(click to enlarge photos)

Colman Dock and the “Mosquito Fleet” steamer the H.B. Kennedy were both built in 1908-09: the later in Portland to join the dock after a maiden voyage across the Columbia Bar, up the Washington coast and through the Straits of Juan de Fuca.  Here the 179 foot-long and famously fleet Kennedy is – I think – backing away from the 700-foot dock to resume the back-and-forth “Navy Yard Route” service to Bremerton that it kept at for many years.

This Colman Dock is not quite the same as the one that the Kennedy first made its home in ‘09.  In 1912 the ocean-going steel steamer Alameda crashed into and through the dock’s outer end splashing the first tower and dome-topped waiting room into Elliott Bay.  This new tower and welcoming façade were designed by architect Daniel R. Huntington, whose surviving landmark list includes the Lake Union Steam Plant, the D.A.R.’s “Mount Vernon” home on Capitol Hill and the Wallingford Fire Station, now a health clinic.

Traumas for Colman Dock returned in 1914 when its neighbor, the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, the next pier to the north, made the biggest fire in Seattle since the “great one” of 1889.  Sparks ignited the top of this Spanish tower, but the fire was hosed before it could reach the clock.   The repaired tower and the dock it topped were razed in the mid-1930s for a new Art Deco-style Colman Dock, which complimented the Black Ball line’s newest flagship, the streamlined ferry Kalakala.  The H.B. Kennedy’s changes included a name change to Seattle and 1924 alterations into an auto ferry.  It kept the same back-and-forth to Bremerton.

Jean Sherrard’s version of what must be one of the most popular photographic subjects in Seattle, is offered considerably wider than the “then” shot in order to show-off the city, and frankly, the clouds above it too.  Both these views and others of the 1909 and 1937 Colman Docks, also recorded from the bay, are part of our exhibit on “Repeat Photography” that is now up at the Museum of History and Industry.

WEB EXTRAS

When I was high atop Smith Tower this past spring, I took shots in every direction. This is one of Colman Dock, looking west.

A couple more are details shot from the approaching ferry:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, we have some additions, again.  We will start with some links to stories we have done earlier on this blog that touch on Colman Dock.  Below those we will add a few more features (although not many) and pictures.

Seattle Now & Then: Colman Dock

Colman Dock Addendum

Addendum #2 – from Captain Eddie

Addendum #3 – Kalakala Ephemera

Addendum #4  -many more Colman Dock views

This is Addendum #5 to an earlier Colman Dock story

This also includes some looks at Colman Dock – from the bay.

This first shows the dock with a SYKES photo from the viaduct.

Fireboat Duwamish addendum #1

Seattle Now & Then: Lost Landmarks at Pier 51

Seattle Waterfront History Chap. 2

Seattle Waterfront History Chap. 3

Seattle Waterfront History Chap. 7

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First we will compliment Jean’s contemporary look at Colman Dock and its waterfront from the Smith Tower with a few more from the same prospect.

1911 GOLDEN POTLATCH

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 21, 1983.)

You would be hard pressed today to attract more than 1,000 people down to the Washington State Ferry Terminal, Colman Dock at Pier 52 to watch first a plane fly by and then one boat arrive. Yet that is exactly what caused all the excitement on July 17; 1911, during the city’s six-day Golden Potlatch celebration.

The scene records an afternoon moment on July 17, 1911 during the city’s six-day Golden Potlatch celebration.  The subject is the then three-year-old extended Colman Dock with its impressive dock tower. At exactly 1:25 p.m. (the time on the clock) Eugene Ely, pioneer aviator, took off from the mudflats of Harbor Island in his Curtiss bi-plane and was soon to sweep by overhead to become the highlight of the city’s first summer festival. A short time later, at 2:10 p.m., eyes were turned toward the bay for the arrival (actually a re-enactment) of the steamship Portland with its ton of gold, in approximation of how it had docked fourteen years earlier at the start of the gold rush of 1897.  The ship’s gangway touched down at the slip north of Colman Dock, the king and queen of the event stepped to shore and were led off to a parade through the city streets. A second parade, this one afloat, was part of the festivities and included the H.B. Kennedy and Athlon, both in the 1911 photo.

The Golden Potlatch was a potluck of symbols favoring the sea, economic growth, pioneer nostalgia and sentimentality for native ways at a time when Seattle advertised itself as “the fastest growing city in the world.” The golden portion of the title came from Seattle’s enduring obsession with the earlier gold rush and the belief that it was responsible for the recent prosperity.

Such summer celebrations were to continue for longer than the unfortunate clock tower. The next year the entire front end of the old pier was rammed by a steel-hulled steamship named the Alameda and the tower toppled into the bay.

The Golden Potlatch returned in 1912 and 1913, but then discontinued until revived for a few years during the Great Depression.  World War 11 put a stop to that and Seattle was without any summer celebrations for nine years until the 1950 inauguration of Seafair.

The Athlon, seen above beside Colman Dock in 1911 or 1912, was one of the mainstays of the “Mosquito Fleet”  of small steamers that once buzzed about Puget Sound.

ATHLON

(First appeared in Pacific, Aug. 30, 1992.)

Lying in its slip beside Colman Dock, the Athlon takes on passengers for Bremerton in this scene from 1911 or 1912.  The route is promoted along the crest of the pier shed’s roof: “STEAMERS FOR NAVY YARD AND BATTLESHIPS.”

Built in Portland, the Athlon was named for the Irish town Athlone on the Shannon River. It was built for a rate war on the Columbia, and at 112 feet and 157 tons, was sufficiently fleet to persuade its competitors to cooperate in fixing fares on the river. Having won the battle, it was sold to Puget Sound’s H.B. Kennedy Transportation Co. and in 1901 was put on the Navy Yard Route in competition with Joshua Green’s Inland Flyer. Almost immediately Green and Kennedy joined forces.

In 1913, the Athlon was used by the Puget Sound Steamboat Owners Association in wonderfully absurd parody of proposed safety legislation. Following the letter of the law as originally written in the LaFollette Seamen’s Act, the association stacked or tied 19 lifeboats to the 112.4 foot steamer – eight were crammed on available deck space and 11 others attached alongside in a scow. The law was amended.

In 1914, the Athlon was sold to the Moe Brothers for yet another competition – this time with the Kitsap Transportation Company’s inadequate service to Bainbridge Island and Poulsbo. It remained on this route for six years until Aug. 1, 1922, when in a heavy fog it struck Ludlow Rocks at the entrance to Port Ludlow. The crew and nine passengers made it ashore but, except for what could be salvaged, the Athlon was a total loss.

Both “principal” views look north on the waterfront from a little ways north of Columbia Street.  In the “now” scene the familiar Marion Street overpass to Colman Dock misses “repeating” the Seattle Coal Co. trestle that shows far right crossing Railroad Avenue at Madison Street in the “then” photograph recorded by the Norwegian Anders Wilse during his residency here in the 1890s.   The third view, below the text, features benches at Colman Dock’s Railroad Avenue façade facing east, circa 1909.

GOLD RUSH ODDITIES

(First appeared in Pacific, July, 2005)

With his back to Columbia Street Andres Wilse nearly straddled the most westerly of 16 rails (8 tracks) that crowded Railroad Avenue to record this waterfront gold rush scene.  The year is probably 1898 – but it may be 1899.

The flooring here is not dirt but very worn planking almost pulverized in places – soft but dangerous.  The planks are very thick and could take the pounding.  After about seven years they need replacing.  Beneath this wide trestle the tides slipped back and forth through whatever rubble or refuse might have been dumped there.  Some planks were removable for convenient dumping.

During the Gold Rush this two-block section between Columbia and Madison Streets was an oddity.  The docks were stubby and the services mostly local.  In a 99-day period in the late winter and spring of 1898 one hundred and seven ships sailed for the Klondike from this waterfront, but most of them from piers that were either north of Madison or South of Columbia.

The leaning sign nailed to the wall of the building far left reads, “Portable Aluminum Houses, Frost and Fire Proof, Just the Thing for Alaska, Weight 150 Pounds.”  (But aluminum would have been more useful for flying to the Klondike than for keeping warm there.)  Otherwise – reading more signs – in this section one can buy a salmon either from C&M Fish or AAA Fish, get almost instant nourishment at McGintry’s Oyster and Chops House, board the West Seattle Ferry (through the distinguished façade to the left of the power pole), or catch either of two popular and swift “Mosquito Fleet” steamers: the Greyhound for Edmonds and Everett or The Flyer for Tacoma.

I confess that the contemporary photo was taken a few yards west of the Norwegian Wilse’s position.  (Railroad Avenue was later widened for wagons.)  That way I stayed out of harm’s way and could “repeat” the cluster of men in the “then” with the 4th and 5th graders of Happy Medium School who at the time were on a waterfront tour with their teacher Reba Utevsky.

Above: Seattle’s future business district recorded from the end of Yesler’s Wharf probably in late 1886.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)  Below: Colman Dock, left, and the still relatively young city’s skyline have both changed notably in the intervening 120 years or so.      Courtesy of Shawn Devine, Communications Coordinator, Washington State Ferries.

COSMOPOLITAN SEATTLE, CA. 1886

If I have figured correctly this panorama of Seattle’s then still future Central Business District was photographed late in 1886 or perhaps early 1887.   There are so many delicate towers and sun-reflecting facades of residences, churches, schools and a few businesses in this record that one could probably narrow the date to within a month or two – after a day or two of more study.  (Study in the Seattle Room at the public library, or at the Northwest Collection in the basement of the Allen Library at the U.W. or in the library at the Museum of History and Industry.)

A thumbnail orientation, right to left, of the scene starts with Columbia Street on the far right; Central School, at Sixth and Madison, the highest structure on the horizon (with the bell tower); the Fry Opera House at the northeast corner of First Avenue. (Front Street) and Marion Street, the large structure with central tower at the scene’s center; the University of Washington main building with its tower escaping the horizon at the northeast corner of Seneca and 4th Avenue (small but obvious enough); and an early Colman Dock, reaching into the bay.

The implied part in this panorama by the photographer George Moore is his perch, Yesler Wharf.  It’s dog leg end turned far north into the bay and beside providing a traditional prospect for photographers also gave John Colman, the builder of Colman Dock, an obstruction to reasonably sue.  The “Great Fire” of 1889 would solve the problem.

Two 1886 events worth note.   The Budlong Boathouse is at the very center of this pan.  A sailboat is tied to its south side.  The Puget Sound Yacht Club got organize there this year, and also ran its first cup race in August of 1886.

The Anti-Chinese riots of February 1886 was followed by a sullen atmosphere that held throughout the year.  The future Seattle judge Everett Smith was scouting Seattle at that time and wrote home to his brother about the riots.  “Don’t show this letter out of the family. The city is disgraced enough as it is.”  In another letter to his fiancé he answered her question about Seattle’s cosmopolitan potential.  “Cosmopolitan?  I should say so.  Walk down Front Street any day and you meet Chinese, Indians, Irish, Negroes, Italians, Germans, Jews, French, English and Americans from every state. I never saw such a great small metropolis.”

YE OLDE CURIOSITY SHOP

(First appeared in Pacific Oct. 16, 1994.)

Almost certainly the above is the oldest formal (more of less) portrait of what after its founding in 1899 quickly became a waterfront institution.  “Beats the Dickens” is the slogan Joseph “Daddy” Standley embraced in allusion to the Victorian novelist, one of whose popular stories was titled for another Ye Old Curiosity Shop.  But it was not Charles Dickens’ fiction that originally inspired Standley into the buying and trading of Indian artifacts and natural curiosities, but a volume titled “Wonders of Nature” that his third-grade teacher awarded him for having the neatest desk in his class.

But now we have found it, or rather them.

As the organized clutter of Daddy’s shot, inside and out, suggests, Standley required a talent for keeping a neat desk if he was not to be overwhelmed by the stuff that went in and out of his waterfront curiosity.  He was, needless to say, a great collector.  Only 10 years after he opened his shop, his ethnological collection won the Gold Medal at the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition.  Subsequently he sold this entire exhibit to George Heye of New York, the founder and original curator of the Museum of the American Indian.

Enter Kat Duncan, a summertime Ballard resident and professor of art history at Arizona State University.  In her study of museums that specialize in the preservation of Indian artifacts, Duncan quickly learned that Ye Olde Curiosity Shop has long been one of the important providers of – as the faded sign above the storefront here puts it – “Indian Curios.”  Duncan was pleased to discover that the founder (who worked to within four days of his death in the fall of 1940) was also a good recorder of his own habits and collector of his own ephemera; order books, diaries, photographs and news clippings.

One of the latter-day rewards of Daddy Standley’s “Wonders of Nature” neatness, is Date C. Duncan’s book history of the shop, “1001 Curious Things: Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and Native American Art.”

Above: The Spanish-style Colman Dock with its landmark clock tower was only four years old when the steel-hulled Alameda cut through its outer end in an outsize docking blunder.  Overhauled with a new tower the 1908 pier was next renovated in the mid 1930s as a moderne terminus for the Kalakala “the world’s first streamlined ferry.” The contemporary Colman Dock, below, dates from 1961 – the dock not the picture.  It dates ca. 2004.

IRON INTO WOOD

I was recently reminded by Scott Morris who sometimes helps crew the Virginia V, the last of Puget Sound’s “Mosquito Fleet”, that the reason so many of the ports of call around the Sound were called “landings” is because bringing an unwieldy steamer along side them was a kind of “controlled crash.”

Here are evidences of an uncontrolled crash at Colman Dock on the night of April 25, 1912.  It ranks high on the waterfront’s list of remarkable blunders.  The culprit was not a small Puget Sound steamer but human communication aboard the Alameda, the Alaska Steamship Company’s ocean-going

liner.   With the Alameda resting about 250 yards west southwest of the pier head Capt. John (Dynamite) O’Brien acting as port pilot gave a “full astern” order to Third Assistant Engineer Guy Van Winter who in turn relayed it verbally to Second Assistant Robert Bunton.  Bunton, who was at the throttle, either heard or understood the order as “full ahead” and quickly jerked the Alameda into action with these results.

Coming at it from an angle the iron-hulled ship crunched through the end of Colman Dock dropping its tower into the bay and exposing the passenger waiting room beneath the dock’s dome.  Slowed but

not stalled the ship continued slicing, sinking the stern-wheel steamer Telegraph that was berthed on the north or opposite side of the pier.  The Alameda might have gone up the waterfront smashing into

other piers but for the quick thinking of O’Brien.  When the ship surged forward the captain shouted for the anchors to be dropped and after 125 fathoms of chain were out, the starboard anchor caught and the next pier north – the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, then the largest wooden pier on the coast – was momentarily saved.   It burned down two years later.

No one was killed although a few were injured and/or dumped into the bay. The hardy Alameda was merely inconvenienced, continuing its scheduled run to Alaska only a few hours late.  When the Colman tower was found at sunrise floating in the bay the hands on its big clock read 10:23. (I notice that the clock on the floating tower shown above shows no hands.  There was more than one clock.)

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MORE LOOKS AT THE SECOND COLMAN TOWER FOLLOW

The above dates, most likely, from early 1914 before the Grand Trunk, seen in part on the far left, burnt to the water.

 

(click to enlarge photos)

I met Frank Cameron during my first year of contributing this feature to Pacific Northwest, where for the June 6,1982 issue I described him as the “complete cyclist; he rides them, repairs them, and researches them.”   Frank was then the bike repairman for Bucky’s Messenger Service, and he had recently published his “Bicycling in Seattle, 1879-1904.”

Frank’s illustrated book provided the first clue – a map – for identifying the accompanying photograph, which Michael Maslan – friend, collector and dealer in historical photographs and ephemera – shared with me then.  Anders Wilse’s 1900 map of Seattle’s bike paths indicates the “divide” where the 10-mile long path to Lake Washington heads east around the north end of Capitol Hill on its way to the big lake.  The map also marks that point of departure as featuring a helpful “guide board.”

Most likely that is the half-way turn sign showing in our “then.”  Although with inhibiting directions, Jean Sherrard’s signs are very close to the mark for a proper contemporary repeat where Roanoke Street heads east from Boyston Avenue first bridging Interstate-5 with an overpass.  More evidence for this conclusion is included in a 1953 Seattle Time’s feature researched and written by Lucile McDonald, for decades this newspaper’s prolific heritage reporter.

McDonald quoted George Cotterill, the assistant City Engineer who directed the construction of the bike paths first in 1897, as having followed north along the east side of an as yet undeveloped Boylston Avenue as far as Roanoke Street.  From there the future Seattle mayor turned the cinder path east to the “great gullies and gorges indented into the northeast slope of Capitol Hill.”  When the local “bike craze” soon segued into a “motorcar madness” that section of the cinder bike path was developed into and survives as Interlaken Avenue.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Shirley Jean.  A few illustrated feature’s from past Pacifics – stories that stay near the bike path to Lake Washington.  First we will show off George Cotterill, the progressive engineer-politician who took charge of building the bike trails – and much more.  George is in substantial profile, right of center and in an opened dark suit with a white shirt showing.

Here follows another look at the split in the path – near Roanoke.   This was photographed by A. Wilse sometime before he returned for good to Norway in 1900.  It is not such a good photograph, which suggests that it is a generation or two down the line from Wilse’s normally sharp recordings.

Next a 1905-6 look at the Roanoke neighborhood – from Queen Anne Hill.

This you might wish to click TWICE to enlarge.  You will note on the far shore an imposing classical revival mansion, one we will soon examine up close.  It still stands at the northeast corner of Harvard Ave. and Edgar Street.  Also far right is the then new Seward School’s second plant. (We include a thumbnail history of it below.)  The “Wallingford peninsula” is on the far left, as yet without the 1907 Gas Works.  Note the undeveloped and irregular shoreline across the lake.   The Latona Bridge is there – it is still about fifteen years before the University Bridge was constructed, and when this scene was recorded the University District was still as likely to be called University Station (after the trolley), or even Brooklyn, the name chosen for it by its developer in the late 1880s.

The mansion on Harvard at Edgar stands here above the subject’s center.  This is part of a 1910 panorama taken, again, from Queen Anne Hill.  Roanoke Street is on the right.  Nearly clear-cut, Laurelhurst shows a few tall firs kept – for some reason – far left.

A wider 1964 recording of the neighborhood includes Seward school about one-fourth of the way in from the left border.  The I-5 freeway is still under construction.  (Again, you may wish to DOUBLE click this for a better study.)

Next is a montage that confesses how Jean and I discussed how to proceed with his “repeat” photo.   The parts of this paste-up include a portion of the map made of the bike path when it was new, a reduced copy of the primary “then,” and a grab from Google Earth.

As it developed we decided to take the “now” not from Edgar – where the red arrow points – but rather from Roanoke.

Now we will visit a Golden Potlatch party on the lawn of the Ann and Edgar Webster home, which was north of (yes) Edgar in the block between Harvard and Boylston and so now in the air over the south approach to the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge on I-5.

POTLATCH PARTY

(First appeared in Pacific, June 3, 1990.) The above scene of a line of Luxury motor cars parked in front of an expansive Capitol Hill lawn appears near the front of a thick photo album recently discovered by a local collector, Michael Maslan. The wide lawn belonged to Edgar and Ann Webster, and so did the album, full of scenes from the city’s summer festival in 1911, the Golden Potlatch.

Most likely the album was a gift from the potlatch organizers, for the 51-year-old Edgar Webster was elected King Edgar d’Oro of the week-long festival. The affable Edgar was an appropriate choice for an event that celebrated the city’s rise over the territory of Alaska. Edgar Webster was New York Life Insurance’s general agent for Alaska and the Yukon Territory, and part owner of the Washington-Alaska Bank in Fairbanks.

The festival’s first grand event was a Saturday, July 17, motorcade led first through the streets of Seattle and then over the city’s new boulevards to King Edgar’s mansion at, appropriately, 704 Edgar St. Although this scene does not include the Websters’ oversized home, which is out of frame to the left, you can see, on the far right, the stately neoclassical home of his brother-in-law, William Hinkley Parsons. Ella Parsons helped her sister-in-law Ann Webster serve tea or punch with ice cream and cake to the more than 500 parading dignitaries.

The society page of the Sunday Times reviewed the occasion as “An ideal summer afternoon, with the surroundings most ‘conducive to comfort . .. A veritable picture was presented on the velvety lawn, with the tea tables arranged under the trees in little bowers formed of hedges of sweet peas and lilies. A touch of color was given the animated scene by the beautiful summer gowns worn by the ladies. A stringed orchestra, screened from view on the wide veranda, discoursed a program of delightful music.”

Follows next something on Webster’s relatives and neighbors across Harvard Avenue.

The PARSON’S MANSION on HARVARD

(First appeared in Pacific on July 8, 1990.) By any criterion the Harvard Mansion is a landmark, and its present owners are attempting to formalize that designation. Its monumental Greek Revival portico looks west over Interstate 5 south of the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge and two blocks north of I-5’ Roanoke Street overpass. This showplace was designed and built in 1903 by Edward Duhamel for his use.

Ella and William Parsons purchased the home in 1909 and within a year added its Colonial-style railing around the second-story deck. Soon after, the family posed in front.  (For the now scene – which is typically in deep storage – the Parsons’ grandson, Allen Engle, of Edmonds, shared the scene with the home’s owners in 1990, Randy Apsel and Olga Bourlin, in the course of their research for the landmark application.)

William Parsons retired from Seattle First National Bank in 1934. The following year the family moved to Washington Park, and for six years the expensive mansion stood vacant. Since it was again occupied in 1941, the Harvard Mansion has changed hands five times until last year (1989), when the present owners moved in and started their restoration and research project.

The energy given by local cyclists to funding and building the city’s bike paths developed into the Good Roads movement, which ultimately replaced bikes and exercise with motorcars and speed while sitting.   The local cycle clubs were often ambitious in their group excursions.  Below is a portrait of club members draped about the large Kent landmark that was their destination.  In 1896 it would still be four years before the first automobile arrived in Seattle.

Another Puget Sound cycle club pose follows, although where I have no clue.

Three maps now.  First the local bike path map, drawn by the photographer A. Wilse.  Following that a composite of the maps from the federal survey hereabouts that was interrupted by the 1856 war between some of the settlers and some of the Salish tribes.   Like the surveyor’s map the third map that follows it is early enough to name the lake “Union Lake.”  It shows a few of the original donations claims at the south end of the lake – however you wish to arrange its name.

Next an early recording of the “east shore” of Lake Union – one, most likely, looking southeast across the passage between the lake proper and Portage Bay.

Identified as a scene on the east shore of Lake Union, the narrow passage in the above snapshot from 1887 suggests that it was recorded from somewhere near the west side of the University Bridge.   For the “now” I photographed  the “east side” of Lake Union from its north shore in the old Latona neighborhood near the foot of Fourth Avenue Northeast and within the bouquet of Ivar’s Salmon House.

“EAST SIDE OF LAKE UNION, 1887”

(First published in Pacific on May 27, 2007) For the first time in a quarter-century of writing this little weekly feature I am, I admit, tempted to not include a “now” photograph to repeat the historical scene. In the original Lowman family photo album from which it is lifted, the roughly 3-by-4-inch print is clearly titled, “East side Lake Union, 1887.” We may have a general confidence in the caption, for there are many other photographs in the album that are accurately described. With this caption, however, we are left asking, “But where on the east side?”

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

It was 1887 when the Seattle Lakeshore and Eastern Railroad was laid along the north shore of this lake through the future neighborhoods of Fremont, Edgewater (near Stone Way) Wallingford/Latona and the University District. Perhaps the photographer hitched a ride on the railroad and took this snapshot looking southeast from near the little park that is now at the foot of Fourth Avenue Northeast, just west of Ivar’s Salmon House.

This conjecture may also help account for how, in the 1887 scene, the shoreline draws closer to the photographer on the left side of the cedar. Historical maps of the undeveloped east shoreline of Lake Union show such an irregularity near where the Interstate 5 freeway bridge sinks its piers on the east shore of the lake.   And so we feel somewhat confident that the right prospect has been found for the repeat.

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Next we turn to take the fork to the right and head for Lake Washington.  Some of our stops will be known, other path photos will be introduced, which we hope were taken on the part of the path system that led to Leschi.

ADELPHIA HALL

(First published in Pacific, on June 23, 1991.) Throughout the 1990s, expect a proliferation of centennials in Seattle. It is a century since this city began its big boom in population and institutions. This year Seattle Preparatory School and Seattle University, both Jesuit institutions, celebrate together.

In 1891 the Jesuits took over St. Francis School, founded in the late 1880s by Seattle’s first Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. F. X. Prefontaine. Soon the order moved to the present site of Seattle University. When the institution moved again in 1919 to the north end of Capitol Hill, it was a combined college and high school.

These, however, are not Catholics in this early view of the school’s Adelphia Hall but Swedish Baptists. Built in 1906 to train Baptist missionaries for Asia, Adelphia College operated until 1917, when World War I depleted the supply of male students. The site was then purchased for the Jesuits by a Catholic couple, Thomas and Elle McHugh, who lived on Capitol Hill.

After Seattle College returned to its Broadway site in 1931, Seattle Prep was left to develop this Interlaken campus. A gym had been added in 1929 and after the 1949 earthquake shook the institution’s foundations, the austere, modern South Wing (Seen on the right of the contemporary scene – if we had found and included it.) was built between the original hall and the gym. Old Adelphia Hall’s roof was removed after the 1965 quake weakened its timbers, and in 1982 its facade was hidden behind the new McHugh Gymnasium.

Earlier, in 1975, Seattle University and Seattle Preparatory School were united again in Matteo Ricci College, a program (with lots of home work) that graduates a high-school freshman from college in six years.

We continue a little distance to a prospect that allows one to look due north into the University District, aka then as Brooklyn.

BIKE PATH PANORAMA
(First appeared in Pacific on Jan. 18, 1999.) This is one of the few easily identifiable scenes recorded a century ago by Seattle photographer J.F. Soule along the Lake Washington Bicycle path. Its view looks due north across Portage Bay in line with the University District’s 12th Avenue. This is also the earliest panorama of the Brooklyn neighborhood, as it was more commonly called in the late 1890s.

The cinder path between downtown Seattle and Leschi Park was opened June 19, 1897. The point was not to get to Lake Washington quickly, but athletically. So the trail -built by the Queen City Cycle Club before there were any motorcars in Seattle -wound around the north end of Capitol Hill. After 10 miles the cyclists reached Leschi Heights. And they did it with one gear.
This path is well marked with bike tracks. Although built 6 feet wide, the lane has been narrowed by encroaching weeds, and the little sign at the bend gives prudent advice: “GO SLOW / RING BELL / KEEP TO THE RIGHT.”

Interlaken Boulevard was developed out of the bike path and the contemporary view (after we find it) was photographed within a few feet of the position taken by Soule for his North-End panorama. This section of the boulevard is just below Seattle Preparatory School.
Most of Soule’s bike-path photographs have been copied and appear in many libraries and museums. This copy, however, was made from one of 15 original prints -perhaps Soule’s complete set – in private but still helpful hands.  (Courtesy Michael Masland and Mike Fairley.)

GOOD ROADS LUNCH & HALF-WAY STOP

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec.16, 1990.) The rustic charm of the Good Roads Lunch Room was enjoyed by tired bicyclists pedaling the miles of cinder path that twisted along the wooded ravines at the north end of Capitol Hill. This sandwich shack was the 1897 creation of the Queen City Good Roads Club, an organization of bike activists who also built the cinder trail between Lake Union and Madison Park.

Determining the exact location of this halfway house, as it was called, required some speculation. George Cotterill, the assistant city engineer (and future mayor) who helped the bikers build their Lake Washington trail, said it was set in one of the two

largest canyons between Roanoke Street and 23rd Avenue, the part of the bike trail that is now Interlaken Boulevard. A crude “Guide Map to Bicycle Paths,” published in 1900, places the lunch stop near where the then-proposed trail to Volunteer Park (now Interlaken Drive) was to meet the Lake Washington bike path.

Given these hints, it seems likely that the Good Roads Lunch Room was at the curved apex of the large ravine just east of where Interlaken Drive now meets Interlaken Boulevard. Of Cotterill’s two big canyons, the eastern ravine is much closer to Interlaken Drive, which climbs the ridge just above it.

The Good Roads Lunch Room was as short-lived as the cinder trail and the early bike craze. In 1905 Interlaken Drive and the eastern half of Interlaken Boulevard that extended from the “Y” to 23rd Avenue -the part that included the Lunch Room site – was widened and converted into a boulevard for motorcars. In 1908 the other (western) half of Interlaken Boulevard, between the “Y” and Roanoke Street, also was included in the city’s growing boulevard system.

 

FOREST RIDGE

(This first appeared in Pacific on Jan. 24, 1993.) The Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus opened its first school for girls in Seattle in an oversized Capitol Hill home in 1907. Its stay was short-lived when anxious neighbors objected to the sisters’ plans to expand. So the school, which was also a convent, moved further north to a spectacular sight 300 feet above Portage Bay, where this brick and sandstone landmark was speedily built and dedicated in 1910. The name Forest Ridge was adopted to avoid confusing the new institution with the local Orphanage of the Sacred Heart.

In his history of Forest Ridge, Seattle historian David Buerge relates how the school’s layout was snipped with scissors from the floor plan of another of the order’s schools, Barat College in Lake Forest, Ill. The collage was handed to Seattle architect F. A. Perkins, who fit it into this neo-classical construction.

The first 63 students began classes two weeks late when the school’s furniture was slow to arrive. The day students came mostly from surrounding neighborhoods; the boarders came from everywhere in the Northwest. Enrollment reached 160 in 1927, but crashed during the depression to only 54. Enrollment rose steadily after World War II, reaching 340 pupils in 1958. Thirteen years later, the Forest Ridge school moved out and up 500 feet to Bellevue’s Somerset Hill, 800 feet above Lake Washington, where this year 242 students are enrolled in grades 5 through 12.

Since 1972 the order’s old plant on Interlaken Boulevard has been the home of the Seattle Hebrew Academy where, this year (1993), 263 primary-level pupils study a curriculum of general and Judaic studies.

 

ALONG THE BIKE PATH ABOVE LESCHI

For a few exhilarating years around the tum of the century, bike riding was a popular craze in Seattle, and the building of bike trails around its hills an ingenious engineering trick. Those were the early pre-gear years of bicycling.

When a writer for Sports Afield visited Seattle in 1897 and tested the new bike trail to Lake Washington, the weekly Argus repeated for the locals the sophisticate’s belief that “had the old Roman road builders dropped into Seattle this spring, they would have been heartily surprised and doffed their hats to the wheelmen who can lead a six-foot path through virgin forests, in and out of a terribly rough country, along the sides of exceedingly steep hills. When completed, the grades will be few and all easy for even a novice to ride.”

Here above is, perhaps, one of those novices on a part of that path. And the photo does a good job of showing both the easy grade and that “terrible rough country.” Its distant view also reveals why the Argus editor dared to draw a moral from the national arbiter’s remarks. “I do not care who the critic is or how many wonderful sights he had seen . . . he cannot pass over the Lake Washington path . . .without being impressed with the magnificent panorama revealed at every tum on this snake-like path.”

But which tum in the snake is this? As often as I have seen this popular photograph in exhibits and publications none of them, including the excellent short history Bicycling in Seattle, 1897-1904 by Seattle’s bicycle authority Frank Cameron, has pinned it down. So 1 first went searching for Frank Cameron and a caption for this photo more precise than the usual generality “along the bike path.” And 1 found that the one-time master mechanic for Bucky’s bike delivery service was now (in 1986) “repairing” or moving humans with his new duties at Traveler’s Aid.  Frank and I put our heads together, switched a few gears and soon determined that this view rather quickly gives itself away.

As surely as a fingerprint, the profile of the horizon and the shape of the shoreline identifies the first land across the water as Mercer Island. And more precisely, that is Mercer Island as seen from what was then called Leschi Heights. So this is near the Leschi Park end of the Lake Washington Bike Trail and more than ten wild but relatively level cinder-surfaced snaking miles out from the city center. Frank also remembered from his research that it was here that the cyclists who did not tum around faced a fork in the road, and both ways were steep. The one descended to the amusements at Leschi Park and the other to the top of Leschi Heights. The trail’s split at the photo’s lower left comer may be that fork.

The Argus editor, concluded that this was a “wheelman’s paradise” where “lost in the forest . . . among the birds that spring from twig to twig . . . he drinks in pure air and thanks God for the power which enables him to appreciate nature.” Frank Cameron adds that in 1901 warnings were issued on Capitol Hill about bears frightening bicyclists on the Lake Washington Bike Path.

