Here we see – above – what The Seattle Times for Sept. 5, 1909 headlined the “Unique and Attractive ‘Seattle Day’ Decoration of Standard Furniture Company’s Store.”  Follows the Times reporter’s often thrilled description of “the most unique and attractive store decoration ever seen in Seattle.”  We quote.

“The idea typifies the ‘Spirit of Seattle’ with a full life-sized figure of Chief Seattle in his ‘glory paint and trappings’ in the foreground surrounded by a forest of real evergreen trees, his Indian tepee . . . and tripod from which actual red fire is produced.”  Behind this “real Indian camp” is a “scenic background of Mount Rainier, over which appears to be the real rays of the shimmering moon.  The entire effect is spectacular and realistic . . . Surrounding the immense glass canopy over the store’s entrance are eight large cast ivory figures representing ‘Seattle’ with outstretched arms, from which a magnificent series of hundreds of colored electric lights and floral festooning is hung.”

The following day, Sept 6, was “Seattle Day” at the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition (AYP) on the University of Washington campus.  Above the front door of this furniture emporium is hung the slogan of the day, “We’ll be There!”

The Schoenfelds were often “there” for Seattle celebrations.  During a long career of sales at Second and Pine they used the front door and Second Avenue side of their skyscraper for many dazzling effects.   For instance, after “Seattle Day” the chief was replaced with what the Times reported on Oct. 3, as “an immense oil painting of President Taft (for his visit to AYP) surrounded with hundred of yards of national colored bunting mounted with an immense gold eagle and a large electric flag which when lighted gave a brilliant ‘wave effect’.”

Then and now Captions Together:  Raised up in 1905-07 while Denny Hill was being cut down behind it the Schoenfeld’s family new company furniture store was a fine example of what architectural historian Rev. Dennis Andersen – minister to both landmarks and souls — describes as architect Augustus Warren Gould’s, “restrained sense of ornament, favoring instead to accent the splendor of site arrangement and visibility of the structure.”   Much later the building was stripped of what ornament it had – including its terra-cotta tiling – in what must have been another of those fleeting anxieties about what is in or out of style.

(click to enlarge photos)

Since first coming upon this professional view of the Freedman Building years ago I have kept it to one side, hoping that some day I might “bump into” Freedman, its namesake.  Now twenty years or so of the Internet later and help also from the Seattle Public Library’s Seattle Room librarian, Jeannette Voiland and genealogy specialist John LaMont, we probably have our Freedman, and he’s from out-of-town.

The address here is 513-17 Maynard Ave., between King and Weller Streets, one lot closer to the latter.  Between 1907 and 1909 this neighborhood was both scraped and filled during the Jackson Street Regrade, locally second in size only to the reduction of Denny Hill.

Louis Freedman shows up in the trade publication Pacific Builder for Aug. 21, 1909 as a citizen of Portland, Oregon intending to erect a four-story brick and concrete building at this address to cost $40,000.  He chose Seattle architect W.P. White to do the designs, which decades later a U.S. register of historic places described as “One of the most elaborate facades within the (International) district, the Freedman represents a higher level of refinement and proportion of line and detail than many of its neighboring hotel structures.”

The Adams Hotel, the building’s principal tenant, appears with an advertisement in the Great Northern Daily News for Dec. 16, 1912.  In the 1938 tax records the hotel’s condition is described as “fair” with 80 rooms, 18 toilets and six tubs.  It operated until 1972 when it went dark for 13 years, opening with fewer and larger livings spaces in 1983 as the Freedman Apartments.

Finally we will include one anecdote in the life of the Freedman.

Early on the morning of Oct. 16, 1923 Fred H. Mitchell, a “rent car driver” patiently waited in the drivers seat while two men who had hired him filled his car with boxes of cigarettes bound for Auburn.  When two curious cops on patrol interrupted, the cigarette thieves calmly carried on and left through the building’s back door, which they earlier broke open.  For unwittingly acting his part in a Chinatown episode of the Keystone Kops, the innocent Mitchell was hauled to jail and spent the night.

(This feature first appeared in Pacific Magazine on January 1, 2006.  The text below has not been changed.  Of course, The Wing Luke Asian Museum was successful in raising the last third of the 23 million needed for moving two blocks from their old location to this new old one.)

The Wing Luke Asian Museum has raised more than two-thirds of the 23 million it needs to restore and arrange the 60,000 feet within these brick walls into a new home for what is the only pan-Asian Pacific American museum in the U.S.

