Unlike the Sykes view of Grand Canyon (on the Colorado) shown earlier, here he looks into the canyon and not unto the clouds. It seems like a diorama or stage set with the seemingly arranged delicacy of the foreground - but watch your step. Another of Grand Canyon, but for Horace Sykes a rare look at the tourists too. Perhaps the qualities of the composition overwhelmed his disposition to avoid human subjects.
(Click to Enlarge) In this pastoral from somewhere Horace Sykes has sheep nicely lined and safely grazing on a green hill while above the cloud plays with all this peace by taking the shape of a dove hovering.
Sheep may safely graze
where a good shepherd watches.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy.
(Click to Enlarge) The Neely family mansion - or big farmhouse - was built in the mid-1890s east of Auburn near a ferry crossing on the Green/White River. (Courtesy Neely Mansion Association.)The restored big home is located at 12303 Auburn-Black Diamond Road, just east of the Highway 18 Auburn-Black Diamond Road Exist. For more information call (253) 833-9409. (Now photo by Karen Meador)
When I first visited the Neely Mansion with my friend Inger Anne Hage it was a mere 71 years old – my age now. But now at 116 it looks considerably better than I. This improvement is the work of the many volunteers who have gathered around it for the restoration and maintenance of this national landmark.
Aaron and Sarah Neely completed the ornate farmhouse east of Kent in 1894. Aaron was seven when he crossed the Oregon Trail with his parents David and Irene Neely in 1853. The family came directly to the future White/Green River valley and was thereby among its earliest settlers.
One of the Neely Mansion volunteers, Karen Meador, introduced me to the historical photograph of the mansion and also took the “repeat” during a visit by Neely descendants. And this would be the proper place to name them.
First the visitors in the “now” photo, left to right. Left to right, Ken Beckman, Aaron Beckman, Grant Beckman, Howard Elliot Neely, and Jane Neely Beckman. Howard is the 93-year-old grandson of the Aaron Neely who built it. Understanding the difficulty of “reading” the faces of the six figures posing in the “then” we will note two with reserved confidence. The young boy, third from the left, is – or seems to be -Howard Elliot Neely’s father Aaron Neely Jr., and the woman, far right, his mother Sarah Graham Neely, Aaron Senior’s wife.
The photograph is almost as old as the house, for by 1900 the family missed the social excitements of town life and moved to nearby Auburn. According to Meador “Through the next several decades the mansion and its 200 fertile acres were leased variously to Swiss, Japanese and Filipino tenant farmers.” Sometime in the 1960’s it made a transition to disrepair. That is how we found it while on our way to the Black Diamond bakery. We peeked in a front window and found a mess. Now thanks to the Neely Mansion Association this classic Victorian is open and operating.
WEB EXTRA
Typically, I cannot find the negatives for that 60s trip to Black Diamond for a cinnamon roll when we also stumbled upon the Neely Mansion. This one example of the day's shoot was available because it was used in The Seattle Sun sometime in the mid-1970s. Susan Chadwick, then the editor, asked me if I had anything they could run for Halloween. I thought of - and found! - the Black Diamond trip photos and made this pre-photoshop collage of my distant snap of the mansion with a foreground copied from a TV Horror film (I once knew the name of this actress - David and Bill will know!). I also lifted a storm cloud from a slide that Fred Bauer sent to me in the early 1970s. That cloud is over Inverness, California (at least that is where Fred was then living) and not over Auburn. It was yet another hoax embraced by a tabloid with progressive instincts and at home on Capitol Hill for quite a long run.
While a combine reaps the wheat does the truck wait on the harvester or keep an eye out? Perhaps you, as I, find the simplicity of all this calming. There are seven parts. On top the sky and then descending, the cloud, the haze, the distant ridge, the combine, the truck and the golden wheat, and all of them given room - a peaceable kingdom. (For all but the gluten intolerant.)
We note that our correspondent Matt the Journeyman has remarked - with pebbles in his mouth - that it is a mild wonder that the desert monolith featured in Our Daily Sykes #38 has not been removed as a highway nuisance by some agency. In line with these concerns we bring up this bush of an extrusion and wonder if it's dark irregularity may not warrant some charge from the highway department's Design & Roadside Attractions Committee. We do not, however, know the state - in either case. Yet. (Is there any interest out there in an "Our Daily Victorian Lesson?" We are well stocked with them. Here's an example. From where? “In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity is the vital thing”)
The surreal shape of Swallow Rock, looking north over the Snake River in the last miles before it joins the Clearwater River and takes a sharp turn to the west for its last mostly slackwater (there are three dams) progress onward to join the Columbia River. The big "C" written with white rocks on the hill beyond Swallow Rock is partnered with an outline of a "bantum" - the mascot of the Clarkston High School teams. (Click to Enlarge) It was the clue - for me - for figuring out the location for this scene. I then learned the name of Swallow Rock from the Lewiston Public Library which is on the right or east or Idaho side of Snake River.Swallow Rock again, looking north again over the curve in the Snake River. The hill beyond the rock is also famous for the highway that descended to Lewiston from the Palouse through what for the car sick - like my Aunt Annie - was a dizzying sequence of hairpin curves. (I think some have been eliminated with a brave new and more direct route.) Dear old Aunt Annie Crabby was my first connection with a victim of phobias, some of which I later learned to share with her.Horace Sykes was surely engaged with Swallow Rock and this section of outflow from the Snake River's Hells Canyon shows the by now familiar shape of the Rock in a valley haze.I am reminded now of Jean Sherrard's description of this landscape shared over his mobile phone when he was gathering "nows" for our book "Washington Then and Now." A few miles short of Clarkston and driving east along the Snake he described it as "wonderful - beautiful." Here's one more "capture" of Swallow Rock by Horace Sykes from sometime in the first years following the Second World War. The rock's eastern face is hidden from the sunset and we have electronically "pushed" some light on it. Note how a slice of the setting sun hits the tops of a small section of trees standing beside the river and below the rock.
"Ira S. Dole" is stamped on the slide. Horace is the subject - taking aim at what? The terrain looks like Hell's Canyon on the Snake River, but the water, I think, is not wide enough. Somewhere in Sykes hundreds of slides might be the one he snapped at this moment. We will keep an eye out.
A banded bluff above a dry Arroyo - somewhere. Another unidentified subject out of the Amercian Southwest brought back to Seattle from Horace Sykes travels in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
This - I think - is Glacier Peak here in one of the wilder reaches of Washington State seen from some ridge to the south of it - but what ridge? Most likely Horace Sykes was still near his car. Perhaps a logging road - note the sunset bathed clear cut at the bottom.
THEN: Looking north on Woodlawn Avenue Northeast through its intersection with Northeast 71st Street, the scene was photographed in 1947. Many of the structures in this East Green Lake business district survive, although not all. Some, like the closed Green Lake Theater, have been remodeled.NOW: The tower above the enlarged theater building is incongruous without its Art Deco ornaments and the theater's name. (Jean Sherrard)
I came upon this revealing look into the East Green Lake business district directly after winning a barrel full of umbrellas with the low and only bid of $1.50. I wanted one umbrella, but to get it had to purchase them all at a mid-1980s Wallingford estate auction.
But behind the barrel was a box filled with prints and negatives, including this week’s subject. There were about 400 in all, and all by Lennard P. LaVanway, who had been a Green Lake-based commercial photographer. With very few exceptions, all the contents — weddings, babies, homes, churches, businesses — are images from the general Green Lake neighborhood, and they date from 1946-47.
Here, LaVanway’s centerpiece is the Green Lake Theater in 1947. Both films on the marquee — “The Time, the Place and the Girl” (a musical comedy) and “Falcon’s Adventure” — were released in December of ’46. The theater opened in 1937 with Art Deco features including curves, parapets and a decorated tower.
Lorenz Lukan, the manager and part owner, lived nearby at the Woodland Court Apartments. Lukan’s 1966 obituary in Boxoffice, describes him coming to Seattle in 1891 to become an “early-day film distributor and theater owner . . . He operated the Beacon, Arabian and other suburban theaters in Seattle as Lukan’s Far West Theatres.”
It is a testimony to the exceptional buoyancy of the movie business that such a fine theater could be opened in a Seattle neighborhood during the Great Depression. It is also a testimony to television that it would not last. Stripped of its Art Deco qualities, the not-so-old theater’s long-term tenant is now Pacific Color, which has managed to stay open as a photo-service business despite the digital revolution.
WEB EXTRAS
Jean writes: Just across the street from Pacific Color/once Green Lake Theatre, looms the Pit, several years ago slated for development of something-or-other, now a great empty space, a maw; territory behind chain link, beyond the pale. The eye avoids it, an absence, a blank zone. Terra incognita without monsters.
The Green Lake pit
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean a few things, but not as much as I would like. It is the usual problem: I cannot find the photographs, either in negatives or scans for two subjects that relate to the above. One of these “missing” – temporarily – is an early 20th century look at the Maust Transit Company’s pie-shaped livery at Winona and 73rd, now a marblecrete apartment or condo. The original clapboard was Lennard LaVanway’s studio for a few years following the Second World War. I came upon a few boxs of LaVanways prints and negatives by attending an auction-run estate sale out of his home on 50th Street N. (near the freeway) about 25 years. I’ll print some examples of his work below. There are a number of subject that have made it into “now-and-then” over the past 28 years that have to do with Green Lake, and we will insert two of them next. And here I must thank you for the bonus, above, of the pit. I hoped for such. It is mentioned in one of the two stories to follow.
EAST GREEN LAKE, Ca. 1911
Deciding, perhaps, to stay clear of the mud on Woodlawn Ave. N., the unidentified photographer of this postcard set his or her tripod safely on the sidewalk at the alley. The subject is therefore peculiarly unrevealing of the clapboard businesses on the left. (For that we include directly below another view – somewhat later of the same block taken from the street.) Still the view from the alley looks into the heart of the then booming East Green Lake Business district sometime after 1907 and before 1912.
The scene has its charms. Note the man waving an American flag while being carted by a friend (or an employee) on a wheel borrow through the street soup. Perhaps it is the pharmacist L.C. Kidd pushing his brother Dr. A.B. Kidd toward their Green Lake Drug Store – the closest storefront on the far left. In its 1903 anniversary issue the Green Lake News notes, “Probably no man at Green Lake is better known or more popular than Dr. Kidd.”
The 1907 date was picked because the Green Lake State Bank was built then at the southeast corner of Woodlawn and 72nd Street. The modest one story structure can be seen over the heads of the couple (father and daughter?) on the sidewalk. Appropriately the bank was the district’s first brick building and stayed so until the surviving two story brick business “block” was built in 1912 across 72nd Street from the bank on the northeast corner of the intersection. Here in the “then” scene its more typical pioneer clapboard predecessor is still standing.
The two-story frame building on the right (at the southwest corner) was replaced in 1949 with the stepped structure that appears in the “now’ scene. (When I find it or reshoot it.) The ’49 building was designed to continue the modern lines of the Greenlake Theatre with which it shares the block. So it had no second floor windows. The second floor occupant’s may have complained for that cheerless arrangement lasted about one years. Windows were installed in 1950.
This scene may have been photographed in the late winter of 1911. “Sure I bet on Hi Gill” is hand written on the border of the original postcard. The controversial Gill was elected Seattle Mayor in 1910 the same year that Seattle women got the vote. In a February, 1911 election Gill was recalled as soft on vice. Most of the 23,000 newly registered women voted against him. But not the owner of this postcard.
Then Caption. In December 2002 I wrote the following caption: In the about 93 years that separate these views (I hope to find the “now” later and insert it.) of the East Green lake Business District practically all the structures have been replaced. The brick bank building at the southeast corner of Woodland Ave. and 72nd Street has been drastically remodeled. The last I looked, which was three hours ago while returning home from dinner with Jean and Karen near Green Lake, the bank corner and everything else on that full block was an impressively huge construction pit. The plans to build upon it were chilled by the recent economy. See Jean’s snap of it above.
It took a while to find this scene and the text too, and I have still to uncover the "now" I snapped in December of 2002. I may need to take it again.I found a pixelated print of it. It will do.Same scene only from the street and a few years later. Used courtesy of the very courteous John Cooper.Looking up 72nd from Green Lake Way East. (story follows)
GREEN LAKE STATION
Thanks to the industry of M. L. Oaks we have a few score photographs of Seattle neighborhoods in the early 20th Century that might otherwise not have been “captured.” Here with his back to Green Lake, Oaks recorded this view up Northeast 72nd Street and across E. Green Lake Drive North about 1909.
Also close to the photographer – but still like the lake behind him – is the primary stop for the Green Lake Electric Railway that by this time had been making settlement around the lake a great deal easier for twenty years. Much like the University District, which for a number of its early years was referred to most often as “The University Station”, so this most vibrant of commercial neighborhoods beside the lake was known as “Green Lake Station.”
The number of businesses and services available just in this short block running one block east from NE 72nd Street to its intersection with Woodlawn Ave. N.E. is an impressive witness to the commercial vitality of this then booming neighborhood. Included here on the right or south side of 72nd – moving right to left – are Green Lake Hardware and Furniture, a dentist, a real estate office, an Ice Cream parlor that stocks candy and cigars as well, the Model Grocery Co. and the Hill Bros who established the first store in the East Green Lake Shopping District in 1901. At the end of the block – still on this south side – is the Central Market. Across 72nd on its north side are the neighborhood hotel, post office and a paint and wallpaper merchant
Completing this tour of 72nd, two blocks to the east the belfry of Green Lake Baptist rises above its southeast corner with 5th Avenue NE. And to this side of the church, worshipers can complete their cleansing if they feel the need with a visit to the North Seattle Bath House. But then so can the bankers. Green Lake’s only brick structure at the time, the single story Green Lake State Bank, is set at the southeast corner of 72nn Street and Woodlawn Ave – at the scene’s center.
Now and Then caps together. Nothing, it seems, survives on East Green Lake’s NE 72nd Street from the early 20th Century to now. Both views look east from E. Green Lake Drive North. (Historical photo courtesy of John Cooper)
OTHER VIEWS of the EAST GREEN LAKE NEIGHBORHOOD by Lennard LaVanway recorded following the Second World War.
JAFFE'S DRUGS
LaVanway's post-war studio at Winona and 73rd. Long ago I wrote a now-then feature about this ornate clapboard when it was new and the home of Maust Transfer. I found the text - but not yet the historical photographs. Same flatiron, same post-war years, ca. 1949.
We will conclude – for now – with a few of LaVanway’s subjects found at his estate sale about 25 years ago. After holding on for a few years as a neighborhood commercial photographer (there are lots of baby shots in the collection) LaVanway landed a job at the University of Washington.
Volunteer Doll Repair - exterior.Inside at VolunteersJim the barber at 73rd and LindenShell Station at 78th and GreenwoodSame ShellHere's Bill McCotter and his bride, who somewhat typical of the time is not named. Weddings were an important part of LaVanway's bread-butter. We included a scene from this wedding in an earlier blog post. Perhaps Jean can mark this so that by touching it you may see the other scene from the McCotter wedding instantly. McAllister's Bikes where Wiwona meets Aurora. Demure valentine in the studioImpetuous Youth also in the studioKay Lake in some studio. LaVanway liked this subject and kept several of Ms. Lake's posses.
When we find them we will add more LaVanway subjects in a blogaddendum – and other Green Lake stories too, although probably not together.
When first I studied this unidentified monolith gracefully leaning away from the road I thought first of Easter Island and then Arizona largely under the influence of my dad's subscription to "Arizona Highways." Now I think it more like Utah, southern Utah. But surely many persons will know such a site! (Click to Enlarge)
Horace Sykes had a telescopic lens for his 35mm but used it prudently. Here the moon over a cragged horizon seemed appropriate. Again, he left no ID for this Kodachrome. (Click to Enlarge)
Another untoward Sykes - an overturned auto and a victim at the side of an unidentified country road. It is one of the very few occasions when he acts forward like an editorial photographer. Sykes tells us nothing about this slide, and unlike many of his unidentified landscapes it is unlikely that we will ever learn more about this scene - for whatever reason we may wish to know more. (Click to Enlarge)
(Click to Enlarge) Doubly rare for Horace Sykes: a psychological study he has titled "Youth's Dreams, #2." We have not come upon a #1 as yet. Nor do we know the name of this youth. Certainly, it is not his daughter of whom we have several pictures. We have still not looked through all the Sykes there is and we may learn more later.
With my parents and next older brother, Dave, I visited this lookout over the Yellowstone River in the late 1940s, very near the time that Horace Sykes recorded this view of its Grand Canyon. My parents had also visited the park in the 1920s when they still had none of their four children and lived almost nearby in Miles City, Montana. (Cllick TWICE to enlarge.)
In character, Horace Sykes returns to the same prospect to photograph this young mountain, which he does not name even with two chances. (Click to Enlarge) And now with the help of Google Earth all - or both - is revealed. This is the Grand Teton over Jenny Lake! Note how Sykes has return to within a foot or two of the prospect for the first recording - admitting that we do not know which was first. And there may well be others too.
With the evidences of the “real photo post card” printed just above we have found the location for the previously unidentified Daily Sykes #10, which was published here last April 22. The photographer, Philip Wischmeyer, we are familiar with having used his ca. 1910 panorama of Neah Bay in our book “Washington Then & Now.” We are, in fact, making quite a few discoveries as we scan through by now decades old 35mm black-and-white copy negatives (technical pan) of images from diverse sources, thanks to our own Edge Clippings Ron Edge’s loan of another of his picker’s findings, a sizable and fine scanner that will handle 24 negatives at one sitting. Thanks again to Ron.
THEN: Looking north from Seneca Street on Third Avenue during its regrade in 1906. (Photo by Lewis Whittelsey, Courtesy of Lawton Gowey)NOW: With the reduction of Denny Hill west of 5th Avenue in 1911, 3rd Avenue was continued north through the new regrade. (Jean Sherrard)
Lewis Whittlesey, a clerk with the Seattle Water Department, visited the Third Avenue regrade in 1906 and took several photographs of its upheaval, including this one that looks north from Seneca Street. After graduating from Amherst College, Whittelsey joined a Rand and McNally expedition into Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains in the late 1890s. It was his first great adventure and last. Upon leaving the expedition, the young surveyor moved to Seattle and was hired by the city, which kept him until his retirement in 1940.
Trained in public works, the city clerk would have known the details of this street work. The parallel timber forms leading up the center of Third probably have to do with the eventual path of the trolley on Third. The stacked bricks to the side are most likely for paving.
With his wife, Delia, Lewis was an active Congregationalist, and he may have chosen this prospect to record the impressive brick pile of Plymouth Congregational Church on the northeast corner of Third and University. Farther on, the sandstone columns of the new federal post office were still a work-in-progress in 1906 and would be for two years more. In the distance, and blocking Third Avenue, the ruins of the Washington Hotel tentatively held on atop the southern summit of Denny Hill. The hotel had its closing ball on May 7. By the end of the year it was razed, and the hill followed.
Within a year of his retirement, Lewis Whittelsey died at the age of 71. His wife donated much of his library to Everett Junior College when she learned of its need for books. She also made a gift of her own book of poems, “Thoughts by the Way.”
Anything to add, Paul? YES Jean – three groups of photographs for three 3rd Ave. locations related to the above now-then.
POST OFFICE – SOUTHEAST CORNER of 3rd and Union.