Much of the old and short-lived bicycle path was eventually transformed into city streets – notably the scenic Interlaken Blvd. that still winds through the woods at the north end of Capitol Hill.

LESCHI LEISURE

(First appeared in Pacific June 10, 2001.) The Topography of Seattle, our picturesque ridges and waterways, has predisposed us to exercise. We may not make a habit of climbing Queen Anne Hill, but if we live on it or any of the 37 or so other hills and hillocks hereabouts, even the most sedentary among us may well have to huff-and-puff to our own front door. That, too, counts as exercise.

But what of reclining in a canoe? Here on the Leschi waterfront nearly a century ago is a crowd that surely delights in itself. Whether pausing on the promenade, sitting on the bulkhead or resting in a canoe, these are mostly young people who otherwise might have been stretching.

Did they, by the end of this day, say in the summer of 1906, also feel the great satisfaction of endorphins got from paddling across the lake? Or the lingering excitement of stretched sinews from biking back to town?

At the east end of the old Indian trail between Pioneer Square and Lake Washington, Leschi quickly developed into one of Seattle’s first pleasure gardens, especially after the electric trolley was completed along that same trail in 1888. Nine years later it was possible to pedal to Leschi very indirectly on a trail around the north end of Capitol Hill, and for about a dozen years biking kept its popularity. Despite vast quantities of lard and sugar consumed, we were in 1900 perhaps as fit a city as we have ever been. The convenience of the motorcar increasingly softened muscle tone.

Today at Leschi the descendants of this lakeside society have moved down a ramp to the locked dock where they keep their sailboats. For a scene as snug and exercise-driven as this it is now best to look through the great plate-glass windows of our many exhibiting health clubs.

Next we will return to surviving landmarks – a school and an apartment building – that are near the fork in the path at – or near – Boylston and Roanoke.

SEWARD SCHOOL

(First appeared in Pacific on May Day, 1994.) All three of Seward school’s historic structures survive and are used side-by-side.  What’s still called the “new” plant was built in 1917. This slender brick structure looks over Boylston Avenue East to Interstate 5. South of it facing East Louisa Street nestles Seward’s oldest building. Built in the sticks of north Capitol Hill in 1893, it was first named Denny-Furhman School for the families that owned most of the land around the school.

A second eight-room structure was added in 1905 when enthusiasm for things Alaskan was a local obsession. Consequently the school board renamed the school after William Henry Seward, the secretary of state who in 1867 arranged the purchase of Alaska from Russia. The charming architecture of the second schoolhouse is the centerpiece of this week’s comparison.  (First published May 1, 1994,  the “now” has gone  hiding.)

The 1917 addition of the large brick plant now behind it diminished the elegant impression this structure made on those passing below on Eastlake Avenue East. However, in the early 1960s when 1-5 bisected the neighborhood the “new” brick building served as a sound buffer for the older frame school house behind it. By 1970 practically all classes – except the already noisy music class – abandoned the brick plant for the relative peace of this timbered school house.

In the inid-’70s, parents defeated the school board’s attempts to close the school. Since 1990 Seward has been the home of TOPS, an alternative program that emphasizes innovative teaching techniques and parent involvement. Perhaps some of TOPS’ 400-plus students will eventually be numbered among Seward’s distinguished alumni, along with Pearl Wanamaker, former state superintendent of public instruction; Pulitzer Prize winner Edwin Guthman; and molecular geneticist Dr. Henry Erlich.

When new in 1909, the L’Amourita apartments at the northwest corner of Franklin Avenue and Shelby Street were a unique Northwest example of East Coast townhouse living built in a Southwest style.  The L’Amourita has been a cooperative since the 1950s.

L’AMOURITA,

(First appeared in Pacific March 3, 2002) L’Amourita, the Spanish Colonial apartment named for lovers, was a half-century old when its tranquility was first interrupted in 1959 by construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge above it. The bridge was completed in the fall of 1961, and tenants in the 21 units at L’Amourita would have a year’s hiatus from the noise before that first Seattle section of Interstate 5 opened to traffic.

Residents have mostly gotten used to the clatter, especially from the express lanes, that manages to break in. Grace Hitchman has lived in one of the apartments for 23 years and has slept soundly except when the traffic stops. Then she wakes up. Since the 1950s, the building has been a cooperative run by a board of tenants. Over the years, the story of its origins has several versions. Costi Parvulescu, a member of the co-op’s board, shared one: “The story goes that a Portuguese farmer built L’ Amourita and kept adding sections as he got more daughters.”

This has a grain of truth. An investments speculator named Adolph J. Jarmuth built L’ Amourita whole-piece and lived with his family in its first apartment at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Shelby Street for the first two years only. In the beginning there were only eight apartments, described in The Seattle Times then as “divided by concrete walls and having from seven to nine rooms.” The building, said The Times, was “the first of its kind in Seattle.”

With exterior concrete walls 22 inches thick, L’ Amourita was built nearly for eternity. “I think most of Seattle has lived here at one point,” says present board president Lysa Hansen.

The PONTIUS MANSION

(First appeared in Pacific on Feb. 5, 1995) Soon after Rezin Pontius’1865 arrival in Seattle, he sent for his wife Margaret and son Frank, who followed him from Ohio by way of the Isthmus of Panama. The family grew in numbers and wealth – five children and much land. Then suddenly Rezin fled his family and fortune. He left unannounced and his wife, who never mentioned his name again, did not learn of his destination – California – until years later when Rezin contacted his sons.

Margaret Pontius, who was described as sometimes darkening her great charm with the shadow of a bad temper, was quite capable of making do without him. The family fortune grew, for the Pontius homestead in the future Cascade neighborhood between Denny Way and Lake Union was in the path of a Seattle expansion that exploded after the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889. That year Margaret built her mansion.

The architect, John Parkinson, is described by Jeffrey Ochsner in the University Press book “Shaping Seattle Architecture” as a “major Seattle designer” in the years following the ’89 fire. Later Parkinson continued his distinguished career in Los Angeles. Parkinson chose the then-popular Queen Anne style for Margaret Pontius. Margaret lived in her mansion at Denny Way and Yale Avenue until her death in 1902.  Rezin, who had returned to live with his oldest son Frank in Bothell, died 16 years later.

In 1905 Margaret Pontius’ children rented the mansion to the Mother Ryther Home for orphans. It served as an orphanage until 1919, when the Rythers moved to larger quarters in Wallingford. (Since 1958 the Ryther Child Center has been located at 2400 N.E. 95th St.) The landmark Pontius mansion survived until 1930, when it was replaced by a garage for the North Coast Transportation Company, a predecessor here of the Greyhound Line.

REPUBLICAN HILL CLIMB

(First appeared in Pacific on Oct. 14, 1984.) Included on our imagined list of lost places is the Republican Hill Climb. This elegant stairway was designed to reach higher than the hill. Its grand qualities were meant to be enjoyed for their own sake. And for half-a-century they were. The climb’s design involved three half-block sections. Each was comprised of two single stairways and one double, or branching staircase that circumvented a curving wall.

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

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

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

Above and below: four women – in all – on two bike paths.  I have not determined where the above photo was recorded, however the curving rail on the far right is a fine clue.  That and the lay of the land.  Perhaps a reader . . . .

The scene below, like the freeway construction shot above, is by Frank Shaw, but twenty two years later in 1984.  Here the bike path is the lower express level of the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge, which has on occasion been closed for the sport of cyclists and joggers.   Why there are only two here is puzzling.

We have expectations of more features for these bikeways – if they come together pretty much on their own and a little help from a few friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

This Green Lake tableau looks south over the shoulders of young boys enjoying the eternity of a summer day at the southwest corner of the lake.  The likely year is 1908 or perhaps ’09.  On the horizon is the nearly new Wallingford sanctuary for St. Benedict parish, which was dedicated in September 1907.

This south end of Green Lake was first reached from Lake Union by a wagon trail in the late 1880s, and soon after by an electric trolley.  The streetcars completed their run along the east and north shores of Green Lake on the grade of a logging railroad that had helped clear-cut all the Green Lake neighborhood except this Woodland Park part of it, then still a country retreat for the Guy Phinney family.

Green Lake was lowered seven feet in 1911 in order to create the park that now rings the lake.  In Seattle Parks historian Don Sherwood’s hand-written manuscript for Woodland Park it is described as including “the first major playfield, swim beach, boating and fishing facility to come under the jurisdiction of the Park Department.”   In the century between this “now and then” the park acres (for both Green Lake and Woodland parks) nearby this scene have also been appointed for track and field, soccer, baseball, golf (the pitch and putt variety), lawn bowling, horseshoes, tennis, soapbox racing, and skateboarding.

For this southwest corner of the lake the most consequential park development was one that did not happen – here.  Despite the vigorous objections of, it seems, most Seattle citizens and this newspaper too, the 1932 extension of the Aurora Speedway (Highway 99) was cut directly through Woodland Park.  The alternative would have directed the north-south traffic linked to the Aurora Bridge in a detour along Stone Way and the west shore of Green Lake, and so directly thru this scene.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

A few features as time allows, starting with the TEXT for the 1903 panorama of Green Lake as see today from a prospect that looks over the 1-5 Freeway.  Jean, you will need to put up the images as illustrations for what follows – put up when you get up in the morning, for a richly deserved slumber after directing the last night of “AS YOU LIKE IT” with your students at Hillside School.   Bravo.    Perhaps you will write something about taking your repeat for the 1903 pan.  For now, I’ll insert a photo of the lumber mill that felled the old grown forest that once surrounded the lake, and a ca. 1890 photo of part of the same East Green Lake neighborhood, and describe these briefly within their captions.

GREEN LAKE PANORAMA

Hidden, but not lost, in the files of the Green Lake Library are the 16 pages of The Green Lake News: Anniversary Number. On November 26, 1903 the News was one year old and excited at having survived to record and promote the suburb’s “amazing growth.” The anniversary number includes a wide-angle photograph of this booming neighborhood captioned “Birdseye View of Green Lake, taken in 1903.” It is a composite of three negatives photographed – probably on commission from the newspaper – by Asahel Curtis. (Curtis’ 1903 panorama is reproduced here with the middle and right panels merged. If I can find the left – north Wallingford – panel I’ll insert it later.)

In 1903 Green Lake was in the midst of its second spurt. John Martin, one of its boomers, confessed in the pages of the anniversary number, “A little more than three years ago an irrepressible desire for freedom from the ‘noisy traffic of the city forced the writer into a search for a quiet home . . . The attractiveness of  Green Lake was irresistible. Then not more than 500 people surrounded it. Now there are nearly 10,000!” Martin was not complaining. Three years earlier he had purchased 20 Green Lake lots.

Martin claimed that this flight to the suburban lake was caused by the congested city, effective advertising (like his own), and what he called the “two-mile charmed circle.” This referred to the liquor-free zone which radiated from the University of Washington and “within which by the grace of the legislature, no saloon can come.”

The first boom was in the early 1890s when settler-promoters like W. D. Wood, F. A. McDonald, and Guy Phinney bought up big chunks of forest about the lake, cleared and platted some of it, and constructed the Green Lake Circle Railroad Loop around the lake and up from Fremont.  The international crash of 1893 stopped the land rush and slowed the trolleys. Phinney’s land is now Woodland Park. We can see its uncut verdure on the far left of the pan.  And the ridge that runs across the photograph (just under the snowy Olympics) still bears his name.

McDonald’s parcel was to the southeast, much of it now included in Wallingford, Wood’s property covers much of the panorama’s center in east Green Lake. Wood was the visionary (and one-time Seattle mayor) who for years pleaded – to quote him from the Anniversary Issue – that “the Green Lake frontage be secured by the city for park purposes, and that the lake be made a water park upon the plan that has made Minneapolis so famous.”

Wood was convincing. The city soon purchased the lake, and in 1911 lowered it seven feet, thereby exposing hundreds of acres for park use. The largest part of this reclamation was the bay that used to dip into east Green Lake and which is now the large playfield across from the Green Lake shopping district.

The one landmark that survived almost into the present is the Green Lake Public School on the far left of the center panel. It was first opened to students in September of 1903 – or within a few weeks of Curtis’ recording it. The wooden school, closed in 1983 by the fire marshal, was designated a landmark in 1981 by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Board. This did not prevent it from being razed, however, in the summer of 1986.  It has been replaced by a modern plant in the same location.

WEST GREEN LAKE WAY

(We may have included the above subject previously in this blog, but without the story below that first appeared in Pacific Mag. on May 1, 1984.)

In the late 1970s Don Sherwood, then a Seattle Park Department employee, organized his department’s historical records. The results of this ambitious project are packed into four 5-foot cabinets in City Hall’s Municipal Library. (This was first published on May Day, 1984.  Now once access Sherwood’s papers on the Seattle Park Department’s webpage.) The Green Lake folder is the Sherwood Collection’s thickest file, and the original photographic print for this historical subject is from it.

Many of the homes in the older view survive. Because most are now hidden behind trees, I used the overlapping rooflines of the houses across the lake to locate the original photographer’s shooting site.  (I have long since misplaced – but not lost – the 1984 “now” for all this.) Wallingford’s Home of the Good Shepherd is faintly evident right of center and through the limbs of the almost leafless tree which is above and to the left of the touring car. Of course, this car and its riders are not touring but posing. There is no one in the front seat because the driver of the car is probably the photographer. “1911” is lightly penciled on the back of the original print. The year is probably correct and the shedding tree suggests it is fall.

It is certainly not spring. If it were, then this planked viaduct would be over Green Lake, not beside it; those two dark boathouses in the scene’s center would be floating on the lake rather than leaning toward it, and there would be no sandy peninsula intruding into this the southern end of the lake. 1911 was the year Green Lake was lowered seven feet. The lake was lowered at the recommendation of the Olmsted brothers, those famous landscapers who designed much of Seattle’s park system. Although the city owned the lake, only a narrow strip of squeezed land lay between the water and the privately owned streetcar line that nearly circled the lakeshore.

In 1908 the Olmsteds proposed that by lowering and thus shrinking Green Lake, it would become “a lake within a park.” They asked for four feet, and three years later the park department obliged and went three feet more.  The lake’s lowering created a park; however, it also provoked decades of “swimmer’s itch,” recurring attacks of anacharis cana densis (a lake weed with a political-sounding name) and clouds of algae. This small lake made smaller did not drain itself well, and so was forced to outfall into the city’s sewers. The irritating “greening of Green Lake” followed with three-quarters-of-a-century of emergency studies, chlorinations, dredgings, and lake closings. Swimmers are still scratching.

The 1908 Olmsted report also recommended that a “pleasure drive run south along the shore of Woodland Park by easy curves.” The pile bridge pictured here was the city’s first response. The city council approved its plans on March 8, 1909. The plans (and the photograph in part) show three rows of pilings supporting a roadway of 4″ x 12″ planks, sided by three-foot railings made from 4 ” x 4 ” posts and 2″ x 6 ” top and side rails.

Once stranded with the lake’s lowering, this picturesque pile bridge’s future was insecure. On October 14, 1914, the city council approved another “plan of improvement” for West Green Lake Way. Within a year the bridge was gone and replaced with a paved boulevard that sill keeps to the grade and line of Green Lake Way.

 

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GREEN LAKE EAST SHORE – 1913

The city’s early-century regarding mania smoothed many of its downtown streets, and it also reached the shores of its lakes. It was so politically fashionable to propose large-mannered public works that in 1909 City Councilman Hiram Gill, fresh from a nearly finished-off Denny Hill (as far east as 5^th Avenue), proposed cutting the top off Queen Anne Hill and filling in most of Lake Union.

Fortunately, when Gill later won the mayor’s race, he was distracted from the project by “regrading” the city’s ethics and opening it up to the good-paying pleasures of gambling, booze and bawdy services. While Lake Union was spared having the city’s highest hill dumped into it, Green Lake was subjected to a less drastic alteration – a kind of manicuring of its rough natural cuticles.

The Olmsted Brothers, those visionary landscape architects, proposed buying up the shoreline around Green Lake, lowering the lake, then landscaping the perimeter as a park. Over a period of years, the city did just that. Showing in this 1913 scene is the intermediate mess between the old and new lake looking north along the eastern shore. The fine-tuning of Green Lake’s shoreline continued until 1933. The final fill dirt was dumped at the south end of the lake in 1932.  The soil was grabbed during the cutting of Aurora  Avenue  through  Woodland Park.

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More than twenty years of work went into shaping Green Lake’s new shoreline and with it the enlarging of Green Lake Park.  The East Green Lake Playfield, shown in part here twice, was the largest addition of park land made from fill piled on top of the old lakebed.   The view looks north along the curving western border of that fill.  I recorded the “now” for use in Pacific in 2005.   It is at the bottom of this cluster.  Jean took another for our “REPEAT PHOTOGRAPHY” that is now on exhibit at MOHAI – for another year, so take your time.  Historical pic. courtesy of Paul G. Pearson

OLMSTED CURVES on the EAST GREEN LAKE ELEVATED

Thanks to Paul G. Pearson who sent along this week’s revelation of how a new shoreline was constructed for Green Lake, and with it the gift of a new city park.

This view of a pile driver constructing its own throughway across the East Green Lake Bay was photographed in 1912.   One year earlier the lake was lowered seven feet with mixed results.  It robbed the lake of its natural circulation by drying up the stream that ran between the Lake and Union Bay on Lake Washington. (Decades of “Green Lake Itch” would follow.)  But it also exposed a shoreline that was the first ground for the new park that was extended with fill.

The pile driver is following the curves of the Olmsted Bros. 1908 design for Green Lake Park.  Following the driver a narrow gauge railroad track was laid atop the trestle and by this efficient means dirt was dumped to all sides eventually covering the trestle itself.  (Unless I am contradicted “by other means” the trestle seen here in the “then” survives beneath the park visitors walking the Green Lake recreational path in the “now.”)

In all about two miles of trestle was built off shore from which more than 250,000 cubic yards of earth was dumped to form the dike.  After another 900,000-plus cubic yards of lake bottom was dredged and distributed between the dike and the shoreline it was discovered that when dry the dredgings were too “fluffy” to support the park’s new landscape.  More substantial fill from the usual sources – like street regarding, construction sites and garbage then still rich with coal ashes, AKA “clinkers”– was added.

The historical photograph was recorded by the Maple Leaf Studio whose offices were one block from the new Green Lake Library seen here on the far right of their photograph.  The exposed shoreline is also revealed there.   Next week we will take a close-up look at this same section of E. Green Lake Way North in 1910 when the library was new and Green Lake seven feet higher.

 

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GREEN LAKE LIBRARY

(This appeared first in Pacific Mag., May 15, 1994.  The events described within it as contemporary are now in their teens, and so are memories of them.)

“I would rather spend one dollar on libraries than $100,000 reforming criminals.”  So spoke Seattle Mayor Hiram Gill to the crowd attending the July 29, 1910 opening of the public library’s new Green Lake Branch library.

Actually, it was Andrew Carnegie not Gill who paid the $35000 required to build this elegant structure in 1910.  The way was cleared for the robber baron turned philanthropist’s gift by the libraries neighbors who bought the lot with $3000 raised in part by door belling the neighborhood for contributions.  The city library board pitched in the additional thousand required to purchase this site on East Green Lake Drive North.

The Green Lake Library  — and this early view of it — is one of the 500 structures treated in the Museum of History and Industry’s major new exhibit, Blueprints: 100 Years of Seattle Architecture.  Curated by Lawrence Kreisman, a frequent contributor to Pacific, Blueprints is much more than blueprints.  Hundreds of historical photographs, building artifacts and architectural models create a exhibition “main street” for the area’s historical landmarks both lost and extant.  (In the coming weeks I will share with Pacific Readers a number of these views.)

This view of its home has also been submitted to The Green Lake Local History Archive, a growing inventory of neighborhood materials  — photos and ephemera — cared for at the Green Lake Branch by its manager Toni Myers and her staff.

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Before Green Lake was lowered in 1911 a stream ran between its eastern shore and Union Bay on Lake Union. The first few hundred feet of its course took the creek through what is now the Albertson’s Supermarket parking lot.  From there it cut through the block between 5^th Ave. NE and NE Ravenna Blvd.   Although there is no telling where along the creek the historical scene was recorded I chose for its contemporary repeat this temporarily rapped duplex facing Ravenna Boulevard.   (Historical view courtesy MUSEUM OF HISTORY and INDUSTRY)

GREEN LAKE OUTLET

The original print for this scene is preserved with its variation – a second print of the same log, stream, bridge, and gun but of a different person – in the air-conditioned library of the Museum of History and Industry.   In this scene a woman sits on the bridge aiming the rifle.  In the other a man (or older boy) stands merely holding it.  For the two shots they may have traded instruments – gun for camera.

Or was A.P. Dukinfield the photographer.   It was the pressman Dukinfield who donated the snapshots to MOHAI in the 1950s.  In 1910, the year typed in his caption, the printer lived on 11^th Avenue NE, a stones throw from this stream he calls “Duke Creek – under Ravenna Blvd, an outlet of Green Lake.”  I know this outlet as Ravenna Creek.  Neither Green Lake historian Louis Fiset nor I know of any Duke.  Surely this is not the “Duke” in Dukinfield.  (Alas, hereabouts no contemporary Dukinfield has been uncovered.)

Following the Dukinfield caption, this is the stream that once flowed gently from Green Lake to the southeast to the Ravenna Park ravine where it rushed along through rapids and swirling pools until it slowed again in the lush wet lands of Union Bay, now mostly the parking lots of University Village.   There are a number of photographs of the stream in the park, but this is the only view I have ever encountered of it near its source where Green Lake John built his log cabin in the early 1870s.

Given the scene’s scrubbiness it was probably taken closer to Dukinfield’s home and Cowen Park than to Green Lake.  By 1910 the lake was surrounded with manicured dwellings.  It was no longer a suburban community.  The reader of 2002 might find the selling of the neighborhood in the Nov. 26, 1903 issue of the Green Lake News revealing and/or amusing.  “Every businessman of common sense knows that the farther away he gets in the evening from his daily commercial association the better off he is and the wiser life he leads.  As to the women, it is a safe assertion that the majority if given their own free choice, would live out in the suburbs, away form the nerve-distracting tumult and hubbub of the city.”

To create the park that circles it today Green Lake was lowered 7 feet in 1911.  This, of course, dried up the creek a year after this scene was recorded.  At the same time a good deal of dredging was done along the eastern shore of the lake and the greater part of this was used to build Ravenna Boulevard above the old creek bed.  This fluffy fill was loose enough to create its own urban legends including that surrounding Green Lake blacksmith Alfred Nelson’s wagon team.  Heading south on Ravenna Boulevard soon after it was completed the teamster reached a spot in the road of especially light fill (opposite the future site of Marshall School) where both the horse and wagon sank out of site.   And there – believe it or not! — they remain buried.

 

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The primordial grove of Douglas Fire and Cedar giants that were just saved from the lumberman’s axe by the creation of Ravenna Park in the late 1880s were later felled by Seattle Park Department axes following World War One. The site was then developed for tennis courts and picnic grounds near the park’s eastern entrance off of Ravenna Boulevard. (Historical photo courtesy of Kurt Jackson.)

RAVENNA PARK EXCURSION, ca. 1888

This may be the oldest surviving photograph of Ravenna Park. It is part of a collection of a glass negatives recorded by Charles Morford in the late 1880s along the then new line of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad (now the Burke Gilman Trail). Morford worked temporarily for the railroad.

The trout stream that once flowed from Green Lake through the future Ravenna Park ravine to Union Bay on Lake Washington was first crossed by the railroad late in 1887. The following year the Presbyterian Preacher and north end real estate developer W.W. Burke bought up the ravine and developed 60 acres of it as a park. With the new interurban conveniently at the front gate of “Natural Ravenna Park”this well-appointed party was almost certainly delivered to Ravenna station and park by friend Morford on “his” railroad.

The photographer has artfully arranged his friends in front of one the park’s giants. With Douglas Firs 15 to 20 feet in diameter and 300 feet tall the exceptional grove near the park’s southeast entrance was considered one of the natural treasures of West, before it was strangely felled (at least in part for chord wood) after the City purchased the park by condemnation in 1911.

Eventually this tree and most of the others were named by the Burkes for distinguished or oversized persons many of whom visited the park like the musician Paderewski (a friend of Mrs. Burke, herself a musician) and Seattle Mayor Hi Gill. The violinist Fritz Kritzler kissed and hugged one of the big trees. His wife explained, “Fritz is always wild about the woods.” The biggest tree was christened for Theodore Roosevelt after his visit to the park in 1908. At the time Mrs. Burke made allusion to TR’s slogan “Walk softly and carry a big stick.”

The Mineral Spring noted by the attached sign was one of about forty springs in Ravenna Park. Many were also given names such as Lemonade, Petroleum, Sulfur and Iron, and the Fountain of Youth. An early-published source describes the bubbling Mineral Spring as containing “many health-giving properties whose waters are unlike many mineral springs in being exceedingly pleasant to the taste.”

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EAST GREEN LAKE WAY NORTH

In this 1910 photograph the lake still rests against it northern shore.  That was the year that the Green Lake Library opened and while we can see it on the far right we cannot, of course, tell if all the tables and books are yet in place.  As noted, by perhaps too often, after the lake was lowered 7 feet in 1911 this shore, like all others, was exposed.   The Seattle Park Department did not simply drop a few grass seeds and plant a few exotics on the exposed beach but rather prepared and extended the new park land with considerable fill.

Most of the homes showing in the historical view were built in the first years of the 20^th Century — Green Lake’s boom years.  It is a double block extending between Latona and Sunnyside Streets.  With three exceptions these homes survive, although most have had lots of changes.  For instance, the big house on the left at 7438 E. Green Lake Way North is here nearly new.  Built in 1908 it has by now lost its tower, but gained much else.  (But you’ll have to visit the sidewalk beyond the park trees to inspect these additions for yourself.)  The missing homes have been replaced with a row of three nondescript multi-unit boxes.  For these the park landscape is an effective screen.

One of Green Lake’s principal early developers, W.D. Wood, proposed to the city in the early 1890s that they acquire the lake’s waterfront for a surrounding park.  Had the city followed Wood’s advice there would have been no need to lower the lake and so dry up the stream that ran from its east side to Lake Washington.  Nor of course would the homes we see here have been built on park-land.

Wood, a man of ideas and initiative, was later elected Mayor of Seattle in time to resign and join the Yukon gold rush n 1897.

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GREEN LAKE’S NORTHWEST SWIMMING BEACH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GREEN LAKE STATION

Thanks to the industry of M. L. Oakes we have a few score photographs of Seattle neighborhoods in the early 20th Century that might otherwise not have been “captured.”  Here with his back to Green Lake, Oaks recorded this view up Northeast 72nd Street and across E. Green Lake Drive North about 1909.

Also close to the photographer – but still like the lake behind him – is the primary stop for the Green Lake Electric Railway that by this time had been making settlement around the lake a great deal easier for twenty years.  Much like the University District, which for a number of its early years was referred to most often as “The University Station”, so this most vibrant of commercial neighborhoods beside the lake was known as “Green Lake Station.”

The number of businesses and services available just in this short block running one block east from NE 72nd Street to its intersection with Woodlawn Ave. N.E. is an impressive witness to the commercial vitality of this then booming neighborhood.  Included here on the right or south side of 72nd  – moving right to left – are Green Lake Hardware and Furniture, a dentist, a real estate office, an Ice Cream parlor that stocks candy and cigars as well, the Model Grocery Co. and the Hill Bros who established the first store in the East Green Lake Shopping District in 1901.   At the end of the block – still on this south side – is the Central Market.  Across 72nd on its north side are the neighborhood hotel, post office and a paint and wallpaper merchant.

Completing this tour of 72nd, two blocks to the east the belfry of Green Lake Baptist rises above its southeast corner with 5th Avenue NE.  And to this side of the church, worshipers can complete their cleansing if they feel the need with a visit to the North Seattle Bath House.  But then so can the bankers.  Green Lake’s only brick structure at the time, the single story Green Lake State Bank, is set at the southeast corner of 72nn Street and Woodlawn Ave – at the scene’s center.

 

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Above: Photographer M. L. Oakes “real photo” postcard looks from Corliss Avenue west on 62nd Street towards Green Lake during the week-long “cold snap” of 1909.  Photo courtesy John Cooper  Below: Jean Sherrard used a ten-foot pole – and his 6 feet 6 inch frame – to lift his camera to the point-of-view Oakes took more easily from a neighbor’s second floor window.   Jean’s “now” was photographed at noon on Jan 16th last.

GREEN LAKE SNOWSCAPE, 1909

If we accept the date scribbled at the bottom of this print – it reads “January 6, 1909” — then this is not only a rare glimpse into the Green Lake neighborhood but also a record from what The Seattle Times described three days later as the “longest cold spell on record.”

This Wednesday view looks west towards Green Lake and the Phinney Ridge horizon through the southwest corner of Corliss Avenue and 62nd Street.  The stately home on the left takes advantage of its corner setting with a tower and a wrapping front porch.  The home is listed in the 1905 assessment roles but not in those from 1900, so it is here somewhat new and perhaps very new.  In both 1905 and 1910 Alice Leroy George is listed as the owner, but it is George A. Kelly who is paying the taxes, and Kelly is also listed as the resident at late as 1911 – but not in 1912.   So here in 1909 this is probably the Kelly home.

Early the next morning, Thursday, the temperature dropped to15 degrees, and by Saturday the Times notes “Green Lake is taking on a coating of ice sufficient to bear a man’s weight in safety.”  But the kids of this neighborhood had by then already been skating on the still unlined floor of the unfinished Green Lake Reservoir at 75th and 15th, which was covered with the six inches of trapped water frozen solid.

This snowscape includes a horse drawn buggy descending – carefully – 62nd Avenue.  “Laundry” is written on the back flap.  Here, at least, the freeze actually improved deliveries.  As the Times again explained, before the storm many of the still new Green Lake neighborhood’s unpaved streets had “been impassable owing to the deep mud.”

Since the trolleys kept running throughout this cold snap the city schools stayed open, except for Broadway High School, which closed on Friday for want of fuel.  The storm’s greatest worry was the city’s shrinking reservoirs.  Residents were warned to stop running their water through the night or have the mains shut down.

 

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GREEN LAKE METHODISTS STONE HOME

The landmark Green Lake Methodist Church is best known for its formidable stone work and the more than fifty stained glass windows that at Sunday morning service transform the light of day into a reverent kaleidoscope.  And in 1918, the year of this week’s historical scene, the Methodists at First Avenue NE and 65th Street were also known for the size of their Sunday School — here about 300 strong.

For many — perhaps most — of these kids church and school were across the street from one another — a part of old Green Lake Elementary shows here, far right.  Note that the capped older boys have been allowed to ascend like angels above the sanctuaries side porch for this Sunday School portrait.  Except for one wearing a white top they all don suit and tie.  It was the costume of the day worn for almost any outing including church and fishing.

The Green Lake Methodists are approaching their centennial.  The congregation began in Fremont in 1895 but soon moved into a north Wallingford  (or south Green Lake) tent at 58th and Kirkwood Place.  Because from the beginning this was a singing church the congregation did not worship for long in the open but below canvas before neighbors arranged their own chorus of complaints.  They were forced to meet again in homes until the 1908 dedication of their Green Lake landmark.

As constructed their sanctuary was a fanciful antiphony of granite and plaster.  The natural randomness of the stacked  boulders was repeated by lines freely drawn in the plaster siding that reached to the sanctuary’s roof line.  There all was framed by a tasteful trim.  In the late 60s the worn plaster and the decorative roof line were replaced by the wooden siding seen in the contemporary view.  Some of the playful plaster survives in the stack but the tower’s comely cap has been removed.

In 1918 the church’s main entrance was still at the base of their main stone tower on 65th.  Part of the that tower’s pointed top can be seen to the right of the church’s smoke stack.  In 1977 the primary entrance was moved to this the First Avenue side.

The sunlight’s angle times the Sunday School scene as shortly after twelve noon.  Given that Methodist’s are also known for their feasts, the Green Lake church’s historian, Nita Wylie, speculates that these kids may have been rewarded for their posing with a church potluck.

That is all in the way of EXTRAS for now.

Now back to Ivar, Ivar’s and “Keep Clam.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

In 1955 Ed and Boe Messet opened a flashy 19-cent hamburger joint they named Dag’s, a nickname for their father.  The elder Messet was a third generation stone cutter, and with family help he sold monuments and chiseled epitaphs off the 800-block on Aurora.  There in 1955, after their father’s passing, Ed and Boe turned from stone to meat and potatoes.  Fast food success seemed assured on their block long lot facing the busy speedway.  The brothers explained that they wanted to run a business where no one would owe them anything at the end of the day.

