(please click to enlarge photos)

In the mix of storefront and walk-up businesses in this first half-block on the south side of Jackson Street (north of 6^th Avenue,) one could, buy a dress, a watch, rent a Packard, get a bath and/or a haircut, have one’s clothes washed and suit pressed, rent a room with a bed, play pool at the alley, and, no doubt, much more.  A likely date for this Webster and Stevens Studio print is 1922 or ’23.

Beyond the alley, the Busch Hotel and its services (including a Chop Suey Noodles café,) fill the half-block to Maynard Avenue.  The big hotel was built by William Chappell and lovingly dedicated and signed in 1915 for his wife Margaret’s maiden name, Busch.  Like most other hotels in the neighborhood, the Busch Hotel hoped to thrive by bedding passengers arriving at the two nearby railroad depots, also facing Jackson Street.

After William Chappell’s death in 1921, his estate endured a good deal of “legal squabbling” among his heirs.  One result was that the hotel’s name was changed from Busch to Bush, a moniker it still holds with its latest “make-over” into affordable housing for senior citizens of the International District.  Purchased in 1978 by the Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, the hotel was badly shaken by the Nisqually earthquake of 2001. Tightened and polished it reopened in the fall of 2006.

Among the forty-plus thousand Webster and Stevens negatives preserved at the Museum of History and Industry, understandably this one is often used.  Jean and I have also used it in the exhibit of “Repeat Photography” at the Museum, (sponsored, in part, by The Times), which we have mounted with our Parisian friend Berangere Lomont.  (The show also features now-and-then pictures of Paris.)  The exhibit is up until MOHAI’s planned move from the west shore of Union Bay in Montlake to its new quarters at the south end of Lake Union next June.  See it before the move if you can and will.  There is plenty of bus service nearby and lots of parking too and the first Thursday of every month you can get in free.  Otherwise, if you can, pay and support the place.  The telephone number there is 206 324-1126.

WEB EXTRAS

Ooh, I know you’ve much to add this time round, Paul.

Nah – not so much.  Time has run from me or I from it.  I’m not certain who is responsible.   I’ll need to drop some features for later, and there may be other opportunities.   How pleased I am to see two familiar Sherrards in your “now” repeat of the 1922 or so  look east on Jackson.  The family is part of it perhaps, I suspect, because it took the shoot as a chance to visit the International District for its cuisine, a lunch perhaps.  Now let’s let the reader decide who or which is yours – those whose sox you bend to mend and to whom you prepare the tenderest roast turkey imaginable.   You may not do the mending but you surely do the finest roasting.  I know you took a picture of the New Years Eve Turkey you prepared, although you took no pictures of any of the guests.  Such is the temperament or concentration of a great chef.   How about putting the turkey portrait up below this text?  For the hungrier readers the taste of your succulent turkey may then, at least, be imagined.

Paul, I’ll drop in a photo of the turkey here, but I must also mention and display the truffle – a precious gift from Berangere – that was both cut into slices and slipped under the skin of the bird, and grated on top after the last basting of Calvados, squeezed orange juice, and honey. (click to enlarge both the bird and the ‘room)

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Follow now two clips from The Seattle Times. The first one an ad for the opening of the new Busch Hotel, published on Oct. 9, 1915.  The second, the graphic part of a long description of the new hotel, and most likely a paid for ad as well.  It made it in the Times one day later, Oct. 10.

Here’s another neighborhood photo by Okawa.

Above and Below:  The above mid-1920s portrait of The Waste Laundry at the northeast corner of Weller Street and 5^th Avenue was one of a collection of prints by International District photographer Yoshiro Okawa that were loaned to me a quarter-century ago by Tomio Moriguchi of the neighborhood supermarket Uwajimaya.  Thanks again, Tomio.   Since 2000 the corner has been part of the expanded Uwajimaya.

THE WASTE LAUNDRY

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 6, 2009)

What may we make of the name of this place: The Waste Laundry?  The building itself is unique enough, for it is both more and less than it appears.

“More” because it was built on stilts high above the tideflats that once flooded this corner of 5^th Ave. S. and Weller Street.  Below it there are nearly three stories of fill and/or basements. The building is “less” than it seems because it is really pie-shaped.  It was built not to disturb the old coal railroad that ran directly behind it at a slant already a quarter-century before the building was constructed as part of a power plant for generating electricity and heat – not laundering – with steam.

But what of the name?  Scott Edward Harrison, of the Wing Luke Museum, determined through city directories that a C.R. Anderson operated an Overall Laundry at this address in 1919, and changed its name to The Waste Laundry sometime between 1923 and 24.  That was not long before Yoshiro Okawa, whose studio was nearby on Jackson Street, photographed it.  By 1933 both Anderson and the laundry were gone.

Neighborhood tour leader, Lon Elmer, recalls that “waste rags” were once collected and cleaned for the manufacture of high quality paper, although not necessarily thru this laundry.

Seattle writer-reviewer Bill White notes that “waste girls” was a common name used for the women who worked in commercial laundries.  White sites Cynthia Rose’s research and reflections on the often-exploitive practices of Seattle’s power laundries in connection with her and others attempts a few years back to landmark the Empire Laundry in Belltown.

We will take Bill White’s lead, and encourage readers to explore Rose’s excellent website www.66bellstreet.com where the culture of waste girls, waste bundles, and waste linens may be delved. The sense of a laundry named for “waste” may be understood then as nearly commonplace.

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JACKSON STREET REGRADE, 1883

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 17, 1999)

Regardless of the blotches and spots acquired by this photograph as public works chroniclers we cherish it, for photos of early street work in Seattle are extremely rare.

Photographer Theodore Peiser came to Seattle from San Francisco in the early 1880s and set up a studio featuring what he claimed on the back of most prints were “the largest and finest backgrounds and accessories in Seattle.” He learned the handicaps of his new home, promising “First-class Work Guaranteed, No Matter How Bad the Weather.” Soon he said he had “the largest and finest assortment of views of Seattle for sale at reasonable prices.” How many we will never know, for Peiser lost most of his stock in the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889. .

Peiser promised to number and preserve indefinitely all his negatives; this view (lower left) has a high one, 65491. (Since there was not way that Peiser could have taken by then that many saved negatives, the number indicates perhaps a promotional vanity or a code privy to the photographer.)  Thankfully, this construction scene also shares a hand-written caption, bottom center: “Jackson Street.” Directly above the street name an uncredited free hand has inscribed the date, 1883, and to the right a refinement of the location, between 10th andJ2th Streets.  All very helpful and the hand-written locator may even be accurate. Jackson Street was regraded in 1883.

In late November of that year developer Guy Phinney (of the ridge) paid for a folksy “conversation between two old friends” In a local newspaper. It goes, in part “First: Well old pard I hear you bought a couple of lots on Jackson street today . . . Second: Great Caesar’s ghost, haven’t you heard the news? Don’t you know that street is being graded to Lake Washington as fast as men and money can do it . . . that it will be the great manufacturing street of the city? Why my friend, lots on Jackson street will be worth $10,000 apiece in five years.”

Peiser also claimed “all manner of outsIde photographic work executed on the shortest notice; in a superior style.” Perhaps Guy Phinney paid for negative 65491.

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JAPANESE BAPTIST SUNDAY SCHOOL

(First published in Pacific, May 24, 1992.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wing Luke Museum’s exhibit, “EO 9066 1892-1992, 50 Years Before, 50 Years After,” will be shown through August. [Again, like the feature, this exhibit dates from 1992.  The museum was then still on Seventh Avenue, just south of Jackson Street.

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JACKSON STREET EAST of 5^TH AVENUE – NARROW & STEEP

(First appeared in Pacific, July 28, 1985)

Of all the Seattle streets regraded early in the century, Jackson received the most extensive work.  By 1909, about three years after today’s historical picture was taken, more than 3 million cubic yards of soil was flushed from the slope’s flanks and into the tideflats (now the site of the Kingdome). Its grade was reduced from 15 to 5 percent and the top, at Ninth Avenue, wound up 85 feet lower.

Both the historical photo and its “repeat” (if we could find it) were photographed from Fifth Avenue looking east into a neighborhood that is still ethically diverse. In the older photo there are Asian hand laundries on both sides of the street. Also on the right (in the shadows) are the Idaho Grocery and Ceasare Galleti’s Boot & Shoe Repair. Adding to the mix is the landmark Holy Names Academy. It’s pictured at right center, up on the hill at Seventh Avenue. Built in 1884, it was called the “handsomest building in Washington Territory.”

Another nod for Jackson’s diversification comes from Oennosuke Shoji, founder of the Seattle Japanese Christian Youth Organization on Jackson Street. He remembered the street as being “a hangout for prostitution where about 300 white, yellow and black prostitutes lived.” Most of them came to town in the late 1890s with the gold rush. They were the fleshy side of Seattle’s gilded age.

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JACKSON STREET, East From near FOURTH AVENUE, 1906

(First appeared in Pacific, March 14, 1999)

More than most, Jackson has been a street in transition. The first Jackson roughed out from Doc Maynard’s 1853 plat was about two blocks long. It ran between the waterfront and the salt marsh. Those were the west and east sides, respectively, of a peninsula first named Piners Point in 1841 by the U.S. Navy. The third side was the tide flats that extended from King Street south to the estuary of the Duwamish River (near the present Spokane Street) and southeast to the foot of Beacon Hill.

Beginning in 1883, Jackson Street was graded primitively between Lake Washington and tidewater. Five years later the cable railway that ran east on Yesler Way to Leschi at the lake returned westbound on Jackson. With the rush of development after Seattle’s “Great Fire” of 1889, Jackson Street was improved with a new timber trestle built over the drained salt marsh. In this 1906 view, a Webster and Steven photographer looks east along that trestle from about Fourth Avenue.

Just out of frame, left and right, are the tanks and processing plants of the Seattle Gas Company. Within a year the company would move to its new Wallingford works (now Gas Works Park) on the north shore of Lake Union. Also within the year began the hydraulics of lowering the ridge – barely seen here on the horizon – that ran between First and Beacon hills. Jets of saltwater shot from cannons did the job. Jackson was lowered 85-90 feet at the first summit of the street near Ninth Avenue.

After Denny Hill, this Jackson Street regrade was Seattle’s largest. Among the institutions forced to relocate was Holy Names Academy at Seventh and Jackson. The gray silhouette of its central spire is visible just right of center and above the roofline of the building with its own tower at the southeast comer of Fifth and Jackson.

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WORK in PROGRESS of JACKSON

(First printed in Pacific, April 2, 2000)

Except for the temporary bridge that carries the middle of the historical scene, the neighborhood revealed in this “then” photo seems much the same as that in this “now” photo. The likely year of the older photo is 1911, since the grandest of the surviving landmarks (the New Richmond Hotel, far left, and Union Depot, far right), though seen only in part, are still clearly works-in-progress. Both were completed in 1911.

The photographer looks east and a little south from Fourth Avenue across the temporary timber bridge to Fifth Avenue. In this block, Jackson Street proper, right, has been closed for construction of a concrete bridge paralleling the grand front facade of the combined Puget Sound terminus for two railroads: the Union Pacific and the electric Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul.

The neighborhood beyond the bridge and east of Fifth Avenue is nearly new, although the structures facing Fifth – including the three-story Idaho Hotel on the southeast corner – are a little older than those behind them. This is the western border of the Jackson Street regrade, which, when completed in the fall of 1909, opened up Rainier Valley to the Central Business District at grades of 5 percent on Jackson Street, rather than the previous 15 percent. The new neighborhood that developed quickly became Seattle’s International District. (The part of it south of Jackson is, perhaps, more often referred to as Chinatown.)

For most “readers” of this photograph, the rolling stock is no doubt the most fetching subject. Four electric trolleys – three of them westbound – test the strength of the temporary trestle. Together the crowded streetcars, trestle and construction work make a tableau of urban enterprise. It is, however, the streaking team and loaded wagon in the foreground that bring it to life. The driver holds the reins a bit firmer in his left hand than in his right,  suggesting that the wagon is completing a tum off Jackson. I will take suggestions as to what is in the bags.

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Six of the surviving seven of Tameno Habu Kobata’s children revisited the site of the family’s flower shop, now spanned by the Interstate 5 freeway. They are, from left, Kimi Ishii, Louise Sakuma, Mary Shinbo, Rose Harrell, Jack Habu and John Habu. Two of Tameno’s 22 grandchildren are also Included – Linda Ishii, far left, and Nancy Ishii, kneeling. Nancy Ishii Is responsible for researching the elaborate family history.

CHERRY LAND on JACKSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MT. BAKER LINE on JACKSON

(First appears in Pacific, July 2, 1989)

Harold Hill was a trolley fan extraordinare, and one of his devoted efforts was to photograph, line by line, the last days of the Seattle Municipal Railway’s electric trolleys. The Mount Baker half of the Capitol Hill-Mt. Baker line No.14 was abandoned on July 6th, 1940. This is Hill’s record of the old Car 278’s last work, perhaps even its last trip down Jackson Street.

The photo also reveals a sample of the commercial culture on Jackson Street a half-century ago. The shops shown here on the south side of Jackson and east of 23rd Avenue include a Chinese hand laundry, Sun Hing; a shoe repairman, Robert Jorgensen; Ernest Stutz’s Radio Service (he lived upstairs), and Samuel Treiger’s Thrifty Cute Rate Store.

Jackson’s diversity was both ethnic and economic. In the three blocks between 21st and 24th there were Scandanavian, Italians, Jews and Asians running 22 businesses including a mattress company, service station, bakery, drug store, beauty shop, dentist, beer hall, furniture store and Safeway grocery.

The Capitol Hill half of line No. 4 was shut down weeks after this photo was taken. And within a year the rest of the old system was derailed. Most of the cars, including No. 278, were scrapped.

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LIGHTER THAN AIR on JACKSON, 1889

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 4, 1991)

PROFESSOR PA VAN TASSELL’S first attempt to lift himself and his oiled silk balloon above Seattle failed for want of gas. However, the following day, Jan. 2, 1889, the “aeronaut professor” reached lighter-than-air condition and took off at 1 p.m. with his parachute lightly tied to the side of his balloon. In this view, which looks north across Jackson Street to the Seattle Gas Company’s plant near Fifth Avenue, Van Tassell’s balloon is about to lift off. The top of the daredevil’s white parachute is draped to the side of the balloon, which is connected by a 2-inch pipe to the gas company’s storage tank, far right. The ascent did not disappoint the throng that was perched on every available promontory and along the waterfront. Van Tassell cast off his sandbags, waved goodbye to the crowd, and, the Post-Intelligencer reported, “shot off.” At about 2,000 feet the craft turned to the northwest and the waterfront, where a flotilla of tugs, steamers and rowboats took up the pursuit, encouraged by the pilot’s offer of $10 and a silk hat to the first one to pluck him from the bay.

His craft rising rapidly, the professor strapped one wrist to a ring attached to his parachute, grabbed hold of the ring with both hands and jumped. The next day’s P-I reported that “Van Tassell’s … descent was indescribably thrilling.” When the parachute at last opened the jolt loosened his grip, and the professor was held only by the strap tied to his wrist. After a descent of about two minutes Van Tassell landed in about two feet of water a short way offshore near the foot of Denny Way. The balloon landed in a tree at Smith Cove.

Van Tassell’s act meant a good bit of publicity for himself and the gas company, which was then in a contest with electricity to light the city and would soon originate the effective slogan, “If you love your wife, buy her a gas stove.”

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TEMPLE to TIMBER

(Click the Photographs to Enlarge them.)

(First appeared in Pacific Feb. 28, 1984, and then was included in Seattle Now and Then Vol. 1, which was published later that year.  It can be read – all of it – on this blog.  Look for the History Books button on the front page.)

The Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition officially opened at noon on the first day of June 1909 when President William Howard Taft, pressing a golden key, sent a telegraphic signal from Washington D.C. Soon after the doors of the Forestry Building swung open. Then while the popular Pop Wagner’s band played the Stars and Stripes Forever from the bandstand outside, “the crowds surged through the great structure admiring its massive architecture and its varied assortment of exhibits.” Actually, this building overwhelmed the exhibits inside it.

There were two ways (at least) to describe this outsized “temple to timber”: with poetry and with statistics. The favorite numbers recited were of its 320-foot length — “as long as a city block” – and the 124 logs that supported its roof and two towers. The 80 on the outside were an average 5&1/2 feet thick, 50 feet high, and “left in their natural clothing of bark.” Those inside were stripped of theirs; but all 124, “selected for their symmetry and soundness,” were unhewed and weighed about 50,000 pounds each.

The poetic response to this building saw it as a “taming of the wild forest where the forest is yet seen.” It was likened to an artistic arrangement of wild flowers into a bouquet. The more popular poetry repeated over and over again on postcards and from park benches was that here was “the largest log cabin in the world!”

The building’s architects, Saunders and Lawton, had with substantial grace shaped Washington State forest products into the AYP’s classic revival architectural style. From the outside the Forestry Building looked “like a Greek temple done in rustic.” However, on the inside it was a lumber sideshow, filled with the freaks of forestry-like a pair of giant dice six feet thick, cut from a single block and captioned “the kind of dice we roll in Washington.” Also on show was the “Big Stick” which, at 156&1/2 feet long, was “one immense piece of milled timber,” and the 19-foot thick stump with a winding staircase to a cabin built on its top.

With this kind of preparation it was expected that when the fair was finished its Forestry Building would become the woodsy quarters for the University’s Department of Forestry. Instead, it became home of the Washington State Museum and a growing family of hungry wood-chewing beetles. The latter ultimately pushed out the former, and by 1931 this “temple of timber” was razed to sticks. Now in its place is the brick HUB, or Husky Union Building.

(click to enlarge photos)

At some moment in the walkabout of life it occurs to more than a few of us to look back to where we came from. This interest in personal history will sometimes be an entrance also to community history and more. But it typically starts with genealogy; finding out about one’s parents and their parents and so on and on. As almost anyone who has taken this hide-and-seek path will confirm, saddling our basic human urges for chasing the fox or the facts can be a most exhilarating ride.

Thankfully for this search we can get some practiced and typically kind help from genealogists, and The Seattle Public Library, the Seattle Genealogical Society, and the Fiske Genealogical Library all have them. For many of us the face on the left of both our “now and then” is a familiar one. For forty years Darlene Hamilton was The Seattle Public Library’s genealogy librarian.

In the contemporary scene Hamilton poses with her successor John LaMont in the genealogy section of the History Department in the still new Koolhaus-designed central library. In the older view, and at her predecessor’s request, Hamilton has joined Carol Lind in the “genealogy alcove” of the central library’s Bindon and Wright designed building (1960), which held to the same block facing Fourth Ave. between Madison and Spring Streets.  When Lind started with the library in 1949 it was still housed in the classically styled stone pile built with funds from the Carnegie Foundation more than a century ago, and also on the same block. Carol Lind retired in 1971.

John LaMont notes that many of the requests made at the central library’s history desk are genealogical. And the electronic tools that LaMont and Mahina Oshie, a second genealogy librarian added this year, have in 2011 are what Carol Lind, perhaps, could have scarcely imagined a mere half-century ago. But LaMont notes, “There are many things that remain the same in terms of assisting people with their research. We suggest they look at family sources, learn about doing research, fill out a family chart, and we make recommendations on where to look based on what they know already.”

WEB EXTRAS

Happy New Year! Anything to add, Paul?

Thanks Jean and the same in return.  Yes we will take a break from partying (which we started at your place for dinner with the most succulent turkey any of the about fifteen persons squeezed into your dining room can remember having ever been served before and all because you soaked the bird for hours in some salty solution and then stuffed it also with exotic spices and mushrooms) and put up some old Seattle Public Library photos.  We may have inserted one or more of these earlier, but this is new “context” so we will not be prevented.  Still the readers are reminded to use the search window for finding out more about any subject that comes up.  We have been putting up enough features by now that you might well find something – or you may also come upon the same thing, in which case please be happy with the new surrounds.

