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This Sunday afternoon, March 10, the Magnolia Historical Society celebrates its tenth anniversary with what it expects to be an “entertaining and informative” open meeting. Those who attend will reflect together on Magnolia’s history, sharing a heritage that includes this tall landmark stump.

Monica Wooton, the society’s engaging leader, professes that this record of engineer Ambrose Kiehl surveying Ft. Lawton from this unique prospect is her “favorite photograph” among the large collection of Kiehl’s negatives,

Society member Monty Holmes is confident that Kiehl’s sawyer-made platform was once his.  The alert 82-year old Magnolian was born and raised on the Magnolia side of the Chittenden Locks.  During the Great Depression, for ten cents a bottle young Monty sold fresh milk got from the family’s cows to the WPA (Works Progress Administration) workers who with shovels and wheelbarrows made a graded West Commodore Way out of what the locals still often chose to call West Cow Manure Way.

In 1984 Holmes moved to his new home on West Commodore and the tall charred cedar stump that came with it.  Seeing this scene published last fall in the historical society’s quarterly gave Holmes his eureka! moment. “Here I am overlooking the Shilshole Bay inlet and that stump struck me as the same!”  Holmes explained that in the end his stump was a mere “thread of itself held together by the net of Oregon Grape that covered it.”

Come if you can between 2 and 4 this afternoon to Our Lady of Fatima Parish at 3218 w. Barrett Street.  It is in Magnolia’s verdant Pleasant Valley, which was once a green pasture for the neighborhood’s dairy farms.  Monica will be there, of course, Monty will be there too, and Jean and I as well.  Among other subjects we will be reviewing Monty’s stump story.  He is quite confident about it all, but we still cannot resist the fun of a silly pun.  We are, we confess, for the moment stumped by the stump.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes, Jean, much, much more, but you’ll have to click on Web Extras to get to it.

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Three thousand men got depression-time jobs building the Lacey V. Murrow Bridge – aka the Lake Washington Floating Bridge.  Forty-five percent was paid with a federal public works grant and the rest by revenue bonds secured by the 25-cent tolls. The bridge was formally dedicated and opened in the early afternoon – judging by the shadows – of a sunlit July 2, 1940.

About 2000 people watched from the tunnel plaza area here on the bridge’s Seattle side and hundreds more gathered around the toll booths at the bridge’s Mercer Island end.  Broadcast by radio nation-wide, the floating bridge was christened like a ship. After cutting the red ribbon, Kate Stevens Bates, daughter of Washington Territory’s first governor, Isaac Stevens, let swing and crash against the concrete bridge a yellow urn in which were mixed the waters of fifty-eight of the state’s waterways: lakes, bays and rivers.

With a smile about as wide, turned up and fixed as the grill work of his inaugural chariot, an open 1940 Lincoln Convertible, the state’s Governor Clarence Martin rode twice across the new bridge.  At half way Martin was the first to pay a toll.

We could compare the public effort required to build “the largest floating structure in the world” with our recent struggle to replace the feeble Alaska Way Viaduct with a deep bore tunnel, except that it would take too long.  Instead, we suggest that readers consult Genevieve McCoy’s fine chapter on the state’s bridges that is part our book “Building Washington.”  You can read it for free on the blog noted here below.

One more toot – an announcement.  This “now-then” comparison is one of about 100 such selected for an exhibit of “repeat photography” opening Saturday, April 9th, at the Museum of History and Industry.  Most of the exhibit’s Seattle examples were first published here in Pacific.  But the exhibit – most likely the last one for MOHAI in its old Montlake quarters – also includes examples from Washington State and even from Paris, the birthplace of photography.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Let me coyly answer my own question. I know Paul has some treats hidden away; including one of my favorites: a delightful photo of grinning then-governor Clarence Martin, as described above. For that and much more, click on ‘Web Extras’….

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Aside from the pyramid tower that originally topped the Pioneer Building  (Far right, it was pioneer Henry Yesler’s last contribution to Pioneer Place or Square), everything has survived between this “then” and this “now.”   (As a precaution the tower was removed following the city’s 1949 earthquake.) The historical photo was recorded sometime between 1902 when the top three floors of the slender Lowman and Hanford Building – here covered with signs at the scene’s center – were added to it’s seventh story, and 1905 when the temporary wood structures at the southeast corner of First Ave. and Cherry Street were razed for the construction of the Lowman Building, the dominant structure in Jean’s Sherrard’s repeat.  Here we will insert a front-on photograph also recorded sometime between 1902 and 1905.

The sensational part of the first of these two scenes is surely that signage, all of it promoting the principal commercial interests of James Lowman and Clarence Hanford.  The former arrived at his older cousin Henry Yesler’s invitation in 1877 and was directly made the assistance manager of Yesler’s Wharf. Within the decade he was managing Yesler’s affairs while also in business with pioneer Clarence Hanford running a joined job printing shop and stationary store that also sold books, pianos and such.

Plastering or painting the side of a brick building with signs is, of course, easier when there are no – or few – windows.   Clearly, when he added floors to his and his partner’s business address next door, James Lowman had his taller namesake building envisioned for the corner.  The signs would be short-lived and windows not needed.

(If you CLICK the “web extras” immediately below you will have opened to you four or five more historical features clustered around Cherry Street and supported with many more illustrations.)

WEB EXTRAS

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The city’s “great fire” of 1889 excited its already boom town qualities with the great labor of rebuilding more than 30 city blocks from scratch and real estate loans.

The technology for running electric trolleys came to Seattle only months before the fire and following the destruction, trolley systems – in addition to cable cars – began to send out their trunk lines in most directions from the city’s core.  Many in the immigrant tide needed cheaper land to build their homes – sites not in old Seattle but also not far from it.  The new common carriers to Ballard, the University District (still named Brooklyn then), Beacon Hill and those on the east shore of Lake Washington obliged.

Three lines reached the lake – at Leschi, Madison, and Madrona.  There all of them featured parks and other attractions like promenades, canoes for hire and nature trails. The line to Madrona was the last of the three and the final part of it, where the trolley cars descended to the lake, was in the embrace of a picturesque forest.  On reaching the lake riders found bathhouses, a dance pavilion, and rustic benches disturbed along paths that led back into the forest.  The hotel shown here greeted them at lake’s edge.

The Madrona hotel was built in 1892 and that’s the date penciled on the flip side of the original photo card produced by A. J. McDonald, a photographer responsible for a few of the best suburban scenes hereabouts in the early 1890s.  On the left a trolley car stands at the end of its line.  Perhaps McDonald road that car to the park to make this impression, while the conductor waited for him to return for the ride back to Pioneer Square, with a First Hill transfer on Broadway Avenue to a James Street cable car.  The fare from waterfront to waterfront – Elliott Bay to Lake Washington – was five cents.

WEB EXTRAS

For the complete MADRONA PARK STORY with some extras too, please click here.

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I first saw this snapshot of high-school fisticuffs years ago. The venerable North End journalist Stan Stapp shared it with me for possible use in The Seattle Times or an exhibit. It was one part of a thick handful of mostly Wallingford glossies he used as editor, columnist, reporter and photographer for his family’s neighborhood newspaper, The North Central Outlook.

I don’t remember Stapp explaining the circumstances of the scene — whose fist, whose chin, when and where. But Stapp was a 1936 graduate of Wallingford’s Lincoln High School; the family home and newspaper office were two blocks from Lincoln, and the bungalow behind the impetuous teens is also very Wallingfordian. Stapp passed in 2006.

Recently I stumbled upon my copy and showed it to John Sundsten, a 1950 graduate of Lincoln. On first glance, the retired University of Washington neuroanatomist thought, “The boys are dancing. Isn’t that odd.”

After quickly surrendering to the idea that this was a fight not a dance, the peace-loving musician-scientist carried the print to the Fremont Public Library where back issues of the Outlook are stored. Sundsten started with the issues in 1950, the year he graduated. Thumbing forward he soon found the picture and its story on page 3 of Stapp’s weekly tabloid, published May 2, 1952.

It was, not surprisingly, Stapp who took the picture and wrote the copy. He gave no names except that of Wallingford’s juvenile officer, Walter J. Hauan, who took the two pugilists to a Wallingford precinct room. Stapp leaves his story with a happy ending, we assume. He concludes, “Hauan’s fatherly manner of approach has helped clear things up for thousands of local youths in the past.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?…..(for the rest of the story, click here)

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Call it the spiritual urge to approach heaven or public relations; the Roman Catholic Church has had a historic knack for putting their parish footprints on tops of hills or on horizons.  St. James Cathedral is Seattle’s best example of a landmark sanctuary. Dedicated late in 1907, it’s twin towers, cupola and reflecting skin lent a plush interruption to the First Hill skyline and for years St. James watched over the city, and the city look up at its good shepherd.

Most likely within the first year after the cathedral was topped-off the commercial photographer William Romans left his studio on the sixth floor of the Colman Building and headed for the nearly new Great Northern Depot on King Street. The depot with its Venetian tower first opened in the spring of 1906. Perhaps Romans noted the dynamic sky beginning to brew over the city and decided its chiaroscuro delights would make an exquisite backdrop for the gleaming St. James, and it does.

One cannot reach the top of the depots’ tall campanile by elevator but rather, as both William Romans and Jean Sherrard discovered, by an exposed stairway. Given the effort it is perhaps not surprising that so few photographs taken from the vertiginous tower survive.