Strange it was then in 1959 when the Messets began issuing credit cards to their many hungry beef-on-a-bun customers.   This oddity was soon resolved once the card was read.  Beside a cartoon of a dapper steer was printed, “Dag’s Credit Card – Good When Accompanied With Cash.”

This “cash card” and many other Dag’s promotions were brain-children of a brilliantly screwball cooperation between Boe Messet and one of the region’s press agent legends, Bob Ward.  There are many examples.  Dag’s new incinerator was dedicated with a fancy VIP party.  The guests included Gracie Hansen, Century 21’s designated girlie-review impresario.   The Dag’s parking lot was once fitted with a dance floor, cordoned with red velvet rope.  It was for doing the twist, and although only four feet square it worked fine for a twisting couple “as long as one of them didn’t move.”

With its hijinks and hoaxes Dag’s prospered, especially once its witty “Beefy Boy” reader board began amusing motorist with messages like “Good Meat but Humble Attitude” and “This is Dag’s, Canlis is Ten Blocks North.” (Canlis is the surviving many star restaurant on Aurora at the bridge.)  The family business survived in the somewhat voracious competition for fast food customers until 1993.  In 1962, the year of its neighbor Century 21, The Seattle Time’s humorist, the ample John Reddin explained that Dag’s served 400 steers a year and “something we fatties can understand, four tons of French fried potatoes each week.  That’s a lot of calories.”

WEB EXTRAS

Jean here: Ah, Dags…  As a young actor in the 80s, I’d often drive home after a play and stop at Dag’s for a bite. I have only vague memories of desultory service and that Aba Cadabra sauce. My fast food tastes leant more towards the long extinct Herfy’s and (to this day) Dick’s.

You, my friend, who today devour nothing with four legs (what do you have against chickens really?), must have something to add – say it’s so, Paul!

Before I answer for Chickens – and fish too – I’ll tell you where the beef is.  It – its devotional ICON – is hanging on the back wall of DICK’S on 45th in Wallingford, a beef buffo (a clown for beef eaters) with which you are familiar.  But, Jean, did you remember this swell or swelling painting on the back wall?  Have you been alert and seen it?  Eyes open, Jean!

Dear Paul, of course I know the cow on the wall. How could one avoid its kindly gaze – blessing the meat eaters who gather at the windows?

The legendary Dick’s, with its tartar-slathered Deluxe and its nonpareil fries (fries, as my pal Sean Sullivan once put it, “with a whisper of grease”)  is a fave of many Seattleites, generations of whom stopped for cones or shakes after Little League, soccer, and football games.

Last year, I stopped for some fries after a late class at the Alliance Francaise in the Good Shepherd Center. It was about 9:30 pm – late February – and Dick’s was deserted. I walked up to one of the windows and ordered. Waiting for my fries (with a whisper of grease), I heard a familiar voice order a Deluxe and fries from the next window over. It was a voice with a classic Northwest inflection, slightly nasal, with perhaps a touch of a whine.

I glanced to my left and observed a mid-50ish man, of medium height and build, wearing glasses with sandy hair worn long over his forehead like many of us did in junior high in the 70s.  At first, I must confess, I though it was our good friend Greg Lange, who lives only a couple blocks  from Dick’s. But it wasn’t Greg’s voice. The raspy tenor belonged to Bill Gates, and he was wearing the same sweater he’d worn on the Daily Show early in the week.

My fries arrived and, without a word, I went to my car and watched Bill collect his order, climb in his car and drive away. If there was security anywhere about, they kept to the shadows, as Bill appeared to be on his own. Amazingly, no one behind the counter seemed to have recognized him.

I finished my fries (“w.a.w.o.g”) and went back to the window Gates had ordered from.  “Do you know who you just served?” I asked. The Dick’s gal shook her head slowly, “He looked familiar.  Who was it?” When I told her, she laughed aloud. “But he was all on his own!” she exclaimed.

Truly, Paul, so many stories swirl around Dick’s – several spring to mind, including when I narrowed avoided bullets on Broadway. Perhaps another time. Surely you’ve got a slew of ’em as well….

Jean, I may be imagining it but isn’t that a full-face portrait – primitive surely – of Bill Gates that I detect in the rain drops on your windshield?

For three years Jean – as you know – I trampled through the Dick’s parking lot while on my daily Wallingford Walks and sometimes I ordered those healthfries too.   The most famous person I saw there was the long-time employee who served me my fries.  Everyone knew her.   I’ll return to Dick’s near the conclusion of what follows in the way of neighborhood subjects as well as features that treat on fast food service, like the Bungalow, a hamburger joint nearby on Roy off of 9th Avenue. The writing on the photograph indicates that this is a tax photo from 1937 or ’38.   Note from the signs the relative dearness of Hamburgers and fish and chips. (click to enlarge)

The above and below center-line studies of Aurora Ave. in the limited access stretch between the Aurora Bridge and Aloha were photographed by a city photographer on July 25th, 1945, a dozen days before the Aug. 6 drop of an A-Bomb on Hiroshima.  (Courtesy Municipal Archive)

Follows a feature that was included on this blog earlier, but is especially apt in this beefy context.

Starting to make Aurora into a speedway in 1932.  The view looks north over Broad Street when it still shared an intersection with Aurora.   The now view below was photographed by David Jeffers whose sensitivities in these matters of repeat photography are, if anything, more exacting that Jean’s or mine.

THE AURORA SPEEDWAY

(Again, we have shared this feature before on dorpatsherrardlomont, and do it now again because of its relevance to fast food and much else on Aurora and beside it.)

The historical view north from Broad Street on Aurora Avenue was photographed in the first moments of the future strip’s transformation from a neighborhood byway into the city’s first speedway. One clue to the street’s widening is the double row of high poles. Old ones line the avenue’s original curb and new ones signal its new eastern border. Also look at the Sanitary Laundry Co. at the northeast corner of Aurora and Mercer Street (behind the Standard Station on the right). The business has cut away enough of its one-story brick plant to lop the “Sanit” from Sanitary on the laundry’s Mercer Street sign.

A photographer from the city’s Engineering Department recorded this view on the morning of June 10, 1932, nearly five months after the dedication of the Aurora Bridge. The widened Aurora speedway between the bridge and Broad Street was not opened until May 1933. Once opened, the speed limit on Aurora was set at a then-liberal 30 mph. Traffic lights were installed at both Mercer and Broad streets, and a visiting highway expert from Chicago declared the new Aurora “the best express highway in the U.S.” It also soon proved to be one of the most deadly.

By 1937, three years after safety islands were installed to help pedestrians scamper across the widened speedway, the city coroner counted 37deaths on Aurora since the bridge dedication in 1932. Twenty of these were pedestrians, and 11 more were motorists who crashed into these “concrete forts” or “islands of destruction.” For a decade, these well-intentioned but tragically clumsy devices dominated the news on Aurora. In 1944 the city removed those that motorists had not already destroyed.

On April 22, 1953, the city’s traffic engineer confirmed what commuters must have suspected, that this intersection was the busiest in the city. Traffic from the recently completed Alaskan Way

Viaduct entered the intersection from both Aurora and Broad. (There was as yet no Battery Street tunnel.) Five years later this congestion was eliminated with the opening of the Broad and Mercer Street underpasses. The Standard gasoline station, on the right, was one of the many business eliminated in this public work.

Now pedestrians can safely pass under Aurora, although many still prefer living dangerously with an occasional scramble across the strip. Since 1973 they have had to also hurdle the “Jersey barrier” — the concrete divider (first developed in New Jersey) thathas made the dangerous Aurora somewhat safer for motorists if not for pedestrians.

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LAKE UNION SW CORNER DUMP & ABBA BROWN SPLASHING – A LAKESIDE TRASHFORMATION

The southwest corner of Lake Union has always been a useful place. The shoreline there was a wetland frequented by waterfowl and the Indians who hunted them — often entangling the unsuspecting birds in nets.  Ducks would fly low back and forth between Elliott Bay and the Lake and the natives themselves regularly trekked this relatively easy pass across the swale between Queen Anne and Denny Hills.

As early as the 1880s the lake’s southwest corner became a popular swimming beach among the settlers. There the gradual slope of the lake bottom made it fit for waders and beginners.  No doubt a number of pioneers learned to swim there.

Although we cannot know whether the splasher – Abba Brown lived nearby. (Her husband and boy Leon appear below on the back porch of the family home on Dexter.) – in the oldest of these two scenes is also a swimmer we can place her with some confidence.  The trolley trestle on the right was constructed in 1890 very nearly in line with the contemporary Westlake Avenue.  Here about three blocks beyond the lake’s old southern shore it reaches the foot of Queen Anne Hill.  From this point it followed the shoreline north to Fremont.  That puts the swimmer near the southeast corner of what is now the flatiron block bordered by Westlake, Eighth Avenue North and Aloha Street.  She may be on the future Westlake itself — ten or fifteen feet below it.

The intermediary view looks east in line with Aloha Street or nearly so.  The evidence for this siting can be seen best with a magnifying lens and the original print for the developed street which begins its Capitol Hill ascent above the roofline of the Brace & Herbert Mill, upper right, is Aloha.  That puts the photographer of this dump scene near Dexter Avenue, most likely a few feet east of it.  The photograph is dated, October 28, 1915 — about a dozen years after the splasher.

Raising ravines and wetlands with urban refuse was a city wide habit well into the 1950s.  At first a number of dumps were required because the horse and wagon delivery teams could not travel great distances to transfer stations to unload their neighborhood junk.  These wagons wait in line on or near what is now 8th Avenue N.  Judging from the size of the horses and the man, far right, raking the discharged trash (for collectibles?) the elevation change on Eighth at Aloha is nearly twenty feet.

The line of Westlake is seen just above the wagon that is dropping its load and is hidden behind the line of billboards left of center.

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Above: On Aloha Street between Dexter and 8^th Avenues, the nearly completed city’s transformer sub-station is readied to supply electricity to the “A Division” – Seattle’s first municipal streetcar line.  (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey & the Municipal Archive)  Below:  Dan Jarvie purchased the city’s obsolete sub-station during the Second World War and converted it for the manufacture of his namesake paints.  He also filled the block between Dexter and 8^th Avenues with additions.  Paint chemist Kurt Bailey purchased the facilities and business in 1978.   At this writing (now years ago) the old transformer station is used by Power R for the manufacture of computer accessories.  (It has since been razed and replace with . . . I’ll need to drive by there an investigate.)

MUNICIPAL TRANSFORMER on ALOHA

Most likely City Architect Daniel R. Huntington designed this sub-station at the southwest corner of Lake Union for Seattle’s first municipal railroad.  In many features – the concrete, the ornamental tile, the roofline, the windows — it looks like a small variation on Huntington’s Lake Union Steam Plant at the southeast corner of the lake.   The original negative is dated March 17, 1914.

The date suggests that some of the workmen making final touches to this little bastion of public works may be feeling the pressure of their lame duck mayor, George F. Gotterill.  In the last week of his mayoralty this champion of public works “insisted,” the Times reported, on taking the first run on the new four-mile line that reached from downtown to Dexter Avenue (the photographer’s back is to Dexter) and beyond to Ballard at Salmon Bay.   Although the double tracks had been in place since City Engineer A.H. Dimmock drove the last “golden spike” the preceding October 10, this transformer sub-station was not completed nor were the wires yet in place for Cotterill’s politic ride.  “The car” a satiric Seattle Times reporter put it, “may have to be helped along by the hands and shoulders of street railway employees . . .”

Fortunately, for everyone but Cotterill and the Cincinnati company that manufactured the rolling stock, it was reported on the day after this photograph was taken that the new cars couldn’t handle the curves in the new line because their wheels were built four inches too close to the framework.

Two months later the first municipal streetcar responded to the call “Let her Go” made by trolley Superintendent A. Flannigan at 5:35 AM on the Saturday of May 23.  Long-time City Councilman Oliver T. Erickson, whom Pioneer PR-man C.T. Conover described as “the apostle of municipal ownership and high priest of the Order of Electric Company Haters,” had just bought the first tickets while his wife and daughters Elsie and Francis tried to “conceal yawns.”   Erickson’s earlier attempts to promote funding for a ceremonial inaugural failed.  By the enthused report of the Star – then Seattle’s third daily – the first ride was a happy one.  “Nobody smiled.  Everybody grinned broadly.  Everybody talked at once.  Nobody knew what anybody else was saying and nobody cared.”

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HERE WE WILL INSERT A SMALL COLLECTION OF AURORA GAS STATIONS.

Next,  Ron Edge has discovered a series of photographs following the slumping fate of the Treasure Chest Service Station, also on Aurora.  Some are dated and all are courtesy of the Municipal Archive.

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BIG BUSINESS on the LITTLE LAKE

In late 1890 or perhaps 1891 David Denny hired Frank LaRoche to record this view of his enlarged Western Mill at the south end of Lake Washington.  That the LaRoche view is a revelator of the mill’s size is no trick of portraiture.  In 1889 this was the largest mill in Seattle.  Denny built it with the help of John Brace his skilled manager who had descended from a long line of lumbermen.  The timing was fortuitous for late that spring the business district of Seattle burned to the ground and, of course, the biggest mill helped rebuild it.

Western Mill opened in 1882 eager to harvest the forests that then still surrounded Lake Union.  The mill was also ready to add Lake Washington to its field when the big lake was “opened” the following year with the cutting of the Montlake log canal. Denny was one of the investors in canal.  By the time this photograph was recorded the sides of Lake Union – with the exception of a few withheld patches – were clear-cut, so the logs waiting here in the millpond are most likely from the big lake.

When the Westlake Trestle, from which LaRoche recorded his photograph, was completed to Fremont in the fall of 1890 the little steamers that had been delivering north end residents – many then still farmers – to the shores of Fremont, Edgewater and Latona (there was as yet no Wallingford or University District) suffered a sudden dive in patronage.

As lumber mills are often want to do – even iron ones – this version of Western Mill burned down in 1909.  By then it was called the Brace and Hergert mill for Frank Hergert and David Denny’s former manager John Brace had purchased the mill from its receiver after Denny lost it – and practically all else – in the great economic panic of 1893.  After the fire the partners rebuilt their mill on new fill north of Valley Street.

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“THE BIG FUNNEL”

In the interests of promoting the south end of Lake Union as the strategic route for boomtown Seattle’s rapid spread north an early 20^th-Century real estate company called it “The Big Funnel.”   In 1906 Westlake Avenue was cut through the city grid thereby linking the business district directly with the lake.   Here the way for the funnel is still being prepared by the Western Mill built, in part, over the lake and seen at the center of Arthur Churchill Warner’s ca. 1892 photograph, directly below.  Warner looks down from the eastern slope of Queen Anne Hill with his back to what would be developed into Aurora Avenue (Historical View Courtesy of Mike Cirelli.)

When Western Mill was first built in 1882 it was surrounded by tall stands of virgin Douglas fir and cedar.   The mill worked around the clock to turn it all into timber and here only a decade later the neighborhood is practically void of trees.  A few stragglers survive on the Capitol Hill horizon.  Most likely many of the homes that dapple this landscape were conveniently built of lumber cut from the trees that once stood here.

The street in the foreground is Dexter.  Beyond it is the trolley trestle bound for Fremont that was built over the lake north from the mill in 1890.  Its name Rollins was changed to Westlake not long after Warner captured it. This side of Westlake — the Lake’s extreme southwest corner — was a popular summer swimming hole until it was turned into one of the city’s many dumps and filled in with garbage and construction waste in the late teens.  Once landlocked Westlake was soon widened and paved.

Beyond the Westlake trestle is a millpond littered with logs.   There more recently a distinguished line of vessels has been moored.  These include ships stationed here after the Naval Armory was completed in 1941.  More recently the ferry San Mateo rested here until she was towed to Canada, and now the San Mateo’s younger sister ferry the Kalakala is expected to find temporary refuge in this harbor.   (As it turned out the Kalakala’s part was more hoped for by some than “expected.” It was, we know, not fulfilled.)

The last of our “Mosquito Fleet” steamers, the recently restored Virginia V now bobs in these waters as one of the main attractions of the new Marine Center that is rejuvenating the old armory.  Locals with a taste for irony may recall that another Puget Sound steamer, the City of Everett, gave her last days here as the converted Surfside 9 Restaurant.  She sank in the 60s after City Light turned off her bilge pumps for failure to pay the electric bill.  (More on her just below.)

 

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SOME GLIMPSES of The CITY OF EVERETT

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B. Marcus Priteca, Seattle’s admired and celebrated architect of motion picture palaces, assisted in the 1940 design of the U.S. Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center at the south end of Lake Union.  In the contemporary view the Center for Wooden Boats fills the slip formerly held by minesweepers, patrol craft, destroyers and the occasional submarine.  (Historical view courtesy of Mimi Sheridan.)

NAVAL RESERVE ARMORY

Used principally by early settlers for fishing, swimming, skating (when it froze over) and more than a few romantic picnics Lake Union was rarely put to work before the Western Mill was opened on its southern shore in 1882.   There were exceptions.

In the mid-1850s an earlier but short-lived mill operated near the future Fremont — it was torched during the Battle of Seattle.  Next a shady scheme by a few prominent locals to turn the lake by legal statute into their private commercial fishing reserve was thwarted in the mid-1860s.  And through most of the 1870s coal scows were towed the length of the lake from Montlake to (the future) Westlake Avenue.

Since 1940 the great white art deco pile of reinforced concrete raised for the Navy to teach its recruits and reserves has dominated the southern end of Lake Union.  As detailed by historic preservationist Mimi Sheridan in her study of the Armory and its landmark status, inside were a full-scale ship’s bridge, a rifle range, a chart room, a radio room and a “wet trainer.”   This last was a watertight room sealed for filling to practice evacuating a flooded ship.

This coming weekend, May 25 and 26 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. the Naval Armory’s big drill room will serve as both a second sound stage for the live music of Folklife Festival and an exhibition hall for the members of AKCHO, the Association of King County Historical Organizations. (Not so.  This dates from a few years back.)

The Maritime Heritage Foundation will be among the about 50 groups participating in this big free show.  Since the year 2000 when the Navy donated this property to the city (from whom it originally received it) it has been the MHF, a consortium of groups nurturing our maritime history that has been developing the lakeside Naval Armory.   It is envisioned that ultimately the south end of Lake Union will grow into a center for maritime heritage comparable to the Pacific Science Center and the Museum of Flight.   This coming weekend is a splendid opportunity to visit this vision nearly at its birth.  (Not so. The Armory is in the midst of renovations for its new occupant, the Museum of History and Industry, expected next summer, 2012.

(This permits us to remind you that the old and still active MOHAI in Montlake will have the REPEAT PHOTOGRAPHY exhibit up for another year.  We are told that the attendance has been “remarkable.”  Well we hope so.  But call first because sometimes they use the exhibit room they chose for the “repeaters” Berangere, Jean and myself for other events.)

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“PIGTALE DAYS”

“Westlake Avenue” from “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle” by Sophie Frye Bass.  Published in 1937. This often helpful book of pioneer recollections was written by Sophie Frye Bass, a granddaughter of Arthur and Mary Denny.  Her subject “Westlake Avenue” is an evocative description of the Indian culture that once camped beside the wetlands at the south end of Lake Union.  The illustration of a typical portable native shelter, made mostly of mats, is corroborated by a photograph of the same kind of structure that appears just below.  Her description here begins with a note on the charms of the abandoned railroad route that ran up the valley in the 1870s.  “The pioneers were naturally resourceful, but it took all their ingenuity to bring coal from the Renton mine to the narrow gauge railroad running from Lake Union to Pike Street by way of what is now called Westlake Avenue.  Some years later a shorter route for bringing the coal to Seattle was chosen by way of Mox La Push, or Black River Junction, and the Lake Union Road was abandoned.   One of our favorite walks was this abandoned road, or “down the grade” as we called it.  It was lined with all kinds of shrubs – wild roses, red currant and squaw berry bushes.  Picnics were held there too.”

“Westlake Avenue” from “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle” continued.   “ I could never understand why mothers did not go early and stay late.  I thought a picnic was not a picnic unless it began at nine and ended at eight.  ‘Down the grade’ as a tall fir tree that had been struck by lightning and curiously marked with rings running spirally down the trunk.  Being so unusual, all the children in town came and had a ‘look see’, and every little newcomer had to be shown that tree.  I doubt if I will ever forget the day Little Brother and I were playing ‘down the grade’ and blowing shrill whistles made from ‘horsetail’ that grew so lush there, when we met an old, gray-haired Indian and blew long and loud at him.  ‘Copet!’ he yelled at us, but we kept right on, although we knew very well that ‘copet’ was Chinook for ‘Stop’.  ‘Copet!’ he yelled again and raised his staff and took a step toward us.  This time we not only ‘copetted’ but we klatawa-ed (ran).  Perhaps the shrill whistle hurt his ears – or his dignity – or possibly there was some superstition connected with it.  How little we white children realized the tragedy of the Indians who

were seeing their ancestral hunting grounds forever taken away.  We were often provoking.  I remember another escapade of Little Brother’s and mine when we rudely intruded upon a klottchman about to bathe.  She too took after us and made us klatawa (run).  A large Indian camp built at the shoreline of Lake Union near Westlake held several families, and, being made of cedar slabs and bark, it withstood the weather.  An opening in the roof allowed the smoke to escape; poles were put across the room, and on these fish and clams were strung to dry over the fire.  Mother could always tell where we had been from the odor that clung to us of smoke and drying fish.  We children liked to go to the camp for there were so many interesting things going on.  The Indians called us ‘George Ply’s tenas’ and laughed at our attempts to speak Chinook.  If we girls wore bright

hair-ribbons or particularly bright frocks, the tslanies (women) would feel of them and say,  “Utch-a-edah, Utch-a-dah”.  Utch-a-dah has several meanings as so many of their words have – pleasure, surprise or sympathy, and long drawn out “Utch — a — dah” means “very, very sorry.”   We would watch the Siwash gamble as they sat in a circle in the big house, or the boys making arrows and spears.  The women would be weaving mats and baskets, cleaning fish and drying berries, most of the work about the camp being done by them.  When not weaving, they were out getting food.  On their way home from digging clams, picking berries, or cutting pitch wood, they would squat on the ground, remove the headbands which were attached to their baskets from their heads, and rest.  There was always a lummei  (old woman) who was a leader among the women, and when she was rested and decided it was time to go, she would say “Ho-bil-itkt-te-dow-wah. Ho-bil-itkt” (move on).  With many grunts and grumblings, first one and then another would slowly pick up her basket, put on her head-band and as slowly move on.  After all had gone and in single file, the lummei would pick up her basket and ho-bil-itkt (move).   Even as a child, I sometimes realized the beauty of Indian life, and there is a memory of a young Indian woman’s silhouetted against the sky with uplifted arms chanting a weird dirge.  Mother said she was probably mourning for her baby.  Westlake North – at one time called Rollin – from Roy Street to Fremont was built along the shore over Lake Union on piles covered with heavy wooden planks.  Gradually

it was filled in underneath with earth, and railway and streetcar tracks were laid.  Little houseboats are now tied along the lake shore and fishing boats from the Banks are resting at their moorings. Since Westlake has developed into a regular street and been paved, Fremont does not seem so many miles away as it did in the early days.   It is hard to make myself believe that I have seen a narrow gauge railroad grow into a city street.  As I look back the changes seem to have come quickly.  It is a though I suddenly awakened to find I live in a city, civilization about me, forests receding, beauty spots gone, and where I had picked lady-slippers, trilliums and Johnny-jump-ups, there is hard pavement; but I accept it – glad to have lived in the beginning of things.”

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BACK TO AURORA – This time in MAY 1967, recent enough, perhaps, for many readers to write their own caption.  A FOUR-PART PANORAMA from the TROPICS HOTEL photographed by Robert Bradley. (CLICK to ENLARGE)

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We will include now more fast food with the beginning of the Ivar’s on Broadway part of “Keep Clam” – a biography of Ivar Haglund “expected” in toto next year.

IVARS ON BROADWAY – 1951

Planning for the city’s 1951 founder’s centennial was led by some of the same Press Club’s Round Table wits who thought up Seafair, in other words some of the many vice presidents Ivar used for his first international clam eating contest in 1948.  The privileged heir of Alki Beach history and property might have been forgiven if he once more exploited his pioneer links the year the city celebrated the “Denny Party” and its landing a century earlier at Alki Point.   However, for his own “landing” celebration, Ivar waited until 1952 and instead looked for other opportunities.  Riding the surge of affection for both himself and his Acres, Ivar was, in fact, ready to look forward and expand.   For the moment at least, history be damned.

While I have failed to uncover any Ivar reflection on why he chose Capitol Hill for this 1951 extension — nor did I think to ask him – with a little pondering I believe we may get it.  With his guide, Harry Blangy, a Henry Broderick real estate agent, Ivar’s search led him away from the waterfront to the long ridge behind the business district where he found the northwest corner of E. Thomas Street and Broadway Avenue North to his liking.  Next, in January 1951 Ivar announced that “a fish-snack bar will be erected there with ample parking facilities to accommodate customers.” (That may have been the only time “fish” and “snack” appeared side-by-side in news about Ivar.)  Eighteen years Ivar held that corner.  Measured by the life span of most cafes it was a success.  It was also a fitful haul requiring many adjustments.

Substitute Ivar’s “Culture of Clams” for the “American Hamburger Communion” and his new drive-in was somewhat like Dick’s.  At both drive-ins the customer had to get out of the car.  Dick’s first opened in Wallingford in 1954 and one year later on Broadway just a block-and-one-half south of Ivar. Compared with Triple-X, Dick and Ivar were late comers.  With its 1930 (continued below)

(Seattle University sports rallies used the Broadway Ivar’s parking lot – especially during the years the O’Brien twins played for Seattle U.  Eddie is with some fans below.)

opening, the Triple-X in Issaquah was (and still is) by far the oldest drive-in around, and like Burgermaster, which opened near the University District in 1952, Triple-X offered curb-service. One never had to leave the car.  Ivar’s on Broadway had a large enclosed lobby where the customer ordered over a counter.  When in opened in the early fifties once food was in hand more often than not customers chose to return to the car or sit on the curb to eat it.  (For reasons we will describe below – in the book – Ivar soon changed that.) Triple XXX and Burgermaster were primarily for beef eaters.  Dick’s was devoted to beef alone and still makes it a point of pride that it serves no chicken sandwiches, onion rings, tacos, turnovers or fish anything.  Recalling Ivar’s vaunted search in 1948 for the “essential regular American cooking”, perhaps the 29-year old Dick Spady defined it in 1953 with burgers, fries and shakes only – not counting the sodas.

 

BACK TO DICK’S next – SHOTS RECORDED on my WALLINGFORD WALKS between 2006 and 2010.

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Concluding, perhaps, with another venerable FAST FOOD SERVER – SPUD on ALKI BEACH

SPUD at ALKI

Brothers Jack and Frank Alger opened The SPUD on Alki Beach in June of 1935.  It was the beginning of summer but also the dead of the depression. At 10 Cent for a cardboard boat stuffed with fries and two big pieces of breaded ling cod the English-born Alger’s fish and chips serving was affordable, delicious and filling – but only in the warmer months.

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

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

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

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

( click to enlarge photos)

My first impression on viewing Victor Lygdman’s dramatic meeting of a boy and his alien was “we come in peace.”  It is the name we gave this subject in “Repeat Photography,” the MOHAI exhibit of many “now and then” features that appeared first here in Pacific over the past nearly 30 years.  (The Seattle Times is one of the exhibit’s sponsors.)

Often we hear that it is “icon this and icon that.”  There is presently an icon hysteria. We, however, will avoid calling the Space Needle such, although for a devoted Seattle it quickly became our steel and concrete analogy for an Eastern Orthodox Madonna painted on wood.  The boy we don’t know, or rather the photographer Lygdman has left no name for him.  Perhaps he is still in Seattle, sometimes still facing its Space Needle, and this morning reading its Sunday Times.

Through the so far brief history of this city it has had only, it seems to me, three graven images: the Smith Tower (1914), the Kalakala (1935), “world’s first streamlined ferry,” and since 1962 this friendly usurper that was raised as the centerpiece for the city’s second worlds fair: Century 21.

When viewed from Pioneer Square, the Smith Tower, with its gleaming terra-cotta tile skin, continues to stand out favorably with the taller towers that followed after and behind it.  In 1967 the Kalakala was sold into an Alaskan exile of processing crab & canning. Then in 1998 it was heroically rescued, towed and returned to a Seattle that had, however, grown inured to its art deco charms and unforgiving of its dents.  It was thumbs down for the ferry, which was towed away – ultimately to Tacoma.

The pampered and polished Space Needle, however, is now being prepared for next year’s golden anniversary.

WEB EXTRAS

Here are a handful of Needle-related shots for your amusement, Paul. They were taken when Berangere was in town for the opening of our MOHAI exhibit.

And a few thumbnails looking down from above.

Look closely, Paul, and you’ll find Berangere posing before the Calder which conceals the Needle.

Anything to add, my friend?   Yes Jean, and I see! there is BB indeed!

Again, I’ll put up what I can in the time remaining before climbing the stairs.  They should all more or less relate to the Seattle Center and/or the Space Needle.   We will start with another needle work-in-progress and then go to the Warren Avenue School.

WARREN AVENUE SCHOOL

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

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

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

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

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FIRE STATION No. 4

(First appeared in Pacific, 6/12/88)

At different times, two towers have looked down on the neighborhood around Fourth Avenue and Thomas Street.  As landmarks go, they hardly can be compared.  One tower is the city’s present baton, the Space Needle.  The other tower belonged to Fire Station No. 4 with its elegant English-style architecture.

Station No. 4 was built in 1908 and was first occupied on Oct. 15 of that year.  Its three grand double doors opened to a steamer, a pump, and a hose wagon, all of them horse-drawn.  Engine Company No. 4 had moved over from an old clapboard station nearby at Fourth Ave. and Battery St., which had been razed that year during the Denny Regrade.   According to fire service records preserved faithfully by Seattle Fire Dept. historian Galen Thomaier, only 13 years later the company moved back to Fourth and Battery into yet another new station.  It is still there.

For four years following this final move in 1921, the still relatively new but deserted structure was idle until the Seattle Fire Department transferred over its alarm center from the SFD’s old headquarters at Third Ave. and Main Street.

For some reason, when this station was picked for the alarm center, its third floor gables were cut away.  The tower looked awkwardly stranded beside its flattened station before it, too, was lowered.   As pictured here, Fire Station No. 4 is the original stone-and-brick beauty designed by one of Seattle’s more celebrated historical architects.   After James Stephen won a 1902 contest for school design, he was employed as the city’s school architect and gave most of his time to designing public schools, more than twenty of them.

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In the historical scene, above, a photographer from the Asahel Curtis studio photographs the brand new Seattle Armory in 1939. His shadow, bottom-right, reveals that he was using a large box camera on a tall tripod. In the contemporary view, photographed from one of the food concession rows at the 2003 Bumbershoot Festival, the old Armory/Center House is effectively hidden behind the landscaping of Seattle Center. Both views look north on 3rd Avenue North towards its intersection with Thomas Street.  (Historical scene courtesy of the University of Washington Libraries.  Contemporary view photographed by Jean Sherrard.)

Armory / Food Circus / Center House

For anyone – well, like me — whose physical impression of the city was first etched in the 1960s (I visited the fair in 1962 but only moved here for good from Spokane in 1966) the big Moderne structure shown here is the Food Circus at Seattle Center. That was the name given to the 146th Field Artillery’s Armory when it was surrendered to Century 21 in ‘62, or as wits at historylink.org put it when it was “drafted into K.P. duty.”

When the Armory was built on the future Seattle Center site in 1939 it had, of course, military functions like a firing range and a garage for tanks and so no prescience for Belgian waffles and cotton candy. But it might have for of all military structures it has been armories that have best melded with the community.

Seattle has had three armories and all of them were ultimately used more by citizens than soldiers. The first was built in 1888 on Union Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. When much of the city including City Hall burned down in 1889 the National Guard Armory served as headquarters for city government. The old brick battlement at Virginia Street and Western Avenue that replaced it (1909 – 1968) was used for dances, car shows, and conventions and during the Great Depression of the 1930s as a distribution center for free food and baths.

This third and last of our three centers for community defense (built before the atom bomb) was used regularly for events sponsored by the pleasure principal. For instance Duke Ellington played here in 1941 for the University of Washington Junior Prom.  Some events were more painful, like the Canwell hearings in the post-war 40s.