We’ll start with a something from SPL genealogist John LaMont and add now our thanks that he took our invitation to write about his personal history as subject and as research.  And we asked John to help illustrate it, so we have a few pictures of the SPL’s genealogist growing up and into his expertise.  John did not title his offering, but we have.   So first an “invitation” from John – and thanks to him too.

AN INVITATION to THE NINTH FLOOR

By JOHN LAMONT

With genealogy and family history, everything fits together in a timeline and events are marked by when and where they occurred. But it’s typically not until we’re looking back that we can see the patterns and connections, causes and effects, and points where our personal histories intersect with others. When I began working as a genealogy librarian at The Seattle Public Library [SPL], my path intersected with that of Darlene Hamilton, the senior genealogy librarian, for seven years.

In 1966 after graduating from library school in Minnesota, Darlene landed a librarian job in Bellingham, hopped on a Great Northern train, and headed out west.  While working in Bellingham, Darlene made several genealogy research trips to SPL and at about the same time, my folks moved from Missouri to Minnesota and then to Montana, which is where I come in.  A few years later in 1971, Darlene was hired by SPL and started her career as a genealogy librarian—a career that spanned 40 years and included the Bicentennial, Alex Haley’s Roots, the public releases of the 1900, 1910, 1920, & 1930 U.S. Census, and helping countless people research their family’s history.

Meanwhile, my folks moved to Northern Virginia when I was a toddler, and it would only take me 17 years to become interested in genealogy, another 6 to learn of Darlene (I moved to Seattle in 1993, discovered the large genealogy collection at SPL and microfilm available at the National Archives Regional Branch and truly became hooked), and another 10 beyond that before I landed a job working with Darlene at SPL in 2004.

For me the draw is mostly about research and discovery, and being able to piece together the lives of ancestors based on information they left behind.  My dad’s family has lived in Washington since the 1880s, and my aunts’ and cousins’ homes in Chewelah are treasure troves of photographs, diaries, family bibles, etc.  Putting those pieces together with other genealogical sources such as censuses, land records, probates, wills, vital records, military records, court records, passenger lists, newspapers, and the like, you can learn quite a bit.  And with much of this information now available online via free web sites or subscription databases, you can make substantial progress in one sitting.  In other cases, even with access to all these records at your fingertips, there are certain roadblocks to progress.  Some of these you may find were put up by your ancestors.

There are two family secrets that I discovered when researching my family history.  The first I discovered early on and it was that my great-grandfather Clarence LaMont had been married twice, first to Laura Rusk who died in 1907 at age 24 and secondly in 1909 to my great-grandmother Nellie Rusk, Laura’s younger sister.  There were two clues: A photo of Nellie standing next to her sister’s grave in Spokane – the stone simply reads Laura with no last name; and an obituary of Laura and Nellie’s mother from December 1906 listing one of the survivor’s as Mrs. LaMont of Harrison, Idaho.   Adding these to the Washington Death Index, a newspaper obituary from Spokane, and the funeral home records, I had my smoking gun. Although someone marrying a deceased spouse’s siblings was not in itself a scandal—then or now—the fact that no one in my family had known about it made it quite interesting.

The second secret, which I just discovered a couple of years ago, is also related to Clarence.  After years of searching for his roots with no success, I was left with a handful of family facts – youngest of four, born January 13, 1879 in Patoka or Vandalia, IL, mother died when he was two, shuffled around from one Uncle to the next until he was 12 or 13, headed out west to make his fortune as a cook, two sisters, one named Ida married a man named Ritter and had son Cliff, a brother, and so on. I knew his parents’ names, based on a Social Security application, to be William Henry LaMont and Elizabeth Andrews. But Clarence never appears in the Census until 1910 and his earliest known whereabouts were in 1906 — Harrison, Idaho.  Turns out Clarence was born and raised as Thomas H. Sharp, and changed his name when heading out west.  I was able to connect with distant cousins and we compared our pictures of Clarence and Thomas and found him to be one in the same.  As to why Clarence changed his identity, that is another, as-yet-unsolved, mystery. And so the fun continues.

If you need help with your genealogy, drop us a line via the Ask-A-Librarian service at www.spl.org, come by during our genealogy desk hours, or make a one-on-one appointment. Mahina Oshie, our newest genealogy librarian, and I are happy to help you with your research.

You’ll find us at the 9th floor reference desk at the Central Library during the following times:

• –Tuesday through Saturday:  11 a.m. – noon; & 1 – 3 p.m.
• –Sunday: 1- 3 p.m.

Appointments are available Tuesday through Saturday at 3 p.m. & 4 p.m.

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Next we will run on with a few photographs.   Most of the first selections show the library block seen from near 4th Ave. and Madison Street, looking to the north and east.   The sequence begins  with a look at the block when the McNaught mansion still held it, circa 1902.

Above and below, construction on the modern library, ca. 1959

TO ALL the dear visitors of this blog, Jean and Berangere and I wish, hope and imagine – we’re concentrating – a fine coming 2012 for you and all that matters, which includes us.

(click photos to enlarge – sometimes TWICE!)

Although named for Jackson Street, the city’s second most ambitious regrade (First, was the razing of Denny Hill.) extended blocks south of what is still the neighborhood’s principal thruway: Jackson Street.   Nearly six miles of streets and about fifty-six city blocks were involved – twenty-nine of them excavated and twenty-seven filled in a “balance” of eroding and collecting.

This look into the reducing work of what the press liked to call “giants” – the cannons blasting salt water sucked from Elliott Bay – was taken from the south side of Weller Street, one of the early targets of the regraders.  The historical photographer looks northwest from near the southeast corner of Eight Avenue and Weller Street.  The canons seen here are moving east – the blast at the bottom – and north – the shooter nearer the scene’s center.  They are carving their way to lower grades at 12th Ave and Jackson Streets, respectively.  Ultimately, with 85 feet cut from the ridge at 12th Avenue the grade of Jackson Street was reduced from fifteen percent to five. The Weller Street statistics are similar.

The June 7, 1908 Post-Intelligencer described two “giants working on Eight Ave in the rear of the Catholic school property.”  The school is Holy Names Academy, originally a formidable landmark with a high central spire that opened on the east side of 7th Avenue, mid-block between Jackson and King streets, in 1884. On June 8, ‘08 the school’s newest graduates, eleven of them, drew a large audience of parents and alums for their baccalaureate.  Everyone understood that within a few days the water canons would be turned directly at their campus and memories.

The same issue of the P-I revealed that school administrators had not yet decided what to do with what the paper agreed was “one of the most valuable buildings in the district.”   Three alternatives were described and all involved moving the school to a new lot.  However, it was an easier backup that was picked.   The building was razed, and parts of it salvaged, or so it would seem from the neatness of it’s dismantling as recorded here.

WEB EXTRAS

Hey Paul, happy holidays! Anything to add?

Some few things more about Weller Street, different points-of-view on Holy Names, a jump to the academy’s new home on Capitol Hill, followed by three of for Christmas related features concluding with a seasonal sampler.

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HOLY NAMES on CAPITOL HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 14, 2007)

A century of greening on the Holy Names Academy campus has half-draped the full figure of this Capitol Hill landmark by architects Breitung & Buchinger.  If the landscape were stripped away we would discover a Baroque Revival plant that has changed very little since the “real photo postcard” photographer Otto Frasch recorded it almost certainly in 1908. The big exception is the tower at the north end of the school, on the left. While a 1965 earthquake did not collapse the tower, it did weaken the structure so much it had to be removed.

The Sisters of Holy Names arrived in Seattle in 1880 and opened their school for girls in a home downtown. In 1884 the school moved to its own stately structure on Seventh Avenue near Jackson Street and remained there until the Jackson Street Regrade (1907-1909) made kindling of the school. Construction on this third campus began in 1906, the cornerstone was laid in 1907, and in the fall of 1908 the school was dedicated. Of the 282 students then attending, 127 of them boarded there. Many came from Alaska, some from “off the farm,” others from distant rural communities, and a few from nearby and yet still-hard-to-reach areas such as Mercer Island.

In 1908 Holy Names served all 12 grades plus a “Normal School” for training teachers. By 1930 the Normal School was closed. The grade school was shut down in 1963, and by 1967, the school also quit boarding students.

Classes may already have begun when Frasch took this photo, but certainly the structure’s north wing (the one closest to the photographer) with the chapel was not finished, and wouldn’t be until 1925. The chapel was included in restoration that began in 1990.

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SEATTLE HARDWARE CHRISTMAS

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec.25, 2005)

Considering the mix of reflections and fancy stuff in 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. In the center is a third pile of gifts, including dolls and a cluster of oil lanterns just below the banner bearing the company name, Seattle Hardware Co.

Once a stalwart of home improvements, Seattle Hardware tempted shoppers through these plate-glass windows at First Avenue and Marion Street beginning in 1890 when the Colman Building was new. Like the clapboard structure John Colman lost here to the Great Fire of 1889, this brick replacement was kept 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 street level, this was one of the busiest sidewalks in town.

When Colman was preparing to add four more floors to his building, Seattle Hardware moved to its own brick pile at King Street and First Avenue South in the fall of 1905. The elegant post-fire neighborhood you see reflected in these 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 to make way for the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building.

In the century since the hardware building grew to six floors, this storefront has been home to a parade of purveyors beginning with Wells Fargo. More recently Bartell Drugs and B. Dalton Books held the corner, and now Starbucks. In the “now” photograph [from 2005], a man holds a sign that reads, “Disabled. Will Work. Navy Vet 78/82 Thanks.”

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WARREN WING R.I.P.

Earlier this now failing year an old and fine friend Warren Wing died.  Warren was an extraordinary rail fan who both collected and shared his evidences of railroads, trolleys, with a good measure of “Mosquito Fleet” steamers as well.   He was a pleasure to be with, and a fine story teller.   During part of WW2 Warren worked as a chef – aka cook – on an army train that moved around the states carrying soldiers from one camp to another.  After the war he kept moving, working as a postman here in Seattle.  While walking his route in the Green Lake neighborhood Warren happened upon a “customer” playing with a model train in his basement.  It was not the beginning of Warren’s interest in rolling stock but it quickened it.  He started collecting negatives and then published several books from the images in his own collection.   Sometimes we lectured together.  It was a delight.  Three times I featured Warren and examples of his work, while helping spread the word about one of his books.   The last time was in 1998: a copy of his Christmas card that year.  The Pacific clip that came from it is printed next and below it is another Seattle Christmas car, one from 1935.  That too I learned of from the helpful Mr. Wing.   Finally, at the bottom of this, is another look at Warren from an earlier feature, that one on the border of Georgetown.  He was a good and sharing friend.

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CHRISTMAS at the BROWN HOME on DEXTER AVENUE

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 23, 1984.)

When the wife of a pioneer clergyman was asked what she did on her first Christmas Day in Seattle, she replied, “Why it came on a Monday, so I did the wash.”

The first Christmases in Seattle were subdued celebrations that only momentarily interrupted the normal regimen of survival. And there was not much call for gathering around Christmas trees since the trees surrounded the pioneer settlement.  Once the forest had been safely pruned away, however, the settlers began embracing the symbol of Christmas time. The first big community Christmas tree was set up in Yesler’s Hall on Pioneer Square in 1864. It was like a family affair, with almost the entire community (nearly 300 persons) attending the party. People sang carols and retold yuletide stories, and Santa Claus was there with a sack full of presents.

As the town grew, the Christmas celebrations multiplied and moved to the churches. Then Christmas was the most ecumenical day of the year as townspeople paraded from church to church, enjoying the decorations, fellowship and potluck dinners.

By the turn of the century, Seattle had grown too big for citywide ceremonies, and a tree in every home became the tradition. They were decorated with strings of popcorn, ornaments of colored cardboard and tinfoil and covered with candles. Homes were filled with the region’s own vast assortment of yuletide trappings, including mistletoe, and native holly.

The historical Christmas subjects include here are from 1900 or near it. The first scene, above, shows a brother and sister sitting by a tree decorated with cut-out paper figures, tinsel stars and strings of cranberries. It is lit by candles and topped by an angel. With one hand, the daughter presses a toy’ trumpet to her lips and, with the other, hangs on to a stuffed black sheep. Beside her is a tower of blocks decorated with sentimental scenes from childhood. Behind the tree is a painting of Snoqualmie Falls, and on the far left of the photograph are the folded hands of the children’s mother resting on her knees.

Most likely, the photo of the Siblings was taken by George Brown, their father.  Brown was a plumber by trade and also played the clarinet in Wagner’s Band. These are a few of many Brown negatives discovered by Bill Greer, which we have for now a quarter century of use shared with many.

The Brown children have grown some between the top photo, of three, and the bottom one.  The “now” that follows is not of the Brown kids grown up on Dexter Ave., but of Anne and George Luther MacClaren in 1952, who lived on Latona Street, near Green Lake.  Anne especially was an enthused photographer, although her focus was, as here, often on the soft side.

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[An excerpt from “Keep Clam,” a work-in-progress – still.]

. . .  As The Seattle Star’s Jamie Jamison recalled the Santa episode, “That first Christmas he had Patsy, he dressed her up in a pinafore, put a baby’s lace cap on her head, placed her in a baby buggy and wheeled her up to Seattle’s leading department store (Frederick and Nelson) to see Santa.” It was, of course, Ivar who alerted the press and whom we may thank for the surviving photographs of the performance.  Much later he would bluster, “Of course, a lot of people thought I was nuts, but the newspapers and news wire services gobbled up the story and soon Patsy and I were celebrities of a sort, and customers started flocking down to the waterfront to see the only baby seal in the world who had visited with Santa Claus.”  On his way the “aquarist” wheeled Patsy through the Pike Place Market repeating in reverse the path of reverie he frequently took as a college student on his way to the waterfront after school as he dreamed of one day working on the docks.

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(click to enlarge photos)

I first enjoyed this vessel’s profile in an old clipping long ago. Pioneer Sophie Frye Bass recounted, that the “handsome Lake Union steamer” Latona so pleased Seattle developer James Moore (of the theatre) that he named his new addition on the northeast “corner” of the lake also for the Roman goddess – and the boat.

Recently Carolyn Marr, MOHAI’s librarian, surprised me with the original print.  It is about the size of a cel phone.  Fortunately there is a hand-written caption on the flip side of the photo’s card stock, which is signed by the pioneer dentist-developer E.K. Kilbourne.  Librarian Marr assured me that it was his hand that wrote it all.   Kilbourne describes how (in late 1888) he bought the Latona on Elliott Bay from James Colman (of the dock) and brought it first up the Duwamish and Black Rivers to Lake Washington, and then carefully thru “David Denny’s ditch” (the Montlake log canal) towed it to Lake Union.  Like Moore, Kilbourne had his own addition on the north shore of the lake, and the Latona was splendid for carrying buyers and commuters the length of the lake.

Discovering that the patch inscribed “Latona,” (again in Kilbourne’s hand) and pasted above the caption had a loose end, I, of course, lifted it.  Below it the letters “ene” are written on the photo card itself but in a different hand.  This fragment was “fulfilled” with a magnified look at the vessel itself.  This is not the Latona but the Cyrene, and “Cyrene” is signed on the bow.  The Cyrene was also built for Colman on the Seattle Waterfront and brought up the rivers to the big lake.  There it stayed and worked for many years running excursions and routine trips between Leschi and Madison Park.   Unlike the Latona, it never went on to Lake Union.

Marine historian Ron Burke reminds me that once again we are left with no known photograph of the Latona.  Burke also reminded me that old age and confusion might explain Kilbourne’s gaff.  He lived to be 103; Burke, as a child, met him.  Also, the lake steamers Cyrene, and Xanthus, were both built to nearly the same plans by the same shipwright, Mat Anderson, for James Colman, from whom, again, Kilbourne bought his Latona.    It may be that if and when we find one, a photo (or sketch) of the Latona will reveal that it looked very much like the Cyrene.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yup Jean, and again more subjects from the neighborhood.  First a couple of Seattle Times clips about the Cyrene, followed by some maps that include Portage Bay and often more.

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UNION BAY FLEET – 1909

This splendid record of life on Union Bay before its bottom was exposed with the 1916 lowering of the Lake for the ship canal was probably photographed from the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way, now the Burke Gilman Recreational Trail.  The boat house in the foreground was built by the school’s associated students in 1906.  It included a dance hall, dresser rooms, lockers, canoe racks and quarters for the keeper and his family.  For the ten years it was moored here the ASUW Boat House was easily one of the most popular campus destinations.  “Canoeing wooing” was then still a commonplace of Seattle dating and courtship.

The occasion for the unusual congestion of Lake Washington “Mosquito Fleet” steamers shown here probably has to do with the commuting of visitors to the summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition on the University of Washington campus.  There are five lake steamers in the scene, but only four are readily seen.  And, if I have identified them correctly, they are, naming them counter-clockwise from the boat house, the Wildwood, the Fortuna, the Cyrene and the Triton.  All but the Wildwood belong to Capt. John L. Anderson who until his death in 1940 ran steamers and ferries on the lake for fifty years.

During the fair Capt. Anderson and his competitors ran 15 minutes commutes between the fair’s landings on Union Bay and Leschi, Madrona, and Madison parks.  An estimated 1,500,000 passengers were handled for these quick hops and for the longer excursion around Mercer Island.

Except for the Fortuna that is seen coming towards shore behind the Wildwood’s stack, all these vessels are empty.  Perhaps, then in this morning scene, the Triton, farthest left beneath Laurelhurst, is returning to Leschi empty to take on more fair goers.  The smaller Cyrene, at the scene’s center, is waiting for her chance to load up for an excursion, and the Wildwood has just left off passengers walking here towards shore along the north (left) apron of the boathouse.  Perhaps.

Union Bay is now dedicated to student parking and recreation. Much of these park and play acres were reclaimed from bottom land by the Montlake Dump.  The dump closed in 1964.

(Historical photo from 1909 courtesy Pemco Webster and Stevens Collection, Museum of History and Industry. Dump photo courtesy of the Municipal Archive.)

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ASUW BOATHOUSE on UNION BAY

(First appeared in Pacific, May 15, 1988)

Some of the hours they now give to motorcars and music television*, University students used to devote to canoeing. Early-century canoeing was such a popular diversion that in 1906 the University of Washington’s students built their own boathouse. This view of it looks to the northwest from a wetland peninsula that extended into Lake Washington’s Union Bay shallows. Comparing then and now maps of the bay we can be confident that the contemporary view (above)  was shot from very near the historical photographer’s wetland roost. Where now racquets are swung and cars parked, paddles were pulled and canoes glided. It’s a difference made from a nine foot (1916) lowering of Lake Washington and years of sanitary filling at the Montlake dump.

The Interlaken, a North End tabloid of the time, in its February 23, 1907, issue touted the Associated Students’ boat house as “an elegant structure … the best boat house on Lake Washington.” The article also details its functions. “The downstairs contains dresser rooms, locker rooms and a large canoe room where canoe racks are rented to students at a much lower rate than they can obtain elsewhere. The upstairs contains the best dancing floor for small parties in Seattle, also dressing rooms and rooms for keeper and family.”

The smaller boat house to this side of the ASUW’s is for the University crews. Built in 1900, again by students, it survived nine years before larger crew quarters were built on Lake Union’s Portage Bay. We may conclude, then, that this historical photograph was most likely shot sometime between 1907 and 1909. And already in the cold of February 1907, The Interlaken noted that “this boat house constitutes a center for University aquatics,” which, “during the spring will be the center of a great deal of the social life of the University.” The newspaper added that soon electric lights would be strung where before the boathouse had “been compelled to remain dark or be lit with candles and lanterns.” We may imagine the reflecting glow of those lanterns across Union Bay.