Looking south on 3rd Avenue from Union Street in 1902. Third north of University and much of Union Street too has been gated for that summer's Elks Carnival. Part of Plymouth Congregational Church is evident upper-left at University Street.This image is new to me. It surely is the southeast corner of Union and 3rd, but is it also another scene from the 1902 Elks Carnival. I suspect it is, but have yet to convince myself. Part of Plymouth Church is on the far right and part of the old Armory is on the left.The future Post Office corner has been cleared for construction of - the Post Office. Date is ca. 1904. Note the University of Washington up on its Denny Knoll (not hill): the first campus. Again, the congregationalist and the assorted rifles are right and left respectively Courtesy Lawton Gowey.Post Office under construction. Plymouth Church top-center.The Post Office when new, ca. 1909. View looks southeast with Union Street on the left and Third Ave. on the right.The "modern" glass curtain post office. I do not remember when I took this snapshot but estimate about ten years ago.This arrived today, May 18,2010, from Matt the Journeyman showing, he explailns "last year's facelift" to the old straight ahead modern glass curtain P.O. from the 1950s. Thanks much Matt. Readers should know that Matt has his own blog. He writes "Kind of you to post my blog address, though not necessary at all. If you like, the blog name is "Just Wondering" on WordPress but there are a million Just Wondering blogs so the best approach is the URL: http://bythedarkofthemoon.wordpress.com and if you would rather direct them specifically to my post about Third Avenue (since I write a lot about family and other topics, too) you could direct them here: http://bythedarkofthemoon.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/the-return-of-third-avenue/
THIRD AVENUE LOOKING SOUTH FROM PIKE STREET
My unattributed caption reads "Third Avenue looking south from Pike Street, ca. 1898." The landmark Plymouth Church is in the picture but no Post Office yet a block away.Same block as the above but now the Post Office is in place one block to the south. The sign on the trolley for the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition guarantees us the year: 1909. Remember we celebrated its centennial last year.My old friend, now long gone too, Lawton Gowey took this on August 3, 1967: the "Summer of Love." It too looks south on Third through its intersection with Pike Street.
MORE CHANGES ON THIRD – LOOKING NORTH FROM NEAR SENECA
Note the distant Plymouth Congregational Church at University Street. This is before the upheaval (directly below) that began on 3rd in 1906. Please note the three story clapboard with two bay windows facing third - on the right, in part behind the power pole. A later version of this structure will be shown below.The Third Ave Regrade in 1907. A partially razed Washington Hotel is on the horizon, and Plymouth Church escapes it. The two-bay structure is on the right and to this side a new structure with a ceramic front, which would survive until the city's modern preparations for Century 21 demanded, we assume, a modern facade.The same block east side in the early 1950s. Note that the two-bay-window three story structure - now on the left - has somehow managed to hold on, but with a ersatz "war brick" siding. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)Sparkman and McClean prepare their facade in the spirit of and in conformity with Century 21. Date is June 28, 1961. Another Lawton Gowey snapshot. Bless Lawton.And the modern consequences seen here in 1970. Thankfully much else in the Central Business District was left along for the Worlds Fair. This was also photographed by Lawton Gowey.
ANOTHER THIRD AVENUE – A DIFFERENT ONE
We conclude by getting off our own Third Avenue and visiting Vancouver, Washington's 3rd at Washington Street, 1942. Photo by Simmer
We have learned that our friend Nathaniel, the steadfast host of the by now nearly ancient Allegro Coffee Bar in the University District (see our blog post from last Wednesday and only four posts down), has “pulled” through his operation and is now “up and walking around and feeling fine.” That would be still in the hospital, but we are confident that he will soon move from those halls to home and then back again to the Allegro when his family permits it.
(The Allegro is either the oldest or the “next to” oldest espresso bar in Seattle, but the coffee is fresh and the pastries too. Yes we at dorpatsherrardlomont can highly recommend the Allegro, a harbor of repast for both town and gown literati for decades. You will easily find it’s now cozy and very European entrance in the alley 2nd door north of 42nd Street between University Way and 15th Avenue n.e., at the western border of the U.W. Campus. Test their teas and study their bulletin and notices board.)
UPDATE
And this afternoon, a short e-missive arrived from the man himself:
Well, the deed is done. I’m home now licking my wounds, as it were. It has been quite a ride and I am so impressed with the folks in attendance. Now, onward and upward!
We also recommend, for greater acquaintance with Nathaniel and the Allegro, this video portrait.
“Another terse title from Horace Sykes, "Downpour" - but from a different storm than the "approaching" one in Our Daily Sykes #30, which hereafter will be officiously abbreviated as ODS30. Again no date and no place are indicated. (Clicks to Enlarge)
Horace Sykes has titled this slide "approaching storm" but then leaves it at that. He does not tell us where or when. For Sykes and his Kodachromes the when is almost always sometime between WW2 and 1954 the year of his passing. The "where" I'll speculate is somewhere along the Snake River, but I hope to be corrected. (click to enlarge)
An opportunity for Horace Sykes to photograph a subject he would most likely not record in full daylight. And he keeps the faith of keeping his subject unidentified. Again, it is from some post-wwar2 year: 1949 with a very wide circa.
(click to enlarge photos) Nathaniel Jackson making espresso this morning
Our friend of many years, Nathaniel Jackson, Café Allegro owner/inspiritor and caffeinated force of nature, put in one last day before undergoing major surgery.
“What’s up?” Jean asked Nathaniel this morning, having heard the news from his cousin Danny Sherrard, who often works behind the counter.
“Tomorrow I’m donating a few inches of colon to the cause,” Nathaniel grinned. Squeezing out another perfect shot of rich powerful espresso, Nathaniel was thoughtful. “Thirty five years I’ve been here, building family.” He’s shaped and nurtured a close-knit community, to which he’s brought his great soul and gentle heart.
We wish him the very very best.
Working the bean
Late night update:
We just received the following poem from Nathaniel. Heady stuff follows:
“Old Barns”
Old barns
Standing in the distance;
Cloaked in grass, morning glories and moss;
Vacant eyes peering over what was and is…
Roofs and walls sagging;
Doors, if there are any, barely hanging,
aided by a rusty nail or two, and entangling vines.
Refusing, thus, to fall all at once…
Beautiful!
Old dogs,
Flea-bitten
Not much to look at,
Hobbling painfully from point to point.
Blink and/or blinding eyes, drooping tail, head bowed;
Concentrating on what was and is…
Periodically rising, with great effort.
Turning a circle or two…
Only to plop back into that very spot,
Now changed in the turning.
Beautiful!
Moth-eaten, sway-backed horses
Standing under a tree,
Or by a fence.
In deep contemplation of what was and is…
Major energy, devoted to standing there.
Obliged to swish
at the pesky flies who have no appreciation
that economy of motion is of the essence
in this moment.
Nothing to excess here.
Beautiful!
These images have intrigued me since early childhood. Of a Sunday afternoon, our family would go for a “drive” through the back-roads of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with its rolling hills and farmlands. My special treat, however, was to actually drive, at age 13 (!), along those same roads alone with my father. The icing on the cake was to be able to listen to The Metropolitan Opera, narrated by Milton Cross as I anticipated seeing THAT barn, THAT horse or THAT dog. That I held the car to the road was quite a feat and I think my father would nod in the affirmative on that score.
My interest holds to this day. To the mix I have added: listing outhouses, rotting boats, ancient trees and old folks who are “jes bone taard…” from work, age, or illness. Here, there is no room for pretense. It is what it is: an honesty and an integrity which I experience as the inherent beauty of creation manifesting unencumbered as there is no desire, will or strength to do other than just be.
I feel nurtured, honored and humbled in the presence.
This, coupled with the precious moments with my father who was content to drink his beer and pontificate during the Texaco commercials and letting me drive (!) constitute one of my most treasured memories.
That I have given expression to it, to my satisfaction, and that I was able to share this story with my parents makes it even more precious.
For the experience, the perspective and the memory, I truly give thanks.
And in the tradition of the first folks here, I say loudly,
In good weather a rolling gravel road like this one is a treat to drive - an engagement with the milieu one dips and swerves through scattering pebbles, and so unlike the high speed routine of driving on a flattened, paved and protected super highway. Again, we suspect that this is somewhere in the Palouse, but Horace Sykes has left no identification. There is a loving analogy that we can phrase so that this blog may still be entered safely by the curious. It is that riding a winding gravel road over hills and through valleys is like "rolling in the hay" while driving a freeway is a kind of "self-abuse" with one's foot to the pedal. I would like to know if this road has been paved. (Click Twice to Enlarge)
THEN: Harborview Hospital takes the horizon in this 1940 recording. That year, a hospital report noted that "the backwash of the depression" had overwhelmed the hospital's outpatient service for "the country's indigents who must return periodically for treatment." Built in 1931 to treat 100 cases a day, in 1939 the hospital "tries bravely to accommodate 700 to 800 visits a day."NOW: Probably to enliven the street grid, Ninth Avenue was turned west for a new meeting with Yesler Way during the construction of Yesler Terrace in the early 1940s. The still looming Harborview easily led Jean Sherrard to the historical photographer's prospect.
As told by the long shadows and what is printed on the cable tracks climbing First Hill on Yesler Way, this look up Ninth Avenue was recorded late Thursday afternoon Jan. 5, 1940. Seven months and four days later the cable cars would stop running on Yesler Way for good — or bad.
The nearly decade-old monolith (from this angle) of Harborview Hospital looks over charming frame homes and apartments on Ninth. Although certainly not “tenements,” these were among the 150-plus structures destroyed to make room for Yesler Terrace — the Seattle Housing Authority’s first big project to provide low-income, unsegregated housing.
In the Polk City Directory, Japanese names are listed in association with half the occupied residences in these two blocks. Stephen Lundgren, First Hill’s historian and longtime employee of several hospitals on “Pill Hill” (another name for this part of First Hill), tells us that the shoe man advertising his “quick” service seen here across the street at 830 Yesler was Toyosaburo Ito.
Lundgren explains that about the time this photograph was recorded, housing authority social worker Irene Burns Miller visited Ito and his neighbors. Her thankless job was to explain to the shoe repairman and the others that they would need to move out; later, the authority would help them find other housing.
Miller could not yet have known what wartime would bring. After Pearl Harbor, here still nearly two years away, these neighbors of Japanese descent would not be “relocated” to Yesler Terrace but rather “interned” to inland camps. Lundgren notes that Miller wrote her reminiscences of these First Hill neighbors in her book “Profanity Hill,” another name for the area. The Seattle Public Library has a copy.
WEB EXTRAS:
Jean writes: Turning west, I snapped a photo that replicated one of my earliest memories. My dad, a lowly resident at King County Hospital – now Harborview – moved his young family to Yesler Terrace, where we lived for a couple of years.
My first pet, a collie I unaccountably named Zassie, raised our neighbors’ ire because of her nighttime barking. After several months, my parents capitulated and gave Zassie to a farmer in eastern Washington. Soon thereafter, our street was victimized by multiple burglaries. Neighbors pleaded for Zassie’s return, but sadly, she’d been run down on a country road.
Smith Tower loomed large then as now.
Smith Tower from 9th & Yesler
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean, but only a few photographs with small captions.
(Please Remember to CLICK Twice to ENLARGE)
An early look across Yesler Terrace when the landscaping was still new and low.The cover to a pamphlet promoting the vision of a new hospital on the hill without yet naming it.Early birdseye rendering of Yesler Terrace.Ca. 1913-14 look to the King County Court House from a new Smith Tower. Note Our Lady of Good Help Catholic Church steeple lower left at the southeast corner of 5th and Jefferson. Also the steps climbing Terrace to First Hill are seen right-of-center.Harborview from a lower floor in the Smith Tower. The church steeple punctures the bottom border. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)Harborview Aerial. Trinity Episcopal Church at 8th and James, bottom-left corner. The graded block of the old and razed courthouse looks raked right-of-center.Harborview Hospital when nearly new.A 1950 aerial of Harborview behind the Smith Tower.Part of the Yesler Terrace neighborhood in 1964 when work on the Seattle Freeway was still underway far left. (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive)
In leaning towards the abstract this composition is unusual for Sykes. Still the pool of melted snow dispels the scene's inclination toward "mere" spatial relations with the reflection of upside down evergreens. Which also reveals the freedom one has with their own blog to act the art critic. (Click to Enlarge)
We may have titled this subject "Horace Sykes and Three Friends" for almost certainly it was his camera that recorded it. It is held by the fourth member of the quartet. Horace, far left, poses with two others at the front end of a truck that will be easily identified by anyone who knows post-war pick-ups. I do not. These look like three with whom one could spend an enjoyable day and also learn something. There is confidence is these poses. Broad-shouldered and handsome, Horace has forearms like Popeye's. Typically, we don't know the names of the others nor do we know the place, although we hold hope for both. (Click to Enlarge)
We repeat Horace Sykes' "Daily #22" in order to elaborate on our speculation that Soap Lake was his subject. (Please Click the Images to Enlarge them.)
Soap Lake’s historian/filmmaker Kathy Kiefer confirms what we only suspected. This is indeed Horace Sykes’ look over Soap Lake from its southwest corner. Kathy writes, “I concur that not only is that Soap Lake, I venture to say that it is one of the enclaves used by nude bathers on that southwest corner of the lake. Male sunbathers created the stone circles to alert others that they were nestled within. The women often made tent like structures – much more private. I am sure we talked at some point about the nude beach and the thriving naturist community on the southwest side of the lake?”
Jean Sherrard's 2005 panorama of Soap Lake photographed from its south shore. This was meant to be included in our book "Washington Then and Now" but was witheld for want of room.A "then" from the south shore. The long dock is a sign of how the lake's elevation varies depending . . .
When Jean visited Soap Lake in 2005 Kathy was his guide and his “repeat model” as well. Below you see Kathy standing in for the angel of mercy included in the historical photo below it, which dates from about 1922. In many printings of this popular postcard, the promise “It Will Cure You” has been written over the rocks by the card’s publisher. The white-robed angel of therapy is leading a lame and bandaged victim to the alkaline-rich waters of Soap Lake, named for the froth skimmed by the wind and deposited on the beaches. When the lake’s popularity as a mineral-rich panacea gained momentum in the early 20th century, this southern shore was quickly stocked with hotels and all the attractions of a fetching health resort, including massage, mud baths, mineral soaks, and, of course, swimming in Soap Lake and drinking from it. The Siloam Sanitarium, seen on the horizon just below the angel’s gesturing hand, was one of the town’s grander retreats for treating both nervous afflictions and hypochondria.
Soap Lake historian/filmmaker Kathy Kiefer standing in for the Angel of Mercy. Jean shot this in 2005."It Will Cure You"
Kathy Kiefer wound up in Soap Lake in August 1980 and stayed. “I rode from Kirkland over Stevens Pass right to the steps of Soap Lake’s Thorson’s Hotel where Roxie Thorson was sipping port and rocking in her steel chair. I had followed the ashen path. It was the year St. Helens blew.” Kathy’s admired film/video history of Soap Lake can be purchased through filmbaby.com. She also has a Soap Lake website: www.soaplakewa.com and a Soap Lake Facebook Fan page featuring lots of historic photos – among other things. Thanks for the help and stewardship Kathy.
This view is the best one to use for a comparison of distant landscape to that in Horace Sykes' view.An earlier view of Thornson's where Kathy Kiefer ended her bike flight to Soap Lake in 1980.Same Stones even earlier.Jean's 2005 photo of the same structure, now a lovely hotel, with bathroom spigots allowing a choice of mineral water, direct from the lake, or tap water.Close-up of the Siloam Sanitarium So named. Another classic stone structure, this one in nearby Ephrata and also snapped by Jean in 2005
Like the earlier strange circle from three days ago or four that is marked against the steep side of an arid mountain that resembles a step-pyramid, so this semi-circle is a mystery to us, and its lake or reservoir too. Were the rocks once painted white and here worn? Have they fallen? There is more of them to the rear- left. And the nearby shore of the “lake” is also strewn with white rocks. Finally, there are two white stakes poking from the grass between the rock circle and the lake. What may we make of this? Where is it? Could this be Soap Lake from the southwest shore? If Horace Sykes lens were a bit sharper we might have read the newspaper resting with the cardboard on the “floor” of the rock semi-circle. (Click to Enlarge)
We received a request from Brian who helped us identify Horace Sykes pictographs. Brian wants more and here are a few, although there may well me more in corners of the Sykes collection I have not yet searched, and those are quite a few corners. I will number these in case Brian or anyone recognizes their location. (Click to Enlarge)
Another lost Sykes. Or rather we are lost. Bucolic at the bottom with pasturing cattle enjoying the stream and the rest, and surreal at the top with a farm, or parts of one, or remnants, clinging to the horizon several hundred feet up.
Another unidentified but not inscrutable Horace Sykes Kodachrome from ca. 1949. There are not that many steams like this on the dry side of the Cascades - south of Canada. Bigger than most creeks, but not a big river. Another good clue for someone willing to spend some time flying along ten feet above the ground with Google Earth is that here we detect a highway between the stream and the cliff. Perhaps the Okanogan late summer?
An "earth work" of nature or the art of an ancient civilization or crop-circles stomped by pledges of an agricultural college, what can we make of this great circle? It is most likely in the American Southwest not Egypt - stuck to the side of some steep mountain that resembles an eroded step-pyramid. (Click to Enlarge)
THEN: The city's regrading forces reached Sixth Avenue and Marion Street in 1914. A municipal photographer recorded this view on June 24. Soon after, the two structures left high here were lowered to the street. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archives)NOW: The corner's final "humiliation" came as a ditch was dug and lined with concrete in the early 1960s for the Seattle Freeway section of Interstate 5. (Jean Sherrard)
In 1880 or ’81 Joseph and Virginia McNaught began building their home at the southeast corner of Marion Street and Sixth Avenue. It sat on a high point that made it stand alone against the sky when viewed from the waterfront. The couple took some kidding about having moved so far east of town.
Soon after following his brother, James, to Seattle in 1875, Joseph drove a herd of cattle from the Willamette Valley to a beef-poor Seattle. With the profits he then returned east for a law degree and marriage to Virginia. Returning to Seattle, the McNaughts became one of the area’s most entrepreneurial couples with investments in transportation, mining, shipbuilding, Palouse homesteads and stockyards.
For much of the two square blocks between Sixth and Seventh, Marion and Cherry — all of it part of the Interstate 5 ditch now — First Hill was mostly no hill. Parts of it even lost altitude before joining the climb east of Seventh Avenue. With the grading of Sixth Avenue, first in 1890, the home was lowered a few feet. That year it was also pivoted 90 degrees, so what is seen here facing north at 603 Marion previously was facing west at 818 Sixth Ave. The regrade of 1914, seen here, lowered the site about two stories to the grade of this bricked intersection.
By then the McNaughts were in Oregon raising alfalfa hay and living in Hermiston, one of two town sites they developed. The other was Anacortes. Virginia named Hermiston, and it includes a Joseph Avenue.
Later, the old McNaught mansion was expanded for apartments. All the Victorian trim was either removed or lost behind new siding. Through its last years it was joined with its big-box neighbor as part of a sprawling Marion Hotel until sacrificed for the freeway.
Have you anything to add for this scene Paul? Jean I do but will start out modestly – or rather unprepared. I need to get to bed. But I’ll post a few pictures and include minimal captions, which I’ll elaborate on later.
A West Shore Magazine feature on some of Seattle's landmarks mid-1880s (I'll get the publishing date later.) Note the McNaught home is included bottom-left.Looking up the draw (now the freeway route) between Sixth and Seventh Avenues from near Jefferson Street ca. 1886. Cherry street, bottom-left dips to the east making this photograph the best evidence for how much of First Hill between Sixth and Seventh and between Jefferson and Marion one featured a slight pause and regression in the climb of First Hill. There's a pedestrian trestle in there, and also road work on the Seventh Avenue, on the right. Central School in the block bounded by Madison, Marion, Sixth and 7th Avenues was destroyed by fire in the spring of 1887. This view may be compared to the next, which was taken later although not much later. Note the McNaugtht mansion to the left of the big fated school. (Courtesy, Seattle Public Library)Similar scene and time as the one directly above, although a little later. This scene also shows the nearly level topography on Cherry Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The intersection of Sixth and Cherry shows above the center of the photograph. The dip between Sixth and Seventh is hidden behind the homes on the right. The McNaught mansion appears again this side and to the left of Central School on the right.
(Please Click to Enlarge) This most of us know from its strange hoodoos and for me also a visit as a child with the family on a long trip from Spokane to Texas. Using Google Earth I lucked out and soon found the proper blue dot to click from hundreds of them. (Much to enjoy.) It brought up another photograph taken like this one by Horace Sykes from a prospect called Sunrise Point, at just under 8000 feet. This is high country in south Utah. You can easily get higher driving the roads west of Bryce and reaching plateau elevations of 10,500 feet and discovering other natural spectacles although at that height hoodoos no longer gather together as they do here like members of several antiphonal choirs in a Queen's chapel. Probably this is also a very good sunset point. Jean has mentioned that here Horace Sykes seems to have had some special performance contract with the clouds, as he does so often.