Two other cross-topped churches appear here.  Directly below St. James near the base of Roman’s real photo postcard stands the cathedral’s predecessor, Our Lady of Good Help at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue & Jefferson Street. To the right of St. James but lower on the hill stands Trinity Episcopal Church at the northwest corner of 8th and James. It was built after the congregation’s first sanctuary at 3rd and Jefferson was destroyed during the city’s “great fire” of 1889. It is the rare survivor of First Hill history that can be also found in Jean Sherrard’s “now.”

This side of St. James, very little survives from the hill-climbing field of mostly flats for workers – many of them single women – who once walked to their jobs in the Central Business District. We will note one abiding five story brick: the Madison Apartments facing its namesake street one block north of the Cathedral on 9th. Its rougher alleyway façade appears on the left horizon to the right of a First Hill grove of leafy street trees.

WEB EXTRAS

First, Paul, a confession (perhaps appropriate considering this week’s subject). Our ‘Now’ photo was cropped from a much larger shot, which I include below:

(please click here for the rest of the story)

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Certainly, many Pacific Northwest readers recall the construction in the mid-1970s of Waterfront Park and to the north of it the municipal aquarium. To help us remember, Frank Shaw photographed the entire process with his prized Hasselblad camera. Because Shaw was good about dating his subjects, we know that this work on the Waterfront Fountain by Seattle sculptor James FitzGerald was nearing completion by Sept. 27, 1974. We also know that the man on the ladder applying finishing touches to that sculpture could not be FitzGerald, who died nearly a year earlier.

This waterworks was the last of five fountains that FitzGerald designed for public places in Seattle. His wife, Margaret Tomkins, also an artist, and his assistant, Terry Copple, completed it. Of course, I wondered if that was Copple on the ladder. An old friend, filmmaker Ken Levine, attended the fountain’s installation and was confident that FitzGerald’s daughter, Miro, was there as well. I had not seen Miro in a quarter century but Levine had her address, so I wrote, asked and she answered that it definitely is Terry Copple in the photo. He helped complete the casting and final finishing during a difficult time of grieving for her family, she said, adding that she had worked in a restaurant with Copple and introduced him to her dad.

“Terry was a caring, dear person who worked from his heart in all he did,” she wrote. “Sadly, he passed away a few years ago in Vacaville, Calif.”

Miro, also an artist, lives in Sedona, Ariz., where for several years she was assistant director of its Arts Center. Recently retired, Miro can now give more of her time to painting — trying, she explains, to “capture the incredible Southwest landscapes.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Jean, the tasks remaining in preparation for our – with Berangere – early April opening at MOHAI of the “Repeat Photography” show (the last exhibit, they say, in the museum’s old Montlake location) weighs heavy on my head and I must give my time to it.  And yet there are some things to pull from some of the same past writing that was used to created the Pictorial History of the Seattle Waterfront, which is now up on this site as a pdf file.   Until “nighty bear” time (we thank Bill Burden for that good night signal)  we will slip a few things in that relate to the Pike wharf site.  We’ll begin with a splendid slide that Frank Shaw took of the performing Fitzgerald fountain on November 26, 1974.

Another of James Fitzgerald fountains in included in Shaw’s collection of colored slides and black-white negatives, most of them shot with his Hasselblad.  The sculptor’s Fountain of the Northwest was created for the city’s new playhouse in 1961, and was one of the artistic attractions of the 1962 Century 21 held there. Fitzgerald – and others  – like this one so much that he made two of them.  The other is on the Princeton University Campus, a kind of  fountain of the northeast.

We’ll follow now with more of Shaw’s recordings of the Waterfront Park, during its construction with 1968 “forward thrust” funds – belatedly – and after its completion.  We will not include his many photographs of the building of the waterfront aquarium.  We’ll save those for another time when we are less taxed.

We will turn now to older subjects, but ones that are still linked to the waterfront neighborhood near the foot of Pike Street.  First a look at the first structure built by the first settlers with California money to exploit the rich coal deposits on the east side of Lake Washington.  When it was new in 1871, the Pike Street Pier and Coal Wharf competed with Yesler’s Wharf as the biggest structure in town.  First we see it from the back of the Peterson & Bros photography studio at the waterfront foot of Cherry Street.

MIIKE MARU Aug 31, 1896.

After a sustained recession of three years following the economic crash of 1893, locals were alive to anything that might indicate a return to the three years of prosperity that followed the city’s Great Fire of 1889.  Nothing before the arrival of the gold rush ship Portland the following year seemed so promising as the appearance of the Japanese liner Miike Maru at Schwabacher wharf on Aug, 31, 1896.  It marked the beginning of a direct and regular service to Japan that since this beginning has only been interrupted by war.

The steamer arrived at 3 o’clock in the afternoon amid a welcoming uproar of factory whistles.   The Schwabacher Dock served as the terminal of this new service until it was moved at the turn of the century two piers south to Frank Waterhouse’s Arlington Dock or Pier 5 and still later to “Empire Builder” James J. Hill’s Great Northern docks at Smith Cove.

This view looks north from near the foot of Seneca Street.  The fanciful construction of the Clark and Bartette boathouse is evident on the far right.  The Schwabacher pier shed that shows to the far side of the Miike Maru is a transitional structure between post-89fire sheds and the 1899 warehouse, long familiar on the waterfront.  The top-most roofline (with two small vents) of the Ainsworth and Dunn’s Seattle Fish Company dock at the foot of Pike Street shows just above the Schwabacher roofline.

SCHWABACHERS WHARF FOLLOWING THE 1889 FIRE

With University Street and the ruins behind the photographer the above view looks north to Schwabacher’s wharf not long after the June 6, 1889 fire.  The photographer stands on the Rams Horn trestle – the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern trestle is on the left.  A box car is used as a wall on the Rams Horn.  It is nailed in place.

The June 19, 1889 issue of the Post-Intelligencer can be read as a caption.   “Most of the shipping in the harbor now lies between the wharf at the foot of Union Street and the wharf at the foot of University Street.  This is now the shipping center, it being all that was left outside the fire, except Mannings wharf in north Seattle [at Wall and Vine].  The Seattle Times description of June 22 continues this description.  “One cannot have a correct conception of the pressing needs of wharfage and more warehouse facilities at the present time without seeing the crowded condition of affairs on Schwabacher Wharf. At this wharf the wholesale grocer business of the Schwabacher firm is carried on, and besides it is the docks for all the O.R. & N. Company’s steamers.  The warehouse facilities are also inadequate, as goods are dumped onto the wharf and have to remain there without shelter until called for.  The ocean steamer Mexico on her last trip from S.F. had a large cargo of merchandise freight, all of which was discharged on the wharf, and left exposed to the elements until called for by the merchants.  In addition to this the company have to keep a special policeman to guard those goods by day and night . . .”

The ‘TON OF GOLD” Ship PORTLAND, JULY 17-18, 1897

No arrival on the Seattle waterfront created such a sustained stir as the sixty-eight passengers who disembarked from the steamer Portland carrying bags of gold dust onto the Schwabacher Wharf.  (above)  The crowd that gathered on the wharf at six in the morning knew they were coming because a Post-Intelligencer reporter earlier chartered a tug to meet the Portland as she entered Puget Sound.  Returning quickly with the story the P-I’s “Ton of Gold” issue came out about the time the Portland came in.  Within ten days 1,500 locals had fled the city for the Yukon.  The best sign of the Seattle hysteria came from its mayor, W. D. Wood.  Visiting in San Francisco he wired home his resignation and headed much further north than his home on Green Lake.

It is probably impossible to determine at what point in the Portland’s short stay that this view of it resting in a low tide between the Schwabacher and Seattle Fish Co. wharves was photographed.   A portion of the Schwabacher pier shed appears on the far right.  There is plenty of room on the apron to build a bigger warehouse, and here for the curious to visit a scene they sensed was historic even at the time.

On July 22 the Seattle Times reported that preparing to return north the ship had “cleared at the customs office this morning.  The crowd of people at the wharf occupies every square foot of space and this morning and afternoon a constant steam of people, men, women, boys and girls were down to see the Portland off.  It is a sight to witness the departure and a tedious delay for those who must wait. Many are the pathetic scenes of wives and mothers bidding farewell to husbands and sons who are off for the fields of gold.”

The “color” of the waterfront in the post-Portland months – and years – is captured in the somewhat gaudy prose of a 25^th anniversary commemorative article in The Seattle Times from July 16, 1922.

“Arrival of the gold ship Portland in July 1897 launched Seattle on one of the most thrilling and picturesque epochs in her shipping history . . . in a few months transformed Elliott Bay from a moderately active harbor into a strenuous and crowded shipping center . . . In a comparatively few months Seattle was able to boast that she could handle 15,000 men to Alaska every thirty days and she made good the boast with characteristic decisiveness . . . Up to Feb 1898 the first class fare to Skagway and Dyoea was $40.  It was then raised to $50 and the second class fare was increased from $25 to $35. In announcing the increase in rates, Seattle newspapers used the headline, ‘Rates Go Sky High.’  In April, however, the fares dropped to $10. The following Sept brought another drop, the first class fare falling to $25.

The stampeders who poured into Seattle the first winter 1897-98 had an inspiring war cry, ‘Klondike or bust, march the fust.’  By Feb 1898 the movement had grown to gigantic proportions and Seattle steamships were shooting back and forth as fast as their engines could drive them.  There were thirty-two scheduled sailings from Elliott Bay in Feb., l39 in March and 36 in April or 107 sailings in 99 days.  Thousands of Argonauts poured into the city from all over the world each week and other thousands departed at the same time for the Golden North.

