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The Alaskan Way Viaduct was shut-down on the afternoon of June 14, 1974 when the still standing six floor Polson Building beside it at Columbia Street, was first ignited by an arsonist (apparently) and then bathed by the heavy streams seen here shooting above Alaskan Way.  There were other spouting hoses aimed at the Paulson, those from its east façade facing Western Avenue.  The first single alarm was made at 1:32 pm and fire fighting continued until 5:50 pm.

The Fire Department keeps good records. Galen Thomaier, the department’s historian as well as the curator of the Last Resort Fire Department, an interpretive museum for retired fire-fighting artifacts, was there in 1974.  (Ron Edge has inserted at the bottom of this blog a button to Thomaier’s museum web page.) Although that day not on duty he was there and surprised by the “four throbbing three-and-one-half inch lines (hoses) that were laid across Alaskan Way.  They led to a manifold that distributed both the salt water from the bay and municipal water from the hydrants.  Thomaier followed the hoses to their source, and found the Duwamish, then still  “the world’s most powerful fire boat afloat.”

Frank Shaw, one of our favorite historic photo sources, recorded these well-composed tableaux.  Near its center, uniformed fire fighters wrestle with a 55-foot long ground extension ladder while other fighters are implied by the bright silhouette that includes three steams shooting at the smoking building.  The atmosphere of spray gives back a shower on what Thomaier describes as a  “six person crew assigned to the six person ladder.” They wear helmets. Sixteen of the day’s crew temporarily wound up in the hospital from smoke inhalation.  There is also some falling debris in this mix.  Flying embers burned two of the Polson fire’s many uncovered pedestrian gawkers. The single man in the sports coat with a camera dashing across the puddle in the featured photo at the top was, according to Thomaier, “probably media and should not have been there.”  Shaw stands as close as allowed.

Years after the 1974 Polson fire, an investigative reporter with whom internal fire department records were shared, concluded a “most plausible theory…that the blaze had been set by pull-tab manufacturers from Chicago who were fighting the Polson Buildings owner, Benjamin Mayers (of Ace Novelty) for control of the Seattle-area pull-tab gambling market.”  In 1996 another un-caught arsonist torched the Polson, again taking the top two floors: the only two by then not guarded with sprinklers.  The principle victims of the 1996 fire were artists. The Polson had become what local art pundits described as one of the largest artists’ colonies on the West Coast.  When the renters were at first not allowed into the ruins to inventory loses, they joined a protest by painting on the street.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads? Yes Jean, Ron has supplied a rugged sampler of our more recent features that apply – somehow – to this one, and I following Ron have come home from fishing for some of the older of the roughly 1800 examples of repeat photography, hereabouts, that we have stocked in our now thirty-six year old pond.

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After Seattle’s summer-long 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, many of its VIP citizens, those who could “make things happen,” longed for more of its multifarious fun.  For new excitement they got the “joyous week of July 17 through 22,” the Golden Potlatch of 1911.  It was the first of several Potlatches produced sporadically by community impresarios up until World War II when public demonstrations became limited to fairwells and welcome-home celebrations for veterans.

Most likely this featured scene on top is  from the first Potlatch’s Industrial Parade.  Judging from the printed banner attached to the roof of the float at the scene’s center, this well-knit wagon carried a loom backed on both sides by women costumed with its knitted dry goods.  Both the rug stretched for a roof and the rug on the floor are examples of this “industry on parade.”  Surely it was very colorful,

more at least than the costumes worn by those watching here (in the featured photo at the top)  as the southbound horse-powered parade takes a turn off Fourth Avenue to Olive Way.  The seemingly idle electric trolley on the left of the featured photo with “express” written on its signboard is probably parked for the duration.  It was here on Stewart Street that streetcars that used Fourth Avenue turned around by moving forward-backward-forward through a t-shaped terminus.

You will be correct to discern a vacant city block behind the rug float (in the fatured photo).  It is shaped like a flatiron or triangle. The grade is a new creation of the then work-in-progress, the Denny Regrade, before which this was the steep southeast corner of this eponymous hill.  In 1906 the intersection of Fourth and Stewart was still several stories higher.  That year Westlake Avenue was cut through from Fourth and Pike to Denny Way making the intersections along Westlake considerably more imaginative.  Here in 1911 Westlake barely touches the southeast corner of itself, Fifth

Avenue and Olive Way. In 1890, well before the regrade, St Mark’s Episcopal built it first sanctuary on the hillside triangle.   When they relocated to a larger First Hill sanctuary in 1897, the abandoned church was first converted into a livery stable and then the “We Print Everything” Cooperative Printing Company.  In 1916 the long vacant flatiron block was filled with the well-loved and still-standing Time’s Square Building, the terra-cotta confection that Jean Sherrard shows off in his repeat.

