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The lifting of the Savoy Hotel in 1905-06 helped advance Second Avenue as Seattle’s urban canyon of steel-framed high rises.

The Alaska Building at Cherry Street was first in 1904. The Empire Building went up at the southeast corner of Madison Street only a few days behind the construction schedule of the Savoy.  (In the late 1970s the Empire was the first of Seattle’s skyscrapers to be spectacularly razed by implosion.) Together the Standard Furniture Building (Broadacres) in 1907 at Pine, and one year later and one block north at Stewart the New Washington Hotel (Josephinum) gave the canyon its northern pole.

The completion of the Hoge Building in 1911 at 17 floors gave a momentary crown to the canyon at Cherry.  But three years later the Smith Tower at Yesler was dedicated with a mysterious 42 stories.   still disagree on what counts as a “story.”   All Second’s “scrapers” except for the Empire and the Savoy survive.

The Savoy’s planners could not have known in 1904 that its position mid-block between Seneca and University Streets would eventually strand it between the new retail district around Pike and Pine and the old Financial district closer to Pioneer Square. But they did soon determine that the height of their slender Savoy was by comparison to the others a mediocre high rise.

Here I introduce the bright blogger Journeyman Matt and his blog “Just Wondering.”  Mat advised me of the Savoy’s height “anxieties” when he revealed that the hotel was first built to a mere eight stories but then quickly cranked up to “Twelve Stories of Solid Comfort.”  Next, working together we illustrated the brief history of its growth, which you can follow on his blog.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

A few somethings Jean.  I searched through the list of now nearly 29 years of doing now-then for Pacific and found a half dozen stories that related to the close neighborhood of the Savoy.  However, for the moment, I found the illustrations for only four of them, and I’m including here three of those.  Two of them feature parades: one for bikes and another for elephants.  I’ll put them down now as time allows before I put myself down tonight.  I’ll proof them in the morning.

THE BIG BIKE PARADE

On February 18, 1901 a local bicycle merchant, Fred Merrill, staged a media event.. He aroused the community and startled his competitors with a peculiar parade up Second Avenue, then Seattle’s Bicycle Row.

The occasion is recounted in Frank Cameron’s recently published “Bicycling in Seattle, 1879 to 1904.”  (This feature was first published in 1982 when Cameron’s bike history was new.)  Cameron writes, “Most merchants announced well in advance when a shipment of bicycles would arrive; it was cause for some excitement. Few could match Merrill. .A shipment of 400 Rambler bicycles was loaded onto all the express wagons available, and hauled to his store in a parade led by a brass band and two carriages, one for Mr. and Mrs. Merrill, the other for company officers.'”

Cameron is pictured here in the contemporary photograph. (When we can find the negative we will replace this screened rendering grabbed from the book “Seattle Now and Then” that you can visit in toto on this blog.)  The location of the “now” image is the . same as the “then” – one half block north of Spring Street on Second Avenue. Cameron poses as part of a different sort of bicycle delivery: 15 bikes and riders from Bucky’s Messenger Service. The deliverers pedal a total of 500 miles a day, courageously darting through traffic that’s not always willing to share the road with bicycles. Cameron is Bucky’s repairman. He is a complete cyclist: rides them, repairs them and researches them.

The historical photograph shows a part of the parade, and that may be Merrill in the lead carriage at the far left. The carriage pauses beside his storefront with the sign for “Ideal Bicycles” to pose with a few of those hired wagons for an unidentified photographer.

In 1901 there were more than it dozen bicycle shops on Second Avenue between Marion and Pike Streets. No doubt in February they were all preparing for the spring rush on two wheelers, but none with the showy delivery of the man in the rented carriage.  The city’s first bicycle was brought from San Francisco in 1879 by the book merchant W.H . Pumphrey, for the son of a local bookkeeper named Lipsky. Little Lipsky’s toy required the resilience of youth because the ride was very bumpy. The tires were hard, there were no brakes and, of course, no paved streets.  The flexible pneumatic tire, and a softer ride, first arrived in 1893; in time to test the city’s first paved surface, an experimental block of bricks on First Avenue South between Washington Street and Yesler Way.

By 1896 there was still only one mile of paved streets in Seattle, including these (above) Second Avenue bricks supporting Merrill’s parade. Cameron estimates that in 1896 there were only about 300 cyclists in Seattle. One year later there were 3,000. In 1897 your first desire was to strike it rich in the Klondike, but you might settle for a bicycle.

And all those cyclists formed an effective lobby. The Queen City Cycle Club was founded in the Argus (a long-lived weekly tabloid) offices in 1896 and a year later it became the Queen City Good Roads Club. The Argus ran a regular bicycle column, which promoted the “wheeling” scene. With funds from licenses, benefit races and pledges, bicycle paths were built first around Lake Union and then through a scenic 10 miles to Lake Washington, a portion of that path is today’s Interlaken Boulevard at the north end of Capitol Hill. By 1901, the year of Merrill’s parade, there were more than 10,000 local cyclists. Many wore bloomers, named for “the rational riding costume” for women.

Bicycle racing for men and women was a popular sport, and the city’s planked and cindered tracks were busy with both local contestants and touring professionals. Club retreats took off on weekends for West Seattle, Edmonds, Snoqualmie Falls – even Tacoma.  Some bicycles were manufactured locally. This city was also an exporter and a few of Merrill’s 400 Ramblers were bound for China, Japan and even the gold fields of unpaved Alaska where the buyers expected to cycle to their nuggets and perhaps even over them..

The bicycle bust followed the boom. By 1907 what Cameron calls the “decade of the bicycle” was over. Of the 23 merchants that sold cycles during the boom only two remained in 1907. Many dealers went on to automobiles. The sales were less seasonal and the buyers, though often out-of-shape, were usually well-heeled for putting their leather to different pedals.

ELEPHANTS ON PARADE

(This feature first appeared in Pacific Magazine on Dec. 11, 1994.)

The circus parade was a great spectacle and promotion, an anticipated annual ritual in many city’s and towns across the county, and often it would also serve to move the circus from the railroad depot to the performance site. That may be what’s happening with this Ringling Bros. procession on Second Avenue, looking north from Seneca Street around noon on a sunny summer day.

Local circus enthusiast Michael Sporrer describes this as “one of the few Seattle photographs that is really good on elephants.” (I count a dozen – elephants, not photos with them.) In Sporrer’s cataloging of Northwest circus appearances (a decades-old unpublished work in progress) he has Ringling Bros. here for two-day stands in late August 1902, ’03 and ’04. Since the most popular early-century Seattle venue for circuses was the old ballpark on Fifth Avenue North at Republican Street (now the High School Memorial Stadium) these elephants may be en-route from the waterfront train depot to the fields of Lower Queen Anne.

Both First and Second avenues were then preferred routes to Queen Anne and North Seattle. Third Avenue stopped at Pine Street, one block and 100 feet below the front portico to the Victorian Denny Hotel atop Denny Hill. Here, this looming landmark interrupts the left -horizon. To the far left Second Avenue still climbs the western slope of Denny Hill, so this view probably dates from 1902 or even 1903, when the Second Avenue regrading began, which in two years lowered it to its present grade. By 1910 the regarding would raze Denny Hill (including the hotel) as far east as Fifth Avenue.

George Bartholomew’s Great Western Circus was, according to Sporrer, the first real circus to visit Seattle. It came overland from Virginia City, Mont. in 1867-by wagon. By Sporrer’s accounting, the last real full-blown circus parade to trek through downtown Seattle probably was the Cole Bros. Circus procession in 1937. The last big tent show hereabouts was Circus Vargas’ 1988 performance in Renton.

PANTAGES VAUDEVILLE

Alexander Pantages built his namesake vaudeville house at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Seneca Street in 1904. It was “the little Greek’s” second theater. The first, “The Crystal,” also on Second Avenue, was a converted storefront that Pantages opened when he landed in Seattle with a small fortune finagled in the Alaska gold rush.

In his Seattle history “Skid Road,” Murray Morgan describes Pantages’ gold-field strategy: “He abandoned his dream of finding gold in the creek beds and concentrated on removing it from the men who had already found it.” Pantages sold the sourdoughs vaudeville, at $25 a seat in his Orpheum theater in Nome. The price of admission to his first Seattle shows was a dime for a mixture of stage acts and short films. Pantages was illiterate, but having roamed the world before landing here he could converse in several languages. His English, it was said, was as bad as any, but he knew what the public wanted.

Pantages built a vaudeville empire that ultimately surpassed all others. Somewhat like royalty, his daughter Carmen married John Considine Jr., son of his chief competitor. At its peak the Pantages circuit included 30 playhouses he owned outright and 42 others he controlled. To an act he liked he could offer more than a year of steady employment. Pantages sold his kingdom for $24 million in 1929 – before the crash.

For Pantages the best act he ever booked was the violinist he married. Lois Pantages always played the first act whenever her husband opened a new house. The first of these was across Seneca Street from the Pantages. He named it after his wife, and until it was destroyed by fire in 1911, the Lois was a successful theater. Also ih 1911 Pantages purchased the Plymouth Congregational Sanctuary at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and University Street, and built his New Pantages Theatre there. It was designed by architect B. Marcus Priteca, and completed in 1918.  Later renamed the Palomar, it was a showplace many locals will remember.  (Search this blog for Pantages and you will find stories about the new Pantages/Palomar at Third and University.)

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Throughout the first anxious year of World War Two, the local Federation of Labor Unions completed the construction of their new Labor Temple at the northeast corner of First Avenue and Clay Street, and in the fall of 1942 the member unions – nearly 50 of them – moved to it from their old quarters here at 6th Avenue and University Street.

Reporting on the move, the Post-Intelligencer noted that the old temple would continue to be used for some union meetings until the return of peace permitted an auditorium to be fitted into the new Belltown building.  The P-I also reflected “most of the important meetings and outstanding decisions made by Seattle labor leaders since 1905 have taken place in the old temple.  The general strike in February of 1919 was planned in the building . . . The streetcar motorman’s strike during the last war was also called from the building.”

The 1905 dedication at 6th and University was two blocks south and four years late.  At the conclusion of the 1901 Labor Day parade a few thousand celebrants gathered at 6th and Pike (not University) to lay the cornerstone for the Western Central Labor Union’s new temple.  William H. Middleton, its optimistic president told the crowd, “In the name of the organized labor, in the name of the great trades union movement and in the name of the Western Central Labor Union, I dedicate this temple for the use of organized labor.  May peace be within its walls and good will always extend to mankind.”

Several strikes and considerable strife between industrial and trade-based labor followed and probably confused the first attempts at building a temple.  Retired U.W. archivist Rich Berner’s first of three books on 20th Century Seattle is the best source for following the labor fireworks of those years.  Now a new illustrated edition of Berner’s “Seattle 1900-1920” can be read free on-line on this blog (click here to download – Rich’s complete book approaches 28 MB, which takes 20 seconds to download with cable, but possibly more time with slower connections) or purchased in hard copy at the University of Washington Book Store.  All proceeds after expenses go to the non-profit encyclopedia of Washington State history, historylink.org.

Here’s a larger rendering of the book’s cover.

WEB EXTRAS

Well, Paul, on this day after Christmas, I thought it appropriate to drag out a production we did together several years ago. It is, of course, our audio dramatization of O’Henry’s THE GIFT OF THE MAGI, which you narrated and I produced for Feliks Banel’s Holiday Express show on KBCS-FM, hearkening back to my days as a radio theatre impresario for NPR. For those who long for yet one more tidbit of Christmas, enjoy.  The rest of you can just cool your heels till next year.

Now, your turn, Paul.  Anything to add?

Jean, mostly another encouragement for readers to check out the book Seattle 1900 – 1920.  It is stuffed with illustrations that are almost always shown on or very near the pages to which they are most relevant.

As you know Jean, Rich begins his 10th decade this coming New Years Eve, Dec. 31.  He will be 90 years old.  Since they cannot find anything wrong with him he may be around until 112.  Here’s the picture you took last year at Ivar’s Acres of Clams.  We took him for lunch.

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Carolyn Marr, the librarian at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) and an authority of the photographer Anders Wilse’s years in Seattle, thinks that this his look east through the entrance to Salmon Bay – from Shilshole Bay – was probably taken in 1900.  That was Wilse’s last busy year in Seattle before he returned to Norway.  During his few years here Wilse received many commissions from businesses and the City of Seattle to do photographic surveys.  But why did he record this bucolic view over a Lawtonwood pasture with seven cows?

It was not long after Wilse recorded this view of the channel that the Army Corps started dredging it in preparation for the ship canal.  Throughout the 1890s smaller “lightening ships” hauled cut lumber from the many Ballard mills on Salmon Bay to the schooners anchored in deep water off of Shilshole Bay.  No vessels here, however.  The channel is near low tide.  You can make out the sand bars.

The home of Salmon Bay Charlie, a half-century resident here, can be found to the far right.  With irregular roof boards it may be mistaken for part of the shoreline.  Charley was one of the principal suppliers of salmon and clams to the resident pioneers on both sides of this channel.  Wilse gives us a good look across the tidewaters into a west Ballard that while clear-cut is still sparsely developed.  The Bryggers settled and developed that part of Ballard, and the few structures seen there may belong to them.

Librarian Marr finds two other related views in MOHAI’s Wilse collection. One looks in the opposite direction across the channel from Ballard, and the other is a close-up of Salmon Bay Charlie’s cedar-plank home.  Marr adds, “Wilse was interested in boats and waterways, as well as Indians.”

One last note: those may be Scheuerman cows.  The German immigrant Christian Scheuerman and his native wife Rebecca were Lawtonwood pioneers.  Settling here in 1870 they multiplied with 10 children.

WEB EXTRAS

Once again guided through the back streets and secret passages of Magnolia, the inestimable Jon Wooton led me to the spot near where Wilse’s ‘Then’ photo had been taken.  The following closer shots of the railroad bridge were taken on return trips over the next couple of days.

Anything to add, Paul?  A few things now and a few more later in the week with a Salmon Bay Addendum.  Here, by near coincidence, is a view of the Great Northern bridge when it was nearly new.  Both views look from the north side of the bay.  This “then” was photographed by James Turner – unless I am corrected.  (Click to enlarge – twice.)

Next – if we may  – we will reflect on what changes along this way must have transpired in the mere 60 years between the above the photograph and the one that now follows.

The KALAKALA

Before there was the Space Needle there was the Kalakala – serving as the principal symbol of Seattle and Puget Sound.  The ferry was introduced in 1935 to help locals take their minds of the Great Depression.  The Black Ball Line named her after the native Indians’ mythical “flying bird” and advertised her as the “world’s first streamlined ferry.”  The publicity worked.  Puget Sound’s first streamlined symbol was known from Peoria to Peking.

The Kalakala’s function, however, did not follow its form.  It vibrated badly, and was not particularly fast.  Its daily wartime work of transporting nearly 5,000 ship workers between Seattle and Bremerton earned it the proletarian title “Workhorse of the Sound.”

