the center is another stock specialist for a busy corner – the newspaper “boy.”

We will figure the date here as sometime between or around the fall of 1906 and Nov. 28, 1908, when the Globe Medical Institute ran their first and last ads in the Seattle Times promising “quick cures, honest dealing, small fees, easy terms” from “Seattle’s most reliable specialists for all diseases of men.”  There’s a Globe sign in the Korn Building window upper-right.  Among other cheats, Dr. Lukens, the proprietor, gave perfunctory five-minute physicals for five dollars to unemployed men collard on the Skid Road sidewalks by “employment agents.”  The men were always in perfect health.  After directing the eager laborer’s to Lukens office for the required “exams”, the agent quickly and conveniently disappeared with the professed jobs, to return later, of course, for his cut.

At the Washington Street end of the block, in the Interurban Hotel, the teenage hustler Violet McNeal got rich working another health hoax, this one selling magic potions concocted of Oriental herbs and beeswax.  She later confessed all in her book “Four White Horses and a Brass Band.”

It is often noted that it was in this block that Pioneer Square turned into Skid Road, a neighborhood attractive to quacks, hucksters, hustlers, suckers, and for a quarter-century passengers to Tacoma.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly but with some restraint compared to some of the previous hordes.   These five or six or seven (depending upon finding the images) features are all pulled from past Pacifics.  Mixed with them will be the supporting illustration that, of course, never made it into the newspaper where the space is a fraction of what this free media allows.   We will begin with the first attention that the Tacoma Interurban got in this now thirty year series of repeats.  It was first published on Nov. 6, 1983 and some of its “points” were used again, above.

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A PLUSH COMMUTE TO TACOMA & BACK

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 6, 1983)

Two commuters recline at the observation end of the plush parlor car, using the ornamental brass railing as a prop. Another passenger to the right exhales a puff of cigar smoke; yet another looks back into the mahogany interior of the car. Inside are 58 pillowy seats where the Seattle and Tacoma Interurban’s more affluent or exuberant riders are attended by a porter. Although these parlor cars were painted the same dark green color as the rest of the Puget Sound Electric Railway’s rolling stock, they were obviously something special. For the classy ride, complete with an enclosed view from the observation deck, passengers paid an extra quarter over the regular 60-cent fare.     Using its corporate initials, the PSER advertised a ride resplendent with “Pleasure, Safety, Economy and Reliability.” The electrically propelled trip was free of cinders and smoke, smooth and fast: the trip included the thrill of “going like sixty. ”

When the Interurban started service in 1902, the automobile was still a sporting novelty for a few of the well-to-do. The practical and preferred way of getting to and from Tacoma was via the Mosquito Fleet steamers that buzzed about Puget Sound. The second choice was via rail.

Heading either south or north, lnterurban passengers could glimpse the mountain Tacoma passengers called ” Tacoma” and Seattle riders called “Rainier.” The route passed through hop fields, dairy farms, truck gardens, coal fields, orchards, forests, one tunnel and an Indian reservation. It took an hour and 40 minutes to cover the line’s 32.2 miles. Some stops like Burts, Floraville and Mortimer are now as abandoned as the rail itself. Others like Georgetown, Allentown, Renton, Kent and Auburn are still familiar.

Within the city limits the Interurban ran over municipal rails and attached its trolley poles to electric lines overhead. But as soon as it crossed the city limits, a motorman would lower his pole and hook up with the mysterious third rail, or contact rail, that ran parallel to the other two.

This third rail was alive with electricity. School children were regularly warned not to touch it. Chickens, however, were sometimes encouraged to peck at the grain strategically sprinkled along its side. Interurban electrocution was a new way of preparing a fowl for plucking.

The Interurban hit its heyday in 1919 when more than 3 million passengers used the line. But within nine years the line’s haul dropped to less than a million. By 1917 highway 99 was finished and the Model T was commonplace. Service along the third rail was threatened.

At 11:30 Sunday evening on Dec. 30, 1928, the last Interurban cars pulled out from Tacoma and Seattle. The Tacoma bound car left from the intersection of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way, for 26 years the location of the Interurban Depot.

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At 115 Occidental South Tats Deli now (2006) sells steaks and subs where the Star Theatre once offered “2 Big Features” for a dime.  The theatre photo dates from 1937.

STAR THEATRE on OCCIDENTAL AVE.

(First appeared in Pacific, early 2006)

In 1937 John Danz was fifty years old and already in his 21st year of running the Star Theatre on Occidental Avenue a half block south of Yesler Way.   Dance immigrated from Russian with his parents.  Later he also migrated from running his Sterling Men’s Wear on 2nd Avenue South to building the largest independent theatre circuit in the Pacific Northwest.  And he kept the name Sterling, ultimately calling it the Sterling Recreation Organization or SRO for short.

It was with his purchase of the Star in 1916 that Danz made the fateful switch from running – with his brothers – a haberdashery with the lure of a nickelodeon at the front door to building a chain of dedicated theatres.   Since Danz was an independent he did not get first runs films, – at first – but drew his customers with low admission prices and double features.   Here the Star is open during the Great Depression – the photograph dates from 1937 – and a small crowd of men is reading the theatre’s broadsides at the sidewalk.   Above and behind them the cheap ten-cent admission is advertised famously in a big sign extending from the second floor over the sidewalk.   Another sign of the depression-time economy of the Skid Road is posted one door south of the Star (to the left) where S. Miyato, the proprietor of the Interurban Hotel, is renting rooms for 25 cents a night.

A year earlier in 1936 Danz purchased the Pantages Theatre at Third Ave and University Street.  Renaming it the Palomar the terra-cotta landmark added class to his chain of by then seven theatres.  The Palomar was also a long-time home for his operations.   By the 1950s SRO owned 25 theatres in or near Seattle.

In a 1922 Seattle Times nostalgia piece on “Old Time Buildings [that] Hold Realms (perhaps “reams” was meant) of Forgotten Stories, a Star Theatre is recalled. “The Star Theatre of today, [is] a two-story building whose exterior plainly speaks of better days.  In 1897 it bore the same name but ‘Flaky’ Barnett ran there also a dance hall [where] in a railed-off center space, gaily dressed girls danced with their partners, earning besides their salary, a share of each drink purchased by their partner.”  In that Star a dime might have got you a dance.

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OCCIDENTAL AVENUE, Ca. 1872

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 3, 1986)

The first thing to note about this early Occidental Avenue view is that it is one of a kind. For it was a rare moment when a photographer took the time to step one block away from all the commercial bustle on Commercial Street (First Avenue South) and shoot the idle irregularity of this tiny side street.