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The ATLANTA & The HANGAR

Here the distinguished lake steamer Atlanta marks the waters of the Montlake Cut as she ploughs into Lake Washington and before the surviving landmark A.S.U.W. Shell House.  The Atlanta was the first ship built by Lake Legend Capt. John Anderson at the Lake Washington Shipyards after he purchased that fledgling marine ways at Houghton (now the site of Kirkland’s Carillon Point) in 1908.  At 90 feet and 87 tons the Atlanta joined the growing fleet of small and sleek steamers named for Greek deities; e.g. the Fortuna, Triton, Aquilo, Xanthus and Cyrene.

In his 52 years on these waterways following his arrival in Seattle in 1888, the Swedish immigrant Anderson rose from polishing deck brass to running Lake Washington transportation both in competition with and for King County.  His death in 1941 followed quickly after the 1940 opening of the Lacey Murrow Floating Bridge (AKA, the Mercer Island Bridge) the overture to the requiem of regularly floating transportation on Lake Washington.  Long before the bridge disrupted waterborne commuting it was the excursion trade that kept Anderson afloat.

The Atlanta was built to handle the rush of sightseers expected for the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition on the U.W. campus.  Anderson ran 12 excursion steamers on the big lake throughout the summer-long AYP.   It was however the 1916 opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal that regularly filled the Atlanta with sightseers enjoying – as the banner on the bow promotes – the “Daily Excursions (through) Sound-Canal-Lakes.” In 1935 Capt. Anderson replaced the Atlanta with the bigger Sightseer, a sturdy vessel that many Pacific readers will have boarded for it was kept in the Sound-Canal-Lake excursion service until 1962.

As revealed by Paul G. Spitzer, past Boeing historian, this scene’s landmark, the old student Shell House, was designed for neither canoes nor racing sculls but rather for seaplanes.  The Navy built it in 1918 while in control of most of the University’s waterfront during World War One.  The sloping walls and oversize hanger doors are enduring signs of its original purpose although, as Spitzer points out “in its eight-four years it has probably never housed an airplane.”

(Historical photo courtesy of Michael Maslan.)

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RETOUCHING LESCHI

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 22, 1985)

A few years back while thumbing through some photos at the Oregon Historical Society, I first discovered this “ideal” scene. This photograph has been made downright sweet by an artist’s creation of some cumulus clouds that resemble cotton candy.  At the bottom of the photo the retouch-artist continued his work enveloping the heads of two women in the fog that surrounds the picture’s caption, “1061 Boat Landing, Leschi Park …”  While on my visit, I made a copy of the artist-photographer’s work, laying it on a tilting table next to a window.  Using a steady tripod, I got a good negative.

The next time I stumbled upon this scene was in Wade Vaughn’s book Seattle­ Leschi Diary. Wade copied his view from a postcard. There are no confectionary clouds and the women have their heads. Instead, it is the postcard’s caption has been decapitated. Vaughn explains below his use of this view, that once a caption did exist, and that it dated the scene 1911.  It also added this stock postcardish description: “Leschi Park is a small picturesque Park bordering Lake Washington at Yesler Way, and is a favorite starting point for excursionists over the beautiful lake.” (Since writing this I have also “witnessed” a hand-colored version.)

Actually, the old Leschi was much more than picturesque. As the dappled light in this photo suggests, in its day Leschi was a resort of fair weather pleasures where the differences between indoors and out, sun and shade, and land and lake were creatively confused by long verandas, arboreal promenades, gazebos, bandstands, ornamental gables and arches.

The Leschi boathouse was a wonderful harbor built beneath eight gables and a decorated tower that covered, but did not hide, rows of wood canoes when they, not motorcars, were the principal means of transport for romance. Here you see only the boathouse sign, far right, on the dock which leads out to the covered canoes.

Nor do you see here the Leschi Pavilion, although the photo was taken from its veranda. (See is directly below.)   The pavilion was immense, extending far out over the water, to the right, and far into the park, to the left. The scene of many dances, romances, and stage shows, its single most famous attraction was the 1906 performance by the “divine” Sarah Bernhardt.

What is in this (top) picture is Captain John Anderson’s landing for his lake excursion launches. Just beyond his depot, and poking its second story above the Anderson sign, is the Lake Washington Hotel and Restaurant. It was built in 1890, or less than two years after a development that turned “Fleaburg” (this spot’s popular name in the 1880s) into Leschi.

The Lake Washington Cable Railway’s formal opening was on September 28, 1888. It took 16 minutes for its open cars to run the three-plus roller ­coaster miles out Yesler Way from Pioneer Square – a fact that encouraged many businessmen to build homes on the hill behind the park. The cable railway’s powerhouse is half-hidden behind the trees on the (top) photo’s left. We can see the smokestacks.

In 1913, or only two years after this (top) scene was shot, the Leschi auto ferry began its 27 years of steaming between here and the east side of the lake. The July 2, 1940 opening of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge put a sudden end to that.  Only five weeks later on August 10, the last cable car to run out Yesler completed 52 years of a service many now wish was still running.

Actually, the end of this old Leschi scene was over many years earlier.  Directly below, I chose a symbolic 1925 when an oiled-gravel surface of Lakeside Ave. was cut down through the center of our historical photo.  After that it was perhaps less likely that any artist-photographer of this view would be inspired to add edible clouds.

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THE LOST RIVER

(First appeared in Pacific, March 10, 1985)

I first uncovered this romantic river scene in a Post-Intelligencer photo feature titled “Canoeing From Lake To Sound.” Originally published on Sunday, September 9, 1906, it featured 12 illustrations of a relaxed flotilla making its way down the old river route from Lake Washington to Puget Sound. The original story was confined to one page, and so the pictures were both small and grainy. Although I wished to see this scene more clearly – a common desire with old news photos – knew that my chances of ever finding an original print, or even negative, were very slim. Recently (now more than a quarter-century ago), those odds were suddenly “fattened” when a friend, John Hanawalt of the Old Seattle Paperworks in the Pike Place Market, showed me a stack of old photographs he had uncovered, and flipped to an original print of this Black River scene.       This is a truly lost place. The Black River used to run out of the southern end of Lake Washington en-route to its union with the Union River to form together the Duwamish River, which made its serpentine journey of a few miles, concluding in the Elliott Bay estuary of sand islands and tideflats. But before it coursed a mile south from Lake Washington, it was joined by the Cedar River at a confluence which was just a few yards north of what is now the Renton intersection of Rainier Ave. and Airport Way. The contemporary photograph shows the view north through that intersection.

The old Post Intelligencer’s caption for this photograph reads, “Black River, near Cedar River.” If the boaters were “near” to the south of the Cedar River, then they were close to the McDonald’s parking lot printed directly below. If, however, they were “near” to the north of that confluence, then they would be paddling in what is what is now the middle of the main runway of the Renton Airport.

In 1912 the Cedar River was diverted into Lake Washington and four years later the Black River dried up when its source, the lake, was dropped nine feet with the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. But before all that, this was the way “From Lake To Sound” and it was best done this way, in a canoe or shallow-bottomed rowboat.

And it took all day. As the text to the old photo feature explains, this group started after 11 a.m. and never made it. At 9 p.m., in the dark and exhausted, they stepped ashore at Georgetown, a few miles short of their goal, the Seattle waterfront. In 1906 the Duwamish River was not yet straightened into a waterway, and so ‘ still snaked its way through Georgetown, which it now misses by a mile.

Although the Black River is now lost for good, there is still satisfaction in having found this inviting photograph of it.  (And the two that follow.)

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1931 CREW ON LAKE UNION

(First appeared in Pacific, 6/21/1987)

Any life-long local over the age of 60 [a quarter-century ago] will know that this is Lake Union. It’s not the shrouded horizon of Queen Anne Hill that gives this scene away, but the three rows of vessels silhouetted by the light scattering through an afternoon haze. Each of these classes of vessels evokes its own well-remembered historical romance.

First are the laid-up sailing ships on the right, the five-and six-masted lumber schooners and barkentines that after the 1917 opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal regularly slipped into the fresh water Lake Union for a winter’s rest and cleansing. Sailing ships continued to use the lake far into the 1930s, although the 1932 completion of the Aurora Bridge limited passage to those whose masts could slip beneath the bridge’s steel trusses. Anchored side by side, these vessels inspired an annual poetics in the Seattle press. They were a “forest of masts,” “veterans of the seas,” “Seattle’s idle fleet of windjammers,” and towards the end, Seattle’s “warehouse of obsolete sailing ships awaiting refurbishing or destruction.” Usually the latter, they were burned for the little scrap metal they contained.

A second class of disposable ships that crowded the lake were the surplus wood freighters built on Puget Sound during and for the First World War, but never used. Tied side-to-side and bow-to-stem they were known locally as “Wilson’s Wood Row.”

In the foreground, forming this photograph’s third line of recollection, are the muscle-motivated, George Peacock-designed sculls from the University of Washington. The man in the hat standing, grading, and following in the powerboat is probably Coach Ulbrickson. This view is used courtesy of Jim Day, boat-builder and competitive sailor, whose father Herb Day, now deceased, is pulling in one of those crews. Annis Day, Jim’s mother, is confident that this scene was shot before the Aurora Bridge opened in 1932. Since the freshman Herb Day began his UW rowing in 1931, that must be the year of this view. And a very good year it was for the freshmen. Day’s crew started by beating the varsity crew, thereby winning the Seattle Times Trophy and ended it by winning the national championship in their class.

In 1932 Herb Day and a few other sophomores joined the varsity crew but, unfortunately, not the Olympics of that year, losing to the University of California in the trials.  However, in 1933 they rebounded, first defeating California by an “almost unbelievable 10-length margin” in the West Coast Regatta, and then Yale by eight feet, thereby winning the national championship. The returning champions were given a mid-day victory parade aboard flower-decorated floats through downtown.

On the last day of 1933, Ulbrickson lamented to the press, “We lose Polly Parrott, Herb Day and Herb Mjorud. They rowed in the waist of the shell. They were a combination a coach gets only once or twice in ten years.”  Ulbrickson’s second such combination came soon enough and included Herb Day’s brother James as part of the 1936 Varsity Crew that won the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

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1887 LAKE UNION REPOSE

This photograph – it seems as much a painting – of two women relaxing in a forest of cedars and firs was found in a nearly century-old album of grainy and often faded prints. Luckily, this scene is captioned, “West Side, Lake Union.” The album includes another Lake Union view, and that second record is also dated 1887. Both prints were exposed on photographic paper of the same size, texture and weight, we may almost assume that the scene of the two women was and other were photographed during the same visit to the lake, which in 1887 would have been an adventure.. These may be the earliest close-up records of the lake, which the Indians and settlers, using the Chinook trade-talk, called Tenas Chuck, or Little Water, to distinguish is from the Big Water: Lake Washington.

Lake Union may be said to have two west sides – the greater and the lesser. The lesser is the shore that runs to the northeast from Gasworks Park along the channel that leads to the University District bridge and Portage Bay. I think it unlikely that the caption writer was referring to this short west side.  It would normally be considered part of the lake’s north side. The longer west side of the Lake extends from its southern end north below Queen Anne Hill to the Fremont Bridge, where, before the ship canal widened and straightened it, a stream joined the lake to Salmon Bay on Puget Sound. It seems likely that the photographer recorded this scene of lakeside repose close to that outlet. There, like in the photograph, the distance across the lake narrows. Lake Union also narrows some at its southern end, but by 1887 the Western Lumber Mill had already been manufacturing there for four years. The mill is not in the picture.

If these deductions are correct, then the two women are posing beside an old cedar near the point where Westlake A venue North now begins its long approach to the Fremont Bridge. Across the water is a district near the present Stone Way North that developed its own community called Edgewater. If we are right in that description then we can also come closer to dating the scene. If it had been photographed in the fall of 1887, the wooden trestle of the Seattle Lake Shore and Easter Railroad would be visible across the lake on its northern shore. The trestle was constructed during the summer of that year. With the railroad came the platting and settlement of Fremont, but the trestle is not there and neither is Fremont. Also, judging from the leafless twigs and the women’s wraps, the photo was taken either early or late in the year, which in this instance means, given the rest of the evidence, early in the year.

One can also see from the photo that the north shore has been cleared some of its timber, which was most likely directed towards the lake in its felling and then floated to the Western Mill at the lake’s southern end. It was a typical practice of most pioneer lumbering to take the easier shoreline timber first. By 1890 most of the forest on the far side would be cleared. But even with the clear-cutting an occasional tree would be left standing because it was irregular and difficult to mill. So the leaning, rough and, perhaps, crooked old cedar may have survived for a few more years – a hope we hold also for the two women.

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FOREST FRIEND

We may expect that the sides of these two five-mast barkentines are painted some shade of forest green.  These and a third sister were raised together at Grays Harbor in 1919-1920.  Built for the offshore and coastal trade of the Forest Line, their names were Forest Pride, Forest Dream and Forest Friend.   The ship on the right is either the Pride or the Dream, for the other is surely the Friend; when magnified, the name appears on the starboard side.  Designed to carry lumber, they were 242 feet long and 44 feet wide.  In 1923- about the time this view of it was photographed – the Forest Friend was the first ocean vessel to reach the south end of Lake Washington when it loaded cargo at Taylor’s Mill near Renton.  This scene was photographed from the end of the Lake Union Cargo Co. dock where Westlake Ave. begins its last long section before reaching the Fremont Bridge (hidden here behind the barkentines); the Aurora Bridge is not yet in place.  When it was completed in 1932, ships as tall as these were not able to pass beneath it.

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MONONGAHELA’S ESCAPE

(First appeared in Pacific, July 15, 1992)

On March 25, 1931, after standing idle in Lake Union for three years, the Monongahela was towed to Eagle Harbor, its four masts slipping between the closing cantilevers of the Aurora Bridge. Built in Glasgow in 1892, it was named Balasore for the town beside the Bay of Bengal where British imperialism was introduced to India in the 17th century. The steel-hulled vessel was later sold to a German company and renamed the Dalbek. In 1914 the Dalbek was sent on a journey from which she did not return. Arriving on the Columbia River on Aug. 2, she was stranded there by the opening of World War I. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, she was seized for the U.S. Shipping Board, which ran her between San Francisco and Manila as the Monongahela.

When the Charles Nelson Company bought her in 1922, she was used at least once on the shipping firm’s intercoastal trade. It towed West Coast lumber to Florida and returned to San Francisco through the Panama Canal with sulfur from Galveston, Texas.

After ending a trip with lumber to Australia in 1928, the Monongahela was anchored in the southeast comer of Lake Union. It stayed there, in the early doldrums of the Great Depression, until it was forced out by the mounting obstruction of the Aurora Bridge. Eventually sold in bankruptcy to a Seattle company for $8,600, the Monongahela was towed from Eagle Harbor to Smith Cove. There it was converted to a barge and sold to the Kelly Logging Co. of Vancouver, B.C., where it survived for a few more years hauling logs before it was scrapped.

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UNION BAY ca. 1909

When the University of Washington moved north in 1895 from downtown, the new site was commonly referred to as the Interlaken Campus.   Views such as this confirm the name.   Most likely this scene was photographed during or soon after the makeover of the campus for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP).

With the campus to his or her back, the unnamed photographer looks southeast across Union Bay.  Madison Park is right-of-center, and Webster Point, the southern extremity of Laurelhurst, shows itself on the left just above the stairway that descends from the pedestrian trestle.   Between them we look across the main body of Lake Washington to an eastside waterfront softly filtered by a morning haze that hangs over the lake on what is otherwise a bright winter day.  This is Medina – or will be.  In 1909 there are as yet no palatial beach homes and/or bunkers to attract our modern flotilla of waterborne life-style hunters.

Lake Washington is here at its old level before it was slowly dropped nine feet between late August and mid-October 1916 for the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal.  At the old lake level the small unnamed island, right of center, was still separated from Foster Island, behind the screen of trees on the far right.  Now joined, they can be explored on the Arboretum Waterfront Self-guided Trail.

We might have wished that the photographer had shown more of the trestle.   It was mostly likely constructed for access to the shore groomed as a picturesque retreat for visitors to the AYP.   The construction of both peeled and unhewed logs repeats one of the Expo’s lesser architectural themes – the rustic one.  The trestle, of course, spans the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern – the railroad that opened up the hinterland of King County in the late 1880s.  It first reached this point beside Union Bay in the fall of 1887.

In 1916 Lake Washington was dropped nine feet and the campus waterfront on Union Bay has since been extended with fills and the construction of oversized sports facilities like the 1927 Hec Edmundson Pavilion and the 1920 Husky Stadium.  The timber trestle has also been replaced with a concrete one that passes over both the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way (now a portion of the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail) and Montlake Blvd. N.E.    (Historical pix. courtesy Michael Cirelli.)

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LOG CANAL & LOCKS at MONTLAKE

(First appeared in Pacific, June 2, 2002)

This is surely the most intimate record of the locks on the old Montlake Log Canal that has ever been shared with me.  It is one part of a stereo recorded by Frank Harwood around 1907. When properly spied through stereoscope optics, the floating logs in the foreground of the original actually seem to be wonderfully in the foreground. With this third dimension, the logger near the locks’ guillotine gate needs considerably more skill to ride his log.

Like the Indians before him, Harvey Pike first saw the importance of this isthmus as a low and short portage between Lake Union’s Portage Bay and Union Bay on Lake Washington. He was paid with this land for painting the original University of Washington building in 1861. Pike platted and named his prize Union City, and soon he also began excavating a ditch for moving logs. The big lake was then ordinarily around 9 feet higher than the small. Predictably, Pike soon gave up this digging. Still, he kept an eye open for opportunities, and in 1871 transferred his deed to Californians with deeper pockets. They laid a narrow-gauge railroad tracks across the isthmus. Between 1872 and ’78, these rails carried cars filled with the black gold of Newcastle.  In those years coal, not lumber, was Seattle’s principal export.   For pulling the coal cars across the isthmus the coal company employed the cattle of the Brownfield family, and their sons to guide them.  The Brownfields were the first farmers to homestead the future University District.

IN 1878, the coal company abandoned this Lake Union route for a more direct route around the south end of Lake Washington to the Seattle waterfront.  Next, the Montlake Isthmus was at last channeled for logs in 1883 by Chinese laborers. This guillotine lock was built near the Portage Bay end of the cut, within a frog jump of the University of Washington’s row of odd-shaped fish hatcheries set today beside Highway 520. (And when we can find our picture of the hatcheries we will put it up.)

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LATONA BOATHOUSE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 6, 1996)

This view is a one-of-a-kind record of the Latona waterfront, circa 1911, or at least that part of it east of the Latona Bridge, from which it was photographed.

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

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

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

(click to enlarge photos)

Jean and I recently met Alice Stuart and Kurt Einar Armbruster on the University District’s “Ave.” in front where the Pamir House – featuring “variety coffees” and folk singing – might have been had it not been replaced by a parking lot more than forty years ago.

Two lots north of 41st Street, Alice led us from the sidewalk thru the parked cars to the eloquent spot where she sang and played her resonant Martin D-18 guitar one year short of a half-century earlier.  It was near the beginning of a remarkable singing career for the then 20-year old folk artist from Lake Chelan and blessed with a beautiful voice.  She still uses it regularly.  (This past year Stuart was on stage “gigging” an average of nearly three times a week – often with her band named Alice Stuart & The Formerlys.)

Alice Stuart is one of the many Seattle musicians that author-musician Kurt E. Armbruster splendidly treats in his new book “Before Seattle Rocked.” The index of this University of Washington Press publication runs 25 pages and covers most imaginable music-related subjects in our community’s past from Bach thru Be-bop to the Wang Doodle Orchestra. This author has a gift for interviewing his subjects.  Stuart expressed amazement at his elegant edit of what she thought of as her “rambling on” about her long career.

Armbruster’s first book, “Whistle Down the Valley” (1991) was built on interviews with railroad workers in the Green River valley.  His second book “The Orphan Road” took a difficult subject, Washington’s first railroads, and unraveled its tangles with wisdom and good wit.   The “Orphan” is easily one of our classics.  Now with “Before Seattle Rocked” Armbruster’s place is insured among those who chose important regional subjects that waited years for their devoted revelators.