The tear-shaped vessel was first sketched by the avant-garde industrial designer Norman Bell Geddes, and so apparently not by a Boeing engineer as is widely believed.  Bell Geddes managed to design an auto ferry that did not resemble a steam-powered garage.  The Kalakala’s aluminum skin was stretched over the burned-out hull of the San Francisco Bay ferry Peralta, towed north in 1934 for its transmutation.

Here, the Kalakala is on an excursion through the Chittenden Locks on April 24, 1947.  Twenty years later, her wings were clipped and she was towed to Kodiak, Alaska, where she was landlocked as a crab-processing plant.  (This feature first appeared in Pacific on Nov. 3, 1991, when the magazine was still credited to both the big local pulps then, “The Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer.” This explains the timing and hopeful fancy of the remaining copy.)

Ever since, persons of energy and imagination have labored to bring the “flying bird” back to Puget Sound, the waterway for which she was once an international symbol.  Most recently this effort has been organized by the Kalakala Foundation.

SALMON BAY CHARLIE

Salmon Bay Charlie and his wife lived in their cedar plank home on the south shore of Magnolia’s Salmon Bay. For half a century Charlie, also known as Siwash Charlie, sold salmon, clams and berries to the first settlers and later to the soldiers at Fort Lawton.  Today’s historical view shows Charlie’s house at the turn of the century, taken by the photography firm, Webster and Stevens.

Charlie’s native name was HWelch’teed, and he probably was the last of the Sheel-shol-ashbsh (hence Shilshole) group that centered on this once narrow Shilshole-Salmon Bay inlet to the fresh water interior. (“Sheel-shol-ashbsh” translates to “threading the bead,” which was descriptive of the canoe trip to lakes Union and Washington.) The Shilshole Indians were one of the eight or nine principal tribes who lived in what we now call Greater Seattle. LocaI historian David Buerge has determined that this Salmon Bay site was once the center of a large community whose area extended from Mukilteo to Smith Cove. Here, long before Charlie’s shack was built, three long houses dominated the area. The largest house was big enough for potlatches, the gift-giving ritual ceremony.

The Shilsholes went into a sudden decline a half century before ‘white settlers grabbed their land.  Once about 1800 of their numbers were ravished by “a great catastrophe,” most likely an attack by one of the slave-taking, booty-hunting and beheading North Coast tribes. By the time pioneer Henry Smith settled Smith Cove in 1853, the tribe had dwindled to a dozen families at most.  By the late 1880s there were only two families left.

Steady white settlement, started in the 1875 when German immigrant Christian Scheurman moved to the area, cleared the timber and married a native woman who had ten children before she died in 1884.

In 1895 Seattle boosters organized to attract a military post to the area and gathered the acreage that is now Fort Lawton-Discovery Park. The part of it that is now Lawton Wood, shown in our contemporary photo, is not part of the military holding because Scheurman withheld it.

Soon after the military moved in next door, this protected enclave was improved with mansions of a few of Seattle’s elite. In 1952 these neighbors – about 30 houses sparingly distributed about a generous 30 acres – organized the Lawton Wood Improvement Club waving the motto “To Beautify and Develop Lawton Wood.” By the time that the last of the Scheurmans, Ruby, moved out in the late 1970s the beautifying had turned more to developing, and the lots got smaller.

Any attempt to, recreate the perspective used in the photo of Charlie’s shack would have put in the bay. During the early part of the 20th century, deep-water dredging by the Army erased the old Indian’s promontory. The excavation revealed the many layers of discarded clam shells that piled up over the centuries of native settlement.

In 2003 I returned to the site to deliver a slide show lecture on Salmon Bay to members of the Magnolia Historical Society.   We met in a member’s home that overlapped Charlie’s “property” broadly foot-printed.  The new print of Charlie’s above – and his dog – had surfaced from a collection kept by one of the Society members,  Russ Langstaff.   Here first is the picture, followed by the feature on it that appeared in Pacific, also in 2003.

SALMON BAY CHARLIE’S VISITORS (With some of the news form above used again.)

Later this day – after I have finished writing this  – I am attending a benefit for the Magnolia Historical Society (MHS) as they prepare to write and produce a second volume of “Magnolia: Memories & Milestones.”  We will be meeting at the home of Betty and Tink Phelps and within whispering (that is, not shouting) distance of where the historical photographer stood who took this week’s “then” photo of three black suits visiting Charlie (or Hwehlchtid) the last of the Duwamish Indians to live on Shilshole Bay.  Of course, while I am at the benefit I will photograph the contemporary scene (including some society members) printed here as a “repeat” of the historical photograph.

Magnolian Russ Langstaff found this newest addition to the small store of Salmon (or Shilshole) Bay Charlie photographs while thumbing through the stock of images taken by both his father and uncle early in the 20^th Century.  However, it took two-time society president Monica Wooton, while searching for photographs to illustrate the MHS’s first book, to identify this scene as one of Charlie, his dog and his home.

While the towering trio are not identified it has occurred to more than one “reader” of the photograph that perhaps these are the agents from the Office of Indian Affairs who removed Charlie from his home to the reservation soon after his wife Madelline died. That was at the time the Ballard (Chittenden) Locks were under construction.  One source says 1915 and another 1916 for Charlie’s removal.

Although, of all the historical maps of Shilshole Bay that have been found none mark the site of Charlie and Madelline’s home (city maps were generally made to sell property and not to identify and so perhaps help preserve native homes like Charlie’s), the several surviving photographs of this historical home lead us confidently to the Phelps back yard or at least very near it.

Now and Then Captions together: Until about 1916 when it was burned Salmon Bay Charlie’s home was a landmark fixture on the southwest shore or the Magnolian side of Shilshole Bay.  Like the contemporary deck of the Phelps home, this sturdy shack of the last of the Shilshole band of the Duwamish Tribe sat on a promontory or knoll near the foot of what was later developed as Sheridan Street in the Bay Terrace Addition of the Lawtonwood neighborhood.  The site was also dredged for a widening of the waterway into the locks.

(Historical view courtesy of Russ Langstaff. I took the “now,” below, myself.  Jean’s contributions began in 2004.  Will we make a decade together Jean?)

In some now lost time of the 1990s I mounted a large exhibit of Salmon Bay neighborhood pictures in Hirams Restaurant, which overlooked the locks and the bay.  I think the name has been changed twice since, and the pictures were removed during a subsequent remodel, and also apparently destroyed – or lost – by the owner.  This portrait of Salmon Bay Charlies standing with his goods was included in the exhibit and captioned so . . .  “ From his home on Salmon Bay, Salmon Bay Charlie gathered clams and netted salmon for sale or barter with Ballard residents.  After the death of Chief Seattle’s daughter Princess Angeline in 1896, Charlie was the community’s best known native.  He was especially popular among children to whom he would tell stories of his own youth.  This studio portrait was probably marketed as a souvenir.  Soon after his wife Madeline died in 1914 or 1915, the elderly Charlie was sent to a reservation by the Office of Indian Affairs.  Bill Phillips, Charlie and Madeline’s neighbor and probably a relative as well, soon afterward burned down their home.  It was the native’s practice to burn the homes of the dead in order to ritually separate them from earth.”

Before showing the homes of two of Charlies neighbors – those on the south and north sides of Chittenden Locks – we will pause to show a few more salmon.

Follows now two past Pacific features about Salmon Bay Charlie’s neighbors, the Shillestads on the Magnolia side of the locks, first, the the Bryggers on the Ballard side following.

BEFORE the LOCKS, the SHILLESTADS

Ole and Regina Shillestad knew each other in Norway. As students, then married here in Seattle. They raised their four children on the south shore of Salmon Bay beside the site of the future Chittenden Locks. The couple acquired this land in 1876.  Four years later they built their home here and planted an orchard of about 30 trees:  plum, pear and apple.  A sliver of the orchard is evident on the left just behind the fence built above the high-side line.

A skilled Norwegian carpenter, Ole built the home himself as well as that of his neighbors, John and Anna Brygger, who lived just across Salmon Bay. (The Brygger home, which survives as part of the Lock Spot Tavern.)  Both homes were ornaments with Shillestad’s hand-cut details.

In 1898 King County bought a portion of the Shillestad property in its campaign to lure the federal government to build locks at the site.  The family home was moved a short distance during the canal’s construction, and when the waters were at last raised in 1916 behind the Lock’s new spillway, the Shillestads picked the fruit of their orchard from a rowboat (perhaps the one seen here.)

After the family moved to lower Queen Anne, the old home was rented often to caretakers of what remained of the old Shillestad family property.  Commercial development of the south shore began shortly after World War II, and for a time June Shillestad and her brother operated the Sealth Souvenir Store and Lunch Counter alongside the spillway dam.  The family home survived until the mid-1970s, when it was replaced by the apartments that now look down on Chittenden Locks.

THE BRYGGERS of BALLARD by Salmon Bay

Anna and John Brygger moved from their log cabin in 1887 into this, their first finished home.  The lumber for it was logged from their homestead on the north bank of Salmon Bay, towed to Seattle for milling and then rafted back for construction.  John died the following year, but the much younger Anna lived until 1940.

Before his death at age 65, Brygger had his successes.  He was one of the first to try commercial fishing and canning on Puget Sound.  In the summer of 1876, the Intelligencer (a predecessor of the Post-Intelligencer) reported that “Mr. John Brygger, a Norwegian capitalist and fisherman, has purchased a site on Salmon Bay about six miles north of the city, where he has already commenced the business of catching and canning salmon.”  His skill was such that he was able to open a bank in his native Norway with earnings.  This banking confidence he passed on to his son, Albert, who later became president of Seattle’s Peoples National Bank.

The Brygger home was built on a knoll a short distance north of Salmon Bay  – and the future Chittenden Locks – near the present intersection of Market Street and 30^th Avenue Northwest.  In 1948 the site was condemned to allow the extension of Market Street west from 29^th Avenue Northwest.  Frank Canovi, Lock Spot Tavern owner, bought the Brygger home and moved the oldest part of it less than 100 yards south of the original site to his popular beer parlor.

[We hope later this week to put up another blogaddendum, this one of the buildings of the Chittenden locks – if time is kind, this week.  And sometimes between then and now, we also hope to proof the above. Now it is time for another visit to the kingdom of slumber that Bill Burden has so honestly named the “nightybears” or “nighty bears.”]

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There is an artful connection between the barracks in the historical photograph and the trees and bushes in the contemporary repeat.  The connection is subtle enough that Jean Sherrard needed a guide, Jon Wooton of the Magnolia Historical Society, to record his “now” scene.   As they approached the site Jon explained, “It would be obvious if you knew what you were looking for.”  What follows is a paraphrase of his revelation.

These “Area 500” standard army issue barracks were built in 1942 for the military to billet and process troops during World War Two.  Almost sixty years later they were given over to the city to become part of the Discovery Park that already surrounded them.  The Army intended to relinquish the nine-plus acres to the Seattle Park Department “in a condition that resembles the immediate surrounding environment,” which is the “urban forest and sanctuary for wildlife” that makes up Seattle’s largest park.

Once the barracks were torn down and the pavement removed the Army was ready to pay for planting whatever appropriate ground cover the Dept. of Parks prescribed.  And here enters that most clever continuity between barracks and bushes hinted above.

Once selected to design and start the transformation from fort to forest, landscape architect Charles Anderson decided to “hold the memory of the barracks for a while” by filling their old footprints with native plants that would also “escape and colonize the rest of the project.”   In time all intimations of the barracks rectangles will blend into the new native forest of birch trees, alders (about 1000 of them at the start), Oregon-grape, sword ferns, salal, strawberries, roses and more.   The few fir trees seen in the “then” that the military planted to break the monotony of their regulation barracks – some of those were kept.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, and of course.  I’ll not surprise you and say no.  We’ll start with a story first used in Pacific Mag in 1988, and its about Officers’ Row, which survives just west of the World War Two barracks site.  I’ll up the “then” followed by the text, and the add the “now” shot of Officers’ Row that you so presciently took when you visited Discovery Park for the barracks shoot.

OFFICERS QUARTERS WITH THE FIRST RESIDENTS, THE KIEHL FAMILY

In 1901 the Kiehl family, with father Ambrose at the reins, climbed aboard the  family buggy and posed in front of the first-lieutenant quarters at Fort Lawton. The camera was Kiehl’s and so was the officers’ quarters, for as yet there were no lieutenants at Fort Lawton.

The engineer Kiehl was in charge of preparing the site for a fort. The family’s first home on the grounds was a board-and-batten shack (shown in another feature, below), but soon after this the first duplex on officers’ row was completed in 1899 and the family was given permission to move in. They stayed until 1905.

Ambrose Kiehl’s large glass negative for this view was cared for by his daughter Laura (here in the back seat) and given by her to architect and preservationist Frederick Mann. Mann’s consultations in the development of Discovery Park and now the Navy’s preservation of officers’ row make him the respected custodian of the site’s architectural history. (Fred has passed since this feature was first published on Dec. 4, 1988.)

Fred Mann discovered a caption for this scene in Ambrose Kiehl’s catalog to his lavish photographic record of family and fort. It reads, simply, “Billy, Doctor and Wagon. Ft. Lawton, 1901.” Billy and Doctor are the horses. Laura Kiehl recounted for Mann how the Army mule was sometimes substituted when either of the horses was not feeling well enough to cart her the long trek to school. Laura already was a teenager when the lieutenants moved in and the Kiehl family moved out to Queen Anne Hill.

The 12 sturdy Georgian Revival homes along Fort Lawton’s officers’ row (all of them duplexes excepting the captain’s quarters) are on the National Register.

Here’s Jean’s look at the row during his recent visit to Discovery Park to repeat the World War 2 barracks site.

The FIRST CONSTRUCTION at FORT LAWTON – The KIEHL’S HOME and OFFICE

In 1896, Ambrose Kiehl. a civil engineer, photographer, musician and family man from Port Townsend, was hired by the Army to survey and clear the new Fort Lawton site and supervise construction of its buildings. The first structure was the two-story board-and-batten shack shown here. The design is Spartan even by military standards, but it was meant to be only a temporary residence/office for Kiehl’s early work on the fort.

Here the family, Isabella and Ambrose (left and right, flanking their daughters Laura and Lorena), pose for a photographer who was probably Ambrose himself, running into the scene after setting a time-delayed shutter on one of his many cameras. Behind Isabella and supporting the bicycle is the building’s one oddity, the squat, windowless addition extending from the west side. Kiehl prepared his blueprints and then exposed them to the sun by opening the trap door. Solar energy was required because the fort lacked electricity (although it did have a telephone, as indicated by the pole on the right).

The date is probably 1899. The summer before, 97 of Magnolia’s 700 acres donated by citizens for the fort had been cleared. The first seven buildings were completed in 1900.

Eventually, 25 main post buildings were set about an oval parade ground.  One of the first constructed was the camp’s hospital. (It is far left in the 1936 aerial included below.)  After 1910, the Army lost interest in the fort and, in 1938, as noted above, the military offered it to the city for $l. The city declined.  In any case the military might soon have taken it back. During World War II, 450 new buildings were speedily erected to make Fort Lawton the sixth-largest point of embarcation for troops in the U.S.