The Horace Sykes below was most likely photographed during the same trip as the Bryce Canyon view from Sunrise Point printed above. There are hoodoo pinnacles in the second view but they are lower in the frame and perhaps this second scene was also taken from a slightly higher elevation and closer to the clouds – even above them. The elevation is somewhere near 8000 feet and perhaps a little over it. This we note in order to compare this Western scene with another – the one printed below it. It is a view of the Brothers in the Olympic Range photographed by Sykes from the east side of Hood Canal somewhere between, I believe, Oak Head and Tsukutsko Point on the Toandos Penninsula. The “lesson” here is in elevation. The Brothers’ summit is a few feet under 7000 feet, and so a good 1000 feet lower than the position Sykes comfortably took from an as yet unidentified point or prospect and most likely from a spot not too distance from his car. Or we may imagine in the bottom photo Sykes in his post-war Chevrolet reaching for the clouds above The Brothers.
Another scene from Bryce by Sykes.The Brothers over Hood Canal. One (or two) of the highest in the Olympics, the Brothers rise quickly to almost 7,000 feet from the west shore of Hood Canal. The Bryce Canyon recordings, also by Sykes, were taken from prospects with elevations of around 8,000 feet, and a few miles to the east of a Utah plateau that reaches elevations of 10,000 feet and more.
An understanding of what created the Dry Falls in the Grand Coulee Canyon was first revealed about 13000 years after the event. And it was not yet known when tourists first started to visit the site in the early 20th Century. The 1890 completion of the Northern Pacific branch line between Spokane and Coulee City made visits to both the Dry Falls and Soap Lake possible for persons willing to trek or take a wagon the last few miles to those destinations from the rail head. The opening of the trans-state highway over Stevens Pass in 1925 substantially increased the volume of puzzled visitors. Many by them brought cameras and the fenced prospect constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the Great Depression has been the platform from which most of the snapshots have been made depicting the effects the late ice age’s great floods as ice dams broke releasing walls of water sometimes 1,000 feet high. Believe it or not.
Now we will nudge Jean to put up at least one more historic shot of the Dry Falls – the one (or perhaps two) we used in our book “Washington Then and Now” – and examples of his own repeats in 2006. (Readers may want to visit our website to see more of Jean’s state-wide repeats pulled from the book.)
(click to enlarge photos)
Horace Sykes wide-angle look at Dry Falls ca. 1950.
Jean writes: the following photos are from two visits to Dry Falls. I’ll begin with the Then & Now photos we featured in our book. A couple from Seattle graciously posed for me to help repeat the original. The boy in the red shirt darted into the photo at the last second, giving it a little impromptu oomph.
Two poplars but where? Horace Sykes does not tell us. To me one looks Okanogan and the other Palouse, or vice versa. Are they poplars? My best evidence is based only on “family resemblance.” Anyone in our family would have called these stately trees poplars.
A Horace Sykes poplar somewhere.A Sykes poplar somewhere else.Here Mike is a detail of the ridge lines for mountains far beyond the long and winding road in Horace Sykes landscape. As you can tell Sykes had a built-in pictorialist soft filter in his camera, that is his lens was not the best. Those ridges look sort of typical - except to someone who has been living with or near them, I think. Paul
Perhaps somewhere in eastern Washington, Horace Sykes has pulled over and parked to take this Kodachrome slide after leaving a scablands community. The stiff sunlit stubble tops a light snow. Someone will know this place - but probably not this media. (Click to Enlarge - Perhaps Twice.)
This, among other things, is, I believe, Mt. Baker from the somewhere south at sunset. Someone who knows the hills and lower mountains between Arlington and the Canadian border may recognize one or another of those several ridges. Again, like most of Horace Sykes’ slides this one is neither dated nor named. “]This Syke's view of Mt. Baker we know. It is from the top of Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island, looking east. Lummi Island rises above the mist hanging over Rosario Strait. The south end of the Island rises with a ridge, but the rest of Lummi is low. Somewhere in that mist I lived in a fisherman's cabin in the winter-spring of 1970-71 working then on a script for "Sky River Rock Fire" a documentary - mostly - of the northwest music festivals held hereabouts in the late 1960s and early '70s. Once the Ivar bio "keep Clam" is completed I hope to get on with the editing of this project that will then be 43-years old. A record for me. From my cabin I looked to Mt. Constitution above the reef netters on the strait. It is impressive way to catch salmon but requires hours of patience - like some film productions.
THEN: A Seattle Street and Sewer Department photographer recorded this scene in front of the nearly new City-County Building in 1918. The view looks west from 4th Avenue along a Jefferson Street vacated in this block except for the municipal trolley tracks. (Photo courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: Jean Sherrard has adjusted his view a little to the north or right in order to see around the vehicle parked on the Jefferson service street.
The top selection is but one of several photographs recorded by an official municipal photographer on January 27, 1918. (Others are printed below.) The event was the ceremonial journey of two municipal streets cars (the second one is hidden), Seattle Mayor Hi Gill, the City Council, the Police Band and how ever many citizens they could carry for a round-trip run along the city’s new public trolley line that used the then new Ballard Bridge. The trip and the celebrating began here at the original front door to the City-County building.
The Ballard Booster Club tended to the official ceremony in Ballard. There shoulder-to-shoulder a crowd of “over 1000,” The Times estimated, filled Market Street “for speech-making and jollification over the completion of the line.” An elevated platform was built into the street for some shouted lessons in municipal ownership of utilities. (This scene is depicted below.)
The perennial and often populist councilman Oliver Erickson, from the council’s committee on public utilities, gave the longest speech. It began, “We are here to dedicate this car line not to the use of private interests to exploit you, but to dedicate it to the common good.” Mayor Gill also reminded the crowd and reporters, “Now it is up to you to patronize the line.”
The police band performed in Ballard, but first here at the City-County building facing City Hall Park. After arriving around 2:30 and playing its first tune, the band and the chosen dignitaries boarded the two trolley cars followed by the queue until stuffed. When the doors were closed many who wanted to take the joyful ride were disappointed. The cars left city hall at 2:40 and arrived in Ballard at 3:15. The long and then still wooden southern approach to the 15th Avenue bascule bridge was lined with citizens enthusiastically cheering the cars as they rolled by to the bridge’s majestic steel and concrete center where they stopped and the band stepped out to play again.
WEB EXTRAS
Jean offers an unobstructed wider view of the same location…
Now without UPS
Anything to add, Paul? Jean there are a handful of past “now-thens” that would join this one nicely. But first I must find them, and will as time allows through the week – perhaps not all.
BALLARD CELEBRATES
Both the THEN (above) and the NOW (below), respectively from 1918 and 2007, look northeast through Ballard’s irregular intersection of Market Street, Leary Way, and 22nd Ave. N.E. By 1918 the east-west thoroughfare of Market Street was taking the place of the narrower and near-by Ballard Avenue as the neighborhood’s principal commercial strip.
Above are two good reasons to celebrate in the middle of Ballard’s Market Street. First we’ll give a terse review of the older view recorded by a city photographer on the Sunday afternoon of January 27, 1918.
A crowd of mostly suited males fills the street to listen to Seattle Mayor Hiram Gill compliment them on their “emancipation” from a company that had until this day run with poor service a trolley monopoly. Accompanied by the city council and the Police Dept. Band, the Mayor rode the 25 minutes from City Hall to Ballard aboard Seattle’s own new trolley, along its new tracks and over its brand new Ballard bascule bridge.
The low platform erected in the middle of Market St. put the Mayor and his entourage in a populist position only a few feet above the crowd. Marked at its corners by American flags the platform appears very near the center of the scene. Behind the speaker of the moment, who has too much hair to be Gill, is the ornate street façade of the Majestic Theatre. Built in 1914 it has with a few name changes became a new and enlarged multiplex in 2000 and been in operation ever since.
On the far right of both views is the 1904 Carnegie Library, which the city sold in the mid-1960s to new owners who have preserved the landmark’s classical revival style.
The modern moment of Market Street’s surrender to pedestrians is, of course, from this year’s (2007) Seafood Festival, Ballard’s growing summer street fair and piscine party.
MUNICIPAL TROLLEY POSING ON THE BALLARD BRIDGE
As its destination sign indicates, car No. 108 was “special.” At 2:30 on the Sunday afternoon of January 27, 1918 “to the music of the Police Department band tooting in competition with the cheers of 200 people,” it began the fledgling Seattle Municipal Railways’ inaugural run to Ballard. The Seattle Star reported, “Four cent street car service from the heart of Seattle to Ballard! It’s a reality today, folks . . . in up-to-date cars operated by smiling crews – – – and financed by the plain people of Seattle who put up the money and bought the bonds.”
On board, besides the police band and the Star reporter, were Mayor Hi Gill, the city council, and an entourage of bureaucrats including the street department’s photographer. The parade of leading streetcar and many trailing motorcars stopped once on the 25-minute inaugural ride to Ballard, and once again on the return trip to City Hall.
Both were scheduled interruptions for the official photographer to record Seattle’s (and so also Ballard’s) new city-owned streetcar on its then brand-new Ballard Bridge. The historical scene is from the second stop – on the ride back home. Many of what the Star reporter counted as the “dozens of autos and hundreds of men and women which were waiting for the car when it [first] passed over the bridge” are still there to admire it on its return crossing. Car No.108’s motorman Dettler and its conductor Johnston pose at the front window, but neither of them is smiling. Or, it seems, is anyone else.
Moments earlier the serious political purpose of all this was explained to a crowd of over 1,000 at a celebration staged by the Ballard Booster Club on Ballard’s’ Market Street. (Again, the photo shown above.) Mayor Gill exclaimed, “This occasion marks your emancipation from the financial interests that have fought municipal ownership and operation of cars.” The City’s Corporation Council added that it was also “A warning! If utility corporations won’t live up to their obligations, the people will own and operate all utilities.”
Within the year, Seattle did acquire, at an inflated price, the rest of the city’s privately owned and mostly dilapidated trolley lines. Today, of course Metro’s common carriers are still running over Ballard’s bridge as part of a transit system which in 1984 was the first pubic bus system to receive the American Pubic Transit Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. (This last feature first appeared in The Times in 1984 – an early one.)
MUNICIPAL TRANSFORMER ON ALOHA STREET
Once again David Jeffers, man about town, has grabbed a "now" snap of this northeast corner of Dexter and Aloha - and he did it today, at "four his afternoon." (Of April 26, 2010) Dave if and when I come upon the "now" I did for this long ago I'll add it to yours, although it will show the old transformer building when it was still around and used as a warehouse, I think. After visiting the site this afternoon, David reflects, "It's quite a different neighborhood now." It is, I think. an eddy or splash sent out from Allentown nearby at the south end of Lake Union.
(ABOVE: On Aloha Street between Dexter and 8th Avenues, the nearly completed city’s transformer sub-station is readied to supply electricity to the “A Division” – Seattle’s first municipal streetcar line. – Courtesy, Lawton Gowey & the Municipal Archive)
Most likely City Architect Daniel R. Huntington designed this sub-station at the southwest corner of Lake Union for Seattle’s first municipal railroad. In many features – the concrete, the ornamental tile, the roofline, and the windows — it looks like a small variation on Huntington’s Lake Union Steam Plant at the southeast corner of the lake. The original negative is dated March 17, 1914.
The date suggests that some of the workmen making final touches to this little bastion of public works may be feeling the pressure of their lame duck mayor, George F. Gotterill. In the last week of his mayoralty this champion of public works “insisted,” the Times reported, on taking the first run on the new four-mile line that reached from downtown to Dexter Avenue (the photographer’s back is to Dexter) and beyond to Ballard at Salmon Bay. Although the double tracks had been in place since City Engineer A.H. Dimmock drove the last “golden spike” the preceding October 10, this transformer sub-station was not completed nor were the wires yet in place for Cotterill’s politic ride. “The car” a satiric Seattle Times reporter put it, “may have to be helped along by the hands and shoulders of street railway employees . . .”
Fortunately, for everyone but Cotterill and the Cincinnati company that manufactured the rolling stock, it was reported on the day after this photograph was taken that the new cars couldn’t handle the curves in the new line because their wheels were built four inches too close to the framework.
Two months later the first municipal streetcar responded to the call “Let her Go” made by trolley Superintendent A. Flannigan at 5:35 AM on the Saturday of May 23. Long-time City Councilman Oliver T. Erickson, whom Pioneer PR-man C.T. Conover described as “the apostle of municipal ownership and high priest of the Order of Electric Company Haters,” had just bought the first tickets while his wife and daughters Elsie and Francis tried to “conceal yawns.” Erickson’s earlier attempts to promote funding for a ceremonial inaugural failed. By the enthused report of the Star – then Seattle’s third daily – the first ride was a happy one. “Nobody smiled. Everybody grinned broadly. Everybody talked at once. Nobody knew what anybody else was saying and nobody cared.”
CITIZEN CAR BAR ON 3RD AVENUE WEST
The Seattle Municipal Railway’s first dedicated car barn was built in 1914 on Third Ave. W. about mid-way between the campus of Seattle Pacific College and the construction then underway of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)
Beyond water, waste and power, the progressive urge to extend citizen franchise to transportation built this temple to trolleys – or car barn — on Third Avenue W., a short ways north of Nickerson Street.
By 1914 (notice the year on the shack far left, whitewashed probably by the graduating class of Seattle Pacific College) local riders were increasingly unhappy with the Seattle Electric Company as its system of street railways slipped in both service and maintenance. On the busiest lines the Jitney alternative featured free lance and unlicensed cabbies running in front of trolleys picking off passengers with the promise of cheaper fares.
Help from the City Council began in 1911 with a successful bond issue for the purchase of the then still independent trolley service into the Rainier Valley. When this plan failed, the city used the approved funds to construct its own track out Dexter Avenue in 1912. The four-mile line turned west at Nickerson and continued to the south end of the old Ballard Bridge. In his book “The Street Railway Era in Seattle” Leslie Blanchard quotes local skeptics as dubbing it “the line that began nowhere, ran nowhere, and ended nowhere.” Probably east and north side Queen Anne residents felt otherwise.
A dozen new arch-roofed double-truck cars that featured two trolley poles distinguished the new line. (Three pose in these portals.) The double system was designed to return the electric charge to the second wire rather than through the tracks to the water and gas mains often buried beneath them. By its electrolytic action the spent charge from single-poled trolleys could increase the corrosion of pipes and so also the coulombs of lawyers.
The need for the city’s own car barn was short-lived. With the 1919 citywide take-over of the Seattle Electric Company rails and rolling stock, the larger barn and service area in nearby Fremont made this plant expendable. For most of its “afterlife” the structure was used and enlarged by the Arcweld Manufacturing Company until 1973 when Seattle Pacific University first purchased and then radically overhauled it for the 1976 dedication of the Miller Science Learning Center.
TURNER HALL
(Above)Looking east from Third Avenue on Jefferson Street ca. 1905. (Below) In 1911 Seattle Mayor George Dilling succeeded with his plans to build a City Hall Park in the place of the then recently raze “Katzenjammer Kastle,” the old city hall named so because of its resemblance to the strange constructions in the popular comic strip of that name.
When Turner Hall first opened in 1886 it was the second over-sized structure built on what for nearly a century now has been a city green: City Hall Park. The new venue for variety sat at the southwest corner of Jefferson Street and Fourth Avenue with its ornamented façade facing Jefferson. We see it left- of-center in the historical picture above.
When it appeared Turner Hall was one of a handful of sizeable Seattle stages, until the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 consumed the others. During the rebuilding of the city it’s role as one of the few surviving stages became crucial for the local “entertainment industry” which by 1889 was. In his “A History of Variety-Vaudeville in Seattle”, Eugene Clinton Elliott lists a few of the acts that reached its stage. Dr. Norris’s Educated Dog Show appeared in 1889, and the following year Professor Gentry’s Equine and Canine Paradox kept the mysterious animals coming. Minstrel shows were also regulars, like McCabe and Young’s Colored Operative Minstrels, which in 1890 appeared at the hall in “The Flower Garden”. In 1897 the hall’s manager E.B. Friend tried a combination of vaudeville and legitimate theatre, but as one local critic noted, “Attempting to run a Music Hall without beer was like running a ship without sea.”
Turner Hall was somewhat hidden behind its greater neighbor, the County Court House (1882), which faced Third Avenue at its south east corner with Jefferson. Here, far right, we see only one undistinguished back corner of the government building. After the city purchased it in 1890 for a city hall it was popularly called the “Katzenjammer Kastle” as it increasingly resembled the haphazard architecture illustrated in the then popular pulp comic the “Katzenjammer Kids.” Trying to keep up with the then booming city, incongruous wings and nooks were attached as needed.
Like its civic neighbor, the theatre was razed for the development of City Hall Park. When the city suggested a name change to Oratory Park, the press objected on the grounds that free public speech might then be restricted to soap boxes in the park.
[The above two pictures look through the same block on Jefferson – between 3rd and 4th – that is the subject of the first photographer at the top – the one showing the municipal trolley preparing to make its first run to Ballard over the new Ballard Bridge. The view below puts this same block in the perspective of a photograph taken from an upper story to the northwest. Here the Katzenjammer Kastle is shown is much of its Korny glory. Behind it is Turner Hall. Momentarily straddling Jefferson Street in front of Turner Hall is a barn-size structure moved there from the Yesler Property north of Jefferson. The King County Courthouse looms on the horizon of First Hill. Yesler Way is on the far right.]
The rich farmland of the Palouse is covered with such deep silt loam that it may be a rare day when the Palouse River does not run at least mildly muddy. The top of two Horace Sykes recordings of these falling waters may be extraordinarily rich with silt even for the state ranger who watches over Palouse Falls. The other Sykes catches a rainbow, which is common in that corner of the state with the most sun and the spray generated by the lower falls. Depending upon water levels, it is an about 180 foot drop. Wet side Washingtonians may have memorized the 270 foot drop at Snoqualmie Falls. Greater differences between these east-west cataracts are the volume of water that is suddenly and for a few second exposed and the yearly number of visitors. The official Snoqualmie Falls website claims 1.5 million – believe it or not. Jean (our Sherrard) was among the somewhat fewer visitor to the Palouse Falls in 2006. We thought to include the plummeting Palouse in our book “Washington Then and Now” but the frugal publisher dropped a few pages and so for us stopped the river. Now we expect that Jean will let it flow and post his nows to Sykes thens. He has promised. The publisher did, however, keep Snoqualmie Falls in the book, most likely calculating the number of book buyers that were in its neighborhood. [Click TWICE to Enlarge]
Untypically Horace Sykes has dated this muddy spectacle - May 15, 1950.Here Sykes returned to form - he did not date this rainbow recording of Palouse Falls.
Jean responds:
Here, Paul, is the photo we never used. You’ll note the Falls on that day was mostly covered by shadow from the surrounding hills. I believe we reckoned that it would emerge seasonally from the darkness.
Jean's wider view of Palouse Falls from 2006This just dropped to my scanner from an envelope of negatives sent to me by Ardith Stark, daughter of the photographer Elmer Doty. She explains that "He always did photography." In part because he was also a professional and had gift stores that emphasized postcards and greeting cards. Elmer Arthur Doty came out of the small town of Latah, which is south of Spokane and north of the Palouse River. He would have felt at home here looking down at a Palouse Falls that looks pristine. It is, perhaps, a time that is both dry and undisturbed in the fields of the Palouse.