Both the original negative and prints for this scene are now long sing gone missing. However, the flip side of the second-generation copy print in the University of Washington’s Historical Photography Collection still carries a caption, which adds three details to this scene. The caption claims that the photo was taken in 1872, that the prominent white clapboard on the right is Mrs. Frances Guye’s boardinghouse and that the shed on the left is A. Slorak’s saloon. That’s it.

Photos, of course, also speak for themselves and this one tells us how in 1872 Occidental Avenue still dipped a bit at Washington Street – or halfway between the photographer and the Occidental hotel two blocks to the north. Actually, not too many years before this scene was shot, that intersection was part of a tide marsh. As Sophie Frye Bass recalls in her Pigtail Days in Old Seattle, “Occidental Avenue was almost Occidental waterway, a way of tides and logs and drift from Yesler’s Mill, a way where Indians beached their canoes and where crows dropped clams on the rocks to break the shells and swooped down in a rush before watchful gulls could gobble them.” So what we see here in 1872 is Seattle’s first reclamation project – a relatively dry and tide-free Occidental Avenue.

The people-less view of the street was somewhat prophetic: In 1872 Seattle had its first bank failure and, oddly, the deaths in town outnumbered the births 21 to 18. But there was a luster in the gray clouds. The little city also got its first brick building and there were 25 marriages, suggesting both a sturdier and statistically brighter future.

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OCCIDENTAL NORTH of MAIN STREET, 1911

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 9, 1992)

Even from two blocks to the south and looking north over Main Street the elegant conclusion of Occidental Avenue at Yesler Way is well-lit with the ornate facade of the Seattle Hotel. Behind it, the top floors of the Alaska Building top off the scene and the city. When it was built at Second Avenue and Cherry Street in 1904, the Alaska Building was Seattle’s first skyscraper, an elevation it maintained until the Hoge Building was put up in 1911, the likely year this scene was photographed.  The primary subject is most likely the first ornamental street-lighting system by the Seattle Lighting Department (precursor to City Light). Designed by the department’s head, J.D. Ross, the five-ball clusters on ornamental iron poles were described in the department’s 1911 report as “generally admired by tourists and visitors from all parts of the country . . . This design gives a beautiful effect of festoons of decorative lights along the sidewalks, and at the same time secures a uniform illumination on all parts of the street.”

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Built in 1890 the often-notorious three-story brick block at the northwest corner of Second Avenue S. and Washington Street was prudently reduced to a single story following the 1949 earthquake. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey.)

SIN SUDS & A FREE LUNCH

(Appeared in Pacific early in 2003)

In the mid-1990s frustrated by the chronic confusion over both the names and historic uses of the buildings of the Pioneer Square Historic District, Greg Lange and Tim O’Brian joined their years of research on the neighborhood and came up with an inventory.   For most of District’s landmark structures they agreed — but not on this 3-story brick at the northwest corner of Second Avenue S. and Washington Street.

Tim O’Brian called it “The Schlesinger-Brodek Block.”   John Schlesinger and Gustave Brodek built it in 1890 upon the ashes of the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.  Greg Lange chose the name Consodine as a kind of landmark reward for its most famous tenant, the impresario John Considine.   The contrite and tea-totaling Considine operated the notoriously lewd and looped People’s Theater in the basement.   His career there and elsewhere is skillfully portrayed in Murray Morgan’s classic of Seattle history: “Skid Road” with his own chapter, “John Considine and the Box-Houses, 1893-1910.”

In this view the open stairway to the basement theater is behind the horses and beneath the sign that reads “Free Lunch Down Stairs.”  The two uniformed policemen standing in front of the mural-sized Rainier Beer sign mostly hide at knee-level the name “People’s Café.”  By this time – early 20th Century – Considine has likely moved on and up to run his national vaudeville circuit and left his basement box-house to sell beer with the lure of free nuts and sandwiches sans sin.

Billy’s Mug was this building’s second famous tenant.  His signs hang over the sidewalk both on the left and over the corner.  In his book “Early Seattle Profiles” Henry Broderick, local real estate tycoon, remembers William “Billy” Belond’s tavern  “where on a fifty foot long bar skillful bartenders would slide a filled beer mug along the sudsy bar ten or fifteen feet so it would come to stop in front of the customer.”

By the Lang-O’Brian inventory here are some other historic tenants.  The Apollo Café, the Oregon Hotel (see the sign upper-left), Barney’s Jewelry and Loan, the Iron Kettle, the Union Gospel Mission Bargain House, and since the late 1930s the Double Header.  The ambitiously named State Medical Institute, whose banner runs the length the building between its second and third floors, was a short-term tenant.  Most likely this “institute” was a collection of doctor’s offices more than a school operated by a learned association of physicians.

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Besides the street trees and the historic three-ball light standard on the right the obvious difference in the “now” is the parking lot that in 1969 replaced the storefronts that held the northeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Washington Street when, toting his camera, Werner Langenhager visited the block now fifty-six years ago.

SKID ROAD IVAR – 1956

We may celebrate the photographer Werner Langenhager’s sizeable and sensitive record of Seattle with this “golden anniversary” example of his work. [2006]  With his back to Second Avenue Langenhager looks west on Washington Street to its intersection with Occidental Avenue where, most obviously, the big block letters for Ivar’s fish bar hold the northwest corner.

Ivar was sentimental about these pioneer haunts.  During his college years in the 1920s he wrote a paper on the Skid Road for his class in sociology.  To get it right Ivar spend a week living in a neighborhood hotel, visiting the missions, and betting in the Chinese lotteries.

For his first try at returning to the neighborhood as a restaurateur Ivar bought the old popcorn wagon in Pioneer Place (then the more popular name than Pioneer Square) in the early 1950s.  He planned to convert it into a chowder dispensary.  And he proposed building a replica of Seattle’s original log cabin also, of course, for selling chowder.  For different reasons both plots plopped and instead in 1954 he opened this corner fish house.  He called it his “chowder corner.”

Consulting the Polk City Directory for 1956 we can easily build a statistical profile for Ivar’s neighbors through the four “running blocks” of Occidental between Yesler Way and Main and Washington between First and Second.  Fifteen taverns are listed including the Lucky, the Loggers, the Oasis and the Silver Star.  But there were also ten cafes (including Ivar’s), six hotels, four each of barbers and cobblers, three second-hand shops, two drug stores, one loan shop, one “Loggers Labor Agency” and five charities, including the Light House.

The 1956 statistic for these four blocks that best hints at how this historic neighborhood was then in peril of being razed for parking is the vacancies.  There were twelve of them.