The name Food Circus was pronounced stale in the early 1970s when the big building got a low budget makeover and renamed Center House. A greater renovation came in the mid-1990s when the Children’s Museum – a primary resident since 1985 – expanded by building its giant toy mountain. In 2000 the Center House Stage became only the fifth national site to be designated as an Imagination Celebration National Site by the Kennedy Center. Now the old armory is busy promoting peace with over 3,000 free public performances each year.    (This is 2003, remember.)

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Between 1909 and 1968 the National Guard Armory on the west side of Western Avenue filled most of the block between Virginia and Lenora Streets.  (Courtesy: Chris Jacobsen) The historical photo, above, was taken from the top of the retaining wall ­ shown below behind the railroad engine.  This north portal was built during the 1903 construction of the Great Northern railroad tunnel beneath the city.

ARMORY ON WESTERN

From this prospect (top) on the bluff below its battlements the military lines and slotted towers of the old National Guard Armory on the slope of Denny Hill stood out like the bastion it was not.  The architectural style was strictly high military kitsch.   Through its 59 years the honeycomb of about 150 rooms within its 3-foot thick brick ­ (about one million of them) ­walls saw more auto shows, conventions, athletics (in its own pool), and Community services than it did military drills and standing guard in defense of Seattle.

Built just north of the Pike Place Market on Western Avenue the armory was dedicated on April 1, 1909 or two years after the market opened.  A month later during an indoor Seattle Athletic Club meet an overcrowded gallery collapsed maiming many and killing a few.  During the Great Depression the armory was outfitted with showers and free food services, and during the ensuing Second World War it was used by both the Greater Seattle Defense Chest as a hospitality center for servicemen and by the Seattle General Depot as a warehouse.   Earlier, in 1939, most of the military uses were transferred to the then new steam lined armory that survives as the Seattle Center Centerhouse.  (The one treated above.)

Following WW2 the state’s unemployment compensation offices were housed within these red walls.  In April 1947 a fire that began in the basement furnace room swept through the state offices postponing the payment of nearly 2000 checks to the unemployed and veterans.  With only two exits the building had already in 1927 been tagged as a firetrap.  Following the 47 fire the Armory was repaired.  Following the larger fire of 1962 it was merely shored up.  In the January 7, 1962 blaze much of the west wall fell on the northbound lanes of the Alaskan Way Viaduct knocking holes in its deck and cracking its supports.

While asking to purchase the armory from the National Guard the Seattle City Council described its 1959 vision of the armory site that featured some combination of lookout park and garage but without the brick battlements. Nine years later when demolition expert John McFarland began tearing it down local preservationists including architects Victor Steinbreuck, Fred Bassetti and Laurie Olin put a temporary stop to it.  The proposals that quickly followed featured either restoring what was left of the Armory for small shops or saving its “symbolic parts” including a surviving south wall turret for a lookout tower connected with the proposed park.  Revealing a preservationist stripe of his own the contractor McFarland offered to Save the armory’s grand arched entrance at his own expense.   In this instance, however, the City Council turned a cold cheek to preservation and instructed the wrecker to resume with his wrecking.

 

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In 1968, the year Stanley Kubrick’s mysterious black monolith appeared and reappeared in his epic film “2001: Space Odyssey” Seattle built its own soaring black box, the Seafirst Tower, at 3rd and Madison.”  While it has held its block the city’s first modern scraper is now less evident.   (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey.)

“The Black Box”

From Elliott Bay and looking up Madison Street – as we do here – it is still possible to see the “Big Black Box” that on its own in 1968 lifted the first shaft for a new Seattle super-skyline.  From most other prospects the thicket of often-taller skyscrapers that have given Seattle its own version of the modern and generally typical cityscape has long since obscured what was originally the headquarters for Seattle First National Bank, R.I.P.

Lawton Gowey photographed the older view of it from a ferry on March 1, 1970.  The long-time accountant for the Seattle Water Department was good about recording the dates for the many thousands of pictures he took of his hometown and lifetime study.

A sense of the untoward size of the “Big Ugly” – another unkind name for it – can be easily had by comparing it to the Seattle Tower, the gracefully stepped dark scraper on the left.  In the “now” it is more than hidden behind the 770 foot Washington Mutual Tower (1988).  After its lift to 318 feet above 3rd and University in 1928 this Art Deco landmark was the second highest structure in Seattle – following the 1914 Smith Tower.  The 1961 lifting of the “Splendid” 600-plus foot tall Space Needle moved both down a notch, and inspired the now old joke that we happily repeat.  Soon after the SeaFirst tower reached its routine shape in 1968 it was described to visitors as “the box the Space Needle came in.”  And at 630 feet it was both big and square enough.

Many of Seattle’s nostalgic old timers (50 years old or older) consider the SeaFirst Tower as the beginning of the end for their cherished “old Seattle.”  For the more resentful among them the Central Business District is now congested with oversized boxes that have obscured the articulated charms of smaller and older landmarks like the Smith and Seattle Towers.  Some find solace in the waterfront where a few of the railroad finger piers survive – like Ivar’s Pier 54 seen on the far left in both views.

But Ivar’s has grown too.  In 1970 Ivar Haglund employed about 260 for his then three restaurants including the “flagship” Acres of Clams here at Pier 54.  Now in its 68th year Ivar’s Inc serves in 63 locations.  (This was first published in 2006.)  This summer it will employ more than 1000 persons to handle the busy season’s share of an expected 7 million customers in 2006.  Every one of them – not considering tourists for the moment — will be an “Old Settler” with refined and yet unpretentious good taste – and so says Ivar’s CEO Bob Donegan.

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IVAR’S FISH & CHIPS CENTURY 21 STAND (now also serving hamburgers)

Here follows and in-house notice Ivar “Keep Clam” Haglund sent to his employees ahead of Century 21.  Within the message Ivar confesses a slight worry about how the festival and fish will turn out.  As it happened both did swell.

Ivar’s Fish Bar at Century 21, above and below.  (Courtesy, the Ivar’s Archive)

 

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Historian Col Thrush’s book “Native Seattle” includes this Potlatch scene of “The Tilikums of Elttaes” among its illustrations.  His caption reads, in part,  “The [Tilikums] shown here on parade during the Golden Potlatch of 1912, enthusiastically adopted “savage” symbolism for their displays of civic boosterism.”   (Picture Courtesy Dan Kerlee)   Lined with bleachers in 1912, 4th Avenue has long since been developed as a typical Denny Regrade street sided by apartments, condos, small businesses and a few theatres.  This view looks north across Lenora Street.

“Going Native” or “Faux Natives” or “The Tilikums of Elttaes”

The Seattle Times called the 1912 Golden Potlatch – Seattle’s summer festival – a “triumph of symbolism.”   Fortunately, the multi-day spectacle was also sensational.   Fireworks, aero plane exhibitions – “1500 feet above the waterfront and at nearly 60 miles per hour” – illuminated water pageants, band concerts galore, smokers and long parades filled end-to-end with fanciful floats and “barbaric grotesqueries” like these marching ersatz totems did not require interpretations only giddy appreciation.

The 1912 Golden Potlatch was considered a great improvement over the festival’s first installment in 1911.  It was “Ben Hur to 1911’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  The Golden part of the festival name was a nostalgic reference to Seattle’s many turn-of-the-century years as the “jumping off place” for the gold rushes to Alaska and the Yukon.   So the festival’s semantic “triumph” was, to quote the Times again, “a collaboration of two great independent themes which though not at all similar, easily were fused in the joint definition of the Potlatch’s significance.”

What are we to make of that part of our abiding Native American history that is urban, and also what of the recurring Euro-American (mostly) urge to “go native?”  With Coll Thrush’s new book “Native Seattle, Histories from the Crossing-Over Place” (University of Washington Press) we get often wise and witty interpretations of urban Indians of all kinds.  It is a surprising subject, which has been more often neglected than not in the many retellings of Seattle history  – mine included.

Thrush got his PhD at the University of Washington, and is now an assistance professor of history at the University of British Columbia.  In his preface he explains, “Local historian David Buerge deserves credit for writing a series of Seattle Weekly articles that inspired my interest in Seattle’s indigenous history in the first place.”  I will echo Thrush.  Buerge has taught me too.  Here also is a hope that David will soon be able to publish his own Magnus opus, a long-awaited history of Chief Seattle.

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Moderne, brand-new and state-of-the-art are terms that may seem to cling to the stucco and reinforced concrete surfaces of the Royal Crowne Cola bottling plant at Mercer Street and 3^rd Avenue North when it opened in the Spring of 1939.  Now (in 2003 when this was first written – and not checked recently) this corner of the block is landscaped with a small grove of cherry trees that shade a plaque commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the close of World War Two.  It may be that Teatro Zinzanni is back! (Historical photo courtesy of Ralph c. Seamens, deceased.)

MODERNE BOTTLERS

This structure will be vividly remembered by a few but also faintly familiar to many others if they put a thumb over the tower.  For many years beginning around 1950 this was the home of Moose Lodge #211 sans tower.  Here, however, in 1939 it is brand new and showing the superstructure that would soon announce that this was the new home of Par-T-Pack beverages.

In the eternal competition for even a small slice of the cola pie (after Coke and Pepsi) Royal Crowne hired Seattle architect William J. Bain Sr. to design this “Streamline Moderne” styled bottling plant at 222 Mercer Street, kitty-corner to the city’s Civic Auditorium.   When the plant opened management lined up its new fleet of GMC trucks along Mercer Street for the photograph reprinted here.  The date is May 24.

Perhaps most spectacular was the state-of-the-art bottling line that was exposed to pedestrians and the traffic on Mercer through the corner windows.   When the levered windows were opened the clatter of the bottles moving along the assembly line added to the effect of industry on parade.   The Mooses replaced the bottling line with a lounge and dance floor.

Beginning in the mid-1980s the Kreielsheimer Foundation began buying up this block 24 of pioneer Thomas Mercer’s 2^nd Addition with the intention of giving it to the city for a new art museum.  When SAM moved downtown instead, a new home here was proposed for the Seattle Symphony.  However, SSO also chose to relocate downtown.

For 14 months including all of 2001 this corner was the first home for One Reel’s still popular dinner tent show Teatro Zinzanni.  (It is billed “Love, Chaos & Dinner.”)  Permission to use the corner came from Kreielsheimer trustee Don Johnson nearly at the moment that the charitable foundation completed its quarter-century run of giving 100 million mostly to regional arts groups.

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A GRAND DEXTER

The three images grouped here all look north along the centerline of Dexter Avenue and through its intersection with John Street, and so beside the west boundary of Denny Park.  This may be considered a “now, then and might have been” triptych for the sketch among these is Seattle architect David John Myer’s Beaux Arts vision of what Dexter might have been had the 1911 Bogue Municipal Plan been approved by Seattle voters in 1912.

The illustration appears facing page 33 of 191-page (plus maps and illustrations) published plan and the drawing’s caption reads “Central Avenue, Looking North to Central Station.”   Dexter Avenue (named for banker Dexter Horton) between Denny Way and the north end of Lake Union would have become Central Avenue, which, the plan trumpeted was “destined to be the principal artery through the city.”  These blocks between the plan’s Civic Center, in the then freshly lowered Denny Regrade, and the exalted transportation center with its majestic tower rendered in the sketch would have been the city’s most exalted boulevard.

The “then” photograph shows the same stretch of Dexter in about 1904 with Leon and Margaret Brown playing with their wagon on a carpet of stones near the center of the street.  (Here I want to thank and remember again Michael Cirelli, my now passed friend who while he lived was a devoted student of Seattle history.  It was Michael who first identified the Browns.)

The father, William LeRoy Brown, took the photograph (at the top).  He and Abba lived with their two children nearby at 225 Dexter.   William was both a professional plumber and a charter member with the local musicians union.  He played the clarinet in “Dad” Wagner’s popular concert and marching band.  And he was good with a camera, leaving a small but unique collection of glass negatives that includes this family scene.

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“Tenth Anniversary Candles” is written on the slide.

Tenth Anniversary fireworks, below.  Photo by Frank Shaw

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This early view of Taylor Memorial Church was photographed soon after the simple parish was constructed in 1887 at the southeast corner of Thomas Street and Birch Street.   In 1895 when many of the city’s streets were renamed Birch was changed to Taylor.  Many of our historical street names were then dropped for numbers thereby losing all allusion to our community’s past. The Executive Inn is the most recent occupant of the site.

IN MEMORIAM  – OR – A STREET NAME THAT REMEMBERS

TAYLOR MEMORIAL

Taylor Avenue runs north from Denny Way through David and Louisa Denny’s pioneer claim and continues with interruptions for about a mile and half before it stops in the greenbelt above Aurora Avenue on the east flank of Queen Anne Hill.  It got its name from this little church at its southeast corner with Thomas Street and the church was named in memory of a Reverend Frank Taylor.

Taylor, a young pastor from Guilford Connecticut, began his ministry at Plymouth Congregational Church on Jan. 18, 1884.  “The Path We Came By”, a parish history published in 1937, recalls, “The entire membership at once proceeded to fall in love with him and his young wife.”  Early that summer Taylor was shot and killed in a hunting accident.  The church history continues, “The young people who had adored him, stripped the summer gardens of flowers to decorate the church for his funeral”

By the evidence of his daily journal parishioner David Denny was as likely to stay home and read as to venture into town on Sunday morning to hear the preacher.  So in 1887 he and Louisa donated the land for Taylor Memorial Church in part so that they could attend services closer to their home.  David also liked to sing.  His daughter Emily recalled that he had a “fine ringing tenor voice and could carry a tune very well.  It was a treat to hear him as he sawed or chopped in the great forest singing verse after verse of the grand old hymns.”   Taylor Memorial became the first “daughter church” for its mother Plymouth Congregational.   W. E. Dawson, George Lee, Lambert Woods and George Fair were a few of the pastors who served there and lived in the parsonage that was built next door at 226 Taylor.

During the 1880s as the booming city quickly moved north to their claim the Denny family also gave land for Denny Park and the first permanent resident of Seattle’s first charity, The Seattle Children’s home.   While the park and the charity (now on Queen Anne Hill) have survived, Taylor Memorial Church did not.  It disbanded in 1904 or 1905 (the records are not clear) although the sanctuary continued to be used for a few years by nonsectarian congregations.

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In 1971, I think,  – on Art Day – John Hillding of the Land Truth Circus and much more, and I and many others raised the Universal Worm to the lip of the Space Needle.  There the 230 foot long inflated soft sculpture fulfilled its calling and promptly ripped on a concrete protrusion directly below the restaurant.  It then began a rapid deflation and flapping fall to the base of the Needle.   The Universal Worm is – or was – one of the recurrent images in the art of members of the sort of mysterious Shazzam Society, a kindly cabal created – perhaps – by novelist Tom Robbins. (He may deny it.)   I adopted the worm for Sky River Rock Fire, (a film I mean to return to and complete once I am thru with the Ivar “Keep Clam” tome.)   Next  year.  We also took lots of 16mm film of the worm’s ascension here, and more film of its moving about and up and over and around in many other places.   All will be revealed, or as much as the Shazzam Society encourages – if we can find it.   The Universal Worm was the first MONUMENTAL ADJUSTMENT of the Space Needle.  Of that, at least, we are certain.

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SEATTLE CENTER

(First published in Pacific, June 14, 1987)

The four wide shots from Queen Anne Hill included here all look south across what was David and Louisa Denny’s pioneer claim and is now – much of it – Seattle Center.   The views show roughly the same territory and were photographed within an easy stone’s throw of one another.

Across the sky of the oldest view, photographer C.L.Andrews has scrawled his dramatic caption, “Seattle when the Klondike was struck – 1896.”  Beginning in 1897, Seattle was “struck” by the gold rushers, who bought their outfits here and later, if they were fortunate, invested their gold here, or at least assayed it here.

David Denny was not so fortunate.  The Alaska Gold Rush came three years too late to save him from bankruptcy following the 1893 market crash.  So by 1897, the first year of Seattle’s economic recovery, David and Louisa no longer owned their claim.

Our oldest photograph also shows Denny Hill, with its namesake hotel on top gradually rising from the meadows in the foreground. The hotel straddled Third Avenue between Stewart and Virginia Streets, on the “front” or southern summit of the hill.  (From Queen Anne Hill one could not easily tell that Denny Hill was made from two humps with Virginia Street the draw between them.)  Part of what was once Denny Hill is marked in the scene photographed by A. Curtis.  The rough clearing on the left is the flattened hill following its last regrade in 1929-1930. (Actually is continued into 1931 but not that one could easily notice from this prospect.) Curtis took his photograph in 1930, the first complete year of the next depression, the “great” one.

As the photograph shows, the city has changed so radically in the 34 intervening years that it is difficult to find any connection between the two views.  There are but a few familiar homes in the foreground of the two scenes.

The 1930 view shows the Seattle skyline that essentially represented the city until the Space Needle was built in 1961-62.  Another World’s Fair creation, the Opera House, is not included in any of the views.  Originally constructed out of the old Civic Auditorium with a lavish renovation in 1961-62, it was more recently – in 2001-03 – stripped for another make over into the current McCaw Hall and Kreielsheimer Promenade. (Ordinarily there is not much talk about the Promenade, although there is a lot of talking in it, as McCaw Hall visitors use it for pre-concert mixing.  Jean and I were part of group of arts oriented writers who wrote the history of the Kreielsheimer Foundation in 2000 – or near it.)   All of its – the Civic Auditorium-cum-Opera House-cum-McCaw Hall – permutations (or mutations), along with the contiguous ice arena and playfield, were built on the site of the old Denny garden in 1927-28.  The fourth view included here dates from Jan. 9, 1928 and shows that construction underway.

Like the Memorial Stadium that replaced it in the late 1950s, Civic Field (seen to the right of the auditorium in the Curtis photograph) was the city’s primary stage for high school football.  For a few years in the 1930s it was also the home field for the Seattle Indians until the baseball team changed it’s name to the Rainiers and moved to Sick’s Stadium in Seattle’s Rainier Valley.

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(click on photos to enlarge)

On a spring day in 1985 Raymond and Zia Hachiya purchased the “Brewer House.”  It was named for the Walla Walla family that built it in 1890 as a Victorian show place for the 40 acres they platted in reasonable hope of making their fortune in the central district of what was then a roaring and generally lucky Seattle.  They named their addition after Walla Walla.   At the southeast corner of Columbia Street and 21st Avenue, their home was conveniently only five short blocks from street car service to Pioneer Square, or a mile and half walk to the same destination.

The Brewer House that the Hachiyas purchased in ’85 was a wreck, although a stately one.  About four years empty, many of the windows were broken out, clapboards had been stripped from the sides and the interior lathe and plaster walls were so broken that photographs taken from one corner looked through the entire house to the farthest corner. On hearing a skulking crow complain from one of the barren cottonwoods on the lot, a relative visiting during the first winter described it as a “bad omen.”  But as Zia explains “I had always wanted a Victorian.”  And with Raymond’s help, judicious planning and perseverant searching for authentic materials they got one, both outside and in.

In 1892 or ‘93 Adora Bell and Louella Mae, two of the Brewer’s nine children, posed on the front porch for this recording of their nearly new Victorian.  The timing is derived from the understanding that Louella, the smaller one, was born in the house.  1893 was also the year of the great economic panic, which was followed by a sustained depression.   The Brewer’s central district dreams were not so enriching and after ten years they returned to the original Walla Walla.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

In the hours left for me before nighty bears* I’ll go fishing for homes – mostly – treated with other Pacific features in the past 29 years.  There are a few less than 200, and the ones chosen – about 20 if there is time – will be the ones most readably found.  It reminds me of fishing with my dad from a row boat in Lake Newman, a few miles east of Spokane, waiting in a bay for the fish to come to us.  We arrived at the moment the state’s fisheries tanker started spouting trout – a restock – into the lake.  Within an hour we had two buckets full.  There was no limit, except to dad’s conscience.  He said, “That’s enough.”  We left for home.  I was about ten.  We shared the trout with neighbors.

* Bill Burden copyright meaning “going to bed.”

I confess that I will trust the text as found in the files – I will not change a thing.  There will, of course, be plenty of time references that are now long past, but I wont change those either.

 

Sited on the “edge” of Phinney Ridge in upper Fremont the Fitch-Nutt House looks west over Ballard to the Olympics.  A Works Progress Administration photographer recorded this view of it in 1937 as part of the WPA’s late 1930’s survey of every taxable structure in King County.    (Courtesy, Washington State Archive, Bellevue Community College Branch)

THE FITCH-NUTT HOUSE

This landmark Fremont Neighborhood residence at the northwest corner of Phinney Avenue North and North 44^th Street will have its fate decided soon.   Should this rare “Vernacular Victorian” be rescued and restored as a local architectural treasure or should it be razed for more town houses?

Called the Fitch/Nutt House, it is named for its first two builders.  The carpenter Jackson D. Fitch was first, building the less adorned western side of the house soon after he purchased the corner in 1899.  In 1902 Thomas W. Nutt followed, adding the distinctive one-and-one-half story front section with its trinity of gables or dormers and decorative bargeboards.   From its back looking west over Ballard and from its front watching the electric trolley’s that first rumbled by on Phinney Avenue in 1905, this working family home was ideally sited with sublime views of the Olympics and speedy connection to all parts of the then booming city.

Local historian Greg Lange in his search for homes in Seattle that were built in 1905 or earlier and still retain most of their original architectural integrity includes the Fitch-Nutt house in his “top 100” list.  And now Paul Fellows and Carol Tobin, members of the Fremont Historical Society, have submitted this surviving feature of old Fremont to the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board for protection.   (I transgress my pledge above not to fuss with time corrections to note that this effort to preserve the Fitch/Nutt house was a success – at least at the start.  The home was registered on the official landmarks list.)

 

The recently completed IDX Tower now covers the moving footprint of the Stacy Mansion that was first built on 3rd Avenue in 1885 and later moved 90 degrees to face Marion Street, where for 35 years it was the home of La Maison Blanc Restaurant.  The Rathskellar bar was built below it at the sidewalk. The Rathskellar featured costumed Bohemian bar maids serving – during the Great Depression – 25 cent lunches. (Historical pix courtesy Seattle Public Library)

MAISON BLANC RESTAURANT

Real estate pioneer Martin Van Buren Stacy brought an inherited wealth to the cash poor west and bought Seattle land.  He also built two mansion-sized homes.  Here we see the first of these at 308 Marion Street in 1959 its last full year. Werner Lenggenhager, the photographer, was one of the more prolific of recorders of state landmarks.   The year he took this photograph of the brilliantly white La Maison Blanc Restaurant Lenggenhager was awarded the Seattle Historical Society Certificate of Merit.  With a few thousand more prints the original survives in the Seattle Public Library.

When Martin and Elizabeth Stacy built it in 1885 for a fortune as high as its ornate cupola — $50,000 — their French Third Empire styled mansion was one of Seattle’s three grandest homes.  Henry and Sara Yesler and Jim and Agnes McNaught owned the others.   The Yeslers and McNaughts generally got along.  Martin and Elizabeth did not.  In her 1944-45 weekly Times series on Seattle mansions, Margaret Pitcairn Strachan notes that “everyone admits she wore the pants of the family . . . He’d talk and joke and swear a lot – until she showed up.  Then he’d never open his mouth.”  This may explain why once finished their grand home stood empty until the couple moved in for only a little more than a moment before relocating to a second mansion on First Hill.  Even then Martin was more likely to stay in a hotel or club than at their new home that later became the University Club which survives at the northeast corner of Madison Street and Boren Avenue.

For a brief period beginning in 1890 this Stacy home on Marion was quarters for the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.  Next it was converted into what must have been the most sumptuous boarding house in town.  But what followed the boarding is what is still remembered by many Pacific Northwest readers.  In the mid-1920s Charles Joseph Ernest Blanc turned the mansion into what many considered to be Seattle’s best restaurant.

In her 1937 guide “Northwest Novelties” Elisabeth Webb Herrick writes “For the adventurous eater, the menu holds fatal lures. Green turtle steaks, reindeer meat, frogs’ legs, escargots, eels . . . Oh you can have a wonderful time here with a $5.00 bill.  Just the two of you.” La Maison Blanc kept dishing out romance and French delicacies until the interior was scorched by fire on April 30, 1960.  Within two months it was torn down.

 

This repeat looks north over W. 58th Street (once also known here as Ballard Place) to a mansion whose institutional uses are not obvious because the large rooftop neon sign for the Simpson Bible Institute is seen only on edge from this point of view. After the bible students moved on to Edmonds in 1977 the site was developed with townhouses.

SIMPSON BIBLE COLLEGE – aka PHINNEY RIDGE MISSIONARIES

If the King County Assessors form has it right then this oversized home at 101 W. 58th Street (three blocks west of Woodland Park) was built in 1911. Ten years later the then new Simpson Bible Institute purchased the mansion and its 3-acre lot and built a four story 63-room dormitory behind and below it on one of the steepest parts of Phinney Ridge. While the dormitory was Spartan in the extreme, the mansion with its large covered porch, graceful rooflines and diverse windows retained its external grace. That the inside was carved-up to conform to the needs of the bible college silenced any issue of saving the structure when the college moved out more than a half century later.

This is one of a few views of the mansion found in a photo album that dates from the late 1920s. One of the scenes shows what is probably the mostly coed student body posing with a slender dark-suit that may be the school’s president but is surely not Albert Benjamin Simpson for whom the school was named one year after his death. In 1887 Simpson founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Nyack, New York. He was a “born again” enthusiast for sending missionaries to foreign lands and students at the Simpson Institute would probably have considered that calling – excepting personal salvation – the greatest. The school’s 1938 catalogue notes Seattle’s strategic status as the “Gateway to the Orient.”

Judge by its daily schedule school routines were indeed soul searching. Students were awakened at 6:30 a.m. for half hour devotion. Chapel at 8:30, noonday missionary prayers from 11:30 to noon, after supper prayers in the dining room, and meditations from 10:00 to lights out a half hour later, completed an “extra-curricular” schedule that was semi-monastic.

The Simpson Institute closed in the mid 1950s but the campus was soon revived with the Puget Sound Bible College. After it too moved out for new quarters in Edmonds in 1977 this oversize triangular lot was converted into modern townhouses.

 

Friends of Admiralty Head Lighthouse, left-to-right, Doris Nothcutt, Linda Neinhuis and Tom Randall, repeat the 1871 poses of Lighthouse keeper Daniel Pearson and his wife and daughter.  The Friends stand many feet lower than the pioneers for the Whidbey Island bluff here was scraped for the construction of the large “disappearing guns” of Fort Casey at the turn of the last century.  The second lighthouse that replaced the first a century ago can be glimpsed in the distance just behind Randall. (Historical Photo courtesy of Friends of Admiralty Head Lighthouse. Contemporary Photo by Steve Kobylk.)

ADMIRALTY HEAD LIGHT

In the spring of 1871 one of the great innovators of pioneer photography traveled the West Coast between Puget Sound and San Diego photographing lighthouses for the U.S. Lighthouse Board at a fee of $20 a day.  Born Edward Muggeridge at Kingston-on-Thames in England in 1830 he would become inventive with both his camera and name.   By the time the 41 year old visited Whidbey Island and the first lighthouse at Admiralty Head Edward had changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge.  Soon after he began his famous motion studies of horses (and much else) running and jumping, experiments paid for by Leland Stanford (of the University).

The trio posing for Muybridge is most likely Lighthouse keeper Daniel Pearson, his wife and his daughter Flora who was her father’s assistant.   At the time Eadweard was either courting or married to (biographers are not certain which) a different Flora who was half his age and waiting back in San Francisco – sort of.  In the fall of 1874 Muybridge shot and killed Flora’s lover, and a jury acquitted him.  Flora Pearson loved better.  After marrying a Whidbey Island pioneer, and taking a San Francisco honeymoon,  she returned to her duties in 1876 – at $625 a year – of assisting her father for two years more until they both retired to a farm with their respective spouses.

Topped by its red lantern room the two-story frame Admiralty Head Lighthouse with tower first turned on its whale oil fed Fresnel lens on January 21, 1861.  After passing the light at Dungeness Spit captains aimed their schooners at the fixed light on Whidbey Island in order to avoid the shallows off Point Hudson.  This old light was moved for the construction of Fort Casey and then also replaced in 1903 with the elegantly stucco-covered brick lighthouse that later this month is celebrating its centennial.  Designed by famed lighthouse architect Carl Leick the 1903 light is a magnet for lighthouse enthusiasts around the world and appears on a U.S. stamp as well. A great variety of public events are planned for the weekend of the 23rd and 24th – including performances by the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band and the Straits of Juan De Fuca Barbershop Chorus.

 

The line of residents of the big brick home at the northeast corner of Boren Ave. and University Street saw how quickly changes came to First Hill.  Built in 1904 for the Banker Manson Backus it became a boarding house during the Great Depression and was vacant when it was destroyed in 1956 to be ultimately replaced by the Panorama House.(Historical photo courtesy of Washington State Historical Society.)

THE BIG BRICK HOME of BANKER MANSON BACKUS

Thanks to a 47 year old tip from Seattle Times writer Alice Staples that may well be Carl A. Peterson at the wheel of the motorcar posing at the northeast corner of University Way and Boren Avenue.  Behind the driver and his riders is the brand new oversized home of the banker Manson Backus.  Staples wrote a eulogy for the Backus home – and three others shown here – in the spring of 1956 when they were about to be torn down for a modern high rise.  She interviewed Peterson.

For a half-century C.A.Peterson was a chauffeur of choice on First Hill. He drove for Backus and others and taught many of his employers to drive.  He told Staples, “I watched them build this house in 1904.”  Manson Backus the Second – the banker’s grandson — described for the reporter the red mahogany living room with a nearly 12 foot wide fireplace, the wide staircase that wound itself to the third floor, and his banker grandfather’s two electrically operated secret panels that he used as safety vaults.

The Mayflower descendent Backus came to Seattle from New York in 1889 with securities already in his pockets and started the (many times renamed) National Bank of Commerce.  By the time the bank president moved into this big home he had lost two wives but had two children.  His son LeRoy lived with his own family (including Manson the Second) next door on Boren, here to the left.  As high-rise apartments first began to replace the mansions on First Hill many of its established families – Backus included – uprooted to the Highlands.

 

The present owners of 4221 Linden Avenue used the above WPA tax photo from 1937 as a guide for restoration.   The restoration if below. (Courtesy Washington State Archive, Seattle Branch.  Tel # (425) 564-3942.)

A RIGHTEOUS RESTORATION

The story of what its owner, Heather McAuliffe describes as a “worker bee home” in Fremont has concluded its first century with a restoration so conscientious that we are inclined to call it an “architectural redemption.”

When the first owner, a plasterer named Alfred Bartlett, moved into 4221 Linden Avenue in 1904 it was a modest clapboard distinguished by decorative gables with brackets, ornamental fish-scale shingles, old-growth porch columns, double-hung windows with crowns.  When Heather and her husband Shawn purchased the home in 1998 it was sans everything – except the clapboards.  For a half century they hid beneath clumsy rows of oversized cedar shakes.  Most distressing, the original windows had been replaced by sliding aluminum ones.  Even before they moved in Heather McAuliffe announced, “Those windows have to go or I’m not living here.”  And now five years later gone they are, and the siding too.

Like many other King Country residents McAuliffe consulted a WPA tax photo of her home for a look at what had been destroyed or hidden since the late 1930s.  She took the additional step of religiously restoring it.

 

The House Upside Down stood on the east side of the midway called the Pay Streak that was the carnival street for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Expo. Held on the U.W. Campus.  It teetered about 700 feet north of Portage Bay on a South Campus site that is now part of the U.W.’s Magnuson Health Sciences Center. (Historical photo courtesy of Dan Kerlee.)

HOUSE UPSIDE DOWN

For this feature readers may wish to turn the magazine upside down for a conventional introduction to the eccentric subject of the House Upside Down.  Next return Pacific to its proper posture and note the gigantic piano on the far right.

The Pianotorium and the House Upside Down (HUD) are two of the thirty odd amusements erected along The South Pay Streak of the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exhibition (AYP) held on the University of Washington campus through the warmer months of 1909.  These two architectural grotesqueries were propped midway between what is now the Burke Gilman trail and Portage Bay in line with Stevens Way – if it ran this way through the south campus, which is does not.

Conforming to AYP expectations, the House Upside Down also had a scientific apology.  Henry Roltair, its manager, advertised HUD as featuring within it the “highest development of optical illusions and scientific information regarding optics.”  Outside Roltair’s “barker and ballyhoo” pitchmen promised a more extreme science for those who handed across their dimes.  Inside, they promised, were “labyrinthine circumvolutions of mazy wonders” and “mutliflexuous anfractuosities” that would “simply paralyze the imagination.”