We found the location of Sykes first pictograph included below with a little browsing on Google Earth. At some point in our highly speculative “Sykes Kodachrome Period” – ca. 1945-53 – Horace Sykes visited this central Utah panel, an example of what the experts call a Barrier Canyon Style of rock art. The name for this site is Buckhorn Draw. It is a tributary to the San Rafael River if you wish to go exploring for it. It will not take long. We have called the top panel “How the West Was Won” – an obvious, we hope, reference to the graffiti that marks the easier to reach lower parts of the rock art. Take some time to read the contributions. Some are dated and proudly note the homes of the scribblers. I found on line another rendering of this Sykes panel, which is included below it. There much of the defacing has been retouched in a 1996 effort at restoration – but not all of it. The remaining pattern may be in same group. Can’t say for I’ve not found it as of yet. With its rock face it is certainly a joy forever, and perhaps it is also harder to reach. [Click twice – sometimes – to Enlarge]
"How the West Was Won" - our name for this rock art in Utah's Buckhorn Draw.Another - and later - view of it found on the web. This was snapped sometime after the 1996 restoration that removed much of the graffiti. You may wish to read John Ullman's comments on this practice of retouching history. Another Sykes and perhaps from the same Buckhorn Draw panorama. (See Brian's attached comment for the correct location of the art directly above. It is near MOAB, Utah. Brian also includes two other recording of it that show how much it has been vandalized since Horace Sykes took his shot of it ca. 1950.)
Driving through or along the edge of summer storms Horace Sykes caught many rainbows ordinarily from his car window or the side of the road. Typically we do not know where any of these were recorded, only that like most of the hundreds of his surviving Kodachrome slides, they were photographed somewhere in the American West in the 1940s and early 1950s. Here the rainbow with the pine tree seems to be reaching for paradise and we might too if we could find a way across the water. The one with the highway I’d chance as somewhere in Eastern Washington. The “psychedelic” one is pushed from an underexposed slide, again we do not know where. [Click – sometimes twice – to Enlarge]
[Click TWICE to Enlarge] Horace Sykes’ visits to the southwest are mostly inscrutable to me. Aside for one trip through the national parks of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and California with the family when I was thirteen I am not familiar with it. That trip and the magazine Arizona Highways, to which my dad had a subscription are my sources. At least some of Sykes’ southwest looks like it is out of that highly saturated and sunset-prone publication. And so and again we will be most pleased if someone recognizes these unidentified Horace Sykes landscapes or asks someone whom they think may have insight. Would that Horace had penciled the name places on the cardboard of his slides, and yet that would have surely spoiled most of the hide-and-seek of it all.
THEN: A winter of 1918 inspection of some captured scales on Terrace Street. The view looks east from near 4th Avenue. (Courtesy City Municipal Archives)NOW: The bus stop at the southeast corner of 4th and Terrace. King County’s nearly new Chinook Building is upper-left. (Now photo by Jean Sherrard)
The scales spilling on the sidewalk beside City Hall are in such disarray that we can’t believe that these were very nice machines. Rather, they are captured scoundrels who did not give an honest measure and proved what the city’s investigators reported sententiously as proof that “with certain trade practices custom does not make right.”
Two sturdy officers of the city’s Weights and Measure Division stand between the exposed scales and the department’s trucks. They may have just returned from one of the city’s open public markets where, the division’s annual report for 1917 explains, “the largest number of transactions in food stuffs occur.” The division was then also doing “war work” helping the Federal Food Administration search for “food hoarders.”
This view is dated January 1918. It looks east on Terrace Street towards what is ordinarily still called First Hill, although there have been other names for it as well including Yesler’s Hill, Pill Hill (somewhat later than 1918) and Profanity Hill. This last came from expressions heard especially on the southern slope of the hill. But the name also derived from what is just out of frame to the right and, if we could see it, looming high on the horizon, the old and long since destroyed King County Courthouse.
Litigants and lawyers could reach the grotesquely domed courthouse by either the James Street or Yesler Way cable cars or they could swear while climbing the long and steep Terrace Street stairway seen here ascending the hill upper-right from 5th Avenue east to beyond 7th Avenue. The lower block was a planked path for the most part, and the top half a steep and wide stairway.
Just left of the stairway stands the curiously named Pleasanton Hotel. It is set back a ways from the northeast corner of Terrace and Sixth, and now in the path of 1-5. To its left and also topping the horizon is the domed roofline of the Seattle-Tacoma Power Company at 7th & Jefferson. The frame building below it, nearby at the northwest corner of 5th and Terrace, is the ambitiously named Royal Hotel. A small part of the Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church’s steeple peeks out upper left.
Jean’s note: This weekend, I’m off in Portland narrating a show. I didn’t quite have time enough to put up the color version of this week’s now, but will when I return. Anything to add, Paul?
Yes Jean. First regarding you and your narration this evening of Chopin’s “Letters to Konstantja” to the accompaniment of his music with dance by the Agnieszka Laska Dancers on the stage of the World Trade Center Auditorium in Portland, “break a leg” while climbing it – or rather don’t, for you have been a bit accident prone lately, losing your pens and such. Here below is another weighted and found wanting picture from Lawton Gowey. It comes probably by way of the old Public Works Department and eventually will be returned to what is now the Municipal Archive. It is, I believe, another storeroom of transgressing scales, (STS). Some of those scattered on the sidewalk above may be here in this room two years later. As you know the original 8×10 inch negative to this image has great clarity and so on your instruction I searched it in detail with magnification but I found no thumbs. [Click to enlarge and search]
And in sympathy with the spatial relations seen in the storeroom above, a kind of mingling of boxes and balls, I have printed below something I created yesterday – by coincidence. I like many others who once used dark rooms for developing and printing, had a practice of exposing strips of photo paper to a negative before exposing an entire sheet of the expensive stuff to a full projection. While cleaning up a corner of my basement I came upon a box stuffed with these developed test strips, and I knew exactly what to do with the contents – scan them. I had kept them for possible use in collage but now with digital ease I have used them for this montage. The circles that appear on all the strips were made from an opaque ring that rested on each strip while it was being exposed in order to hide the paper the ring covered and so see an undeveloped white area when the strip was placed in the developer for slowly revealing the image and testing the exposure. Here I have made six different montages from these strips. I then joined them and then flip-flopped them four times to make this mandala-like montage. The original negatives all have something to do with Alki Beach history and not weights and measures. They have come, I think, from an exhibit I produced for SPUDS fish and chips years ago. The exhibit is a permanent one and on the large size too. [Click to Enlarge and explore the details for historical Alki locations. Or go have some fish and chips at SPUDS and study the exhibit.]
West Seattle Alki Beach Ca. 1910 Fragments Perhaps as a Buddhist "Well-Packed Region."
This place and point-of-view can be found with a dedicated search of Utah’s Zion National Park on Google Earth. The clue is that it was photographed from a highway bridge, but a highway that was, no doubt, much less “improved” in the 1940s when Horace Sykes made this recording than now. For this example of Syke's knack for the picturesque you must CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
Berangere sends us photos from this beautiful spring day along the Seine.
She writes:
Today was a marvelous day!
I had planned to fly to Nice because the trains are still on strike, but the Icelandic volcano erupted two days ago and since then a cloud of volcanic ashes paralyzes all the European air traffic .
Every flight was canceled. So it a free day of April in Paris !
(please click to enlarge images)
In the mood to smell flowers...In the mood to knit...In the mood to drink : Quai des Orfèvres In the mood for love
For some time now, Berangere, our Paris correspondent and the Lomont portion of DorpatSherrardLomont, has been photographing the interior of the great domes of Paris – the coupoles – masterpieces of French art and design.
We will share some of them here, beginning with the coupole of the Hôtel des Invalides.
BB writes:
Founded under Louis XIV , to accommodate the old soldiers of the King’s army, this Hôtel became very quickly a symbol of monarchical power, later to become a mausoleum with Napoleon’s tomb. After three centuries, the Hotel remains a military place (wounded soldiers still recover here) and many visitors visit this historical place…
The Coupole des Invalides
This coupole, painted by Charles de la Fosse (199.5 cms ) is dedicated to Saint Louis, kneeling and offering his sword in front of Christ in glory (a very good strategy for celebrating monarchy and religion together).
The coupole is not very well photographed because Napoleon’s tomb (lined with 7 coffins inside) is standing in the middle, so I asked if they were cleaning the tomb, and proposed to photograph from the ladder.
Even more familiar than yesterday’s Steptoe Butte, today’s Crater Lake is an exception to the Sykes “rule” of unidentified subjects. Of course, all of his landscapes are familiar to someone and this is one of the anticipated or hoped-for pleasures of showing them, that persons will come forward and locate the ones for which we are nearly clueless. This Crater Lake subject is also unique for Sykes in that it includes people. Most of his landscapes are without them. We would not mind it if someone could also name names for these few tourists. Their tableau is so perfect that we might wonder if they have been posed – but probably not. [Click to Enlarge]
A scene at Crater Lake, Oregon. By Horace Sykes ca. 1946.
Two of these Sykes’ Steptoes were taken from the top of the Butte, where the road that winds about the Butte reaches it. Horace Sykes visited Steptoe several times. Getting to the top was easier after the coiling road was completed in 1946 – if memory serves. Before that it was switchbacks all the way. In our book Washington Then and Now Jean and I include one of these Sykes shots from the top and also describe the part Cashup Davis played both below Steptoe were he and his large family serviced stage coaches and on top where he built a Hotel. It was a Quixotic labor for all water had to be carted to the top and there were not a lot of tourists in the Palouse in the 1890s. The shaped stones that show in both views from the top are remnants of the hotel’s foundation. It was also in the late 1940s that my dad drove me up that road. I was so thrilled that I still own a childish (or childlike) enthusiasm for Steptoe Butte. [Click the images to enlarge them.]
Foundation stones for Cashup Davis' hotel survive at the top of Steptoe Butte and here directly above the finder of Horace Sykes car. All these Skykes slides came my way through an old friend by now long passed away, Lawton Gowey.
The barn of this ruined farm seems to have held up so well that we might imagine restoring the grand old home – except that this is another unidentified Sykes view from the 1940s. But where? Such architecture in such a setting must be remembered by someone. [To enlarge click and then click again, if you like.]
In the Palouse, the Okanagon, the green fields of Idaho, the wheat fields of Oregon? Sykes kept it a secret.
We know that these are the wheat fields of the Palouse and that Steptoe Butte, its topographical oddity, rises above it all on the distant horizon. But what horizon? Given the profile of the Butte, and the helpful guide of Google Earth, we think it most likely that Horace Sykes took this surreal view of it from the east – in the direction of Idaho, or rather away from Idaho with that state behind his back. From the evidence of his collection Sykes visited the Palouse often and drove to the top of the Butte at least three times. We shall follow him there with an upcoming “Daily Sykes” but not tomorrow, not yet. [Click to enlarge and then click again.]
Under Berangere’s instruction I have been taking my daily French lessons on the chance that I might some day go ex-patriot. A late life in the French provinces is appealing, but also life in Paris for an old man might be exciting. So I study my French. Soon after we began these lessons both Jean – who is far ahead of me in this business of learning French – and Berangere encouraged me to post these lessons every day. I am not sure why, but I liked their recognition. They have either given up on that or thought the worse for it and I’ve not heard a thing from either of them about publishing these daily lessons on this blog for some time. Among the handicaps of growing old are losing one’s powers and loneliness. In partial relief from both I’ll now introduce today’s French Lesson in hopes that either Jean or Berangere will bring the matter up again, or that any of you will find it helpful and make some comment that is kind and encouraging. Today’s French Lesson includes some prudent advise for anyone considering the ball and chain. And it is illustrated to make the point better.
FRENCH LESSON for APRIL 13, 2010 (The French lesson is followed by its English translation. The point is, in part, that I get the translation correct. How have I done?)
Le caméraman-councelor: une tradition française. “Le mariage n’est pas quelque chose à prendre à la légère. Pour le moment, de prendre une pause dans la cérémonie. Pensez-y.”
The cameraperson-counselor: a French tradition. “Marriage is not something to enter into lightly. For the moment take a pause in the ceremony. Think about it.”
Like our first “Daily Sykes” from yesterday, this our second offering may be a scene along the lower Yakima River. We don’t know. When Horace Sykes arrived in Seattle in the late 1920s to his new job as a fire insurance adjuster he was already an accomplished and published photographer with a knack for experiment and a genius for the picturesque. A quarter-century ago I was given a large collection of his Kodachrome slides. They are landscapes from the 1940s for the most part, but with many orchids mixed in. Except for family photos people rarely appear as subjects. As Jean introduced yesterday, it is always a surprise to find any identification written on the cardboard of Sykes’ slides. Consequently, we ask again – and will every day – that if you have some understanding or even hunch for where Horace Sykes recorded a “daily Sykes” – this time a riverscape – please share it. And if you are near it, please repeat it with your own camera and share that with us all as well.
THEN: This Denny Regrade subject looks northwest across Blanchard Street towards Second Avenue in 1911. Posing for the unnamed photographer are both the “caste” in the float and some residents in windows of the Blanchard Apt. across the street. (Pix courtesy of Michael Maslan Vintage Posters, Photographs, Postcards & Ephemera.)NOW: For the “now” repeat Jean Sherrard had to step into Blanchard Street to get around parked trucks. (Jean Sherrard)
More than a quarter-century ago I copied this week’s parade scene from an album of 1911 Golden Potlatch subjects generously loaned to me by collector/dealer and friend Michael Maslan. The intended subject is quite peculiar – a sort of float with four bushes pruned like small trees decorating the corners, a comfortable ensemble of half-costumed characters, two teamsters, two teams and two signs.
The larger sign shows real wit. It reads, “Everett the Most Prosperous City in the Northwest” and then sites Seattle as if it were a suburb “33 miles south of Everett.” The sign draped to the horse reads “Washington State Reunion Everett, Aug. 20 & 21 Big Time.” It is, however, unclear even to the admired Northwest History Room of the Everett Public Library what parts of Washington were reunited in Everett that august of 1911. A review of the dozens of floats pictured in Maslan’s album reveals that this one is easily the most minimal, perhaps an intended contrast to its own boast of “big time.”
Most readers probably know that the setting here is part of the Denny Regrade, and not so long after it was scraped from Denny Hill. This block on Blanchard between Third Avenue (off-frame to the right) and 2nd Avenue (on the left) was one of the steepest on the hill and negotiated by steps only. Before the carving began the block climbed west to east 58 feet from 170feet (at 2nd) to 228 feet (at 3rd) above sea level. After the grading it climbed gently in the opposite direct, from east to west, and at a much lower elevation throughout. These regrade changes were made by blasting the hill with jets of eroding water.
Of the several hundred structures on the hill few were saved. However, the Blanchard Apartments shown here was one of two big buildings that were carefully lowered with the hill. A cheap three-story tenement (with three tubs and four toilets for 21 one-room apartments) it was lowered to a new brick first floor with two storefronts. Built in 1900 – only five years before it’s descension – it kept wearing out until it was razed in March of 1972. “Run down inside and out” is how the surviving tax card describes it.
JEAN we have a few additions. [Click to Enlarge – sometimes twice]
This photograph is close to my heart and habits for the last 28 years. About 1980 I wrote a feature in the old Seattle Sun about how exciting it was for me to discover that this was part of the old Denny Hill neighborhood. It looks south on Second through the intersection with Bell Street. That artical and my pleading - and Erik Lacitis' advocacy - got me into or onto Pacific for the weekly now-then feature that is now in its 28th year. The next attachment shows this view again as printed in Seattle Now and Then Volume One, 1984, along with another essay - one for Pacific. A small section of the Blanchard Apartments can be seen below the top-left corner and left of the power pole. Below that are the gabled apartments that still hold to that southeast corner of Bell and 2nd. It is best to click to enlarge the next attachment in order to read its text. (Photo Courtesy, Old Seattle Paperworks)
In the book Seattle Now and Then Volume One (1984) the above appears on two pages, side-by-side. Here I have stacked the pages to better your chances of reading the text from about 1983. Ron Edge (of our Edge Clippings) has recently scanned all the features included in Seattle Now and Then Vol. 1, so the entire book will soon be up on this site.”]The Blanchard Apartments are still in place, upper-left, although the Second Avenue Regrade (an early part of the Denny Hill Regrade) has been completed - between 1903 and 1906. In the distance are both the white Moore Theatre at Virginia and the New Washington Hotel at Stewart. The original photograph was recorded by the Webster Stevens studio and is used here courtesy of MOHAI.Here the Second Avenue regrade is still underway, and the old Washington Hotel (first named the Denny Hotel) is still in place on top of the southern summit of Denny Hill where it would have straddled Third Avenue - could Third have climbed the hill. The south facade of the Blanchard Apartments are apparent on the far left - in the sunlight. (Not the structure that is the farthest to the left. That one is on the west side of Second and closer to the photographer.) The structure bottom-left appears frequently in our recent posting (last week actually) showing Second Avenue south from Pine Street. This view was taken from Pike and Second.In this section of a 1908 panorama taken from Duwamish Head both the Moore Theatre and the New Washington Hotel are in place as the front "hump" of Denny Hill has been removed. On the left, however, we can make out the west facade of the Blanchard Apartments clinging above the cliff at Second and Blanchard. We can also detect some of the scaffolding for the Lenora Street flume that carried mud from the regrade out into the bay. A new flume was built off of Bell Street for the second and larger regrade south of Virginia Streeet. This year that razing of the hill's southern hump and so also the lowering of the Blanchard Apartments began. In the distant horizon is the Volunteer standpipe with its exterior brick facade in application (if I am reading it right). The complete panorama from which this section has been lifted appears on our web-page dedicated to some of the pages from our book Washington Then and Now. Google it. There are also pans from 1907, 1910 and 2006 for comparison. The regrading is underway south of Virginia Street - eroding the northern summit with water canons. I have embraced the opinion that this view was taken from the Blanchard Apartments before they were lowered. I have, however, not attempted to prove it. The old Broadway High School is evident on the horizon left of center. So the view looks east. This was photographed by the prolific postcard producer Frasch. This also has a chance (for future confirmation or rejection) of being photographed from the Blanchard Apartments. It is an earlier recording than that shown directly above. The Wesbster and Stevens studio's own caption that it is "3rd Ave. Looking South from Battery" is twice wrong. This is Second Avenue on the right. As noted here the grade change on Second Avenue at Bell Street before and after the regrade on Second amounted to very few feet. Battery is one block north of Bell. This, if I am correct about the Blanchard Apt. prospect, is one block south of Bell. On the right the top floors of the New Washington Hotel (with the flag) reach above the old grade. Lowering the Blanchard Apartments. I have temporarily lost a negative of the Blanchard resting on top of its "spike," the name for the mounds that were left temporarily by the regraders as their canons ordinarily attacked the hill from its streets. I'll put it up when I find it.This view and the one below it look from some surviving structure on the west side of Second Avenue to the northeast and so cut diagonally across both Second Avenue and Blanchard Street. Notice that the Blanchard Apartments are hear identified as the Cicero Apartments by the sign on the west facade just above the building's new concrete and brick foundation. The horizon includes much of the new (1909) Ballard High School on the left, and Denny School (1884), the tower above the Blanchard Apartments and left of the surviving spike. The big residence - probably a boarding house - just south (right) of the spike was skidded there from a location about one block to the east. Sacred Heart Parish is on the right horizon. Both Denny School and Sacred Heart survived there until the regrade picked up again in 1928 at the cliff it left to stand for 18 years along the east side of 5th Avenue. After the regrading reached it in 1911 they temporarily stopped. The work began again in 1928 they used steam shovels and conveyor belts - not water cannons and flumes. There are many small differences between this view and the one above it, which was taken from the same upper story window of a structure on the west side of Second Avenue and south of Blanchard Street. There is also one big difference. A subtraction. Can you find it?This view looking north from the Seaboard Bldg at the northeast corner of 4th and Pike offers a clue for answering the challenge given at the end of the caption for the view directly above. The multi-story Calhoun Hotel at the northeast corner of Virginia and 2nd (across Virginia from the Moore Theatre) is on the left. That is not the clue. Far right the regraders are giving shape to the cliff on the east side of 5th Avenue. The extended work of Denny School, with both its west and east wings in tact, shows at Fifth and Battery. And that is the clue - or give-away. Of course, the Blanchard Apartments also appear in this scene, left of center. One block of Third between Stewart and Virginia has been freshly paved. Sometime in the 1920s and with a narrow lens this view looking north on Third was recorded most likely from an upper story of the Securities Bldg at 3rd and Stewart. The large gabled boarding house right of center, at the northwest corner of 4th and Blanchard, appeared above in a circa 1910 scene resting in front of a "spike" or mound. The spike is gone here, but a remnant of the hill - a small spike survives here. It appears behind the Blanchard Apartments on the left. (Thanks to Ron Edge for producing these images.)