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After the Seattle National Bank Building at the southeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way became the depot for the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban railway in 1903 it became popularly known as the Interurban Building.  It is the name that is now preferred, although it has also been called both the Pacific block and the Smith Tower Annex.

THE INTERURBAN BUILDING

(Appeared in Pacific, March 2006)

Not yet 30 the English-born architect John Parkinson moved to Seattle with fateful good timing.  He arrived in January 1889, a little less than a half-year before the business district was kindling for the “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.  In the post-fire reconstruction Parkinson’s talent for design was soon patronized and his surviving Seattle National Bank Building displays, to quote the modern expert Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, “a remarkable level of coherence and repose in contrast to the agitated work of so many of his contemporaries.”

The most striking feature of this Romanesque landmark is either the Lyon over the bank’s corner front door or the building’s color: a coherent red from sidewalk to cornice.  At its base Parkinson used red sandstone shipped from Colorado rather than the commonplace gray stone quarried in the Northwest and used by most of the bank’s neighbors.

While Ochsner has the bank completed in 1892, that might have been the year for finishing touches.  This view may date from the spring of 1891 when the Pioneer Place (Square) neighborhood was decorated with fir trees – like those on the right — for the May 6 visit of Benjamin Harrison.  (The President rode a Yesler Way Cable Car – like Car #13 on the left – out to Leschi, boarded the lake steamer “Kirkland” to Madison Park, and returned to town on the Madison Cable Railway.)

In this view a book and stationary store, Union Hardware, and the Wilcox Grocery all face Occidental Ave.  The Queen City Business College is on the second floor, while the Washington Temperance Magazine, and several lawyers have offices upstairs.

After a stint as the first official architect for Seattle schools, Parkinson left for Los Angeles where he had more than considerable success.  Through his L.A. career the young architect grew old and counted both the city’s famed coliseum and city hall among his accomplishments.

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”
(Appeared first in the Pacific, June 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.

“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 on the 7th or 8th that this record of their silhouette was captured for the district was still generally hot and smoldering 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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[If I have some luck in finding one or more other related features and soon, I’ll attach them later today – Sunday.  If not they will show up later and fit somewhere then as well.]

WEB EXTRAS

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(click to enlarge photos)

On the third day of the four-day snowstorm that visited us last January – the one that kept schools closed, and had auto body shops polishing their tools for the expected parade of clanking fenders – Jean drove downtown, carefully.

His repeat of the historical snow scene that looks south on Second Avenue from Pike Street is relatively lean on snow but seems just as cold as the earlier snow – or colder.  The psychological warmth of the older snow might have something to do with the glow reflecting from the 5-ball cluster light standards, Jeweler Benjamin Gates sidewalk clock and the many snuggling store fronts that once made this stretch of Second Avenue one of the city’s most sparkling commercial strips.

The Big Snow of 1916 still holds as the second deepest blizzard in the city’s history. “On Tuesday, the first of February, when the commuters began leaving work around 5pm the snow became devoted to falling.  Twenty-four hours later 21.5 new inches were measured . . . This is still a record – our largest 24-hour pile.”  There I have quoted from my own “History of Seattle Snow” which can be found in the blog Jean and I share with Beranger Lomont – the blog referenced every Sunday at the bottom of “now and then.”

We will start with the Clemmer Theatre for a short review of three of the well-lit businesses on the east – left – side of this block.  Built in 1912 exclusively for photoplays, aka movies, with its 1200 seats the Clemmer won the distinction in 1915 to show “Birth of the Nation,” described at the time as “the most tremendous dramatic spectacle that the brain of man has yet produced.”  Meanwhile, and nearby, Boston Dentists were already ten years into half-a-century on this corner promoting themselves as “The originator of low prices for first class dentistry.”

As for “shoes,” fourteen of the 34 Seattle shoe retailers listed in 1915 were located on 2nd or within a half block of it.  Of the 34 one – or half of the Wallin and Nordstrom, far left – is still boosting shoes in Seattle, although not at this corner.

WEB EXTRAS

As you know, Paul, I wandered around downtown for a couple of hours. Here are a couple repeats and a playful angle for your amusement.

Anything to add, Paul?

YES Jean, and with Ron Edge’s help we will first put up the fountainhead of Chief Seattle in Pioneer Place (square) under a frosting of the 1916 snow as a button to click, which will take the reader to that part of our History of Seattle Snows that treats on 1916.  Following that there will certainly be some repetition in the few stories we include below.  We may have even run one or more of them in a previous contribution (we don’t keep count), but we are always reminded and comforted then by my mother’s advise “Repetition is the mother of all learning.”  When I asked her, “What then is the father of all learning.”  She answered, “Memory does not need them.”

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Eight-seven Februaries separate these two views of First Avenue looking south from Virginia Street into Belltown. (2003)  On the right side of both scenes the Hotel Preston, it seems, is the only survivor  — at least in the foreground blocks and in 2003. (Historical view courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive)

BELLTOWN BLIZZARD

(First appeared in 2004)

The “Big Snow” of 1916 was a weeklong spectacle that may be the single most photographed event in the history of the city.  (I’m referring to “unplanned events” here; world fairs and summer festivals don’t count in this calculation.) Probably everyone who owned a camera got it out between Sunday, Jan 30 when the snow began to fall and the following Sunday Feb. 6, when the first snow-stalled trains – 19 of them – reached Seattle. On Monday the 7^th, city streets were sufficiently cleared so that all the streetcars lines were again in operation.

This view looks south on First Avenue from Virginia Street.  In 1916 the street was lined mostly by one to three story structures – a mix of frame and brick – that would typically have “rooms” upstairs and businesses at the street level.   Between Pine and Bell streets the structures on the west side of First Avenue (like those on the left side of this scene) were generally a few years older than those on the east side of First.  The reason was regrades.

Between 1900 and 1903 the east side of First north of Pine Street was effectively a cliff until the Second Avenue Regrade of 1903-06 moved this steep bank one block east to the east side of Second.  With its modern grade the buildings on the right of this scene, like the Hotel Preston, could be quickly built to prosper, it was hoped, in a brave, new and nearly level Belltown. Instead, the commonplace urban legend that attaches itself to many small old hotels that at some point they operated also as “harlot hotels” may actually be true here on First Avenue.  Belltown never really recovered from the depression of 1907 until the 1970s when it began its transformation into a Seattle mini-version of Vancouver’s West End; a neighborhood of high-rises.

No enthused amateur recorded this snapshot.  Rather, James Lee, for many years the official photographer for the city’s Department of Public Works, made it.  Lee’s work has been shown many times in this weekly feature.  I am thankful both to him and the 1916 Snow, which has also frequently fallen here.