THE TROLLEY To The FORT

[Much thanks to Jon and Monica Wooton of the Magnolia Historical Society for helping supply some of the illustrations used here.  And Ron Edge – not of Magnolia but of North Seattle – helped as well.]

More than ten years after local boosters began to lobby for a military post, Brig. Gen. Elwell S. Otis noted in 1894 that the rolling plateau on the western head of the Magnolia peninsula ‘might be a suitable place to house soldiers. He advised the War Department that they might be needed to keep the peace in boomtown Seattle. Many and perhaps most Americans were then hurting from the economic depression that had crashed upon them the year before, and Otis noted that in Seattle “now dwell 100,000 people, a part of whom are restless, demonstrative and often time turbulent upon fancied provocation.”

Four years later, clearing began on the acres coaxed from Magnolia pioneers for free or cheap by the local Chamber of Commerce for an as-yet-unnamed fort. In 1899, when construction began, the fort got its namesake hero and added mission from the same source: the Philippines. Maj. Gen. Henry Ware Lawton was killed in action there in 1899 and, as fanciful as it would later seem, the Spanish-American war painted the Pacific Coast with a fear of invasion.

The scene of the guard and waiting station at the Fort Lawton terminus was most likely taken soon after the branch of the Ballard trolley line was completed in the summer of 1905. During the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, Fort Lawton and every other Seattle destination reached by electric trolleys and cable cars were promoted by the Seattle Electric Co. as tourist destinations. The military obliged with regular dress parades and concerts.

THE 1912 BAIST REAL ESTATE MAP PLATE 34

http://pauldorpat.com/rke/maps/baist/plate_34.pdf

You should be able to click the address directly or map above which will then take you to plate 34 of the 1912 Real Estate Map  for a very detailed examination of it.  Note that the trolley line curves into the fort and reaches its terminus between the map’s “T” and “O” in “Lawton.”

Click your mouse TWICE and get good enough detail to study Seattle’s ambitious bike path system in 1900 – and more.  Magnolia’s part is, of course, on the left.  Note that it enters the then still largely proposed Ford Lawton.   The maps shows the path crossing Interbay on a bridge at Interurban, which is still a bridge on Dravus Street.  The wagon bridge to Ballard follows 14th Ave. NW and not the later bascule bridge on 15th.  The Great Northern enters Ballard from Interbay on a curving trestle that comes close to snuggling with the wagon road.  It then ran along the Ballard waterfront, and was only rerouted to its new Bascule bridge at Shilshole when committed construction on the Chittenden locks began in 1910-11.  Far right, the canal showing at Montlake is for logs and not vessels.  The ship canal was dedicated 17 years later.  Find the trestle on Westlake at the southwest corner of Lake Union, and what a strange eastern shoreline the lake shows before most of the public works tampering.  Imagine much of the bike path mileage passed then still through wooden copses thick enough to feel like forests.

Looking east over the Fort in 1936.  (The date was carefully determined with internal evidences by the Magnolia-Ballard wit, Hal Will – since deceased.  The aerial was interpreted for me by Jon Wooton, one of Hal’s many surviving friends.  Click TWICE to enlarge.) Between the shoreline on the bottom right and Salmon Bay on the top, much of the fort is revealed.  (At the very top is the line – left/right – of the Ballard bridge on 15th Ave. nw before the new concrete piers replaced the wood pilings on its long approaches.) Officers Row is this side of the water tower, which is this side of the small forest where the barracks would be built during the Second World War.   The original barracks are the two large u-shaped structures seen from the rear and near the center of the aerial.  The next building to the left was the Fort’s entertainment venue where many bands performed. (The next photo shown features one of them.)  The building to its left near the end of the “block” is the Fort’s stockade.  The long slender buildings on the left are stables for a fort that was designed for the cavalry and not the infantry.  Part of the non-commission officers homes are in a row – with trees – above the stables.  And the hospital is above that, between two roads and two rows of trees.

The NEW MAGNOLIA BRIDGE in 1930

When it was completed in 1930, the sweep of the Magnolia Bridge as it ascends west of Pier 91 was considered a modern engineering wonder.  At nearly 4,000 feet, it was the largest of only three reinforced concrete spans built anywhere. The big bridge was first proposed six years earlier when the West Wheeler Street Bridge was set on fire by a spark from a Great Northern locomotive passing beneath it.

At first, the Seattle city council refused to build a high bridge to the bluff, since only 4,000 people lived west of Interbay and south of Ballard. The city chose a humble alternative by extending the West Garfield Street Bridge with a timber trestle that reached Magnolia at an elevation just a few feet above high tide.

Magnolians, however, organized the Garfield Bridge Club and persuaded the city to replace the trestle with the soaring trusses shown here. The strewn timbers of the temporary low bridge, cluttering the base of the new span, are also evident.

This view was photographed Dec. 22, 1930, two weeks after the high bridge was dedicated with band music, the usual speeches and a procession of motorists and pedestrians. Then the tidelands of Interbay still reached far north of Garfield Street, requiring the bridge to be built above piles driven 20 to 40 feet into the ground. Now the tide basin has been reclaimed and blacktopped as a parking lot most often for Japanese imports. (This last about imported cars was true in the spring of 1991 when the above was first written.)

PLEASANT VALLEY & TWO BOOKS

Magnolia:  Memories and Milestones answer the question those of us who do not live in Magnolia have sometimes asked, “Why go to Magnolia?”  (beyond Discovery Park and the garage sales.)  This book is surely the most elegant neighborhood history yet produced hereabouts.  More than a dozen contributors have managed to fill it with charm and wit.  Hall Will’s chapter “Dumb Stunts and Grade School Memories” is worth the price of the cover.”

Among the chapters are expositions on the pioneers, Fort Lawton and Discovery Park, Interbay and Fisherman’s Terminal, the Village, the farms, West Point and most of the trestles and bridges.

No Seattle neighborhood resembles an island community as much as Magnolia. During the melting of the last ice age it most likely was an island. Well into the 20th century it was almost an island until the Port of Seattle, the railroads and the city began filling in the once extensive Interbay tidelands. Still one must take a bridge to reach Magnolia.

Magnolia is two hills divided by a naturally cleared vale so hidden that Seattle pioneer Arthur Denny, when seeking grazing land for his livestock and following an Indian’s directions, could not find it. Later when the bucolic valley was dappled with small farms, it was called Pleasant Valley.

The early 20th-century view of a part of Pleasant Valley printed above looks to the north and a little east through a portion of the Marymount Dairy farm. The historical photographer – probably a member of the Hanson family that purchased the dairy farm in 1905 – stands either on or near what is now part of the West Magnolia Playground. One of the Hanson children holds a future milker.

To get a copy of “Magnolia Memories and Milestones” call almost any business or organization with “Magnolia” in its name and get directions on how to find one.  (Sorry.  The above was written a decade ago, and Volume One, I believe, is sold out.  It was so appreciated that the Magnolia Historical Society went forward with a second volume, which is still available through the society.)

THE KIEHL WOMEN at WEST POINT

“Long ago” in December of 1981, historian Murray Morgan, U.W. architect Fred Mann and I drove up to Port Townsend to collect and record some oral history with Laura Kiehl. At the time, Laura was 89 years old and I was carrying a stack of photos printed from negatives taken by her father, Ambrose Kiehl. This week’s historical scene is one of them, and Laura remembered it well.

Laura was born in Port Townsend in 1892. At the age of 4, she moved with her younger sister and parents to Seattle. Her father, a civil engineer, had been hired by the Army to survey the forest wilderness that is now Magnolia Bluffs Discovery Park. He also helped build the fort that local politicians hoped would pad the city’s purse with military money and also help defend Seattle against the rowdy radicals then milling about the city’s economically distressed streets.

Ambrose, who paid his way through college by playing a pipe organ, did his work well in helping design and build Fort Lawton. It breaks the rules of dull rectilinear military-post design and imaginatively nestles the buildings in their striking setting. He used this artistic eye in his photography as well.

In this week’s historical photo, Laura is pictured, second from the left, between her mother, Louisa, and her sister, Lorena. Laura explained that the other three women in the costume of the day were guests, not relatives. The six are wading in the tide flats off the southern shore of West Point. That is the then-still-forested Magnolia Bluff on the left. On the right, West Seattle is barely visible through the haze across Elliott Bay.

In this scene, Laura is a teen-ager. She was always tall for her age, she said. The picture was taken around 1908, the last year of major construction at Fort Lawton, until World War II, when it flourished briefly as the second-largest point of departure on the West ‘ Coast.

Except for the latter day brief activity during World War Two, it became clear soon after the fort was completed that it would never be a big installation, and the locals started musing over what a wonderful park it would make. The Kiehl family had been treating it as a park right along, Laura said. For years they used this beach below the fort to entertain family and friends with clam and salmon bakes and, of course, wading and beachcombing.

Getting to the beach then required a long hike on a path bordered by salmon berries, devil’s club and nettles, and patrolled by giant mosquitoes. Today the nettles are gone, but the beach is still protected from the summer swarms that fill Golden Gardens and Alki Beach. To enjoy the sun-warmed tide pools, you must hike to get there.

Once an adult, Laura pursued more serious outings than beach walking. She graduated from the University of Washington in 1916. Later she became the first woman in the state to be issued a brokerage license. Since no brokerage house would hire her because of her sex, she successfully operated her own office for years in the Smith Tower. Laura died in January 1982, less than two months after our visit.

The above was printed in Pacific in the fall of 1985.  For the now Bill Burden, who took the repeat photos, and I got help from Carson F. who was a good friend of Bill’s daughter Caroline.  Carson persuaded a few of her friends to take the several poses of the Kiehl “wading party” at West Point, and then to improvise with a pyramid on the sands with the, perhaps, inevitable results. I sat on a log and watched.  (Carson is on the far right Imagine! She and the rest are now in their forties. In order at least for the first orderly repeat are Liesel Murray, Erin McCaffery, Terri Sullivan, Sabina Steffens, Leslie Steward and Carson F.)

(click on photos to enlarge)

Victorian row houses like these were once wonderfully commonplace in San Francisco, but not so much here. Our few examples have nearly all been destroyed, even the beauties among them like these.

I know practically nothing about this Belltown row, but I would venture that it was constructed either in the early or late 1890s, prosperous years for a booming town that was being steadily enlarged by new residents. (Since writing the above Ron Edge has reminded me to search the 1891 birdseye.  I did and the row is shown.  In place of the line “constructed either in the early or late 1890s,” imagine that I had done my research and written “constructed around 1890.” A relevant detail from the ’91 birdseye in included in the “extras” below, as well as other maps.)

The print I copied has “Western” penciled on the back, and an early-20th-century pan of Belltown shows this row sitting snugly just downhill and west of its principal business block — on First Avenue between Bell and Battery streets — facing Western Avenue.  (I have momentarily lost track of the pan just noted or I would have put it up.  Later.)

Who lived in any of these six ornate flats, beneath their blooming finials, and with their scrolling corbels, box bays, carved panels and playful latticework? I don’t know. (See the comment from Cathy Wickwire who found by searching the newly released Seattle Times database several sitations for the address nailed to this row.) I have a 1903 City Directory and considered running my finger down its pages through about 30,000 home listings looking for any of them between 2306 and 2316 Western Avenue. I have done searching like that in the past and find it relaxing — like knitting, I imagine — but this time I declined.

Those big bay windows with splendid views of Elliott Bay were needed because there were, of course, no windows along the sides of at least four of these flats. Families living here were steps away from many services. They were conveniently close to Denny School at Fifth Avenue and Battery Street, and only two blocks from the waterfront.

Finally, we will give thanks for the resident dog that seems to welcome us at the bottom of the photograph.

WEB EXTRAS

Jean here. In a Viaduct-covered triangle between Western Avenue and the Battery Street tunnel access road just north of the Market, one may find these familiar if now-deserted concrete protuberances, now enclosed in chain link fencing.

I couldn’t find any signs indicating the sculptor or the name of the sculptures, although I recall some years ago encountering both.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean, something on row houses, although not all of it tonight.  First let me note that I have never turned my head for those waves of concrete cool whip beside Western Avenue.  Do you remember another under-a-bridge moment with modern art, with the “Wall of Death” below the north end of the University Bridge?  You cannot forget the name for it is written on the art.  For years it seemed uncannily free of grafitti markings.  I imagined that the can artists were frightened by it.

I’ll add a Row House Addendum during the week, I hope.  Here I will show a few maps and birdseyes that do and/or don’t include our Gothrow on Western.   As noted above I remember one image of it that looks from the bay and has the porch crests peaking over some rooftops below them – but I cannot for the moment find it. Perhaps I will before the night is over. (I failed in this, but will keep looking a predict victory in this search.)

Victorian row houses in Seattle are neither so prolific nor resplendent as in San Francisco.  A row of these charmers climbing a San Francisco hill – often steep – is one fulfilled vision of street life for the American cityscape, which more often is a “mixed bag” or dull scatter.  In 1968 during the Helix tabloid’s grass and salad days I visited a few friends in Berkeley and San Francisco.  A Seattle “ex-patriot” Carmella S. was one of them, and she lived in a San Francisco row.  The ceiling of her living room was higher than the room was wide, and she had the walls covered with framed art like in a salon or academy show of the 18th Century (or Seattle’s first Frye Museum when it was still in an annex attached to the Frye home at 9th and Columbia.)

Except for a few churches and the Academic Gothic buildings on the U.W. Campus, Gothic is hard to find around Seattle.  It was thought too playful or naive or ornamental or irrelevant or charming by modern sensitivities and standards and its revival was almost over before it began in Seattle.  “Gothrow” houses date from the later 1890s and early 1890s for the most part.  In this Seattle neighborhood – Wallingford – there are a few Gothic touches and a few rows. On Meridian Avenue near the Guild 45 Theatre on 45th Street they join.   John Sundsten, a semi-retired U.W. Med. School lecturer on Anatomy and sometime learned contributor on similar subjects to this blog, lives in one of them when he is not

on Hood Canal watching the Olympics and his oysters.  Nearby is, by our standards, an old home, and one with Victorian touches. For years it sat empty and tilting until someone purchased it, leveled it, added a floor and had a good time retouching it. It is on Sunnyside mid-block north of 43rd Street.

Still abiding in Wallingford is a home on Corliss Avenue mid-block north of 45th Avenue and Al’s Tavern.  The builder (or more likely later the remodel artist) attached over the front door an intimation of a Gothic ornament.  It is a distinguishing gesture.  This home is one of the 400-plus subjects I tried to photograph every day  – and nearly did – over three-years-plus with the intention of animating them.  (Jean, as you know we intend to include some of these in our MOHAI show with Berangere – of this blog – when it opens next April.)  Here are four of perhaps 800 recordings of what I call “Gothic 2.”  (Here just below Gothic 2 is  Goth 1 where with its restrained garage it is watched from the side.)

A new  and almost churchly Wallingford row at 46th and Meridian (northwest corner) has been oddly overwrought with its own pasties of faux stone and fish-scale siding to add some distinction that warrants the high price of its condos for this neighborhood.  They were mid-way with putting on the roof when I started walking in July of 2006.  Three years later they had still not sold their four opportunities for living within walking distance of the QFC, Al’s Tavern, the Good Shepherd P-Patch and the Guild 45 Theatre.