We here at DorpatSherrardLomont are pleased to announce the first installment of our newest feature ‘Our Daily Sykes’.
Photographer Horace Sykes (a member of the Seattle Photography Club) wandered the northwest for decades seeking the picturesque and the profound, snapping shots of flowers, snowstorms, mountains, valleys, and plains. Paul has a large collection of these marvels and has used a number of them in Seattle Now & Then – and several in his and Jean’s recent book Washington Then and Now. Sykes’ keen eye captured visual treasures during the 40s and 50s, but most of his photos are without annotation, which often leaves us guessing at location.
Hence, we propose a kind of collaboration with our readers. We will, as the title suggests, offer a daily Sykes photo; some will be well-known locations, others obscure or unfamiliar. If you know where a photo was taken, please let us know; and if the urge takes you, perhaps even attempt your own repeat.
Above is Jean’s beloved Yakima River Valley. There you can see Mt. Adams off in the distance and even through the summer haze some of Mt. Rainier on the far right horizon. But where this is in the valley, and how close to Sunnyside, Jean’s frequent destination, we do not know. We would ask any reader who does know and can identify the location of the bluff on the left to step forward.
THEN: Looking south from Pine Street down the wide Second Avenue in 1911, then Seattle’s growing retail strip and parade promenade. (courtesy of Jim Westall)
NOW: Very little survives in the near-century between the “then and now.” The Columbia Building, second from left, is still standing. The parking lot, far left, took the place of the Wilson Modern Business College Building in 1956. The tiled Venetian Renaissance-style Doyle Building, far right, replaced the Elk Hotel in 1919. Jean Sherrard took his repeat through a window of what is now the Nordstrom Rack.
This is the fourth “snapshot” we have plucked from an album of Seattle subjects recorded by Philip Hughett between 1909 and 1911. (Following this “now-then” will join to it a few more snaps of the neighborhood recorded by that pastor-salesman.)
In the 1911 Polk directory Hughett is listed as a salesman for Standard Furniture, which is wonderfully apt for this week’s subject. It looks south on Second Avenue from inside the Standard Furniture building on the corner with Pine Street.
Perhaps, Hughett took a snapshot break from selling sofas. And the most likely date is also 1911.
Although too small to read in this printing, the banner running across Second Avenue just beyond Pike Street — one block south of the photographer — reads “Golden Potlatch.” Between 1911 and 1913 the Golden Potlatch Days were Seattle’s first try at holding a multiday annual summer festival.
The amateur photographer was probably selling furniture here in 1910 as well, because Hughett was using the then-3-year-old Standard Furniture building for a high-rise prospect to record the big changes under way in Seattle’s new retail district and the nearby Denny Regrade. As late as 1903 this block on Second was considerably higher at Pine than at Pike. So everything here is nearly new, except the ornate frame building seen in part on the far right.
This view looks north on Second Ave. from Pike Street and shows the same ornate hotel at the southwest corner of 2nd and Pine. Beyond it 2nd Avenue still climbs Denny Hill, but not for long. By 1906 the present grade of 2nd was establsihed between Pike and Battery Streets and that hotel was lowered too. (Photo by Lewis Whittelsey, courtesy of Lawton Gowey)Looking down fm Denny Hill to Second Avenue and over a roughed-up Pine Street, Again, the Elk hotel is supported on their southwest corner. The depth of the cut on Pine Street is easily examined, right of center, with the mid-block scar between the Elk Bldg and the new Gateway Hotel (now The Gatewood) on the southeast corner of First and Pine, far right. Far left is the Eitel Bldg under construction at the northwest corner of 2n and Pike (1904-06). Likely date for this is 1905.
The Elk Hotel, its name in the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map, was built before the regrade and had to be lowered two stories because of it.
In 1911 all of Seattle’s principal department stores, Frederick & Nelson, Stone-Fisher, The Bon Marche, London’s and MacDougall & Southwick were on Second Avenue north of Madison Street. It is a good indication of how commerce had moved north from “old town” around Pioneer Place during Seattle’s blusterous boom years.
Here follows – and so soon – several more photographs recorded by Hughett, perhaps all of them while he was in the employ of Standard Furniture at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street. We will try to exercise some restraint with the captions, rather than thumbnail every landmark included in Hughett’s recordings. All of these – unless otherwise noted – are used courtesy of Jim Westall. They were copied from a family album of prints, which Jim shared with us.
From nearly the same window, looking south on Second Avenue from its northwest corner with Pine Street and from an upper floor at Standard Furniture. Hughett's caption, that this is a scene of parading Odd Fellows for their day during the Seattle's summer-long Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYPE), suggests that the photographer was also selling couches here in 1909, the year of the AYP Expo. Although not taken from the same window as the view just shared above, this one is also most likely of the same AYPE parade for the Odd Fellows. Note that most of the awnings shading the building on the east side of Second Avenue - the block showing - hold their position between the two photographs. Most - not all.
Next we will leave Standard Furniture and go south on Second Avenue two blocks for more excitement.
Philip Hughett has shared the date for this look north on Second from University Street. This is July 4, 1910. A few of the buildings survive for this centennial repeat but not so many of the fashions. In 1910 it was still likely that a parade - like this one - would include lines of horse-drawn wagons carrying not VIPS - they would have by then taken to motorcars - but the regulars, those who pay their bank fees, shop for bargains and in a decent lifetime might get to ride in a parade. The banner strung across Second promotes the Sons of Norway's Grand Picnic. Just beyond and to the right of the banner is the Seattle Times building then still at the northeast corner of Second and Union. The paper's name is signed on the roof. On the same afternoon as the Independence Day parade a crowd gathered on Union Street - clogged it - beside The Times building to follow the wire reports on the James J.Jeffries vs. Jack Johnson "fight of the century" in Reno. Jeffries, a former world champion, came out of retirement, he said, "to demonstrate that the white man is king of them all." Rather than be knocked out by Johnson, Jeffries withdrew in the 15th round and Johnson held on as top heavyweight. The ambitions of the "great white hope" had flopped. By the following morning across these United States of America 25 blacks and 3 whites had died because of the riots that followed Jeffries' loss.
Next Philip Hughett returns to Standard Furniture and takes us to its roof for looks south, southeast, east, and north – witnesses to the condition of the Central Business District and the Denny Regrade a century ago.
The look south. Built quickly in 1911, the 18-story Hoge building at Second and Cherry is not evident. The nearly new Federal Post Office, on the left at the southeast corner of Third and Union, is. A look southeast to the First Hill horizon from the roof of Standard Furniture at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street. St. James Cathedral (1907) still has its dome and would keep it until 1916 when the Big (and wet) Snow of that year collapsed it to the floor of the sanctuary. The King County Courthouse and Jail, on the right horizon, lasted 40 years (from the time it was built) and handled a few hangings below its dome. Finally it too was judged and dropped - by dynamite - in 1931. Not so long ago we printed a cropped version of this for another now-then feature - one describing the fate of Seattle Electric's trolley car barns at 5th and Pine. The view looks east on Pine. The outline of the nearly new Volunteer standpipe appears on the left horizon. The car barns appear left of center behind the Westlake Market sign.The look north past the new New Washington Hotel, on the right, and over the Moore Theatre to a degraded (photographcially) Queen Anne Hill. In between work continues on the Denny Regrade. Sacred Heart Catholic Church appears lust left of the tall Hotel Washington Sign. It held to its campus at 6th and Blanchard until the Denny Regrade was revived in 1929 and that intersection and many others east of 5th Avenue (where this regrade stopped in 1911) and north of Denny Way were graded to new lower elevations. The church then moved to its present location contiguous to Seattle Center. Here the cliff that drops from the church to the east side of 5th Avenue was a Denny Regerade feature for nearly 20 years. One of the regrade's hydraulic cannons at work can be seen left-of-center near the intersection of 3rd and Bell. The New Washington Hotel at the northeast corner of Second and Stewart as seen from the northwest corner of Standard Furniture's roof. (The Hotel survives as the Josephinum Apartments.)No longer on the roof but still from an open window at Standard, Hughett gives a good recording of the new Haight Building at the southeast corner of Second and Pine. If the curious reader returns to the second photograph included in this sequence (not counting those in the repeated story above them) they will see the building site for the Haight, next door to the Wilson Business College. A likely year for this view is 1911. This concludes the Philip Hughett extras. A Webster and Stevens Studio (they did most of the Seattle Times early editorial photography) shot of Standard Furniture, its effect extended in the elegance of its new retail neighborhood. The view, of course, looks north on 2nd over its intersection with Pine Street.
Here's a rough look into the construction pit for Standard Furniture. Note that the Second Avenue regrade on the right is getting its polish. The old Washington Hotel (first named the Denny Hotel) atop the front or south summit of Denny Hill still stands, but not for long. It was destroyed in 1906 and by 1908 the south summit was removed and the New Washington Hotel and Moore Theatre filled the east side of Second between Steward and Virginia Streets.Seattle Day at AYP and at Standard Furntiure in 1909. (Courtesy MOHAI)After more than one make-over it is still the same building. But Jean! I can no longer remember - after five years - if you or I took this "now." Please advise.
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.
THEN: The Freedman Building on Maynard Avenue was construction soon after the Jackson Street Regrade lowered the neighborhood and dropped Maynard Avenue about two stories to its present grade in Chinatown. (Photo courtesy Lawton Gowey)
NOW: The Freedman survives in an international district often distinguished by ornate four and more story brick business blocks and hotels. (Jean Sherrard)
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 "now-and-then" feature first appear in Pacific Magazine on Jan. 1, 2006. As the text below explains at the time the Wing Luke Museum was still active in its campaign to raise funds for the conversion of the East Kong Yick Building into a new home for the museum, a task which has since accomplished to considerable effect. Photo courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry AKA MOHAI. This "repeat" of the East Kong Yick building was photographed in the late autumn of 2005 before the Wing Lunk Asian Museum had moved in. Aside from the fourth floor balcony overlooking King Street and a change in the building's cornice, at first inspection not much has changed in the Kong Yick building at the southwest corner of 8th S. and King Street since the Webster and Stevens photography firm took the historical photo ca. 1918.
(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 7th 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 8th 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.
The tenement on the far right sat at the northwest corner of 6th Avenue and Lane Street in what is now commonly referred to as Chinatown. The view looks northeast although more north than east. The photo is used courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry, aka MOHAI. This now-then feature first appeared in the Pacific Magazine for Oct.16, 2005.Much of Chinatown in this southwest part of it was raised above the tideflats during the Jackson Street Regrade of 1907-09. This view was taken from a basement grade - used for a daylight parking lot - south and east of the intersection of 5th and Lane. It too looks to the north by northeast. Part of the south facade of Uwajimaya Village shows above.
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 9th avenue. But here at 5th 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 5th 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 5th Avenue and Lane Street is as a parking lot for the International District’s by now historic Uwajimaya Village.
Another 1908 look into the neighborhood being raised during the Jackson Street Regrade. The top of the then but three year old Great Northern tower pokes between the elevated building on the right and the trestle on the left. Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry aka MOHAI.
Here’s a slightly different perspective of one of my favorite places. Drove over this week to capture the subtle greens of spring, which so quickly shift to summer gold and tawny.
THEN: The clerk in the city's old Engineering Vault attends to its records. Now one of many thousands of images in the Seattle Municipal Archives, this negative is dated Jan. 30, 1936. (Check out http://www.cityofseattle.net/cityarchives/ to see more.)NOW: City archivist Scott Cline, left, and deputy archivist Anne Frantilla look to Jean Sherrard from out of the deep storage of the modern, climate-controlled archives in City Hall.
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.
Sally and Ron and Jean did you know that your crows are members of the same family with the Steller Blue Jay? As are the ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays magpies and nutcrackers. This afternoon, and very near to my own front door, I heard this Steller jumping from branch to branch, breaking dried twigs it seemed, and sometimes rattling, which dear Wikipedia indicates is the “sex-specific” vocalization for the female Steller. See how close – ten feet perhaps – she allowed me to approach her.
The posting of Ron’s crow tale below reminded me of another crow story – actually a crow and falcon story from a couple of years ago.
On a roof across the street from where I live in North Greenlake, a falcon was perched for about half an hour. It wasn’t long before crows found it and commenced to attack. The peregrine falcon had flown off from its handler at Woodland Park Zoo and seemed puzzled and alarmed by the diving crows, but was only driven off after the following picture was snapped, using a telephoto lens.
Peregrine falcon and attacking crow
Officials from the zoo combed our neighborhood minutes later, but to no avail. The missing falcon was found early the next morning near Northgate.
“I have been feeding a crippled crow for about a month now. He has a broken ankle and has learned to walk with his foot bent under. We have worked out a routine to distract the rest of the crows, giving him time to swoop down and grab the food I throw to the garage roof. They are really bright birds.”
Ron Edge joins the site to give us two for the crow – a crow on his garage roof, and then a sensible reflection on crows, which he has pulled from the Monday July 15, 1878 issue of the Daily Intelligencer, a precursor of the recently demised Post-Intelligencer. It is titled, “Feeding Instead of Killing Crows.”
Ron notes that if you take some time to browse YouTube you will find pet crows, playful crows, and problem-solving crows, for instance, crows that build tools to fetch food from crannies. For the toolmaker you can use Ron’s links.
Paul. The Orpheum Automobile Hotel was the cause for our reacquaintance a few years ago. Do you remember? You sent me off to Greg Lange at the Bellevue archives where I discovered this beautiful (and now digitally cleaned up) 1937 King County WPA survey photo. I spent considerable time walking the site and offer here the gorgeous original and my 2007 shot, taken with a Nikon Coolpix 995. The mosaic brickwork on the facade is just visible, peeking out from under the metal screens, if you're looking for it. If I recall correctly, the stone facing around the driveway openings is gone, a victim of the same remodel. I can almost imagine men in tails and women in furs, pulling up to a waiting valet attendant in bow tie and white gloves, before crossing the street for a concert at the Orpheum. Maybe one day I'll return with my 4x5 on a sunny winter Sunday for a serious attempt. The WPA photographer who took the survey photo was a real artist.David Jeffers repeat of the WPA tax photo he found at the Washington State Archive on the Bellevue Community College Campus.
THEN: Thanks to Pacific reader John Thomas for sharing this photograph recorded by his father in 1927. It looks north across Times Square to the almost completed Orpheum Theatre. Fifth Avenue is on the left, and Westlake on the right.NOW: Razed in 1967, the Orpheum was soon replaced by the "corncob architecture" of the Washington Plaza Hotel, later renamed the Westin. In this view from the corner of Olive Way and Fifth Avenue, Jean Sherrard has adjusted his prospect a few feet in order to look around the monorail support.
When it opened on Times Square in the summer of 1927, the Orpheum Theatre was the largest venue for films and vaudeville in the Pacific Northwest. However, in six months the distinction of its 2,700 seats was surpassed only six blocks away when the Paramount Theatre opened with 4,000 seats. The Paramount, of course, has survived, while the Orpheum was razed in 1967 with hardly a protest.
Six years earlier, the destruction of the Seattle Hotel in Pioneer Square was vigorously protested because it was the cornerstone of that neighborhood. But here uptown in the mid-1960s the unique three-block diagonal cut of Westlake, from its origin at Fourth Avenue and Pike Street to Sixth Avenue and Virginia Street, was being discussed as the best place to create a civic center that Seattle did not have since the city’s commercial interests moved north into this retail neighborhood. This aura of progress by building something “new and modern” surely dampened preservationist enthusiasm for the Orpheum.
Right after the two-day auction of its lavish appointments, including the marble cut from floors and walls, the theater was destroyed. Surprisingly, the tear down took so long it broke the wrecker’s budget. The sturdy Orpheum was more reluctant than expected.
This “Spanish Renaissance masterpiece” was one of Seattle architect B. Marcus Priteca’s greatest theaters. And in spite of the squeeze of its location his Orpheum was in every part sumptuous from sidewalk to sky. The roof sign was the largest on the coast. Meant for Vaudeville as well as films, it had 14 dressing rooms, all but two with baths.
The Orpheum opened with the film ‘Rush Hour’, and although designed for live performance, it kept for the most part to movies through 40 years in business. I remember seeing both “Never on Sunday” and “Goldfinger” there in the mid-1960s, and confess to being more interested in the films than in the theater (or even aware that it was doomed). Perhaps if it had been in Pioneer Square. (Later I purchased in a garage sale a nicely cut piece of marble that was, I was told, salvaged from the lobby. It was then my belated part in preservation. Now it is on my desk.)
McGraw
WEB EXTRAS
Jean writes: Stepping out into Fifth Avenue gave me a better view of the “corncob” and the statue of Governor John McGraw (1850-1910), which existed both ‘then’ and ‘now’.
The Westin (née Washington Plaza) Hotel unobstructedA blown up detail of McGraw's statue shows the governor and former Seattle police chief peeping from behind the firs.
Anything to add, Paul? Yes – a few things Jean. And will first say that it is a fine hide-and-seek with the Police Chief in the bushes, you show above. Another evidence of what a shadow is life. How brief and how forgotten. A man of such note, now unknown but to a few. Not even this monument in one of the landmark intersections of the city will instruct or distract citizens enough to make much mark for the identity of Governor McGraw, pawn of the railroads. Still surviving in a few libraries are copies of McGraws “In Memoriam” chap book served up at his memorial service. This cover was copied from the library of our regular supplier of “Edge Clipping” – Ron Edge.
First another photo of the new Orpheum, followed by another now-then feature first published in 1993, and more, which will be captioned in its places.
Could this have been the official portrait of the theatre? The Chorus Kid, a 1928 silent film, is on the Orpheum Marquee. So here is the nearly brand new theatre in all its majesty and a year before the Great Depression would dim even this lustre. This pix, like many others, was got from Lawton Gowey, and below we'll also include two of the site that he took. Hopefully David Jeffers, our local silent film expert, will check in and instruct us some on this 1928 offering and this theatre too in its first years.
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY FOR THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY.
(This story was first published in The Seattle Times Pacific Magazine on Dec. 5, 1993.)
In 1953,The Seattle Symphony Orchestra promoted its golden anniversary with a pubic campaign to discover “Where were you on the night of Dec.28, 1903?” – the night Harvey West directed the Seattle Symphony’s first concert in the ballroom of the Arcade Building at Second and Seneca.
Arthur Fiedler guest-conducted the Seattle Symphony for this Nov. 3 concert, and local virtuoso Byrd Elliott was featured with Prokofieff’s Second Violin Concerto. The Orpheum was filled to its 2,600-seat capacity.
Earlier, in January of 1953, Arturo Toscanini’s assistant, the violist Milton Katims, made his first appearance here as guest conductor. The Seattle Symphony was then still playing in the Civic Auditorium, an acoustic purgatory that violinist Jascha Heifetz called the “barn.” Heifetz’s opinion was shared and extended by Sir Thomas Beecham. The already-famous English maestro conducted the Seattle Symphony during much of World War II and, before leaving here, famously called Seattle a “cultural dustbin.”
The symphony’s first postwar conductor, Carl Bricken, resigned in 1948. The musicians soon formed their own Washington Symphony League and scheduled a season of 16 concerts at the Moore Theatre with a conductor of their own choosing, Eugene Linden of the Tacoma Symphony. This rebellion was short-lived, and the following year the organization was reformed. Milton Katims, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s guest conductor became its residence conductor with the 1954-55 season and he stayed on until 1976.
In 1993 when this feature was first published, the Symphony was it its 90th season and, the story noted then, “is quietly campaigning for a new auditorium.” It got it, of course.