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The Big Snow of early February 1916 may have been the city’s greatest photographic subject – of relatively short duration.   Here Herbert R Harter who described himself as a photographer in the 1915 city directory pointed his camera north on Railroad Avenue from the Marion Street overpass.   Photo courtesy, Dan Kerlee

In 1935 when motor vehicles already dominated the waterfront Railroad Avenue got its name changed to Alaskan Way.

SNOW on SNOW on SNOW

One of the marks for the community’s passage of time is our Big Snow of 1916.  While still celebrated it is, of course, increasingly not remembered.   A very small circle of Seattle “natives” now recalls events of 90 years ago vividly.

Not so long ago the 1916 blizzard was still remembered.  Ten years ago during our latter day big snow of 1996, any born and bred local of, say, 90 would have remembered the snowfall that began in earnest on the late afternoon of Feb. 1, 1916.   By 5 pm on Feb. 2 the Weather Bureau at the Hoge Building at Second Ave. and Cherry Street measured 26 inches.  This is still our 24-hour record.   Five hours later the depth reached 29 inches.

This view of the historic pile-up looks north up the waterfront from the Marion Street overpass.  Here are the several “railroad piers” built early in the 20^th Century with boom-time profits increased by the Yukon/Alaska gold rush of the late 1890s.  Most survive.  The smaller structure right of center is an earlier version of Fire Station No. 5

Canada’s Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad built the ornate pier filling the left foreground in 1914.  Here passengers could board the railroad’s own “mosquito fleet’ of sleek steamers for a scenic ride north to the railroads west coast terminus at Prince Rupert and there make connections for “all points east.”   The railroads first pier here was built in 1911 but destroyed by fire only three years later.  This replacement was built in the style of the original designed by Seattle architect James Eustace Blackwell, and survived until 1964, when it was razed for the staging of vehicles waiting to board Washington State Ferries.

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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)

THE LOCKS “DEWATERED”

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.

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CEMETERY SNOW – 1916

When the Big Snow of 1916 decorated the granite and iron gate at Lake View Cemetery, it was already forty-three years since the first graves were dug there.   After pioneer Doc Maynard died in the spring of 1873 he cooled for a month while a road was built from the village to what was first called the Seattle Masonic Cemetery.   By the early 20^th Century when this ridge got its surviving name — Capitol Hill — the original Lake View was so crowded with headstones that the cemetery was doubled to the east as far as 15^th Avenue E.

This snow-bound gate is on Fifteenth.   But where?   Entrances to the cemetery have moved about.  Following the lead of a map a few years older than this scene (both map and photograph are in the Lake View archive) I recorded the “now” scene a half block north of the contemporary entrance near E. Garfield Street.  (When I can uncover it, this “now” will also show Jean Sherrard across the way, a rare treat.)  But I confess that the lay of the land behind this gate looks more like that inside the present gate than it does the steeper incline in my speculative “now” setting.

This snow scene is one of more than 100 illustrations in Jacqueline B. Williams’s new 200-page history of Capitol Hill.  She lives a short walk from the gate.   Williams has titled her well-wrought history “The Hill With A Future, Seattle’s Capitol Hill, 1900-1946.”    Last spring we reported on it as a work-in-progress and invited readers to help the author with leads.  Now they may help her and themselves with purchases.   This is the energetic author’s tenth book.  Among her other subjects are books on pioneer kitchens and cooking.

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OLMSTED CENTENNIAL

(2003)

Through the coming year (2003) we will have many reminders  — attached to opportunities  — that 2003 is the centennial for the arrival of the Olmsted Brothers.   To celebrate the contributions of this pioneer landscape firm, the Seattle Parks Foundation will feature monthly walking tours consecutively through twelve Seattle Parks that were shaped by the Olmsteds, the most celebrated of national activists in the progressive “city beautiful” movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.   The first tour begins here at Volunteer Park next Saturday, Jan 18 (2003) at 10am.

The Olmsted Bros. are still very much with us.  In the more than 30 years that followed the 1903 introduction of their comprehensive plan for Seattle parks the Olmsteds were involved in 37 park projects.   Their near omnipresence is increased if we add our boulevards, the firm’s designs for many private local gardens, and their master plans for the University of Washington campus as well as the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition.

Volunteer Park at the summit of Capitol Hill was included in the Olmsted’s 1903 report and these recommendations were elaborated the following year with a Preliminary Plan for the park.  This view looks north through the park from the entrance to the water tower – another Olmsted proposal – during the snow of January 3, 1916  – a mere prelude to the “Big Snow” that began falling on the last day of what was then “the coldest month in Seattle history.”

The walkway that appears just above the three figures left of center runs between two lily pools that are planned for restoration during the Olmsted Centennial.   In 1916 both the glass plant Conservatory (top center) and the charming lattice pavilion (right of center) were but four years old.   The latter was replaced in 1932 by the Seattle Art Museum.  The covered bandstand on the far side of the reservoir is the newest structure in this winter scene.  It was completed in 1915 for Volunteer Park’s then frequent and popular concerts.

[This may still work.]  For more information on the Olmsted Centennial including a list of the other parks scheduled for tours you may contact the Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks through their web page,   http://www.seattle.gov/friendsofolmstedparks.

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With its dome collapsed under the “Big Snow” of 1916 because of a flaw in its construction, St. James Cathedral has gone through four renovations and/or restorations, the most recent in 1994.  Built in 1907 the cathedral is fast approaching its centennial.

“NOT A WORD OF THIS TO THE PRESS”

At 3:15 on the afternoon of February 2, the skylight dome of St. James Cathedral neatly folded like a house of cards and carrying the cross behind it fell to the transept floor 120 feet below.  It was the most spectacular collapse of the several local roofs that were crushed under the wet snow dumped during the historic blizzard of the winter of 1916.

In the accompanying photo most of the ruins are hidden beyond and below the partially crushed altar rail that crosses the scene from the right just beyond the steps to the bishop’s chair.  The sancturary was then still elevated four feet above the nave, and the high altar sheltered below its baldachin – a canopy supported by four ornate columns one of which shows in the foreground the historical view.  The repaired cathedral was built at one level and the altar now rests directly below the “oculus Dei.”  This “eye of God” first returned unfiltered light to the sanctuary a part of the cathedral’s most recent restoration in 1994.

The best way to compare the original sanctuary with its present setting is to examine the part that has changed the least — the nave that is capped at its western end with an organ that when it was installed was considered by many as “the best in the west.”   Because of the length of the cathedral and the accompanying acoustic delay a second organ was  installed at its eastern end, and the two can be played from one keyboard.