Armbruster is a “proud member of Seattle Musicians’ Association, AFM Local 76-493.”  Among other instruments, Kurt plays the bass for music of many kinds including rock and pop.  The book’s dedication reads, “To Ed ‘Tuba Man’ McMichael (1955-2008), a working musician.”

WEB EXTRAS

A couple more shots of Alice Stuart and her guitar:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean.  Directly below Ron Edge has added a cluster of relevant extras with a link to a blog contribution that appeared here first on July 9, 1911.  (Just click on the photo of the WW2 war bonds rally at the corner of 45th and University Way.) It features several items touching on University District history, many of them also on “The Ave.”   Following the Edge link, I’ll insert a few other related features and photos from diverse sources.

(Remember, if you wish, to CLICK to ENLARGE)

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Above:  The University District’s “main street” 14th Avenue was renamed University Way by contest in 1918, or about nine years after this record of the street and its then principal intersection at 42nd Street was photographed.  (Courtesy Dan Kerlee)  Below:  A few of the structures in the historical view do survive in the “now’ although most of these have been “modernized” with new facades like the buildings on the far right at the southeast corner of University Way and 42nd Street.

“THE UNIVERSITY STATION”

Now often called simply “The Ave”, University Way was first platted in 1890 as Columbus Avenue.  Two years later an electric trolley was laid along its centerline to help sell lots in the new neighborhood (then still known as Brooklyn) but also to prepare for the daily delivery of students when the University of Washington fulfilled its plans to relocate there in 1895.

This postcard view looks north on the Ave to its intersection with 42nd Street, which the students soon learned to call “University Station” for the waiting shed built at its northeast corner, and also for the familiar bark of the trolley conductor.  “The Station”, for short, quickly become the center of neighborhood activity, and with the transfer of the old Latona Post Office to the northwest corner of the intersection in 1902, Columbus and 42nd had a second direct reason to be so called.

A dozen businesses crowded to all sides of the intersection in 1905.  Three more, including the district’s first bank, opened in 1906.  By then the Station was also the off-campus stage for fraternity initiation rites. Freshman were directed to sweep the street in front of any woman crossing it, and perform as sidewalk mimes acting out the business being done inside the storefronts.  Also in the summer of 1906 the intersection had its own musical accompaniment when the University Station Band played from a pavilion built beside it.

In preparation for the summer-long1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Expo (AYP) on the university campus, a second trolley track was added to Columbus, AKA 14th Avenue, and the street itself was paved with asphalt in the early fall of 1908.  During the AYP the Station’s commercial dominance was temporarily deflected one and two blocks south on 14th, closer to the Expo’s main gate on 40th Street.  And after the AYP the center of the district’s business life jumped north to 45th Street and 14th Avenue.  When the post office joined in this move, businesses near 42nd first complained but then pleaded for at least a sidewalk letterbox on the Station corner.

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AVE RIP UP

On the twelfth of May, 1940 gas-powered busses replaced the then 48-year-old trolley service to the University District.  Here two months later in July, we look north on the Ave through its intersection with 45^th Street. After the trolley tracks were removed the rough center of the street was exploited as a temporary parking strip while the curb lanes were reserved for moving traffic the busses included.  On August 11, trolleys returned to the Ave but they were maneuverable trackless ones.  In this scene their overhead wires are not yet installed.

The Ave got its cosmopolitan advantage in 1895 when the University arrived beside it.  In 1940 U.W. English Professor Frederick Padelford described University Way as “the silver chord” or “vital connecting link between the life of the campus and the life in the community . . . where town and gown mingle to their mutual advantage.”  And by Seattle standards life on the Ave has always been extraordinary.

In the nearly 63 years that separates then above from now (in 2003) all the same structures on the west side of University Way north of its main intersection at 45th Street have survived. (And continue to in 2011.)   However all the 56 listed tenants (including the apartments) on this west side of the street have changed and most of the uses have changed as well.  By example, gone from 1940 are G.O. Guy Drugs, Buster Brown Shoes, the Diamond 5 Cents and $1.00 Store, Brehm’s Delicatessen, VandeKamp’s Dutch Bakery, Mode O’Day Women’s shop, Mannings Coffee Shop and the Egyptian Theater. Gone but still remembered.

Above and Below: Two more July 1946 Parking Conditions survey snapshots taken from a U.Book Store upper floor.

NEXT: Looking south thru the same block from 45th.  First in 1908 when the 4300 block of 14th Avenue, (University Way) was still as much residential as commercial, followed by another Merry 20’s look south through the intersection with 45th Street.

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The Main Gate to the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP) on the University of Washington campus was sumptuously set looking west on 40^th Street from the east side of 15^th Avenue. E.  After the Exposition the entrance on 40^th was developed for driving onto the UW campus.   (Historical photo by A. Price)

AYP MAIN GATE

Here is where most visitors to the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition got their first inkling for what awaited them within in the way of edifying instruction or cheap thrills.  And these ordinarily conflicting emotions may have been enjoyed together when crossing the threshold beneath a gateway that could have been erected for Caesar’s return.

The photograph looks west across Puget Plaza and over the shoulders of sculptor Loredo Taft’s bronze statue of the American Caesar, George Washington, left-of-center. (Washington was later moved one block north and now looks west on Campus Parkway.) To the sides of the gate and through its three arches can be glimpsed the confusion of commercial signs and small shops on 15^th Avenue hoping to pick up a few dimes from the fair visitors.  Included are the AYP Laundry, a KODAK store, and a big billboard (far right) promoting Charles Cowen’s University Park Addition.  This is mildly ironic for Cowen was one the boomers for beautifying the University District in preparation for the exposition.

The bandstand on the far left is busy with musicians – perhaps AYP regular, Wagner’s Band.  AYP expert-enthusiast and bassoonist Dan Kerlee notes that the exposition campus was generally alive with music – live music.

The date may be Sept 18, for a banner stretched above 15^th Avenue on the far side of the gate has that date printed large at both its ends.  September18^th was Exhibitor’s Day with lots of prizes promised.

Early hysterical rumors that the fair was too expensive for families was answered with a Seattle Times editorial, which claimed that for two dollars a workingman could take a family of four under this gateway and still have fifty cents left “for ice cream, soda water, peanuts or whatever they may desire.”  For comparison the Times also noted “There are many men in Seattle and every other city who live on 20 cents a day – ten cents for trolley car fare and ten cents for lunch.”

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AYP TROLLEY STATION on BROOKLYN AVE. 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, March 28, 1999)

This symmetrical structure that, it seems, is still under construction was a temporary feature of the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition. The summer-long fair temporarily remade the University of Washington campus and also stirred the University District. This looks north along the centerline of Brooklyn Avenue from near what, since 1950 has been its intersection with Campus Parkway. The temporary trolley station was designed to handle the throngs expected to visit the fair.  This terminus was only three blocks from the main entrance to the fair at 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 40thStreet.

The full message of the signs emblazoned on the south walls of the waiting sheds is revealed in another photograph recorded on the same occasion. The sign on the left reads “TO CITY Via Eastlake Ave. & Broadway – Save Exact Change Ready, No Change Given At Turnstile.” The sign concludes “Get Change Here.”  “Here” is the little window showing at the far left. The sign on the right offers an alternate route to the city by way of Wallingford and Fremont avenues.

One landmark survives.  The church steeple rising at the middle of the “then” scene tops the University Methodist Sanctuary, at the southeast corner of Brooklyn and 42nd Street. Later the steeple was removed and replaced by a neon-lit cross, which the University Methodists used in advertising themselves as the “church of the revolving cross.” Eventually the congregation removed its cross, and moved to its present home nearby on 15th Avenue Northeast. The old church, however, has survived as a mixed commercial-spiritual property.

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SHOWBOAT THEATRE

(First appeared in Pacific, May 4, 1986)

The old Showboat Theater on the University of Washington campus was recently called “a distant derivation of a derivation of a derivation of the riverboat.”  That description was offered by Ellen Miller-Wolfe, coordinator of the local Landmarks Preservation Board [in 1986]. It may be that lack of architectural purity which will eventually doom the sagging Showboat. It is scheduled to be demolished soon.

When or if it bows out, the Showboat will leave a legacy of fine theater and personal stories. (It is said to be haunted by the ghost of its founder Glenn Hughes, a man once known on the English-speaking stage west of Broadway as “Mr. Theater. “)

The theater’s opening night, Sept. 22, 1938, was a banner-draped, lantern-lighted, elegant black-tie setting for the old farce, “Charlie’s Aunt.” One of the showboat’s best remembered offerings was the 1949 production of “Mrs. Carlyle, ” written by Hughes and starring Lillian Gish, the silent screen star and stage actress.

The theatrical variety and often professional quality performances that six nights a week moved upon the Showboat’s stage were a far cry from the fare of the old ”’mellerdrammers” that played the real showboats of the Mississippi River days. Chekhov, Thurber, Sophocles and, of course, Shakespeare all made it onto Seattle’s revolving proscenium stage. And some of its players were Frances Farmer, Robert Culp and Chet Huntley (who later switched careers to the theater of national news).

The original design for the Works Progress Administration-built “boat” came from another member of the UW’s drama faculty, John Ashby Conway, who envisioned it being occasionally tugged about Lakes Washington and Union for off-shore performances. Instead, for its nearly 50 years [by 1986] it has been in permanent port on Portage Bay, supported, for the sake of illusion, a short ways off shore on concrete piling.

[In 1the mid-1980s the destruction of the then unused but not sinking showboat was forestalled for a time by a group called SOS (Save Our Showboat).  Many of its members once acted on its stage and have left their sentimental shadows there.  As I recall it was long after an SOS denouement that, as if in the night, the Showboat was razed to below its waterline.]

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Meany Hall, for years the U.W.’s primary auditorium, was built for the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition held on campus in 1909.  After the regional earthquake of April 29, 1965 twisted its foundation and loosened its cornice the old hall was torn down.   It was replaced by a new Meany Hall with the 1968-69 makeover with red tiles (hence its nick name “Red Square”) replacing the green sward that once faced the old hall.

MEANY HALL

Meany Hall on the University of Washington campus was – and still is – named for a red headed history professor who arrived in Seattle as a tall and slender 15 year old.  Edmond Meany’s elaborate and legendary connections with the University begin ceremonially with his graduation from it in 1885.  Six years later as a member of the Washington State Legislature he was the primary political mover behind the University leaving its downtown site on Denny’s Knoll in 1895 for its new “Interlaken” campus.

In 1906when a committee of Seattle’s most prominent boomers visited the school with a request to make it over for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Exposition (AYP) it was the by then Professor Meany who welcomed and promoted them.   The campus was given over to the Expo in part to get some funds out of the ordinarily reluctant state legislature for new permanent buildings.  The largest of these was the auditorium seen here.  A mere five years after the AYP the school’s regents broke tradition and reluctantly renamed the auditorium for the still very alive Edmond Meany after the students refused to call it anything else.

The long front steps of Meany Hall were the school’s ceremonial stage.  Here class pictures were recorded and it was here also on an October night each year that the venerable “keeper of traditions” lighted only by torches led freshman in a ceremony that from the year 2003 may seem fabulous: the recitation of the Ephebie Oath.  With upraised hands the new students led by Meany dedicated the education they were about to receive from the people of the state to the service of the state and of society.

A 72-year-old Edmond Meany died quickly in this campus office from a stroke in 1935.  By then he also had a hotel and a mountain named for him.

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TWO FAVORED RESTAURANTS on the AVE in their time.

The European Pastry Shop, nearly across the Ave. from the Pamir House, below in 1994 and above with a tax photo from 1955.   Many intense conversations have passed across its tables or been digested with its pastries.  (Top pix courtesy of Washington State Archives, Bellevue Branch.)

The LUN TING RESTAURANT, long a cherished destination on the Ave. and very near the University Book Store.   Both are tax photos with the dates scribbled on them.

Follows the storefront directly north of the Varsity Theatre, first in the late 1930s and then in 1996, showing a typical modernizing that followed for many of the original ornate facades on Ave addresses.

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[Here we will return Victor Lygdman’s look east from the Freeway Bridge construction zone toward the University District and campus during the winter of 1961-62.  We do so that the reader (aka you) might search within for the back west facade of Mean Hall on campus.  This photograph, with a caption, appeared first on Friday last as part of the most recent posting for Seattle Confidential.  Best to CLICK THIS ONE TWICE!]

(click to enlarge photos)

Waiting on the front lawn of his studio at 817 Second Avenue, we imagine that pioneer photographer Theo. Peiser arranged with Andrew Charleston, Herman Norden and/or Martin Gunderson, all officers of the Lake Union Furniture Manufacturing Company, to pause and pose with their float here two lots south of Marion Street.   The San Franciscan Peiser reached Seattle in 1883 and soon set up his studio on Second. Most of his sign appears on the left.

In booming Seattle there was then plenty of work for a photographer with Peiser’s hustle.  Of his four local competitors David Judkins was also on Second and so close by that Peiser advised the readers of his full page advertisement in the 1887 Polk City Directory, “Be sure to read the sign before you enter, so as not to make any mistake and get into another gallery. Peiser’s is the only one with the title ‘Art Studio.’  Please bear this in mind.”  Peiser’s ad is so “arty” that is features a fourteen-verse poem extolling Seattle, its surrounds and his studio.  The last verse reads, “Eight hundred and seventeen, Second Street, Theo E. Peiser’s Art Studio neat.  His work, view and portrait, can’t be beat  – On the continent.”  (Click the poem directly below to enlarge it.)

Lake Union Furniture ran its own full-page ad in 1888, the first one in that year’s city directory.  As on their float, the partners promoted themselves as “a deserving home industry” with furniture “for furnishing the cottage as well as the palace.”  While the manufacturer’s plant was on the south shore of Lake Union, their primary saleroom was at Second and Yesler (Mill Street), which put it in the way of the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.   Peiser and all of his competitors’ studios were also consumed.  Before the fire he had proudly noted, “every negative was preserved.”  No longer; all his glass plates with local scenes and paid portraits were broken and scorched.  Distraught, he moved to Hood Canal.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yea Jean, a few things relating to Peiser and/or the neighborhood near Marion and 2nd.  I’ll put it up, but probably wait with corrections until Sunday morning – late.

PEISER’S ART STUDIO

(First appeared in Pacific, August 9, 1987)

When Theodore Peiser came to Seattle in 1883, the San Francisco native set up his studio one lot south of Marion Street on the west side of Second Avenue. But, like most other local photographers, Peiser did not always stay in town.   Peiser advertised “A large stock of Washington Territory views” on his street-facing facade of is rough studio building on Second Avenue.  The accompanying photo also shows his “Traveling Studio” – a tent – next “door” to the south. Apparently the photographer rolled up part of the tent roof, to use the sun as the light source for exposing contact prints when working in the “field” or even, as here, three lots south of Marion.

Typical of photographers of his day, Peiser liked to consider himself an artist. Photography was then still young and promoted itself as a kind of “painting with light.”  They were eager to borrow some of the romantic distinction residing in the fine arts.  It was a grab for the glamour that did not attach directly to the job of merely making images with the aid of optics and chemicals. In the smaller type between his main sign and the montage of selective views he fixed to the front of his studio, Peiser promised “First class work guaranteed in any weather.”

Peiser could handle the weather, but not Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889. Of the roughly 33 city blocks destroyed, his was included, and it nearly wiped him out. It was a loss for both Peiser and the photographic memory of Seattle, for what survives of his work from the 1880s is still one of the more significant records of the city’s growth in that explosive decade.  Here are a few examples, concluding with a self-portrait that recently surfaced through the good services of Dan Kerlee and Ron Edge.

It the exceedingly useful Seattle Times on-line archive that is wonderfully word-searchable (get out your library cards) for all subjects that appeared in the Times between 1900 and 1984, Peiser first appears with the first clip attached below, a snipped – and snippy – classified ad directed to a target in far off Seattle.  Peiser makes his post from San Francisco. We do not, however, learn if Peiser determined if Lewis Ericckson was an “honest man” after his return to Seattle.  If he was, would Ericckson then insist that Peiser run a second classified in The Times indicating that “Honestly Ericckson you are an honest man, and I never expected any other.”

Late in 1904 Peiser advertizes for a cheap room to rent and in that context also indicates a desire to sell his photography equipment.  Next in 1906 (below) he looks for a farm, still has his photo gear and still wants to sell it.  And he is addressed in the Eitel Building at the northwest corner of Second and Pike.  It is still there.

On the tenth of March, 1907 the Seattle Times reports on the photographer’s poor health.

Less than three weeks later The Times reports again on Peiser’s health, and this time his complaints as well.  Peiser is living in the East Green Lake neighborhood at this time.

Later that year, 1907, or the next Theo. Peiser does make it back to California.  Born in 1853, he dies in 1922 – 69 years and before antibiotics or asthma sprays.  Finally (for us), Peiser and his studio are remembered in 1922 with The Seattle Times then popular – and probably first – series on local historical photography, called . . .

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What follows first appeared in Pacific on January 24, 2004.  In the first photo above – at the top of this day’s blog – part of the south facade of the Stetson Post Building facing Marion Street appears in the upper-left corner.  That apartment house survived the 1889 fire and much else.  Here, below, we see it still holding its place at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Marion Street.  (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

One century – plus a year or two – separates these views looking north on Second Avenue through its intersection with Marion Street.

MARION STREET REMINDERS

(First appeared in Pacific, January 2004)

Only one feature survives between this “then and now” and it has been truncated. On the right of the contemporary view five of the original seven floors of the Marion Building have been lopped away at the southeast corner of Marion Street and Second Avenue. But while humbled on top, at the sidewalk the building now boasts a stone façade with monumental pillars. Somewhat early in its now more than century-long life the first floor was altered for a bank, the long since merged and folded National City Bank.

The Webster and Stevens negative number for this (two pixs above) look north up Second Avenue is 665. That’s an early number for the studio that was the principal supplier of photographs for The Seattle Times during the first quarter of the 20th Century.

Besides the red brick gloss of Second Avenue, the illustrative intention of the photograph may be to contrast the two showy structures that look at one another from the north corners with Marion Street. On the right is the Victorian clapboard Stetson-Post Building with the central tower. It was built in 1883, curiously only six years before the ornate brick and stone Burke Building on the left was raised above the ashes of the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.

When new, locals considered the Burke Block our best example of the latest design in business blocks. When old, the Burke Building was mourned by many as it was replaced in 1974 with the Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building. In the 1880s Thomas Burke, its namesake, had been a resident in the Stetson Post Building that was saved from the fire by the generous width of Second Avenue and the vigorous reapplication of wet blankets to its steaming skin.

While it appears to be an antique, the Stetson-Post has only reached its mid-life here (Six photos up). On August 10, 1919 The Seattle Times noted its passing, describing it as “Second Avenue’s last pioneer landmark.” By then it was an outstanding anomaly on Seattle’s most modern street. Lined with skyscrapers like the Smith Tower (1914), the Hoge Building (1911) and the New Washington Hotel (1908) Second Avenue was our first “urban canyon.”

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AYPE WELCOME ARCH, 2^nd & MARION, 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, May 18, 1997)

Four days before the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition’s opening on June 1, 1909, on the University of Washington campus, locals were excited by a published sketch of a commemorative arch that Vancouver, B.C., planned to erect at Third and Marion. Seattle Mayor John Miller announced that he “regretted in view of Vancouver’s enterprise that Seattle had not seen fit to build an arch.”

City superintendent of buildings Francis W. Grant quickly plucked an arch design from architect W.M. Somervell for the mayor to wave at the City Council. One councilman, future Mayor Hiram Gill, declined; the 17 others agreed, including T.P. Revel, who appealed to the powerful political motive of shame – or its avoidance.  Revel noted that he did  “not favor the expenditure of funds for gilt and tinsel as a rule, but I will vote for this bill since it is apparent that Seattle must maintain its own reputation.” Grant lamented that the proposed $4,000 would put Seattle at a disadvantage in what he said should be a race with Vancouver to complete the monuments. The council raised the investment to $6,900 but declined to treat the building as a contest.