As the Klondike rush subsided in 1900 the Nome rush began calling more thousands to the North.  In the spring of 1900 no less than 45 steamships were coming and going between Seattle and northern ports.  As many as five vessels arrived or left here in a single day.  In 1901 eighty ships went from her to Nome alone.”

WILLIAM HESTER AND HIS MARITIME CAMERA AT PIKE STREET

Although the ship is unidentified the two posing women are probably the photographer’s friends and not shipmates.  Women friends often accompanied the marine photographer William Hester while he solicited work on ships visiting the harbor.  His normal bread-and-butter subjects were the ship’s crews and captain.  And they, of course, were likely to welcome Hester’s companions as much as the photographer himself.  This turn-of-the-century scene looks at the Seattle skyline from the slip between the Pike Place pier, out of the picture on the left, and the Schwabacher Wharf on the right.   We repeat, the latter pier was later replaced by the open water of Waterfront Park.”

The S.S.OHIO ENROUTE TO TROUBLE

Written across the base of the subject above is it’s own helpful caption. It reads, “S.S. Ohio Leaving Seattle for Nome Alaska, June 1st 1907.” A broadside or poster tacked to the slab fence between the crowd and the ship promises “Fast and Improved Steam Ships between Seattle and Nome, Frequent and Regular Sailings.” A year later the White Star Steamship’s Ohio left Seattle for Nome also on the first of June. So it was regular.

It was also unlucky. In the 1907 sailing the Ohio struck an iceberg in the Bering Sea and 75 panicked passengers jumped overboard to the ice. Four perished before they could be returned to the ship that was not sinking. In 1908 the Ohio’s captain was careful to the extreme, infuriating many of its passengers who missed what they imaged were their best Nome chances while the ship waited for the ice to melt. In one year more the Ohio hit an uncharted rock in Swanson’s Bay, B.C. but the captain managed to make a run to shore and all but four of the 214 on board survived before the 360 foot-long steamship slipped away. When it was new in 1873, the Ohio was the largest vessel built in the U.S.

We may wonder at the size of the crowd here – far too many than can fit on the Ohio. Obviously the embarking of a vessel to Alaska even towards the end of the Yukon-Alaska gold rush era was enough excitement to bring out spectators in pants. Judging by their hats, caps and bonnets practically everyone of these figures – excepting the women in the light-colored frock, center-bottom – are men in the uniform of the day: dark suits.

The truth is that going to Nome in 1907 – or ten years after the local excitement connected with the Yukon-Alaska gold rush era began with the 1897 arrival of the S.S. Portland and its “ton of gold” – was still ordinarily a “manly affair”, meaning that many and perhaps most of those on board were still hoping to get rich quick on or near the beaches of Nome by some combination of sweat and luck.

There remain a few more subject to put in line here and, no doubt, many mistakes to proof.  I’ll return to them after a late breakfast.  Now I’m away – I repeat – to Nighty Bears, that wonderfully silly cave of sweet dreams.  I’m back, kind of, at 12:30 Sunday afternoon.  First here is another look at the Ohio, a close-up from the southeast corner of the Schwabacher Wharf.

TWO A. WILSE LOOKS SOUTHEAST from the PIKE PIER

As the gold rush stirred in the Schwabacher slip it also climbed to the pier.   Encouraged by the wealth got in part from warehousing and wharf rates the already venerable firm built a much larger warehouse on its wharf.   Two photographs by Norwegian photographer Anders Wilse from the same position on the roof of the Seattle Fish Company Wharf (Pier 8/59) record the big changes on the neighboring Schwabacher pier.

Both views look southeast over Railroad Avenue to the varied rooflines of the Diamond Ice plant and the hotels on First Avenue.   The conical tower of the Arlington Hotel (the old Gilmore block) surmounts the intersection of First and University Street from its southwest corner.

In the above view a small structure appears lower-left at the northeast corner of the Schwabacher Wharf.  Above it is the rear (west) wall of the Vendome Hotel on First Avenue.   A portion of the same small structure appears on the far left of the later Wilse view, below.  Although it holds the same position (one point in a triangulation when the photographer’s prospect is considered) with the structures across Railroad Avenue, it has been separated from the Schwabacher wharf which has been reconfigured about ten yards to the south.  The north wall of the much larger pier shed  (it fills most of left half of the frame) stands about ten feet south of the crest of the roof in the old shed that appears on the right of the earlier photograph.

Another and later Wilse view (below) looks back at both the Schwabacher Wharf and the Seattle Fish Wharf from the back of the First Avenue hotel row between Seneca and University Streets. The view reveals the considerable size of the penultimate but short-lived Ainsworth and Dunn’s Seattle Fish Co. pier (8/59), as well the first photographic evidence for wharf structures (8&1/2 — 60-61) built north of it between Pike and Pine streets on the site of the future municipal aquarium.

W. W. ROBINSON

An early look down from the bluff upon the new Pike Street Wharf as home for its first primary tenant, the hay and grain dealer W. W. Robinson.  Willis Wilbur Robinson was born in Kansas in 1871 and came to Mount Vernon in 1890 where he had success as a farmer and learned the wholesale trade in hay and feed.   He is first listed as operating at the Pike Street Wharf in the 1905 city directory.  His stay at the foot of Pike Street last until about 1909 when he moved his operations to the new reclaimed industrial area south of Pioneer Square.  Before the railroads took charge of moving commodities like Robinson’s hay, stern-wheeler steamers capable of reaching up the Puget Sound tributaries like the Skagit River, on which Robinson’s farm was located, handled most of it.

The CATALA [Canadian Queen] (This feature was first printed in Pacific ten years ago.)

As the “Queen” of the Union Steamship Fleet the Catala was a tramp steamer dressed in a formal.  For nearly 35 years her pointed bow was eagerly greeted at the logging camps, canneries and isolated villages between Vancouver and Prince Rupert, British Columbia.  Here she rests on the Seattle Waterfront waving the Stars and Strips as a sign of a new service that was also a rescue.

Headed for scrap in 1959 the Catala was instead gussied-up to perform as a “boatel” on Seattle’s waterfront during 1962 Century 21.  Along with the 682-foot-long Dominion Monarch and the 537-foot-long Acapulco the 253-foot Catala was the smallest of three liners outfitted to serve as hotel ships during the worlds fair.   According to Gene Woodwick, the vessels sympathetic chronicler, the Catala was also the only one to make a profit and stay for the duration of the fair.  The steamer was already familiar to Canadians and many of the guests that enjoyed her plush quarters during the fair were the loggers, fishers and shore-huggers who had once ridden her.

Built in 1925 in Montrose, Scotland her last stop in 1963 was at Ocean Shores where she was set up again as a “boatel” with 52 staterooms, a restaurant and lounge, but this time for fishers. During the night of New Years Eve, 1965, the Catala was driven ashore by 70 mph winds.  Picked by scavengers and salvagers she remained a picturesque wreck until bulldozed over.

Gene Woodwick (She is also the director of the Ocean Shores Interpretative Center.) is pleased to note that on New Years Eve 2001 – thirty-five years after blown ashore – another storm exposed the keel and remaining ribbing of the Catala, which then resumed her very last service as a maritime relic.

If you have a Catala story (or photograph) to share, Gene Woodwick would love to hear from you.  You can contact her thru this blog with a reply.

THE END OF THIS FEATURE  – for now (and then).

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Seattle’s first commercial center was built on a small peninsula south of Yesler Way, which the exploring Navy Lieutenant Wilkes called Piner’s Point in 1841, a decade before the first settlers arrived. The commercial buildings, upper-right, are on Piner’s Point. To the south the peninsula ended with a small bluff at King Street.  Beyond that were the mudflats seen here, and to the east a salty marsh that was flooded at high tide.  This little inlet east of Piner’s Point was called Plummer’s Bay for a pioneer that lived beside it.

This view was – I think – recorded from a knoll that once topped Beacon Hill like a hood ornament.  If Charles Street had climbed the hill it would have reached the knoll.  Charles is one block south of Dearborn, and if I have calculated it correctly that wide pathway extending from the bottom of the photograph to the bay is Dearborn – or very near it.  This is a quarter-century before there was any Dearborn Cut through the ridge that previous to the cutting merely slumped between First and Beacon Hills.

Jackson Street is on a timber quay far right, and King Street is the narrow-gauge railroad trestle curving quickly to dry land to be free of the wood boring Teredo worms. Here pioneer Joe Surber built the trestle with piles 65-feet long because of the mud. It took only two poundings of his pile driver’s hammer to push the piles through 35 feet of mud to hardpan. The King Street rails can be followed west to the King Street wharf, where the coal brought from mines near Renton was delivered to ships.  This wharf, here with a coal collier tied to its north side, was the biggest thing in town and coal Seattle’s biggest “cash crop.”

In “Orphan Road,” Kurt Armbruster’s helpful sorting of the often snarled history of railroading hereabouts, the author names the wide trestle extending out of frame to the left the “broad gauged strip” because regular gauge track was laid on it. Armbruster has it completed in Sept. 1883, which most likely means it was then “connected” with the Point. The laying of tracks followed.  The date for this scene may be as late as early 1884.  If you can see it, the little cupola or fog bell tower built atop the south end of the Ocean Dock, right of center, was completed in mid-December of 1883.

WEB EXTRAS

(Greetings, Paul and friends. As we are trying to run a leaner, meaner operation here at DorpatSherrardLomont, we are reducing the size of our front page. For those interested in more content supplementing and expanding upon this week’s ‘Seattle Now & Then’, please click on WEB EXTRAS.)