Thinking of the music, architect Lewis Beezer who helped plan the sanctuary’s reconstruction put the best construction the dome’s collapse when he predicted that the cathedral’s notoriously bad acoustics would be greatly benefited by the much lower and closed dome that was part of the new plans.   And the new roof would also leave no anxious doubts among parishioners that it might fall in again.  Still on the chance that a new, great and open dome might be installed four oversized piers were built at the corners of the transept.  One of these shows left of center in the “now.”

We conclude by briefly recounting two clerical responses to the dome’s collapse as shared with us by the present Director of Cathedral Liturgy, Corinna Laughlin.  When Father Noonan, the church’s pastor, first gazed upon the damage he instructed the editor of the Catholic Progress who was at his side, “Not a word of this to the press.”   By contrast, Bishop O’Dea almost as quickly went to the press with promises that a ‘new and substantial temple will replace the old.”

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Resting as it does besides the “Mediterranean of the Pacific” Seattle, in its now 154 years, has had only six “big snows”—1861-62, 1880 (the deepest), 1893, 1916, 1950 and 1969.  If we join snow-to-mud 1996 may also be added. (This was written before the 2008 snow – but was it big?)  This campus scene is from 1916 – the second deepest of the seven.  Historical photo by Werner Gaerisch courtesy of Doreen Delano.  Contemporary photo  by Jean Sherrard.

CHILLED CHIMES

Almost certainly Werner Gaerisch snapped this campus scene during the “Big Snow of 1916” – a February blanket that still measures as the second deepest in Seattle history.  At the time the German immigrant was a 24-year old baker with – judging by about 200 negatives preserved by his granddaughter Doreen Delano – an extraordinarily sensitive eye.

While the snow itself is perhaps the general subject the Campus Chimes is its centerpiece.  Built originally as a water tower for the new campus in the mid-1890s it was clothed and converted into a Gothic belfry in 1912 when Seattle Times publisher Colonel Alden Blethen donated the bells for it.

From 1917 to the tower’s destruction by fire in 1949 it was associated with George Bailey, the blind musician who three times a day played the 12 bells with heavy handles that required two seconds of delay in the keys mechanics between Bailey’s action and the bell’s peeling. Occasionally prankish students who required little ingenuity to break and enter the aging wooded structure also played the bells in the wee hours.  Bailey made a practice of composing or arranging a new piece every week and by 1935 remembered many hundreds of them.

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BAILEY ON THE CHIMES

(First appeared in Pacific, July 31, 1988)

Almost all University of Washington alumni will recognize the observatory. Built from stone left over in the construction of Denny Hall, it is one of the two oldest structures on campus.

Those who remember the Campus Chimes will recall more the sound than the sight of them. Seattle Times publisher Col. Alden Blethen donated them to the university in 1912.

For 32 years, George Bailey made his way 10 blocks from his home to campus, and three times a day he would play the 12 bells. Bailey was blind, but he used neither cane nor guide dog. Rather, he whistled, bouncing his own sonar off the many shapes of the University District.

Bailey began playing the bells in 1917, the year he graduated from the University’s School of Music. His repertoire was alternately witty, sentimental and classical. He played love songs the week he got married and the day his child was born. Bailey’s celebrated wit included numbers that fit the school calendar. Freshman~ orientation day he would introduce, with “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” and the conclusion of finals with “There’s going to be a hot time on the old town tonight.”

Another George Bailey tradition was sounding the football scores on Saturday afternoons. Using the biggest bell he would play the UW alma mater before peeling forth its points. For the opposition, he used the small bell.

Twice on Sundays, Bailey withdrew his playful wit for the more sublime repertoire of hymns and appropriate classics like the “Bells of St. Mary’s” and the “Lullabye of Bells.”

Aside from campus hooligans, who would sometimes work the bells at night, Bailey was the last to make music with them. On May 23, 1949, he played “Summertime.” At 7 o’clock the next morning, the tower caught fire. Within 10 minutes, the flames reached 200 feet, dropping burning embers on the roofs of fraternity row.

George Bailey was making ready for his walk to campus when he was told of the fire. As the tower burned, Bailey wondered what he would do.

He eventually took care of the new carillon chimes which he played from a keyboard in the music building sending the sounds amplified to speakers in the Denny Hall belfry. With 37 notes, Bailey made new arrangements for his old repertoire. He continued to take requests until his death in 1960.

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CARNEGIE SNOWBOUND

Nothing like a big snow to break the generally gray monotone of winters on Puget Sound.  And dramatic winter storms offer meteorologists thankful relief from the need to devise new descriptions for a weather which ordinarily rolls from drizzle to drizzle.  But most importantly photographers have a field day.

This view of the snowbound Carnegie library was photographed during the first week of February, 1916.  Probably no other natural event has been so embraced by local photographers as the Big Snow of 1916.  Of course in a city it is the artificial effects of a blizzard that make it such an entertainment.  Here with three feet of snow in two days the town’s electric and cable railways were shut down for a week, the schools closed, and a number of roofs collapsed one of them a landmark — the octagonal copper-skinned dome of St. James Cathedral.

But here on Fourth Avenue the big snow’s effects are decorative not disastrous.  The snow’s frosting, especially on the library’s grand front entry, is quite appealing.  This stairway was not part of the library’s original design.  Almost immediately after it opened in 1907 Fourth Avenue was regraded, lowering it here nearly to the level of the central libraries basement.

Both views look north across Madison Street.  One block north, across Spring Street, the blizzard continues its display on the overhangs, reliefs and faceting of the McNaught mansion .  Built in 1883 on the future site of the Library, James McNaught’s big home was moved across Spring Street in 1904 to make way for construction of the neo-classical granite and sandstone pile bankrolled with the help of steel capitalist Andrew Carnegie’s $220,000 donation.

The two landmarks stood across from one another on Spring Street until the late 1920s when the McNaught mansion was razed for the Kennedy Hotel.  The library held on until 1956 when it was knocked down for the modern library recorded in the “now” view (not included here).

The Big Snow of 1916 melted quicker than it fell and with considerably more disastrous effects.  The unseasonably warm and wet whether that followed loosened the many exposed home sites on Seattle’s hills crashing dozens of them to smithereens below and taking two lives.

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FOLLOWS NOW A 1916 SNOW MISCELLANY with SHORT CAPTIONS

WEB EXTRAS

(click to enlarge photos)

On Tuesday afternoon April 4, 1939 in Olympia Washington State Governor Martin inaugurated his “economy program.”  Also that afternoon in Seattle about 400 jobless persons were assembled in the County-City Building to promote their own “program” for jobs and food.  From these a few volunteers adjourned to the nearby City Hall Park to help construct “Starvation Camp No. 2” in a canvas parody of Martin’s “austerity plan.”  (Camp No.1 was already up on the Spokane County Courthouse lawn.)