The opportunity to move less than two blocks from its now old home on 7^th South near Jackson (in a converted car repair garage) into the East Kong Yick Building on King Street is motive enough to sustain an ambitious capital campaign.   But this opportunity for the museum to expand its role in the community required the cooperation of an earthquake and the 95 year-old building’s many shareholders – some of whom had lived or worked in the building or even descended from those who had built it.

As the old story goes, in 1910 — soon after the extensive Jackson Street regrade had lowered this intersection at 8^th s. and King Street about as many feet as the four story building is high – 170 Chinese-American shareholders joined to finance the building of the East Kong Yick and its neighbor across Canton Alley (here far right) the West Kong Yick building.   And many of them also joined their hands in the construction.

In 2001, the hotel’s ninety-first year, the Nisqualli Earthquake shook up both the building and the hotel’s by then venerable routines.  The Kong Yick had been home not only for single workingmen – Chinese, Japanese and Filipino – but also families and the extended family associations that were the sustainers for a vulnerable community of minorities.  This social net was also a social center where basic needs and services were charmed with entertainments: the many traditional games and shows that the immigrants had brought with them and loved.  After the quake the building’s shareholders turned to the museum for help.

The Wing Luke Asian Museum plans to move over to East Kong Yick in 2007.  Part of its designs include preservation of the building’s Wa Young Company storefront (third from the alley, near the center) and the hotel manager’s office.  One of the buildings typical rooms will also be restored and appointed with traditional fixtures and furniture.

Between 1907 and 1909 while the destruction of Denny Hill was daily attracting its own unpaid force of sidewalk inspectors (otherwise idle), Seattle’s other big earth-moving project, the Jackson Street Regrade, was underway.  By comparison to the Denny Hill excitements this “second place regrade” was underwhelming to the curious public – until they started lifting the neighborhood.

The Jackson Street Regrade was named for its “Main Street” and northern border.  On Jackson dirt was mostly removed — lowered nearly 90 feet at 9^th avenue.   But here at 5^th and Lane, three blocks south of Jackson, the blocks were lifted with dirt borrowed from the burrowing and sluicing along Jackson and King Street and also from the low ridge to the east.

About fifty-six city blocks were reshaped by the Jackson Street regrade, twenty-nine of them excavated and twenty-seven – including these  – raised.   In particular, these blocks just east of 5^th Avenue straddle both the old waterfront meander line and the trestle of the Seattle and Walla Walla railroad after it was redirected in 1879 to the shoreline south of King Street.  The wood-boring Teredo worms had quickly devoured the original trestle that headed directly across the tidelands from the Seattle Waterfront.

In these raised blocks the city was responsible for lifting the streets to the new grade.  The property owners, however, were required to both first lift their structures and then also to either fill in below them or construct what amounted to super-basements.  Many chose the latter.

Later this subterranean region would build its own urban legends of sunken chambers reached by labyrinthine tunnels and appointed for gambling, opium and other popular and paying pastimes.  The contemporary use for this particular underground at the corner of 5^th Avenue and Lane Street is as a parking lot for the International District’s by now historic Uwajimaya Village.

(click photos to enlarge)

It is more than rare when this little weekly feature moves from repeating a “place” to repeating a “theme.” Still, these two places are not far apart; they are kitty-corner across Fourth Avenue and James Street.

The 1936 “then” was photographed in the city’s “Engineering Vault,” then housed in the County-City Building, long since renamed the King County Courthouse. Plans, graphs and maps are held in the tubes on the right. On the left are more rolled ephemera and shelves holding the punch-bound, engineering-project forms and reports that I was introduced to 40 years ago.

The “now” photo is of its descendant, the Seattle Municipal Archives. City archivist Scott Cline says the old records were “a great benefit for the archives; our collection was originally built on the strength of engineering and public-works records.” Cline has been city archivist since the archives’ formal beginning in 1985. Since then he has improved the place and its services while winning prizes from his peers. In 1999 Cline hired Anne Frantilla as deputy archivist. Julie Viggiano, Jeff Ware and Julie Kerssen followed in 2005.

Our archives are at least one happy example of how things may improve. In his recording of the contemporary archives, Jean Sherrard has posed Cline and Frantilla in the one aisle that is open in the long rows of files showing on the right. The rows can be quickly moved by motor along tracks in the floor.

This Tuesday, at 1 p.m., the archives will celebrate their 25th anniversary in the Bertha Knight Landes Room at City Hall, 600 Fourth Ave. I have been asked to take part by showing some slides on the growth of the city and its services, like this one. The public is encouraged to attend.