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How many Pacific readers can name the make, model and year for the motorcar at the lower-left corner of this look down Fourth Avenue and through its intersection with University Street? I cannot, although I nervously propose that it at least resembles a 1909 Pierce-Arrow. Perhaps a modern urge led the unnamed photographer to include the car in the composition.  It is in fine contrast to the two horse express wagon heading south on 4th at a pace that is not a gallop.  A century ago there were still many more horses on Seattle streets than automobiles.

Above the car is the brand new Cobb Building with terracotta Indian heads banding the façade at its 9th floor.  The Cobb took its first occupants early in the summer of 1910, and most of them were dentists and doctors.  The Metropolitan Building Company designed it for them – the first building on the Pacific Coast predisposed for the efficient handling of tooth extractions and the mysterious request, “cough please.”

Right of center are the White and Henry Buildings. Both were completed in 1909, the White first at Union Street.  Hip to hip they were the first two-thirds of what by 1915 was the block-long White Henry Stuart Building, an elegant show strip for this make-over of the old Territorial University campus into “a city within a city.”  The majority of the residents there had connections with lumbering.  The trio and all else on that block were razed in 1977 while the Rainier Bank tower with a pedestal boldly resembling a golfing accessory was completed.

To me the Cobb seems to still be preparing to open, so I choose a warm spring day of 1910 for this recording.  Three years earlier this part of 4th was about 30 feet higher and covered with campus grass.  Fourth neither climbed nor crossed Denny Knoll.  It stopped at Seneca Street on the south and Union on the north.  The 1907 lowering of the campus and the regarding of Fourth was completed during the first weeks of construction on the White Building in 1908.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, a few things and some of them more than once.  There will be some repetition of points or observations in the three stories I have brought along.  They appeared in Pacific years distant from each other, and all have something like thumbnail writing in them, mentioning the basics.   And these basics overlap.

DENNY’S KNOLL

DENNY’S KNOLL

In January of 1979 the Olympic Hotel was nominated for the National Register of Historic places.  We might have hoped that years earlier the same had happened for the old Territorial University which once stood in its place.  The old school was surrounded with living memories as profoundly loving as those offered the Olympic Hotel by citizens successful in their efforts to save it from demolition.  However, in 1907, the year of the university’s removal, a booming spirit of progress was simply too insistent to be forestalled by cherished memories of school days.  (Actually, 1907 developed into a crashing year economically nation-wide.  The local regrade projects on Denny Hill and Fourth avenue then became acts of faith conceived in good times but underway in hard times.  The 1907 recession inspired anxious memories of the 1893 crash.  Digging into hills and streets was a good way to relieve these flagging recollections.)

This photographic image, clouded with exhaust fumes of steam shovels and the dust of cave-ins, is of Fourth Avenue being cut through the site of that old school.  The photographer is above University Street and his or her camera sights south across Fourth towards Seneca.  There in the center of the picture the gathering cloud half obscures what was the location of the old university.  The building was 20 to 30 feet higher as the exposed cliff on the left reveals.

Atop the cliff is a sign reading “Metropolitan Building Co., Lessee of University Tract.”  That name “Metropolitan” was chosen to help attract eastern capitol to finance a project its local boosters advertised as showing a “business boldness amounting almost to romance . . . it will probably be the largest commercial development of its kind undertaken in any part of the world.”  And the signing of that lease in the late winter of 1907 turned into a very big deal indeed.  Within five years the entire grass-covered tract of the old campus was congested with buildings returning rents to Metropolitan and lease monies to the university.

The photographed of the regrade was taken during the winter of 1907-08.  For many years before, the only thing growing on this knoll  – beside young minds – was the deep grass, maples and first that girdled the western slopes of Denny Knoll’s greenbelt of inviting calm.  From 1861, the year it was built, through the many decades of its dominance as the young community’s most imposing landmark, the clapboards, cupola and fluted columns of the old university shone with a hard white enamel.

When in the mid-1890s the regents moved the university to its present Interlaken location, their images of the old acreage switched from one of academic sanctuary to the pragmatic stage of real estate. Successfully resisting a city plan to turn the knoll into a park,  they dickered for a decade while the city doubled in size and commerce began to press in on the picked fence.  Still in 1907, when the deal with Metropolitan went through, the old university building was not destroyed.

It was moved 100 years or more to the northeast,  near Fifth and Union, where it waited while its alumni, under the charismatic urgings of Professor Edmond Meany, tried to gather support to have the building either relocated to the new university site or somehow saved.  They failed and had to settle for those fluted columns alone, which now stand at the present site of the “University of a Thousand Years.”

Above: The columns in their present on-campus home in late November, 1993.  This tree encircled park is call the Sylvan Theatre and on some moonlit nights you may find ecstatic dancers there.

YWCA (The feature that follows looks through the same block on 4th Avenue, south of University Street, as that watched during the 1907-8 regrade, above.  This was copied from Seattle Now and Then Volume One, which can be seen in-toto on the blog, by approaching it through the “History Books” button on the blog’s front page. But please be patient with the download time.  Read something else while you wait . . . perhaps.)

(Here especially click TWICE  to enlarge the text.)

FOUR SUBJECTS on UNIVERSITY STREET BETWEEN 4TH & 5TH AVENUES.

THE YOSEMITE

Look closely and you will find the Cobb Building in the off-shore view below.

THE PIER & THE SIDE WHEELER

We will consider two contrasting profiles here.  One is white – all 282 feet and 3 inches of the Yosemite — and the other dark – the west end of Pier 57.  Both are over water but only the former is afloat, and yet not for long.

The crowed skyline here is filled will clues so this view is relatively easy to date.  On the far left horizon the White Building at 4th and Union is completed (in 1908) and to the right of it the structural steel for its adjoining neighbor, the Henry Building, is about to receive its terra-cotta skin.  This is either late 1908 or 1909. Also in 1909 the 46-year-old Yosemite while on excursion with about 1000 passengers broke her back on rocks near shore in the Port Orchard Narrows.  This may be her last formal profile.

At the foot of University Street Pier 57 was long associated with the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad (CMSPRR), and was often referred to as the “Milwaukee Dock” in part because that name still has such a euphonious ring to it — “The Milwaukee Dock.”   Of course it had other tenants as well and in 1902 (seven years before the CMSPRR arrived in Seattle) the ends of the Pier were blazoned “The Agen Dock.”

It was named for John B. Agen who founded the Alaska Butter and Cream Company in time to feed at least some of Alaska when gold was discovered first in the Yukon in 1897 and soon after on the beaches of Nome.  Consequently Pier 57 had two rooms for cold storage.  Here, however, Agen’s sign is gone, the Milwaukee sign is not yet up, and the Arlington Dock Company is – for the moment – obviously in charge.

Two things more about the Yosemite.  Built for the Sacramento River in 1863 it was sent north twenty years later. In 1895 the maritime encyclopedia of the time, Lewis and Dryden’s Marine History, described it as “the handsomest as well as the fastest steamer which had yet appeared in Northwestern waters.”  It was long rumored that the side-wheeler was purposely driven to the rocky shore for the insurance money.  No one was hurt and apparently the owner collected.

THE METROPOLITAN TRACT again

When the University of Washington moved to its new campus in 1895, it left behind a 10-acre campus on Denny’s Knoll – roughly between Third and Sixth avenues, and Seneca and Union streets.  The popular proposal to make a park of the site might have proceeded quickly and cheaply except for the UW regents’ prudent aversion to mere recreation.  Still, the old campus was a sort of Central Park for the 12 more years before it became a “city within a city.”

In 1907 the Metropolitan Building Co. assumed a 50-year lease on the old campus and raised its first two show “skyscrapers,” the White and Henry buildings south from Union Street along the east side of Fourth Avenue.  Chester White was the new company’s president and, like Horace Henry, he was also a stockholder in the venture and a lumberman.  Most of the office space was quickly taken over by the regional lumber firms.  The success of this development played an important part in the voters’ rejection in 1912 of the comprehensive metropolitan Bogue Plan, which would have included another grand style civic center on the freshly cleared and subdued Denny Regrade.

In 1915 the Stuart Building was added at the corner of University Street, completing the coherent façade along Fourth Avenue.  In this view, which dates from the late 1920s, the developer’s metropolitan vision has been nearly completed with the 1925 addition of the Olympic Hotel (far right) and, one year later, the Skinner Building, (far left).

The White-Henry-Stuart Building and the block it sat on were razed in the mid 1970s for the construction of the Rainier Tower on what continues to be University of Washington property.

(click photos to enlarge)

This week we continue what we began last week, comparing early views from the Smith Tower with those Jean Sherrard “captured” on a recent visit to the tower’s observation platform.  Last Sunday we looked east to First Hill, and now north over much of the business district to Lake Union.

In all directions we have cropped the “now” view considerably wider, especially on top in order to include the full height of the Columbia Center, still the tallest thing in Seattle. When nearly complete in 1985, the community’s best-known preservationist, U.W. Architect Victor Steinbrueck, described the Columbia Tower (as it was then called) as “a flat-out symbol of greed and egoism.”  Take it or leave it, at 932 feet it makes the rest of Seattle’s high-rises look like middle management forever waiting for promotions.

There are scores of structures in this historical scene that survive, although, like Lake Union, you can no longer see them from the Smith Tower.  We’ll point out the Central Building at 4th and Marion, bottom-center in the “then.”  In the “now” it half hides behind the cream-white “milk carton” of the 23 story Pacific Building. More exposed are the Rainier Club and the recently saved First Methodist Church, both in part on the south side of Marion Street between 4th and 5th Avenues.  They appear here between the Pacific Bldg. and the Columbia Center.