In 1939 the Great Depression was grinding on thru its eleventh year.  On Thursday April 6, Seattle Mayor Arthur B. Langlie ordered the protestors to remove their tent from the city-owned park by nightfall. It wound up only a few feet away pitched on an asphalt courthouse courtyard.  County commissioners were more sympathetic than the mayor or the governor.  That day the county’s Welfare Department, which had its funding reduced by 45 percent in March, released the latest figures on the number of King County citizens dropped from relief rolls because of the cut backs in state funding.  It was 13,214.

The grim irony was that the grand solution to the loss of jobs and lack of food was being prepared far off in Europe.  That April the Pope was testing a Vatican bomb shelter, the Nazis were marching into Czechoslovakia, and soon after into Poland.  It was World War Two that brought jobs to Seattle (and nearly everywhere) and food too – rationed – while also killing millions and flattening cities.

A very good – and perhaps best – guide to studying Seattle during these years is Rich Berner’s book “Seattle 1921-1940 From Boom to Bust.”  In his concluding chapter Berner elaborates on the parallels between then and now.  “In the 1930s, a permanent underclass was in the making.  Now it has been made and its being extended internally within the United States, though its composition differs from the one taking shape before the second war threw it a lifeline.”

WEB EXTRAS

I thought I’d include a couple of pix of those wrapped trees, Paul. Welcome splashes of color to offset the dreary days to come.

Anything to add, Paul?

Certainly, Jean – but first bon voyage on your week off to southern California, and if you get into the desert we will be watching the blog back here in the gray and green Northwest hope you will send along some warming burnt umber pictures.  And blue too.  I’ve picked a few features from past Pacifics – mostly – that have to do with the neighborhood, and one that shows something of Hooverville, also during the Great Depression.  We will start with a detail from the 1878 Birdseye of Seattle, and note there the clutter of small buildings that are depicted as holding the small triangular block (now City Hall Park) south across Jefferson Street from, in 1878, the Yesler’s orchard.

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CITY HALL PARK

(First appeared in Pacific, March 6, 1994)

The odd-shaped block of grass shown here was called City Hall Park. The Seattle City Council’s first recommended name, Oratory Park, was rejected by progressives who claimed it was a political ploy to limit free speech to this open plot between Yesler Way (on the left), Jefferson Street, Fourth Avenue (bottom) and Third Avenue. The year the park opened was 1913, when radicals – ”Wobblies” among them – used much of the business district, especially the Skid Road section south of Yesler Way, for soap-box oratory.

This top view was photographed around 1916, the year the ·first six stories of the City-County Building, far right, were completed across Jefferson Street from the park. Somewhat hidden in this view, Jefferson street may still be block by tunnel construction. The tunnel, from its entrance off Fourth Avenue just north of Yesler Way, curved beneath the street and park en route to parking in the new building’s basement. The entrance to the tunnel can be seen in the contemporary view photographed from the roof of the 400 Yesler Building, itself once a Seattle City Hall.   The contemporary view is paired with another early look at the park and County-City building also from the roof of the 1908-09 flatiron construction, between Terrace and Yesler and east of 4^th.  It was renamed for its address, the 400 Yesler Building with its restoration in the 1970s.

City Hall Park was used during the Depression for mass meetings of the unemployed and during World War II as drill grounds for the Seattle Air Defense Wing (housed across Yesler Way in the Frye Hotel, far left). In the mid-1950s it was redesigned with new walkways, trees and plastic game tables. In the late ’60s the City-County Building was remodeled and its entrance moved to Third Avenue. Now (in 1994) the county is studying plans to return a restored grand entrance to Jefferson Street.

City Hall Park itself was closed, landscaped and rededicated in 1993, in part as an attempt to retard its common-use then as a “Muscatel Meadows” by the down-and-out.

Above: For a few years after the 1909 razing of the old Katzenjammer City Hall, the future City Hall Park was used for a variety of public gatherings and carnivals.  Here a crowd is – or may be – listening to a speech delivered from the covered platform on the right.  It sits at the southwest corner of Jefferson and Fourth Ave.   The super-sized Coliseum Theatre took the place of the Yesler Mansion and orchard until it too was razed for the building of the City-County Building, aka the County Court House.

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SEATTLE’S FIRST HORSELESS BLACK MARIA

(First appears in Pacific, Sept. 30, 1984)

Seattle’s first horseless carriage came to town in 1900. Four years later, the city took an offical count. For one day in December 1904, the Seattle Street Department counted and typed every vehicle that passed through the busy intersection of Second Avenue and Pike Street. The tally came to 3,959, but only 14 of them were automobiles.    But by 1907 America and Seattle were automobile crazy. Every issue of the daily newspapers featured something about them. And although most American families could not afford to “get the motorcar habit,” there were, in Seattle at least, three chances to ride in one.

The favored choice was to take the Seeing Seattle tour bus. Or, for a little more trouble, an early Seattleite could get a ride in the Seattle Police Patrol’s brand new Black Maria. The last choice was indeed a final option: a ride in Seattle’s first motorized hearse.         But it was the city’s patrolling Black Maria that seemed to get the most attention. In today’s historical photo, the new paddy wagon was being shown off in front of the old Katzenjamer city hall and had no problem luring a crowd. The year was almost certainly 1907. On May 13 of that year the Post -Intelligencer ran another photo of the police wagon with a caption that read, “The new automobile police patrol is ready to be formally delivered to the police department, provided it measures up . . . Chief Wappenstein and others made several trips in the wagon. On level streets, the machine moves along at the rate of 15 mph. It was built by the Knox Company of Springfield, Mass., and is for durability rather than speed.”

And it measured up. The earliest record that contemporary police historian Capt. Mike Brasfield could find for the paddy wagon’s performance is from 1909. That year it made 7,637 calls, an average of almost 21 calls a day. But since it traveled an inner-city beat, its seemingly low 8,547-mile total included a lot of short trips to the jail.

Pictured in today’s contemporary photo is one of the department’s four modem vans. [In 1984]  This one’s radio call name is David-Ten. It’s parked in the same spot as old Black Maria (actually about 20 feet to the north of the “then”, but today the site of the old City Hall is called City Hall Park.

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The LONDON GHOST SHOW

(First appeared in Pacific, July 6, 1986)

This rare circus scene was copied from an old family album compiled early in the century by a Capitol Hill couple, Delia and Lewis Whittelsey. Though the couple had no children, they left plenty of photographs. This scene was pasted into the album without a caption, but its location and approximate time are easy to track. The circus was set up on what was called the “old Yesler site,” a full city block between Third and Fourth avenues and Jefferson and James streets, often used for such occasions after 1901 when the Yesler Mansion was destroyed by fire.