One of the disturbing distractions perhaps from the sublime intentions of this well-gabled row was the abandoned APEX dry cleaners across 46th where one tenant has labored in the night to write his or her own complaint for our times with spelling impassioned enough to miss the “d” in landlord.  Here the housing bubble has met the soap (or cleaning) bubble and both have fallen.

We return now to Belltown with a Gothrow that long ago momentarily made my heart leap – the three gables above Mama’s at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Bell Street.  When I started studying the illustrative side of local history in the mid-1970s I did a search for early evidences of the old Denny Hill razed by its namesake regrade. When I first saw these gables in a historical print that was part of a pack of Webster and Stevens studio glossies shared with me by John Hannawalt of Old Seattle Paperworks (lower level Pike Place Market) I had the stirring and uncanny feeling that I have seen these “in person.”  I thought this is a “lost place” – there was no intersection in Seattle that quite felt like this one – in the then existing Seattle.  Soon enough with the help of a street sign on the telephone pole in the print I found the place and so my first evidence of what the hill – in this part looking south on Second Avenue through its intersection with Bell Street – looked like before it was razed. I wrote a longish piece on this discovery for the old Seattle Sun and later used that writing as evidence for my weekly freelance assignment with the Times Pacific Mag 29 years ago this coming January.

Next we will search maps and/or birdseye views from 1878, 1884, ca.1890, 1912, and 1917 for the row on Western, and when included the row at the  Belltown corner of Second Ave. and Bell Street.

Their places are marked but as yet – in 1878 – no Gothrows.  A portion of the Pike Street coal wharf and bunkers appears far right.  1878 was it’s last year, supplanted by new bunkers off King Street.  This birdseye artist is either unaware of or neglected the Belltown Ravine between Blanchard and Bell Streets.

Here another artist has made a kind of mark for the Belltown Ravine – bottom-center – but it is one block too far south.  The still future location for the Belltown Gothrow is marked.  The 2nd and Bell site is not, but you can find it – by now.

Both row sites are marked, and the rows are also in place in this ca.1890-91 birdseye.

Both sites are marked in the above detail from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, which we will remind readers has been recently made available in all its 34 plates (in every detail) on this site and can be button-clicked to by visiting the front page.  If we move north through the Baist Map (and you can) we can derive a sense of how many row houses survived then in the neighborhood.  (Or any Seattle neighborhood)  Near the top of the detail included below at the southwest corner of 2nd Ave. and Clay street is a long row across Clay from the marked Seattle Floral Company.  I don’t remember seeing any illustration or photo of this and so don’t know how Gothic it was.  Nearby at the southeast corner of 3rd and Clay is another row, and across Third is another.  Both share the block on 3rd with the Temple Baptist Church at the northeast corner of 3rd and Cedar.  On 2nd Ave. between Cedar and Clay is a small row of three – Gothic or no we do not know.  And finally for this detail at the southeast corner of 1st and Cedar is another threesome.  (With the gift of this 1912 Baist Map on this blog if one had time and a touch of the compulsive-obsessive disorder they could do this for the entire city in 1912.)

And, indeed, having a coloration – or touch – of this condition, I’ll continue north of Denny Way with some more of the 1912 Baist, and minimal comment.  You count the rows.  One rowless comment: the red-marked First Station on the far right is the site since 1960 of the Space Needle’s foundation.  And that would put the Pacific Science Center where?

Below is  a Belltown detail from a much larger 1917 sketch that looks west by northwest over the Denny Regrade – the part completed by then west of Fifth.  The full sketch promotes the new land’s opportunities in the year the Frederick and Nelson Department Sore was getting established as its southeast anchor. Here we have marked with a red X not the Gothrow on Western but the brick building at the northwest corner of Bell and First that hides them – or does not.  We don’t know if they were still around in 1917, but I suspect that they were.  In the upper-left corner of the detail is the bridge across Railroad Avenue that leads to the Port of Seattle’s Bell Street pier.   Bottom-right is the back of the Austin Bell building, only the facade of which facing First was kept in a recent remodel.

When the Denny Hotel, AKA Washington Hotel, looked like “the scenic hotel of the west” as it advertised itself, sitting on the south summit of Denny Hill, straddling the future path of 3rd Ave. between Steward and Virginia Avenues, there were below it. left and right,two distinguished rows “falling down” the hill with the connotation of San Francisco.  The one to the east of Second Avenue was built first and is seen here far left in a pan of Denny Hill taken from First Hill probably in 1903, the year that the hotel at last opened.  Note that the cable railway that climbed to the hotel entrance the one long block from Pine Street and in line with Third Avenue is showing with its car in service above the trestle that crossed Stewart Street.  Also note that there is as yet no row on Fourth Avenue, the first street this side of the cable railway.

The row on 4th shown directly below was surely short-lived.  Styled the same as the row facing Second Ave, it was built after the view above and destroyed in 1906-7 with the razing of the front hump – or south summit – of Denny Hill.  Again, the trestle over Stewart with the posing trolley is seen on the left above the row on Fourth and at the front door to the hotel.

Standing at a prospect near or at the hotel and looking back and southeast at the neighborhood from which a photographer held to make the above prospect of the hotel looking northwest, we will search what is now much of the city’s retail neighborhood for rows of any sorts ca. 1902.

So much to point out so CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE.  Getting settled, the single Goth spire of the Norwegian-Danish Lutheran Church climbs towards the center of the scene.  It held the northeast corner of 4th and Pine, now the Westlake Mall’s primary structure – the one with an arcade.  Note that to the right of the church on the east side of Fourth Avenue are three variations on “row.”  First at the southeast corner of Pine and 4th are two box-shaped residential structures, each home for perhaps more than one family.  It is now home to the Westlake Mall fountain. Next to the right of the boxes are three attached uniform bays – very stately.  And to the right of that and the intruding tree is another row of two, with gables and boxed bays, and bigger.  It is mid-block on the east side of 4th between Pike and Pine, and so within the spray pattern of the fountain, but pre-regrade and so really several feet above it.

The grid-cutting of Westlake Avenue  is still about four years ahead.  The brick Ranke Building is to the right of the Lutheran spire at the northwest corner of 5th and Pike.  In size and materials it was a distinguished building when constructed around the time of Seattle’s “Great Fire” of 1889, a pacesetter into the new retail neighborhood.  (Ivar “Keep Clam” Haglund’s father, a baker, was living in the Ranke at the time of the fire.  I have yet to determine if it was Ranke’s clapboard structure that preceded this brick one.) To the left of the brick Ranke is the tenement-looking rear wall of the clapboard Idaho Building at the northeast corner of 5th and Pike.  There is a good chance that there were rats in the attic.  On the far left are a few of the trolley bays or service garages of the Seattle Electric Company’s facilities at the northeast corner of 5th and Pine, not yet razed for Frederick and Nelson.

The bare patch left-of-center and below the  horizon is the steep intersection of 9th and University Streets.  It is still steep.  Much of of this is now part of Freeway Park.  Below the patch is the Unitarian Church two or three lots north of the northeast corner of 7th and Union, now part of Act Theatre’s remake of the old Eagles Auditorium (which takes me back again to the grass and salad days of the Helix.)  To the right of the patch and almost reaching the horizon is the back of Congregation Ohaveth Sholum, the first synagogue in Seattle.  It opened one lot west of the northwest corner of 8th and Seneca on Sept. 18, 1892.  Six hundred and eighty persons attended the dedication.  Now the site is filled with the Exeter House Retirement Community, which is across Seneca from Town Hall.  Directly above the Synagogue and on the horizon is the smokestack of the Union Trunk Line (cable and electric) at James and Broadway and to the left of it the tower of Castlemont, the Haller mansion at the northeast corner of James and Minor.  Both the stack and the tower are now replaced by First Hill Pill Hill services.

Three more details to point out.  Far right is the northeast corner of the old Territorial University campus south of Union Street.  Far left and just above the trolley car barn described above is a “row-like” structure at the southwest corner of Sixth and Pine, which we will visit in close-up below.   And left of center is another row – one of three box houses facing Pike on the northeast corner with 6th.  Soon after its construction this row took on the nickname “Bridal Row.”  Here follows a take from Seattle Now and Then Volume One (which can be seen in-toto on this blog.)  It was first published in Pacific on Feb. 20, 1983.  (Click TWICE to Enlarge)

With storefronts along Pine and apartments above them, this row held the southwest corner of 6th and Pine.  (We noted it too in the pan above.)  The back of Bridal Row shows left of center, still at the northeast corner of Pike and Sixth.  The recently doomed Waldorf Hotel is on the far left at the northeast corner of 7th and Pike.

Below is another section grabbed from the 1912 Baist Map.  Just above and right of center is the row shown above.  Across Pine street is the Westlake Market which took over much of the sprawling Seattle Electric block.  The look down at the row may have been taken from the trolley company’s multi-story brick administration building which faced 5th from about the third lot north of Pine.   I’ve not dated the view so there is a chance that it was taken from Frederick and Nelson, perhaps during its construction.  On the map below someone has added “Frederick”  over the Westlake Market property at the northeast corner of 5th and Pine.   The intersection of 4th and Pike is at the bottom-left corner of this detail.

Hoping to return with a mid-week Addendum with more rows, we will conclude with two pans, first another from Denny Hill, this time looking south and southeast in the mid 1880s.  (Click TWICE to enlarge.)

Without dwelling on the parts, here the Territorial University Camps and its lawns and landscape still hold Denny Knoll a decade before moving north to the Interlaken campus, where it remains.  The first Lutheran church in Seattle is directly above the bottom-center of the pan near the northeast corner of Third and Pike.  Second Ave., then, is on the right and both Fourth and Fifth still originate here left-of-center out of Union Street at the northern border of the Campus.  Beacon Hill is on the right horizon and First Hill on the left.  Haller’s mansion can be found there, and Coppins Water tower at 9th and Columbia too.  For those who hold or have learned the pleasures of row-hunting, there are several to be found here.  We conclude with another row – or several.  Rows of sheep grazing somewhere on a northwest range and photographed without any identification by Horace Sykes, most likely in the 1940s.  We used it previously for an early Our Daily Sykes.  (Courtesy, University of Washington Special Collections)

(click to enlarge photos)

This past spring, Jean Sherrard and I attended the memorial service for Virginia Lee Slate Eals, mother of our friend, the writer Clay Eals. The oldest of three sons, Clay was the principal eulogist, and his memories of his mother were stirring.

The memorial was held at Park West Care Center, where Virginia spent the last six years of a buoyant life that began 87 years earlier, only seven West Seattle blocks away. The big room was filled with flowers, family, friends and photographs. The candid sidewalk snapshot shown here was among them.

From the 1930s into the 1950s, coming upon sidewalk photographers with the pitch of a candid portrait for a low price was commonplace. Virginia Slate had four of them in her album, all taken in her prime, before and during World War II. Clay explains, “She had many jobs downtown, and several of them were copy-girl type positions, delivering printed material from one place to another, so it’s no surprise that person-on-the-street photographers snapped her multiple times.”

With the then-popular Manning’s coffee house and the Colonial Theatre marquee behind her, both the place and time are easy to identify. The view looks north on the west side of Fourth Avenue between Pike and Pine streets in 1945, the year the films “Castle of Crime” and “Hotel Berlin,” on the marquees, upper-left, were making their American runs.

In 1970, Virginia went back to work, in part to help pay for her sons’ education. Clay notes that her job with the Bellevue Traffic Violations Bureau “was both tough and enlightening.” In a letter to Clay during her 18 years there, Virginia reflected, “It’s amazing how many people are repeaters on traffic violations. I’ve been cussed at and told off, which I was expecting, and also lied to. You can never tell by just looking at people what they are like. … I saw a part of life I’ve not been exposed to before, and it’s fascinating and depressing. It makes you appreciate good friends and family all the more.”

WEB EXTRAS

Hey Paul, this time round, I just know you’ve got a treasure trove to share with us – but let’s begin with Clay’s extraordinary and moving eulogy for his mom Virginia. What’s more, we’ve illustrated it with a sampler of family photographs supplied by Clay.

And now, on to your mini-survey of street photography now and then from around the planet. And of course I’ll prompt this outpouring with my usual query:

Anything to add, Paul?

YES Jean.

First something more about Clay Eals and 4th Avenue north of Pike.   This part of 4th first – here in 1947 with the old Colonial.

On October 18, 2009 we put up on this blog a look at this from about the same year – about.  It was – do you remember Jean? – a night shots with all the lovely neon aglow and you repeating it in the evening too.  I came with you.   That now-then also featured an excerpt from film reviewer Bill White’s work-in-progress, “Cinema Penitentiary.”  If might be something to visit again for those who know how to use the search machinery.   Ask to see anything with “Colonial.”

Next, Clay also figured in another 2009 insertion – the one for June 5th.  This was an article putting the Portola Theatre in its proper place – a long move from West Seattle to Queen Anne Hill.  Ask to see anything with “Portola” or ask for “Eals.”   He comes up in some other stories although he is not identified.  He hides more than lurks.  You can also – you know Jean because you put him there – find him in the “now” repeat shot for this candid photo of his mother in this – and back to it – block.

Now as time allows (bedtime) I’ll lay in three stories that include street candor, followed by examples of another photographer’s (Victor Lydgman) candid shots on Pike Street (mostly) from the early 1960s, and a samples of my own Broadway Bus Stop project of 1976-77.  (About this last I have an uncanny feeling that I showed a lot of these earlier on this blog but I could only find one, and so I will go ahead with it.)  I might mix in some other grace notes if they make themselves heard before another nights “nightybears,” which  you know is our mutual friend Bill Burden’s (of the button on our front page) customary salutation for metabolic closure, that is, which is his “good night.”

MILLER’S CANDOR

The Seattle News-Letter, a turn-of-the-century weekly, published candid photographs of locals on the city’s sidewalks to accompany a gossipy front-page column, “Stories of the Streets and of the Town.”  The couple “posing” here was photographed for the series, although it seems that this shot never made it to print.  Perhaps the photographer could not pry any stories from them.

The photographer was a young Walter P. Miller.  Pieces of his estate, including these negatives for the tabloid – about 100 of them – survived in their original wraps.  Roger Dudley Jr.s’ father worked for Walter Miller and in the mid-1930s bought out the business.  The 3-inch-square flexible negatives were part of the deal.  Roger Dudley Jr. took over his father’s studio 20 years later, and after a quarter-century more of commercial photography he retire and gave the negatives – these candid ones – to me.  Miller lightly penciled the names of most of his subjects on his negative holders.  This couple was one of the exceptions.

According to Lois Bark, costume curator for the Museum of History and Industry [in 1993 when this story first appeared in Pacific – on April 12] the woman is dressed conservatively but still modishly.  Her hat, held in place with a long pin, is most likely straw-trimmed with tulle (a fine net) and artificial flowers.  Her S-shaped figure is a creation of corsets, whale bones, petticoats, hip pads and hooks, and below all that maybe an S-shaped anatomy.  Her two-piece walking dress was certainly black, the common dress color of the time, and most likely wool.  It required help to get on and off and could not be cleaned, only brushed and spotted.