Finally, we turn right to the four-story apartment house on the south side of Olive Way.  It was the Waverly and is now a studied object of interest for preservationist and historian Diana James.  (The northwest corner of the Waverly appears in the first photo beyond this point.  It is the southeast corner of Fourth Ave. and Olive Way, and so the origin of Olive Way at its west end.) What I know of these apartments – and many others – I learned directly from Diana.  Jean and I have, in the past, featured a number of her discoveries, which PacificNW readers may also know from her book “Shared Walls”, a history of Seattle’s early apartments.  Thankfully, her research continues.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boyos?  Surely Jean, and starting, again, with the appropriate or relevant features (usually from the neighborhood) grabbed from recent features, followed by older ones presented, with few exceptions, merely as clips scanned from older Sunday Times.  So please click away.

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This week we hope to encourage our readers, and especially the Wallingfordians among them, to join our welcoming cadre at the Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., on Saturday, January 6, 2:30-4:00 o-clock for a lively introduction to the newly formed Historic Wallingford.  It’s about time.

We embrace Wallingford, the Seattle neighborhood that looks south to the Seattle skyline while sitting comfortably with its feet in the foot-bath of Lake Union.  It is a neighborhood of mostly modest homes and always has been. It’s a stable place to tenderly raise a family while still being close to almost everything.  Did you know that “surveys show” that Wallingford residents are often considered learned by reason of their proximity to “higher education.”  Having lived in Wallingford for more than thirty years, I’m counting on it. I hope to have picked up on some of the smarts regularly pushing west over Interstate-5 from the atmosphere circulating above the University of Washington.  (Note: one does not move into Wallingford from that direction without also battling the air and audio pollutants contributed by the freeway.)

The neighborhood’s first homebuilders promoted it as Wallingford Hill, and north of N. 45^th Street, it surely does rise high above its eastern border, the freeway.  But Wallingford is uncertain about its northern limits.  By now, after waves of planners, promoters and Green Lake advocates have massaged the neighborhood’s shoulders, its north end is generally set at N. 50^th Avenue.  This is mildly embarrassing, because the Wallingford Addition was first platted north of N. 50^th in the southeast Green Lake neighborhood, although Wallingford Avenue does run the entire inter-lake journey north-south from Green Lake to Lake Union.

First printed in The Times Rotogravure Pictorial Section on October 25, 1925, this week’s featured photo looks east on N. 45^th Street to Wallingford Avenue.  The still-standing apartment house at the northwest corner was blessed with tenants James and Carrie Straker. The steadfast Strakers lived in one of the eight apartments and ran their mixed hardware store and auto supply (see signs) for 45 years at the same address, 1720 N. 45^th Street.  Note, that while N. 45th is busy, the namesake arterial that crosses it is at rest, at least when compared to Stone Way, Wallingford’s next north-south arterial to the west. Stone Way is still considered by some Fremont folk as Wallingford’s western border. It largely lost this distinction to Aurora Avenue in the 1930s with the building of both the Aurora high bridge and its speedway cut through Woodland Park.

With the Good Shepherd Center, Lincoln High School, the Gas Works, and, maybe your home – perhaps a bungalow – Wallingford is landmark-rich.  There will be plenty of parking at the Good Shepherd Center on the afternoon of Saturday, January 6.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Again and again from Ron Edge and myself – Ron First with the more recently published links picked from the blog.  Some, we hope, will be familiar to you.

 

 

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Ninety-seven years have passed between these two games? The game played “then” was the first in Husky Stadium, brand new in 1920 when the Dartmouth College Indians from Hanover New Hampshire beat the Huskies 28 to 7.

Besides a few points, the most important thing missing in 1920 was a bridge, a way for fans to readily get to the new stadium from the more populated south side of its intimate neighbor, the Lake Washington Ship Canal (1916).  For the Dartmouth game the Huskies graduate manager, Dar Meisnest improvised a row of barges that would only temporarily block shipping.  Meisnest was also a leading promoter for the Gothic Montlake Bridge first opened in 1925. It is the last of the bascules to span the canal.