For a close-enough dating of the historical panorama I depended upon two missing structures.  The sizeable Lincoln Hotel at the northwest corner of 4th and Madison (across 4th from the Carnegie Library, which can be seen at the center of the “then”) burned down on April 7, 1920.  The tidied ruins of part of its foundation can be glimpsed left of center above the Central Building.  The 4th Church Christ Scientist – now Town Hall at 8th and Seneca – was completed in 1922.  Its splendid dome could be seen from the Smith Tower, but not here.  This is too early – perhaps the summer of 1920 or 1921.

WEB EXTRAS

From the Tower’s observation deck, I shot a much wider angle of the Now. Here it is:

Anything to add, Paul?  Oh Jean just a few photographs, mostly – ones looking north from the tower like those above.  I’ll also attach an early Pacific feature – one from 1982, the year I started writing that weekly feature for The Times. We lean on an old friend who is now long passed, Lawton Gowey, for many of the pictures below.  There are more, but these are what I could find this evening.  (If you are timing this, it is now fifteen minutes after midnight, and I intend on being in bed by 2 a.m..)

THE SMITH TOWER

This feature first appeared in Pacific Magazine on June 20, 1982.

Before the mid-I960s, when the Seattle skyline began to sprout the modern American silhouette of glass, steel, and polymers, the city’s front face looked much as it did on the Fourth of July, 1914, the day the Smith Tower opened to its admiring public.  At least for a while Seattle had distinguished itself with the tallest building outside of New York – or Chicago – or this side of the Mississippi.  The building’s promoters boasted that one could tour its 42 stories and 600 offices, pass through any of its 1,432 steel doors to gaze at the unparalleled view through a few of its 2,314 bronze encased windows and still feel secure that the 500 foot high edifice stood secure on 1,276 concrete piles reaching 50 feet below to the bedrock.

After the skeleton of structural steel was topped off in February 1913, the terra-cotta skin began to steadily ascend its sides. The completed frame of the “monster structure acts as a guiding beacon to vessels in and out of Elliott Bay . . . The Queen City’s noblest monument of steel is declared by seasoned skippers to be by far the finest aid to navigation ever placed on Puget Sound . . .now Seattle would be better advertised than any place outside of New York,” wrote the Seattle Times.

The recurring comparison to New York extended to the building’s namesake Lyman C. Smith, a New Yorker but from upstate Syracuse. In the early 1890s Smith made what was then the largest purchase of Seattle property in the city’s history. It included the Second Avenue and Yesler Way site. By 1909 the armaments entrepreneur had beat his firearms into a typewriter fortune big enough to finance skyscrapers. During a 1909 visit, Smith unexpectedly met another eastern capitalist with similar ambitions. John Hoge was also in town scrutinizing his site at Second Avenue and Cherry Street, catty-corner to Seattle’s first skyscraper, the Alaska Building. Both Smith and Hoge had monumental plans for enhancing what was already being called the “Second Avenue Canyon.” Since each wished to build a little higher than the other, they coyly agreed that the Alaska’s 14 stories was “about the proper height.”

The dramatically different consequences of their will to build are apparent in the 1913 panorama of the Seattle skyline. The 18 stories of the Hoge are just left of center and left of the Alaska Building.  Hoge began his construction in March 1911 and set a world record for speed of steel framing. The skeleton was up in 30 days. Later that year Smith started his tower. By the time the photographer from the firm of Webster and Stevens climbed the coal bunkers near the foot of King Street and sighted the tower’s newly completed frame, it was already a “beacon to the world.”

For all the Smith Tower’s steady grandeur there are plenty of ironies and oddities connected with its history. The darkest irony is the first. Smith decided to build a tower so high that there would be no danger of anyone, including Hoge, approaching it in his lifetime. Smith died before it was completed.

The building project was announced in 1910, only after Smith received the assurances of the city council that they would not move City Hall from its site at Third and Jefferson Street, a half-block from the proposed tower.  Both Smith and Hoge were anxious to stabilize land values in the southern business district. They were ultimately unsuccessful. Already in 1910 it was the commercial fashion to move north and away from the “old city center.”

The building’s first superintendent, William Jackson, gave the tower its final topping in 1914 with an unplanned 20-foot flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes were waving for the Fourth of July opening. This is the same pole that years later flew another symbol for reasons more piscatorial than patriotic. Ivar Haglund, in 1976 the first local owner of the tower, insisted that the carp he was flying from the top of his tower was not a publicity stunt but an innocent public service for indicating the wet direction of Seattle’s weather. ‘

The city’s skyline, as it appeared above in the spring of 1982, was photographed from the Port of Seattle’s Pier 46, once the location of the old coal docks and now of containers. Orville Elden, a mechanic then for the American President Lines, the pier’s lessee, stands beside one of the cooling units that are regularly spaced between two rows of refrigerated containers. The composition like runway lights forms a line-of-sight that ends in the city’s new corporate center. The Hoge and Alaska Buildings, although dwarfed, are still visible to the left of the light pole. The lights pin point the spot where the Columbia Center’s 76 stories will eventually top off in 1984.   The paired photographs above from 1982 and 1984 were scanned from Seattle Now and Then, Volume One, where this story was reprinted after first appearing in Pacific Magazine long ago.

(click to enlarge photos)

Last Sunday’s “now-and-then” looked northwest from the roof of the brand new Harborview Hospital into the retail section of the business district.  That photo was recorded near the time that the hospital was dedicated in February 1931.

Now we look back at Harborview when it was still under construction. Here the photographer stands on the observation deck of the Smith Tower on May 30, 1930. Harborview reaches to its 5th and 6th floors, or about half way to its ultimate height, not counting the about three-story cap of its central tower.  There’s another hospital here as well. The tower and top floors of Providence (now part of Swedish Hospital) straddling James Street on 17th Ave. E. are not yet obscured by a full Harborview.

The old King County Courthouse on the right is but seven months and 9 days from being dynamited to its foundation. A belfry at the top has already been decapitated from this ponderous and painful tower.  Here through its 41 years some King County prisoners were executed.  Here in 1930 the building is a danger to enter, and yet it is still home to the county’s prisoners who were still months away from being marched to their new quarters at the top of the King County Courthouse facing City Hall Park.

The drying tower for the Fire Department’s Engine House No. 3 rises above the courthouse roof and just to the right of Harborview.  The station survives, although not its tower.

All the structures in the bottom half of the scene have been long since razed, and the Interstate 5 Freeway now makes its concrete swatch between 6th and 7th Avenues. Bottom-center sits the Pleasanton Hotel with three-story bays, balconies and an arched front door.  The Pleasanton faced Elliott Bay from the east side of 6th Avenue and on the north side of a Terrace Street so steep that it was only climbed by steps – you can see them to the right of the hotel.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, a few related features from the past imperfectly presented.  For two of them I could not – again – find the negatives, and so have substituted scans of clips.   We have done it before and will again.   We start with another and earlier look to First Hill from the top of the Smith Tower.

FIRST HILL PANORAMA from the SMITH TOWER, ca. 1913

The prospect east from the observation disk of the Smith Tower looks at about eye-level with the horizon of the part of First Hill, which has been variously called Yesler’s Hill, Profanity Hill and Pill Hill.

The name Yesler derived from Henry Yesler’s first reserve of timber, which he harvested here after the easy logging along the shore was used up.  The name Profanity comes from the habit of lawyers and litigants acquired after an exhausting climb to the King County Courthouse, the dominant landmark, right of center, included in the detail, which was taken from the pan exhibited below it.   Pill Hill is a reference to the collection of hospitals that have more recently taken the place of First Hill’s mansions.

The older view – photographed most likely in 1913 – and current view  (at least on January 29, 1929 when this was first printed in Pacific) share only two landmarks.  Easiest to located is the Trinity Parish Episcopal Church at 8^th and James, the northwest corner.  If you follow the line of the old James Street cable up three blocks you will find the three stained-glass windows on the rear chancel wall of what is the sanctuary for the oldest Episcopalian congregation in Seattle.  The twin towers of the second surviving landmark, Immaculate Conception Church, just escape the horizon near the middle of the 1913 view.  The original neighborhood of homes and apartments between 4^th and 7^th avenues has been replaced by government buildings and the I-5 Freeway.

COURTHOUSES AND KASTLES

The two most evident structures in the photograph above, taken about 1906, were both once King County Courthouses, and each was called a “castle.” Their somewhat eccentric histories, though quite different, both border on the grotesque.

The frame construction in the center was built in 1882 at the southeast comer of Third Avenue and Jefferson Street, the present site of City Hall Park. It had two careers, the first as the modest home for the county’s courts. But soon after the county moved out in 1890 and up to its new imperious courts overlooking the city (the dome on the horizon), the city moved in.

In the eighteen years municipal government was managed from that comer, Seattle’s population swelled from 40,000 to more than 200,000. City Hall swelled as well into an odd collection of clapboard additions aptly renamed the “Katzenjammer Kastle.”             When, in 1890, King County gave in to the monumental urge to recommend itself with a castle-on-a-hill, it also set off a chorus of complaints. From the start it was called the “Gray Pile,” the “Tower of Despair,” and the “Cruel Castle.” This poetic invective often fell to expletives less literary when lawyers in a hurry were forced to sprint the long and steep steps on Terrace Street to reach their litigation and pant out the abuses that gave the hill its popular name, “Profanity.”