The man is distinguished by his gold chain.  His double-vested waistline is another projection of his affluence or, at least, self-importance.

The couple stands on the southeast corner of First Ave. and Union Street.  The pioneer Arthur and Mary Denny home is directly behind them and over their shoulders at the northeast corner is their son Orion Denny’s home.   In 1852 he became the first boy born to white settlers in the village of Seattle.  He died in 1916.

TWO MORE FROM MILLERS CANDID ONE HUNDRED

Walter Millers example of candid street photography are rare – for Seattle.  Perhaps for anywhere, for the practice of “catching” subjects that were not confused by their own movement was dependent on still subjects and/or fast equipment.

MORE CANDOR ON FOURTH AVENUE NEAR (OR AT) PIKE STREET

Although the date for this Fourth and Pike scene is recorded on neither the original negative nor its protective envelop, uncovering it was not difficult.  The newsstand at the center of this view includes copies of both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A 15-power magnifying glass reveals the date.  It is Monday, July 25, 1938.

The Post-Intelligencer, just above the dealer’s head, announced “A New Forest Fire Rages at Sol Duc.”  A week and a half of record heat had not only encouraged fires around Puget Sound, but also filled its beaches.

On this Monday, Seattle was even hotter with anticipation of a Tuesday-night fight.  Jack Dempsey’s photograph is on the front page of the P-I. The “Mighty Manassa Mauler” was in town to referee what those who sport so consider one of the great sporting events in the city’s history: the Freddie Steele-Al Hostak fight for the middleweight title.

About 30 yours after this photograph was recorded, hometown-tough Hostak, in front of 35,000 sweating fans at Civic Field (now the Seattle Center Stadium) made quick work of the champion Steele.  The P.I.’s purple-penned sports reporter, Royal Brougham, reported “Four times the twenty-two-year-old Seattle boy’s steel-tempered knuckles sent the champion reeling into the rosin.”  Hostak brought the belt to Seattle by a knockout in the first minute of the first round.

The day’s fevered condition was also encouraged at the Colonial Theatre (a half-block up Fourth) where, the Time’s reported, “an eternal triangle in the heart of the African jungle brings added thrills in Tarzan’s Revenge.”   The apeman’s affection for a young lady on safari with her father fires the resentment of her jealous fiancé.  We will not reveal the ending of this hot affair, although by Wednesday the 27^th, Seattle had cooled off.

[HERE we remind the reader that another visit to the Colonial was offered on this blog on Oct. 18, 2009 with an excerpt from film critic Bill White’s work-in-progress, “Cinema Penitentiary.”  It is illustrated with a neon-lighted night view of Fourth from this corner  in 1945.  Search for “Colonial.”]

CANDOR (OR FEVERED PRODUCE EXHIBITION) AT THE PIKE PLACE MARKET ca. 1907

FARMERS AND FAMILIES

(This was first published in Pacific on August 6, 2006.  The Pike Place Market and the city were preparing for the former’s100^th Anniversary.)

A century ago Seattle, although barely over fifty, was already a metropolis with a population surging towards 200,000.   Consequently, now our community’s centennials are multiplying.  This view of boxes, sacks and rows of wagons and customers is offered as an early marker for the coming100th birthday of one of Seattle’s greatest institutions, the Pike Place Public Market.

Both the “then” and “now” look east from the inside angle of this L-shaped landmark.  The contemporary view also looks over the rump of Rachel, (bottom-left) the Market’s famous brass piggy bank, which when empty is 200 pounds lighter than her namesake 750 pound Rachel, the 1985 winner of the Island County Fair.   Since she was introduced to the Market in 1986 Rachel has contributed about $8,000 a year to its supporting Market Foundation.  Most of this largess has been dropped through the slot in her back as small coins.  It has amounted to heavy heaps of them.

Next year – the Centennial Year – the Market Foundation, and the Friends of the Market, and many other vital players in the closely-packed universe that is the Market will be helping and coaxing us to celebrate what local architect Fred Bassetti famously describe in the mid-1960s as “An honest place in a phony time.”  And while it may be argued that the times have gotten even phonier the market has held onto much of its candor.

The historical view may well date from the Market’s first year, 1907.  If not, then the postcard photographer Otto Frasch recorded it soon after.   It is a scene revealing the original purpose of the Public Market:  “farmers and families” meeting directly and with no “middleman” between them.

Then and Now Captions together:  The Pike Place Market started out in the summer of 1907 as a city-supported place where farmers could sell their produce directly to homemakers.  Since then the Market culture has developed many more attractions including crafts, performers, restaurants, and the human delights that are only delivered by milling and moving crowds.

BELOW THE PIG ON PIKE PLACE

ONE BLOCK SOUTH OF THE PIG THE FIREMAN AND THE YOUNG WOMAN SITS THE BED

FOUR FROM JEAN AND FOUR FROM BERANGERE

This morning I suggested to both our Jean and our Berangere that they apply some candor to this and they have with the following examples pulled from their profound larders or happy hordes or profound multitudes.  Four for each – with Jean first.

FOUR FROM VICTOR LYDGMAN – CA. 1962

This quartet hangs around Pike Street too.

BROADWAY BUS STOP – 1976-77

For the two years I lived above Peter’s on Broadway in the grand-box apartment with two floors handed on from Cornish students and faculty to Cornish faculty and students through many years, I took the opportunity to photograph the bus stop across Broadway.  It was laid beside the east facade of Marketime, a big place with food and sundries.  The light was wonderfully mellow as it bounced off our side of Broadway in the afternoons.  In the mornings it slanted from the south – left – directly into the architecture of the bus stop shed and those who were protected by it.  I recorded a few thousand shots, both black and white and color.  The Friends of Rag also put on a fashion show at the bus stop for the project.  I asked many friends to sit for portraits with my zoom lens poking out below the open kitchen window on the second floor above the kindly Peter’s front door.  Peter, I think, was the first gay clothier in Seattle, and he was also one of the first oulets for the Helix weekly in the late 60s.  Here are a few examples taken from the thousands.  A few of these – or others – were exhibited on city buses at the time.  (Not all the buses.)

AT LAST MORE SIDEWALK CANDOR

TWO STREET SNAPS OF DELIA & LEWIS WHITTELSEY

Delia and Lewis, like may others, had a custom of doing much of their shopping downtown, and often the Pike Place Market was among their stops.  As with Clay Eals’ mother Virginia this frequency meant that they had more than one chance to purchase a candid snapshot of them having their ways on a downtown street.  Lewis Whittelsey “contribued” to his blog with his photography on another Sunday.  You can search for him.

(click photos to enlarge)

Soon after the Medical Dental Building at 509 Olive Way was completed in 1925 a photographer climbed to the roof of the Wilson Business College, one long block north at 5th and Virginia, and recorded this view looking back at the grand new health center’s soaring irregularities. The new skyscraper was a brilliant standout for the business district’s north end.  Built on five-star Times Square corner of 5th, Olive, Stewart, and Westlake it gained the charms of asymmetry, a commitment that crowns the top with a small stepping tower.

That the Medical Dental Building it not easily mistaken for any other Seattle structure is because of its odd and soaring shape as much as for its gleaming tiles, which at the time were the preferred skin used in construction projects throughout the business district – if the tiles could be afforded. The new building continued the clean reflecting glow of the brilliant Frederick and Nelson Department Store (1918), seen here behind it at 5th and pine.  It also complimented the brilliance of architects Bebb and Gould’s home for The Seattle Times.  The Times Square Building is both cut like a piece of cake and decorated like one with a terra-cotta egg shell “frosting.”

Apart from these buoyant structures practically all else in this view is dark and made of wood and warm brick.  For instance, the top three stories of the Times home, showing here on the right, rise above the dark Hotel Rainbow. Although here only in its “teens,” the big wooden box with small towers and simple bays was a Victorian hangover constructed soon after the Denny Regrade had completed lowering Denny Hill west of 5th Avenue to its present grades in 1910-11.

The Rainbow sat at the northwest corner of 5th and Stewart and survived into the 1930s when it was replaced with a small service station.  That it is now a mere parking lot puzzles this writer about how such an important site can be so modestly employed.

We will conclude with a readers’ quiz followed by the answer.  What two distinguished landmarks – not surviving in either our “then” or “now” – filled the block showing here on the left or east side of 5th Ave.?  The answer: the Orpheum Theatre (1927-1967) and the Benjamin Franklin Hotel (1928-1967).  Remember them?

WEB EXTRAS

Jean writes: I occasionally find myself wandering Seattle rooftops when searching for ‘Then’ footprints. Here are a few alternate views from the Griffin building:

Anything to add, Paul?

Yup Jean, and as time allows and seems prudent I’ll go looking for past features that hang around the neighborhood.  Again, I am more likely to find the “then’s” than the “nows” for over nearly 25 pre-digital years I had a careless habit of not looking back at my own “now” negatives, and they are rather a jumble now, although they are safe in binders and with time they could all be put in order and dated.  But not now.  I will grab what we can before retiring.  Tomorrow – Sunday – I’ll find some more.  Meanwhile please forgive my typos and dyslexic flips.  I’ll hope to discover and correct or flip them tomorrow.  Now we will start with another story that is at the same intersection of 5th and Virginia although much earlier – ca. 1886.  But you know this, because you took the “now” for it recently.  We agree that these two views from Virginia south on 5th will be a pair to use in our show with Berangere at the Museum of History and Industry next April and thereafter for a few months.

THE WAGON ROAD TO QUEEN ANNE

In the mid-l880s there was no suburbia separating the city from the country. This week’s historical scene is evidence of that. It was photographed looking south across downtown Seattle’s northern border. The foreground is bucolic.

The view was photographed from the eastern slope of now-regraded Denny Hill.  The evidence for this claim is the shaft of light that streaks across the scene’s foreground and bathes the fence posts in a late-afternoon glow. That beam cuts through the hill in line with Virginia Street, which was a valley between the two humps of Denny Hill.

After a little homework, I determined that the boxy white building just right of the scene’s center and above the break in the fence sits on the north side of Pike Street in the second lot west of Fifth Avenue. The clear break running diagonally between the buildings across the scene’s center is Fifth Avenue. The view shows Fifth ending at the Territorial University’s greenbelt.

The three principal landmarks – with towers – on the horizon left to right are Coppins Watertower at 9^th and Columbia, Central School at 6^th and Madison, and the Territorial University at 4^th and Seneca. No structures survive from the old scene to the new. And Denny Hill and Denny Knoll have long since been graded away.   In place of the wagon ruts are monorail struts.  The level of the pre-regrade intersection is about 40 feet higher than Jean’s recent “now.”  So the wagon road was in places close to the level of the monorail.  Believe it or not.

FRANK SHAW – 2 TRANSPARENCIES LOOKING SO. on 5th TOWARD STEWART: 1962

TIMES SQUARE

The photograph above of Times Square includes three prominent Seattle fixtures.  One is moving, one is long gone and the third survives. The survivor, of course, is the Times Square Building, home of The Seattle Times from 1916 to 1931 at the irregular intersection of Westlake and Fifth avenues with Olive and Stewart streets. The moving subject is Car 51, one of the six Niles cars that the Pacific Northwest Traction Co. bought from Niles, Ohio, for the Seattle-Everett Interurban. Car 51 continued to serve until the Interurban’s last day, Feb. 20,1939. The missing landmark is the noble little structure in the foreground, built in 1917 for a bus stop and underground rest rooms. It has been replaced by a simple bus shelter.

Times Square borrowed its name from New York City’s Times Square and, like its East Coast namesake, was highlighted by a newspaper. The building, embellished with granite and terra cotta, is perhaps the city’s best memorial to the art of Carl Gould, Seattle’s most celebrated turn-of-the-century architect. He designed it in a Beaux Arts style and this flatiron confection is still widely admired.

A LITTER OF TRIANGLES

HOMES FOR THE SEATTLE TIMES

In “RAISE HELL and Sell Newspapers,” Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConagy’s 1996 history of Col. Alden J. Blethen marking the centennial of the founding of The Seattle Times, the 69-year-old editor-publisher is shown in shirtsleeves vigorously scooping the first shovel for the 1914 groundbreaking of his new Times Square plant.  As the authors explain, this was a momentary vigor, for Blethen’s health was in steep decline. Actual construction was put off until after his death in July 1915, and resumed by his sons as a monument to their father’s uncommon life.

The building of Times Square began in September 1915 and proceeded with such speed that one year later, on Sept. 25, 1916, The Times could devote an entire edition to its move north from Second Avenue and Union Street to its new terra cotta-tile palace at Fifth and Olive.

The architects, Carl F. Gould and Charles Herbert Bebb, created a monument as much to Renaissance Revival style as to the Colonel. The new partners repeated the division of labor employed so effectively by Bebb’s former Chicago employers, the famous “prophet of modern architecture,” Louis Sullivan, and his partner, Dankmar Adler. Here the practical Bebb, like Adler in Chicago, handled the business and engineering while the Harvard-educated aesthete Gould, like Sullivan, created the designs. Gould took the Gothic plans Bebb had drawn earlier with another partner and transformed them into this gleaming Beaux Arts landmark.

The rare view (at the top of this feature) of the full northern facade was photographed before much of it was hidden between its neighbors. The flatiron block was Blethen’s direct and proud allusion to the similarly styled New York Times Building, which also faced a Times Square in Gotham.

The newspaper continued to publish here until 1930, when it moved north again, this time to its current offices on Fairview Avenue North.

THE WESTLAKE BEAT

I confess to having featured this intersection four times – that I remember – in the now 28-year life of this feature. Here’s the fifth (first put up five years ago), and I wondered then what took me so long. There are so many delightful photographs taken from this five-star corner looking north on Westlake from Fourth Avenue and Pike Street, and we have shown a few already on this blog acting like a webpage. But this scene with the officer probably counts as a “classic” because it has been published a number of times and has not grown tired.

It is only recently that I looked closely at the policeman, and I think I have figured out what he is doing. He is scratching his head. I suggest that the officer may be marveling at the great changes that had occurred in the three years before he was sent to help with traffic on the day this photo was taken. (I’m figuring that this is 1909 or near it.) Heading north for Fremont, trolley car No. 578 to the left of the officer, is only 2 years old, and so is the Hotel Plaza to the left of it. If the officer returns to this beat in a few years, he’ll probably know that there is a speakeasy running in the hotel basement.

Westlake Avenue was cut through the neighborhood in 1906 along what its planners described as “a low-lying valley, fairly level, with just enough pitch to give it satisfactory drainage.” The plan was to connect it with “a magnificent driveway around the lake.  Readers may remember that there have been many magnificent plans for this part of Westlake. Beginning in 1960 with the opening of the Westlake Summer Mall, which quickly changed to Seafair Mall, the blocks between Pike and Stewart streets were dreamed over for a quarter century as the best available site for developing a civic center for a central business district that somehow wound up without one.  One key to this dream was stopping the traffic on Pine Street between 4^th and 5^th Avenues, a dream accomplished but for only a while.  The big retailers didn’t like it, thinking that any inhibition on the motorcar would make it harder for citizens to reach them.