This snapshot and these quotes all come from Dan Kerlee, the local AYP scholar-collector.  Kerlee discovered that by the time Roltair came to Seattle he and his HUD were old fair attractions.  In 1901 for the Pan American Expo at Buffalo, Roltair erected a HUD that aside from a few ornaments was the same as this one on the carnival midway of the AYP.

 

This Craftsman Bungalow on 62nd Ave. SW near Alki Point (was) one of the nine destinations included  in the 10th Annual Homes With History Tour, produced by the Southwest Seattle Historical Society. (Historical photo courtesy Washington State Archives. Contemporary photo by Brooke Best.)

HOMES WITH HISTORY

Some readers may remember the once popular “progressive dinners” in which, say, the eager and eligible members of a church’s youth league would pile into cars and drive from host to host consuming a new course at each stop.  This coming Saturday June the 5th from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm the Southwest Seattle Historical Society (SWSHS) will run its 10th annual Homes With History Tour.  (This is dated by more than five years.) Here, of course, it is not potato soup or marshmallow Jell-O that is gobbled but heritage, architecture and something that the cliché “life style” seems to keep covering.

There are nine stops in the Saturday tour and since the Southwest Seattle is far flung you will want to drive.  The historical society provides the list of sites, an open door to each and hosts that “interpret” the several landmarks and answer questions.

This Craftsman bungalow at 3253 62nd Ave. SW is one of the stops for the sufficient reasons that it is a fine example of one of the region’s most popular home styles and that the present owner is willing to share her delight in its typical and sturdy qualities. Built in 1907, this is an old bungalow.  The historical photo dates from 1937 when catalogers were beginning to gather names for the 1938 Polk City Directory, which lists Fred and Esther Wheeler living here.  Perhaps those are the Wheeler kids on the front steps.  Fred worked as a laborer for the city’s department of engineering.  Wages were low, living was often a pinch and the Wheelers were renters.

This year the tour stretches “domesticity” by including the Log House Museum, the newly renovated West Seattle Carnegie Library, the century old Homestead Restaurant (would that the home tour were also a progressive dinner!) and the Alki Point Light House.  Since 9/11 this last has been harder to visit so here is your chance to visit the light that is about four years younger than the bungalow.

These annual tours are also fund-raisers for the Southwest Seattle Historical Society but the modest fee is well spent.  Of course, you are encouraged to fill your car with family and/or friends that share your interest in community history and appreciate the open arms that will greet you at each place along the way.  You may wish to call (206) 938-5293 for details or contact the society.

 

The Ranke home at the southeast corner of Terry Avenue and Madison Street was once one of the great mansions of First Hill.  Built in 1890-91 it was razed in 1957 for an extension of the Columbus Hospital.  Presently the home and hospital site are owned by the Cabrini Sisters and are being prepared by the Low Income Housing Institute in two stages for a mix-use development that will feature for the most part low income housing.  This, of course, is by now a done good deed. (Historical view courtesy Lawton Gowey)

RANKE HOME

When new in 1891 Dora and Otto Ranke’s First Hill home was appropriately baronial for a family of six and one of the Seattle’s most prosperous pioneer contractors.   The mansion was lavishly appointed with carved hardwoods, painted tiles, stained glass, and deep Persian rugs.  On the first landing of the grand stairway was a conservatory of exotic plants including oversize palms that grew to envelope the place.

Also inside were the family’s famous traditions of performance and fun. The Rankes were married in Germany and immigrated together.  Dora was a dancer and Otto a tenor.  Together they supported and performed in the local productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas.  The couple also helped found the Seattle Juvenile Opera Company giving it rehearsal space in their home and instructions from an imported coach.

Perhaps the most surprising moment of Ranke family theatre was the informal one noted by Margaret Pitcairn Strachan in her 1944-45 Seattle Times series on Seattle Mansions.  After Dora confounded Otto by declining to accompany him to a masquerade ball at Yesler’s Hall, she sneaked down in a baby costume with baby mask, and baby bottle.  Dora danced with many men and sat on the laps of many more – including her husband’s although he did not know it was she – offering them a drink.  Near the end of the evening with the judging of the costumes, Otto, who was one of the judges, “was chagrined to find he had awarded a prize to his wife.”

Most of the Ranke’s playful life was centered in their home at Fifth and Pike.  Otto had little time to enjoy this their third Seattle home.  He died in 1892.  The family stayed on until1901 when the house was sold to Moritz Thomsen.  The last occupants were student nurses training at Columbus Hospital that much earlier had been converted from what was originally the Perry Apartments, the large structure seen directly behind the Ranke Mansion.

 

Whatever its name or primacy the Alki cabin in this photograph was razed in the fall of 1892.  The photograph is not dated.  Its site may have been lost as well – temporarily.  The contemporary photograph looks towards the corner of Alki Avenue and 63rd Avenue S.W., the original location of the Founder’s pylon that commemorates the builders of this log cabin. (The pylon has long since been moved across Alki Avenue.) Historical photo courtesy of Seattle Public Library.

LOW DOWN ON THE DENNY CABIN

Our punning headline plays with the uncertainty about this celebrated photograph.  Is this the Denny Cabin or the Low Cabin?   To add to the confusion, for reasons that still grieve John and Lydia Low’s descendants, the Low Cabin is most often called the Denny Cabin?

After scouting and then choosing Alki Point for a townsite John Low hired the teenager David Denny to build a cabin beside Alki beach while he returned to Portland to bring back his family and the rest of what later became known as “The Denny Party” and not the Low Party.  The foundation was laid on Sept 28, 1851 and when the immigrants (22 of them) arrived on the schooner Exact on Nov. 13th the cabin still had no roof.  Injured by his axe, a dismal David welcomed his older brother Arthur so, “I wish you hadn’t come.”

While building a second cabin – the Denny Cabin – the dampened settlers crammed into the Low Cabin.  So the Low Cabin was first cabin, but in practically every printing of this photograph the structure is described, in some variation n, as “The Denny Cabin, the settler’s first home on Alki.”  I think it is the Low Cabin.  Greg Lange, of the Washington State Archive, thinks it is the Denny Cabin – or the second cabin.

Both Greg and I are members of the growing “CABIN COMMITTEE”—hitched to the Southwest Seattle Historical Society.   (Since this is a committee without meetings you might like to join.)  Members agree to two collective goals.  The first is to investigate and share the early history of the Alki townsite and its architecture.  The second  is to identify where this cabin sat, and for this our standard is both liberal and circumspect.  We want to locate it to within “the length of a medium sized horse, from nose to extended tail.”  (The CABIN COMMITTEE failed to make its public report on Nov. 13, 2005, the centennial of the First Founders Day and the dedication of the Alki Beach landmark, the “Birthplace of Seattle” Pylon.  It – we – need more time.)

 

From 1894 to their deaths in 1928 Henry and Kate Holmes raised their family in the ornate Victorian mansion seen here in part at the center of the historical scene.  The residence in the foreground that survives in the “now” view was for many years the home of one of the Holmes daughters; Ruth Huntoon and her lawyer husband Richard. The historical photo is used courtesy of their grandson, also an attorney, Peter Buck.

THE HOLMES HOMES

In 1894 the retail-wholesale druggist Henry and his wife Kate Holmes followed the increasingly fashionable move to the ridge overlooking Lake Washington. Their grand home was three houses north of Jackson Street on 30th Avenue S and consequently conveniently close to the Yesler Way Cable Railway.  When the Holmes moved in the Leschi neighborhood was already clear-cut and the view east unimpeded.  Now the lofty greenbelt of Frink Park partially obscures it.

From whomever the couple bought the well detailed and mansion-sized Victorian – (the tower rises here at the center of the scene) they may have got it at a good price from an owner injured by the nation-wide financial crash of the year before.  And the purchase may have also been speculative for it was expected by many of their neighbors that one day the ridge would be lined with hotels and apartments.

But the Holmes stayed put and raised a family of fours daughters and a son.  As each grew to maturity they stayed on the block building homes beside their parents and creating thereby a kind of Holmes family compound.  The larger modern bungalow in the foreground was built in 1910 (if you believe the tax records) for Ruth Holmes Huntoon and her lawyer husband Richard W. Huntoon, and they lived there for many decades.  After the druggist and his wife both died in 1928 none of their children wanted to live in the ornate mansion of high ceilings and winter drafts. So it was razed in 1929.

A stand alone showing of the old Holmes home is featured on page 116 of “Leschi Snaps”, the third of Wade Vaughn’s books on the neighborhood.  Of the three, this photo essay is the best evocation of Vaughn’s sensitive eye for his surrounds and like the first two it can only be purchased at the Leschi Food Mart.  The proceeds all go to the Leschi Public Grade School Children’s Choir.

 

While the historical photograph is neither dated nor are it posers named, the home is identified as the last of the Bell residents in Belltown.  A likely date is the mid-1880s.  Like the Parking lot that replaced it, the Bell home faced First Avenue between Bell and Battery Streets and so in the heart of Belltown. Historical pix courtesy Museum of History and Industry.

BELLTOWN HOME

This is the last of the Bell family homes in Belltown.  It faced First Avenue from its east side about mid-block between Bell and Battery Streets.  Counting a temporary home near Pioneer Square this is the fourth Bell home.  The family moved both around and away.

During the Indian war of 1855-56 the Bells sensibly fled their first finished home to Seattle for protection.  That home overlooked Elliott Bay from the low bluff that was nearly two blocks west of this home on First.  It was torched during the “Battle of Seattle’ and the fire could be seen from the navy gunboat Decatur that protected the village.  After the battle the Bells left for California.  Later William returned with his son and several daughters to develop their 320 acres into Belltown. His wife had died in California.

It seems that William Bell moved into this his last home in 1875 with his third wife Lucy, who was the sister of his first wife. William died in the fall of 1887 although he’d been an invalid for six years previous. So if those are Bells posing that is most likely William’s only son Austin posing with his wife Eva and three sisters.

Austin was gregarious, well liked and loved and to quote Edward Arlington Robinson’s famous poem, he was also “imperially slim . . .a gentleman from sole to crown . . . always human when he talked . . . he was rich . . .he was everything.”  But also like Richard Cory he “put a bullet through his head.”  The son thought he recognized his father’s dementia in himself and explained to his wife with a shaky note that life with such poor health was not worth living.

Austin shot himself in the right temple on April 24, 1889. The day before he was out with a nephew cheerfully describing the brick business block he was planning near the family home.  The structure was built by his widow and named by her the Austin A. Bell building.  The ornate front façade was landmarked and it survives facing First Avenue.

 

The Hainsworth home in West Seattle on 46th Avenue SW north of Massachusetts Street is certainly one of the oldest residents in Seattle.  Although it has been added onto over the years the home is still distinguished and very fit.  Richard and Holly Grambihler, the present owners, are pleased to point out how the strange variation in the number of panes in the two front second floor bedroom windows survives.  On the left the pattern is four up and four wide.  On the right it is four up and three wide. Such are the pleasures of preservation. Historical photo courtesy Southwest Seattle Historical Society and Log House Museum.

THE WEST SEATTLE PLATEAU

This week and next we’ll feature two William Hainsworth homes.  Here is William Henry Hainsworth II Victorian mans on 46th Avenue Northwest overlooking Puget Sound and the Olympics.  Next it will be “William the Third’s” home on S.W. Olga Street overlooking Elliott Bay and Seattle.   Both distinguished residences survive up on the West Seattle plateau although their neighborhoods are separated by one of the most enchanted and yet hidden natural features of Seattle, the deep and long Fairmount Ravine.

William and Mary Hainsworth, their daughter Betsy and two sons Will III and John moved to the West Seattle plateau in 1889 when, according to the recollection of Will III’s brother in law Arthur Stretch, it was still “covered with second-growth timber and brush.”   Both the Stretch and Hainsworth families lived on what the West Seattle Land and Improvement Company named Columbia Street — Arthur Stretch’s father Richard was the engineer who laid it out.   The name was changed to 46th when West Seattle was annexed into Seattle in 1907.  The fathers of both families – William II and Richard – were English immigrants and by Arthur’s accounting their’s were the first two families to settle there.  They and their families were very close with Will III marrying Arthur’s sister Florence.

The 57-year-old Will II moved to West Seattle directly from Pittsburg where he had considerable success building a steel foundry when still in his late thirties.  Family tradition, at least, has Andrew Carnegie advising him to stay in Pennsylvania but Hainsworth declined and opened a new foundry in Ballard.  It might have taken a while then to get between Ballard and West Seattle but not forever.  The San Francisco based developers that promoted the West Seattle plateau outfitted it with cable cars and an 8-minute ferry ride to Seattle.

This may not be the earliest photograph of the Hainsworth home. Another appears in Chapter Three of the West Side Story (page 28) where there is much more about the two families and the early years of life on the plateau.

Apparently when the Hainsworth home on Olga Street was built in 1907 the streets were still only lines on the plat map.  The contemporary view looks southwest along 37th Avenue SW.  It was taken a stones throw (to the rear) from the Belvedere Viewpoint on SW Admiral Way. Historical View Courtesy of West Seattle’s Log House Museum.

ENGLISH MANOR on OLGA

Last week we featured an early view of William Hainsworth Senior’s West Seattle home on 46th Avenue S.W.  Built in 1889 it was one of the first two residences on the West Seattle plateau and it survives.  True to our promise then here is the English Manor Manse of William Jr and Florence Hainsworth.

Florence’s maiden name was Stretch, and with the Hainsworths the Stretches was the other of the first two families.  They also lived on 46th.  When the couple’s grand home was built in 1907 at the southwest corner of SW Olga Street and 37th Ave. SW it was still a different neighborhood from that of the older homes on 46th overlooking Alki Beach.  The new mansion was sited so that it could look directly over Elliott Bay to the Seattle waterfront.

In visiting the old homes from the new the couple could not at first easily follow the crow for although there were probably plenty of crows in the deep Fairmount Ravine there was no substantial bridge over it.  The Hainsworths were leaders in getting the bridge built.

When Florence’s brother Arthur returned from the Yukon Gold Rush in 1899 he and his brother-in-law William Jr. opened the Coney Island Baths, one of the first on Alki Beach.  While Arthur had been digging in Alaska William had been playing it careful with real estate in West Seattle and obviously doing very well at it.

Arthur recalls their pleasant times together in the Hainsworth mansion. “Will and my sister were great ones for entertaining and my wife and I spent many happy times with them.  They would have community sings, dances and card parties and their tennis court and croquet field were popular.  Every year they held a fourth of July celebration for the whole community with games, picnic supper, and fireworks in the evening … It seems to me that Will Hainsworth always was involved in some civic project for the improvement of the district and he assumed that I would work with him.”

 

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

COSTUME PARTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

STAR-CROSSED ON SPRING STREET

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The LATIMERS of FIRST HILL

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

The scene was almost certainly recorded in 1907 because a slightly wider version of the same photograph shows construction scaffolding still attached to the north side of St. James Cathedral’s south tower, far right.  The Cathedral is the most obvious survivor.  By the time of the church’s dedication on Dec. 22, 1907 the scaffolding was removed.  The second artifact is the stonewall that once restrained the Latimer lawn and now separates the Blood Bank parking lot from the sidewalks that meet at the southwest corner of Terry and Columbia.

In the “now” Margaret Latimer Callahan stands about two feet into Terry Street and near where her banker father Norval sits behind the wheel in the family Locomobile.   Born on July 22, 1906, Margaret is the youngest of Norval and Margaret Latimer’s children.

For a while, Margaret, it was thought, might be a third visible link between the then and now — although certainly no artifact.  The evidentiary question is this.  Who is sitting on papa Norval’s lap?  Is it his only daughter or his youngest son Vernon?  After polling about – yes – 100 discerning friends and Latimer descendents the great consensus is that this is Vernon under the white bonnet.   And Margaret agrees.  “I was probably inside with a nurse while three of my brothers posed with my parents.”

Margaret also notes that her father is truly a poser behind the wheel, for he was never a driver.   Sitting next to him is Gus the family’s chauffeur with whom he has traded seats for the moment.*

The clever reader has already concluded that Margaret Latimer Callahan will be celebrating her centennial in a few days.   Happy 100th Margaret.

*The Locomobile used the English configuration for the driver’s position (to the right) until about 1912.  Gus (I think his name was Gus.) the normal driver or (that French word) Chauffeur is closest to the camera.  He is a big guy with either a lantern jaw or a weak jaw as I remember.  On the other side of Gus is Norval.  He is all suited up with gloves and riding gear and behind the wheel with his child on his lap.  Yes this is Norval and so father is further from the camera than is the big-guy-gus-that-is-not-behind-the-wheel but would normally be because Norval was not a driver and he is only posing like one here.

 

The Furth family followed the procession of the Seattle’s movers and shakers to First Hill in the late 1880s and built this mansion at the northeast corner of 9th Avenue and Terrace Street.  By the early 1900s they had move again, a few blocks to Summit Avenue, and for a few years thereafter their first mansion was home for the Seattle Boys Club.  With the building of Harborview Hospital in 1930 Terrace at Ninth was vacated and bricked over as part of the hospital campus.   Historical View courtesy Museum of History and Industry.

CITIZEN FURTH

When the Furths moved to Seattle in 1882 their new hometown was enjoying its first buoyant year as the largest community in Washington Territory.  (It stepped ahead of Walla Walla in 1881.)  In the next 30 years Seattle would roar, its population expanding from about five thousand to nearly 240 thousand, and much of this prosperous noise was Furth’s contribution, the ringing of his wealth and the rattle of his trolleys.

Born in Bohemia in 1840 – the eighth of twelve children – at the age of 16 Jacob immigrated to San Francisco, and managed during his quarter-century in California to express his turns as both a brilliant manager and caring citizen.  In 1865 Jacob married Lucy Dunton, a Californian, and with her had three daughters.   Once in Seattle with the help of San Francisco friends he founded the Puget Sound National Bank, and was in the beginning its only employee.  After Furth built this substantial family home on First Hill he continued to list himself as the “cashier” for the bank.  But he was effectively the bank’s president long before he was named such in 1893.

After the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 Furth is quoted as cautioning his own board of directors to restrain their urge to take advantage of the ruined by calling in their loans.  “Gentleman . . . what you propose may be good banking, but it is not human.”

When the 74-year-old capitalist died in 1914 he was probably Seattle’s most influential citizen, president of its big bank, its private power and streetcar company, a large iron works – fittingly named Vulcan – and much else.  But it was his thoughtful kindnesses that were memorialized.  His First Hill neighbor Thomas Burke noted how Jacob Furth’s “faculty for placing himself in another’s situation gave him insight . . . [and] he always found time to express understanding of and sympathy for the motives of even those who were against him.”

(Jacob Furth would have surely have had his life story told in detail had Seattle historian Bill Speidel managed to live a year to two more than his seventy-six.  With his death in 1988 the creator of the Seattle Underground Tours was not able to complete the biography of Furth he was then preparing.)

 

Then photograph. Built in 1890 the above Victorian vestige on Eastlake Avenue survived until 1961.  (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.) Completed in 2001 this home, below, to the Howard S. Wright Construction Co., the UW Physicians, and the Pro Sports Club is the third structure to hold the northwest corner of Eastlake Avenue and Republican Street.

VICTORIAN VESTIGE

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

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

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

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

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

[ See BREWER HOUSE ADDENDUM for a rear view of this corner home dating from about 1950, in the latter-day years of it dilapidation.]

 

A half century ago – nearly – the Wallingford residence, above, at the southeast corner of 44th Street and Meridian Avenue was smothered in asbestos siding and shorn of much of its original charm. Since its imaginative restoration in the 1990s the home is a Wallingford Landmark.  Historical photo courtesy Washington State Archives, Bellevue Community College branch.

A WALLINGFORD PLANATION

Chris and Mary Troth moved into their “classic Seattle box” at the southeast corner of 44th Street and Meridian Avenue (in Wallingford) as renters in 1993.  In less than a year they persuaded their absentee landlord to sell it to them, and since the couple first met in architecture school at the University Oregon their new home was perhaps inevitably in store for more than a fixing-up.

The first sensitive “issue” was the concrete asbestos shingles that were sold sometime after WW2 to a former owner by some persuasive siding salesman.   They appear in the 1957 tax photo printer here.  An earlier tax photo from 1937 – not printed here – shows the home with its original clapboards.   That depression era photo was a guide for the couple’s restoration, and like many homeowners the Troth’s found that most of that old wood siding that the ’37 photo showed was still intact when the asbestos was removed by masked men in white uniforms.

The “plantation effect” followed the couple’s decision to add a second open floor while restoring the original front porch.  In 1917 when the 1908 residence was first converted into a multifamily dwelling, the steep and exposed stairway to the second floor, showing in the 1957 photograph but not the “now”, was attached to the building’s south façade.   The landlord Troth’s desire to reach their second (and third) floor apartment out of the rain drew them into the labyrinthine variance process required to get permission to build their inspiring two story portico.

Fortunately for the couple and Wallingford they won, and to the perhaps uniform delight of their neighbors their corner home more than hints of New Orleans.  Their box is now a Wallingford landmark – the neighborhood’s plantation.  The colors are white, a golden-orange named “Jubilation” by its manufacturer, and a dark red, which Mary Troth explains acts like the home’s “eye-liner.”

 

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

[An attentive reader named Joshua has pointed out that one cannot ordinarily see the Space Needle when looking northeast across Republican between Dexter and 8th.   I chose the wrong picture, and will next attach the correct subject below the wrong one for which you might like to find a proper home.]

A DRY REPUBLICAN HOME

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

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

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

(click to enlarge photos)

Motorman D.E. Stiles, Conductor P.J. Donnelly, and about 20 passengers were outbound on a Madison Street trolley on the Friday afternoon of Jan 9, 1920, when it jumped its slippery tracks while “dropping” about 40 feet through the steep block between 18th and 19th Avenues.   Feeling the car leap forward, Stiles told the police that he applied the breaks but to no effect.  Standing at the back platform conductor Donnelly would up with a sprained back.  He speculated that he had been thrown against the metal railing there, but added that “I simply can’t remember anything about it.”

After the streetcar sailed across Madison it jumped the curb and smashed into the front door of Youngs Grocery at the street’s northeast corner with 19th Avenue. Residents of the several apartments above the grocery were described in the next day’s Seattle Times as “severely shaken by the impact.”  (It is not a “reach” to imagine that some of them have here joined the small crowd in the street to inspect the damage.) As a precaution, passenger Minnie Aldrich, collapsed in shock from the excitement, was taken to the hospital but like Conductor Donnelly she was soon released and taken home, although not by trolley.  After being counter-punched in a few places by Young’s Grocery, the abused streetcar was again put to its tracks and drove home to the car barn under its own power.

In spite of its potential for mayhem, the municipal trolley wreck of Jan. 9, 1920 was a mere incident, unlike the tragic derailment on the Green Lake line five days earlier when seventy passengers were injured and one killed.   Naturally, the wreck on Madison was felt citywide as a foreboding aftershock to the Green Lake accident.   It was also more evidence that the streetcar system that the city had recently purchased from its private builder at an imprudent price was even more dilapidated than thought.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yeseree Jean.  As you know the above subject came to us from the blog’s own Ron Edge.  First we’ll put up some more photographs and related clippings that come from Ron and have to do with this incident on Madison Street and another that was considerably more tragic on the Green Lake Line.   After that we will return to Madison Street and, for the most part, share more trolley related features from the past.  A few will stray afield to other routes.

The Seattle Times report on the Madison Street crash.  (Click to enlarge, for it is very readable.)

That day Webster and Stevens also covered – or illustrated – a reported safe busting, which like the trolley wreck appears in the afternoon paper.

 

DERAILED AT TWELFTH & MADISON, 1900

At 2:15 P.M., Sunday, May 13, 1900, a photographer named Franks photographed this derailed cable car on Madison Street at 12th Avenue. Sundays were the cable line’s busiest days, carrying working men and women and their families to Madison Park on weekend retreats. In midsummer cars would come along about every two minutes. The crowd here is a collection of stalled passengers and curious neighbors.

Given the number of westbound cable cars stacked up behind the derailment, it is likely that many other passengers got tired of waiting and decided to simply hoof it home. Since the trip to the end of the line at Elliott Bay was only a little over a mile, many of these passengers were almost home.    Ww

The first cable car to run the nearly 20,000 feet between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington did it in December 1890. Two cables, like two arms, extended east and west from the powerhouse midway on the line at 22nd and Madison. To make the switch from cable to cable, the cars simply coasted the few feet between them. Their average speed was about 11 miles an hour, so the three-mile-plus trip from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington took less than 20 minutes. Given the pebbles, debris or, here the seasonal mud dirtying the rails, cars jumping their tracks were exceptions but not extraordinary.

THE POWERHOUSE

The competition for early transit franchises in Seattle was fought between two technologies: cable and electric. Although underground cables did not clutter the cityscape with overhead wires, the cables were harder to bend, so the best cable lines ran in a straight line or nearly so, like the Madison Street Cable Railway.

Nearly 40,000 feet of cable pulled the line’s stock 3&1/2 miles between its western roundtable on the waterfront and its eastern terminus at Madison Park. Aside from the 14-percent turn at the powerhouse this arrangement amounted to two straight and unconnected lines: the town section and the lake section. The former moved at 10 mph, while the latter went through the woods to Lake Washington at 12 mph. When a cable car reached the powerhouse at 22nd Avenue, the grip was released and the car coasted the few feet through the gap to the second line, where the gripman again took hold and the car jerked slightly forward.

The powerhouse was the cable company’s best chance for building a showpiece headquarters. Here Victorian ornaments are playfully ordered across a mounting false front. This symmetrical facade includes fan windows that admit some light onto the dominant artifice hidden within – the giant wheels that turned the cables under the strain of two 250-horsepower steam engines.

In 1911 a new powerhouse outfitted with electric motors was built one block west of Broadway. While the original powerhouse is long gone, the second survives, converted for the classrooms and studios of Seattle University’s Department of Art. The lake section of the line was eventually abandoned in favor of electricity. But both cable and electric railways were ultimately trampled together under rubber. In the spring of 1940 the cable below Madison Street quit pulling its cars up First Hill from the waterfront. Buses followed.

MUYBRIDGE IN SEATTLE

While revealing in its several parts this early 1890s look east up Madison Street from the trolley line’s terminal turntable is also a puzzle.  A friend found this image in the Kingston Museum at Kingston on the Thames, England.  It is attributed to Kingston’s most famous son, Eadweard Muybridge.   The photographer-inventor returned to his hometown in 1895 after more than forty years of mostly taking photographs in the American West and performing some of the earliest experiments in motions pictures.

The puzzle is this.  As far as I have been able to determine none of Muybridge’s biographers have ever put him in Seattle.  The famous photographer was on Puget Sound in 1871 taking photographs for the U.S. Lighthouse service but that is at least 20 years before this lanternslide was recorded.

The best chance for having Muybridge here in time to take this photograph would be in the spring of 1893 when he left the West Coast for the last time.  He was heading to Chicago to show his rudimentary “animal locomotion” pictures in his own “Zoopraxographical Hall” at the 1893 World Columbia Expedition in.  But the Expo opened in May and this presents another problem for this scene includes a street broadside advertising an event for July 18.  Perhaps the Englishman was late in getting to Chicago.

Another curiosity of this image is this; it is the only identified Seattle scene of any sort included with the Muybridge bequest of his life’s work to his hometown museum.  The caption  “Washington, Seattle, Madison Street Terraces” does have a Muybridge fit.  San Francisco was the photographer’s west coast home base, so the Madison street cable line would have interested him, especially this part of it climbing to First Hill.  Locals claimed that this was the second steepest incline in the trolley industry.  Of course, the steepest trolley ride of all was in San Francisco.

The Madison Street Cable Railway began sending cars to Madison Park on the west shore of Lake Washington in 1890 from its turntable directly west of Western Avenue.  Although the Madison railway was always a paying line it was closed down in 1940.  Both views look east on Madison Street and across Western Avenue.   (Muybridge photo courtesy Kingston Museum, Kingston on the Thames. The Haynes photo, directly below, courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library.)

The McGILVRA FIEFDOM

Judge John J. McGilvra, the pioneer who laid out the line of Madison Street, wanted to get to his homestead on Lake Washington the quickest way possible. So after climbing First Hill and crossing Broadway, Madison Street continues on its own way cutting through the city grid.

As it turned out, McGilvra’s short-cut also negotiated the city’s ups and downs in an oblique and easier manner. Beginning in 1890, these gradual grades helped considerably in the construction of a cable railway the entire length of Madison from salt water to fresh. In the early 1890s passengers enroute to the excitements of McGilvra’s many lakefront attractions, after first passing through still largely forested acres, dropped into the scene recorded here: grounds cleared for the playful enterprises of leisure.

The Madison Park Pavilion, left of center, and the ball park, far left, were the cable company’s two largest enclosed venues. But the beach itself was an equal attraction with floating bandstands and stages for musicals, farces and melodramas in which the villains might end up in the lake. McGilvra’s fiefdom – he would only lease lots, not sell them – and the railway’s end-of-the-line attractions also featured dance floors, bath houses, canoe rentals, restaurants, promenades, a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and a dock from which the “Mosquito Fleet” steamed to all habitable points on Lake Washington.

MADISON INCLINE

The city’s announcement in the summer of 1938 that Seattle’s three cable railways (on Yesler, James and Madison Streets) would be abandoned inspired considerable citizen resistance.  Led by attorney Ben A. Maslan the protestors organized the Seattle Downtown Association.  They managed, however, only to postpone the end.  The city’s entire cable service was retired in 1940 and so was the fleet.  After 51 years of clutching the cables beneath Madison Street car number 42 was scrapped.

The above view of the climbing cable car looks west on Madison from mid-block between 4th and 5th Avenues.  The old Carnegie Library (1906-1957) is on the right.  It seems a rail fan named Whinihan (the name is printed on the back of the original print) took the photograph as a tribute to the doomed cable car and line.  The second historical view looks west from Fifth Ave.   (Both come by way of Lawton Gowey.)

Arthur Denny, the city’s founder-surveyor, named Madison Street in 1853 for James Madison, but he did it for poetics (and fraternity) more than politics.  In deciding to name his streets as a sequence of alliterative pairs (Jefferson & James, Cherry & Columbia and so on) Denny needed another M-moniker to partner with the street he named for his brother Marion.  The fourth president was an obvious choice.

Lincoln-appointed federal attorney John McGilvra improved the three plus miles of Madison Street between the central waterfront and Lake Washington in order to reach his home beside the lake.  Madison Street (more than Yesler) then became the principle first leg to the hinterlands both across the lake and to the northern destinations like Bothell and even Laurelhurst.  The lake’s first steamers picked up and delivered their passengers at McGilvra’s dock.

Although faded the allure of Seattle’s old cable lines has not vanished and serious proposals to reintroduce them are periodically put forward. If the cable cars were to return to Madison they would serve a street in which nothing of the old street has survived west of Sixth Avenue since this they last ran there in 1940.

THE MYSTERIOUS MADISON STREET TRESTLE

Many years ago a friend of a friend asked if I had a photograph of the Madison Street trestle that once crossed the Madison valley roughly between Empire Way and the Lake Washington Blvd. I neither had the photo nor any inkling of the trestle. Silently – and foolishly – I concluded that his youthful memory of the big bridge was a childish exaggeration. Yet here it is, long and wide, and if we could walk into this scene and look over the railings (that ripple from settling) we would see that it was quite high as well.

The photograph is not dated. The Madison Park Apartments, on the right, were built in 1914, and this scene may have been recorded when they were nearly new. This is one of four photographs that trolley expert Lawton Gowey shared with me not long after I was asked about and mystified by the trestle. All four photos look east in line with the bridge and roughly from the same location, a few yards east of 29th Avenue. In one of the three not printed here the railing is gone, the power poles on the left no longer peek up from below but have been reset much higher in fresh fill along the north side of the bridge.

In his history of Washington Park, Don Sherwood, the now deceased Park Department historian, writes that in 1905 the trestle replaced the rough corduroy road that once crossed the valley and the stream that ran through it. Sherwood also estimated that the “the trestle was replaced with a fill about 1915.” The encyclopedic Ernie Dornfeld, Information Manager for the city, suggests a sensible alternative: the fill was a long project.

When driving on Madison east of 29th we are probably still crossing the trestle – or over most of it. Once the long effort of filling between and to the sides of the bridge timbers reached the roadway the deck could be removed and the fill packed and paved. Since the cable cars on Madison could not be stopped for long this final alteration – and it only – must have been done quickly.