The camera was aimed to the northeast across the block where Sara and Henry Yesler began to build their 40-room mansion in 1883.  The block is now completely filled with the bulk of the King County Courthouse. The landmark that gives the site away is the old First Baptist Church on Fourth Avenue, a short distance south of Cherry Street. Here its steep roof rises above the big top. Between the destruction by fire of Yes!er’s mansion and the 1906 construction of the Coliseum Theater in its place, the old Yesler site was used for mass meetings or amusements like the London Ghost Show.  In the second subject above the vortex ramp has nearly been surmounted by the climbing ball man.

According to Michael Sporrer, Seattle’s resident circus expert, the London attraction was one of many sideshows attached to the La Fiesta and Alfresco Society Circus that performed here for two weeks in July 1904. It was the main attraction for the Seattle Mardi Gras’ and Midsummer Festival. Sporrer describes this production as an outstandingly unusual mix of circus and carnival acts. It included Fraviola, “the only woman in the world who loops the loop twice,” but who apparently missed a loop in Seattle and was badly injured.  In the “now” photo, Sporrer stands well below the circus elevation but just a few feet from where the London Ghost Show once haunted the old Yesler site.

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HOOVERVILLE BURNING

(First appeared in Pacific, 2-23-1997)

The fires in the fall of 1940 at “Hooverville” and other shack communities spread along the beaches and tideflats of Elliott Bay were a squatters’ Armageddon – with a posted warning. The mostly single men who lived in these well-packed, rent-free communities were told the day of the coming conflagration, so there was time for some of the shacks to be carefully trucked away to other sites not marked for wartime manufacturing.

This was quite different from the old Hooverville ritual of farewell.  That was a kind of potlatch. When a resident found a job (a rare event), he was expected to ceremoniously give his house, bed and stove to others still out of work. In 1939 this gift-giving became commonplace; the war in Europe had begun to create jobs here, and among the residents of Hooverville were many skilled hands.

Squatters’ shacks had been common in Seattle since at least the Panic of 1893. Miles of waterfront were dappled with minimal houses constructed mostly of whatever building materials the tides or junk heaps of nearby industries offered. For the most part, these free-landers were not bothered by officials or their more conventional neighbors. Swelling during the ’30s into communities sometimes of 1,000 or more residents, these self-policing enclaves were an obvious and creative solution to some of the worst effects of the Great Depression.

In Seattle Hooverville was the biggest of them. It sprawled along the waterfront west of Marginal Way South, roughly between Dearborn Street and Royal Brougham Way. The scene of prodigious shipbuilding during World War I, the site had been increasingly neglected and then abandoned after the war. Now these acres are crowded with Port of Seattle containers – or were, at least, in 1997.)

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Like a medieval theme park or a child’s castle fantasy the City of Seattle allowed the Masonic Knights Templar to build their headquarters in City Hall Park for the order’s Grand Encampment of 1925.  The City-County Building (1914) behind it had not yet reached its full height with the addition of five more stories in 1930 including the “penthouse prison”– the kind of castle designed to keep knights-in-error within.

SIR KNIGHTS’ CASTLE

With more than thirty thousand Sir Knights and many of their dependents expected in Seattle for — to give the full title — the Conclave of the Grand Encampment of the United States of America for the Thirty-Sixth Triennial of the Knights Templar, a headquarters was needed which was both central and symbolic.  This ersatz castle is it.

Filling most of Seattle’s City Hall Park the Knights Templar headquarters was designed for the conclave by local Sir Knight architects including the Headquarters Committee’s Vice-Chairman Henry Bittman.  But it was the Chair, John C. Slater, who envisioned the feudal castle.

A castle-headquarters was appropriate, for this rite of Free Masonry was named for the medieval crusaders who, with Pope Honorius III’s imprimatur, were warriors for the faith, battling the Moors and protecting pilgrims in the Holy Land.  So for the last five days of July, 1925 Seattle was overrun by plumed “Soldiers of the Cross Carrying the Banner of Christ” and erecting crosses everywhere, on light poles and roof tops.  It was also projected by local Sir Knights that the visiting Christian Soldiers would drop between eight and ten million dollars into the Seattle economy.

Each morning the castle’s drawbridge was lowered in ceremonies led by Boy Scouts. The walls of the interior courtyard were decorated with the seals of the Northwest states.  Also inside were accommodations for the Conclave’s many committees including that which arranged the more than 2000 volunteer automobile tours of Seattle for the visiting Sir Knights and Ye Ladies.  In a sign of the times, however, the Horse Committee could find only 210 good saddle horses — some shipped from Eastern Washington — for the event’s Grand Parade, not the 500 promised.

The Knights Templar castle-headquarters was another quixotic fit for a site with a history of warriors and even one other “castle.”  Here during the Jan. 26, 1856 battle of Seattle the Navy’s howitzer balls splintered the forest hiding the Indians firing their small arms at the village.  The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) commemorating that battle erected here in 1914 a surviving monument holding three canon balls.  And it was here that King County built a frame courthouse in 1882 which was later enlarged as Seattle’s City Hall with such a topsy-turvy of additions that it was popularly called the Katzenjammer Castle: an allusion to the architecture included in a then poplar comic strip, the Katzenjammer Kids.  More recently, it was here during World War Two that Seattle’s Air Defense Wing, housed in the Frye Hotel across Yesler Way, practiced its daily drills.

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YESLER WAY LOOKING WEST from 5^TH AVENUE

(First appeared in Pacific, March 17, 1991)

Photographed in 1911 or 1912, this view down Yesler Way from the Fifth Avenue overpass is dominated by two land-marks that still grace the neighborhood: the Public Safety Building, nearby on the right, and the ornate Frye Hotel, left of center. When it was completed in 1912, the Frye’s 11-story lift was second only to the 18 floors of the Hoge Building. (One year later, across Yesler Way, the city’s skyscraping ambitions reached further toward the heavens with the 40-plus stories of the Smith Tower.) In 1972 the 375-room hotel was converted into 234 apartments.

The Public Safety Building was nearly lost. The City Council’s 1970 ordinance to destroy what was then an eyesore parking garage was stopped in the courts by local preservationists. Built in 1909, the Public Safety Building was the first substantial structure planned exclusively for city use since Seattle’s clapboard central business district was destroyed in the fire of 1889. After its last municipal user, the Police Department, moved out in 1951 the city had difficulty finding a buyer until an auto body shop moved in and stayed 19 years.

In 1977 the structure was beautifully restored as one of Seattle’s first renovation projects motivated by tax breaks for the owners. Then its newest occupant was its oldest, only the city was renting.