Lawton Gowey's 11th Hour of the Orpheum in 1967.Frank Shaw's look into the wreckage.Lawton Gowey's repeat of the theatre site soon after the Westin Hotel was completed. Note McCraw standing revealed. A different and earlier Orpheum Theatre, this one on the east side of Third Avenue between Jefferson and James Streets, where the City-County Building was raised in 1914 (if memory serves, which is to say, without checking). For a while this Orpheum was the longest theatre in town. Some spoken lines were relayed by helpful customers who on hearing them from the middle of the theatre would then turn and shout them to the back. The players would ordinarily wait. This theatre was so long that it could be raining at the front door on James Street when sunlight was streaming through the windows on Jefferson Street. This theatre was so long that the ushers were organized into two platoons: east and west. This theatre was so big that the pigeons who lived on one end of the roof knew nothing of those at its other end. The theatre had to wait on the destruction by fire of the Yesler Mansion that stood on this block from the mid 1880s until 1901 when it was home for the local library. Only the books that were checked out survived. Those who returned books late were especially thanked - we hope. This theatre was so long that when it was razed the two crews working from either end wound up six inches off.
Frank Shaw recorded this scene from the Spring Festival of Fun, on March 14, 1964, in the rain at Westlake Mall. Now 1964 is not so long ago. Hopefully someone will help us identify the keepers of these daffodils and nurturers of this fun.
The first Downtown Seattle Spring Festival of Fun was promoted mid-march in 1964. It was another try at adding some zing to a city who felt deprived of it since its Century 21 left it a Seattle Center in the fall of 1962 but not yet much to use it for. As the southern terminus of the Worlds Fair’s Marvelous Monorail, the Westlake Mall was also developing into another and smaller Seattle center. The Ides of March – the next day, March the 15th – was designated the festival’s Waterfront Day. Joe James manager of Ye Old Curiosity Shop was the chairman. Ted Griffin, the manager of the marine Aquarium at Pier 56, which had done well during Century 21, two years later was struggling to draw visitors. Days before the March fun Griffin announced his plans to stage an octopus wrestling match at his aquarium. Every Old Settler understood that Griffin’s promotion was inspired by the “Great Rassel of 1947” when Ivar Haglund brought out from the east the pugilist Two Ton Tony to take on Oscar, the star octopus at Ivar’s Pier 54 Aquarium. Griffin’s bout did not make such a splash, but his great celebrity was less than a year away when he captured and put on show at his far end of the pier the killer whale Namu. For Ivar’s part in the ’64 Festival he arranged the musical accompaniment for the Ide’s Waterfront Day with Pep Perry’s Fire House Five Plus Two playing for the open house at the new fire station, which still stands at the foot of Madison Street, and next door to Ivar’s Acres of Clams.
We include below four displays of the same southeast corner of 46th Avenue and Corliss Street, for the years 2007 through this year, 2010, all of them photographed during the afternoon of the 8th day of March. It is radiant evidence of our early spring after the warmest January in Seattle’s history and then a mild February following it. One neighbor notes that his budding dogwood does not ordinarily show itself so until the time of his daughter’s birthday in early April. These are not his dogwood but another neighbor’s cherries. All four images involve a merging of left and right halves. The joining is not always perfect, but close enough for these cross-references. After three-plus years of walking the neighborhood almost every day I have many hundreds of impressions of this corner and a few hundred more. Without a computer and digital photography this would have cost a fortune. With them it was just a few thousand snaps and a lot of walking.
[click to enlarge and then click again]
46th and Corless, southeast corner, Seattle's Wallingford Neighborhood, on the afternoon of March 8, 2007.Same southeast corner sometime on the afternoon of March 8, 2008.Entering or escaping some sturm und drang on the afternoon of March 8, 2009.This year the southeast corner of 46th Avenue and Corliss Street holds a soft repose in a late afternoon light on a radiant eighth of March.
Below are a handful of the thousands of photographs taken from the Smith Tower through its now 96 years. The most popular prospects were north to the central business district and west to the harbor, but if Mt. Rainier was showing this southern view might be captured too. One could look above and beyond the industrial “park” to the the national park. (Actually, Mt. Rainier can be seen in only one of the views included here.) The Frye Packing site can be found in all of them, although not always the same plant. It is above the Great Northern tower – somewhere above it. The most recent view is from 1982, and the only one I photographed. Perhaps we can stir Jean to return to the observation tower for a “now” recording that will display the recent glories of SODO, and the enduring ones of “The Mountain That Was God.” Watch for “Jean’s Turn in the Tower” coming to this blog soon.
The Smith Tower was dedication on July 4, 1914, however photographers reached the top already in 1913. Without study (of its "internal evidences") I give this a ca. 1914 date. Lawton Gowey took this 1961 view and the two that follow, from 1971 and '76. Note that the Seattle-Tacoma 1-5 Freeway has not as yet "upset" the Beacon Hill greenbelt.This view from 1971 has its nearly new Interstate-5 but as yet no Kingdome.The nearly new Kingdome in 1976. Another by Lawton Gowey.Looking south-southeast from the Smith Tower in 1982.
Looking southwest from Walker Street to the burning ruins.
THEN: A few minutes out on its first test a still secret and as yet unnamed B-29 turned back for Boeing Field, and did not make it. The view looks southwest from Walker Street to the severed north wall of the Frye meat-packing plant at 2203 Airport Way South. (compliments The Museum of History and Industry, the P-I Collection.)NOW: Dating from 1985, the contemporary structure mostly replaced the repaired Frye plant. The new structure was built on the meat plant’s foundation. (Now photo by Jean Sherrard.)
Twice I have heard from persons who were working downtown – one in the Exchange Building and the other in the Smith Tower – during the Second World War who described the strange bomber, trailing smoke, sputtering and flying much too low over the business district as it headed south in what test pilot Edmund T. Allen probably knew was a hopeless attempt to make it back to the Boeing Field it had left minutes earlier.
At 12:23 they heard – and many also saw – the still secret B-29 Superfortress first sever with arcing explosions the power lines north of Walker Street and then slam into one of the biggest structures in the industrial neighborhood, collapsing the northwest corner of the Frye meat packing building that was dedicated to the slaughter of pigs and the manufacture of, among other products, Frye’s big buckets of Wild Rose Lard. (The cans were famously illustrated with its namesake rose.)
Those who heard the surreal chorus of squealing pigs that followed the explosion described it as terrifying.
The death toll for that Feb. 18, 1943, included one fireman, twenty Frye employees and the ten from Boeing who stayed with the plane and two who did not. Most were engineers. Earlier when the bomber was close to colliding with Harborview Hospital, two engineers bailed out but there was not enough distance between the plane and First Hill for their parachutes to open. Eighty pigs did not make it to slaughter.
This famous press photo and scores more are included in Dan Raley’s new book “Tideflats to Tomorrow: The History of Seattle’s SODO.” For readers who have not heard, SODO – meaning “South of the Dome” – is the name for the neighborhood south of King Street, long ago reclaimed from the tidelands, but more recently divested of its Kingdome. All that is recounted in the book and much more.
Reader’s can contact the publisher via fairgreens@seanet.com, or check their neighborhood bookstore – those that have survived.
WEB EXTRAS
Jean is away in Illinois attending a Knox College theatrical performance in which his youngest son, Noel, plays one of the principal parts. When the last performance was completed and the congratulations too, Noel went off with the players for the cast party and dad returned to his room in a converted Ramada Inn on the town’s principal square. There from his lap top he inserted this week’s story of the B-29 crash into this blog and asks me, “Anything to add, Paul?” Yes Jean we’ll put up the map we arranged to help locate the proper spot on which to shoot your “now.” And it also shows the crash site at the northwest corner of the Frye Plant. And we have grabed a low-resolution aerial that shows the damage looking to the southeast. A look at the Frye’s first plant on the same site when it sat of pilings over the as yet unreclaimed tideflats follows. Then up to the Frye Mansion on First Hill, at the s0utheast corner of 9th Avenue and Columbia – one block south of St. James Cathedral. Here we first insert a photograph of the old Coppins Water Tower. From the mid 1880s to about 1901 the big well below that tower was the principal provider of fresh water on First Hill. The Frye mansion took it’s place. Emma and Charles Frye collected genre paintings and . . . well more is told below with the feature that first appeared in The Times in 1997.
(As Ever – Click Images to Enlarge Them – sometimes click twice.)
The map we assemble to determine the proper prospect from which to repeat the original photo of crash site at the northwest corner of the Frye Packing plat at Walker Street and 8th Ave.The damage seen from the sky. The view looks to the southeast.The Frye Packing Plant at the same location but here still held on pilings above the tidelands. Courtesy, Lawton GoweyCoppins Waterworks at the southeast corner of 9th and Columbia. Coppins was the principal provider of fresh water to much of First Hill Neighborhood before the city's Cedar River Gravity System began its service in 1901.Emma and Charles Frye's mansion replaced the water tower. Note the one-story wing to the far right, attached to the south side of the home. This addition of 1915 served as a second "home" for their growing collection of genre art, most of it purchased in Europe. (Courtesy Frye Museum)The Cathedral Convent built on the former site of the Frye mansion. Photo was taken in March, 2001.The Frye's home gallery. The door leads into the relative dark of their home. The added exhibition space was brightened with skylights. The joyful nude with uplifted arms - to the left of the doorway - appears again below in the 1952 interior of the then new Frye Museum a block away from the home on Terry Avenue. (Courtesy Frye Art Museum)
[Here we hope to insert the “now” that appeared in Pacific in 1997. It is temporarily in a shuffle of negatives – somewhere in this studio.]
THE FRYE’S SALON
(This first appeared in Pacific Magazine, April 6, 1997)
Here’s an aside to the hoopla encircling the reopening in new quarters of the 45 year old First Hill institution, the Fry Art Museum: a short notice of whence came these paintings of cattle, angles, graybeards and bucolic paths.
After returning from Europe in 1914 with more paintings for their swelling collection the Fryes joined a large gallery to the south wall of their big home on the southeast corner of 9th Avenue and Columbia Street. Soon its four walls were filled “salon style” with ornately framed oils crowding one another from the Persian rugs on the floor to the skylights. This view of the gallery’s northwest corner reveals a fair sampling of the type of often sentimental realism the couple preferred in their art.
Charles Frye who made his considerable fortune as the Northwest’s biggest meat-packer, was especially fond of animal subjects including the German master Heinrich Zuegel’s “Cattle in Water”, here the second oil up from the floor in the second row right of the gallery’s West (left) wall. In the contemporary scene Zuegel’s cattle have been returned with the help of real estate maps, aerial photography — the gallery skylights show well from the sky — and a 100 ft tape measure, to within five or six feet of their original place on the north gallery wall.
(Now we identify below some persons as seen in the “now” photo that appeared in Pacific, but again, not yet here. We will insert that photo from 1997 – when we find it . . . again. Temporarily we will include, directly below, the clip from Pacific.)
A clipping - only - of the April 6 1997 feature as it appeared in Pacific Magazine.
Found! - the original negative, or nearly. 3/27/10
All this figuring puts the painting in the living room of the St. James Cathedral Convent which replaced the Frye home in 1962, ten years after the Frye collection had been moved one block east to the then new namesake museum. Standing about the painting — and supporting it — are Sisters Anne Herkenrath and Kathleen Gorman, right and center respectively, both distinguished members of the order Sisters of the Holy Names and therefore long-time Seattle educators.
With the sisters is artist and author Helen E. Vogt. The Frye’s great niece was practically raised in the Frye home and lived with them in the early thirties while an arts student at the University of Washington. As part of my “art direction” for the “now” scene I asked Helen Vogt to hold a copy of her most recent book Charlie Frye and His Times. Before the opening of the Seattle Art Museum in 1933 Seattle’s largest art gallery was the Frye’s, and the public was free to visit it. Pacific Readers wishing to know more about Seattle’s early art history should consult Vogt’s biography of Seattle’s one-time cattle king — packed and framed. Those wishing to make a closer inspection of Zuegel’s deft impression of Cattle in Water, and hundreds more paintings from the Frye’s collection should visit the museum at 704 Terry Avenue. The admission is still free.
The main exhibition space in the Frye Art Museum when it opened in 1952. The picture is a fine example of a "set-up" architectural photograph, with the persons chosen, their locations and gestures too. (Courtesy Frye Art Museum)The new Frye Art Museum in 1952 (Courtesy Frye Art Museum)The new Frye Art Museum in 2001.
Here – at last – we can compare two “big snows” on the Queen Anne Counterbalance, that unique stretch of hill climb that reaches from Lower Queen Anne to Upper. For a few decades these blocks were fitted with an underground trolley counterbalance. It featured a tunnel running beneath and in line with Queen Anne Avenue – but only here where it climbs the hill. Running on tracks within the tunnels was a peculiar “box car” made of concrete, which when hooked by cable to the bottom of the trolley helped pull it to the top of the hill – while the box car descended in the tunnel – and also helped brake it by climbing the hill when the trolley came back down it. And none were left on top. This unique device would not have been bothered by snow, unless it was a really big snow. The 1916 Snow was such a pile that even the counterbalance cars here on Queen Anne Hill were stopped – like the one we see stalled in the middle of the Avenue between Mercer Street (behind the photographer) and Roy Street, behind the car. Perhaps the motorcar is also stuck – but not the horses.
Jean is away to Chicago this weekend to see his son perform in a play. When he returns he will link this little blogaddendum directly to the blog’s history of Seattle snows. [Jean’s note: it can be done, Paul; yea, even from the city of big shoulders – or thereabouts]
The Queen Anne Avenue Counterbalance seen from Queen Anne Avenue, twixt Mercer and Roy streets, during the stall of the "Big Snow of 1916."The snow of 1968-69 while not so deep as that of 1916 was still one of the most impressive of our "modern snows." This view looks north from the southeast corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Roy Street. The Counterbalance Hill has been barricaded to traffic. I wanted to put this up in January 2009 when I worked on this blog's Pictorial History of Seattle Snows, but I had to wait patiently for this slide to rise again to the surface of the light table, which is did earlier today. Queen Anne resident Lawton Gowey took this photo on the last day of 1968. The Bayview Retirement Community on the hill was then but one decade old.
WE INTERRUPT WITH THIS BLOGADDENDUM
A good look up the Queen Anne Counterbalance, sans snow. The tunnel and tracks of the Queen Anne Counterbalance.
THEN: Eating a horse was considered less disturbing during the Second World War when beef was rationed. (Courtesy of Lawton Gowey)NOW: Mr. D’s Greek Deli now holds the Pike Place address where Montana – and perhaps other – horse meat was sold for many years. (Photo by Jean Sherrard)
In these United States of America, eating horse meat is just not done by most people these days. Yet in this week’s historical view we see three grown men boldly confronting that taboo and raising another sign announcing in big letters “horse meat.” They promise to have it by Monday — inspected by the government and not rationed, so always available as long as there are Montana horses to slaughter.
While the name of the Pike Place Market business offering the equine steaks is the “Montana Horse Meat Market,” the buyer could not know for certain that all this promised horse meat would actually come from the Big Sky Country. They may have wished it were so. In 1942, the likely year for this sign-lifting, much of the Montana range was still open.
Partners Lewis Butchart and Andrew Larson were already selling beef and pork at 1518 Pike Place in the late 1930s, but then with the war and the rationing, they brought out the horses. In a 1951 Seattle Times advertisement, they used the Montana name and offered specialties like “young colt meat, tender delicious like fine veal.” “Montana” is still used in the 1954 City Directory, but not long after.
In the mid-1960s (and perhaps later) one could still find a smaller selection of cheval cuts (the French name for the meat the French often eat) at 1518 Pike Place. Market resident Paul Dunn remembers buying horse kidneys there for his cat. Those humans who have tried it commonly describe the meat as “tender, slightly sweet and closer to beef than venison.” Those who promote the meat might note that it is lower in fat and higher in protein than beef. That is not likely to change the average modern American’s view about eating an animal most view as a pet.
WEB EXTRA
Jean writes: A Mr. D’s employee led me down narrow steps into a basement storage area. She recalled large iron hooks, hanging from the pipes, which had, Mr. D himself asserted, been used for hanging horse carcasses. The hooks were recently removed.
Where hooks once hung...Behind the counter at Mr. D's
Anything to add, Paul?
Yes Jean but most of it uncertain, and more cheese than horse meat. I’ll caption what I know about the pixs below within their frames. [May we remind our readers to click twice and sometimes three times to enlarge these images.]
This is surely an earlier vendor of viande de cheval (and have I got the French right Jean?). It appears with a collection of Pike Market images, but it is not otherwise identified. I looked up both "Range" and "Horse Meat" in Polk City Directories for 1915, 1920 and 1925, but got no citations. So until some reader joins a more complete truth to this, we leave it here or there.More meat at the Pike Place Market, but none of it from horses who previously spent their happy lives running on the range. This one is dated - 1963. So some readers will remember this Pure Foods Shop. The photographer was Bob Bradley.Some really big cheese headed for the Pike Place Market - but I don't know when, only that it was really really big. I also do not know if this photo was taken first, or the one that follows of our really big cheese on a wagon was first. I'm inclinded to think this big cheese is here waiting for the wagon, but I am prepared to be corrected by someone who knows better how to "read" this photograph.Our really big cheese pauses to pose for the photographer on Railroad Avenue before heading up Western Avenue, most likely, to the Pike Place Market, its final resting place as one big piece of cheese.
Finally, neither meat nor cheese Jean. We are looking here into what will be the heart of the future Pike Place Market – a quarter-century later. Rising above the tides and off shore you can see the ruins of what was once the largest structure in Seattle: the Pike Street coal wharf and bunkers. It was photographed ca. 1881 from the King Street Coal Wharf that replaced it in 1878. This is but a detail of a pan of the city. (This also appears in our Waterfront History Part 5, with a more detailed description and in context too of more, yes, waterfront history.) Note the south summit of Denny Hill on the right, and Queen Anne Hill on the left. In between them is the north summit of Denny Hill, and running between the two “humps” of Denny Hill is Virginia Street. The original for this is at the University of Washington’s Special Collections.
Ron Edge is sorting through his collections and finding forgotten things. One of these we print below as an “Edge Clipping”. (Whenever you see the ALKI logo above you can depend that there will be an Edge Cllipping below it.) We use the term “Edge Clipping” for Ron’s offerings as wide as they range, and here it is an old photo postcard he has lifted from his really well-ordered horde. And it is yet another early 20th local subject by Oakes, who has appeared “in these pages” many times past. The text below Ron’s “clipping” is from a Times “Now and Then” feature I wrote for Pacific, and it appeared on August 15, 1989. The “now” photo printed beside a different photograph of the fire station #8 (I mean, not this one) shows that a tennis court replaced the station – or was in its place in 1989. Perhaps Jean will return to the site again and find out what is there now – if it is something other than the grand new Queen Anne standpipe that we featured here last January 3, when Pacific also ran a sidebar explaining my tongue-in-cheek part in a local hoax. Happy reading and Keep Clam and My oh My.
Another early 20th Century "Real Photo Postcard" by Oakes. This on of both the Queen Anne standpipe (two of them) and Fire Station No. 8.
(Click to Enlarge)
A QUEEN ANNE MISSION – is the title The Times gave to the story below.
Of the fanciful fire stations built in Seattle in the 20 years or so following the city’s Great Fire of 1889, Queen Anne Hill’s Engine House No. 8 was a unique creation – although it had its double. The Mission-style building featured curvilinear gables on the front-center wall over a small balcony (with flower pots), and to either side (of the gables) there were low-pitch roofs with wide eaves and exposed supporting rafters. The bell tower with its arched windows also fits the style, although this tower is for hanging hoses, not bells. It stands next to another “imposter”, the Queen Anne water tower, which is decorated with battlements at its top. The standpipe was built in 1900 as part of the city’s then-new Cedar River gravity system. The bleaker steel “beaker” (without pouring spout) was soon added by a water department that in between No. 1 and No.2 lost its urge for elegance.
Engine House No. 8 was not alone. It had is doppelganger at Minor Avenue and Virginia Street. Engine House No. 15 was its mirror image, with a reverse floor plan and the hose-drying tower on the opposite side of its otherwise symmetrical presentation. No. 15 was destroyed in 1951. Built in 1908, Engine House No. 8 survived a dozen years more until it was razed in 1963 and replaced by a tennis court. Engine Company No. 8 then moved into its simple and modern station a few yards south of this its old “Mission.”