In 1914 a local landmark of both mass and scale was completed with no despair: the Smith Tower. Less than one relatively level block away, ground was ceremonially broken, beginning construction of a new courthouse: the one still with us. The Town Crier, a local tabloid, announced: “In a city and county possessing such structures as the Smith, Hoge, and Alaska buildings and the Washington, Savoy, and other fIne hotels, the old Court House has long stood as a silent and dingy bit of sarcasm… . Fifteen years of effort by county commissioners to reduce profanity in King County to a minimum is now triumphantly consummated!”

Although lawyers and judges no longer needed to climb the hill, that did not end the profane career of the castle on the hill. The Times of January 17, 1926 reported that after 35 top-heavy years “King County’s old Courthouse, rearing its imposing bulk atop steep, slippery Profanity Hill, is in danger of collapse. Beneath its 200-foot tower of tons of crumbling brick . . . are more than 200 human beings, prisoners locked behind bars. The jail is a relic of barbarism. The danger of collapse is no mere fancy.”

The Times writer added to this grave description a dark and ironic revelation: “In the west wing, under the statue of Justice who has lost her scales, is the execution chamber, where records show at least two condemned prisoners have been hanged.”

Six years later on January 8, 1931 36 holes were bored into the crumbling brick pillars then still tentatively supporting the old Courthouse cupola. They shared 200 sticks of dynamite. In the moment it might take an exhausted barrister to mouth a monosyllabic indecency, the old embarrassment was leveled. And now fully revealed behind it and braced against a modem sky, the new King County Hospital appeared ready and waiting for its February dedication. 2 In 1931, the prisoners were moved into their own “penthouse” in the top floors of the new addition to the King County Courthouse looking down on City Hall Park.

LOOKING SOUTH FROM THE TERRITORIAL UNIVERSITY in 1887

(correction: The clip below asserts that the view looks southwest from the territorial university.  It is actually southeast.)

The new Providence Hospital in the Squire Park Neighborhood on Second Hill (behind First Hill) on 17th Avenue was first printed in Pacific on June 10, 1990.  (That seems far too long ago.) Here folows another clip substituting for a lost (temporarily) negative.  It should be noted that the new Providence follows the old with a central tower facing the setting sun.   And this is the Providence that can be seen looking over the construction of Harborview Hospital in the photograph at the top.

You will find the substation, here looming down from 7th and Jefferson, in the First Hill pans, above – those taken from the Smith Tower.

THE SEATTLE CATARACT COMPANY

Among the pack of turn-of-the-century power companies vying for Seattle consumers, the Seattle Cataract Company headquarters was cited to show-off.   Built against the steepest grade of First Hill this temple for power generated at Snoqualmie Falls flashed upon the customers and competitors below two electric signs.  The higher sign is evident here in whole, and the lower, in part.

At the southwest corner of the fourth floor the electric letters signing “Snoqualmie Light” illuminate a space the same size as the six windows at the structure’s northwest corner.  The effect makes the symmetry of substation’s west façade more dynamic.   Lower, between the second and third floors, the second sign, “Seattle Cataract Company,” is extended two-thirds of the width of the building.  Much of this second sign is hidden behind power poles.

This view dates from 1900 or 1901 when these looming headquarters were nearly new.  In 1898-99 the civil engineer Charles H. Baker slacked the grandeur of Snoqualmie Falls by diverting the river’s water behind the falls through a rock tunnel.  With a head of 270 feet the borrowed water suddenly turned 90 degree into a chiseled chamber fitted with four water wheels for the state’s first large hydroelectric plant.  The 6,000 kilowatts of power generated there was transmitted to customers from Everett to Tacoma.

When the Cataract company headquarters was built at the southwest corner of 7^th Avenue and Jefferson Street – now the northbound lane for Interstate Five – its joined a neighborhood of mostly modest clapboard lodgings like those shown here.  First Hill mansions were at the top of the hill.  The Seattle Photo Company photographer recorded this scene from a back window or porch of the pioneer Kalmar Hotel at the southeast corner of 6^th Avenue and James Street.   The old landmark Kalmar was lost to the Freeway in the early 1960s – in spite of efforts by local preservationists, led by architect Victor Steinbrueck, to save it.

The roofline of the First Hill landmark recorded here appears more ornate then it was.  The smaller cupola to the right is not its own, but rather tops the King County Courthouse otherwise hidden behind this the Snoqualmie Power headquarters and substation.  (Courtesy,  Museum of History and Industry)

EUROPEAN ADVICE

We shall wind this Sunday up with some Edge Clippings – two pages from an 1889 Seattle Post-Intelligencer.   It is a curious collection of proverbs translated from European sources.  Like “Our time runs on like a stream; first fall the leaves and then the tree.” Some are by now cliches.  Others offer strange advice.  A few are by now  inscrutable.  Several are examples of what we like to excuse with a . . . “Well you know that is the way they thought back then.  They can’t be blamed for that.” And often they cannot.

CLICK THESE not once but TWICE and they will be easily read.

What then have we learned?

“Don’t throw away your old shoes until you have got new ones.” Still “Everyone must wear out one pair of fool’s shoes, if he wear no more.” But “an ass does not stumble twice over the same stone.”  It is said that “A rich man is never ugly in the eyes of a girl” and yet “fair, good, rich and wise is a woman four stories high.”  Remember then that “a melon and a woman are hard to know (or chose).”

(click to enlarge photos)

A likely year for this look into the Central Business district is the year, or even month*, the photographer’s “platform” – Harborview Hospital – was dedicated.  That was in February 1931. (*I must have been concentrating on the towers and missed the trees.  How painfully silly of me to write “even month” when the trees are all bulked up with leaves. This cannot be February.)

Of course a sincerely excited photographer might have got early access for a wonderfully elevated recording of this part of the business district northwest of the hospital. Directly one block west, however, it may have been still hidden behind the grotesque old King County Court house.  On Jan 8, 1931, it was then razed to rubble by dynamite, a reduction that was also an unveiling of the hospital behind it.  In a few seconds Harborview was the best elevation from which to look at the city in all directions.

This view to the northwest displays what were then most of the city’s new landmarks.   Left of center is the highest among them, the still gorgeous Northern Life Tower (Seattle Tower) completed in 1929 at Third and University.  Right-of-center, the other and “whiter” tower is also nearly new, the 1930 Washington Athletic Club at Sixth and Union.  Directly to the right of WAC is the Medical Dental Building (1924) and behind it, both left and right, are parts of the featureless and flattened blocks left by the last of the Denny Hill Regrades (1929-1931).

The Olympic Hotel (1924) is at the view’s center, and far left is the new YMCA (1929-1931) with its small arched windows high above 4th Avenue and north of Marion Street. The familiar and saved domed of First Methodist Episcopal Church (1910) is just right of the “Y.”  Far right and far off at the base of Queen Anne Hill is the Civic Auditorium (1928).  And for a keen eye the thin white line of the reinforced concrete bridge on Garfield Street can be followed through the distant haze, top-center, in its climb to Magnolia.  The bridge was dedicated early December 1930, mere weeks before the hospital.

WEB EXTRAS

This ‘Now’ was accomplished with the aid of a number of helpful Harborview personnel, particularly Orlando Galves, who escorted me through every door that would open. I snapped a shot of Orlando on the spot, which I include below.

Views from the top of Harborview will surely be included in future columns, as well as in our upcoming exhibition at MOHAI opening in April.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean.  (First a reminder to the readers that sometimes you – at least I on this MAC – will want to click twice on a picture in order to enlarge it to full glory.)

Searching the brand new prospect from Harborview featured above I understandably found quite a few structures that I have visited over the last now 29 years of writing weekly features for Pacific Mag, the inheritor of The Seattle Times’ old Sunday rotogravure section tradition.   I have picked a few of them and will now pour them forth, but I will make a bit of a puzzle.  I will not identify the same structures in the 1931 view from the hospital – except those that appear in the text above proper.  We’ll start with Trinity Episcopal Church which was hit badly by the earthquake now a few years ago.  But the church has bound its wounds and bounded back to do its inner-city service.

TRINITY EPISCOPAL

On the Sunday afternoon of Jan. 20, 1902, Edmond Butler gave his first recital on Trinity Episcopal Parish’s new organ. Since the instrument was declared to be the finest north of San Francisco, the church’s pews were crowded long before Butler took his place behind the console. There, he played a program which a local reviewer reported as “carefully selected with a view to contrast and to show off the capabilities of the instrument.”  Later that night, when Butler and his appreciative audience were fast asleep, the organ performed an encore of its own.

Two days later, after sifting through the ashes, the fire department concluded that it was the organ that had burned down the church. A short circuit in the wiring ignited the chancel and then spread to the nave. There, hidden behind stone walls and dark glass and fueled by Christmas decorations still hanging for Epiphany, the heat built up under the high roof until the windows exploded and the roof fell in with the organ’s last crescendo. Only the rock walls remained. And they remain today as the granite shell for the rebuilt Trinity which we see in both our then and now photos.  (My now was taken long ago.  This first appeared in Pacific on July 31, 1983.) The view is west down James Street and past the parish at Eighth Avenue.

This was not the first time that fire had figured in the building plans of Seattle’s original Episcopal congregation.  Trinity’s first church was built by its parishioners in 1870 at Third Avenue and Jefferson Street. That cozy Gothic clapboard covered a floor of only 24-by-48 feet and was not adorned with a tower until 1880. However, it then made music with the largest bell in Washington Territory.  In 1889 the rector, George Watson, bought property on First Hill where many in his congregation were building lavish homes. The motivation to move followed the destruction of the wooden church during the Great Fire of 1889.  It was the only structure destroyed on Third Avenue north of Yesler Way.