Seattle’s completed arch over Second Avenue at Marion was “unveiled” July 21, one day after state Superior Court Judge J.T. Ronald denied an injunction by local labor unions to stop construction on the grounds it was contracted without bids and built with non-union labor. Ronald, a former Seattle mayor, reasoned that the city could build whatever street ornaments it wanted so long as they were not as ephemeral as fireworks or flags.

What Seattle got was, at least, flag-like: a welcome banner strung between two 85-foot-tall columns. After dark the two braziers at the top emitted smoke-like steam illuminated by fire-red lights. These burning pots were copper green, and the columns were an old~ivory tint.

The enthusiastic mayor joyfully announced, “I’d like to see Seattle smothered in bunting.”

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DAD’S DAY

(First appeared in Pacific, June 15, 1986)

The banner being marched down the middle of Second Avenue in the parade scene above reads: “Every Dad That Don’t Tum Out Is a Coward.” And what might that dad be afraid of? Mom, of course!

So, on Thursday, July 17,1913, near the start of the Golden Potlatch, Seattle’s third annual summer festival, mayor and “dad”, George F. Cotterill pleaded with the city’s mothers through a mayoral proclamation “calling upon the bosses of the dads to give ‘them a holiday’,” and to encourage them to promenade on Saturday afternoon in the Dad’s Day Parade.

Some of the city’s mothers responded by putting down their rolling pins and handing their aprons and brooms to the dads: In the foreground of the photo are fathers dressed in kitchen drag and wearing signs that say “I’m a Dad.” This is just the start of the procession. Behind them are floats, which depicted “Dad doing the family washing, dad on ironing day, dad washing the dinner dishes, dad hooking up mother who was about to go out to a theater party . . . and dad in every other form of servitude, which the downtrodden declared had been suffered too long.” according to a Seattle Times article.

The dads’ floats were donated by dad-owned local businesses (It was the only 1913 Potlatch event that didn’t cost the city an extra cent.), with the omnipresent “Your Credit is Always Good” Standard Furniture float the best among them. Herbert ‘Schoenfeld, the founder of Standard Furniture [In 1896, at least, still the Schoenfeld Furniture in Tacoma], was the originator and chairman of Seattle’s first “Dad’s Day.”

But the dads didn’t entirely take over the summer event. Waving above this parades scenes, on the right, is the Potlatch Bug. The Potlatch name was taken from a Northwest native ritual during which fortunes were given away in exchange for prestige.  Ed Brotze was The Seattle Times artist who designed the Potlatch bug as a somewhat primitive amalgam of a totem-pole figure and a native mask. And the most popular Golden Potlatch costumes were not aprons and bonnets, but traditional dress of old sourdoughs and Indians – with variations.

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PARADE of ALL NATIONS

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 21, 1984)

William the Duke of Proclamations pronounced six of them (proclamations) for Seattle’s first summer festival, the 1911 Golden Potlatch. The first was: “Forget dull care and remember that this is the time for INNOCENT AMUSEMENT.”

Recently [in 1984], two albums stuffed with photographs of these amusements have surfaced from the other Seattle underground of lost or forgotten images. This view of the Afro-American float in the Potlatch’s Parade of All Nations is one of them. On July 21 , 1911, The Post Intelligencer’s review of this spectacle was headlined, “PARADE OF ALL NATIONS IS SEEN BY GREAT CROWDS . . . Cooler Day Brings Out Throng For Racial And Industrial Pageant.” The article below the headline listed the “races.”

“After the Japanese Lantern Float, the Cle Elum band led the Italian section. Prominent Italian citizens and their families rode in gaily-decorated automobiles. Then followed the Chinese in automobiles and after them an Afro-American float, which won much applause. The Indians followed . . . ”   Or Europeans dressed like them – it was not very difficult to tell them apart.

The Golden Potlatch was a local creation hybridized from Seattle’s enduring fixation with the 1897 Alaska Gold Rush (hence, the “97 Seattle” pennants on the float), and the white man’s fascination with the Indian’s ritual of gift-giving called the potlatch. In this spirit, another fair spokesperson, a Reverend Major, advised all citizens to give the gift of “good cheer because it tears down the walls built between us.” The clergyman advised that the Parade of All Nations would show how “Every citizen of Seattle is interested in every other citizen . . . We are a big family.”

Wisely, Seattle’s Black community arranged their float with girls – the human representatives with the best chance of escaping the grown-up anxieties of racial prejudice. Of course, the reality that awaited them at the end of the parade was the double discrimination held for both black and female. They could return to the love of their own families, but the “big family” would return to making it very hard for them to become anything other than housemaids, nursemaids, cooks, charwomen, or mothers.

Esther Mumford, in her excellent history, Seattle’s Black Victorians, notes that “Most of the women never realized their importance . . . Regardless of their marital status, they were at the bottom of society, often poor and ignorant, but it was from that position that women served to undergird the black community by maintaining its basic unit, the family.”

Racial discrimination in Seattle was more pernicious in 1911 than it is today. But it’s here, and there is still “bad cheer” to dispel if we are at last to respond to William the Duke’s sixth and final proclamation: “Apply the Golden Rule to the Golden Potlatch and you will do wrong to no man.” Or woman.

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KNIGHT TEMPLARS ARCH, 2^nd & MARION, 1925

(First appeared in Pacific, March 18, 1984)

The last week of July in 1925 was outstanding for Second Avenue. To hail a parade of 30,000 marching Knight Templars, Second Avenue wore hundreds of illuminated banners and wreaths, some 700 flaming torch globes and the smile of a welcome arch six stories high.

The Knight Templars, a masonic order modeled after Medieval Christian Crusaders, were attending their 36th triennial conclave. And since their principal symbol is the Christian cross, for this one summer week in 1925, Seattle, the host, was filled with crosses. The Knights’ committee, with help from a contracted General Electric Company, put a four-story illuminated and bejeweled cross atop, the then brand new Olympic Hotel, lined the streets with another 155 illuminated passion crosses and “crossed” the sky with 12 searchlights. The Grand Welcome Arch at Marion Street was topped at 95 feet with its own flood-lit cross. It was an sensational and for some enchanting light show.

But it was also Second Avenue’s last hurrah.

Second Avenue was distinguished from other downtown streets when Seattle’s first steel-girder skyscraper, the Alaska Building, was erected in 1904 at the southeast comer of Second and Cherry Street. The avenue was on its way to becoming the city’s center-stripe of grand-style urbanity, its main canyon of glass, terra cotta and granite. In 1908 the New Washington Hotel (now the Josephinum) was completed and stood as the northern pole for this 12-block belt of hotels, banks and department stores. After 1913, the 42-story Smith Tower was Second Avenue’s southern summit.

By 1926, the year following the Templar visit, Second Avenue’s reputation as a bustling strip was beginning to be ecliopsed by major development plans for higher avenues. Henry Broderick, the long-lived real estate hustler, prepared for the press a map locating the 37 downtown buildings that were either underway or projected for early construction that year. They represented an investment of $25 million – a Seattle record. Ten were slated for Third Avenue, four for Fifth Avenue and five on Sixth, and most were closer to Westlake and the new retail north end than to the pioneer south end and Yesler Way. Only one of the buildings was listed for Second Avenue.

(click to enlarge photos)

A liberal arts graduate from Harvard, the not yet thirty Herman Chapin came to Seattle to invest eastern money – most of it not his own – in Seattle real estate and also stay alert to other opportunities.  Arriving in 1886 Chapin purchased for his Boston backers the northeast and southeast corners of Columbia Street and Second Avenue.  On the latter he raised the four-story brick Boston Block and on the former what is seen here: the Colonial Building, aka the Chapin Block.

For Chapin the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 was a most favorable real estate turn.  The heat popped the windows of both buildings, but the flames did not cross Second Avenue, making the New Englander’s two properties buzzing landmarks in Seattle’s rebuilding.  Even before the glaziers replaced all the windows, the Boston and Colonial blocks transformed to hives of enterprise, stuffed with merchants and professionals displaced by the fire.

Following the fire the city’s post office moved around the corner from the Boston building to its own classical and comely structure attached to the Colonial Building (here far-right) and facing Columbia at the alley.  The P.O. stayed there until 1899.  In this ca. 1900 view James Justice’s stationary store is signed there above the sidewalk.  Included next door among the Colonial’s tenants are Masajiro Furuya’s Japanese Bazaar (with a storefront on Second); cycling enthusiast and vegetarian Victor Hugo Smith’s office in rooms 8 and 9 for selling tideland lots, and “mail order tailors” Irving and Cannon.

In 1905 the St. Louis brewer, Adolph Busch, tried to buy the Colonial corner to raise there “the largest hotel in Seattle.”  The sale developed a “hitch.”  At $365,000, it cost too much.  Instead the Bostonians kept to this 120-foot square corner, replacing it with the two-story ornament still standing, new home then for the Seattle National Bank for which Herman Chapin was for many years a director.  Thru a prosperous life in his adopted city, the New Englander “built a dozen buildings and belonged to a dozen clubs.”  Pioneer Clarence Bagley’s History of Seattle described him in 1916 as an example of that “finest type of American citizen – the man who is born and reared in the east but seeks the West with its opportunities, in which to give scope to his dominant qualities.”  And New England cash.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean by the morning – Sunday morning.  I’m scrambling up the rugged slopes of past research at the moment.  And yet we could start with a quiz – a visual one but with no prizes.   The pan below was photographed from the roof of the steam plant between Western and Post and south of  – well south of where?  I have, as a sort of studied habit, dated it 1901.  I might be a few months later, but certainly with disciplined study could be dated to within a few weeks because of the rich detail and the fact that Seattle was then booming, that is, changing rapidly.    Last thing I do this evening before climbing the stairs to join the bears is extract the detail from this pan that shows the Chapin block at the northeast corner of 2nd and Columbia – or part of it.  It is really pretty easy to find.  Most likely I’ll put off the proof reading until late morning.  Please be compassionate.  (Click and click to enlarge)

(CLICK TO ENLARGE – probably twice.)

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SEATTLE TIMES “KEY WORD SEARCH”

We will add now a Seattle Times clipping from 1901 that makes note of Chapin’s part in the build-up of Second Ave..  It is a fragment clipped from a longer article, but it shows off this most wonderful gift of the internet and The Seattle Public Library and The Seattle Times.  It is now possible to do key-word searches from the Times for the years 1900 to 1984.  All you need is a library card and some instructions from SPL on how to proceed with this service.  Why it stops in 1984 I don’t know, but it may have something to do with the fact – as I remember it – that 1984 was the year that  The Times went to computers for processing their old news.  I remember when I started doing my weekly feature for Pacific in 1982 that persons in the library were still clipping past issues for research files, which I can tell you were and still are a wonderful resource.  But now everyone has access to everything in the paper and for so many years.  It is really wonderful.  Would that somehow the Post-Intelligencer and The Star and  the Flag and the Argos the Union Record and many other publications out of Seattle’s past also get this treatment.  My work on Ivar Haglund for the book “Keep Clam” is suddenly enriched by this new opening, for although I had already used the Times Library in this Ivar research, the key word search is considerably more thorough and I am finding many things I never knew about.  I urge you, if you have a subject – any subject – of interest, try it out.  Call the library.  It is also a fine hide-and-seek.

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POST OFFICE on COLUMBIA

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 21, 1997)

Through most of the 1890s, Seattle’s U.S. Post Office was sited on the north side of Columbia Street, just west of the alley between Second and Third avenues. In this rare mid-decade view, the reliefed letters of “U.S. Post Office” at the top of the scene are half-hidden in the shadow of the building’s overhanging cornice; on the right the flag is flying.     Before Sept. 11, 1887, when free mail delivery was introduced, locals had to fetch their mail from the post office at the comer of Yesler Way and Post Street, then the commercial heart of the city. But soon after the first four carriers began their daily rounds, the post office was moved to the Boston Block at Second and Columbia, only a half-block west of this location. The new site was described in the local press as remote, and the move was decried. But the new post office survived the Great Fire of 1889: Second Avenue stopped the fire’s eastward advance, although the heat popped the building’s windows. Soon after the post office was moved to these quarters.

In 1890 the postmaster’s count of pieces handled reached more than 7 million, two-thirds delivered by carrier. The next year total receipts were $96,643, six-fold those of 1887, when home delivery began. Business dropped suddenly with the economic crash of 1893 but, as with most of the community, the post office’s revival was quickened and romanced by the late-’90s gold rush to the Yukon and Alaska.

In 1898, six substations were added, as well as trolley deliveries to Green Lake, the University District, South Park and Rainier Valley. In 1899 the post office left these cramped quarters on Columbia for a larger space at First Avenue and University Street. This temporary leap north was criticized as “like moving to Ballard.” Nine years later, the post office would pack again to its current location at Third and Union.

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HOME GUARD ca. 1886 SECOND & COLUMBIA

(First appeared in Pacific Jan 17, 1999)

This little classic of Seattle’s historical photographic record has been published many times before. And deservedly. Very few pioneer photographs survive of Second Avenue, and it seems this is the only extant view of a territorial era parade on that street.  My copy was lifted from a print in the collection of the Seattle Public Library. Marked “#15040,” its caption describes the house, upper right, at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Columbia Street as built by Seattle’s second mayor, J.T. Jordon. In this scene, however, if the library’s 1886 date is correct, the home is occupied by Martin Van Buren Stacy and his wife, Elizabeth. By this time M.V.B. Stacy – listed as a “capitalist” in the 1879 city directory – had built a mansion only two blocks away. (Some older readers may well have had dinner in it.  It was later used as the Maison Blanc restaurant.) Yet the couple would not move from Jordon’s modest house into one of the community’s few truly lavish and oversize homes until 1887. Martin Van Buren Stacy is also often listed as living in one local hotel or another. The couple, it was rumored, did not get along when together.  After building a second mansion on First Hill (now the University Club at Boren and Madison), they built a third and lived apart.

In the late 1950s, local historian Jim Warren used this in his Changing Scene column for The Seattle Times. Warren’s regular feature was a precursor to this; it too compared a historical scene with a contemporary repeat. In his caption, Warren speculates that this is a parade of Seattle’s new Home Guard, organized in 1886. He also speculates that the Home Guard Band in the foreground is led by Seattle’s most popular pioneer musician, coronet player and conductor T.H. “Dad” Wagner.  (We learn from Kurt Armbruster in his new book about Seattle’s musical history, title “Before Seattle Rocked” that Theo H. Wagner arrived in Seattle on June 7, 1889, a day after its “Great Fire.”  Kurt writes, “He arrived in Seattle with his wife and baby.  Sitting in with the First Regiment Band of the Washington National Guard, Wagner demonstrated his natural leadership ability and was handed the baton.  The twenty-man ensemble made a modest public debut in Denny’s cow pasture, but better venues soon followed.”)

Farther up Second Avenue two pioneer landmark towers should be noted. The first tops the Stetson Post residential arcade at Marion Street. It was Seattle’s original upscale apartments. Finally – and dimly – breaking the horizon, upper left, is the spire atop Plymouth Congregational church north of Spring Street.

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Above: Looking west down a planked Columbia Street to the waterfront from Third Avenue, circa 1900.   [Photo courtesy Larry Hamilton]  Below: 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 Ca. 1900

(Appeared in Pacific early in 2008.)

Looking west on Columbia St. from Third Ave. 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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Above: In the shadow of the Haller Building at Columbia Street an unnamed photographer looks south on Second into what was then still the city’s primary financial district.  (Courtesy Michael Cirelli.) Below: Second Avenue has been elaborately altered in the century between this now and then.  Still the Alaska building can be detected in both.   (Pix by Jean Sherrard)

FINANCIAL DISTRICT CA. 1906

(Appeared in Pacific, Spring of 2008)

Looking south on Second to its intersection with Columbia, this is another look at Seattle’s financial district during its 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.

In the feature that precedes this one (above), Columbia Street was the subject, looking west from Third to Second, ca. 1900.  And here about another six years later an unnamed photographer records Second Avenue, again, 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.  We choose 1906 as a likely date.   It is the last “full year” for the Chapin building on the left.

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 10 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 in the feature directly above this one, 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.  (We will include one soon below.)

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SOARING SECOND

(First appeared in Pacific, May 24, 1998)

The photographer’s intentions for this mid-1920s view of Seattle’s urban canyon are, I think, transparent. The view looks south on Second Avenue across its intersection with Columbia Street. The camera’s architectural lens has straightened the skyscrapers that would otherwise, from the street, seem to lean toward infinity. And the soaring dignity of these subjects is increased by the silence of the street and sidewalk. There is nothing to distract us from the mass.

When it was dedicated in 1914, the Smith Tower, far right at Yesler Way, was trumpeted by its builders as the “largest building west of New York.” Also by a somewhat impressionist counting, it was figured to reach 42 stories at the skylight ball that balanced on its pyramidal tower.

At Cherry Street, two blocks north of the Smith Tower, Seattle’s first steel-frame skyscraper, the Alaska Building, was topped off in 1904 at 14 stories. From its penthouse the members of the building’s namesake dub enjoyed an unsurpassed prospect of the city.

The Smith Tower is covered with a skin of white terra-cotta tiles – “it shined like a beacon” to mariners. The brick-clad Alaska Building limited its tile work to ornamental bands and its bricks do not gleam. Nestled here between its neighbors, the Alaska Building is noticeably darker.

The real “shiner” is the Dexter Horton Bank Building, named for Seattle’s first banker. From this view (primarily of its plain backside) we can measure the structure’s mass. However, only one of the 15 terra-cotta sides that complete the building’s four great wings facing the Alaska Building across Cherry Street is evident. The revealed Second Avenue facade does feature, rising from the sidewalk, the building’s great three-story columns. Perhaps they intimate this institution’s monumental future as Seafirst Bank – for those who remember it.

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Above: Looking south from the south facade of the Boston Block.  The Wycoff residence at the southeast corner of Second and Cherry is at the bottom of the scene.  The new neighborhood of temporary tents is spreading thru the burned district.  Below: Looking north and back at the Boston Block, upper-right, with the roof of the Wycoff home in the foreground and Second Avenue and more tents beyond it.

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MEYDENBAUER HOME – 3^rd and Columbia Northeast Corner

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

Before the 1907 regrading of Third Avenue, the neighborhood was graced with old homes and churches. One home belonged to William Meydenbauer, the town confectioner. Meydenbauer was 18 when he headed for the United States after an apprenticeship with a candy maker in Prussia. That was in 1850. He made his way to San Francisco in 1854. After a ruinous try at gold mining, and a short experiment with teamstering, he returned to the small but sweet rewards of confections.

The Meydenbauers moved to the Northwest in 1868 when Seattle had less than 1,000 cash-poor residents waiting for something big to happen in the 16-year-old village. Those post-civil-war years were still sour, so the confectioner was welcome. The candy man built a home on Third Avenue at Columbia Street around 1880. Before that there may have been a crude shack on the property but little else. At the time, Seattle’s idea of refreshments for fancy public receptions was sliced apples and gingerbread.   Meydenbauer bought the Eureka Bakery on Commercial Street (now First Avenue South) and soon made a significant addition to the town’s sweet offerings with a selection of well-dressed candies and sweets, including their celebrated Yule cakes.

He and the town prospered and in the mid-1880s, Meydenbauer moved his business into the new and bigger bakery he had built behind the family home. The rear of that plant is pictured above behind the tree and to the left of the family home, and below prominently on the north side of Columbia between Third and Fourth Avenues near the center of the subject.