Husky Stadium has also hosted a few performances without footballs.  In 1923 hundreds of local pastor-led Christian thespians staged a passion play before forty thousand on a stage that filled the

west end zone.  In 1927 Charles Lindbergh buzzed the stadium in his Spirit of St. Louis, and after landing at Sandpoint took the short ride to the stadium in a yacht for a “visit” with about 30,000 admirers.

For lifting spirits on the home front, civilian-defense workers produced a mock “Bombing of Seattle” by a squadron of P-38 fighters firing blanks on faux but flammable homes and businesses built and ignited on the playing field (not by the fighters) for the spectacle of destruction.  The fake but fiery bombing of June 13, 1943 was well attended.

For his repeat Jean chose the Husky’s game with the Utah Utes on the Saturday night of November 18 last.  With the last minute victory of 33 to 30, Husky quarterback Jake Browning broke the UW career record for touchdown passes (now with seventy-seven.)  We wonder how many football games have been played on this gridiron since its 1920 loss to the Ivy League, and how many of those were won by the Pacific Northwest lads. Given the ripening now of another Husky centennial we expect that the athletic department’s public relations statisticians will to come forth with answers by 2020.

WEB EXTRAS

I took a few panoramic shots of the stadium in 2013 – back when there were day games! Here’s my fave:

Anything to add, fellahs?  Yup – more of the same: neighborhood shots of yore pulled for your Horatian pleasures by Ron Edge and myself.

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HIS MARK BY FISH REMARKS ON UW FOOTBALL SUBSTITUTIONS IN 1947 [October 12, 1947]

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A note from Jean:
Before continuing on to this week’s column, please excuse Paul and me for a shameless plug of our upcoming event. Sunday evening, we will return with our annual celebration of literature and music ‘A Rogues’ Christmas’, a part of ACT Theatre’s Short Stories Live series (usually held at Town Hall, but moved this year to the Taproot Theatre during reconstruction). 

(Now, as always, please click to enlarge photos)

For his contemporary repeat Jean Sherrard has moved a few feet north of this week’s featured “then.” The brick Google Building at the southwest corner of Fremont Avenue and 43rd Street, got in his way. While both views look west from the north end of the Fremont Bridge, the historical photographer stood a few feet south of Jean’s prospect to include, on the left, the then new double trackage of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The construction confusion on the right hides the work-in-progress on the grade separation between the railroad tracks and the line of false-front businesses on the north side of Ewing Street.

The businesses showing in this first block west of Fremont Avenue as far north as Evanston Street are from left-to-right, a dye works, a pool hall, a café, a real estate, loans and insurance office, the New York Laundry (which in a 1910 Times classified was looking for an “experienced ladies’ clothes ironer”), and the Star Plumbing and Sheet Metal Works. The plumbing store shows two small windows on its second floor with a door between them that oddly or imprudently opens to neither steps nor a balcony. This is surely a vestige of this business row when Ewing Street was at its original elevation, nearly twenty-feet lower than it stands here. Continuing to the right (east) the business lineup is stocked with more community necessities: a bar, an undertaker, a store for shoes and another for home furnishings.

Ewing Street was named for Henry Clark Ewing, a precocious real estate agent who came to Seattle with his parents as a fourteen-year-old in 1886 and was building his own real estate office within ten years. In the biographical section of Seattle and Environs, judge and pioneer historian Clarence Hanford describes Ewing as one who “has acquired a wonderfully intimate knowledge of realty values and his judgment of such carries as much significance as that of any other man’s in Seattle.” Ewing’s significance reached Fremont in the late 1880s with his own street name. However, beginning in 1923 the street remembered Ewing only south of the canal where it was kept in the mostly residential Lower Queen neighborhoods. On the industrious Fremont side of the canal Ewing and its historical connotations were surrendered for another street-grid number, North 34th Street.