THEN: Long thought to be an early footprint for West Seattle’s Admiral Theatre, this charming brick corner was actually far away on another Seattle Hill. Courtesy, Southwest Seattle Historical Society.NOW: Although in Jean Sherrard’s December-last recording of it, the Peet’s sign still adorns the old Queen Anne Theatre building, the Coffee shop has recently closed. The neighborhood has seen a recent proliferation of coffee servers and Peet’s, the Berkeley, California brand that first taught and supplied Starbucks, decided to escape.
Here’s a lesson in the sleeping befuddlements that may nestle for long naps with mistaken captions.
In this instance we return a quarter-century to the mid-1980s when Clay Eals, then the editor of the West Seattle Herald, was busy assembling the West Side Story, the very big and revealing book of West Seattle History written and illustrated by volunteers, (myself included) with Eals our guiding hand and kind support.
But then briefly and undetected something bad happened in the editor’s office.Clay made a mistake, or rather he repeated one.Eals, who led the neighborhood’s forces of preservation in a successful save of its threatened landmark theatre, The Admiral, received the print shown here from a credible and even venerable West Seattle source and so felt confident enough to include it in the big book as the Portola Theatre, the predecessor of the Admiral.After all, “Portola” is how it was identified with a label stuck to flip side of the print originally loaned to him.
Here, and recently, enters one of Seattle’s silent film era experts David Jeffers who was not convinced.First, there is no “Portola Marquee” showing for what is still obviously a motion picture theatre with film posters pasted to it.With a sharp enlargement – and no deadline – Jeffers studied the scene in detail.Knowing where Seattle’s now “missing theatres” were once located he soon determined that this was not West Seattle’s Portola but Queen Anne’s own neighborhood theatre at the northwest corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Boston Street.
Jeffers reflects, “Much of our history is forgotten, not lost, and only awaits re-discovery. Just as every neighborhood has a branch of the Public Library, in the years before television they all had a movie house, typically within easy walking distance. One of these forgotten theaters stood on the Northwest corner of Queen Anne Avenue North and West Boston Street. The Queen Anne Theatre opened for business in 1912 and closed, as did many, with the advent of sound in the late 1920s.”
WEB EXTRAS
Jean writes: Just a couple of extras from my end this week, Paul. The first is a sweet pair of perpendicular shoes across the street from the now-horizontal Peets:
And the second, Clay Eals himself, about to slurp from the water fountain at the base of the Queen Anne water tower. Some may note his Cubbies hat and recall that Clay recently authored a masterful biography of Steve Goodman, songwriter/musician known for writing ‘The City of New Orleans’ but also the immortal “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request’ (amongst many others). For more about Clay and Goodman, click here.
Observant readers may recall that Clay appeared in a previous SN&T column at the beginning of the year.
Anything to add, Paul?
Yes Jean, I have some more “web extras” or as we sometimes call them “blogaddendums.” Many years ago – in the 1980s – I was given Lawton Gowey’s slides of Queen Anne Hill where he had lived all his life. Previous to his death by heart attack Lawton was a collector-student of local history. He especially liked trolley history. He died suddenly on a Sunday morning while preparing to go once more to play the organ at his Queen Anne church (Presbyterian). His collection was quite large and most of the prints in it were directed by his family to the University of Washington’s Northwest Collection. All of the below are pulled from about 300 (or more) slides of Queen Anne he left. Some others have been sorted into “programs” (carousels) that were not examined for this selection. Among those are others scenes for our intersection of Queen Anne Avenue and Boston Street, but I have not as yet found them. I’ll come upon them most likely when preparing a slide lecture – later. Jean, if you like, you may wish to take some repeats for these when you have time, for instance, on your way downtown. They are all of Queen Anne and easily found. I will give short captions for each with location and date. All of the colored slides were photographed by Lawton.
Les Hamilton's old house at 1607 10th Ave. West. Les was another Queen Anne historian and a good friend of Lawton's. His collection also wound up at the University of Washington. Les dates this ca. 1910.The same house on 10th on Feb. 7, 1981. Someone sold the owners a covering of "war brick" probably in the 1940s, and it is still in place here in '81. Looking east on Boston St. through Queen Anne Ave. on Aug. 25, 1971.Looking east on Boston from its intersection with Queen Anne Ave. on March 8, 1981. The coin laundry at Queen Anne Ave. & Republican on Feb. 8, 1974. I was still cleaning my clothes at such vibrating places then and it was always a real pleasure to sit reading in the midst of those hard working machines.Galer Street looking west from near Queen Anne Avenue, 6/22/1927.Galer Street looking west from Queen Anne Ave., March 8,1981. Queen Anne Avenue North from Galer Street, March 10, 1979.Looking northwest through the intersection of Thomas Street and Queen Anne Ave. to the Uptown Theatre on March 24, 1966.Tony's and the Uptown on "lower" Queen Anne Avenue, July 11, 1974.
On Monday, Feb. 8th (Boy Scout’s Day) Jean and I visited Steve Sampson in Belltown as he fidgeted with his office-studio. I took the first view below of the two of them. The place is a-funk because Steve was at the time closing it down before returning this coming Sunday to his new home in Paris with Cynthia Rose, another good friend.
Next we came upon the stables or livery door in the alley that Jean put up on this blog a ways below this contribution. We were on the way to the Pike Market where we shared lunch at the Pan Africa. Jean used his “Ethiopian utensils” for the Ethiopian dish prepared. I have often enjoyed Jean’s many good stories of his trips to Ethiopia and he will include below some highlights and illustrate a few of them too.
This evening we met with Steve again – for the last time during this visit to Seattle – in Fremont at Brad’s Swingside Cafe. Next time Jean will see him in Paris this summer. There we found Brad revived from a long and risky stay in hospital (last fall) but now back again behind the stove where he is famous for his delicious concoctions. The carved angel on the front porch of the Swingside was placed there in a vigil for Brad’s recovery. The gracious guardian did well, enjoyed the stay and has decided to abide a while longer.
Jean Sherrard and Steve Sampson pose on moving day in Steve's Belltown studio.Jean to the sides handling the Ethiopian repast served to him by the hands, which have just closed the "take home" portion of Pan Africa's generous serving. Except for what remains of the wine the Swingside table has been cleared. Jean and Steve pose below the kitchen window where Swingside owner-chef Brad appears half-bent over his "stove."Brad's Guardian Angel at Brad's Swingside Cafe on Fremont Avenue.
Jean writes:
As Paul suggested above, I’ll revisit a few highlights of my last trip to Ethiopia, which was, Paul neglects to mention, a number of years ago. The photos I took are pre-digital – a compact Canon point-and-shoot – scanned much later.
I last went to Ethiopia in Nov 1999, missing the Battle in Seattle, the progress of which I watched on a flickering hotel TV in Lalibela, (arguably an eighth wonder of the world – which begs the question, is there a single eighth wonder or is that a category?).
Carved out of solid rock in the 12 C. - the Church of St. George stands in a pit, its roofline at ground level. Note the precipitous cliff edge at bottom right and left corners.
It was a little shocking after a month of travel to see images of Seattle on CNN Asia, which was the only channel available. Of course, it being CNN, the images were stock – a ferry approaching the docks with the space needle in the background. But I’d gone to Ethiopia on a bit of a lark, hardly imagining the serendipities that would grace my trip.
Addis tannery
On the plane from Rome, I sat in front of, and carried on a long sore-necked conversation with, Hussein Feyissa, who’d studied engineering in the midwest and ran his family’s burgeoning tannery in Addis. Amazing man of industry who sent me to friends and associates all over the country.
Within my first couple of days, I booked an in-country series of flights on Ethiopian airlines, and standing at the counter, met Firew Bulbula who, it turned out, was returning to Ethiopia for the first time since 1974 when Mengistu overthrew Haile Selassie and became an Ethiopian Stalin. We were flying the same routes and became traveling companions. Amazingly, in 1974, Firew was a freshman at the University of Washington, ended up studying economics and teaching it at Seattle Community College by the early 80s. We actually had friends in common, in particular, Gassim, an Oromo prince and PhD, with whom I’d spent long hours chewing the fat at the Last Exit.
Yet another tej bar. Firew drinks at right. Tej comes either sweet or dry, but is always drunk out of flasks that look like laboratory beakers.
Firew and I toured the north together, visiting Bahir Dar and Lake Tana,
On Lake Tana
Gondar, and Lalibela. Each one deserves a short novella. In Bahir Dar, accompanying Firew to a tej bar, where country men came of an evening to drink honey beer and sing improvised poems to the lyre. The old man who sang of his fallen friends on the battlefield (translated in whispers by Firew) and overcome with emotion had to step outside to recover.
Gondar vista
In Gondar, meeting a Japanese woman traveling alone across Ethiopia by bus, staying in roadside hotel/brothels to save money, her arms and neck covered with bites from bed bugs. Brave beyond measure, but she was the nail who refused to be pounded down.
Gondar's earliest castles date from the 17th C., and were designed and built by Portuguese architects for the emperors of Gondar (see one of them mummified below)
The hyena man of Harar, who made a show each evening of feeding a pack of hyenas outside the walls of this medieval town (once host to the greatest of Victorian travelers and linguist/translators Richard Burton,
Rambo's house
as well as Arthur Rimbaud, whose putative house is labeled ‘Rambo’s house’ and was built long decades after his death).
Harar hyenas
Heart pounding after feeding the hyenas and being plunged into unexpected darkness, I tipped him a month’s rather than a day’s wages and an Ethiopian friend told me that the hyena man said he would pray for me and my family as long as he had the good fortune of surviving the hyenas.
Dinner
Near the stone meeting bell of an island monastery,
Meteorite?
I stumbled over an unusually heavy and seemingly once-molten stone, unlike any other in the area. After returning to the states, I sent a picture and a description of it to a geologist at Harvard, who also thought it likely to be a meteorite.
Mummy king
Or the 4 hour trip crossing Lake Tana to reach another island monastery where the mummified remains of Ethiopian emperors are enshrined, and where the monks, pissed off at my belligerent young guide, threatened to beat us up. One of the monks had an infected ulcer on his shin and I gave him a tube of antibiotic cream as a gift, which mollified him and the others.
King's sword
The night before I flew home, Hussein Feyissa brought me a bucket filled with fresh honeycombs as a parting gift. I was sure that raw honey would certainly be impounded by customs and insisted that he take the bulk of it home to his wife, who loved honey, he said. But the two of us slurped through several handful of golden brown comb before Hussein took it away. In the middle of the night, I felt my stomach begin to roil in protest. By the time I boarded the plane the next morning, I was munching on fistfuls of anti-diarrheal pills, just to allow me to stay seated through take off. A month wandering Ethiopia, eating virtually everything that came my way, and it was honeycomb that leveled me.
On PRESIDENTS DAY, February, 15, 2010 we at Dorpatsherrardlomont are distressed at how poorly Americans – generally – know the chronology of their so-far FORTY-FOUR PRESIDENTS. To do our modest something to correct this puzzling withdrawal from the history of our nation’s leaders we mean below to teach with rhymes for children. Certainly, many readers will find it easier to memorize verse than mere lists, and that is what you get below: honest poetry for honest ends and not as difficult as many poems used in accelerated reading programs to help primary school children’s chances for entering one or more of the best universities. When possible the rhymes have also been chosen for added patriotic meanings, which are also suitable for children. (Anyone who has picked up a book of rhyming words knows that there certainly are plenty of competing choices that are also proper ones.)
One final precaution: the poem begins with Warren G. Harding rather than George Washington. As you will soon discover, we needed a rhyme for “spouse’s bidding”.
44 IMPERFECT PATRIOTIC RHYMES for 44 ALMOST PERFECT PRESIDENTS
Set in Chronological Order for Easier Instruction for Minors & Their Parents in the History of the American Presidency.
In the name of Warren G. Harding
Give us this day to play
And do our spouse’s bidding.
First we fetch a key to the pantheon
From the owner George Washington.
Now all together we will holler at the Talibans
From behind the shoulders of John Adams,
And then fix some things in the Constitution.
(All the changes will be signed by Thomas Jefferson.)
We may arouse the distracted James Madison
With a Stereopticon and a little canon,
And then play “Friend or Foe”
Withthe doctrinal James Monroe.
Let us laugh again at the Talibans
With the son, John Quincy Adams.
Now let us put some steaks on
For Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren?
Invest in a panopticon and another little canon
With William Henry Harrison,
Who died of a cold
When but 32 days old.
Let’s Run a quarter-miler
With John Tyler,
Do a somersault
With James K Polk
Whose manifest destiny
Lassoed Oregon territory,
Followed by a nap in the trailer
With Zachary Taylor.
May we please eat some more
With Millard Fillmore
And dip the chin and eyes lower
For Franklin Pierce
Who died of cirrhosis.
We will play hide and seek in the White House
Withbachelor James Buchanan dressed as a mouse,
And perhaps little bo peep – such fun!
Then turn the vacuum on and run
To excite Abraham Lincoln.
Now put a chop on,
For the impeached Andrew Johnson.
Let us now dance ‘till we pant
With Ulysses S. Grant
And then press his pants.
Take in two or three costume plays
With the unpopular Rutherford B. Hayes,
But now stand far-a-field
From James Garfield,
Discuss ding an sich and things obscure
With No. 21 Chester A Arthur,
Show our pictures of Disneyland
To Grover Cleveland,
And count again the budget and the bison
With “Billion Dollar” Benjamin Harrison.
Now Cleveland more –
He get’s his encore,
Which we break with a litany
For William McKinley.
Next get up and run about
With Theodore Roosevelt,
And this time ignore the fat
Of William Howard Taft.
Share some pheromones
With a Parisian Freudian
And Woodrow Wilson,
And pray for the pardoning
Of William G. Harding.
We open the fridge
For a thin Calvin Coolidge.
We may visit the Louvre
With Herbert Hoover,
And then fish in the West for smelt
With Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Or with Eleanor and him
And Harry S. Truman.
Yes, we do feel the military-industrial power
Of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Yet another litany
This for John F. Kennedy.
Now that’s no fun
So stuffed bears for everyone!
We’ll Visit Saigon
With Lyndon B. Johnson
And put a fix on
With Richard M. Nixon.
Next we may either continue
With west wing bourbon & shuffleboard
Or share a cheeseboard
With Betty and Gerald R. Ford.
Let us also share Coke and his brother
With James Carter.
And then entertain a gregarious vegan,
While White House guests of Ronald Reagan.
We are pleased to sit on our tooshies
Between the two Bushies
(George on the left, George on the right))
And in between them
Carve a soapstone billikin
With the handy Bill Clinton?
At last we will sit in our pajamas
With the Barack Obamas?
THEN: With her or his back to the Medical-Dental Building an unidentified photographer took this look northeast through the intersection of 6th and Olive Way about five years after the Olive Way Garage first opened in 1925. (Courtesy, Mark Ambler)
NOW: Jean Sherrard repeated the Fox Garage shot on a cold sun-lit January afternoon. Besides the irregularity of the windows on the west (left) façade (and the signs) that some of the industrial-fitted windows in both the “then and now” are open suggests that this could be a garage. (Jean Sherrard)
How had this lovely Gothic Revival garage escaped me for half of its life? I have driven by it a few hundred times since my first pass in 1966. It was built in 1925 at the northeast corner of 6th Avenue and Olive Way. Perhaps I was a good driver and kept my eyes on Olive Way. But by such prudence I missed much including the slender corner tower that reaches seven stories to the Gothic parapet, which runs the length of the building’s public facades on both Olive and Sixth.
This photo of the Fox Garage was one of several Mark Ambler showed me in hopes that I could help him locate it and the others. I recognized the Tower Building (at 7th and Olive) behind the garage, but remained puzzled about the garage itself.
Thanks to the “historical sites” section of the city’s Department of Neighborhoods website I found Karin Link’s summary of Fox Garage history. The historic preservation consultant writes, “This is a very early and unique attempt at creating a tall parking garage, which could accommodate many cars, and still engage the neighborhood of well-designed city buildings.” There is much more in this “Link report”, which you can read here.
The Fox Garage signs hanging here from the parapet are improvisations. The landmark first got its glamorous tie to the Fox Theatre/Music Hall when that lavish Spanish Revival theatre opened in 1929 at 7th Avenue, a block east on Olive Way.
George Wellington Stoddard, the architect, had a long and productive career in Seattle. It may not surprise you to learn that he was also responsible for the concrete Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center (1947) and the concrete Green Lake Aqua Theatre (1950).
Jonathan Swift, 1667 to 1745, was one of the greatest of English satirist. Some think him the greatest. He is best known for Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, And Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, A Tale of a Tub, but not so much for THE LADY’S DRESSING ROOM as such. This wonderful description of a woman’s boudoir is widely known as the Celia Shits Poem for its most memorable line. I remember it from Dr.Clarence Simpson’s class in Enlightenment English Literature at Whitworth College in 1960. Jean also “had” Clem nearly 20 years later when he attended Whitworth for fewer years than I. Jean finished at the U.W..
When the opportunity of dedicating our book Washington Then and Now came up, we agreed that Clem would be a wise choice for he was often wise and we both liked him for it and his unfailing kindness.
I have learned that the Swift poem is new to Jean. He remembers Clem for teaching medieval literature not Swift. Not so long after our dedicatory lecture to Dr. Simpson and some other residents at the Des Moines retirement home where he then lived with his wife, Clem died, and she not long after he. We print these valentines, the Swift poem and a much lesser verse by myself written a moment ago, all in honor of Professor Clem and his teaching, and also in thanks for the Irish-English satirist Swift and his exuberant example – the thoughtful or prudent use of a few naughty and/or bad words.
Reading the entire Swift poem is a delight – so go to it! And please read it aloud. Or will you instead surrender to the continuing decline of the West and return to the comforts of your home entertainment center, perhaps a Television choice that you agree is half-witted but sensationally so?
How so satire?! What follows is a poem done in parody of those many verses that glory in the beauty of their own Celias – safely out of . . .
THE LADY’S DRESSING ROOM
By Johnathan Swift
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
Strephon, who found the room was void
And Betty otherwise employed,
Stole in and took a strict survey
Of all the litter as it lay;
Whereof, to make the matter clear,
An inventory follows here.
And first a dirty smock appeared,
Beneath the arm-pits well besmeared.
Strephon, the rogue, displayed it wide
And turned it round on every side.
On such a point few words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest;
And swears how damnably the men lie
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces
The various combs for various uses,
Filled up with dirt so closely fixt,
No brush could force a way betwixt.
A paste of composition rare,
Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair;
A forehead cloth with oil upon’t
To smooth the wrinkles on her front.
Here alum flower to stop the steams
Exhaled from sour unsavory streams;
There night-gloves made of Tripsy’s hide,
Bequeath’d by Tripsy when she died,
With puppy water, beauty’s help,
Distilled from Tripsy’s darling whelp;
Here gallypots and vials placed,
Some filled with washes, some with paste,
Some with pomatum, paints and slops,
And ointments good for scabby chops.
Hard by a filthy basin stands,
Fouled with the scouring of her hands;
The basin takes whatever comes,
The scrapings of her teeth and gums,
A nasty compound of all hues,
For here she spits, and here she spews.
But oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels,
When he beheld and smelt the towels,
Begummed, besmattered, and beslimed
With dirt, and sweat, and ear-wax grimed.
No object Strephon’s eye escapes:
Here petticoats in frowzy heaps;
Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot
All varnished o’er with snuff and snot.
The stockings, why should I expose,
Stained with the marks of stinking toes;
Or greasy coifs and pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a week in?
A pair of tweezers next he found
To pluck her brows in arches round,
Or hairs that sink the forehead low,
Or on her chin like bristles grow.
The virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia’s magnifying glass.
When frighted Strephon cast his eye on’t
It shewed the visage of a giant.
A glass that can to sight disclose
The smallest worm in Celia’s nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
(For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.)
Why Strephon will you tell the rest?