By employing several helping hands and running two delivery wagons, Meydenbauer was efficient enough to sell wholesale. Meydenbauer and his wife, Thelka, raised eight children. A son, Albert, continued in his father’s profession after the latter’s death in 1906. After the 1907 regrading of Third Avenue, the Meydenbauer home was replaced by the Central Building, which survives.

Not so oddly, this family is not remembered for its perishable sweets but for sustaining real estate. In 1868 Meydenbauer rowed across Lake Washington and set a claim beside the Bellevue bay which still is called by the family name.

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BUILDINGS IN BUNTING

(First appeared in Pacific, 2-10-1985)

Seattle was aroar with excitement in May of 1908. Fags were hung everywhere and the city dripped with red, white and blue. All the pomp and fuss was over the arrival of 13 battleships from Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. During the morning hours of May 26, 1908, a three-mile-long military parade was the last big hurrah of a four-day event celebrating the show of force in Elliott Bay.

According to a local newspaper, “Seattle never before in its history appeared in such gay attire.” The old Haller Building (see here), at Second Avenue and Columbia Street, was “decorated in a tasteful and artistic manner,” The Post-Intelligencer reported. But it was a modest adornment compared to some of the garnishing done by businesses along the parade route. “Vying with one another, the mercantile firms have created a veritable spasm of color on First, Second and Third avenues . . . the eye almost wearies of the view.”

The Alaska Building – the city’s first skyscraper – was adorn with more than 500 flags. The 14-story building was a block south of the Haller Building at Cherry Street, and at night it was a target for the barrage of spotlights shot from the 13 fighting machines in Elliott Bay.

Throughout the four days, Seattle was hit by a wave of humanity as an estimated 200,000 visitors took the city by storm. “Night and day the streets are full, alive with a rushing time of humanity restless as the-sea,” the P-I reported. The next day, Wednesday, May 27, Roosevelt’s big show moved on to Tacoma for four more days of boat races, parades, barbecues, dress balls and more buildings dressed in patriotic colors.

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Returning now to the roof of the power plant on Post Alley.

This panorama extends about 180 degrees from the Colman Dock on the far left to the King County Courthouse on the First Hill  horizon, far right.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)

(click to enlarge photos)

We’ll begin with the complete and descriptive title of Lorraine McConaghy’s newest book: “New Land, North of the Columbia, Historic Documents That Tell the Story of Washington State from Territory to Today.”   In the book’s introduction she calls it our “paper trail from the territory’s very founding with President Franklin Pierce’s appointment of his political cronies to the patronage jobs of the new territory.”

The historian’s own paper trail began first with letters and notes made from phone calls and then with bus and train tickets and rides with friends.  McConaghy doesn’t drive, so she spent an adventurous year crisscrossing the state by other means, visiting archives, museums and libraries with her digital scanner and making copies to share from the state’s “magnificent common treasury of file folders . . .”  The book’s many pages are elegantly arranged with Washington ephemera like “housing treaties and patent drawings, political cartoons and FBI files, personal correspondence and business records.”

With her abiding métier as the Museum of History and Industry’s resident historian, Dr. McConaghy had been impressively productive as a teacher, curator and author.  This time, she explains, “My intent is to turn peoples attention to the archive.”  She wants us to not only “be proud of our shared archival heritage” but also to be “grateful to the archivists.”  When she made her earliest contacts with the same, she asked, “Show me cool things that you have that tell great stories.”  They and she have succeeded.  Surely, “New Land, North of the Columbia” is a merry journey of discovery.

Early in the book (page 15) McConaghy features a full page from one of pioneer historian-chronicler Thomas Prosch’s two photo albums filled with early recordings of Seattle street scenes and other settings.  Like McConaghy, Prosch was prolific. With his own caption he dates and locates the subject at First Ave. S. and Washington Street (looking northeast) in 1873, and then in his 1901 two-volume manuscript, “A Chronological History of Seattle,” Prosch shares eight well-packed pages on touchstone Seattle events in 1873.  Prosch’s albums and chronology are both kept in the archives of the University of Washington library.  Should you choose to visit the library for a closer look, you may want to also thank the archivist.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, more old news from the neighborhood.

But first some links provided by Ron Edge that will take our readers into PDF displays of both Prosch Seattle albums, a Washington State Album, which includes lots of Seattle subjects as well,  and then (wonder of wonders!) Prosch’s  type-written chronological history of Seattle – EVERY PAGE!   Then for desert Ron adds a couple of examples of newspapers that Prosch edited in 1872 and 1875.  (This, of course, is all in the spirit of Lorraine’s new book – as well.)

Thomas W. Prosch History References:

Seattle Views AlbumVol 1 (Courtesy U of W Digital Collection)

Seattle Views AlbumVol 2 (Courtesy U of W Digital Collection)

Washington View Album(Courtesy U of W Digital Collection)

AChronological History of Seattle 1850-1897 (Courtesy Seattle Public Library)

Thomas W. Prosch Newspaper Editor:

DailyPacific Tribune October 17, 1872 (Courtesy Ron Edge)

WeeklyPacific Tribune May 28, 1875 (Courtesy Ron Edge)

Back on Commercial Street, our opportunities run over and on and one for of all the subjects covered over the past thirty years (shy about 8 weeks) of weekly features in Pacific no part of Seattle has got more attention from this rocker than the pioneer three blocks extending south from Yesler Way on what was first called, I know you know, Commercial Street.   We will show a mere ten of them – unless I bring it to a dozen or so – and we’ll start with Yesler’s Cookhouse, which is one of the oldest surviving photos of any part of Seattle.

Next to Henry Yesler’s sawmill his cookhouse was the most legendary of pioneer Seattle structures.  Built during the inordinately cold winter of 1852-53 it was razed in mid-July1866.  Photo courtesy of MSCUA, UW Libraries.

YESLER’S COOKHOUSE

Before first operating his steam sawmill early in 1853 – the first on Puget Sound – Henry Yesler quickly constructed his cookhouse.  While for years the mill supplied Seattle with it principal payroll, the rough-hewed cookhouse gave it much more than hot meals served beside a broad fireplace.   This was a 25-foot square stage for sermons, trails, political caucuses, parties, hotel accommodations, military headquarters (during the 1856 Indian War), elections, the county auditor’s office and civic meetings of all sorts.   And until his wife Sara joined him in 1859 it was also Henry’s bunkhouse.

But where was it?   Seattle historian Greg Lange has recently converted me from my mistaken belief that it rested at what is now the northwest corner of Yesler Way and First Avenue.   Although others and I have liked it there Lange has confirmed Cornelius Hanford’s 1924 directory of 1854 structures.  Hanford puts the cookhouse on the west side of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) on the second lot south of Mill Street (Yesler Way.)

Lange’s evidence supporting the pioneer historian’s claim is impressive.  First Lang uncovered a notice in the Dec. 17, 1866 issue of the Puget Sound Weekly stating that “a new building . . . on Commercial Street . . . has arisen on the spot where the famous old log cookhouse stood.”  Next Lange found the site confirmed again in 1889 affidavits connected with a court case between Yesler and “city father” Arthur Denny.  Although this is enough for any contrite conversion Lange also discovered that the cookhouse was first located on Commercial street (before the street was there) and later moved to where we see it retouched but still smoke-stained.   Here it faces the street beside the home of Seattle’s first photographer E.A. Clark, and it is a good guess that Clark took the picture sometime before the 32-year-old photographer died on April 27, 1860.

This, the only photograph of the cookhouse, appears in “More Voice, New Stories” where it is used as an illustration for Coll-Peter Thrush’s* essay “Creation Stories, Rethinking the Founding of Seattle.” The attentive eye will notice that most of the group posing here are Native Americans. Perhaps all worked for Yesler in the mill.  The new sesquicentennial book’s twelve essays on “King Count, Washington’s First 150 Years” were written by members of the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild and published by the King County Landmarks & Heritage Commission.   You may purchase a copy directly from the guild.  Call Guild President Chuck S. Richards at (206) 783-9245for details.

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SAMMIS PAN From SNOQUALMIE HALL

First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 7, 1982

The Gazette, Seattle’s first newspaper, reported in 1865 that E.M Sammis, the town’s first resident professional photographer (however briefly), had just returned from a stay in Olympia and would “be ready in a few days to take pictures of everybody at his splendid new gallery over Kellogg’s Drug Store.” Although not “everybody” responded, the number of citizens who did was probably more than the seven or eight whose portraits have survived.

The University of Washington’s Historical Photography Collection preserved traces of Sammis’ work also include cartes de viste (small view cards) of the young town’s two architectural showpieces, the Territorial University and the Occidental Hotel, and a card of Sammis’ “splendid new gallery,” which was where the Merchant’s Cafe is now on Yesler Way. Surely the most extraordinary image in these few remains is one lovingly described by Dennis Anderson, formerly in charge of the collection, as “a bent, torn, soiled, little rag of a photograph but the earliest surviving original panoramic view of the city.” The original measures 2.5 x 4 inches.

Sammis took his panorama from Snoqualmie Hall, above the southwest comer of Commercial (now First Avenue S.) and Main Street. The view is to the north extending from the still-forested eastern slopes of Denny Hill on the left to the residence and barn of settler Charles Terry, on the right, on the block that until recently held the Public Safety Building.  On the horizon at center left, the Territorial University looks down from Denny’s Knoll at the northeast comer of Fourth Avenue and Seneca Street. (Denny’s Knoll is not Denny Hill. Again, the southeastern forest slope of the latter can be seen on the far left.) The little “White Church” in the center of the photograph was Seattle’s first, and directly below it is the Masonic Hall near the southeast comer of Front (now First Avenue) and Cherry. A bit less than a block farther south and across James Street is the white Occidental Hotel. (A flagpole reaches another thirty feet or so up from its roof.)

The normally busy Commercial Street seems void of human activity not because Sammis requested everyone to stay inside. Rather, the fIlm in his camera required such a long exposure that busy persons on the streets would not hold still long enough to be recorded.   Therefore, loggers heading for McDonald’s Saloon, in the lower right comer of the photograph, riders moving up the street to Wyckoff’s Livery Stable, the only two-story structure on the east side of Commercial, and even the idlers that commonly hung out around the flagpole where Commercial ran into Yesler’s mill, they are all invisible.

Because of cash-poor times, paying customers were usually invisible to Sammis. A year earlier, in 1864, Sammis was in Olympia advertising his photographs at “six dollars a dozen or fifty cents each.”

With his return to Seattle in the spring of 1865 he carried with him into his new studio a hope that business would improve. However, the editor’s announcement in the August 12 issue of the Gazette reveals that by mid-summer Sammis was relaxing his cash-only policy: “E.M. Sammis, photographer, wishes to say to the farmers and country people in the vicinity of Seattle that he will take all kinds of country produce in exchange for pictures. He says, “There is no excuse now. Come one come all.”

Within a year Sammis would be gone, but he left his panorama and those few other dog-eared traces of his photographic art that survive.

Sammis’ “drug store” portraits do not include his recordings of both Doc Maynard and Chief Seattle.  Some may consider the latter especially, as his most important contribution to our memory.  He did those portraits at another and earlier studio, one at the southeast corner of Main Street and First Ave. South, which was still the home of the Elliott Bay Book Store when this feature was first published in 1982.

A photographer from Victoria B.C. named G. Robinson visited Seattle in 1869 and recorded this look north up Commercial Street with his back near Jackson.  On the left is Plummer’s Snoqualmie Hall, revealing the roof’s ladder, directly over the sidewalk, that Sammis climbed to record his panorama.  Robinson also went into the hall to make a pan of the city in 1869, although he did not climb to the crest of the roof.   Instead, he used a second story window and one further back – or west – in the hall.  (We include it directly below.) The Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront, which we feature as a pdf file found on this blog’s front page, discusses both the Sammis and Robinson pans, and in considerable context.

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Another Prosch album artifact, with some of his text included for “proof’ only.

COMMERCIAL STREET North From MAIN STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 1, 1984)

Resembling, perhaps, a set for a Hollywood Western, the empty street and the waiting “extras” scattered down the sidewalks seem suspended just before the director’s command releases a gang of hooligans or a stampeding herd of longhorns from behind either the camera or the distant corner onto the two busiest blocks in the gas-lighted commercial heart of Washington Territory’s largest town. This was Seattle’s Commercial Street (now First Avenue S.).

In these two blocks between Main and Mill (now Yesler Way) streets, most businesses opened at six in the morning and stayed that way until nine or ten at night. Laboring here were two jewelers, four hardware merchants, a tailor, a sign painter, a fish merchant, five tobacconists, a bill collector and a ship chandler; there was also a combination gun and toy shop (See how it starts?), a hotel, four bars, an opera house, two barber shops, two banks, two restaurants, and four clothing stores, And, as the newspaper ads then often exclaimed, there was “much more than there is room here to tell.”

The year is probably 1881. That’s the dating ascribed by Thomas Prosch in his pioneer photo album of Seattle. And Prosch would likely know, for in 1881 he was just around the corner on Mill Street editing either the Intelligencer or the Post-Intelligencer. On October 1, 1881 the Daily Post consolidated with Prosch’s Intelligencer, and he came along as editor and part owner.

Unlike the first, our second and somewhat earlier view of Commercial Street is not deceptively still. Rather, the “Big Snow” of 1880 has silenced it.  The storm began on January 6 and within a week was piled in six foot drifts. On January 8 John Singerman, unwilling to wait for a total meltdown, dug a channel across Commercial and, as the Intelligencer reported, “began removing the extensive stock of the San Francisco store into its new rooms in the Opera House building.”

The two across-the-street locations of the capacious and elegant quarters in the Opera House were the largest in the city. With this move the San Francisco Store became the city’s first department store, keeping its boots, shoes, and clothes in one room, with dry goods, fancy goods, and general merchandise in another.

Squire’s Opera House (on the right) was put up in 1879 by the future governor and senator Watson C. Squire. Its biggest night came in 1880 when Rutherford B. Hayes, the first president to visit the West Coast, shook 2,000 hands in a reception there. The highlight of 1881 was the five night stand of Gounod’s Faust by the Inez Fabbri Opera Company. To save voices this touring company carried a “double cast of star performers” who sang on alternate nights.

Across the street (on the left) the New England House, as an 1881 Seattle Chronicle ad claimed, was “eligibly located and its accommodations for families unsurpassed.” Actually, the city directory of 1882 reveals that it was mostly single men like George Elwes, music teacher; J.H. Morris, stonemason; J. Jasques, shoemaker; William Downing, speculator, and J.D. Leake, compositor at the Chronicle who lived there and boarded on the European plan.

The Miners Supplies down the street was most likely one of the few businesses on this commercial pay streak whose 1881 profits were petering. The Skagit River gold rush of the previous year was by now a disappointing bust, and there was not much call for outfits, although there was for beer next door.

Throughout the 1880’s Commercial Street was the stage for many parades and one riot. The”Anti-Chinese Riot” of 1886 flared at this Main Street intersection in the scene’s foreground. Three years later the great fire of 1889 scattered Commercial Street with the remains of its flattened commerce. Within three years it was rebuilt wider, higher, sturdier, and into the neighborhood of brick we now have the wise urge to preserve and enjoy.

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COMMERCIAL ST. Ca, JULY 4, 1887 LOOKING No. From MAIN STREET

(First appeared in PACIFIC, May 11, 1986)

What are they waiting on?  One user of this scene has described it as part of the 1881 reception for President Rutherford B. Hayes. Another agrees about the “greeting” but not about for whom.  The second caption has the crowd waiting on the 1883 visit of Henry Villard and his entourage, celebrating the completion that year of the transcontinental Northern Pacific.  Both appear to be wrong

There no telephone or power poles lining Commercial Street for Hayes’ visit and in 1883 the three-story brick building on the scene’s far upper right was not yet constructed. Most likely the crowd is saluting Uncle Sam on an Independence Day in the late 1880s. July 4, 1887 is my almost confident guess.

Electric lights were first in limited use on Seattle streets in 1886. Here at the intersection of Commercial (now First Avenue South) and Main streets, there is a bulb hanging left of the pole that stands before the packed balcony of the New England House hotel. Also, records show the weather was cloudy on the Fourth of July in 1886, but the sun shone on the 1887 festivities. Further, there were evergreen branches lining the parade route. Both appear to be the case in the disputed photo.

Seattle’s Fourth-of-July celebrations tended to keep to form.  They began with a late morning parade of dignitaries and military units through the city streets and ended at an open-air meeting on the University of Washington campus (still, downtown then). Several speakers gave somewhat long-winded and loud (there was as yet no amplification) testimony to their patriotism. A reading of the Declaration of Independence was always included and, of course, there was plenty of patriotic music.

(Follows another parade on Commercial, that one as seen looking south from the rear of Yesler-Leary building.)

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Above and below: Seattle was first developed along the four blocks of Commercial Street decorated here with small fir trees for a parade in 1888.  Following the city’s “great” 1889 fire, Pioneer Seattle’s two principal commercial streets, Commercial and Front (First Avenue) were joined directly here at Yesler Way and run through the site of the old Yesler-Leary building.  Consequently, Jean Sherrard needed his ten-foot extension pole to approach – but not reach – the prospect of the unnamed historical photographer.

COMMERCIAL STREET, 1888, South Over MILL STREET (Yesler Way)

(This first appeared in Pacific recently enough that it probably has also appeared previously in this blog.  But, as my own mother advised me, “Repetition is the mother of all learning.”)

For looking south through the full four blocks of Seattle’s pioneer Commercial Street (First Ave. south from Yesler to King) an unnamed photographer carried his camera to the top floor of the Yesler-Leary Building.  The occasion was a parade heading north towards the photographer and considering the array of small American Flags strung across Commercial this rare view was most likely recorded on the morning of July 4, 1888.

There was then both a physical and cultural jog here at ‘Yesler’s Corner” (later Pioneer Square). It required all traffic, (including marching bands), to go around the Yesler-Leary building in order to continue north on Front Street (First Avenue).  Yesler Way was also the border or line between the grander, newer, and often brick-clad Seattle facing Front Street (behind the photographer) and the old pioneer Seattle seen here  “below the line.”  Generally Yesler was a gender divider too, for only women with business there ventured “below the line.”

An 1888 Commercial Street sampler includes seven of the city’s dozen hotels, three of its four pawnbrokers, and three of its four employment agencies, nine of its forty-one restaurants, four of seven wholesale liquor merchants.  The tightest quarters were in the block on the left where fourteen storefronts crowded the east side of Commercial between Yesler and Washington Streets.  Among those quartered were a cigar store, a barber, a hardware store (note the “Stoves and Tinware” sign), a “pork packer”, two “chop houses”, two saloons and the Druggist M.A. Kelly whose large and flamboyant sign shows bottom-left.

By contrast Front Street featured more of the finer values and “fancy goods”, like books & stationary, dry goods, confections, jewelers, photographers, physicians, tailors and an opera house.  Of the thirty-seven grocers listed in the 1888 city directory, eighteen have Front Street addresses, while on Commercial there was apparently nowhere to buy an apple or a bucket of lard.

In another eleven months and two days everything on Commercial Street and most of Front Street would be destroyed by the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

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The Front Street Trolley tracks had been sprung and curled by the heat of the June 6, 1889 “Great Fire” here on Commercial Street (First Ave. South) looking south from Mill Street (Yesler Way.)   Although scorched the thick street planks survived the fire.  The “now” below was scanned from a processed print because, again, I cannot readily find this “repeat.”

FIRST AVE. South From YESLER WAY June, 1889

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 2, 1984)

Although today’s photos both look south from Yesler Way, they were taken from different elevations, for first Avenue was raised above its old level after the Great Fire of 1889.   (How much it was raised continues to be a clouded figure.) Before the fire, this portion of First Avenue was Seattle’s retail shopping district and, appropriately, was called Commercial Street. It was a four-block-long strip where shoppers strolled, horse races (before they were outlawed) were staged and at least one riot broke out.  It then ran only as far south as King Street where it fell over a low bluff to either slip or submerge into the tideflats, depending on the tide.