Two colored postcards looking over the Westlake, 4th, Pine Street triangle follow.  For may years grand lighted signs for railroads and coke were displayed at this odd corner.   You are asked to date the cards.  The last has got the name wrong.  Times Square is down the ways at 5th, Stewart, Westlake & Olive.

WAR BOND DRIVE at FREDERICK & NELSON DEPT STORE

DURING WORLD WAR II, the local effort and ingenuity applied to the sale of war bonds reached the monumental when for the nation’s Sixth War Loan Drive the “two largest flags on the Pacific Coast” were draped across the Pine Street and Fifth Avenue facades of the Frederick & Nelson department store. In addition to rolling Red Cross bandages and selling bonds and stamps at the main-floor Victory Post, more than 90 percent of Frederick & Nelson’s employees invested at least 10 percent of their income in war bonds. During the Fifth War Loan Drive this was added to management’s investment, pushing Frederick & Nelson’s total purchases past $1.5 million, a prize-winning performance worthy of the Treasury Department’s T-flag award.

Billboard-size murals promoting bonds were commonplace outside and inside the store. Facing the bank of main-floor elevators, the names of former employees who were off to the war were displayed on a plaque that read, “Staff members who served you here . . . now serve our country.” To the sides were military uniforms draped on store mannequins.

Frederick & Nelson also opened a branch in a white cottage at Boeing Plant No.2, where civilian staples (toilet articles, bras, street suits, work clothing) were available. This convenience also was another way of saving the gas and rubber required to shop downtown. The war revived the flow of cash around Seattle, where nearly 50,000 people were employed making airplanes and twice that number making ships. But necessities were commonly rationed and luxuries postponed. War bonds, the nation’s price administrator explained, were a good way not only to aid the forces abroad but also to help ease inflation on the home front by taking extra cash out of circulation.

ASSOCIATED POULTRY (Click Photos to Enlarge)

With its eccentric sawed-log shell, and the neon chicken perched on a big hanging sign that could be easily read by drivers coming in both directions on Victory Way, (AKA Bothell Way and Lake City Way), the Associated Poultry Company was an almost charming place to “buy direct,” as other sign boards declare, fryers and eggs cheap.

The eggs were gathered from the nesting boxes in the long log box to the rear and there the hens were also knifed, plucked, and trimmed before being brought out to the A-frame show room.  There the fryers were hung above a sawdust floor from steel racks screwed to a knotty pine ceiling.

The Associated Poultry was constructed in 1930 primarily, as another sings reads, to “supply the Coon Chicken Inn,” a road house with live music, and chicken dinners served from its own semi-log quarters nearby on Lake City Way.  It survived for twenty years on Associated Poultry’s fryers; a menu it claimed was homage to southern cooking.  Older readers may remember the front door to this chicken dinner house. One entered through the open mouth of a black face.  It was a grotesque but skilled caricature of a minstrel player more than a West African male.

The Inn closed in the 1949, when America’s “Jim Crow” years of post-civil war race relations were on the eve of being rolled over with civil rights.  A G.I. Joe’s New Country Store moved into the building.  Associated poultry was torn down earlier in 1950-51, and replaced ten years later with a Shell station.

Artifacts from the “Coon Chicken” culture on Bothell Way are exhibited and interpreted at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia on the campus of Michigan’s Ferris State University. The museum’s candid mission is “to promote racial tolerance by helping people understand the historical and contemporary expressions of intolerance.”

(click photos to enlarge)

Waking fresh from the long night of repeal for daylight savings 2010 Jean awakened to a sky with promise, and when it fulfilled he set out to take more repeats or “nows” for our upcoming show next spring at the Museum of History and Industry.  He will return to put here our Highway #2 parts of Washington Then & Now later with Startup Addendum #2.  Meanwhile I’ll search my collections for Stevens Pass (and routes) related illustrations, most of them what is called by their dealers and consumers, “Real Photo Postcards.”  Depending upon how rare, some of these can be precious, indeed!   My scans are mostly taken from loaned prints or from internegatives I have made from loaned prints.  I learned early on to take nearly every precaution making my internegs – cleaned prints, polarized lights and lens, tech-pan high resolution 35mm black and white film.  Consequently, what you see will be quite close to what I saw when I recorded or scanned the original.   In some instances if the original was faded or cluttered with wear I have  attempted to fix it with a little “photoshop polish.”

Showing now a slew of odd pictures identified by location, we will “startup” at Everett and stop at Wenatchee.  Some of these will relate directly to what Jean will put up with the Startup Addendum #2.   We will keep the captions short – mostly  This is a sample only.

Marysville Old & New

Thanks to the popularity of “real photo postcards” we have faithful and often detailed historical views of most communities nation-wide.  The first years of the 20th century was the time of greatest enthusiasm for this sharing and collecting and the date 1913 is postmarked on the rear of this record of the old Marysville business district on First Avenue looking west from State Street.
The three-story Marysville Hotel on the right is impressively fronted with an open veranda.  If the three women standing at its second floor were not preoccupied for the moment with the unnamed “postcard artist” they might have looked a little ways south across First Avenue to the Marysville waterfront on Ebey Slough or two blocks west to the railroad tracks that first brought trains to town in 1889.
That was the old Marysville.  Walt Taubeneck’s mother recalled for him how when the Pacific Highway first entered Marysville in the 1920s from the east on Third Avenue, “First Avenue wasn’t cutting it.  It was built for boats and the railroads not automobiles.  One by one the businesses moved north.”
Taubeneck, an expert on the history of Snohomish County logging, is one of the stalwarts of the Marysville Historical Society.  His friend Arthur Duborko is another.  In 1922 the Duborko family was living temporarily in the Marysville Hotel when it burned down.  The seven-year-old Arthur was playing a quick game of marbles on the rug with a cousin before the two planned to take off for school.  After someone started yelling “fire upstairs!” the boys dropped their marbles and started throwing furniture out the window.  The quick thinking second grader went on to become Marysville’s mayor.
Marysville was founded in the 1870s as a trading post for the Tulalip Reservation.  Now its citizens regularly shop at the Tulalip Mall.  An alternative is the Marysville Mall, whose unadorned rear wall, seen here on the right of the “now” view, fronts First Avenue west of State Street.  (The above first appeared in The Seattle Times Pacific Mag in late Sept. 2005.)

(click to enlarge photos)

Five years ago when Jean and I were gathering images for our book “Washington Then and Now,” he headed out on Highway 2 for Stevens Pass carrying a handful of historical views of towns – like Sultan, Startup, Gold Bar and Skykomish – along the way.  He intended to repeat them for the book; this “now” of Startup is among them. We have been instructed by no less an authority than Snohomish County historian Louise Lindgren that “the blue paint on the steps to the century-old German Baptist church has faded but otherwise not much has changed since then.”

It was Louise who also introduced us to this fine Lee Pickett photo, most likely taken in 1911.  It was Louise who help organized Pickett’s photographs and direct them into the University of Washington’s Northwest Collection, where many more examples of his Skykomish River valley work can be enjoyed on the library’s website.

In 1990 the Startup Baptists moved three miles down the highway to Sultan and sold their old sanctuary to arts and crafts professionals Toni Makinaw and Bill Schlicker, who then ran a gallery in the sanctuary while raising several children in the living quarters arranged in the rear.  I was introduced to Toni through the regional historian and publisher, Buddie Williams.  Williams has known the couple at least from the day they moved into the church twenty years past, and were then promptly sprayed with mace by a local sheriff who mistook them for invading foreigners, perhaps from Canada or Seattle.

Don Keck lives across 364th Ave. SE (on the left) from Toni and Bill.  A long-time Baptist and church member, Keck tells us that this sanctuary was built in 1903-4, and typically it was church members who held the saws and hammers.

The climb to Stevens Pass can be said to start up at Startup, but it was not named so for that reason.  Rather a local lumberman, George G. Startup, was given the honor.  The town was first platted as Wallace in 1894 but the federal postal authorities soon nixed the name.  Mail to Wallace, Idaho too often wound up in the valley of the Skykomish.  It might have been renamed Sparling, for it was Francis Sparling who first settled here.  The lonely bachelor soon got a wife.  Ohioan Eva Helmic answered his advertisement in Heart and Hand Magazine with an energetic yes.  My Startup advisor Buddie Williams says that Eva was escaping from a spouse intended for her by devout parents. Eva and Francis lived happily ever after.

WEB EXTRAS

Hey Paul, I’ve got a slew of Now and Then photos from Highway 2 starting in Everett and ending up in Wenatchee.  Shall I post them?

Hey Jean, I’d say yes but it is a getting late and we both know what a week you have had.  It is now a better time perhaps for you to retire knowing that another hour of rest will surely be given to you thru-the-night as we stop saving daylight.  Tomorrow you will be refreshed and ready to return to or repeat your tour across Stevens Past and along Highway #2 five years past for our book “Washington Then and Now,” the “slew” you refer to.

Meanwhile I’ll look through my things and pull out a few more photos along the Stevens Pass way, most of them real photo postcards by the likes of Pickett and Ellis.   I’ll be ready to interject them tomorrow following you like the truck with rock salt follows the plow.   The reader, then, is asked to visit the site again Sunday evening before their own “nightybears” to see what we have come up with.  And in preparation, I’ll now put up two photographs that prepare the way.

One is a state map from 1855 with markings that are sometimes accurate – taking into consideration the work of the earliest surveyors – and other times wildly off the mark.  This I’ll follow with a photograph of a van outfitted to install highway signs.  Putting up signs was then not so much the work of the state’s department of highways as of the Washington Chapter of the AAA or American Auto Association.  This “signage photo” comes with a challenge to the readers.  Where it is?  There surely are plenty of clues: all those signs pointing to Snohomish County communities and the number of highway miles required to get to them.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

WIN A VALUABLE PRIZE!!!

Readers who read comments will find Arthur Allen’s hunch (resting on evidence) that the above photo was taken at Cavalero Corner.  It is there that one can follow the sign both ways and get to Lake Stevens in about the same amount of time.  (It is a big lake, but I’d suggest taking the way to the left if you want to get around it’s north end while on our way to the Stillaquamish River with innertubes – our frequent intentions years ago.)  Below I have crudely merged three Google Earth street views to show – and Arthur will correct me if I am wrong – Cavalero Corner “today.”   The last time I approached it at the east end of the roughly 2&1/2 miles trestle across the flood plain from Interstate-5 there were no flyovers like those you see in the pan.  (Click to Enlarge the Pan Below.)

(click to enlarge)

FIREBOAT DUWAMISH & The INLAND FLYER

The fireboat Duwamish is warming up at the end of Fire Station No. 5’s short pier. Built in 1909 at Richmond Beach for the Seattle Fire Department, it was 113 feet long and weighed a relatively heavy 309 tons. This photo probably was taken a year later.

The smoke escaping the fireboat’s twin stacks partly obscures the tower of the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, on the left. The Grand Trunk Pacific was Canada’s second transcontinental railroad. After reaching its terminus Prince Rupert in 1910, it took up the steamship business as well, running a coastal feeder service from Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver to Prince Rupert.

In its time, the Grand Trunk pier was the largest wood structure of its kind on the West Coast; but its time was brief. On July 29, 1914, it was gutted by the second-largest fire in the city’s history. (The largest was the Great Fire of 1889.) Its location next door to the fire station did not save it, although the fireboats Duwamish and Snoqualmie did help contain the fire.

To the right of the Duwamish, moored at Pier 3, is the Puget Sound steamer Inland Flyer. After 11 years of running on what was called the “Navy Yard Route” to Port Orchard, Inland Flyer was sold to a Capt. R.G. Reeve, who changed its name to Mohawk. This little 106-foot wooden steamer was only 7 feet shorter than the fireboat, but at 151 tons, it was less than half the weight. In 1916, Captain Reeve stripped it of its engine and converted it into a fish barge at Neah Bay.

Pier 3 – long since renumbered Pier 54 – was constructed in 1900.  For 72 years, first as an aquarium and then as a cafe, it has been the platform for the late Ivar Haglund’s prescriptions in the “culture of clams” on how to “keep clam.” Although Ivar just missed seeing his remodeled Acres of Clams reopen, he did help choose the scores of historical waterfront photographs that now cover the restaurant’s walls. One of Ivar’s favorites was an enlargement of the historical photo discussed here. It is one of a collection of Seattle images uncovered in northern Idaho. One of Ivar’s last philanthropic acts was to help purchase the collection for the University of Washington Library’s Special Collections.

ELEGANT ENDS (above)

Prolific cityscape photographer O.T. Frasch recorded this trinity of venerable ship sterns for a postcard.  The view looks toward the city from either the end of Colman Dock or near to it.

The white terra-cotta skin of the Empire Building at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street is the dominant structure in the backdrop. Just to its right, the twin towers of Saint James Cathedral peek above the black stack of the steamer Flyer.

Next to the streamlined ferry the Kalakala, the Flyer is probably the most celebrated vessel to have regularly plied the waters of Puget Sound, and not nearly as abused as the poor Kalakala.  She consumed 24 cords of wood a day in her four round trips between Seattle and Tacoma. In 1918, after more than a quarter-century on the Sound and nearly 2 million miles, she was rebuilt as the Washington for the Puget Sound Navigation Company.

The City of Seattle – blowing steam to  the right of the Flyer – was the first ferry on the Sound, beginning her service on New Year’s Eve, 1888. A tool of the West Seattle Land and Improvement Co., it moved prospective buyers between this slip and the company’s real estate above its ferry dock on West Seattle’s Harbor Avenue. The fare was five cents, and the two-mile run took about 8 minutes.

The ferry City of Seattle was a fixture on Elliott Bay through the 1890s and until 1907, the year of West Seattle’s incorporation into Seattle when the new trolley along Spokane Street as well as a bigger ferry, the West Seattle, took over. Eventually sold to a ferry company on San Francisco Bay, City of Seattle is now a houseboat for an artist living off-shore of Sausalito, California.

The Tourist, far right, was the first vessel to regularly carry cars on Puget Sound. Beginning in 1915, it carried six autos at a time between Seattle and Bremerton.

CIRCA 1886 LANDMARKS (above)

Several artful landmarks formed Seattle’s early skyline above. The effect presented the city’s new urban confidence of the mid-l880s to those arriving at the largest city in Washington Territory by Elliott Bay, and most did.

The most formidable structure in this view, center-left, is the mansard roof line of the Frye Opera House. When it was completed in 1885, George Frye’s opera house was the grandest stage north of San Francisco. It was modeled after the Bay City’s famed Baldwin Theater, and dominated the northeast corner of First Avenue and Marion Street.

Kitty-corner from the opera house and above a grocery store, the YMCA’s functional quarters are marked by what appears to be a banner. They moved into this spot in 1882 and out of it in October 1886. That information helps us date this scene at sometime in 1885 or ’86.

Across the street from the Y, with its own high-minded sign, is the Golden Rule Bazaar. Just above the bazaar and behind the opera house is the ornate Stetson Post Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street. When the Post building was built in 1882 it was the most fashionable address in Seattle.