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FRYE HOTEL

(First appeared in Pacific, July 2, 2000.)

When it was new in1911 the Frye Hotel was described by consensus as simply the finest hotel in Seattle.  It was also one of the highest of the city’s new steel-frame brick and terra-cotta tile skyscrapers.  Here the construction continues at the retail level facing the sidewalk on Yesler Way.  Eleven stories up the grandly ornamented cornice nearly overflows like a fountain at the cap of this elegant Italian Renaissance landmark.

The Frye Hotel was the last of Seattle pioneer George F. Frye’s many accomplishments.  Arriving in Seattle in 1853, the twenty-year-old German immigrant helped Henry Yesler assemble his steam sawmill and quickly became a favorite of Arthur and Mary Denny and later also of their daughter.   Louisa just turned 17 when George married her in 1860.  Together they had six children and many businesses, and Louisa was very much a partner in both.  The children recalled how their father would never make a major business decision without the review and approval of their mother.

These partners ran the first meat market in Seattle, opened a bakery, raised the city’s first distinguished stage, the Frye Opera House (Frye also organized the community’s first brass band.), built and managed at least three hotels, and invested in real estate with great success.  For four years beginning in 1870 George Frye was also first purser and then captain of the Puget Sound steamer J.B. Libby when it had the federal contract to deliver mail to Whidbey Island and other points north.

Typically, the Fryes formed their own contracting company to build their grandest hotel and George, entering his late 70s managed the construction.  A little more than a year after the hotel’s grand spring opening in 1911, George F. Frye died.  His widow, of course, continued to manage the Louisa C. Frye Hotel.  George had named it for her.

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KLONDIKE OUTFITS

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 22, 1989)

This Klondike Gold Rush-era view was uncovered by Mary Marx from a miscellany of family mementos. Her father, William Michel, is second from the left below the Frasch’s Cigars sign. Born in 1873, he is in his mid-20s here. The photograph is the conventional one of a proprietor and his store – assuming the owner is at the door or perhaps on the right. The man on the left, clutching the sack, is possibly a customer.

Determining the exact corner of this photo was easy because of landmark steps to Our Lady Of Good Help on the far left. Seattle’s first Catholic Church was at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Washington Street. Thus, this store is at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Yesler Way, the present site of the Frye Hotel.

And what kind of a store is this? During the late 1890s the sign “Klondike Outfits” was almost as common as the sign “Lotto” today. And the buyer’s odds were about the same. Some of the items on sale here are homemade bread, slabs of bacon, blood sausages, imported Swiss cheese, all sorts of fruits and vegetables, and inside the paraphernalia for traveling men on their way to the Klondike gold fields.

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TRINITY PARISH – FIRST HOME

(First appeared in Pacific, April 26, 1998)

When measured by its seating, Trinity Parish’s church — with a footprint of only 24 by 48 feet – was, when new in 1870, the largest sanctuary in Seattle.  Still its simple unadorned style made it seem smaller than its neighbors, the Roman Catholic and two Methodist churches.  They had towers.

This scene may well date from the early 1870s when the building still faced north and south at the northwest corner of Third Avenue and Jefferson Street. The view looks west toward Elliott Bay where the masts of a tall ship moored beside Yesler Wharf can be seen faintly on the far left.  In 1880 the building was turned 90 degrees and a tower added for what was then claimed to be the largest bell in Washington Territory.  The church was also lengthened for a chancel and the territory’s first pipe organ.

Much of Trinity’s materials were donated, but not the Gothic windows which were purchased in San Francisco.  Typically with pioneer congregations it was the women who were most responsible for raising the funds to build, adorn and run their churches.  In a recollection on church history pioneer Trinity parishioner Mrs. E.E. Heg recalled how the town’s industrialist Henry Yesler also once helped spank some coin for the building fund.

At a benefit held in his namesake hall, Yesler announced to the women “Now, I will help you make some money.  I will go and get a crowd of the boys and get sticks for them to whittle, and bring them in here, and we will whittle all over the floor, and you must make them all pay something for the muss they make.”  Yesler soon returned with an entourage of the village’s leading capitalists.  In order, he made them buy and put on the women’s aprons, whittle on the floor, and pay to have it cleaned up.

While the popular standing room only parish was raising funds to build a bigger sanctuary on First Hill it lost its original sanctuary to the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.  It was the only structure destroyed on Third Avenue north of Yesler Way.

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THE OLDEST

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 14, 1999)

Neither commonplace nor rare, all early-century views of the James Street regrade also show tampering with its cable railway.  The regrading on James Street was episodic, contingent on the north-south upheavals of Seattle avenues, first on Third in 1906, next on Fourth in 1908 and so on to Fifth and Sixth.  This view looks east up James from Second Avenue.   The temporary holding of the cable railway on blocks at its original grade continues as far as Fourth Avenue.  The date is early in 1906.   In an October view from the same year, the structure with the tower, upper left has been removed and a block-long vaudeville theater is under construction at the southeast corner of Third and James, just to the right of the cable car.

The considerably rarer subject here is the old frame structure, center right, at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and James.  The sign protruding from its west wall reads “Normandy Furnished Rooms,” but not for long.  The name was soon changed to The Drexel, and a brick floor added to the hotel with the lowering of both James and Third.   The ladder leaning beneath the Normandy is a kind of caliber of both the cut and the space available for the eventual excavation of a new ground floor.

What is totally unique about this building is that it survives as the oldest structure in the Central Business District.  Built as the Ingels Block shortly before the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 it barely escaped it.  The Collins family home to this side of it on Second Avenue (a portion of the replacement Collins Building appears far right) as well as Trinity Episcopalian Church, south of the Ingels on Third Avenue, were both destroyed.  Soon after the fire the name of the hotel was changed to Normandy.  Surviving with it were the homes of Henry Yesler and Bailey Gatzert, neighbors across Third Avenue and James Street respectively.

The Ingels-Normandy-Drexel was already treated as “historic and old” in 1944 when Seattle Times reporter Bob Burandt noted that “the upper two stories are now getting a ‘beauty treatment’ rather than be torn down, and workmen have been at the ‘covering up’ process for some time.”   The new cement-asbestos board covering was required by a then new fire code.  Beneath it is the clapboard of the original Ingels as well as the ground floor Drexel brick addition.

In 2000, or thereabouts, this oldest of structures downtown got a facial by the Samis Land Company, its present owner.   There were plans, at least, to steam-clean the exterior, and the original Drexel first floor facing Third Avenue was to be restored.  In 200 when this was first written, a corner tenant to replace the half-century old Spin Tavern had not been identified.

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