The historical photo was taken only a few days after the fire. It shows only part of the more than 35 city blocks that were consumed that day and night of June 6 and 7, 1889.  Most of the shops and hotels that lined the street, many of them clapboard structures, burned to ashes. One exception was Seattle’s (and Dexter Horton’s) first bank. It is the surviving stone shell on the scene’s far right.

The Dexter Horton Bank ruins at the northwest corner of Commercial and Washington.

(click to enlarge photos)

Jean and I still agree with the “City of Destiny’s” now century-old promotion, “You’ll Like Tacoma.” We do. Much of its restored downtown deserves devotional study. We visited Tacoma on the recent Sunday when flags were at half-mast for the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. That day was also one of the hottest (almost) of the summer, and it felt like the Tacoma business district was held in a long moment of stately silence.

We drove to Tacoma to visit the oldest Carnegie Library in the state, and now also the home of the Murray and Rosa Morgan Room. The library was dedicated on June 4, 1903 – the Morgan Room on 9/11. A grand staircase of White Vermont Marble climbs to the room on the second floor and beneath the dome that surmounts the roof in the “then” photo – or did. The dome was damaged in the 1949 earthquake and removed. The Morgan Room is wonderfully appointed with the Morgan’s research library and literary estate (research papers, manuscripts, recordings, correspondence and newspaper columns.)

In Seattle, Murray Morgan is best remembered for his never out of print history, Skid Road. Murray wrote this Seattle classic while tending Tacoma’s 11th Avenue bridge, which was later admiringly renamed the Murray Morgan Bridge. During our September visit we found the lift bridge wrapped in white plastic for the work of restoration. (The two towers held a shape that looked uncannily as if it were perhaps hiding London’s Tower Bridge.)

I first “read” Murray Morgan long before I met him. In 1980 Murray asked that I help prepare the pictorial history of Seattle he was then preparing with his daughter Lane. Thru a life of writing it was the kind of help that the librarian Rosa Morgan was best at, especially for the couple’s set of books about Tacoma and the South Sound. The Morgan’s friendship was cherished, and sharing in the repartee at their table was always a delight. When his students and admirers asked Murray for help he would sometimes reply that he needed to first “go to the attic.” Now his attic – the heritage it held – is on the shelves of his and Rosa’s namesake room at the Tacoma Public Library. Although both are now passed, they will continue to help.

WEB EXTRAS

I’ll toss in a few photos from the event itself – the first taken at the dedication of the Morgan Room. Paul, perhaps you can insert the ‘Then’ photo to accompany it.

Certainly, Jean.  First the ‘then’ for your interior “now” view below it.   I will note the book end standing out at the top of your photograph.  The reader may know that Jean had to removed a shelf of books in order to get the right position for the now, taking it from the next isle in the room’s stacks.    Following your collection, I’ll attach a feature I did of the bridge for Pacific in 1994 and another of the Tacoma City Hall, that was published in The Times in 1995.

And now a few from our book, Washington Then & Now:

THE TACOMA WATERFRONT

The Northern Pacific Railroad decided in 1873 to head for Tacoma rather than Seattle in part because the former had Commencement Bay, a harbor the railroad considered more promising.  The railroad also liked it that there were only considerably fewer citizens in Tacoma – about 200.  Consequently the waterfront a mile south of what became Old Tacoma was free for the railroad’s confident speculations with a New Tacoma.  Like the scene on the facing page Thomas Rutter also recorded this view in 1888 from the site of the new railroad headquarters, but in the opposite direction.  In the distance is the Northern Pacific wharf below today’s Stadium Way and also very near Old Tacoma.  Early proposals to build a road between them were blocked by the railroad.

“CITY OF DESTINY”

Probably the most popular and repeated view of Tacoma is this one through  “The Gateway to the City of Destiny.”  On the left is “The Mountain” and on the right City Hall.  While Mt. Rainer — AKA Mt. Tacoma — is more often hidden than revealed it is still obligatory in any cityscape meant to catch the character of Tacoma.  Consequently, the mountain is often retouched and enlarged as it is in the postcard bottom-right.  Tacoma City Hall, however, does not require any fixes.  Built in 1893 with walls eight feet thick at the base the Italianate bell tower is slightly tapered to accentuate its height.  The NPRR headquarters is directly across Pacific Ave. from the tower.  This black-and-white photograph is by Tacoman Paul Richards and by Tacoma Public Librarian Bob Schuler’s assessment probably dates from 1910.

ST. PETERS in old Tacoma

In 1873 when the first few Anglicans of Tacoma learned along with the Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, etc. (the list is long) that the Northern Pacific Railroad had picked their little mill town on Commencement Bay for its Puget Sound terminal they built the town’s first church in three weeks.  In this construction they got obvious help from nature when they topped all but 40 feet from a Douglas Fir standing at hand and installed at the top of the stump a bronze bell donated by the Sunday School of another St. Peter’s in Philadelphia.  It was certainly the “oldest bell tower in America.”  While the small sanctuary survives, with some changes, the original rustic tower does not.  Toppled by a windstorm in 1934, St. Peter’s was given a new and this time Western redcedar stump to replace it by yet another saint, the Saint Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company.

Anything to add, Paul?

First that bridge story I mentioned above.

The 11^th AVE. BRIDGE now renamed the MURRAY MORGAN BRIDGE

(First appeared in Pacific, Christmas Day, 1994)

With a topography somewhat less marked by many hills, ridges and waterways than Seattle’s, Tacoma requires fewer bridges of size. Two of these are city icons: the world-famous suspension span that crosses the Tacoma Narrows and the landmark 11th Avenue bridge, which connects the City of Destiny’s business district with its . . . well, its destiny, which is the industrial district on its reclaimed tidelands at the mouth of the Puyallup River.

There have been two Tacoma Narrows bridges (“Galloping Gertie” and its replacement) and two City Waterway bridges. This historical photograph is a rare record of the first of the latter. It dates from the late 1890s and looks from the Tacoma Hotel (or near it) to the “Boot”: a sabot-shaped island of silt, sand, gravel and muck upon which the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Mill was set in the late 1880s. It was the mill that persuaded the citizens of Tacoma to borrow the money to build the bridge. By the time it was accepting lumber wagons at the swing-span’s’ eastern terminus, the “Boot” had been joined with the mainland by diverting the Puyallup River’s west channel into its east and transforming the former into the city waterway shown here.

The swing bridge lasted barely 20 years, although its timber approach – more than 1,000 feet long – from the tidelands was used initially for the eastern ramp to the new lift bridge. The replacement was dedicated Feb. 15, 1913. Its pilings were driven 160 feet to bedrock, and when lifted, it was 135 feet above high tide.

(The rest of this was written before the landmark bridge was both saved from demolition and renamed for Tacoma’s “favorite son,” the history Murray Morgan.  And now, as evidenced with Jean’s recent photograph of the Murray Morgan Bridge, it is being restored.)

This Tacoma symbol, now scheduled for demolition, has a well-wrought link to Seattle. Author Murray Morgan completed “Skid Road,” the Seattle history book, while working as the night bridge tender there in 1949-’50 – and not once in that time did he have to raise the bridge.  (Although I recall Murray telling me that this was so – that in all the time he worked on the bridge writing Skid Road, he never had to lift it – now I have been told at the dedication of the Murray Morgan Room by one of the day’s speakers that on Murray’s last day at the job he did indeed raise the bridge – but also flubbed it.   It was his last day because he was fired for his mistake.  It is a delightful story, whether true or not.  I am inclined to believe it, for it makes the renaming of the bridge for the “dean of Northwest historians” even more poignant and ironic.)

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Click this next one TWICE = please

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And finally for some Tacoma things completely different.

In conclusion, another look at the mighty Pierce County Court House.

(click to enlarge photos – and often CLICK TWICE for the full enlargement.)

Between 1877 and 1903 a King Street trestle crossed First Avenue here.  It was built for a narrow-gauged railroad that carried mostly coal from the east side of Lake Washington to the bunkers on the King Street Coal Wharf.   The trestle offered this prospect south in line with First Avenue through a strip of small hotels, bars, cafes, laundries and storefront businesses for sharpening saws, supplying sheet metal and other light manufacture needs.

Especially in these first blocks south of King it was a short-lived street scene built of wood in the decade following the city’s “great fire” of 1889.  The post-fire building codes that required brick construction did not apply to these blocks, which in 1889 were still tidelands south of King Street and so ordinarily under water.

1903 is the likely year for this scene. Many of the small business here, like the Chicago Bar on the left, appear in the 1903 Polk City Directory, but then move on or fall away.   It is also the first year that the photographers Webster and Stevens are listed.

The Seattle Everett Interurban began operation thru these blocks in the fall of 1902, the year Chamber of Commerce’s Tidelands Improvement Company began promoting public works improvements south of King Street.  Here the Interurban tracks are temporarily blocked as First Ave. South is being prepared for a pavement of vitrified brick.  Contractor bids for this work were accepted by the Board of Public Works “up to 11 o’clock a.m. Monday July 6, 1903.”

Enlargements of both this and last week’s “then,” also on King Street, are new additions to “Repeat Photography,” the exhibit that Jean and I, along with our Parisian ally, Berangere Lomont, prepared for the Museum of History of Industry. The Seattle Times is one of the sponsors of the show, which will be up until June 3, 1912.  Contact MOHAI for details.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

A few more from the neighborhood around First and King.   Again, most of this is grabbed from now-then’s done down the years (since 1982).  And here I’ll have the same blog failing – I wont always be above to find (easily) the “now” for some historical image for which I still have the text.   Perhaps organizing past “nows” will be something to get to next year – post Keeping Clam with Ivar.

First we will go out to the far west end of the King Street Coal Wharf and look to the east-southeast.  The wharf began its service of accepting coal from Renton and Newcastle in 1878.   The first of these is from the early 80s, and the snow scene was taken, I believe, during a 1884 snow, and so not the bigger 1880 one.    Beacon Hill is in the horizon (note the first homes built there), and the tides still push against it.  The lumber mill is Stetson-Post.

The railroad trestle connecting the King St.wharf with the worm-free slope of Beacon Hill was used until 1903 (or thereabouts) when the coal wharf was moved south to Dearborn Street and a new trestle connected with it.  King Street was then developed for the Great Northern’s Union Depot, which could not be bothered with a narrow-gauged coal road cutting through it.   The next image looks west on the King Street trestle in the 1890s.   All of this replaced what was burned to the bay during the “great” 1889 fire.   Note the height of this trestle.  It was also from this scaffolding that the historical photograph was taken looking south on First Avenue.   Here the pier that is about one-fourth of the way into the frame from its right border – one of the two pier sheds with a curved roof – would thru the years be rebuilt into what is now Pier 48, that part of the historical waterfront’s sold survivor from the 1890s.  It is near the foot of Main Street.

Next we will copy the Pacific clipping of a tideland story first publish there on July 22, 1990.   The contemporary photo was taken from within the old Kingdome.

Best to CLICK TWICE for what follows.

There was a filling of the tideflats from the beginning of settlement, but the systemic work of dredging Elliot Bay for  vast amounts of the muddy sands needed to reclaim the flats to an elevation high enough above high tide to be safe began in 1895.

DREDGING the TIDE FLATS – MAY 1896

(First appears in Pacific, May 16, 1993)

The empty foreground of this scene is its subject. “Tide flats” is written on the original negative. What’s being dumped upon these tidelands is of greatest interest – mud. The mud-spurting pipe is included just left of center (in the left panel of an imperfect merge of two parts).

The date is May 1896, 10 months since work began to make new land on the tidelands south of King Street. The first dredging, July 29, 1895, was accompanied by speeches, band music and cheers, especially when the first waters propelled by the pumps of the dredge Anaconda erupted from the half-mile-long pipe. “Soon the stream became slightly discolored, and the dash of black announcing the sand called for a redoubled cheer,” the Post-Intelligencer reported the next day. “Then the stream became black and blacker until it seemed to burst out of the vent in great blotches of liquid mud.” These dredgings would drain and dry as they rose above the tides protected behind bulkheads of pilings and brush.

It required much more than the mud from the bottom of Elliott Bay to fill in the more than 2,000 acres of sandy tidelands between Beacon Hill and West Seattle. Other sources included gravel from the city’s bigger regrades, including those at Jackson and Dearborn streets and the Denny Regrade. The fill used to finally reclaim these acres in the 1930s was construction junk, yard waste and all manner of disposed stuff that was once regularly dropped into the old city dumps or sanitary landfills.

Three landmarks ascending the horizon in the historical view help approximate its contemporary repeat (when I find it): South School at 12th near Dearborn, far right; the spire of Holy Names Academy at Seventh near Jackson, right of center; and the King County Courthouse, far left. At Seventh and Alder the courthouse filled a block that is now part of the relatively new addition to the west side of Harborview Hospital. The top of the hospital’s central tower is a minutia on the far left of the “now” scene. (Most of the “now” view as printed in Pacific is filled with the west side bulk of the old Kingdome – R.I.P.)

Now follows something about the Centennial Mill, one of the first industries to build on the reclaimed tidelands. (Click to Enlarge)

Best to CLICK TWICE for what follows.

We discovered another feature that was the first milling of much of the grist included in the top story here.  What follows first appeared in Pacific on Aug. 18, 1991.

(Best to still  CLICK TWICE for what follows.)

For the map below CLICK TWICE.

Now we ascend again to the top of the King Street viaduct in its last days and look north with help from a Webster and Stevens photographer.

FIRST AVE, LOOKING NORTH from the KING STREET OVERPASS

(First appeared in Pacific on NOV. 24, 1985)

Photographers are opportunists, and sometime (probably) in 1903 one grabbed the chance to climb high above the center of First Ave. S., point a lens north and shoot this historical scene from the last of the coal railroad King Street overpass, which carried coal cars to the King Street Coal Wharf and Bunkers.  The view, then, looking north from King St. is wonderfully revealing. We will start at the bottom.

The tracks that cut diagonally across the scene are part of what was then still the main railroad line through town. The Great Northern did not begin cutting its tunnel beneath the city until May of 1903, and it took two years more to complete it. That tunnel was bored to ease the congestion of boxcars on the waterfront and the frequent interruptions of traffic here on First Ave. S. The year 1903 is a good guess for dating this scene. Here’s the evidence. In the hole on the right at the southeast corner of First S. and Jackson St., foundation work is beginning on a building that was completed in 1904. Now it’s called the Heritage Building after the Heritage Group that recently (in 1985) renovated it. However, we remember it best as the recent home of Standard Brands and before that of Wax & Rain, another paint supplier.

Beyond the pit is another clue for this date-of-choice, the electric trolley on Jackson St.  Although its markings are too small to decipher in this printing, a magnified inspection of the original photo reveals the number “324” on the trolley’s side. Car 324 was built in St. Louis in 1902 for the Seattle Electric Co., but was soon sold to the Puget Sound Electric Railway for service on its then new Seattle Tacoma Interurban line. Here, en-route to Tacoma, it will turn off Jackson onto First S. and soon pass on the tracks, right of center, just beneath the photographer’s perch. Behind Car 324 is the Capitol Brewing Co. building. Built in 1900 it was the Seattle office for Olympia Beer and home of the Tumwater Tavern. The familiar brewery symbol of the horseshoe-framed waterfall is stuck to the stone just left of the trolley. This pleasing three-story combination of brick and stone is still standing and renamed the Jackson Building.

The old Olympia sign is gone and in its place there should be (but was not in 1985) a plaque telling how the architect Ralph Anderson boldly bought this modest neoclassical structure in 1963 and, with help from a lot of preservationist friends, began the fight to save this entire neighborhood. Bill Speidel soon joined him with the above ground offices for his Underground Tours, and Richard White, who now owns the building, opened his first gallery here. Their long battle was largely won with the institution of the Pioneer Square Historical District.

But the fight continues. A recent victory (in 1985) is on the photo’s left. Just across First Ave. S. from the Jackson Building, the elegant Smith Building was also built in 1900. For half a century it was the home of Steinberg Clothing. In 1982 it was lavishly renovated into 24 large loft studio apartments where photographers and graphic designers have enough undivided room beneath l6-ft. ceilings to both live and work.

In 1903 there were so few motorcars around that if one sputtered by, you might run out to see it. In this scene, aside from the trolleys, everything is still, to quote the contemporary master saddle-maker Jack Duncan, “Horse, Horse and Horse.” That’s Jack Duncan at the bottom of the “now” photograph and above him is Seattle’s last horse. Jack Duncan helped me out. I was not so lucky as the historical photographer to find a temporary platform above the center of First S. at King St., and so I moved one block south for Duncan’s horse, hospitality, and loan of a ladder. There I took the contemporary shot leaning against the family business that has been making “Everything For The Horse Since 1898.”  (Apologies for the ink-smudge that is the “now” repeat.  When the original negative surfaces I’ll make a redemption.)

Next we stay at the same intersection, and not long after.  The trestle is gone but the Schwabacher warehouse is in ruins.

Best to CLICK TWICE for what follows.

. . . and staying at the corner.

THEN & NOW CAPTIONS together.  Both views look north of First Avenue South from King Street.  All the buildings that appear in the ca. 1908 view survive, although now their architectural pleasures flirt with pedestrians through the trees that line the center of First Avenue.  They were planted in the 1970s as part this oldest neighborhoods’ dedication as a historic district.

The GAMBLING HERD

(First appeared in Pacific Jan. 22, 2006)

For the few years that the photographer Otto T Frasch explored the streets of Seattle he managed to publish postcards of many – perhaps most – of the city’s landmarks.  The results are often the best records of early 20th-century boomtown Seattle that survive, and local postcard enthusiasts are pleased to now show each other their Frasch collections.

This view is unique for Frasch.  It is less a landmark than an event – or the beginning of one.  Sometime after the 1902 opening of the Meadows Racetrack, the Seattle Electric Company devised this cheap way of transporting betting men to the Georgetown track in a style accustomed to cattle.  The passengers that are busy boarding this odd train do not require plush seats or even closed cars to enjoy their journey to the excitement of racing and the snickering promise of its riches.  These men are universally covered with hats and the husbands among them carry more cash in their pockets than homemaking wives would ordinarily condone.

With its covered grandstand, and stables, the one-mile Meadows track was built in the embrace of one of the many serpentine curves that were the Duwamish River before it was straightened into the Duwamish Waterway.  The 1907 incorporation into Seattle of the regulatory-lax Georgetown put a muzzle to the medley of vices sometimes associated with gambling (and more recently smoking cigarettes) and with the 1909 state ban on gambling the track’s chargers moved to other pastures.  The Meadows site, once on a meandering floodplain, is now one small part of an industrial gerrymander: the cheap-tax “Boeing Bulge” that pushes well into the city’s southern border.

Frasch photographed these traveling men sometime after the mid-block construction of the Seller Building in 1906.  The here (far left) vacant lot at the northwest corner of King and First Ave South was filled in 1913 with the surviving Hambrack Building, a name hardly remembered as it, the Seller and the Pacific Marine Schwabacher Building at Jackson Street are since the mid-1980s all parts of the flashy “high-tech office campus” called Merrill Place.

If you happen to have one of Otto Frasch’s cards you probably know that it is a “real photo postcard” continuously toned with real grays.   Most printings of images – postcards included – show illusory grays made from fields of little black dots of diverse thickness.  Mixing with white spaces between them these black dots produce the illusion of gray to the unaided eye.  (For a look into this trickster’s universe of black-as-gray the reader may wish to search at the accompanying photographs with magnification all the while searching hard for some gray.)

Follows three survey’s of the tide flats, all recorded from Beacon Hill.  The oldest dates from the 1890s, the next from 1914, and the last from 1968.  This last is a combo of two slides taken by Lawton Gowey.

The 1914 view above includes the Centennial Mill on the left, Luna Park at the Duwamish Head, the Moran ship-building yard at the center, the coal wharves (now two of them) relocated from King Street to Dearborn Street, on the right, and the north-south avenues heading across the tide flats still on trestles in anticipation that they will always need to pass above the trains.  These elevated fly-overs were later forsaken for streets, parking lots and loading docks all at the same level as the trains that use them (or merely pass by on their way to the nearby stations at King Street.)