The Madison Park Apartments on the right were built originally at the western end of the Madison Street trestle that crossed the Madison Valley east of 29th Avenue. (Historical photo courtesy of Lawton Gowey)

THE BRIDGE & The BRICKS

One of the helpful traits of many an official photograph is that it may, like this one, have a caption inscribed directly on the negative.  Although not printed here, the description for this scene begins with its number, 394, and continues, “Brick Culls 30 Ave. (N. of Madison St.)  2-28-12.”

My first reading of this caption was immediately accompanied by one of those “eureka” experiences that are the liquor of research — I swooned.  There on the horizon was my first unobstructed full sighting of the Madison Street trestle.  It was built originally to take the cable car across Madison Valley and the stream that once meandered north through it to Union Bay.  However, the ‘brick culls” in the scene (and in its caption) remained such a puzzle that I kept the picture back waiting for another revelation.  Obviously, I have stopped waiting but these bricks remain a puzzle.  I hope some reader will come forward with instructions – or even speculations.

One munificent source on Washington Park history is Don Sherwood.  Don and my research paths often crossed decades ago when he was the Parks Department employee let loose to follow his bliss by preparing handwritten histories of every park in Seattle.  Typed transcriptions of these histories (with facsimile reproductions of Sherwood’s accurately sketched maps) can now be visited on the net at www.cityofseattle.net/parks/history/sherwood.htm.

You are encouraged to visit the site and read Sherwood’s detailed history of Washington Park.  You will learn about the filling and grading of the ravine to this side of Madison Street for the creation of the athletic field evident in the “now” photograph.   You will also learn much else including the location of the 350,000 cobblestones taken from Madison Street and buried in the park.  However, you will discover nothing about bricks.

MADISON PARK PAVILION

Like Leschi Park Madison Park was developed as an attraction at the end of a cable railway line.  Both featured exotic landscapes, waterside promenades, gazebos, greenhouses, refreshment stands, garden-lined paths, bandstands, and boat rentals, even lodging.  Leschi’s early novelty was its zoo.  Madison Park’s was the baseball diamond.  (The roof of the bleachers can be seen on the far left of the historical scene.)

Both parks featured monumental-sized pavilions with towers on top and great ballrooms within. The theatre-sized room in this landmark could also seat 1400 for melodramas, minstrel shows, musicals, farce, vaudeville and legitimate theatre.   For many years members of the ever-dwindling mass of the Pioneer Association chose the Madison Park Pavilion for their annual meetings and posed for group portraits on the front steps.

Here the grand eastern face of the pavilion looks out at Lake Washington.  The pleasurable variety of its lines with gables, towers, porticos and the symmetrically placed and exposed stairways to its high central tower surely got the attention of those approaching it from the Lake.  (For many years beginning about 1880 Madison Park was the busiest port on Lake Washington.)

However, most visitors came from the city and the real crush was on the weekends for ballgames, dances, band concerts (most often with Dad Wagner’s Band), theatre, and moonlit serenading on the lake — ideally with a mandolin and receptive ingénue looking for pointers on how to navigate a rented canoe.

The Pavilion stood for a quarter century until destroyed by fire on March 25, 1914.

TWIN T-P’s 70th

[The feature that follows were first published in 2007 and made note then of its 70th birthday.  We did not know then that it was also the last cake that this survivor would eat.   While the story strays from the general subject of trolleys it does depend on transportation and like the Madison Park Pavilion, just above, has towers.  But then the Twin T-P’s were nearly all towers – two of them. ]

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

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

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

ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION

Across NW 54th Street from the long parking lot at Ballard’s Chittenden Locks sits one of Seattle’s roadside attractions, the Totem House.  Built in 1939 to sell souvenirs the sturdy cedar structure was called by its owner-builders the Haida House Curio Shop.  Like Ivar’s Salmon House thirty years later, although much smaller, its shape and parts – the vertical poles, planks, and artifacts – were arranged in admiring imitation of North Coast Indian architecture.  Here the flap in the roof opening is up and open, a sensitive tribute to the aboriginal model. (Venting a central fire pit was necessary for a Haida longhouse, but probably not so for the Haida Curio Shop.)

The building permit for 3058 NW 54th Street reveals that the plans were submitted on March 31, 1939 and the final inspection followed only four months later, on the last day of July.  This speedy construction allowed the owners to lure lock’s visitors still in the quick of the ’39 tourist season.

While the building permit describes the building’s owner James L. Houston as also its designer, the artist-entrepreneur’s children are quite certain that Houston’s father-in-law, the jeweler Del Thomas, was behind this enterprise.  And it was also Thomas who took this photograph of the landmark shop soon after it was completed and before the necessary signs were added.

For its quick construction and the carving of its centerpiece, the totem pole at the front door, Huston family history for their curio shop has it that James Houston worked side-by-side with a native carver-builder named Jimmie John.  An art student at both Cornish and the U of W, the blue-eyed Irishman Houston, born in 1908, was a talented watercolorist and jeweler who had a long life in the production of carvings done with the materials and refined styles of North Coast tribes.

THE LOST CREEK AND RAVINE

Most likely this photograph from the Asahel Curtis studio was recorded late in 1909.   The number on the original negative falls near the end of the roughly 4556 studio numbers allotted that year.  For Curtis it was a record year for picture taking, probably because the summer-long Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was held in 1909 on a picturesque University of Washington campus made photogenic for it.

Every part of the greater University District was retouched for AYP including Cowen Park although obviously the hard surface paving on University Way did not make it as far north as the entrance to the park here at Ravenna Boulevard.   That Cowen Park was named for Charles Cowen, the wealthy English immigrant who gave it to the city in 1906, was part of the deal. Cowen also paid for both the rustic entrance shown here and when it wore out for the two stone columns and wing-wall seats that replaced it in the early 1920s.

The stone gate survives, and on it is written “Man Shall Not Live By Bread Alone.”  Looking here beyond the woman standing with the child and through the original rustic gate it is clear that neither shall man leave the land alone. On the north side of the gate the park land drops away into a ravine.   Since the early 1960s it has been a more-or-less level playfield made from one hundred thousand yards of “free fill” scooped away during the creation nearby of the 1-5 Freeway.  At the time, to quote from Don Sherwood’s hand-written history of Seattle parks, “Many residents and the Mountaineers Club were appalled.”

In 1909 the creek from Green Lake still splashed down the enchanting canyon through Cowen and Ravenna parks.  Had the Seattle Park Department followed the Olmsted Plan for Green Lake the creek would have been saved, for the lake would have been lowered only four feet.   Instead it was dropped seven feet and the primary source of the creek was turned off.   Green Lake Park’s gain was thereby Cowen and Ravenna Parks’ loss.  Also taken from the community was a meandering Ravenna Boulevard for before reaching the ravine the primeval creek wandered through what is now the wide and straightened path of the boulevard.

Jumping forward to the freeway fill in 1971, that August the Second Annual Frisbee for Peace Intergalactic Memorial Thermogleep U.F.O. Frisbee Festival was held on the settled playfield.  However, a proposal from the University District Center – the event sponsors — to make it an official Seafair event was rejected.

BUSES TO DIFFICULT DESTINATIONS

The official A.Curtis number (38871) for this image indicates that it was probably photographed late in 1919, or two years before Cornish moved from the Booth Building here at the southeast corner of Broadway Avenue and Pine Street north a few blocks on Capitol Hill to another Spanish-styled structure, the school’s then new home at Roy Street and Harvard Avenue.

When the city took public control of all the streetcars in the spring of 1919 they purchased a dangerously dilapidated system at a price so dear it precluded most improvements.  The few exceptions included these buses that were purchased to reach parts of the city that the old private trolley system did not service. These buses are signed for Magnolia where most of the developing additions were not reached by the street railway line that ran only to the front gate of Fort Lawton.

Thomas White began making sewing machines in Massachusettes in 1859.  He was still around in 1901 when his company made its first steam-powered automobile in Cleveland. Gas powered trucks were added in 1910; buses followed.  Vancouver B.C. also purchased WMC buses to service the Grandview area to the east of that city.  The best-known and longest-lived White buses were the red ones used for narrated tours at Glacier National Park.  They were a park fixture (moving ones) until retired with “metal fatigue” in 1999 after 64 years of continuous service.

WAITING FOR THE INTERURBAN

This1923 tableau of municipal workers refurbishing a portion of the “grand union” of trolley tracks at 34th Street and Fremont Avenue allows us to reflect on the histories of both transportation and art in Fremont, the playful neighborhood that signs itself “The Center of the Universe.”

First the transportation.  When a sawmill was built at the outflow of Lake Union in 1888 it was already possible to conveniently get to the new mill town from downtown Seattle aboard the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, which was laid along the north shore of the lake in 1887.  After a trolley above a Westlake trestle was added in 1890 the bridge at Fremont increasingly became the way to get north to the suburbs and remained so until the Aurora Bridge was opened in 1932.

Next the art.  According to Roger Wheeler, Fremont artist and historian, public art as a Fremont fixation began with the formation in the late 1970s of the Fremont Arts Council.  Appropriately its first installation has a transportation theme with some built-in Fremont fun.  The figures in sculptor Rich Beyer’s popular Waiting for the Interurban, will have to wait into eternity for they are pointed the wrong way – north.  The interurban to Everett never turned east on 34th Street and so would have missed them.

The GRAND UNION

Barely hidden below the intersection of 34th St. and Fremont Avenue  – at the north end of the Fremont Bridge – rests an iron cross of intersecting rails appropriately called the Grand Union.  We see here the most western part of this steel matrix on June 29, 1923 at 6:30 in the morning.  This is number ten in a series of thirty photographs that record the steps of replacing the plank paving framing the rails with bricks.

The artful work of laying the original Grand Union was guided by plans drawn in 1916 by Seattle Electric Company.  It was timed of necessity with the building of Fremont’s bascule bridge that opened in 1917. Although this Fremont route was the major trolley feed to the north end the elaborate rail crossing at 34th would not have been needed except that it was also the way for trolleys to reach the Fremont Car Barn a few blocks west.  (In 1905 when the barn was completed, 34th St. was still called Ewing Street.)

The last photograph – number thirty – of this repaving dates from the third of March the following year.  Titled “Completed Layout” it looks west on 34th St. from the east side of the intersection and reveals a very spiffy Grand Union indeed.  It was then as much a piece of public art as a public work.   And as noted above this landmark survives below the veneer of blacktop that was first applied during the Second World War after locals complained about the slipper bricks on Fremont Avenue.   One day, perhaps, the Grand Union will be revealed again, but beneath a transparent street surface – one that is not slippery – that we can now but imagine.

MADRONA HUB

This is the hub of the Madrona Neighborhood, the intersection of Division and Carroll looking south on Carroll — if I have counted the blocks correctly in the1893 street name index by my desk.  If I have not bumbled then Division is now Union Street and Carroll is 34th Avenue.  With city ordinances in 1895 and 1901 many of the historical street names were discarded for the efficiency of numbers and so also their benumbing.  The name Carroll Street at least promises a good story.  Thirty-fourth merely follows 33rd and comes before 35th.  What can you do with that except find it?

The original names were probably given by George and Emma Randell who developed this Madrona Ridge in 1890 and built their home one block west at Drexel Avenue, or 35th now – I think.  They did well, especially after the Union Trunk Line trolley to Madrona Park reached this intersection by 1893.  The park first and then the neighborhood soon after got its name from the trees (arbutus) that were also residents.  Thereon the Randall barn became Randall School and stayed so until 1904 when one of the typical frame box schools designed by school architect James Stephen opened at 33rd Avenue (AKA Alvan) and Union and was also named Madrona.

If the tax records can be believed the frame structure that survives on the right of both views was constructed in 1907 and so is about to fulfill its own century.  The historical photo dates from ca. 1940 when the trolleys, like this car No. 376 on the No.11 Cherry Street Line, were traded for busses and, here also, trackless trolleys.  The 1938 Polk Directory (also by my desk) lists the same businesses that show in the photograph – the pharmacy on the corner, followed by a barber, a shoe renewer, a luncheonette and a fish market – all of them named Madrona, except the café.  Vernon and Anna Herrett who run the luncheonette, live upstairs, and Walter Cort, the cobbler, lives behind his store on 33rd..

Perhaps some reader will write and share the Carroll or Drexel or Alvan Stories.  One likely storyteller would be Junius Rochester who wrote “The Last Electric Trolley,” in part a history of Madrona.  But that lucky historian is often away conducting tours on Columbia River cruise ships and may not be reached.

SEEING SEATTLE

After the turn-of-the-century consolidation of Seattle’s previously diverse trolley lines the new and more efficient monopoly, the Seattle Electric Company, purchased four “special” cars from the John Stephenson Company of New Jersey.   At 46-feet-long, bumper-to-bumper, they were then the biggest of Seattle’s electric cars, and the trolley company’s special plans for them were clearly signed on their sides.  The four double-ender trolleys — numbered 362 to 365 — carried both visitors and locals on rail explorations of our then rapidly expanding metropolis.

Since motorcars were still a rarity in 1903, aside from walking, there were few ready ways to sample Seattle that were not by rail.  From Pioneer Square the trolley lines reached to Lake Washington, Ballard, Green Lake, the University District, Rainier Valley, all destinations with attractions.   So for the purchase of a single ticket a customer could explore almost every corner of the city, including, beginning in 1907, West Seattle.  Since there was no competing cacophony of motorcars, to be heard by their passengers the conductor-tour-leaders had only to bark above the creaking of the long cars themselves as they rumbled along the rails.

By 1907 these “Special Seeing Seattle Cars” were not the only tour in town.  There were then enough paved streets and even boulevards in Seattle to allow open busses to go anywhere hard tires and spring seats could comfortably carry their customers.  These sightseers were also regularly photographed as a group and many among them would purchase a print of their adventure either for a memento or message.  The group portraits were ordinarily printed on postcard stock and of the many sold some carry handwritten flip-side expressions of the joys of seeing Seattle.

The GREAT LATONA TRAIN WRECK

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

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

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

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

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

CASEY JONES SPECIAL

Life – the leisure part of it – is a relatively simple affair for rail fans.   Perhaps the one conflict that can add distress to this zest – and it cannot be avoided – is whether to be on a train or off it.  On December 1, 1956 super rail fan Lawton Gowey was one of the nearly 1300 rail enthusiasts joyfully crammed into the 13 cars behind Northern Pacific steam engine no. 1372 for the first Casey Jones Special to Snoqualmie.  The route followed the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way.

Seven months later Gowey chose not to ride the train but chase it.   Here on June 29, 1957 he has beat Northern Pacific Engine No.1372 to the north side of Lake Union.  Perhaps steadying his camera in the open window of his car Gowey made a snopshot of the Special that with the smoke and steam escaping it we can almost hear.  In a moment more he was stepping on his own throttle heading for the next photo opportunity to  catch the train crossing the concrete trestle that still parallels N.E. Pacific Street about 100 yards east of the 15^th Avenue N.E., the western border of the main U.W. campus.   He made it in time.

For twelve years the regions rail fans were engaged with nearly 50 nostalgic rail excursions in every direction from Seattle that railroad’s lesser lines and spurs could carry them.  The promoter was a pianist named Carol Cornish who was 71 when she started them.   Actually, as her assistant Tom Baker notes in his Memories of  the Casey Jones Excursions “She took the name of Carol Cornish as a stage name.  Here actual name was Edna Baker.”

While no relation to Tom, Carol Cornish treated him as such.  Titling him her “Train Host” she encouraged the friendly and handsome Baker to walk from car to car smoozing his good will and broad smile with the passengers.  Baker and his kids also sold box lunches, and printed programs.  When the two Bakers worried if their cars would fill up they could count on Seattle Times columnist Byron Fish to write a story about their next heroic efforts to – quoting By Fish here – “take one last steam trip before all the locomotives and their water towers are junked.”

 

More often than not they need more cars.   As Tom Baker puts it, “Miss Cornish was a battler.  Many a time ticket sales would run into the hundreds.  The railroad would say that they did not have the cars.  It always ended up with the railroad giving in and getting the cars needed, even if they had to borrow some from the Great Northern.”  The last Casey Jones was to North Bend on June 9, 1968.  It was also the day that Carol Cornish died.

EAST MARGINAL WAY ELEVATED

The waterfront did get a belt railway of sorts in 1919 but one that was as poorly timed as the Seattle general strike.  During the war, the workers were so hard to deliver to the shipyards that Mayor Hanson ordered an elevated railroad built to carry them south from Pioneer Square to Spokane Street and from there out to Harbor Island.  It started street level at First South and Washington, and from there climbed the one block west to Railroad Avenue where it took a sharp curve south to be on its elevated way without impedance to another right turn on Spokane Street, this time west to Harbor Island and even West Seattle. 

The elevated trolley was also Mayor Hanson’s political response to the almost universal criticism of the Seattle Electric Company’s trolley service.  Hanson not only did the politic thing of ordering that the elevated be built, he also bought out the SEC, but at such an inflated price that in the 21 remaining years that trolleys were run on Seattle streets the debt could not be paid in full.  While Hanson’s new municipal rail system was an albatross, his new elevated was a white elephant.

The Sunday Times of August 17 prepared the citizens to prepare themselves for a ride to Fauntleroy or Alki – there was of course no need to consider shipyards – that would be from five to ten minutes faster than the current service down First Avenue South because the railroad crossings in the industrial district would be avoided.  Without fanfare, service started on the 4^th of September, one week after the mayor resigned.  Hanson claimed it was for reasons of health but more likely, as noted, he left to pursue his dreams of winning the Republican Party’s nomination for President.  Certainly Hanson was also fleeing the growing complaints over the “deal” he’d made to purchase the worn out trolley system. Streetcars were regularly breaking down and sometimes – like the Mayor – running away.

Although brand new, the elevated railway to West Seattle had a ride that swayed like a roller coaster.  It was scrapped in 1929 – in time for the Great Depression.  They had only ten years to remember, but the survivors of the dwindling set of West Seattle old timers still describe it as a white-knuckle thrill.  Two of the better-known members of this species – Emmett Watson and Ivar Haglund – now long gone remembered the ride well.  Typically, as West Seattle adolescents both were fascinated with how to get to Seattle and equally thrilled by the trolley ride across the Duwamish waterway.  In his book Digressions of a Native Son Watson recalls,  “The way you got to First Ave. from West Seattle was by thumb or street car, those rattling old orange things.  They clanked and swayed over an incredible old wooden trestle, high above Spokane Street, weaving and shaking until you had to close your eyes to keep from getting a headache.”  Similarly Ivar recollects,  “Some of my earliest memories are of taking the West Seattle ferry to Seattle, a ride that while thrilling was not so thrilling as that aboard the trolley.  It was our rollercoaster.  That thing would throw us from side to side as it stumbled along a trestle that was high, narrow and, most of the way, without guardrails.  It seemed like there was nothing between you and the ground but the roofs of the buildings below you.  It was marvelously scary.”

THE WRECK EPIDEMIC of 1919-1920.

After the private trolley system was made public in 1919 what Leslie Blanchard in his helpful history “The Street Railway Era in Seattle” calls a “wreck epidemic” followed.  Blanchard described the crash of January 5, 1920 as its “climax . . . one of the most appalling accidents in the history of public transportation in Seattle.”

Heading downtown early in the morning with a full load of workers and shoppers car 721 jumped the track where Woodland Park Avenue still curves through its intersection with 39th Street.  The speeding car fell from its tracks into a sturdy telephone pole (left of center) that opened the car roof like a can of cheap pop.  Of the more than seventy passengers injured seven were seriously so and one of these died the following day.

The wreck was “appalling” because it was an accident made inevitable by the circumstances surrounding the sale of the system. The Seattle Electric Company sold the dilapidated line to a Seattle mayor, Ole Hanson, who purchased it at such an inflated price that no funds remained for repairs.  At the time Mayor Hanson was more interested in whatever bold moves might make him an attractive candidate for the American presidency.

The Seattle Times’ same day front-page story on the wreck leads off with an ironic listing of conflicting voices.  Councilman Oliver Erickson described the brakes and rails of the system as in “rotten condition.” Thomas Murphine, superintendent of public utilities, described them as “in perfect shape” but that the driver was “new and inexperienced.”  For his part Motorman M.R. Fullerton claimed that the brakes would not work and that “I used everything I had to try to stop the car before reaching the curve.”  Fortunately for Fullerton it was the bad brakes excuse that – unlike car 721 – ultimately held sway.

 

THE WORST

One of the most common recollections of Seattle’s “old timers” – those exploring Seattle already before the Second World War – is the elevated trolley ride along the Spokane Street viaduct and its old bascule bridges to West Seattle. That the experience of riding the rumbling and swaying electric cars along the exposed wooden trestle could be more than thrilling is evidences in this view of the worst streetcar wreck in Seattle history.

At about 7:30 on the Friday morning of Jan. 8, 1937, with its air-brakes frozen open, car 671 inbound on the Fauntleroy line lost control as it descended 30th Avenue Southwest and flipped to its side where the track curved sharply onto Spokane ‘Street. Derailments on this old system were not that uncommon and even flips not unprecedented. The upended car 671 did not skid to a grinding stop, however, but collided suddenly with a concrete pillar.

The afternoon Seattle Times listed the dead – Lee Bow, a 50-year-old city fireman, and William Court, a 39-year-old-mechanic – and the 60 West Seattle commuters who were injured with breaks, bruises and lacerations. Of these one died the next day. The derailment might have been even more deadly. The pillar that injured some might have saved others when it· prevented the car from falling to the railroad tracks below, at the lowest level of this three-tier grade separation at the western end of Spokane Street.

This catastrophe became an anxious symbol for the entire municipally owned trolley system that was in physical, fiscal and political tatters. The coincidence of this tragedy with the campaign to tear up city-wide the system’s rails aroused the -hysterical rumor that this wreck and others were planned by those who favored gas engines and rubber tires over electric motors and trolley tracks.

The concrete construction above replaced the wooden trestles below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

These two blocks on Front Street (First Avenue) between Columbia and Mill (Yesler Way) were Seattle’s first show-strip of distinguished structures.  The view looks south on Front thru its intersection with Columbia. The subject was photographed sometime in 1887, perhaps only days before Toklas and Singerman, the city’s first department store, moved that year into its new home at the southwest corner, here right-of-center.

At the far end of this extended block, the tower of the Yesler-Leary Building (1883) tops what was known best then as Yesler’s Corner, after the pioneer who owned most of what we now call Pioneer Square.  This classy strip faced east across Front to a pioneer string of plain false-front clapboards that contrasted with the brick, tile and cast iron ornaments of the buildings shown here.

After the city’s “Great Fire” ignited at Front and Madison in the mid-afternoon of June 6, 1889 it was hoped that should the fire eventually reach these formidable landmarks that they would not allow themselves to be consumed.  The strip, however, proved almost as combustible as the wood firetraps on the east side of Front Street.  These handsome facades did, however, make the best ruins.

In his Chronological History of Seattle, Thomas Wickham Prosch, explains this strip as another sign of Seattle’s robust prosperity then.  He writes that the city’s boom began in 1886, and then “grew in volume and force in 1887, continued with unabated activity and vigor in 1888 . . . Every week at that time meant 150 more people in Seattle.” The reconstruction that followed the 1889 fire also swelled the immigration and spread the fire of ambition.

WEB EXTRAS

This time, Paul, Berangere has something to add. While she was visiting us for our MOHAI opening, she accompanied me downtown when I took the photo for this article.  Here’s her shot of me and my ten foot pole:

Anything to add, Paul?  What a splendid profile of you and your big ten foot pole Jean.   Yes I have somethings to add, but again the question is how much may I load before I climb the padded stairs to nighty bears.   Most of it relates to FRONT STREET, the subject above – some before and some after the 1889 fire.  Again, there will be few “now” shots for I have never taken the time over the past nearly 30 years to properly file my own weekly negatives away.  I know how to find the historical shots ordinarily because they are “classed” under different collections.  Not so my own photographs of local “nows.”  This was a bad habit of mine Jean and don’t you get into it!  Some day I’ll  organize it all – hopefully.

We will start with a hand-colored version of an 1888 4th of July parade on Front Street and followed it directly with a proper mono-toned version not of the same photograph but of the same parade – with some story.

JULY 4, 1888 ON FRONT STREET

Parades of many sorts were commonplace in the pioneer city.  Streets were not so nervous, they were not overrun with motorcars.  If you wish to celebrated you election to city council or appointment to animal control, if you knew a band that march and play for it you were ordinarily welcome to arrange a parade down “main street,” which for Seattle was First Avenue, or Front Street north of Yesler Way and Commercial Street south of it.

This grand parade with all the bunting and flags is surely an Independence Day celebration. Just to this side of the only open sidewalk awning is the Lace House, a woman’s apparel shop with fancy work that opened in February of 1888. So this can only be July 4, 1888, for in another eleven months and two days everything here was consumed by the “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

The photographer looks north from the southeast corner of Cherry Street and Front Street. Front was named for a setting that is now long lost. When platted in 1853, First Avenue (Front) was the most westerly of the avenues, and on a windy day at high tide a pedestrian on its west side might be splattered. Now the waterfront has moved far to the west.

The fancy structures on the left are part of Seattle’s two unbroken blocks of pioneer splendor between Yesler Way and Columbia Street, its touch of San Francisco elegance. The corner structure at Columbia Street; right of center, with the grandest decorations was the Toklas and Singerman Department Store, built in 1887. Some hoped that the Great Fire might be stopped by its sturdy brick façade, but the flames were barely stalled before they burst the windows, chewed the mortar and razed all but the sturdiest of walls south of it – like the bank facade on the far left, which was left standing although the building was gutted like all the others.

 

THE ELEPHANT STORE

In this 1878 view up Front Street (First Ave.) only the Elephant store on the right – where, presumably, both the bargains and the selection were over-sized – is obviously a retail house. The others look like homes, but the street’s residential character is slightly deceptive. One of those clapboards is a foundry; another, a cigar store; another, a drugstore; and the roof on the lower left-hand comer tops a brewery.

The Elephant Store is at Front’s southeast corner with Columbia, and two blocks north at Madison Street, Moses Maddock’s drugstore is the dominant white structure just left of the photo’s center.  (The subject printed next was photographed from the balcony of the drugstore, and both it and this look in the opposite direction along Front Street were photographed by Peterson and Bros., which ran their commercial studio at the waterfront foot of Cherry Street.)  Beyond Maddock’s drugstore at Madison Street, Front St. was sided for the most by homes. The gabled Amos Brown home at Spring St. rises above the drugstore and right of the tall fir.  It and the Arthur & Mary Denny home at Union St., just left of the fir, were Seattle’s first grand homes. For the Dennys, city founders, it was their third residence when they moved there in 1865. Arthur lived in this fancy Victorian mansion with the jigsaw trim until 1899, the year of his death. By then the house was surrounded by tall hotels and department stores.

Beyond the Denny home Front St. jogs a little to the left and northwest beyond Pike St.   Pike was the northern end of the street’s 1876 improvement. Before that regrading, there was a hump at Cherry St. (the site of the photographer’s studio and perch), another rise at Marion and a ravine at Seneca deep enough to require a bridge.

Finally this scene includes a subject on the horizon that is bigger than either the street or an elephant.  It is Denny Hill.  Here the top of it reaches about 100 ft. above the present elevation of Third Ave. between Stewart and Virginia streets. This is one of the few early recordings of Denny Hill that survives, while the hill itself, of course, does not.

 

FRONT STREET PROMENADE FOR THE PIPERS

The captioned subject of this Peterson brothers photograph is its vacant street. The studio has inscribed it “Front St. Seattle W. T. [Washington Territory]” along its dirty diagonal line.  As the scene shows, the street’s name was appropriate. The Petersons took this shot in 1878 or 1879. Then, at high tide, Elliott Bay beat against the timber retaining wall that held Front St. high and dry above the waterfront. This is Seattle’s first major public works – the regrading of Front St. from a stump-strewn, ravine-ridden path to a filled-in, smoothed-out public work, with guardrail and a sidewalk promenade along the city’s front. The Petersons are showing it off.

The scene was shot from the balcony above Maddock’s drugstore at the N.E. corner of Front’s intersection with Madison St. The drugstore did not survive the Great Fire of 1889. I took the “now” shot from the second floor of a brick building which was raised there soon after the fire, and which, in 1986, was still after half-a-century the home of Warshall’s Sporting Goods.  (For the moment I cannot find my “now” shot from the early 1980s.  Typical.  I did not also look to using it again while I was then preoccupied with looking back.)

The ’89 fire started across Front St. at its southwest corner with Madison in the Pontius Building. The corner of its balcony is on the older photo’s far right. It and the Woodward Grain House, the building that dominates the photo’s center, were both built on pilings.  Between them is a glimpse of a section of Yesler’s wharf and mill.

The Woodward was the business home of Peter’s Furs, Cigars and Liquors. Peter was in the right line. The 1878 city directory claimed “five out of every six men in the territory use tobacco, and nine out of every ten men use intoxicating drinks.” However, another of the directory’s statistics suggests that these prevalent vices were still lonely ones, for “There are three bachelors to every bacheloress in the territory. ”

Posing in the photograph’s lower left-hand 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. The 1878 directory reviewed his confections as “warranted and strictly pure.” Both Piper’s confectionary and the Peterson’s studio were on Front St. near Cherry. They were, no doubt, friends.

For 30 years the Pipers lived in Seattle making candy and friends. When Piper died here in 1904, his Post Intelligencer obituary was an unusually good-natured one. The publisher-historian Thomas Prosch first of all remembered “Piper’s cream cakes. During the 1870s they were particularly noted. The people of those days to this time think nothing of the kind … has ever approached them in excellence.”

Piper was also an artist. Prosch recounted, “He could draw true to life, could mold in clay, cut stone . . . his Christmas display was noted for its originality, humor and beauty.”

In many ways the candy-maker was unconventional.  A religious Unitarian, he was also a socialist member of the Seattle City council, and an unsuccessful Populist candidate for Mayor.  He was, however, a successful practical joker.  Once, at a public dance, he mimicked Henry Yesler so convincingly that the real Yesler ran home to construct a sign, which read “This is the only original Yesler.”

Thomas Prosch concluded, “Everybody regarded him as a friend.”  A.W. Piper dies at the age of 76, survived by Mrs. Piper, their nine children and many friends.

 

[Somewhere within three feet of this desk is a black-white scan of this same Frye Opera House look into North Seattle and when found I’ll insert it here.]

NORTH SEATTLE

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

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

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

In his “King County History,” pioneer historian Clarence Bagley dates this view “about 1887.” Given the absence in this scene of important 1887 additions and the presence of structures not around in 1885, the likely date is 1886.

 

HUNTINGTON  – & Others – EARLY RECORDS of FRONT STREET

The Huntington Bros. Studio of Olympia would not allow hometown bluster to get in the way of marketing and flattery. On the flip side of this view up Front Street (First Avenue) from Cherry Street, the Huntington promoter has written a rather long paragraph on Seattle’s virtues, noting: “Seattle is the leading town of Washington Territory … Its principal exports are agriculture produce, lumber and coal . . . It also exports much fish, furniture, doors and windows, flour, etc. The town is conveniently, beautifully and healthfully situated, and gives promise of becoming a place of considerable importance . . . Its own people are very proud of Seattle, and think it inside of 10 years destined to be second on the Pacific Slope to San Francisco only.”

The added claim that Seattle’s population “numbers 3,500” suggests that the Huntington caption was written in 1881, when Seattle first overcame Walla Walla to become the largest town in Washington Territory. The photograph, however, was most likely recorded before June 20, 1879. On that day, J. Willis Sayer notes in his book, “This City of Ours,” “the last forest tree on the central waterfront, standing just north of Pike

Street, was cut down.” That tree, I’m claiming, stands nearly alone on the horizon, left of center.

A few of the identifiable businesses here are F.W. Wald’s hardware store, far right, next door to Hendrick’s plumbing. Across the street in the shade of the sidewalk porch is the Fountain Beer Hall. To Huntington and his potential customers, the noteworthy quality of this street is not that it is vacant, but that it is smooth. In 1876 the bumps of Front Street north of Yesler Way were cut away to fill its valleys. This historical scene was copied from an original Huntington Stereo view.   It may be compared to other studio’s recordings of Front Street also looking north through Cherry Street.

Looking south here through the same block only this time into Pioneer Square.

 

BOREN & BELL at SECOND & CHERRY

This pioneer snow is neither from Seattle’s still coldest winter of 1861-’62 nor from its still deepest snow, the “big snow” of 1880. The scene is too late for the former and too early for the latter. What is most curious about this look into what was then still Seattle’s first residential neighborhood is the scene’s “centerpiece,” the two-story box with four windows on its west facade. It sits at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street.

Judging from the remnants of the old forest on First Hill and from the other structures, most likely this view dates from the early to mid-1870s. Above the barn or large shed on the far left is the tower to Seattle’s first sanctuary, the so-called White Church at the southeast corner of Second and Columbia Street.