In its new home on First Hill Trinity continued to grow into a family church serving the often upper-crust residents. However, by the early years of this century, this distinguished society was moving out of its mansions as the apartment houses moved in. Trinity was then faced with the difficult decision of whether to follow the flight or stay and serve the central city. It stayed.

CENTRAL SCHOOL

CENTRAL SCHOOL ca. 1887

Throughout the 1860s and ’70s, the Territorial University on Denny’s Knoll, the present site of the Olympic Hotel, was the crowning landmark on the city’s horizon.

During the winter of 1882-83 eyes for skyline landmarks shifted two blocks east and two blocks south. Grabbing attention was the great white wooden hulk of the new Central School at the southeast comer of Sixth Avenue and Madison Street. With six rooms on each of its two floors and another two stories of tower above, it was the largest school in Washington Territory.  It could seat 800 students.

The new crowning glory was short-lived. In the spring of 1888 the Central School burned to the ground. The five years the school was around covered a time of radical change for Seattle. The school was started amid the small town flavor where everything and everyone was familiar. On Jan. 14, 1882 citizens gathered in Yesler Hall to vote for the speedy construction of the new schoolhouse. Three days later many of these same grassroots, civic-minded agitators pulled from the city jail two prisoners accused of murdering a local businessman named Reynolds. After “encouraging” a confession, the crowd lynched them on two maples along Yesler Way.

During the next few years strangers crowded out the familiar faces. By 1889 outsiders were coming in on the-transcontinental Northern Pacific at a rate of 1,000 a month. From 1880 to 1890 a city anxious to attract immigrants, yet still fearful of strangers, had grown from 4,000 to 40,000.  The 1880s in Seattle was soiled with violent racial resentment in the anti-Chinese riots of 1886.  The ‘80s also brought technological innovations like the telephone, public transportation and a general electric lighting system, and physical devastation like the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.

LAROUCHE’S PAN 1890.

Photographed only a year after the fire, the two-part panorama above by LaRouche, looks north of most of the blocks razed by the late spring informer of June 6, 1889.  The dirt street in the foreground is Seventh Avenue.  The pan was photographed from the front lawn of the then new King County Courthouse.

Most of the landmarks shown here had short lives. The spire at the center, topping the First Methodist Church at Third Avenue and Marion Street, was destroyed in 1907 during the Third Avenue regrade.  The building with the square profile on the background horizon, right of the spire, was the York Hotel at the northwest comer of First Avenue and Pike Street. At that point new, it was razed 14 years later because when rattled during the construction of the railroad tunnel beneath the city and directly below it. The Rainier Hotel, the huge and barnlike building left of the power pole on 7th, was built quickly after the fire. Later it became a boarding house for working women.  The Denny Hotel, atop Denny Hill and above the Rainier’s roof line, closed in 1906 closed to the Denny regrade and was soon razed for it.

The longest-lived landmark was the red brick Central School, right of the power pole, at Sixth Avenue and Madison Street. It lasted till 1953, nine years before the 1-5 ditch sliced through its block.

NORTHERN LIFE TOWER

The RAINIER CLUB

The RAINIER CLUB

(The following feature on the Rainier Club appeared in Pacific April17, 1988 – the club’s centennial.]

This year the Rainier Club celebrates its own centennial, one year before the state’s. Appropriately, it is writing its own history. In a draft of the book, author Walter Crowley concludes, “as the wheel turns and future generations regard this curious mansion nestled at the feet of skyscrapers, the Rainier Club will still serve as a reminder of the remarkable individuals who shaped Seattle out of forests and mudflats.”

It was only in 1986 that the club was recognized for what it has been since it was first constructed in 1904: a historical landmark. Wishing to keep its options, the club itself for a time resisted the description because the landmark designation restricts a structure’s future to those that preserve its historical integrity. However, Seattle’s central business district would surely be more severe than it already is were it not for the gracious relief of this well-wrought clubhouse.

Modeled after the English example, Seattle’s men’s club held its first meeting on Feb. 23, 1888. The next day’s Seattle Press reported, “the object of the club is like that of a hundred other kindred bands scattered over the face of the civilized world, the pursuit of pleasure among congenial conductors,” Of course, the club is no longer exclusively a men’s club. In 1977 its bylaws were amended to admit women. As of now (In 1988) forty women are numbered among the 1,200 members.

The early view of the club (its third home) looks across Fourth Avenue and dates from about 1909 or soon after the 1908 regrading of Fourth. Of the club’s Jacobean style, the work of Spokane-based architect Kirtland K. Cutter, Crowley notes: “However antiquated the club was designed to appear on the outside, the trustees spared no expense for modem luxuries on the inside, including telephones in every room.” The club’s style was preserved when its size nearly doubled in 1929 with the south extension. That was the work of Seattle architects Charles Bebb and Carl Gould. Within the walls of this chummy setting many landmark projects were planned, including Metro, Forward Thrust and both of Seattle’s world’s fairs.

The ELKS LODGE

ELKS LODGE

(First appeared in Pacific August 27,1995)

Seattle’s Elks took three days in 1914 to dedicate their lodge at the southwest corner of Fourth and Spring.  There was plenty to do.  The basement and sub-basement had a Turkish bath, bowling alleys and a big swimming pool. The Lodge Room on the top floor had a pipe organ and this hall was also used for social events. Three floors were reserved for members’ living quarters and, aside from rented shops on the street, the rest of this nine-story landmark was used for lodge activities.

The Seattle lodge was the third largest in the order and, when counted with the Ballard Elks, made Seattle the only community outside of New York with two lodges. Within two years of taking possession of their new lodge, membership swelled to more than 2,000, four times the number that met 10 years earlier in temporary quarters on the top floors of the Alaska Building.

Seattle Lodge 92 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was instituted in 1888 with eight members. Its records were destroyed in the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889. The Frye Opera House, the Lodge’s home, was one of the first structures consumed.

Lodge 92 sold its Fourth Avenue quarters in 1958. Nine years later, in preparation for the building’s razing for the construction of the Seafirst Bank tower, bank publicist Jim Faber staged one of great conceptual arts moments in Seattle history. In monumental block-cartoon letters he wrote “POW” on the brick south wall of the old lodge, a target for the wrecker’s ball.

Since leaving Fourth and Spring the Seattle Elks have had two homes: first on the west shore of Lake Union and now in lower Queen Anne. Lodge members have been at Queen Anne Avenue and Thomas Street for a year and half (in 1995) but withheld the dedication until tomorrow’s visit of Grand Exalted Ruler Edward Mahan.

SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY – CENTRAL

SEATTLE’S CENTRAL LIBRARY

(This feature first appeared in Pacific long ago – on July 25, 1982.)

When local booklovers met at Yesler’s Hall in August 1868 to organize Seattle’s first library association, they appointed Sara Yesler librarian. On the executive board’s list of classic titles for acquisition were Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Essays,” William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” and Percy Shelley’s “Collected Poems.” But one board member objected to the latter selection, calling the poet a “freethinker.” Fortunately for freethinking this objection was overruled.

A board member who was probably an advocate of Shelly was the association’s first president, James McNaught, an erudite young lawyer with bad eyes and thick lenses. Whatever McNaught read, including romantic poets, he held it four inches from his face.

When McNaught arrived in town only one year earlier he created a sensation with his exceedingly high silk hat and long frock coat. But McNaught’s cosmopolitan costume fit neither his new hometown of rough-palmed stump pullers nor his own financial condition. The dapper young McNaught had only enough cash to pay for one week’s board, and no prospects. However, he kept wearing that hat and coat, and 22 years later McNaught was working in New York City as Northern Pacific Railroad’s chief solicitor and commuting to his high fashion home on the Hudson River near WestPoint. When he left his Seattle home on Fourth Avenue, he had a high status among the legal fraternity of Washington Territory.

The home James and Agnes McNaught and their two children left behind in Seattle is the mansion prominent in the historical photograph that is two above. Built at the southeast comer of Fourth Avenue and Spring Street in 1883 for $50,000 it was a monument to the entrepreneur who designed and built it to be conspicuously included in all the local tour books. A home like this one required servants, and there were three or four rooms for everyone. The sumptuous display of furnishings cost nearly as much as the many wings, gables and towers that sheltered them.

About the same time McNaught left town his old friends and associates started a new social organization they called the Rainier Club. Their purpose was to further nurture the success of their “Seattle Spirit” by promoting their social and business connections. The club’s first home was the McNaught mansion, where it stayed until 1893 when the grand still young home was converted into a boarding house.

By 1904 the city had bought the entire block of the mansion site to put up the local library’s first permanent home. The photograph looking across Fourth Avenue from the present location of the Seafirst Building (it’s name in 1982) was most likely taken some short time before the big house was moved across Spring Street to the northeast corner of its intersection with Fourth Avenue. A small portion of the mansion’s southern side is revealed at the far left of the second historical photograph. It focuses on the new Carnegie Library, taken shortly after it was completed in 1907.

The Carnegie Library was built with a $220,000 donation from its namesake, Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate and philanthropist. At the time, it was considered the most elegant structure in town. Fifty years later it was described by Kenneth Colman, chairman of the citizens for the library bond issue as “A community eyesore, not fit for a progressive and forward looking city like Seattle.” The bond issue passed and by 1957 the same forces of local modernism that gave us a city hall and Public Safety Building that look like airport hotels were at work on the new library, the one that preceded the one seen over the Moore sculpture in Jean’s contemporary photograph.