And now come three examples of real estate ads, invisible hands marking and extolling the attractions and prosperous here-afters of these acres made from mud.  One is copies from a bound two pages and so the center of the message is hidden in the fold – but still can be easily inferred.   Another refers to “Papa Hill.”  That is James Hill the builder of the Great Northern Railroad, the tunnel to the tidelands, the depot on them and much of the reclaimed neighborhood south of King Street.  Hill used several agents to buy them up “secretly,” that is, without coordinating among themselves and without knowing for whom they were ultimately  purchasing the freshly made land.  By these means he meant to keep the prices lower – and did.  (click – sometimes twice – to enlarge)

The 1913 relocation of Sears onto the tide flats was a considerable boost for both, although much of the immediate land to the sides of the new distribution center for catalog sales was often still under water.

(Best to CLICK TWICE for what follows.)

Reaching now to conclude, in the late 1970s I was part of an artist’s collective that rented and divided the top floor of the Cork Insulation Building – a long block north of Sears between First S. and Utah Street – into studios.  I distributed my first two “Glimpses” books on local history from a studio space that looked down on First Avenue and east to Beacon Hill.  Especially on vacant Sundays I liked walking through the neighborhood, perhaps to visit St. Vinnies or Good Will, both almost nearby.  I sometimes carried a camera with me and the stepping sawtooth roof (for vertical skylights) of the weathered warehouse below was taken then.  I do not, however, remember where in the district it is – or perhaps was.  Here it will represent that part of the flammable construction that can still be found on the flats.   The brick higher rise below it is an example of how First Ave. S. was respected sufficiently to get some spirited brickwork even on the tide flats.  That one is a tax photo from the late 1930s W.P.A. inventory of all taxable structures in King County.  Like all the others the legal description is written on the print (actually the negative) and sometimes the address too.  [If you have a pre-1938 property you wish to research and wonder if this WPA archive has a picture of it, it probably does.   With legal description in hand –  Addition-Block-Lot or tax number – call Greg Lange at 425 634 2719.  Greg is the Washington State Archivist who has the most to do with the collection, and he can let you know the costs – modest – and whatever else.]

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(click to enlarge photos.  click TWICE for the full size of many)

In the ninety years that separate Jean Sherrard’s portrait of the Seattle Kung Fu Society, and the Webster and Stevens Studio’s 1921 record of posing players in Chinatown’s week-long Go-Hing celebration that May, this part of King Street looking east through its intersection with 7th Avenue has hardly changed.   Both views also show a lion.

“Go-Hing,” – if I have used my Chinese phrase book correctly – in Cantonese means something close to “pleased to meet you.”  Surely civic conviviality was one result of the six day carnival, but its concentrated purpose was to raise relief funds for the famine that had already killed millions in northern China, and encouraged the formation in Shanghai of the Chinese Communist Party in July, two months after the last day parade of Go-Hing, a procession in which this lion played its part.

Go-Hing was also a kind of belated civic atonement for the atrocious treatment of the town’s Chinese residents during the 1886 Anti-Chinese riots.  For the carnival, Chinatown was elaborately decorated on the street and off it too in the alley shops and upstairs in the tongs, which were opened to visitors that week.  The neighborhoods arts were also put on show and its many talents proven on a stage set up in the intersection of 8th Ave. and King Street.  There was dancing in the streets.

Here’s Jean’s description on how he arranged his repeat of the May 1921 photo. “I stopped by the Wing Luke Museum, just up the street in the photos.  Bob Fisher, the museum’s Collections Manager, confirmed that the mask in the old photo was that of a lion – not of a dragon as Paul and I had first assumed – which meant we were on the hunt for lion dancers.  The museum’s Vivian Chan recommended we visit the Seattle Kung Fu Society, serendipitously located just two doors down from the Milwaukee Hotel.  (The hotel is on the left of both views.)

I was heartily welcomed by society founder Sifu John Leong who, in his mid-70s could easily pass for twenty years younger, a testament to the benefits of his life-long discipline. Next year will mark his fiftieth anniversary in the International District.  Sifu Leong unpacked his spectacular multi-colored collection of lion heads, and we chose the gold lion featured in our ‘now’ photo, planning to assemble the next day before sunset to repeat the ‘then’.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yup Jean.  But first here’s hoping that this year’s Tale of Hillside Horror (for your Students at Hillside and their annual Halloween Party) went as well as you hoped and even expect when you were putting the story’s  last lines to your tablet (for scribbling while you soaked in the tub this afternoon).  The combination of horror and bathtub reminds me of the French class, Diabolique.    A very scary movie, indeed.  Hope to be frightened by your creation.

First, there are several links from past blog efforts that will take one to stories that have something to do, as well, with King Street.  The relevance may not be at the top but it is there in every case.  Please click them and search them.

Then I’ll put up five more features with a scattering of supporting illustrations.   They will  concern, in order, the coal  trade that came down King Street on a trestle from the late 1870s to the first years of the 20th Century.   Next, a few items on gas and the gas plant between 4th and 5th, Main and King – during pretty much the same years as the coal road.    Follows the Felker House, Seattle’s first structure built from milled planks and not logs or split cedar.  Then a photograph of a Salvation Army parade preparing, perhaps, to serenade a bar on Jackson Street.  We will finish up with the “Flower of Italy” on 5th south of Jackson.

Comments: First the links to click – seven of them.   Be patient please.  It may take moments for a link to materialize.

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(Click to Enlarge these Illustrations – often CLICK TWICE to call forth their full size.)

The KING STREET COAL WHARF

(First appeared in Pacific, June 10, 1984)

The biggest thing in Seattle in 1881 was the King Street coal wharf. The Lilliputian pair in the foreground gives the pier its scale. It was both a favorite perch from which to photograph the city and a popular subject itself for photographers throughout the 1880s and 1890s.

In this view the camera looks east towards Beacon Hill, or what is really the ridge that once ran continuously – if with a slight slump – from Beacon Hill to First Hill. The two were not separated until 1909 when work began on the Dearborn cut just a little left of the hump that appears at the photographer’s center horizon. To the right of the railroad’s right-of-way is the beginning of Seattle’s first industrial neighborhood. Most of these manufacturer’s sheds are on pilings driven into the sand. The systematic filling of the tidelands began later, in 1896.

The sheds just behind the water tower are parts of a planning mill for the manufacture of sash and blinds. Behind that is a box and furniture factory, and, further on, the long sheds that cross the center of the scene are the repair shops for the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad.

The C.&P. S. was originally the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad, the narrow-gauged line completed in 1878 to the coal deposits east of Lake Washington. The first coal-filled gondolas pulled out of Newcastle on February 5 of that year, and for another half-century delivered much of it the this “south side” of Seattle central waterfront.

Another pioneer landmark, the Felker House, is on the scene’s left. This glossy white clapboard with the dark shutters and second floor veranda was built in 1853 when it shined like a temple amidst the rough log cabins of the then year-old settlement. It was Seattle’s first hotel and often called Mother Damnable’s after its quick-tempered manager, the profane Mary Conklin, who was as salty as her patrons.

(The above dates from the mid-1880s.  The Holy Names Academy – with the spire left-of-center, was completed in 1884,)

There were 54 marriages in King County in 1881. Seattle got its first foreign language churches (the German Reformed and the Scandinavian Baptist), a city-wide water company, and a telephone franchise, even though there were no telephones. Other 1881 highlights included the first local demonstration of electric lamps aboard the Willamette, which was one of the 42 steamers licensed that year for business on Puget Sound.

It was also in 1881 that the two newspapers the Post and the Intelligencer came together as something you can still hold in your hands 103 years later.  (Or could.  As noted above this was first composed a quarter-century ago.)

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GAS YARD on KING STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, April 25, 1993)

This view looks east on King Street from Fourth Avenue. The date, March 24, 1907, is scribbled at the bottom of the original print, one of many Seattle Gas Company scenes pasted to the black pages of a photo album shared with me now long ago by my friend Michael Maslan.

The first gas lights illuminated a few intersections and 42 residences on New Year’s Eve 1873. The gas was delivered through bored fir logs imported from Olympia; the plant where the gas was manufactured from coal and stored in a wooden tank was on Jackson Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, just off-camera to the left.

The photographer’s back is to the King Street Station. The station and the railroad tunnel beneath the city made these reclaimed tidelands just south of Jackson too valuable for mere manufacturing. The album from which this view was copied includes many more on the 1906-07 construction of the alternative gas works in Wallingford – now Gas Works Park.

Soon after this view was recorded, the gas plant on Jackson was razed for construction of the Union Pacific Station, whose rear shows in the contemporary view – when I find it.

Everything in the background of this scene was radically altered in 1909 with the Jackson Street regrade. Among the structures razed was Holy Names Academy on Seventh Avenue, which had opened to girl students in 1884. Its domed spire dominates the skyline, top left.

Most of the dirt scraped away during the regrade was used to reclaim more of the tidelands south of King Street. The wagon, the barrels and the stacks of pipes in the foreground are supported by a timber scaffolding, over which a thin layer of dirt has been spread. With the beginning of the regrade in 1909 this construction was torn away, dropping what we see here (or will later) to roughly its contemporary level as an abandoned railroad yard.

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FELKER HOUSE

(First appeared in Pacific, June 18, 1989.)

When Captain Leonard Felker built his hotel at the southern end of town in 1853, he out did the prescriptions of his friend and sometime partner Doc Maynard. Maynard, one of city’s founders, sold the captain the block south of Jackson Street and west of First Avenue South for $350 on the growth-promoting condition that a “substantial building be constructed on the premises within three months.” The captain complied very substantially.

Felker’s two-story frame Felker House was the first hard-finished construction on Elliott Bay with milled clapboard sides, an imported southern pine floor, and lath-and-plaster walls and ceilings. The rest of the less than two-year old village was built from rough planks, split cedar, and logs. The brilliant white hotel was so prominently set atop a low bluff at Maynard’s Point that navigators aimed for it. What else they aimed for at Felker’s hostelry is a natter of controversy.

According to Roberta Frye Watt, a pioneer’s daughter and the author of “The Story of Seattle,” it was clean sheets and Mary Conklin’s cuisine. Conklin, Felker’s proprietor, was “noted for her good cooking, nasty temper and rough tongue.” She was the wife of an old sea captain whom “she could out swear any day.” So, by Frye’s description, it was from a fearful respect that she earned her nickname, Madame Damnable. But according to Bill Speidel, the recently deceased historian and sometimes creator of Seattle’s sinful past, Conklin was called Madame because she ran a whorehouse in the back of the hotel. Whatever the case, uncommon sensation followed this “stout, coarse Irish woman” to her grave where, it was nearly universally believed by Seattle’s pioneers, her body turned to stone – a claim made when her hefty casket was later moved to a new cemetery.

The woman posing between the men on the hotel’s veranda may or may not be Mary Conklin. If we had a portrait of her we would probably still not know, for this surviving view, which is one of the city’s oldest and most valued photographic records, is, no doubt, a few generations removed from the lost and sharper original.

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The ARMY on JACKSON ST.

(First appeared in Pacific, March 30, 1986)

In 1865, William Booth founded his first mission in the slums of London’s East End. Twenty-two years later, General Booth’s “soldiers without swords” opened fire on Seattle when the young newlyweds, Captains Duke and Harris, held service in a rented room beneath a bar at First Avenue and Washington Street. The sounds of their praying and hymn-singing did antiphonal battle with the honky-tonk piano and laughter above them.

The Salvation Army in its war with the devil developed an elaborate military metaphor. General Booth led a world-wide force of uniformed batteries fighting from Fort Salvations with the battle cry of “Blood [of Christ] and Fire [of the Holy Spirit].”

What distinguished this army, and still does, was its willingness to fight in the meanest streets where the down-and-out often did not hunger after righteousness so much as for a meal. The Salvation Army’s confident compassion is still appealing.

The Army’s most effective form of street fighting used swords that were beat not into plow shares but cornets, trombones and flugelhorns. As General Booth explained, the end of salvation justified any means including brass bands – often accompanied by a formation of Hallelujah Lassies beating their tambourines.

Here we see a battery – with brass band and tambourines – in the mud on Jackson Street sometime in the 1890s – a decade that was peculiarly sinful, especially on Jackson. Writing of Seattle in 1900, Salvation Army adjutant Earnest Hawkes (a fine fighting name) charged that “its hundreds of saloons and scores of gambling dens, concert halls, and dives of various description were filled with a surging, seething mass of people and crime and outlawry that seemed to defy every attempt to suppress it.”

But here they are trying on Jackson Street where this entire line of false front businesses was put up after the fire of 1889 and many were designed for the business of sin. The Palace Theatre (behind the band) was probably a box house or combination saloon-theatre-whore house (it is not listed in any city directory). There a tired and drunken workingman could recline in a half-hidden, box-like loge while he looked upon some stage show and/or participated in his own where half the talent pays the other half.

These theatres were often the targets for the musical ammunition shot from the Salvation Army’s comets and bass drums – the drums were said to beat repentance. Sometimes the theatre’s own band would set up on an outside balcony and fight back. To the avant-garde among them, the cacophony was, no doubt, often quite appealing.

And the Army’s bands could also play popular tunes. Founder Booth agreed with another Protestant composer, Martin Luther, that the devil should not have all the good tunes. But these songs-of-the-day were always accompanied with sanctified lyrics.

Here, however, the cornets are quiet and whatever sin is on Jackson Street is seething behind the clapboards. The Army is at ease and posing for what is probably a scheduled portrait. The occasion might be the beginning of an early morning parade through skid road to wake up the sinners, or perhaps a parade to celebrate the visit of an out-of-town officer.

Perhaps this is the parade for Lieutenant Colonel Brewer who visited Seattle in March of 1900 – a celebration which a Salvation Army reporter remembered this way. “Walking three abreast with the concertina playing, [they] marched up the center of the street. It caused quite a stir, and greatly increased the attendance at the meeting attracting many who otherwise would have been indifferent. The Colonel sprang a surprise upon us by playing a comet solo in the open-air meeting, which was greatly appreciated by the great crowd who stood around us.”

These too make music and see the light.  Ivar’s good works on the waterfront were most appreciated by his neighbors.  His knack for putting the best construction on anything — including the jokes directed at his singing – shown in the late winter of 1950 when he linked the bright new but glaucous-green light on the waterfront with a traditional celebration. On the sixteenth of March, 1950 at 6:15 P.M. between Bay Street and Yesler Way the new mercury vapor lights were turned on giving the waterfront what Ivar described as a properly “romantic green tinge” for St. Partick’s Day.  (Certainly brighter, the green light still seemed to many to be also frightening.  They cast a cadaverous tone on human flesh.)

Members of the Seattle Chowder and Marching Society and the Ale and Quail Society, diverted for the moment from their Seafair business, joined with Ivar in parading along Alaskan Way to the music of Jackie Sounder’s Chowder and Marching Band.  And as host of the lighting ceremony, Ivar fed them all.  It was, the restaurateur mused, “A day to make the Swedish sailors and the Norwegian navigators glad.  For the first time since 1852 when the settlers moved from Alki Point to Elliott Bay, there is adequate light on Seattle’s waterfront.  In fact, not since Chief Seattle held his big tribal meetings around giant beach fires has the Seattle waterfront been so well lit up.”  Dressed in green, the combined memberships posed in front of the Acres of Clams in time to watch the new mercury vapor lights turn on, and some enterprising press photographer climbed above the sidewalk festivities and recorded the moment.  Looking like one of the “little people” Ivar gazes up admiringly at the new light from his place between the lamppost and his nearly new Fish Bar.

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The FLOWER OF ITALY

(First appeared in Pacific, May 18, 1986)

In 1924 or ’25, Giacomo and Maria Traverso opened their Fiore d’Italia at 414 Fifth Ave. S., between Jackson and King St. South. These Genoese cooks had the knack for fixing delicious traditional dishes, and soon their cafe was favored for serving the best Italian cooking in the city. Naturally, many of their regulars came from the Italian community, most of whom, the Traversos included, lived in or near Rainier Valley.

The aromas that wafted within this flower of Italy were also for many years the favorite lunchtime relief of the city’s garbage collectors, many of whom were, like the Traversos and Christopher Columbus, Genoese. Favorite dishes included: a codfish concoction called Baccala, a generously seasoned cornmeal mush named Polenta, and a meat-and-potatoes mix called Stufato. And every Wednesday Maria Traverso would prepare the week’s noodles for the pasta of the the day.

The Fiore d’ Italia was Traverso’s third and most successful attempt at Italian cooking. In 1917 and 18 the city directories list him at the Pentema Restaurant at 116 2nd Ave. S. But in 1919, with the Pentema closed, the Polk Directory canvassers recorded Giacomo not as a cook but as a wartime shipbuilder. (Traverso, may have taken part in the 1919 general strike which started in the shipyards.) However, as the Traverso’s daughter, Jenny Cella, recalls, her father could not be kept out of the kitchen. Soon he was cooking at another skid road cafe, the Columbus Cabaret at 167 Washington St. South.

The mid-20s opening of the Fiore d’Italia at 414 5th Ave. was not the Traverso’s last move. By 1928 they shifted their cafe a few doors north to 404 5th Ave. South in a storefront below the St. Paul Hotel. Still, the Fiore d’ Italia was the fixture on a block that saw many alterations.

Appearing in this scene to either side of the cafe are the N. P. Restaurant and the Midget Lunch. Neither can be found in any city directory. The Dreamland Cabaret was a short-lived dive in the St. Paul’s basement. It should not be confused with the notorious Dreamland Hotel, a crib house for prostitution that was located but a block-and-a-half away at 6th Ave. and King St. (See accompanying photo.)

Fifth Ave., south of Jackson Street, could be described as the Mediterranean western border of the International District. There were other Italian establishments on the street including a grocery at the comer of Jackson. Here Fifth Ave. is half a street, for it is bordered on the west by the big pit of the railroad yards and grand stations. And to the east is the East, the international community, which is still largely Asian and more often named Chinatown.

This scene (the primary or featured one – four photos up)  was photographed by one of the Traverso’s Asian neighbors, Yoshiro Okawa, whose Aiko Photographic Studio was located at 6th Ave. and Jackson Street.  For years Okawa’s fine commercial photography “at reasonable prices” was a neighborhood given – until 1942 when the Okawa family, and all Japanese  persons  in  the  district  were shipped off to internment.  Since  they  could  take  with  them only what they could carry, Yoshiro Okawa’s years of work were destroyed, including the original negative for this record of the Traverso’s cafe. Luckily the print survived. And so did Okawa to open another studio in Chicago after the war. Later he retired to Seattle where he died in 1976 at the age of 85.

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(click to enlarge photos)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB EXTRAS

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

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The BURKE BUILDING

(First appeared in Pacific, March 3, 1996)

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

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

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

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

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The STAR THEATRE

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

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

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

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

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

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The PIPERS on FRONT STREET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GRANDEST STAGE NORTH of SAN FANCISCO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FIRE STATION No. 1

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 5, 1992)

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

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

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

The PROSPECT From the FRYE OPERA HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRONT STREET, 1886

(First appeared in Pacific July 26, 1992.)

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

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

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

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

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

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FIRST AVE. North Thru MADISON STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, June 22, 1986)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The EXCHANGE BUILDING

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan 10, 1999)

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

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

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

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

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The GARDEN OF ALLAH

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

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

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

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

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

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

(click to enlarge photos)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB EXTRAS

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

First, THE CHEHALIS DEPOT:

Now the Lewis County Historical Museum.

THE CHEHALIS STREET DANCE:

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

Next, TWO PIONEER SANCTUARIES ON HIGHWAY 6:

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

Anything to add, Paul?

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

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

Follow THREE of WINLOCK (“most likely”)