I feel safe in ascribing the date for the featured view as sometime between 1910-1912. On Sept. 2, 1910, The Seattle Times reported “work was begun this morning on the new Fremont Avenue viaduct across the Lake Washington Canal site just below Lake Union.” We note that the bridge is called a viaduct in The Times report and the canal merely a site. Committed canal cutting between Lake Union and Shilshole Bay began in 1911 and continued into 1916. (Remember, we celebrated its centennial last year.) Although about two stories taller than the first bridge at Fremont, the new “viaduct” was much longer and so actually resembled a viaduct while reaching new and higher grades at both ends. Also in 1911, the north shore of Lake Union received a second temporary bridge – a lower

pile-driven viaduct that reached across the northwest corner of the lake from Westlake to the foot of Stone Way. The Stone Way Bridge was razed in 1917, soon after the viaduct on Fremont was replaced by “the busiest bridge in America”, the bascule span on Fremont Ave. that we still cross and/or wait to cross. (Note the second Edge Link below on the opening of the Fremont Bridge.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, blokes?  Yes Jean – more older neighborhood/vicinity features.

 

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REPUNZEL at the FRONT DOOR of the WEST TOWER

I snapped this while crossing the Fremont Bridge many years ago when the orange primer on the bridge was turning pink.   It was several years before Fremont glass artist Rodman Hiller convinced the powers that then were both downtown in City Hall and in Fremont,  ( perhaps then already “the center of the universe”)  to help him brighten the north facade of the west tower with shining neon tubes giving shape to a glowing likeness of Rapunzel the Teutonic beauty with blonde (or golden) hair that grew so fast and unrelenting that “before the tower” she wrapped it around herself.  She had no need for clothes, although with adolescence wore them for fear of arousing the loggers who worked for a very bad witch who owned the forest that Rapunzel and her parents lived beside.   And much else.  The hag paid well enough to keep the men chopping.  The forest surrounded a tower that was fated to move Rapunzel’s tale into it and toward tragedy if not into it.  As with most enduring tales there are versions.  With this one we need to both learn more and get some sleep.   We pause noting that at the age of about thirteen (about development one cannot be sure with fairy tales) Rapunzel was locked in a tower without doors and but one high window by a very very bad witch named Gothel who was easily one of the one percent of Bavaria and  who was owed something – Rapunzel – by Rapunzel’s parents, who were also her renters.  Rapunzel was named for the plant her mother craved when she was  pregnant.  Her father stole it at night from the only source, the witches garden, and was caught.  I have read that one does not censure the diet of a pregnant woman.   I’ll pause here back on bridge.  My capture of the blonde on the door to the north tower predates artist Hiller’s portrait installed and captured there by many years.   I’ll count them later following more study of the fable.

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For occupying the attention of his two youngest sons, David and me, during long family road trips Dad devised and repeatedly replenished what we called “Pop’s Pop quizzes.”  On one such trip from Spokane to Seattle, I was able to easily answer Pop’s query, “What is the name of the world’s first streamlined ferry.”  That this then ten or eleven-year-old’s answer was correct is testimony to the widespread popularity of the feted Kalakala.

The Black Ball Line’s flagship ferry was the most popular man-made creation on Puget Sound until the raising of the Space Needle in 1962.  We have, perhaps inevitably, featured this ferry for “Now and Then” more than once.  For instance, on the Sunday of November 3, 1991, we showed her passing through the Chittenden Locks in 1947 for one of the ferry’s few visits into our fresh waterways.  Ordinarily, busy carrying both tourists and Naval shipyard workers back and forth to Bremerton, the Kalakala did not need our lakes.

Of the many photographs or illustrations of this ferry that I have collected and/or copied, the over-the-shoulder portrait by Frank Shaw that we have chosen for our feature this week is one of my favorites for several reasons. We put it at the top.  By contrast, the clouded sky brightens the ferry’s silver shine.  The colored slide’s stern end view improves the ferry’s streamlined claim.  Still, the Kalakala’s less kind nickname, “The Silver Slug,” may have been inspired as much by this tapered stern as by the ferry’s bowl-shaped bow where two doors opened wide enough to admit the big trucks of its years, 1935 to 1967.

Perhaps the photographer’s most effective assistant for embellishing the streamlined qualities of the ferry was the low tide.  It drops some of the ferry’s vertical chunkiness, hiding it below Shaw’s prospect, the exposed deck of one of the two Northern Pacific piers are the foot of Yesler Way.  The N.P. was Colman Dock’s neighbor to the south. (In the PacificNW’s printing I mistakenly – and foolishly – named this pier, which served as stand for the photographer, the Grand Trunk Pier.  That, of course, was on the north side of Colman Dock.  My dyslexia seems to be increasingly settling into an early dementia.  Stay tuned.  I’m trying to remember my cane. It has no name that I can share.)