In our oldest image (by now far above), behind the McNaught mansion we can see the center tower and southern half of Providence Hospital at the present location of the Federal Courthouse at Fifth Avenue and Madison Street. To the right of the hospital and one block east at Sixth Avenue rise the brick towers of the Central School that was completed in 1889.

The buildings in these historical scenes are long gone. Providence Hospital moved to its present location at 17th Avenue and East Jefferson Street in 1911. Central School was leveled in August 1953. The McNaught residence was replaced by the Hotel Hungerford, and the Carnegie Library was leveled in 1956.  There is, however, still some continuity with those first library association meetings where McNaught presided in 1868. Shelley’s poetry has still been neither expunged nor outmoded.

LIBRARY LOBBIES

(This little feature appears first in The Seattle Times Sunday magazine Pacific on April 28, 1991.)

This month (April, 1991) the Seattle Public Library celebrates its centennial.  On April 8, 1891, a reading room opened on the fifth floor of the Occidental Building (later the Seattle Hotel), which filled Pioneer Place’s pie-shaped block west of Second Avenue and between James Street and Yesler Way.

The library moved many times between then and the 1906 dedication of its Carnegie-endowed permanent on Fourth Ave.  This view of the main branch’s vaulting lobby was photographed about 1912 and shows the talents of its architect, P.J.Weber of Chicago.

Although formidable the Carnegie gifted structure was not so safe.  Shakes from the region’s 1949 earthquake revealed what Weber no doubt once knew that neither steel nor reinforced concrete had been used to strengthen the classic structure’s masonry.  Officials (one’s with degrees in engineering) decided the structure might collapse in another quake.

Consequently it was with some prudent justice that the library board’s 1955 campaign for a new plant repeatedly denounced the old beau arts beauty as a “death trap.”  It was demolished in 1957 and replaced what has since been replaced.  The lobby of the current library has its own sublimity.

The WASHINGTON ATHLETIC CLUB

WASHINGTON ATHLETIC CLUB

(First appeared in Pacific on August 22, 1999.)

Is it the example of organizations such as the Washington Athletic Club (WAC) that makes America’s rhapsodies about its can-do qualities seem like science. The WAC’s “myth of origin,” as revealed in its own chronology, begins most practically. In 1928, “California real estate developer Noel B. Clark came to Seattle to develop residential subdivisions and couldn’t find a place to play handball, so decided to start a club.”

America’s self-advertised speed was fulfilled by the initial WAC membership drive. In 90 days, 2,600 physical culturists were persuaded to pony up $100 each. Matters then sped along. Architect Sherwood D. Ford, an English immigrant, quickly shaped the many longings of a large volunteer building committee, and just over two years from the moment Clark felt deprived of handball, a new 22-story clubhouse was in place.

The ground at the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street was broken on Dec. 16, 1929, and one year later to the day the new sanctuary – with super-sun rooms, swimming pool, pining room, baths living quarters (for members) and much else, including handball – was dedicated.

The dedication was two months after the market crash of ’29.  But the WAC was well stocked with optimism that prosperity was just around the comer. It wasn’t, and membership soon took a big hit.  Nearly 500 resigned or had their memberships canceled. The club, of course, survived the Great Depression. A 1932 joining with the Arctic Club was neither needed nor consummated. When the Arctic Club at last disbanded in the early 1970s, WAC grew yet again welcoming many of its members.  WAC added $3 million in new facilities, including a larger gymnasium, a women’s conditioning department, a beauty salon and boutique, and – surely in the spirit of Noel Clark – three more handball courts.

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MADISON STREET Looking East from 6^th AVENUE

(Printed first in Pacific on February 2, 1985.)

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

The strip was not only popular but also populated. Madison was evolving into a vital city link. The two cable cars pictured in the early 20^th century view up Madison from Sixth Avenue started running there in 1890 when the Madison Street Cable Railway first opened service up First Hill and Second Hill and through the forest to Madison Park on Lake Washington.

The white sign hanging from the front of the closest car reads, “White City, Madison Park, Cool Place, Refreshments, Amusements.” White City was a short-lived promotion designed by the cable railway’s owners to attract riders onto the cars and out to the lake. White City failed in 1912, but by then the top attraction at the lake end of the line was not the park but the ferry slip and the ferry named after the 16th president of the United States: Lincoln.

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

In 1940, Madison lamented another loss when its cable cars gave way to gasoline-powered buses. Then, 20 years later, the entire block pictured in the foreground of the historical scene gave way to the interstate freeway built in the early I 960s.

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

click to enlarge photos)

On Sept 16, 1935 City Light moved into this its new building at 3rd Avenue and Madison Street – or Spring Street for it stretched the entire block.  The agency’s 1935 Annual Report claimed that it was “the most modern building in Seattle.”  It was also 24 stories shorter than hoped for and about four years late.

City Light purchased this half block in the 1920s primarily to locate its central distributing station for the business district.  Above the basement substation two floors would be reserved for sales and agency offices.  The additional 24 stories would be rented making City Light a landlord – a big one.  From these ambitions the agency, upon reflection, soon withdrew.  It did not want to compete with some of its customers as a landlord. Instead the project and its skyscraper were leased to a private building company. The deal was signed in February 1930, only three months after the economy crashed.  And so soon did these grand plans in private hands.

For sixty years it kept to this corner, and along the way added nine stories more of  green class above these two.   In 1995 the agency moved into the Seattle Municipal Tower.

There are, of course, many more stories in the history of City Light than in even its dropped skyscraper of 1930, and now Historylink, the web encyclopedia of Washington State history, reveals and sometimes exposes them in their new book ‘Power for the People.”  It is well illustrated and on the cover David W. Wilma, Walt Crowley and The HistoryLink Staff are credited.  David reminded me that when it was planning the 24 story tower “City Light paid for all its operations out of rates, not taxes, and the rates were dirt cheap.”  You can find “Power for the People” in most surviving bookstores.

YESLER WAY SUBSTATION ca. 1910

(The below first appear in Pacific, March 15,1987)

When City Light built its first installation on the southwest slope of First Hill it assumed a symbolic shape. First, it was a signed symbol distinctive on the horizon.  At night rows of incandescent bulbs outlined the square, fort-like building and radiated the then still relatively fresh romance of electricity. It was saying brilliantly that “the city has plenty of power and it’s all yours.”

In 1902 the citizens of Seattle voted 7 to 1 to pay for the timber dam that city engineers proposed to build on the Cedar River. Power from the dam was planned to light the city’s streets. When the first generator started to hum in 1904 they voted again to extend his public power into their homes.  They would do it competition with private power that was wiring the city as well.

By 1911 the likely year this’ view of the substation was shot across the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Yesler Way, City Light was earning twice as much as it was spending. Consequently, it lowered its rates every year, and thereby drove down private power’s charges as well.

The year before, 1910, the installation of the five-ball cluster street lights was completed, inspiring Seattle’s pioneer historian Clarence Bagley to later brag in his 1916 history of Seattle, “This makes the Seattle municipal light and power plant America’s greatest publicly owned system and also makes Seattle America’s best lighted city.”

THE SPOKANE STREET SUBSTATION – 1926

Seattle City Light opened its South End service center on Spokane Street in 1926 – the year this photograph was recorded – on land then recently reclaimed from the tides. Seattle architect J.L. McCauley’s public building was not only functional but attractive. As the historical scene reveals, the restrained ornament used in the service center’s concrete forms has been enhanced with a wrapping of the building in a skin of stucco and off-white plaster.

Signs for the structure’s principal roles – warehouse and shops – adorn its major division, to the sides of a slightly off-center tower where “City Light” is tastefully embossed on the arch just beneath its flag pole. The name is promoted twice on the roof, with block letters about nine feet high illuminated at night with about 400 bulbs for each spelling of CITY LIGHT.

The building survives, although its north wall facing Spokane Street was hidden in the 1960s by the textured concrete panels. In the spring of 1997 when this text was first written, a new north wall was in the works that would how to visitors and Spokane Street traffic a curvilinear facade ornamented with public art made from recycled glass. Inside, a two-story skylit atrium was planned to repeat the roof forms incorporated in the building’s original design. (I suspect that these changes were completed for in ’97 there was no worrying recession.) The sawtooth roof, which runs nearly the length of the center’s west (right) wall above the shops, is to these eyes the historical plant’s strongest architectural feature.

The twenties were a decade of endless tests for City Light, as it developed the first of the Skagit River’s generators, Gorge Dam, and fought a service war with Puget Power when lines for the public and private utilities were still duplicated throughout the city’s streets.

BUILDING WASHINGTON PAGES 284-TO-287

(Later this morning Ron Edge – of Edge Clipping and other services to this blog) will, upon rising, will insert here a link that will speedily take the reader to the four pages in BUILDING WASHINGTON, A HISTORY of WASHINGTON STATE PUBLIC WORKS that treat on the founding and growth of Seattle City Light.  The entire book may be read on this blog, although as a big book it takes awhile to load it.  It is found within our front page button titled “History Book.”)

EDGE CLIPPINGS

Below are a few examples of covers to City Light Annual Reports, that Ron Edge has pulled from his collections.   It begins, however, with the competition – a link to Stone and Webster’s small 1909 booklet in pdf format.   It was published by the city’s private power competition, the Seattle Electric Company, the local holding of the Boston firm.

http://pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/seattle_electric_company_1909.pdf