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

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

The Great Fire in 1889, which started near the corner of First and Madison in the far left of this scene, destroyed Frye’s Opera House and practically everything else showing west of Second Avenue.  The boathouse, however, survived because it could be floated from harm’s way.

POTLATCH “PORTLAND” LANDING – 1912 (above)

Across the bottom of the negative for this waterfront scene, the photographer has written, “Arrival of Sourdoughs on the Portland.” The allusion is to that legendary moment when the first ensemble of gold rushers returned from the Klondike not only with news of the big strike but with the dust itself – $700,000 of it.

This, however, is not that spontaneous moment, but a staged re-enactment of it, 15 years later to the day, for the Golden Potlatch of 1912, Seattle’s second running of its first summer festival. This waterfront assemblage of hacks and motorcars is awaiting what The Seattle Times described later that day as “a triumph of symbolism” – the Potlatch’s peculiar mix of Native American and gold rush motifs.  It is just after noon on July 17.

For this ritual arrival, the Portland is” carrying the Potlatch’s big chief or Hyas Tyee, dressed, the Post-Intelligencer reported, in his “barbaric headdress and gorgeous blanket,” leading his hybrid court of shamans (medicine men in togas) and “flannel-shirted high-booted sourdoughs” sweating under the weight of their obese gold pokes.

The photographer sights north from near Marion Street and is most likely perched atop a boxcar, a favorite prospect for watching waterfront events when Alaskan Way was still Railroad Avenue. This scene does not wait for the chief and his ersatz band of natives and miners but catches instead the waiting crowd – or part of it. The local pulp’s boast of 100,000 witnesses was, perhaps, not so inflated when we remember that the obstructing Alaskan Way Viaduct was not yet intruding on the view of the many thousands who leaned from the windows and crowded the roofs of the buildings in the business district.

Once on shore, the chief relaxed his “haughty mien and stony gaze” with a most happy decree. “All is as it should be. There is no thought but to find joy, to give and receive happiness and that is Potlatch.”

The BLACK BOX (above)

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

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

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

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

But Ivar’s has grown too.  In 1970 Ivar Haglund employed about 260 for his then three restaurants including the “flagship” Acres of Clams here at Pier 54.  Now in its 68th year Ivar’s Inc serves in 63 locations.  (This first appears in Pacific early in 2005.)  This summer it will employ more than 1000 persons to handle the busy season’s share of an expected 7 million customers in 2006.  Every one of them – not considering tourists for the moment — will be an “Old Settler” with refined and yet unpretentious good taste – and so says Ivar’s CEO Bob Donegan.

(click to enlarge photos)

Seattle’s second fireboat, the Duwamish, is now a century old and although no longer chasing waterfront or waterborne fires she apparently could be with a 100-year tune up.  Instead its iron-clad 120 feet floats in her slip beside the lightship Swiftsure at the South Lake Union Park accepting visitors and hoping for enthused volunteers.

The Duwamish was built nearby in Richmond Beach, and her designer, the naval architect Eugene L. McAllaster, made her strong enough to ram and sink burning wooden vessels (if needs be) and flat enough (with a low draft) to chase fires bordering shallow tideflats.  And he equipped her to break records in shooting water at her targets – eventually 1.6 tons of it a second. However, it was a power used more often for water shows during city celebrations or spectacular welcomes for visiting ships or dignitaries when they were still arriving here by sea.

Launched on July 3, 1909, it was then polished, appointed and delivered to waterfront Station No. 5, here at the foot of Madison Street. Soon after the Duwamish took to her slip, the largest wooden dock on the Pacific Coast was built directly south of her.  The short-lived Grand Trunk Pacific dock is seen here sometime before July 30, 1914, when it was consumed in what was then the city’s most spectacular fire since the “great” one of 1889 razed the business district and most of the waterfront.  While the combined barrage from the water canons of the Duwamish and the Snoqualmie, her smaller sister vessel, could not save the Grand Trunk, they are credited with keeping its neighbors, including Fire Station No. 5, from igniting.

During World War 2, the Duwamish worked for the Coast Guard as a patrol boat.  After returning to her original service she was converted in 1949 to diesel-electric power and thereby became “the most powerful fireboat in the world.”  In 1986, one year after her retirement, the Duwamish was added to the list of Seattle Landmarks, and three years later she was made a National Historic Landmark as well.

WEB EXTRAS

The ‘Now’ photo was taken from the far end of the open air seating alongside Ivar’s. Here’s the Chief Seattle from the other direction, now a backdrop for the feeding of seagulls.

Anything to add, Paul?  Yes Jean, as time allows and before nightybears I’ll add a few past features and other things that gather around the slip to the south side of Pier 3/54.   I’ll start off with a compliment to your mother-child fish-bar dining photo above and then go forward with a feature on the Puget Sound steamer Alida, an early story as our “now-and-thens” go.  It appeared first in the Seattle Times Pacific Mag on August 12, 1984.

THE ALIDA

The scene above is the second oldest surviving photographic record of Seattle’s waterfront. The view was made from the end of Henry Yesler’s wharf, and looks across his mill pond to the sidewheeler Alida.  Above and behind the steamship’s paddle is the dirt intersection of Marion St. and Front St. (now First Ave). That puts the Alida in the parking lot now bordered by Post and Western avenues and Columbia and Marion streets – or just behind the Colman Building.

The occasion is either in the summer of 1870 or 1871. The steeple-topped Methodist Protestant Church on the left was built in 1864, as we see it here. In the summer of 1872 its’ builder and pastor, Rev. Daniel Bagley, added a second story with a mansard roof. Bagley was also the main force behind the construction of the University of Washington, the classic white structure with the dome-shaped cupola at the center horizon.

The photograph’s third tower, on the right, tops Seattle’s first public school. Central School was built in 1870 back away from the northwest comer of Third and Madison. If the bell in its bell tower were still calling classes, it would be clanging near the main banking lobby of  the Seafirst tower. (This was first printed in Pacific, Aug. 12,  1984. SeaFirst is by now long-gone.)

The Alida’s 115-foot keel was laid in Olympia in 1869. but its upper structure was completed in Seattle, in June of the following year, at Hammond’s boat yard near the foot of Columbia St., or just to the right of this scene. Perhaps, the occasion for this photograph is shortly after her inaugural launching.

The Alida first tested the water on June 29, 1870. Captain E. A. Starr invited Seattle’s establishment on the roundtrip trial run to Port Townsend. The July 4 edition of the Weekly Intelligencer reported that “During the passage down, the beautiful weather, the delightful scenery, the rapid and easy progress made, and last though not least, the excellent instrumental and vocal music which was furnished by the ladies, all contributed to the enjoyment of the occasion.” The steam to Port Townsend took four hours and eight minutes, and a little more on the return.

The Alida’s 20-year career on Puget Sound began with a few months of glory. She was the first steamship to successfully intrude on the monopoly which another sidewheeler, the Eliza Anderson, had on the Sound. What the Alida’s owners, the Starr brothers, won from the Alida’s triumph was shortlived. She was too slow and too light face the open waters of the straits.

In 1871 the Starr brothers introduced a second and stronger sidewheeler, the North Pacific. For ten years it controlled the Victoria run, while the Alida was restricted to steaming between Olympia and Port Townsend and way points, including Seattle.

The Alida came to her somewhat bizarre end in 1890. While anchored just offshore in Gig Harbor a brush fire swept down to her mooring and burned her to the water.

A year earlier the Seattle waterfront was also swept by fire. When it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1889, all of what is water in this historical scene was planked over and eventually filled in to the sea wall that is 500 feet out from First Ave.

THE FIREBOAT SNOQUALMIE

Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889 burned 130 acres of the central business district and left the city’s fire ‘ department red-faced. There wasn’t enough pressure to conjure a flood against the flames, and there wasn’t a hose strong or long enough to reach the fire with salt water pumped from Elliott Bay. When the smoke cleared the message was obvious.        The then mayor, the ship builder Robert Moran, told the enflamed citizens assembled in the armory at Union Street and Fourth Avenue that rebuilding a city should also include a fire department that could safeguard the new quarters.  Within a year the city had five new firehouses, an electric alarm system with 31 boxes and the first fireboat on the West Coast: the Snoqualmie.

The Snoqualmie was designed by William Cowles, a New York naval architect as a 91-foot, coal burning, tug-shaped ship that would do 11 knots and shoot 6,000 gallons of saltwater per minute.  The fireboat’s trial run was a celebrated affair. On deck for a closer look was T.J. Conway, assistant manager of the Pacific Insurance Association. He later announced to the press, “She did very well, splendidly in fact, and l shall feel justified in recommending a liberal reduction in insurance rates here.”

For the businessmen on the waterfront this we delightful news. More than 60 wharves and warehouses with frontage of more than two miles had been put up since the fire flattened everything there south of Union Street.

The Snoqualmie made its home in a slip next to Fire Station No.5 at the foot of Madison Street. For 37 years the fireboat wandered up and down the waterfront looking for small fires to put out or big ones to contain. The new fireboat was also used to rescue ships in Puget Sound and even salvage them, using its strong pumps to raise sunken vessels. ‘

The Snoqualmie fought its last fire on Elliott Bay in 1927, the year it gave up its slip to the new fireboat in town, the Alki. For the next 47 years the Snoqualmie helped lower insurance rates on Lake Union and then served as a small freighter between here and Alaska.

The last fire the Snoqualmie attended was its own. Only eight years ago (first published in 1984 that might mean 1976) it burned for 36 hours off shore of the fuel dock at Kodiak, Alaska.

THE NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD PIERS, 3(54) to 5(56)

In their basic shape, it is easy to compare the past and present of these three piers along the Seattle waterfront. (This would be especially true if we could find the “now” photographed for this story when it first appeared on May 25, 1986, now nearly a quarter-century ago. For the moment the reader is asked to imagine it, or to proceed to the “Keep Clam” waterfront trolley island and inspect it.  And, of course, don’t expect the trolley.)

Where they differ dramatically is in their uses. The historical photographer took his shot about 1902, soon after the Northern Pacific Railroad built the piers that were then numbered 3 through 5. (During World War II, in an official “act of war,” they were re-numbered 54 through 56).

The railroad’s first tenants at Pier 3 were James Galbraith and Cecil Bacon who had already been selling hay and feed on the waterfront in the 1890s, before their first step into the 20^th century and Pier 54. When the partners moved on to the new pier, they widened their commercial cast to include building materials.

The early wharf was mostly known for being the home port for many of the vessels in the famous “Mosquito Fleet.”  The Kitsap Transportation company’s busiest packet was for the little steamers that plied Puget Sound waters carrying passengers to the Kitsap mainland and Bainbridge Island.

The next pier north, Pier 4(55), became port for ocean-going steamers that sailed to Antwerp, London, Mexico and San Francisco. But in 1902 the gilded romance of Alaska was the larger allure with the Alaska Commercial Company’s coast steamers named Portland, St. Paul and Bertha carrying gold seekers north to Nome.

The last pier, No. 5/56 was taken over by the English stenographer turned shipping magnate Frank Waterhouse and his steamship line, which was the first to regularly reach the European Mediterranean from Puget Sound by way of Hawaii, the Philippines, Australia and the Suez Canal. Trade with Russia through Vladivostok was also one of Waterhouse’s commercial coups until the 1917 revolution put a stop to it.

Today this section of the old working waterfront is mostly for playing. And one of the very first players was Ivar Haglund who in 1938 opened his little aquarium on Pier 3 and, of course, at the same spot opened his famous “Acres of Clams” during the buoyant clam-happy post-war summer of 1946.  In its abiding dedication to hoaxes, Ivar’s is presently celebrating it’s 100^th anniversary on the pier – 30 years early.

THE KITSAP

The Kitsap was both trim and dauntless. In 20 years of rate wars, races, collisions and switching routes, the steamer energetically participated in the wildlife of Puget Sound waterways. At 127&1/2 feet and 195 tons, the Kitsap was an average-sized steamer about 12 feet longer than the Virginia V, which most readers will be familiar with as the last survivor of Puget Sound’s “Mosquito Fleet.”

The Kitsap was built in Portland for the Kitsap Transportation Co., one of the two strong arms of Puget Sound navigation. For a quarter century, the KTC competed with the Puget Sound Navigation Company. Oddly, at the Kitsap’s 1906 launching, the presidents for both companies, KTC’s  W.L. Gazzam and PSNC’s Joshua Green, were on board. Four years later Gazzam and Green traded abusive language when the Kitsap was sent to compete with Green’s much plusher and larger but significantly slower Chippewa on the Bellingham run. Green complained to Gazzam that the fleet Kitsap represented a general threat to business because it taught patrons to expect speed.

Green also responded by scheduling a steamer on Gazzam’s Bainbridge Island route. This route war featured at least two bumps between vessels, safety hearings, suspended captains and ruinous effects on Green’s Seattle-Vancouver route. In the rate war that ensued, both companies lowered the fare to Bellingham to a quarter. Smart customers would take either cheap trip to Bellingham and catch the train from there to Canada.

In this ca.1911 view of the Kitsap, the banner strapped to her starboard side reads, “Bellingham-Anacortes-Seattle 25 Cents.”

On Dec 14, 1910, Green inadvertently got even when three days after the Kitsap punched and sank the launch Columbia, the PSNC’s Great Lakes steamer Indianapolis rammed the Kitsap about 400 yards off Pier 3, and sent it to the bottom of Elliott Bay. The Kitsap was raised and towed to West Seattle where it was patched up and ready to compete by the following May.

In its remaining 15 years of service, the Kitsap steamed a variety of courses – her owners acting like coaches looking for winning match-ups with the opposition. Its packets included Poulsbo and Port Blakely, and a longer round trip from Seattle through Harper, Colby, Port Madison and back to the company’s depot at Pier 3 – now, as most readers will know, Ivar’s Acres of Clams.

In the 1920s, cars became a factor. In 1925, 40 minutes were cut from the car ferry Washington’s run between downtown Seattle and Vashon Island when the then-new Fauntleroy ferry dock allowed it to make the crossing in 17 minutes.

The Washington’s old route from the foot of Marion Street was picked up by the Kitsap, by then renamed the Bremerton. (This, its last passenger-only route, is being considered for revival or was when this feature first appeared Sept. 10, 1989.)  A year later, in November 1926, the Kitsap-Bellingham caught fire while laid up at the Houghton shipyards on Lake Washington, and was destroyed along with two other vessels.

THE CAPITOL CITY

What makes this steamer shot instructive in the methods of transportation safety is its revelation of the passengers’ random arrangement at the stern-wheeler’s bow. Many of these passengers are probably sightseers out for a weekend excursion to the Capitol City’s regular ports of call, Tacoma and Olympia.

For sightseers and commuters, the Mosquito Fleet of small steamers was still the way to get around Puget Sound in the early part of this century. Most of the areas with the smaller ports had no rail connection and only very rough roads reaching them – if any. And although the Northern Pacific could get you to Olympia quicker than the Capitol City, the ride was neither as smooth nor as exhilarating.