And must you needs describe the chest?
That careless wench! no creature warn her
To move it out from yonder corner;
But leave it standing full in sight
For you to exercise your spite.
In vain, the workman shewed his wit
With rings and hinges counterfeit
To make it seem in this disguise
A cabinet to vulgar eyes;
For Strephon ventured to look in,
Resolved to go through thick and thin;
He lifts the lid, there needs no more:
He smelt it all the time before.
As from within Pandora’s box,
When Epimetheus oped the locks,
A sudden universal crew
Of humane evils upwards flew,
He still was comforted to find
That Hope at last remained behind;
So Strephon lifting up the lid
To view what in the chest was hid,
The vapours flew from out the vent.
But Strephon cautious never meant
The bottom of the pan to grope
And foul his hands in search of Hope.
O never may such vile machine
Be once in Celia’s chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
“Those secrets of the hoary deep”!
As mutton cutlets, prime of meat,
Which, though with art you salt and beat
As laws of cookery require
And toast them at the clearest fire,
If from adown the hopeful chops
The fat upon the cinder drops,
To stinking smoke it turns the flame
Poisoning the flesh from whence it came;
And up exhales a greasy stench
For which you curse the careless wench;
So things which must not be exprest,
When plumpt into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell
To taint the parts from whence they fell,
The petticoats and gown perfume,
Which waft a stink round every room.
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
But vengeance, Goddess never sleeping,
Soon punished Strephon for his peeping:
His foul Imagination links
Each dame he see with all her stinks;
And, if unsavory odors fly,
Conceives a lady standing by.
All women his description fits,
And both ideas jump like wits
By vicious fancy coupled fast,
And still appearing in contrast.
I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the charms of female kind.
Should I the Queen of Love refuse
Because she rose from stinking ooze?
To him that looks behind the scene
Satira’s but some pocky queen.
When Celia in her glory shows,
If Strephon would but stop his nose
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams,
Her washes, slops, and every clout
With which he makes so foul a rout),
He soon would learn to think like me
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.
Celia, We Presume
(What follows was composed in nearly effortless admiration of Jonathan Swift and his Lady’s Dressing Room, but then it much shorter.)
I CANNOT READ YOUR HEART
I cannot read your heart
And that is just the start.
I cannot read your books at all
Your taste is so abominable.
I cannot read your eyes
As if my own had styes.
I cannot read your fashions
Your clothes should be on ration.
I cannot read your lips
Nor can I read your hips
(A horse seen from a cart)
I cannot read your knees
But my how you do sneeze!
Well!! And now I hear your fart!!!
Yet I cannot read your heart.
[Click TWICE to Enlarge Everything – especially the thumbnails that follow.]
“Hello Ednah Dear 7/28/14 Nothing like what is on the other side of this card in Albany for I have not seen any one here that would have the nerve to do such. Well dear we made our 11500 test [?] and no one hurt but I was just a little timid in making some of the moves but all over now. Gee I wish you were here now for this AM was trying on your family and everyone is so strang [sic] to me but my (W) B.B. [Top of card] Dear this is one lonesome day for me. How I wish I could see you to talk to you. Your’s forever B.B.”If we have read it correctly . . .the message above is faithfully typed out atop the card too.
An EDGE CLIPPING as BLOGADDENDUM – a Belated Valentine sans hearts but with fit sentiment and fit timing from February, 1908.
While visiting Steve Sampson in Belltown yesterday, Paul and I wandered down an alley between 1st and Western and found this gorgeous red door set in blackened bricks. Paul guessed it must have been a stable, which was confirmed by former manager and realtor Stan Piha this afternoon. The Seattle Fire Department kept horses here. Stan recalled wooden columns inside showing marks of being gnawed at by horses. The sign for Doty & Associates is long out of date – the firm having pulled up stakes and moved to SoDo 7 years ago.
THEN: In late 1855 the citizens of Seattle with help from the crew of the Navy sloop-of-war Decatur built a blockhouse on the knoll that was then still at the waterfront foot of Cherry Street. The sloop’s physician John Y. Taylor drew this earliest rendering of the log construction. (Courtesy, Yale University, Beinecke Library)Here for comparison is Thomas Phelps wide panorama also sketched from the bay. (This is noted in the text below.) The pan extends from Columbia Street on the left, with the "White Church" at the southeast corner of 2nd and Columbia, to the King Street bluff on the far right. South of King it was all tidelands then. Phelps map is included below the block house photos far below.NOW: Jean Sherrards “repeat” for Dr. Taylors drawing was taken from the southeast corner of Colman Dock, a location that in 1855 was still in water deep enough for the USS Decatur and close to the proper perspective for his drawing of Seattle’s then new north blockhouse. Sherrard’s “now” is also capped by two competing Pioneer neighborhood landmarks, the Post Street smokestack and the Smith Tower. In 1902 the Seattle Electric steam plant began delivering its sooty black cloud to the neighborhood, which after the terra-cotta clad tower’s dedication in 1914 helped dim its gleaming facade.
Lorraine McConaghy, historian at Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI), spent the summer of 2005 in “the other Washington” hoping to find treasures in the U.S. Navy’s archives. The object of this ardor was the 117 ft U.S. Navy sloop-of-war, the USS Decatur, which one hundred and fifty years earlier visited Seattle and stayed for nine months defending the village during the Treaty War.
The result is adventures all around – aboard the Decatur, inside the blockhouse, which the sailors helped the settlers complete, and in the village and in the woods behind it. All are wonderfully recounted in McConaghy’s “Warship Under Sail, The USS Decatur in the Pacific West,” a new book from the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in association with the University of Washington Press.
John Y. Taylor, a navy doctor on board, drew this detailed likeness of the blockhouse Fort Decatur – named for the warship. Until the historian uncovered it, the drawing was buried in the archives. One of the two oldest renderings of any part of Seattle, this sketch is totally new to us. The other, also drawn from the Decatur ‘s deck, is by Thomas Phelps, Taylor’s friend and shipmate. Taylor’s rendering has greater detail. The rightfully enthused McConaghy proposes, “You could build the blockhouse from this drawing, I think.”
When the heavy boxes of microfilm copied for her from Taylor’s journals first arrived in Seattle from Yale’s Beinecke Library McConaghy recalls, “I raced to the MOHAI library and my hands were shaking with such excitement that I could hardly thread the reader. But there were Taylor’s drawings, right up on the screen, of Seattle (and much else). I laid my head in my hands and wept.”
McConaghy’s recounting of the Decatur at Seattle and in the five-year Pacific cruise required years of searching and shaping but now the book is readily available to readers and deserves lots of them. She is right: her work “allows us to see (pioneer) Seattle with completely new eyes.”
(The public is invited to Dr. McConaghy’s lecture about her book at Horizon House, on First Hill, Thursday, February 18 at 7:30 pm.)
WEB EXTRAS
Paul suggested we illustrate our web edition of this week’s Seattle Now & Then with several photos of surviving blockhouses, featured in our book Washington Then & Now.
THEN: the Crockett Blockhouse on Whidbey Island, taken by Asahel Curtis in the early 1900s.NOW: Restored and moved by the WPA in 1938 alongside Fort Casey Road. THEN: The English Camp Blockhouse on San Juan Island, also snapped around 1900. Site of the infamous Pig War (a 13-year standoff between Yanks and Brits beginning in 1959 with the shooting of a British pig by an American settler) which eventually led to U.S. possession of the San Juan Islands. NOW: English Camp Blockhouse in 2005. It too has been significantly restored.
Anything to add, Paul?
Yes Jean once more we have some BLOG EXTRAS. (!!!)
UP ABOVE – and already – we inserted Thomas Phelps panorama of the village also rendered, as it were, from the Decatur. And then just below these notes and in order, we include Phelps map of the village both as he drew it (nearly), and then as incorporated in into a larger map of the first settler’s claims. Below that are two paintings of scenes from the “Battle of Seattle.” One by one of the Denny daughters show the villagers rushing to the blockhouse. The other is an “Indian’s-eye view” from the woods of First Hill.
Thomas Phelps' map of Seattle by now famously misplaces the blockhouse one block too far north of its real location on a knoll at the waterfront foot of Cherry Street.The Phelps map later and helpfully extended into a map of the city's street grid and an indication of the borders between the original settlers' claims. This map - and more - get more explanation in this blogs' Pictorial History of the Seattle Waterfront. (Much of it is "up" but it is also still a work in progress - as time allows and/or we hold out.)Settlers running to the blockhouse with the first rifle fire from the woods. No one was hit during this scramble. The original painting was by Eliza Denny, of the second generation Dennys. The original is kept by the Museum of History and Industry. This print comes with an excuse. I have a better rendering but could not find it. For decades, it seems, I thought this was the best surviving copy of a painting - that may be lost - showing the battle of Seattle and the peninsula aka "Piner's Point" upon which most of the village was first built, imagined from the point of view of the resisting/attacking Indians on First Hill. Another photographic copy of the painting surfaced about ten years ago (for me) that does not also feature the glare of a light at the bottom-center.
THEN: Part of the roofline of Cascade School - the school that named the neighborhood - rises above a tight ensemble of workers homes in 1937-8. (Courtesy Washington State Archive, Bellevue Community College branch)NOW: The school was damaged by the 1949 earthquake and removed. These homes were razed in the early 1980s and replaced first by a play area for day care. Since 1996 the corner has shined with one of the city’s many community gardens or P-Patches. Jean Sherrard’s winter repeat may be complemented with the Cascade P-Patch’s own blog at http://cascade-ppatch.blogspot.com/ (Now photo by Jean Sherrard)
For a moment, only, this historical photographer paused on Minor Avenue about 40 feet north of Thomas Street and aiming east snapped this official record of lot 5 in the tenth block of the Fairview Homestead Association’s addition to Seattle. The addition was filed in the mid-1880s but the photograph was taken in 1937 as part of the depression-time Works Progress Administrations picture-inventory of every taxable structure in King County.
The tax assessment here was not very high for these are four nearly identical 900-plus square foot homes squeeze onto one lot, the second lot north of Thomas. The tax card indicates that they were built in 1900. (Perhaps, but they do not show up in the ordinarily trustworthy 1912 Baist Real Estate map.) The intentions of the original pioneer developers were to help working families stop paying rents and start investing in their own homes. Innovative installment payments made the lots affordable and many of the homes were built by those who lived in them, although probably not this quartet.
If we may trust the 1891 Birdseye view of Seattle – and it is splendid to study – Minor Avenue was then part of a shallow ravine or very near it, which gathered run-off in this Lake Union watershed. And since 1996, as part of the Cascade Neighborhood’s public garden that spreads 50 lovingly tended p-patches across this 7000 sq. ft. corner, rain water for the garden is collected into big barrels from the roof of the nearby Cascade Peoples’ Center.
I am a very small part of the footprint of this corner, having lived from 1978 to 1980 in the house immediately to the rear of principal home shown. My desk sat inside the longer window there and looked out on a coiling blackberry patch where now are many kinds of berries, and veggies, and flowers tended with the meditative pleasures of gardening. JoJo Tran, one of the gardeners here, plants for his table and many others. He reflects, “If you love nature, the environment, the colors of the plants, it you can see the beauty of the garden, you feel the beginning of love.”
WEB EXTRAS
Jean writes: Visiting this sacred corner of Paul’s personal history on a sodden day at the end of December was a mini-revelation. Here, Paul lived with his dear friend Bill Burden (whose wise and scintillating blog can be found here and through the button ‘Will’s Convivium’ at upper right) and I snapped him looking bemusedly from the spot he identified as having once contained Bill’s room.
Paul sits where Bill's room once stood
Paul brought along a photo he’d taken from his own bedroom window of the church across the road. We include it again, below.
Paul holds up a photo taken from his window
Here’s a repeat I did of the photo in Paul’s hand above:
Repeat of Paul's original photo
Anything to add, Paul? Or to correct?
BLOG EXTRAS we call them Jean. And yes I have a few – a slew even – of other pictures that catch this corner or nearby. I will given captions for them, but little ones I hope. I have also written a few now-thens (other ones) about landmarks within a block of this corner but I’ll not include them here. I mention that only to inspire longing in the reader or readers if we have more than one, which is to say more than you.
I’ll begin with two of the south side of 306&1/2 Minor, where Bill and I lived in the late 1970s. My desk – with its Selectric typewriter – sat at the larger of the windows on that wall. I looked out across the vacant ans sunken blackberry snarled corner lot to Thomas Street, and to the left of Thomas still stands Immanuel Lutheran Church. After the views of the window, I’ll place one that looks from it to the church on a night of snow, then others photographed in the late 90s and early 2ooos of the p-patch development. I will date them as best as I can. I believe a highlight of what follows will be my snapshot of Bill trucking down the Minor Avenue sidewalk.
306&1/2 Minor North looking north from Tomas, ca. 1938. A tax photo.306&1/2 Minor in 1958 with "War Brick", a popular asbestos covering sold by door-to-door salesman in the 1940s.Looking from my bedroom window to Immanuel Lutheran Church on a snowing night of the 1977-78 winter.1997 building of the Cascade P-PatchApril 2001. The lot has been raised to street grade. When I lived there it was a pit deep enough for a basement but not necessarily built for one. Next, I'll put in a 1891 birdseye that shows a ravine here or very near here that ran south towards Lake Union.Cascade neighborhood detail from the 1891 Birdseye View of Seattle. Depot St., since renamed Denny Way, runs along the bottom border. Lake Union at the top. Eastlake is far right with the trolley tracks. Rollin, now Westlake, is on the far left. Near the center a ravine runs north-south from Thomas Street towards Lake Union. The big house hanging there above the east (right) right side of the ravine is near the northeast corner of Minor and Thomas, the P-Patch corner.August 2002Jan. 30, 2005Immanuel Lutheran at southwest corner of Thomas and Pontius, early 20th Century.2001 pan of the corner from Minor Ave. sidewalk looking southeast with Cascade Playfield on the left and the corner of Minor and Thomas, far right.306&1/2 interior with the door to my bedroom behind me. I am looking northwest to Bill's desk. Bill's bedroom was off-camera to the left, and the kitchen to the right. Bill did the cooking, and fine cooking it was. Jan and Jack Arkills, old friends visiting from Spokane are on the left. Paula Calderon Kerby is on the right writing a letter it seems. Paula and Bill head for faux stairway to Cascade Playground on Minor Avenue. Our home was to the right. 1977 snow.Unable to reach the Cascade Playfield by its Ceta Mural stairway (ca 1975 Seattle Arts Commission granted creation) Bill Burden continues to truck north on Minor Avenue towards Harrison Street.Stairway off Minor Avenue to Cascade Playfield twenty-two years later & still in good enough repair. Same wall along the east side of Minor Ave. between Thomas and Harrison Streets during its depression-time 1930s construction for the Cascade Playfield (to service, in part, the children of Cascade School, which was directly to the east - right - across Pontinus Avenue.)Looking north from the Roosevelt Hotel over the Cascade Neighborhood to Lake Union in 1959. Still no hint of the freeway. Immanuel Lutheran (painted brown) can be seen but with difficlty - about one-fourth of the width of the slide to the left of its right border. The landscape on the distant north shore of Lake Union (in Wallingford) is a half century younger here than now, and its relative lack of verdure shows. The houses - their roofs - still dominate the 1959 scene. Freeway construction looking south from near Republican. Photo by Frank Shaw, 5/30/62. Only now do I notice that at the bottom left-of-center is part of the stonework on the old Republican Street Hill climb that for pedestrians once extended from Eastlake up to Melrose and so through the steepest part of the climb from the Cascade neighborhood to the attractions of Capitol Hill. Also by Frank Shaw - Freeway construction sometime later. Another Frank Shaw of the I-5 "Seattle Freeway" construction. This one looks north from near Olive and over the Denny Way temporary timber trestle (I believe). It dates from 1963. Cascade neighborhood and beyond it the I-5 freeway construction effectively cutting off the Cascade neighborhood from Capitol Hill. Photo taken by Robert Bradley in 1967 - as seen from the Space Needle. The green lawn of the Cascade Playfield can be easily found right-of-center. Thomas Street rises from the photograph's bottom border about one-third of the way across it from the right side.
That is all for now Jean. Is it too much? When I find one of Cascade School I’ll attach it.
FOUND the school Jean. Twice – back and front. And another looked at Bill on site in 2006 at the bottom.
Cascade School looking northeast from Thomas and PontiusThe source of the Neighborhood's name, Cascade School backside looking west. A south wing on the left has been added.This new one was taken by Berangere - of this blog - in 2006 when both were visiting: the one from Paris and the other from California. Here is Bill smelling and perhaps preparing to buss a sunflower in the Cascade P-Patch and not far from where his bedroom was comforted him at night.
We are delighted to recommend for your enjoyment, Shadow and Light Theatre, a groundbreaking new theatre company presenting two one-act plays by Harold Pinter. Paul and I will be attending next week – the production runs through Feb. 7th at ACT’s Bullitt Theatre – and we urge anyone interested in ‘da real magilla’ to join us for a provocative and haunting theatrical experience.
Directed by Victor Pappas and featuring Frank Corrado and Suzanne Bouchard, this production offers theatregoers an opportunity not only to encounter masterpieces of the theatre (A Kind of Alaska, staged at ACT in 1985; and Ashes to Ashes, receiving its Seattle premiere), but to do so in the company of some extraordinary artists.
Blue Angels, Blue Flower, Blue Grass, Blue Leaf, Blue Hair, Blue Madonna, Blue Moon, Blue Jays, Blue Boy (paint-by-numbers), Blues Stage, Blue Mountains, Blue Bottles
Below are several winter colors photographed this day, the 25th of January, 2010, on a short walk of five blocks here in Wallingford. I have named none of them, for the reason, I confess, that I know the names of very few of them. Perhaps you will help with a comment. But how can we indicate them? If I can number them below I will. [Carolyn Honke has sent a few names this way from the Azores, where she lives, and we wil include them.]
[Click to Enlarge]
No. 1 (vinca major L.)No.2No. 3 (Origanum vulgare L, majoram)No. 4 (camelia)No. 5 (dandilion)No. 6 (salix, willow)No. 7No. 8No. 9No. 10No. 11 (crocus)No. 12 (crocus)No. 13 (crocus)No. 14No. 15 (snowdrops)No. 16 (forsythia)No. 17 (ericace)The southeast corner of First Ave. N.E. and 44th Street where the recording began.
![Such Zen but no idea where. [Click to Enlarge please]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mount-lake-mist-4-web1.jpg "Mount-Lake-Mist-4-WEB")
Finally, neither meat nor cheese Jean. We are looking here into what will be the heart of the future Pike Place Market – a quarter-century later. Rising above the tides and off shore you can see the ruins of what was once the largest structure in Seattle: the Pike Street coal wharf and bunkers. It was photographed ca. 1881 from the King Street Coal Wharf that replaced it in 1878. This is but a detail of a pan of the city. (This also appears in our Waterfront History Part 5, with a more detailed description and in context too of more, yes, waterfront history.) Note the south summit of Denny Hill on the right, and Queen Anne Hill on the left. In between them is the north summit of Denny Hill, and running between the two “humps” of Denny Hill is Virginia Street. The original for this is at the University of Washington’s Special Collections.
![[If we have read it correctly . . .] Hello Ednah Dear 7/28/14 Nothin like what is on the other side of this card in Albany for I have not seen any one here that would have the nerve to do such. Well dear we made our 11500 test [?] and no one hurt but I was just a little timid in making some of the moved but all over now. Gee I wish you were here no for this AM was trying on your family and everyone is so strang [sic] to me but my (W) B.B. [Top of card] Dear this is one lonesome day for me. How I wish I could see you to talk to you. Your's forever B.B."](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/valentines-message-web11.jpg "Valentines-message-WEB")
We are delighted to recommend for your enjoyment, Shadow and Light Theatre, a groundbreaking new theatre company presenting two one-act plays by Harold Pinter. Paul and I will be attending next week – the production runs through Feb. 7th at ACT’s Bullitt Theatre – and we urge anyone interested in ‘da real magilla’ to join us for a provocative and haunting theatrical experience.