Significantly, the “centerpiece” box is a frame structure. Therefore it is not the log cabin that Carson Boren built at that corner in the spring of 1852. The local tradition that the Carson cabin was the first structure completed in Seattle is remembered with a plaque on the Hoge Building (that now fills the corner). However, according to Greg Lange, a historylink.org scholar of Seattle’s pioneer life, the Boren cabin was more likely the third house.  It was completed after Doc Maynard’s home on First Avenue South and William Bell’s first home in Belltown.

Actually, Bell is also better associated with this box if not with its predecessor, the log cabin. In 1855 Boren sold the corner to him. Lange concedes that the frame building, seen here, may have been part of the deal. However, he thinks it more likely that Bell, not Boren, built it sometime after 1858. By the late 1870s the black box at Second and Cherry was replaced with a more distinguished residence.

As for the snow, we don’t know.

Another snowscape looking east on Cherry from Front (First).  This one is also by Peterson & Bros and was recorded from the front door to their studio on the west side of Front.   This 1880 is still the deepest in the city’s history.  (See the Snow History buttoned on the front page if you like.)   In 1880 Seattle was a few more than 3000 citizens, a few less than Walla Walla.   Seattle would surpass Walla Walla in the next year and then become one of the country’s greatest examples of a boom town as it grew to roughly 40 thousand by 1890, more than 90s thousand by 1900, and to more than 200 thousand by 1910.  The photographs directly below also look up Cherry from First and date approximately, in this order, from 1892, and two from around 1913.  By then Cherry Street  was one of the city’s examples of an “urban canyon” with steel-frame high-rises to many sides.

 

1884 SNOW ON COLUMBIA STREET

Although the snow of 1884 did not make it into our local freezer of big snows, it lent its own perishable delights. Through the first week of February, the winter of 1883-84 had been peculiarly dry and pleasantly warm. The local paper predicted more of the same. Then on the 8th two inches of snow dropped on Seattle, and the temperature dove, sticking below freezing.

Lake Union froze over and a procession of skaters trekked the length of the boardwalk that followed the bed of an abandoned coal railroad (near the line now of Westlake Avenue) to the south end of the lake. It was safe to skate until the 15th, when the thermometer first rose above freezing. With the skates, sleds were then also surrendered, but only temporarily. In three days more the sky opened and again dropped the fun stuff you see here -18 inches of it.

The photographer, Theodore E. Peiser, was nearly as fresh to Seattle as this snow. In 1884 the oversized gear and glass-plate routines of photography were both rare and elaborate enough to gain attention. Here, everyone seems to be posing for Peiser. The commercial photographer set his tripod at the waterfront foot of Columbia Street with his back to Elliott Bay.

Peiser recorded some of the best views of Seattle in the 1880s. There might have been many more, but his “Art Studio” on Second Avenue between Marion and Columbia Streets was destroyed along with his equipment and negatives in the city’s “Big Fire of 1889.” The loss is especially grievous given the claim Peiser made on the flip side of one of his surviving prints: “The largest and finest assortment of views of Seattle and Sound towns, logging camps, etc., for sale by the copy or in large quantities, at reasonable prices.”

 

MACKINTOSH’S SAFE DEPOSIT BUILDING

The Safe Deposit Building was one of the Victorian jewels strung along the west side of Front Street (First Avenue) between Pioneer Place (Square) and Columbia Street in the mid-1880s. Angus MacKintosh’s Merchants Bank operated at the sidewalk level, and in the basement was what the trim Scotsman from Ontario advertised as “the best safe-deposit vaults on the West Coast.” The bank was also distinguished by its biggest customer: the U.S. government.

Arriving in Seattle in 1870, the 31-year-old MacKintosh was among a second wave of pioneers who came too late to take claims but early enough to buy land cheap. He soon married Elizabeth Peeples, who had arrived in 1866 as one of the adventurous “Mercer Girls.” Both Elizabeth and Angus were talented accountants – she as the first woman to act as enrolling clerk for the House of Representatives in Olympia and he as specialist in preparing abstracts.

Soon after MacKintosh formed his bank, he built this building to house it. The date 1884 is set in relief at the crown of the building. Five years later the bank and more than 30 downtown blocks were destroyed by the Great Fire of June 6, 1889. The day after the fire, MacKintosh’s claims about the security of his basement vaults were given a grand affirmation when, to quote a contemporary, the Rev. H.K. Hines, “they became the storeroom for all the banks of the city until order was brought out of the existing chaos.”            MacKintosh rebuilt his bank to seven stones above the same vaults.  A nation-wide economic panic that began in 1893 brought down the Merchants National Bank four years later. MacKintosh, nearly 60, tried to recoup by joining the Yukon gold rush. When that failed he fell into depression and then poor health, dying in 1904. “Lizzie” lived another 22 years, which was time enough to see their son Kenneth become a Superior Court judge.

CLEMMER’S DREAM

On September 3, 1932 Seattle’s “pioneer showman” James Q. Clemmer rolled up the sleeves of his tuxedo and mounted a soapbox outside the Fifth Avenue Theater, which he managed. Above him stretched a bright red banner reading “Jim Clemmer’s Campaign Headquarters.”

In that depression and election year, radio charisma propelled Franklin Roosevelt’s promises of “a new deal for every American” far ahead of Herbert Hoover’s monotone assurances that “prosperity is just around the corner.”  The showman Clemmer was running not for an office but in the Fox Theater’s coast-wide contest for the “most popular manager in the West.” Both FDR and JQC won. Jim Clemmer beat out 200 other west coast managers by hawking the most advance sale tickets to the Fifth Avenue’s coming show, Will Rogers’ new talkie, “Down to Earth.” Clemmer personally peddled these admissions to the multitude of happy customers he’d been entertaining, by then, through 24 years of pioneering film-playing in eight Seattle theaters.

The first of these was Clemmer’s Dream. In 1907 the 26-year-old newlywed brought his wife over from Spokane to live in and manage a recent family acquisition, the Kenneth Hotel. The Kenneth was one of the first and also most pleasingly ornate stone structures put up after the fire of 1889. Its very narrow but tall seven-story facade sat at the First Avenue foot of Cherry Street. Within a year Jim Clemmer converted an abandoned bank lobby on the hotel’s first floor into his Dream Theater. It was one of Seattle’s first photoplay houses and its “most spacious and best equipped.” In our historical photograph we see the Dream’s marquee in one of its several incarnations. Clemmer was constantly making improvements, both outside and in, and the best of these was the organ. The Dream’s Wurlitzer was said to be the first organ installed in any motion picture theater anywhere. And both the organ and Clemmer were fortunate to have “Ollie on the Wurlitzer” Wallace improvising his dramatic accompaniment to sentimental films like the “one advertised above the Dream’s entrance, “A Brother’s Devotion.” Oliver G. Wallace was one of those Seattle phenomena that after a hometown nurturing went on to great things elsewhere. With Wallace it was to Hollywood and a career of writing scores for many of Walt Disney’s films including “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan.”

Another of Clemmer’s Dream Theater innovations was probably the first “talking” motion picture. This it did literally. In 1910 Clemmer put actors behind the Dream’s screen to mouth aloud the screen actors’ mute lines. Predictably, after a week of this often too-comic dissonance, the noble experiment was shut up as an artistic howler.

The Dream Theater’s fare was actually a 50-50 mix of one-reelers and vaudeville. Much of the latter was on-stage singing acts. The movie shorts included Italian dramas, French comedies, pastoral forest stories, and from an American producer named Bison, the first of the cowboy pictures. Bison advertised that he still “employed men who have had actual experience in Indian fighting.”

In 1912 Jim Clemmer sold the Dream and built the 1,200-seat Clemmer, “the nation’s first grand theater devoted exclusively to photoplays.” In the next 20 years he also managed the Winter Garden, Music Box, Blue Mouse, Music Hall, Paramount, and the Orpheum. When Clemmer and Roosevelt won by landslides in 1932, Clemmer was in his second term as manager of the lavish Fifth Avenue Theater. When he died in 1942, he was remembered by John Hamrick, the Fifth Avenue’s owner, as “the best theater manager I ever knew.”

 

1884 BIRDSEYE of FRONT STREET from the OCCIDENTAL HOTEL

After searching some “ancient sources,” I think it likely that this look up Front Street (First Avenue) was photographed in the late summer or fall of 1884. The scene includes a number of well-leafed trees packed between buildings, so this is not in winter. But why 1884?

The unnamed photographer stood on the top floor of the nearly new Occidental Hotel, one of the then-prospering city’s showpieces, and looked north to another, the Frye Opera House at the northeast corner of Front and Marion. Here, the reader must concentrate. The mansard roof line of the opera house and its dominating tower, shaped like an inverted basket with the hazed mass of Denny Hill behind it, can be located above and to the right of the center of the photograph.

The Frye opened in early December 1884, although the structure was not completed until 1885. Here, the rear half of the “largest theatre north of San Francisco” -that part to the right showing the seven large, vacant windows through three floors –I s still far from complete. .

More evidence for 1884 appears with the construction scene on Front Street, left of center, for the ornate Safe Deposit Building at the foot of Cherry Street. In his 1901 “Chronological History of Seattle,” Thomas Prosch notes that the first pressed bricks used in Seattle (7,000 of them) were brought from San Francisco in May of 1884 and used for the Safe Deposit Building.

By 1888 that entire west side of Front Street between Columbia Street and Yesler Way was filled with ornate brick buildings. It was Seattle’s elegant show strip. All of them, and practically everything else in this panorama, including the opera house, was kindling for the city’s Great Fire of 1889.   The pie-shaped Occidental Hotel – now the site of the “Sinking Ship Garage” facing Pioneer Square between James Street and Yesler Way – was also gutted.

 

YESLER-LEARY BUILDING

Completed in 1883, the Yesler-Leary Building was the proper symbol for its namesake owners, Henry Yesler and James Leary. Many of the 6,645 citizens counted in the Seattle census that year may have thought Yesler and Leary were, like their towering namesake landmark, made of bricks and cast iron. Yesler, the pioneer mill man, paid the most taxes, and Leary was described as “the president of everything.” The following year Leary would also be mayor of Seattle – the first to keep regular hours. Yesler had already been mayor and would be again in 1886.

William E. Boone, Seattle’s principal pre-1889 “Great Fire” architect, designed the Yesler-Leary Building. The cost of raising this Victorian ornament was, for the time, a whopping $100,000. This photograph was recorded sometime between late December 1883, when the planks evident on Mill Street (Yesler Way) were first laid, and September 1884, when the horse trolley first passed by on rails not yet part of this street scene.

The condition before planking is indicated in a Dec. 20, 1883, news story. “In attempting to cross Mill Street yesterday from the Post Office,” (the next structure on Mill Street to the left of the Yesler-Leary Building), “a woman came near drowning. She sank deeper than we care to describe, and only succeeded in saving herself, with dreadfully soiled skirts, after great difficulty.”

The utility poles seen here are nearly new. Telephone service began this year. Street numbering also began in 1883 possibly because 600 homes were added to Seattle. It was a booming year before it busted in the fall with another deep recession. The cosmopolitan tone of this growth is suggested by the appearance in ’83 of Die Puget Sound Post, the first locally published non-English newspaper.

 

“GREAT FIRE” OF JUNE 6, 1889

It takes a conspiring of coincidences to tum an ordinary fire into a great one. Mid-afternoon, June 6, 1889, Seattle was ready with a heat wave, a fanning wind from the north, its fire chief out of town, next to no water pressure, a clapboard business district, and an upset pot of boiling glue. By sunset Seattle had what has ever since been recalled as the Great Fire of 1889. Burning south through the night, it extinguished itself in the tideflats south of Pioneer Square – now the site of high salary sports. The next morning the exhausted citizens awoke to a smoldering landscape which, depending upon their disposition, inspired some to meditate on human folly and others to set up tents for business over warm ashes.

On the day of the fire most of the city’s photographers were too busy res?cuing their equipment from the flames to record them. So our photographic record of the Great Fire itself is not so great. But not so the ruins. On the morning of June 7, the photographers (those who still had cameras and film) got busy recording the conventional romance of ruins scattered through more than 30 picturesque if ruined city blocks.

(Note, above, the cleaned bricks at the southeast corner of Second Ave and Cherry, and above the bricks the still standing facade of the Merchant’s Bank, described above.)

Actually, there were not many distinguished ruins left in a firetrap business district made of wood. The best of the stood along the city’s incinerated “show-strip,” the buildings along the west side of Front Street (First Ave) between Yesler Way and Columbia Street, beginning with the Yesler-Leary building at Yesler Way. When it was built in 1883, it set the architectural example for masonry and decorative cast-iron that was soon after followed throughout the entire long block to Columbia Street.  When the fire crossed Yesler Way around dinnertime it had left a gutted Seattle show block behind it but had not completely subdued it.

The photographers had to shoot quickly. The picturesque ruins were soon razed. Within the first year 150 brick buildings were started and some completed that year as well. The city celebrated the first anniversary of its very own Great Fire by serving strawberry shortcake to all those who had helped to first fight the fire and then feed and shelter those made destitute by it. The strawberry shortcake tradition is continued in Pioneer Square’s annual Fire Festival, which also features craft booths, live music, and displays of fire-fighting equipment.

(Under construction, bottom-right, is the frame for one of the many tents pitched for commerce following the fire.  This one is set at the southwest corner of Second Ave. and Columbia Street.)

The 1889 Birdseye litho of Seattle was released weeks before many of its subjects were destroyed in the ’89 fire.  Here someone had given a broad-stroked border to the incinerated blocks.  Bottom left is a drawing of the extant Pioneer Building, which Henry Yesler was planning before the fire and then went on to build following it.)

 

FIRE STATION No. 1

The fancy brick façade of Seattle’s first dedicated engine house face Columbia Street from its south side mid-block between First and Second Avenues. 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 and team.

Earlier, the department’s other engine, the smaller man-powered Washington No.2, was also housed here – in a bam. 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 “Great 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, were included.

 

“HIDEOUS REMAINS”

[What follows first appeared in Pacific on June 6, 2004.] Exactly 115 years ago this morning on June 6, 1889, Seattle awoke to these ruins and 30-plus blocks more. The Occidental Hotel’s three-story monoliths – perhaps the grandest wreckage – held above the still-smoking district like illustrations for the purple prose of that morning’s Seattle Daily Press.

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

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

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

 

GOLDEN RULE BAZAAR

One of Seattle’s first department stores, the Golden Rule Bazaar, was founded by a man who failed in the gold fields.  Down and out in Comstock, Nev., Julius Bomstein chose Seattle over Portland and Walla Walla to begin again. He brought his family here in 1882, and within three years the Bomsteins had their own storefront on First Avenue, at Marion Street.

Eighty years later Julius and Louisa’s son, Sam, recited for Seattle Times writer Lucille McDonald some of the pioneer staples the Bomsteins sold here: “Lamp chimneys and wicks, dollar watches, chamber pots, spectacles, clothes hampers, market baskets, wooden potato smashers, .nutmeg grinders, luggage . . . telescopes and toys at Christmas.” Sam Bomstein recalled a brisk business in baskets that his father purchased from the natives in exchange for cooking utensils. Sam also claimed that the Golden Rule Bazaar was the first store on the Pacific Coast to have counters devoted exclusively to cut-rate items priced at a nickel, a dime, 15 cents and a quarter.

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

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

 

THE GOTTSTEIN BLOCK
In the dawn of urban renewal, in the mid-1950s, the then-dilapidated Pioneer Square area of Seattle was envisioned as a parking lot for the central business district. A number of distinguished buildings were razed for the comfort of motorists before preservationists mobilized to save what remained of this historic district. The Gottstein Block at the southeast comer of First Avenue and Columbia Street was one of the losses.
Soon after the Great Fire of June 6, 1889 destroyed its predecessor, plans for this brick block were announced by the Gottsteins, local wholesalers of liquor and cigars. The Frisch Brothers jewelers were in the pre-fire building and returned to its ornate replacement. Their sign spans the building’s main entrance at 720 First Ave. The somewhat swift change in the character of First Avenue is repeated in the changing of the Gottsteins’ tenants. Eventually, the Brunswick Hotel upstairs became the Right Hotel, a semi-dive for mostly single men working the waterfront or moving Through it. The Frisch Brothers fled with their diamonds, and the Flag Pool Parlor moved in.

Beginning in 1930 until its sacrifice to parking, the Gottstein was home for the Seattle Seamen’s Mission. With a nautical decor featuring paintings of sailing ships, a reading-room window with stained-glass fish, and a blinking lighthouse at the mission’s entrance, the Norwegian Lutherans offered free meals and free or cheap bunks, found jobs, made loans, kept and forwarded mail, and preached the gospel in “a service to all seamen.” In the beginning most of the Mission’s users were Scandinavians and so often also Lutherans. When the center moved from First Avenue to Dexter Avenue in 1957 more were Buddhists and Shintoists.

FRONT STREET FROM PIONEER SQUARE, 1891

In 1891 any Seattle resident of three years residency looking over the shoulder of photographer Frank LaRoche would have understood the wonders of his subject. Everything here (above) is new, including the portion of Front Street (First Avenue) in the foreground.

The streetcar at the center of the scene is not an electric trolley but a cable car. When it began its service in March 1889, the Front Street Cable Railway ran between Yesler Way in Pioneer Square and the line’s powerhouse near Second Avenue and Denny. Three months later the tracks south of Seneca Street were destroyed in Seattle’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

The Front Street that rose from the ashes was made 18 feet wider and turned through its last block between Cherry Street and Yesler Way to connect with Commercial Street, now First Avenue South. Cutting this little stretch of street through Henry Yesler’s corner – the pre-fire home of the Yesler-Leary Building – cost the city $150,000, about half of its entire post-fire bill for street condemnations. Talk about pioneer clout.

The Starr-Boyd building on the far left was another of the (by one reckoning) 51 Seattle buildings architect Elmer Fisher designed in the first year after the fire. After an earthquake in 1949, the top three floors were dismantled as a precaution. Seven years later the surviving ground floor was razed for the parking lot still in use.

 

SHOW STRIP SEATTLE ca. 1887

This is the best face of the pre-fire Seattle – the west side of Front Street (now First Avenue) between Columbia Street and Mill Street (now Yesler Way). The fire, of course, was that “great” one of June 6, 1889, which reduced this and about 30 other blocks to a few brick ruins rising above the ashes. These are all substantial buildings, built with brick and ornate caste iron in a showy style that delighted in details – the architectural trimmings of a community self-conscious of its successes. And this pre-fire Seattle was booming with an average of 150 new residents arriving each week.

The photographer – probably David Judkins – took this view of the elegant side of city life at eight minutes to three o’clock on the afternoon of a gray day during the winter of 1887-88. The time is indicated on the clock to the left, and the date speculated from the signs on the right.

C. C. Calkins, of the banner-advertised real estate firm Calkins, Moore & Wood, came to town in 1887 with $300 dollars in his pocket, plenty of promotional savvy in his head and luck in his hands. After borrowing, buying, and selling, he was left holding, within the year, $170,000 worth of real estate. Below the Calkins banner, the sign in the window reads, in part, “The Lace House will open about February 10th.” We can conclude that this February was in 1888 from the little vanity biography of its proprietor, J. A. Baillargeon, included in the Reverend H. K. Hines 1893 Illustrated History of Washington State. Baillargeon ‘s window sign promotes the motto for his shop of “Fancy goods and materials of every description” as “reliable goods, lowest prices.” The historian-parson Hines explains his low prices fell from his policy of only selling on a cash basis and thus “proving the old adage that a nimble penny is better than a slow shilling.”

For all its distinction, this was a difficult two blocks to show off photographically – the pre-fire street was narrow and its east side was lined with non-photogenic frontier clapboards that were a confession of the boom town’s still somewhat pimitive soul. Here the photographer shoots from one of those false-fronts, misses them, but still manages to half-hide the block’s distant crowning touch – the tower atop the Yesler Leary Building, obscured behind the long pole on the left.

The reason for this apparent sloppiness is in the street itself. Front is being paved in a public work meant to cover the dirt with a little class of its own – planks. Here the eastern half of the street has been planked, and just to the right of the long pole that hides the tower we can see the line of men at work beginning the planking on the elegant west side of Front Street. The photographer cut off the tower because he was primarily interested in the street.

We might wonder what would have become of this long block had not the Great Fire of ’89 nipped it in its distinguished youth. These structures were solid and might have made it well into the 20th century – perhaps as far as the early twenties when a higher but still ornate strip of terra cotta tiled landmarks could have taken their place. Such a successor would have had a better chance of surviving today – in place of the more Spartan parking garage that now dominates the western side of First south of Columbia Street.

The post-fire impression for a new Toklas and Singerman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge photos)

Signed at the lower left corner, “1225 W&S” is an early and low number for the Webster and Stevens Studio.  Soon after they opened for business, Webster and Stevens became the primary editorial photographers for The Seattle Times when the newspaper was beginning to feature screened photographs rather than etchings on its pages.

Judging from the negative’s fledgling status and the structures showing we will give this subject a circa 1903 date.  That’s the year that the Denny Hotel on top of Denny Hill opened in the spring for its first guest, President Theo Roosevelt.  Here the hotel and the hill stand in the way of Third Avenue ten blocks and a few yards north of where the photographer stood in the middle of the avenue a few yards south of Cherry Street.

Right to left, the landmarks here include the St. Elmo Hotel, which opened in 1888 and so in time to host and care for those who fled and fought the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  The Russell House, as it was then called, was one of the few hotels in Seattle to escape incineration.  The proprietor, Sarah Russell, also the first music teacher at the U.W., fed the fire fighters and played the piano for them as well.

Across Cherry Street the Seattle Theatre (1892) was one of the city’s leading venues for variety, and later for programs that paired vaudeville with silent films.  Across Third Avenue from the theatre is the brick Dexter Horton Building.  It was constructed soon after the 1889 fire and in a rush.  It took about three months from setting the foundation to welcoming its tenants.  The venerable bookman Samuel Shorey kept his bookstore in the corner storefront until the building was razed in the early 1920s. You can see his books in the window facing Cherry Street.

The 1906-7 regrade of Third Avenue made deep cuts in Third Avenue north of Cherry Street, and brought with it the grades showing in Jean Sherrard’s “now.”   The Denny Hotel’s last hurrah was a closing ball in May of 1906.   The hotel was soon razed and then the hill too.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Thank you Jean, and yes, although not as much as I’d like for those nighty bears are gently growling at the top of the stairs and I must soon join them.   We’ll stay in the neighborhood with five features previously published as “now-and-then” features in Pacific Mag. of The Sunday Seattle Times.   First – if we take the position the Webster and Stevens photographer used above to look north of Third and turn 90 degrees to the left (west) and go back a few years we might see Lyman and Nellie Wood on their front porch, as they are seen directly below.  This first appears in Pacific sometime in 1988, and thanks to collector William Mix for sharing them now many years ago.

THE PEOPLE’S MAN

One won’t find Lyman Wood mentioned in any of Seattle’s earliest histories, although Wood once had a song written about him, which was sung with a brass band before 4,000 people in Pioneer Square. And in his time both Lyman and his wife Nellie were consistently popular with the people.

Not long after the Woods arrived in Seattle, Lyman went to work at the post office’s general delivery window, a job that eventually put him face to face with most of the town’s 5,000 residents. Within five years Lyman Wood was King County’s auditor, and this view of him framed by his front door with Nellie to his left was photographed in either 1888, his second and last year as auditor, or 1889. The 1889 city directory, compiled in 1888, lists the Woods’ residence on the west side of Third Avenue between James and Cherry streets. That this is that place is corroborated by the appearance in the photograph of the Yesler-Leary Building’s landmark tower on the scene’s far left between the ornate fence post and the tree. Then the most lavish structure in Seattle, it did not survive the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889.

Lyman Wood held a variety of government positions, some elected but most assigned: deputy assessor, clerk of Seattle School District Number One, bailiff in the federal court, deputy county treasurer. He was also exalted in the International Order of Odd Fellows, (I.O.O.F.), and his wife Nellie was a charter member of Rebekah Lodge, No. 6, and its chaplain for twenty years.

After 53 years of living with Lyman, Nellie Wood died suddenly on her eightieth birthday. In customary good humor, Lyman printed a memorial card featuring 16 portraits of his wife at different ages surrounding a portrait of himself. He captioned it, “Lyman Wood and his wives.” [This montage can be found published with the 45th chapter included in “Seattle Now and Then, Vol. 3,” which can be found as a PDF file through our book-button on the front page of this blog.]  On the backside Wood printed a poem of his own which included the lines,

Stately, handsome Nell;

Your eyes are as clear as the eagle’s

They fling ’round me a magical spell

You sparkle, you radiate, you shine,

In all the walks of life

As friend, lover and wife.

Lyman died in 1924 at the age of 85, seven years after his “Beloved Nell.”  Both of their funerals were officiated by a Rev. J.D.O. Powers, pastor of the People’s Church.

The Woods’ sentiments consistently ran with the people. Lyman Wood was the People’s Party (the Populists) nominee for secretary of state in 1892, and earlier that year he was their candidate for mayor of Seattle as well. It was during the mayoral campaign that Lyman was praised in a Pioneer Square rally with a song including these lines.

Ho , the People’s Party are in the race;

They’ll never fly the track;

For there’s our fore-horse Lyman,

Running neck and neck . . .

Three candidates are in the field,

Now . . .vote for an honest man

So vote for the People’s man.

FIRST METHODIST CHURCH, THIRD & MARION

The city’s oldest congregation has moved twice, but never far. Since 1908 First United Methodist Church has worshiped in the light of 16 windows that support its classical dome at Fifth Avenue and Marion Street. This low-rise Christian landmark is surrounded by skyscrapers in the heart of Seattle’s banking Babylon.

In 1855 the Methodists dedicated Seattle’s first church at Second Avenue and Columbia Street, or less than four blocks from its present location. This Spartan little clapboard was modest in every respect, including its color. It was called simply the “White Church.” As the size of its congregation grew so did the price of its promising commercial corner, which the church sold for $30,000 in 1887.

With those thousands the congregation skipped two blocks to Marion Street and Third Avenue and built the lavish Gothic pile we see above. Its first “white church” was moved too, by its new owners up to Third Avenue & Cherry Street. There, the First Methodist’s published history laments, “it fell into the hands of selfish men who used it for a saloon, gambling den, dance hall and other evil purposes.”

Both buildings survived the disastrous June 6, 1889 fire that swept through about three dozen city blocks, but destroyed only one building on Third Avenue north of Yesler Way, and that a church: Trinity Episcopal ‘s first sanctuary at Jefferson Street. But the Methodists at Marion Street did not survive the clean sweep of the 1906-7 Third Avenue regrade which put their front steps a few feet in the air.

As with their former property, the commercial value of this corner had also risen, this time considerably higher than the expensive, but not priceless, architectural detailing on their second home’s gothic spires. So the corner was sold, the landmark razed and the congregation moved, again only two blocks, up Marion Street to its present home. The first church survived three decades, the second but two, and the third still stands on a central city block the present value of which would have excited Nebuchadnezzar.

It also excites some of the mainstay members in the First Methodist congregation who would like to sell their landmark – for millions no doubt – and move Seattle’s first church onto a fourth corner. Although there were no landmark laws to save the Methodists’ first two historic sanctuaries, there are for the third. Preservationists both within and without the congregation like the distinguished old church where it is: a soulful center for a neighborhood of bankers and lawyers. Both sides have their lawyers. This old contest between the bottom-liners and the fine-liners is now (in 1988) in the courts, and will, no doubt, stay there for a long time.   (This feature appeared first in Pacific long ago, and as we now know they have saved their third home and stayed put.)

SEATTLE THEATRE

Considering that the whole world is a spectacular stage which is electronically delivered 24 hours a day into our well-wired living rooms, we may be forgiven for not fathoming the excitement that once was part of leaving the house and stepping out to the theatre.

Seattle pioneer real estate nabob and theatre patron Henry Broderick remembered those early-century times as “an era when little pleasures were looked upon as treasures. Going to a theatre now is an incident in one’s life. Then, it was an event.”

And those events were decidedly democratic. You would almost certainly see a friend or acquaintance at the performance whether you were a “mechanic or a member of the 400.” You might well have dined out with friends before the show.

When the Seattle Theatre, at the northeast corner of Cherry and 3rd Avenue, was opened in 1892, it was the city’s premier showplace.  J. Willis Sayer, who in his time was an early-century theatre critic for both the Times and the P-I, remembered it as “a beautiful modern structure that housed leading attractions for a dozen years and was used until 1915.” This view of it dates from about 1910, or a few years after its heyday. The billboard here reads, “Emma Bunting, In Excellent Company with Anita the Singing Girl.”

During the 1890s when the Seattle Theatre was the city’s leading stage for variety theatre, it billed national acts like Hopkin’s Trans-Oceanic Star Specialty Company for a three-day run in May of 1894; David Henderson’s American Extravaganza Co. in “Sinbad the Sailor” for two days in April, 1895; and Professor Bristol’s Educated Horses for a full week during the summer of 1896. Traveling minstrel shows like the Georgia Minstrels, Black Patti’s Troubadours, Dante the Magician, Rusco and Holland’s Operatic Minstrels, and Hi Henry’s Big City Minstrels were also popular acts that made it on the Seattle Theatre’s stage in the 1890s.

Even motion pictures in their early dim and jerky form made it into a darkened Seattle Theatre. In August,1897 a “Veriscope” exhibition of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight was projected there. Film, which didn’t get a voice of its own until the late 1920s, was throughout the early 1900s often run on the same program as vaudeville (the 20th century name for “Variety.”) As Eugene Elliott notes in his A History of Variety-Vaudeville in Seattle, it was “the motion picture that freed variety from the saloon. The darkened house made the sale of drinks during the show impractical . . . Now income depended solely upon admissions, a rapid turnover was necessary . . . Sometimes as many as 15 or 20 performances were given in a day. When the vaudeville part of the show was still the most important, motion pictures were used as ‘chasers’ to clear the house for the next performance.”

Of course, ultimately the movies eclipsed vaudeville. It was much easier to move a few reels around the country than a seven-act variety show with seven stars and supporting paraphernalia.

When John Cort, one of Seattle’s nationally known early century impresarios, opened his Grand Opera House in 1900, only one-half block down Cherry Street from the Seattle Theatre, the latter was superseded.  For a while Cort also controlled the Seattle, introducing burlesque there after he captured the lease in 1905. But as Broderick recalled, this burlesque was of a “genteel character with only occasional lapses into the visceral vernacular.”

The Seattle Theatre’s run was, all in all, a rather long and successful one. It survived until the elegant terra cotta Arctic Club took its place. And more recently, beginning in the 1970s with a proliferation of many new companies, theatre in Seattle has once again become, for many residents, something more than a mere incident.

SHOREY’S BOOKSTORE

By all descriptions Samuel Shorey, an old bachelor in a skull cap, was a fussy eccentric, and he loved books. He and his partner Bradford Trask started out selling magazines and tobacco from a little storefront on Third Avenue near Yesler Way. In 1894 or ’95, they moved to 701 Third Ave., at its northwest comer with Cherry Street. The front window of Shorey’s Old Book Store reads “Old Books Bought and Exchanged.”

Shorey also was an essayist and aphorist with wide interests. This was a tradition continued into the 1970s with Shorey’s Publications, publishers of hundreds of out-of-print Northwest titles. Their limited first runs of inexpensive reprints could amount to as few as 25 books.  (Many are now cherished by collectors.)  Early century Shorey’s was a hangout for undergraduate intellectuals. The bookman was a kind of free tutor to university students in pursuit of scholarly leads and citations for school assignments.

In 1922, Shorey’s was forced to move one block north on Third Avenue when Seattle First National Bank razed this corner for the creation of the terra-cotta Dexter Horton Building.  Sam and his brother William took 100,000 volumes with them to 815 Third Avenue, seen directly above.  Millions of books and 53 years later the store moved to the northeast comer of First Avenue – then still “Flesh Avenue” – and Union Street.

Seattle’s largest used-book store celebrated its centennial in 1990. In 1991, displaced again, Shorey’s moved across First Avenue to the South Arcade Building of Pike Place Market.  About ten years later it moved to its last location in “Freford” (aka Wallmont) the interstitial strip to both sides of Stone Way between the Fremont and Wallingford Avenues.   There it lasted until – and this is from a very imperfect memory – about 2005, when Shorey’s became strictly an on-line book seller.