There was at least one occasion when the Capitol City was in a greater hurry. Late October 1902, off Dash Point near Tacoma, a Canadian freighter struck the steamer and put a large hole in its port side.  It started to go down. The steamer’s engineer answered Capt. James Edward’s call for full steam ahead and dashed for shore, arriving out of steam but safely beached.

The glass negative for this rare view was discovered by a carpenter while remodeling a Capitol Hill home. The amateur photographer, Lewis Whittelsey, was a bookkeeper for the Seattle Water Department. His identity was traced through the coincidental discovery of two more sources of Whittelsey’s work. A friend, Harold Smith, belonged to the same church, Plymouth Congregational, as Whittelsey and had been given two albums of his photographs.  Another friend – and one often credited here – Lawton Gowey, a latter-day accountant at the city’s Water Department, was introduced to three more albums of Whittelsey’s work uncovered in City Hall years after his death in 1941.

The second look (below) at the Capitol City comes from MOHAI and its collection of glass negatives from the professional Webster and Steven Studio.

THE “WORLD’S FIRST AIR FERRY”

Verne Gorst got started transporting mail by dog team in Alaska, and he kept his memories of that adventure alive by staying a Sourdough Association member in good standing until his death in 1953.  After the dogs Gorst gave a half-century to hauling freight — including the U.S. Mail — and passengers by bus, truck and plane to various destinations between Los Angeles and the Aleutians.  Here he was, perhaps, best know for, he claimed, “the first air ferry in world” running hourly trips between Seattle and the “navy yard city” Bremerton.

Gorst’s June 14, 1929 advertisement in The Times announced that the new line’s eight-passenger closed-cabin Loening Amphibian would leave its berth at the foot of Madison Street the following morning at 9 A.M. for its first service.  If he kept to schedule than this view of the Loening at the foot of the old Gailbraith Dock, Pier 3 (now Ivars Acres of Clams Pier 54) and the line of sportily dressed witnesses on the Pier’s skirt above it have not come together for the inaugural ceremonies. The sun is nearly overhead so its closer to noontime.

Still this is surely a record of some moment in the first year of Gorst’s air taxi enterprise, for by its first anniversary the air ferry was operating not from this improvised float but from a covered hangar tied to the end of Pier 3 (54). (see below) That floating depot was, the Times reported, big enough to house “five planes, a passenger waiting room, two repair shops, a stock room and a five-room modern apartment.”

Even though his first year ran into the Great Depression Gorst could afford his floating depot for from June to June he had carried more than 25,000 passengers on 2,700 round trips across the Sound.  The one-way hops ran an average of 51 minutes less than the water ferries hour-long ride and if the winds were right the flight could be done in seven minutes.  The Navy Yard was then one of the region’s great tourist lures and, of course, most of those flying there had never flown before. Gorst assured them of the line’s safety with the comforting point that the amphibians could land anywhere along the route.

In 1929 the fare was $2.50 one way.  But in June of 1933, beginning his fifth year, Gorst dropped his round-trip depression-time charge to $1.50.  And in 1934 after a fall storm battered his Elliott Bay Depot he towed it to new quarters at the south end of Lake Union.  There Verne Gorst’s Bremerton taxi service petered out as the Great Depression dragged on.

[Time now to climb the steps to the comforts of slumber, but will continue with an addendum tomorrow including other features and subjects that relate to this busy spot on the waterfront.)

(click photos to enlarge)

When the bright voters of Seattle agreed to the $365 million “Bridging The Gap” levy in 2006 some of them would have known that the nearly 500 foot long west approach of the 45th Street Viaduct, which also marked the north border of the University of Washington Campus, was a gap in dire straits.  It was made of wood.  Twenty thousand vehicles gave it and the rest of this steep link between the University District and the neighborhoods to the east a daily pounding.

Construction on the viaduct began in 1938 and it opened Sept 28, of the following year.  In his “now” repeat Jean Sherrard chose a prospect several yards west of the historic photographer’s position in order to show the work-in-progress a few days before the viaduct was reopened on Sept. 10 last.  For this the city hosted a street party on the viaduct.  As every paper and street department spokesperson made sure to make note, the opening was in time for the Huskies game against Syracuse, which the Huskies won handily, no doubt in celebration of the department’s finishing on time.

While the University District merchants of 1939 were happy with their new bridge to neighbors in the east, they were yet anxious that another bridge then still under construction, the Mercer Island floating bridge, would divert from their University Way, AKA “The Ave,” much of the traffic and business that came to it around the north end of Lake Washington. The greater surprises to U. District culture came in 1950 and 1956 when, respectively the shopping malls at Northgate and University Village opened.  Because of the latter the 45th St. Viaduct began siphoning perhaps more business off “the Ave” than to it.  Village parking was so easy and at least seemed free.

The location of 45th Street – and so also both its viaduct and campus border – is an accident of the Willamette Meridian: the marked stone near Portland from which Federal surveyors began charting Washington and Oregon in 1851. When with their solar compasses and Gunter chains the surveyors at last reached Seattle and its hinterlands in the mid-1850s, the future 45th Street became a major section line. And as topographical fate would have it, 45th also marked how far north Lake Washington’s Union Bay reached before it was lowered 9 feet in 1916 for the ship canal.  Once securely high and dry, 45th Street could be developed as an arterial for the three-plus miles from Stone Way to Laurelhurst. The viaduct completed that.

WEB EXTRAS

It was an early September evening, just a few days before the viaduct re-opened, that I paid the work site a visit.  Here are a few more shots using a longer lens:

Anything to add, Paul?  As the late hours allow – I’ll restrain myself to a few additions.

First we are all invited to a behind-the-scenes tour of the Seattle Municipal Archives and a workshop on basic research tools for using the Archives.  Both events are on Tuesday October 26 in celebration of Archives Month. There will be two tours, at 11 and 3; the workshop is at 1:30.  Please RSVP to archives@seattle.gov if you are interested!   We will note that the principal historical photos shown above and below were obtained through the Municipal Archive.  This visit is also a fine chance to see – if you have not as yet – the inside of the relatively new City Hall.

NEXT some more from the MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES on 45th Street Viaduct history interspersed with the city’s own history of the viaduct’s several public works between 1939 and now.

A HISTORY OF 45TH STREET VIADUCT CONSTRUCTION

Seattle’s topography has always been a challenge to transportation, especially along west to east routes. A concerted effort in the 1930s to ease automobile traffic led to a series of bridge projects including construction of the NE 45th St Viaduct that would provide a direct route from Sand Point Way and Laurelhurst to Highway 99. At that time, the land at the base was mostly farmland. The project was approved in 1935 by Ordinance 65629 with major community support from the University Commercial Club. Construction did not begin until 1938. (The street designation was E 45th Street until 1961 when the directional designation was changed to NE.)

The viaduct was funded with a combination of federal Public Works Administration (PWA) dollars ($103,550), state gasoline tax revenue ($200,000), and a small appropriation in 1939 from the City Street Fund ($8,000). Other PWA-funded projects in 1938 included the Montlake Boulevard pedestrian overcrossing, 24th Avenue Southwest paving, East Madison Street repaving, and the Ballard Bridge.

The project was completed in September 1939 with great fanfare. A celebration luncheon was held at the Edmond Meany Hotel on September 28, followed by a parade that included the Husky Marching Band. The procession made its way from the Meany to the dedication ceremonies where Mayor Langlie cut the ribbon in front of several thousand spectators.

In 1955, funds were approved to widen the viaduct from two to three lanes; construction took place in 1956-1957. The construction was estimated to cost $192,000 and the funds were approved as part of a $10 million traffic improvement bond issue approved by Seattle voters in 1954. Additional funds for this project were approved in 1956, increasing the appropriation from $218,000 to $248,000. A 1956 scale of wages shows that carpenters earned $2.80 per hour in that year. The additional funds in 1956 were for a bus stop and for approaches to University Village. During the construction, traffic was limited to one lane eastbound. Westbound traffic was asked to detour to Blakely Avenue and Ravenna Place. Once the construction was finished, two lanes were designated for westbound traffic and one for eastbound. By the mid-1950s, the farmland was gone, but a Carnation plant and Shell station could be seen on NE 45th.

During a 1972 Engineering Department survey of bridge needs, it became evident that the wooden trestles on the east end of the viaduct were compromised by a 1966 fire and needed to be replaced. After two public hearings, it was determined that there would be no big changes to the viaduct. Work began in January 1976. Federal funds were used to help fund the project, and additional funds were approved in 1976 for rail replacement. In 1976, carpenters earned $8.90 per hour. For various reasons, mostly related to the pilings used and the noise of the pile-driving machine, the work took longer than expected. Neighborhood groups and businesses, as well as the University of Washington, made their concerns about the delay known to the City. The viaduct was closed from January to October 17th, 1976.

In 1983, City funds were approved for deck rehabilitation on the viaduct. Adverse weather and an initial unavailability of specialized equipment needed for the project required the completion date to be postponed until the spring of 1984. A temporary asphalt overlay was installed to enable the viaduct to be used during the time construction was stopped and restarted.

After a fire in January 1996, the viaduct was briefly closed so an inspection could be made of the supports on the west end.

In 2010, the viaduct was closed again for several months for a major project to replace the west approach. Portions of the approach dated back to 1938 and needed to be replaced for safety reasons. The project was budgeted at $30 million and was expected to last about six months.

RAVENNA

(Click to Enlarge)

Soon after the Burke-Gilman Trail leaves the University of Washington campus it passes north below the ’45th Street viaduct, it begins a gentle but steady curving to the east between the Ravenna neighborhood on the north and University Village on the south.  Although this trail for cyclists and joggers can be vaguely seen in the center of the contemporary photograph (It is not so contemporary, for it dates from 1982), its curving original ‘line of use” is very evident in the historical panorama. Both views look northeast from Ravenna Avenue near Northeast 50th Street.

The Seattle Lake Shore & Easterb Railroad (SLSER) was begun in 1885 by Judge Thomas Burke and entrepreneur Daniel Gilman (hence the trail) and a few eastern capitalists (hence the rails). It was intended to go north around Lake Washington and east over Snoqualmie Pass to Spokane and a probable hook-up with the transcontinental railroads that paused there or promised to. By 1887 it got as far as Union Bay.

One of the SLSER’s most pleased passengers was the Rev. William W. Beck, who besides his spiritual offerings, advertised himself as a “wholesale dealer in gold, silver, iron, coal, timber, and granites.”  But it was with other of his enterprising interests, “parks and townsites,” that the energetic Presbyterian pastor was thinking in 1887 when he stepped off at the railroad’s Union Bay Station, the white structure just right of center.

William Beck bought 300 acres. He would clear much of it to stumps for his townsite, but sixty lush acres he would keep and protect as a park. Both were named Ravenna.  Beck’s lightly settled Ravenna town runs through the center of the old panorama. The southeastern end of his park is evident on the far left. The photograph was taken sometime in the mid 1890s. The park still had a virgin forest of giant cedars and firs, and would remain so until 1911 when Beck sold it to the city.

By Thanksgiving 1887 the railroad reached Bothell, 20 miles out. All along the line the road’s construction brought with it logging camps, mills, mines and towns. It fed mill workers and their families in the new towns of Ballard, Ross, Fremont, Edgemont, Latona, Brooklyn (now the University District) and a milltown on Union Bay named Yesler after the Seattle pioneer.  It is now-part of Laurelhurst.

In 1888 Gilman’s railroad reached the coal miles of Gilman (now Issaquah), and on July 4, 1889, the first of many packed and popular excursion trains left the Seattle waterfront for Snoqualmie Falls.

Preacher Beck had the right stuff: start a town by the railroad only a short ride from the city’s center, promote an industry like the flour mill on the right of our panorama, preserve a park for communing with nature and start a finishing school for Girls. The Seattle Female College is the churchy structure upper center in the panorama.

But the school closed in 1895, a lingering effect of the 1893 economic crash, the arrival that year of the University of Washington at its new campus nearby and the failure of Beck’s township to develop anything like Ballard, Fremont or Latona.  The Park, however, did well.

On April 1, 1902, .Leon Burley, 10, and his family left their farm near Fullerton, Nebraska, and headed west in a wagon. They reached Ravenna in the fall and rented the then vacant Female College for a temporary winter home. Now (in 1982 still) this Ravenna panorama is filled with loving memories for Leon Burley. He played in the abandoned flour mill, fished for suckers and trout in Ravenna Creek, which transects this view, delivered supplies by wheelbarrow to Roper’s Grocery on 24th Street, the storefront just left of the tree trunk, and with the Beck boys explored their parent’s park.

Burley also remembers attending, in 1912 or 13, a youth Christian Endeavor meeting at the old Female College and hearing his future fiancee, Marie Phillips and her friend Fay Bayley, sing in duet “Saved by Grace.” The meeting was interrupted by fire, and that night Beck’s old school burned down.  All were saved by getting out of there.

Marie Phillips lived in the home which can be faintly seen halfway between the college and the left border of the photograph. It is still there, and is the home of Marie’s sister, Constance Palmerlee, who is writing a history of the Ravenna neighborhood.  (Or was in 1982)

Actually, those trees, that old house and much else in the contemporary view of the Ravenna neighborhood might have been filled with the R.H. Thomson Expressway had not Constance Palmerlee and many other activists in the Ravenna Community Association victoriously fight and beat the freeway.

RAVENNA PARK

(First appeared in Pacific Oct 9, 1988)

In 1888, the Rev. William Beck and his wife bought a wooded ravine just north of town. A creek flowed through it from Green Lake to Lake Washington. Beck fashioned the area into a retreat where the busy citizens of boomtown Seattle could escape for some communion with nature. Through its first 20 years, thousands paid a quarter to mingle “among the giant firs and beside the laughing brook.”

Some of Beck’s park artifice is evident here, for instance, the ground cover  has been moderately cleared.  Beck also added benches, a bandstand and fountains.

The man leaning against the red alder is surrounded by western hemlock, vine maple, bitter cherry, lady fern, Indian plum, Douglas fir -parts of the ravine’s wild ecology. Whatever trampling those early hordes might have given the ravine, it did not compare to the changes that came after the city bought Ravenna Park from Beck in 1910. The next year the city diverted the warm phosphorus water of Green Lake from the ravine into the North Trunk Sewer line. This left a smaller and cooler creek fed by Ravenna Park’s many small springs.

Now, 77 years later (in 1988), the ravine is more passive than when the ‘Becks charged admission. The Park Department’s economizing neglect has been benign. Nature and the ravine’s volunteer neighbors have conspired to make Ravenna Park an almost wild retreat. How long it will remain so is uncertain.  One of Metro’s alternative plans for separating the North End’s storm drainage from its sewers proposes burying a pipe the length of the Ravenna ravine. It would drain the runoff from the North End’s streets and parking lots into Union Bay. At the same time, the city’s parks department, in trying to clear the waters of Green Lake, wants to bury a second pipe in the ravine that would allow the exchange of water between Green Lake and Lake Washington. The proposal to lay the pipes is not popular with those who like the park the way it is: a wild retreat for urban hikes, botany classes, composers and courtiers. Many of these park users have formed the Save Ravenna Park committee.  (A good reporter would follow all this up 22 years later.  I haven’t.  Perhaps a reader can bring this history up to date.)

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