The FRYE HOTEL

When new in 1911 – and so a century ago – the Frye Hotel was described by consensus as simply the finest hotel in Seattle. It was also one of the tallest of the city’s new steel-frame skyscrapers.  In the early photo, construction continues at the retail level facing the sidewalk on Yesler Way. Eleven stories up, the grandly ornamented cornice nearly overflows like a fountain at the cap of this elegant Italian Renaissance landmark.

The Frye Hotel was the last of Seattle pioneer George F. Frye’s many accomplishments. Arriving in Seattle in 1853, the 20-year-old German immigrant helped Henry Yesler assemble his steam sawmill and quickly became a favorite of Arthur and Mary Denny and, later, their daughter Louisa who was 17 when George married her in 1860. Together they had six children and many businesses, and Louisa was very much a partner in both. They ran the first meat market in Seattle, opened a bakery, raised the city’s first distinguished stage (the Frye Opera House), and built and managed at least three hotels.

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

The commercial heart of Seattle was already moving north from Pioneer Square when the Frye was opened. In the early 1970s, the hotel was converted into low-income apartments.  Some brief time before this feature first appeared in Pacific on July 2, 2000, the Low Income Housing Institute purchased the hotel, restored the marble grandeur of its main floor, strengthened it against earthquakes and repainted and appointed its 234 units.  Congratulations to the Frye on its centennial.

(click photos to enlarge)

In my oldest memory of this flat iron building the stone is a soiled black and the inside is stuffed with automobiles. As I remember it they seemed to have all been made in Detroit or near it.  The pie-shaped place was well ventilated, for many of the windows were broken.

That was about fifty years ago, or roughly at its half-life. This our third City Hall was completed in 1909, and designed by local architect Clayton Wilson as a home not for the mayor or the council but rather for the local police, prisoners, courts, the city’s health and sanitation departments and emergency hospital.

When it opened in the spring of 1909 the Mayor and City Council moved in too, but temporarily.  In 1916, they moved on and nearby to join King County offices in what was then called the City-County Building. Wilson’s trapezoidal creation between Yesler Way, Terrace Street and Fifth Avenue, was renamed the Public Safety Building.

Earlier, the primary addition to the building was a penthouse built not for the mayor but for housing the nurses.  The hospital kept responding to emergencies until 1951 when the city abandoned the building, which sometime after got filled with those auto bodies, some of them also in distress.  For those an auto repair shop was in residence.

Really the best source for Public Safety Building history is Dotty DeCoster’s illustrated  – and still fresh – narrative on historylink.org.  Published last year, it is that digital encyclopedia’s Essay 9336.

In 1977 a restored 400 Yesler Building, its new name, welcomed some municipal offices – including the Department of Community Development  or DCD – back to its floors.  I was by coincidence nearby when a visibly beaming Mayor Wes Ullman inspected it that year, his last in office.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, a few relevant past features from the neighborhood.  There are seven or eight more – although it is getting late.   I’ll start with something on the first city hall.

CITY HALL, ca. 1886

This ca. 1886 portrait of a police line-up (of policemen not suspects) may be also the only surviving close-up of the Seattle city hall that was built on the east side of Third Avenue (Second Ave.) south of Mill Street (Yesler Way) in 1882. This first dedicated city hall is given a succinct description by pioneer journalist Thomas Prosch in the typewritten manuscript of his helpful chronological history of the city. “The house was a two-story brick of 40 by 60 feet, the first floor being used in the front for an engine room and in the rear for a jail, the upper floor being divided into a Council Chamber and rooms for the Clerk, Treasurer and Chief of Police.” The 1884 Sanborn fire insurance map notes that the rear windows were covered with iron bars and that this was the only brick building on the block – a material that nonetheless did not save it from destruction by the city’s Great Fire of 1889.

Chief, William Murphy posed on the far left. Murphy’s part in local history is in sum an unpleasant one. Instead of prohibiting the round up of Seattle’s Chinese from their homes on the Sunday morning of February 7, 1886, Murphy joined in. And since most his victims lived south of Yesler Way in quarters within a block or two of City Hall, the Chief was both near by and knew on what doors to pound. By the time the county sheriff, deputies and the volunteer home guards were alerted by the ringing of church bells, Murphy and his gang of sinophobes had pushed the resident Chinese and their belongings to the docks. Remarkably, for this sour performance Murphy was not fired. Instead he was outranked by a new office of inspector of police. The too-human truth is that Murphy’s racist behavior was widely popular and required time and a police force stocked with new officers loyal to the new inspector to check the habits of this chief and some of his force.

 

WILSE’S KATZENJAMMER CASTLE

In the long and comic history of Seattle’s search for a dignified city hall, the most bizarre years occurred when the city’s population exploded. Government offices for 40,000 Seattle citizens moved into the firetrap pictured in today’s historic scene just one year after the fire of 1889. It sat facing Third Avenue to the west between Jefferson Street and

Yesler Way and was saved from the fire by water buckets and wet blankets spread between the building’s roof and the shower of sparks that swept across Third.

The building was already eight years old in 1890 and had been the home of county government. When the county moved up to First Hill, the clapboard building was left to the city. Over the next 19 years, the city’s population quadrupled, and so did this city hall with an assortment of alterations and extensions that resembled the comic constructions in the then popular cartoon strip, the Katzenjammer Kids. In its last years, this city hall was popularly known as the Katzenjammer Castle.

Scores of photos exist showing the variety of permutations it took through its relatively short life. This view was recorded by Norwegian photographer Anders Wilse, who lived and worked in Seattle between 1897 and 1900. The first of these Katzenjammer scenes looks to the southwest, across the intersection of Third Avenue and Jefferson Street. By this time the city had added the extension to the clapboard muni-building visible on the right side along Third Avenue, the double stairway on the left along Jefferson, and had cut a sidewalk-level door into the odd-shaped space beneath its main entrance on Third.  In the decade after Wilse shot this scene, the Katzenjammer Castle grew to at least three times its original size.  However, the city outdistanced it and the castle was razed by 1909.

BLACK MARIA

[First published in Pacific on 9-30-1984.]

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

The favored choice was to take the Seeing Seattle tour bus. Or, for a little more trouble, an early Seattleite could get a ride in the Seattle Police Patrol’s brand new Black Maria. The last choice was a final option: a ride in Seattle’s first motorized hearse. But it was the city’s patrolling Black Maria that seemed to get the most attention.

In the accompanying historical photo, the new paddy wagon is being shown off in front of city hall and has no problem luring a crowd.  On May 13, 1907 the Post-Intelligencer ran another photo of the police wagon with a caption that read: “The new automobile police patrol is ready to be formally delivered to the police department, provided it measures up . . . Chief Wappenstein and others made several trips in the wagon. On level streets, the machine moves along at the rate of 15 mph. It was built by the Knox Company of Springfield, Mass., and is for durability rather than speed.” And it did measure up.

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

Pictured in today’s contemporary photo is one of the department’s four modern vans. This one’s radio call name is David-Ten. It’s parked in the same spot as old Black Maria, but today the site of the old “Katzenjammer” City Hall is called City Hall Park.

SIDE BY SIDE

As far as I can recall, this is the only photograph that shows, side by side, two of the more significant structures in our pioneer history.  On the left facing Third Avenue is the Yesler Mansion; on the right, Seattle City Hall. You cannot tell it here (although you directly above), but in its lifetime the latter grew into such a heterodox structure that it was popularly called “the Katzenjammer Castle.” The nickname was drawn from a comic strip featuring the two mischievous Katzenjammer Kids, whose adventures took place in a cityscape stuffed with clumsy structures resembling Rube Goldberg inventions.

In its own, ornate way, the 40-room Yesler Mansion was also clumsy. In “Shaping Seattle Architecture,” Jeffrey Karl Ochsner of the University of Washington Department of Architecture, notes its “highly agitated forms . . . irregular bays, picturesque profile and varied details . . . are typical of American High Victorian architecture.”  I, for one, fall for this kind of clumsiness. When construction began on the mansion in 1883 in time for the depression or “Panic of 1883,” its municipal neighbor was already standing for two years as the King County Courthouse. When, in 1886, Henry and Sara Yesler moved two blocks from their home in Pioneer Place (Square) to their big home, it was barely furnished. After Sara died the following year, Henry and his nephew James Lowman went east to visit relatives and buy furniture. Henry died in late 1892. Seven years later, the Seattle Public Library moved in. The stay was short. On New Year’s Day 1901, fire destroyed the Yesler Mansion and 25,000 books. Twelve years earlier both buildings just escaped the city’s “Great Fire.” ~

UNREAD RUINS

In 1883 the city’s first industrialists, Henry and Sarah Yesler, rewarded themselves by building a 40-room mansion in their orchard facing Third Avenue between Jefferson and James Streets. The oversized home was not yet twenty when it burned down early in the morning of New Years Day, 1901. Actually, from this view of the ruins it is clear that while the big home was gutted by fire neither the corner tower (facing 3rd and Jefferson) nor the front porch – including the library sign over the front stairs – were more than blistered by it.

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

Soon after Sarah’s death Henry and James Lowman, Yesler’s younger nephew who was by then managing his affairs, took a long trip east to visit relatives, buy furnishings for the still largely empty mansion and, as it turned out, find a second wife for Henry. It was a local sensation when next the not-Iong-for-this-world octogenarian married in his 20-year-old (she may have been 19) cousin Minnie Gagler.

After Henry died in the master bedroom in 1892 no will could be found. While Minnie was suspected of having destroyed it this could not be proved. Consequently, the home was not — as Lowman and others expected — given to the city for use as a city hall.  Instead Minnie stayed on secluded in it until 1899 when she moved out and the Seattle Public Library moved in.

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

After its destruction the site was temporarily filled with the Coliseum Theatre (“The largest west of Chicago, seating 2600.”) until the first floors of the King County Courthouse – aka the City-County Building – replaced it in 1916 . . This comparison (the principal one) looks east across Third Avenue.

THE WAYSIDE MISSION

The Idaho was probably one of the last ships to be buried beneath Seattle’s waterfront. The irony of this sidewheeler’s last days was sensational enough to be popularly told and retold. As a 1903 article in the weekly Commonwealth put it, the Idaho’s career was “a happy instance of compensation” in which an “opium-smuggling ship became an ark of refuge for opium victims.”

Built to work on the Columbia River out of The Dalles, the Idaho was soon successfully taken over that river’s treacherous cascades and then, in 1882, was sent on to Puget Sound. Here its shadier labors included smuggling illegal aliens and opium. But in 1899 the ship was redeemed by a Spanish Jesuit turned surgeon.

Dr. Alexander de Soto bought the steamer with money made from practicing surgery on the well-to-do and converted it into a hospital for the down-and-out. With the ship set above high tide on pilings at the foot of Jackson Street, De Soto and his wards abandoned their first hospital, a borrowed bam where he not only cared for but also lived with his indigent patients. The good works of De Soto’s Wayside Mission were so in demand that his example eventually spurred the city itself to provide health care for the indigent. With the 1909 completion of the new Public Safety ·Building (now the 400 Yesler Building); Seattle opened its own clinic.

Two years earlier, in 1907, the Wayside Mission was forced from its land-bound sidewheeler and moved to a temporary site at Second and Republican, now the part of the Seattle Center taken by the Bagley Write Repertory Theatre.  Soon after, the redeemed Idaho was laid to rest beneath fill near the foot of Jackson Street.

[ CLICK TWICE on the two Commonwealth pages that follow from May 23, 1903, and they will leap to a size for reading.]

 

FOURTH AVENUE UPHEAVAL

Under the headline “Many Evidences of Progress,” The Sunday Times of Nov. 22, 1908 reported that the completion of the Fourth Avenue regrade “comes doubtless something of a surprise to many who did not realized the progress that has been made.”  Looking at the evidence of this photograph that looks north on Fourth from the Terrace Street overpass two days earlier we may also be surprised.

But we shouldn’t be.   While the new street is not yet completed the lowering of it to a new grade has been.  Within a year all of the structures — save for the middle one of five on the right — would be destroyed including the historic Turner Hall on the left.  Built in 1886 it survived the city’s Great Fire of 1889 to be renamed the Seattle Opera House, although its standard faire was not Mozart or Verdi but minstrel shows.  (Note: on the Friday night this photograph was shot Maud Powell, America’s greatest violinist of the time, played Ernst’s ‘Fantasia’ on airs from Verdi’s Othello to more than 1000 packed into the U.W.’s then new gymnasium.)

Also in the Sunday Times just noted, Henry Broderick, then the most quotable of local real estate agents, shared his philosophy of progress in this upheaval.  “Someone has said that, in an American sense, a dead town is one in which the streets are not all torn up.”  Broderick added this statistic, “It is interesting to know that at the moment there are not less than 15 lineal miles of Seattle streets in various processes of improvement.”

Finally, November 1908 was also a month for spiritual upheaval between two Presbyterian ministers: the Rev. C. H. Killen and the Rev. Mark Matthews.  Speaking at Matthew’s invitation before the Ministerial Federation of Seattle, Killen warned his fellow preachers that if they did not reinstitute early Christian practices like “feet washing ceremonies, love feasts and holy kissing bees” that they with their flocks would “tumble head foremost into perdition.”

Embarrassed at having been “buncoed by a religious crank” Matthews soon put it strait on who is really going below.  “There is no place where the ruin of young lives can be carried on so easily as in Seattle. The pernicious dance hall, the wine room and the quack doctor are inseparably involved in the steps of progress toward destruction.  After that ring down the curtain, for the next act is in hell.”

YESLER CABLE’S LAST DAY

The above historical scene on Yesler Way was photographed on Friday afternoon August 9th, 1940.  It was the last day of cable car service in Seattle, and on Saturday the Yesler line was turned over to gas busses.

Enough locals understood the significance of this Friday that the Municipal transit had to put two extra cars on the line.  Before the last car was silenced at 2 a.m. Saturday morning the typical whirring and clanging noises of the cable line were counterpointed by the cheering and singing of the trolley fans that crowded onto the cars.  The operators added to this noise by clanging the cable cars bells all along the line.

Earlier a spirit citizen attempt to save the cable lines only postponed their demise and first the James Street line, followed by the Madison cable and last the Yesler system were closed in 1940.  Since its death at 52 there have been periodic calls for the system’s return and, no doubt, a rumbling and ringing cable line between Pioneer Square and Leschi Park would be a very popular “unrapid” transit for tourists and locals alike.

Car 22 was constructed in 1907 by the Seattle Electric Company at its Georgetown shops.  It was part of the fleet sold with the city’s transit system to the city in 1919.  Painted orange like the rest of the municipal fleet Car 22 was soon scraped.

In 1920 the Yesler Cable line’s western terminus was moved two blocks east from First Avenue to Prefontaine Place where here (in both photographs above) twenty years later Cable Car 22 takes on passengers for one of its last trips to Leschi Park on cable railway’s last day of operation in Seattle. More than half a century later both the Prefontaine Building, right, and the 400 Yesler Building, left, survive.

It has reached “nighty bears” time and so we will cut it off with a detail from the new City Hall, or Municipal Building – a moving piece of its sliding water.   Tomorrow late morning we will look for two missing subjects and add them – if we find them.

(click on photos to enlarge)

Judging merely from the paucity of pictures taken from it, few photographers have struggled to climb to the top of the Great Northern Depot’s tower for this unique look north into the city’s Central Business District. The tower and its depot were completed in 1906, and soon a nearly 180-degree panorama looking north like this was recorded in its first year.   The top view was recorded a quarter-century later, and I have not seen any other pans snapped between them.

Roughly one-fourth of the way into the pan from its left border there is an “unnatural” jog in the street grid.  That is where part of the left panel and the entire center panel of the panorama have been joined. (Nothing of the third right panel has been included here.) Jean Sherrard’s repeat of it all was recorded with a wide-angle lens that required just one snap.

If you can remember the city’s skyline before 1968, the year the SeaFirst tower at Third and Madison was topped off at fifty stories, you may be counted as an old timer, at least by cityscape standards.  In 1967 the skyline looked very much like it does here in circa 1930. I think the date for this cityscape is late 1930, for construction of the added floors to the City-County Building, far right, is nearing completion, and the dates inclusive for that improvement was 1929-31.  This view cannot have been recorded after Jan. 8, 1931, the day when the old King County Courthouse on First (aka Profanity) Hill was razed by dynamite.  It is still standing in the third panel, the one that is not included here.

WEB EXTRAS

This time, Paul, I’m going to add a couple of pans I took from the Great Northern Tower. One looks south-to-west, much backlit by the sun.

The other (somewhat distorted by the stitch of Photoshop) looks more to the east, over the International District.

My challenge is, Paul, can you find a ‘then’ photo taken in either direction?  Sir, you test me, or you tease me, for I have at least hinted to you the shapes, subjects and directions of the first two views added directly below.

THE JACKSON STREET (& More) REGRADE

One has to sign a release to climb to the top of the King Street Station’s clock tower. A steel stairway ascends through room after empty room until you reach the larger chamber with the four clockworks. Next, a somewhat shaky spiral staircase leads up to the catwalk beneath the tower’s pyramidal roof. There, 240 feet above the railway tracks, you can enjoy a 360-degree, unobstructed view that is rarely seen. Hardly anyone (including me) ever takes the time or gets permission to make this aerobic climb. Both of the “now’ and “then” panoramas were photographed from the east side of the tower looking down upon the International District. Jean Sherrard took the color “now” and – if I can still find it tonight – Genny McCoy took the black-white sort-of-now back some few weeks before this feature first appeared in Pacific Mag. on Nov. 2, 1983. (For the moment I have failed in finding McCoy’s recording.)

The oldest view was taken sometime between 1905 when the tower was completed and 1907 when work began on the Jackson Street regrade. The difference between “now” and “then” is deep. The hill has been cut away as much as 85 feet, and the neighborhood, originally part of pioneer Doc Maynard’s claim, has been entirely made over. Only one structure from the “before” remains in the “after.” In the 55 years between 1876, when First Avenue was graded between Yesler Way and Pike Street, and 1930, when the last of Denny Hill was removed, more than 50 million tons of Seattle earth were scraped and shifted about in the city’s more than 60 regrade projects. Of these, after Denny Hill, the Jackson Regrade was the largest.

Even from as high a prospect as the campanile’s catwalk, the grade change is obvious. King Street, which runs east from 5th Avenue up the center of both views, is now a gentle incline. In 1907 the two-block grade between Sixth, Maynard, and Seventh Avenues was a cliff too steep for a street. And on the left, the steepest grade along Jackson Street was reduced from 15 to 5 percent.

The regrade’s promoters referred to Jackson Street as “the Pike Street of the South.” Their promotions for the project explained that it would make the Rainier Valley as accessible to the business district as Capitol Hill was by way of Pike Street. Jackson’s deepest cut was, again, 85 feet at Ninth Avenue. If the dirt were reapplied, then in the contemporary view it would reach to the top of the Interstate-5 freeway. The highest part of Jackson was just to the left of the rooftop of Holy Names Academy, the dominant structure whose gothic spire pierces the center horizon of the ca. 1906 historical scene.

Holy Names was built along the east side of Seventh Avenue in 1884. Six years later, South School, the dark profile on the right horizon (referring here, again, to the top pan that looks east from the GN tower), was put up at Twelfth and Weller. Both of these landmarks were razed by the regrade.

That one structure that was not removed was the Japanese Baptist Church. This four-story clapboard still stands at the northwest corner of Jackson and Maynard, although it has seen be remodeled. In Jean’s “now” view east from the tower, its imitation war-brick exterior rises directly across Jackson Street from the much larger Bush Hotel. In the historical view the Baptist Church is the three-story gabled building located across Jackson Street from the large vacant lot which is just left of the photograph’s center.

The actual work of lowering and so preserving this church “fell upon” L.B. Gullett who advertised himself as an “experienced house mover.”  He used a picture of the Japanese Baptist Church to prove it.  Actually, this church was one of the few sacred institutions in a more profane neighborhood of flophouses for single immigrant men and establishments with names like “The Dreamland Cabaret,” “Miss Emma’s New Stars,” “The Gaity,” and “The Red Light.” On November 1, 1909 the politicians and promoters who thought this kind of neighborhood expendable gathered on the regrade to celebrate its conclusion. They envisioned a new neighborhood of modern construction. Fortunately, we got the International District instead.

Frank Harwood’s Stereo

Frank Harwood took his stereoscopic camera to the north side of Weller Street and pointed it northeast towards Maynard Avenue.  The boxish rooming house that dominates the upper-right-hand corner sat midblock between Weller and King Streets.  The white streak near the center of the photograph(s) is a high-pressure jet of water being thrown at the hill along King Street.  Before the regrade King Street, too steep for a street in the two blocks between Sixth, Maynard and Seventh avenues, was a switchback trail.  The trail can be located easily in the earliest look into the neighborhood east from the Great Northern tower.   Now the King Street grade runs about 5 percent.  Maynard Avenue, supported behind cribbing in this view, was also lowered and its grade reduced.

The stereo was made not long after the 1907 beginning of the Jackson Street Regrade which, when it was completed in 1909, took as much as 85 feet of sandy loam and glacial hardpan from the ridge between First and Beacon hills.  In a public work second in size only to the Denny Regrade, 27 blocks on and near the tidelands were filled with the mud blasted with hoses from 29 blocks above the tides.   The regraders next moved south to cut Dearborn Street through the northern flank of Beacon Hill.

The two regrades – Jackson and Dearborn – razed several landmarks, including South School and Holy Names Academy; part of the academy’s tower shows at upper right above the rooming house.

(click to enlarge photos)

The photographer of this satisfying record of Guy Phinney’s Woodland Park Green House is unidentified because although she or he signed the negative at its bottom-right corner, someone’s fingerprint sooner or later smudged it beyond recognition.  The early view (ca. 1890) looks east-southeast across the park’s extension of Fremont Avenue.

For his repeat Jean Sherrard moved a few feet to the west of the historical prospect in order to include samples of the illustrated banners that now decorate the entrance to the zoo.  Jean used his extension pole to approximate the elevation of the historical view, which was photographed somehow from the roof of the well-wrought stone home in which the Phinney family was temporarily living at this entrance to their big country estate.

The Phinney family shared the park with that part of the pubic that obeyed park rules.  Out of frame to the right was a grand granite arch with “Woodland Park” chiseled across it and next to it a large sign posting the commandments.  These included prescriptions against dogs, guns, spitting, swearing, drinking, picking the flowers, and teasing the animals in the Phinney’s small zoo.  The stars were one bear and two ostriches, caged but not together.

The Phinney’s grand plans for their park, including a mansion for the family, were stopped with the father’s sudden death in 1893.  In 1899 the prudent city council overruled the mayor’s veto and purchased the park for “future generations.”  The green house, which was used to nurture starters for landscaping in other city parks, was succeeded in 1912 by Volunteer Park’s new plant conservatory, and Phinney’s charming glass house for plants was sacrificed for what later, with the activism of the Seattle Rose Society, became Woodland Park’s prized Rose Garden.

WEB EXTRAS

Now we’ve moved to our new Cadillac server, Paul, I’m hoping we can return once again to our tradition of lengthy blog posts on the front page.

So, without linking to an inside page, I ask the weekly question:  Anything to add, Paul?

A little Jean – a few features from the dozen or so subjects I’ve given to Woodland Park or Green Lake over the past 30 years.  The choices here have to do either with matters near to the main entrance to Woodland Park or with ways to get to the park and across it.  We will also include a few distant looks at Phinney Ridge to feel the effects on the horizon of the old growth that was kept in the park part of the ridge for a few years, at least, into the 20th Century.

GUY PHINNEY’S CAR

(First appeared in Pacific, March 11, 1990)

The electric trolley on the right of this scene did not, at least in the beginning, have a regular run. Rather, it was the private car of Guy Phinney, and his name was inscribed on the trolley’s sides. The tracks for Phinney’s Woodlands Railroad ran only from his park to Fremont, where it hooked up with the Seattle Traction Company’s line from Seattle.

Guy Phinney brought his car from the East in 1890, one year after he began developing his acres on Phinney Ridge. Soon Phinney made his family car somewhat public, carrying passengers to a park he first intended to be his country estate, but which soon developed into a popular retreat but not without conditions.

Post at the arched granite entrance, Phinney outlined his rules. The first read: “This is a private park, but free to all persons who obey these rules and conduct themselves in an orderly manner.” Rule Two continued, “Positively NO DOGS allowed in this park. Any dog seen within its limits will be shot.” Phinney’s other prohibitions against guns, animal abuse (except his own on visitors), picking flowers and vulgar language were backed up by his physique.  Guy Carleton Phinney stood 6 feet 3 inches and weighed almost 300 pounds.

Phinney does not seem to be included in the above informally posing group at the entrance to his Woodland Park. The year is probably 1890 or ’91. The Phinneys’ dream of building a permanent home at their park was interrupted when Guy died in 1893 at the age of 42. The park and trolley continued to be used for retreats and recreation.  In 1899 Mrs. Phinney sold her country estate to the city for $100,000.

 

 

SAMI CENTENNIAL

(This feature first appeared in Pacific June 21, 1998.)

One of the curious stories attached to the Yukon and Alaska gold rushes of the late 1890s is the adventure of nearly one hundred Laplanders – or Sami as they are more correctly called – and their reindeer.

By order of President McKinley the U.S. Army’s Reindeer Service launched an expedition for rescuing reportedly hungry American miners on the Yukon River with meat bought on the hoof in Lapland.  After funds were appropriated by Congress in December, 1897, 538 harness-broken reindeer (all gelded bucks), with their Sami herders, were carried across an Atlantic Ocean stirred by winter storms from Norway to New York’s Pennsylvania Station.  There they were boarded on special trains for a trans-continental trip pursued by a press and public still stimulating on the gold rush story.  With their March 7^th arrival on a sidetrack to Fremont these sensational attentions continued.

After the reindeer were led up Fremont Avenue to the fenced enclosure of the still private Woodland Park, the Sami and their stock were soon surrounded by locals there to enjoy the Laps and their exotic costumes.  This sightseeing climaxed on Sunday, the 13^th when 8000 picnickers came to Woodland Park gawk and talk loudly – to make themselves understood – to the visitors.  The next day’s Seattle Times headlined their report “A Day For Reindeer And Dears That Reign.”

Actually, the Samis’ troubles began here, but not from sightseeing.  Assuming that the reindeer could eat the grass of Woodland Park, Major W.R. Abercrombie, the officer sent to temporally command the expedition, ordered that the larger portion of their packed supply of moss be destroyed.  Twelve reindeer soon died from a combination of park grass and the junk food fed them by curious tourists.  By time the expedition reached the gold fields on the Yukon River months later, the majority of the herd had died of starvation for want of their destroyed staple.  By then, however, it was universally known that the first reports of the miner’s hunger were wildly exaggerated and none of them were found starving.

The expedition’s story was recorded at the time by one of its Norwegian herders.  Pacific Northwest readers who wish to follow this journal and story in detail can read Reindeer and Gold, past Western Washington University’s professor Keith A. Murray’s history of this extraordinary expedition.

FREMONT REINDEER

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 23, 2003)

This odd scene of eight or nine reindeer posing near the middle of Fremont’s main intersection of 34^th Street and Fremont Avenue was recorded probably on either March 7^th or March 15^th 1898 – most likely the latter.

On Monday the 7th a few more than 500 reindeer were unloaded at Fremont after a transcontinental railroad journey.   The trip created a nation-wide commotion as locals in most of the towns along the line knew the special trains were coming and lined the tracks to get a glimpse of the herd and the about 100 Norwegian Samis (Laplanders) who cared for it.   It was first reported that they were on a journey of mercy – to carry food to the starving gold miners on the Yukon River.  But by the time the trains left New York it was reported that while the miners were not starving the U.S. Army Reindeer Service would still deliver.

From Fremont the reindeer were marched up Fremont Avenue to Woodland Park and fenced in.   There they also served as a week-long sensation while the Reindeer Service arranged steerage for Alaska.  The human herd that rushed to the park to get a glimpse of the visitors was many times greater than the exotic visitors.  The curious hordes so taxed the electric trolleys that lights dimmed downtown.

On Sunday the 13^th it was estimated that 8000 visited the park.   A Seattle Sami – living in Ballard – was hired as interpreter.  One reporter claimed that “stylish ladies kissed the Lapp men” and there was considerable reciprocal drinking as well.  The casualties were 12 reindeer who died from a combination of park grass and snacks fed them by the crowds.   The dimwitted officer in charge had destroyed the moss – their normal diet – shipped with them believing that reindeer could eat hay and park grass instead.

The herd and herdsmen left Woodland Park and their celebrity on Tuesday March 15.  They paraded back down Fremont Avenue to Fremont and there boarded cattle cars for a short trip to the waterfront where the three-masted bark “Seminole” awaited to carry them to Alaska.  The trip that began in Norway on February 2, 1998 reached Dawson nearly one year later on Jan 27, 1899.   Most of the heard was lost to starvation and exhaustion on the overland trek between Haines, Alaska and Dawson.  The miners asked to buy the survivors to slaughter for fresh meat.  They were refused.

The GREEN LAKE TROLLEY

(First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 19, 1992)

Beginning in the spring of 1890 it was possible to make a comfortable and relatively speedy trip from downtown Seattle to the north end of Green Lake. Until the completion of the electric trolley to Fremont along the future landfill of Westlake, the Green Lake trip required a ride on a small steamer across Lake Union.

Construction of the Green Lake Electric Railway was made easier with the purchase of the old logging railroad that skirted the east shore of the lake.  The logged-away landscape around the lake was not so picturesque except for one portion, the southwest corner of the lake where developer Guy Phinney’s (hence the ridge) private park was saved from the woodman’s axe. Appropriately, they called it Woodland Park.

Soon after the Phinneys sold their park to the city in 1900, the Green Lake Electric railway was extended along the west side of the lake and through the park. In 1903 Green Lake developer and once Seattle Mayor W.D. Wood wrote, “A first-class electric railroad now belts the lake, so that the beauties and privilege of this lake and of its shores and Woodland park are available to all. Any intrusion of the car line is offset scores of times by the increase of public service and enjoyment afforded by its presence.”

The Olmsted Brothers, the park’s designers, did not agree. They wanted the noisy railway removed from the park, or at least hidden behind paralleling earth embankments. The famous landscaping firm, however, lost this battle to the railway’s owners, the Seattle Electric Company. The trolley entered the park at North 59th Street and Whitman Avenue North and exited at North 55th Street and Woodland Park Avenue. It proceeded directly south through the park atop a system of appropriately rustic wooden viaducts that spanned the undulating topography of the park’s eastern slope.

(It would seem that the above subject was photographed from the rustic stone and timber bridge shown several times below.  It looks north to the trestle that crossed a shallow ravine up which a paved park road now climbs until it is stopped by the Aurora interruption.  This may be used for another now-then.  The prospect may surely be reached by the tall Jean with his 10-foot extension pole.)

 

INTERLUDE – A ROCK WALL MYSTERY

Earlier this afternoon I searched for a feature I imagined, it seems, that I had written about a rustic bridge that once crossed above the Green Lake trolley as it passed through Woodland Park near its northern border.  The dirt approaches to the bridge were supported by river rock walls and the span itself  was made of rough-hewn lumber.   I could not find it, and now doubt that I ever wrote it.  I should have, for, as we show below, there are many surviving photographs of this landmark, which still exists as a pars pro toto, which Latin phrase is one of the very few fragments that I remember from my high school Latin class.  Another is “Puella est parva.”  In the early 1950s it was still a regular curriculum practice to require young American teen barbarians to study Latin.  Pars pro toto – if I have spelled it correctly – means the “part for the whole.”  All of us are for ourselves the most important pars pro toto in the universe.  Mothers who adore their children may be the exceptions.

A SPEEDWAY BIFURCATION

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct 31, 1993)

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

When an ordinance permitting the park’s bifurcation was passed by the Seattle City Council over the objections of the city’s park board, a front-page battle to save the park ensued. The leading advocate of this preservation and opponent of “park vandalism” was The Seattle Times. “It is proposed,” The Times’ editors wrote, “to build an 8,800-foot speedway 106 feet wide over a hill 293 feet high, and through 2,400 feet of the central portion of Woodland Park to save 25 seconds of time required to drive the 9,850 feet by way of Stone Way.” The Times figured the difference was about the length of three city blocks, and said 107 homes would be sacrificed to the thruway.

Much earlier, when the park’s hired landscapers, the Olmsted brothers, were designing the city’s boulevards and parks, they included West Green Lake Way, connected with Stone Way, as the principal route for north-south traffic and thereby circumvented Woodland Park. The landscapers proposed that the undeveloped center of Woodland Park be saved for, among other things, the expansion of the park’s zoological garden. In the meantime the Olmsteds recommended that the old-growth forest in the park’s undeveloped interior be preserved. However,  here are the stumps.

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

FIVE MORE