With the sensational introduction of its modern service in the mid-1930s, the streamlined ferry was promoted with a modern makeover of its Colman Dock terminal with Art Deco touches. You will know, perhaps, that the Kalakala had been transformed from the burned shell of the Peralta, a fire-gutted San Francisco Bay ferry that was sold cheap to the Puget Sound Navigation Company.  Rebuilt here as the PSNC’s flagship it is also a moving monument to Deco design.

At its center, Frank Shaw’s (or Robert Bradley’s ) waterfront glimpse also includes a second Art Deco landmark, the Securities Building. (sic.  And here falls a second mistake of fact put forth in this trending-pitiful feature.  Thanks to my friend Gavin MacDougall for catching that the Art Deco landmark on Marion St. is the Exchange Building and not the Securities, which is on the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street.   I have confused the names for these before – and may again.)  The Exchange Building still faces Marion Street from the full block between First and Second Avenues. In his contribution to the University Press’s book “Shaping Seattle Architecture,” Seattle architect-historian Grant Hilderbrand considers this 1929-31 landmark as “perhaps architect John Graham, Sr.’s finest work.”  The reader will surely enjoy a visit to the building’s lobby.  The Exchange Building still stands back-to-back and in contrast with the seventeen stories of International Style aluminum and glass curtain-wall construction of the Norton Building.  Built in 1959 it is considered by some to be Seattle’s first modern skyscraper.  The tops of both the Securities and Norton Buildings can be found in Jean’s repeat — just barely.

LAYING THE CORNERSTONE – SEPTEMBER 30, 1959

ONE MONTH LATER THE NORTON GARAGE OPENS

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Later, LAWTON GOWEY LOOKS NORTH OVER THE SHOULDERS OF BOTH THE NORTON & EXCHANGE Buildings from the SMITH TOWER.

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WEB EXTRAS

Our good friend Clay Eals contributes the following:

“I understand that the focus of tomorrow’s “Now and Then” is on the “Then” of the Kalakala, not its “Now,” because, of course, the Kalakala no longer exists with integrity. But its large wheelhouse and drive train exist in the south parking lot of Salty’s on Alki, courtesy of the restaurant’s owner, Gerry Kingen, who salvaged them in Tacoma on the day in February 2015 that they were to be wholly scrapped. I’m attaching a fun photo I took on Feb. 23, 2015, of the downtown skyline as seen through the portholes of the wheelhouse as it sits at Salty’s on Alki. On one hand, it’s quite sad that the Kalakala is no longer intact, but on the other hand, it’s nice to have a couple of (large) remnants.

P.S. You can see many more photos of Kingen and the salvage operation on this page of the West Seattle Herald from Feb. 9, 2015: https://www.westsideseattle.com/west-seattle-herald/2015/02/09/slideshow-mv-kalakala-comes-saltys-alki. Scroll to the bottom for the slide show of photos by Kingen and the Herald’s Patrick Robinson and David Rosen to get the full view of the remnants.”

Anything to add, lads?  For sure slim Jean, more old features and most of them from the Seattle waterfront.  The first example will be the other Kalakala feature noted above.  It is scanned out of the paper.  After that the first seventeen of these are recent features pulled forth by Ron Edge from the blog, which has been around now for a decade or more.  They need to be clicked to open.  The rest are older features that were scanned as clippings.   They also need to be clicked for enlargements – to read them.

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Is it obvious that here is a work-in-progress?  Evidences of a new city addition in the throes of creation include the rough ground cover on the far right.  It is in need of a home.  A meandering clue is the fresh and hardly-stained concrete ribbon that has laid its eccentric path both beyond and behind the line of unfinished homes that cross thru the scene’s center. That the last two or three of the eight or nine homes built here all in a row are the least finished, at least suggests that most of the motorcars parked here belong to carpenters, realtors perhaps more than to prospective buyers.

This is Conkling Place, named for the family of pioneer historian Thomas Prosch’s mother, Susan Conkling Prosch.  In the late 1890s Thomas Prosch wrote the Chronological History of Seattle that a century later historylink, the popular on-line encyclopedia of Washington history and heritage, used for the first factoid construction of its webpage.  Although the Prosch mansion was on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill, in the early 20^th century the family purchased these acres near the northwest corner of the Hill.  They submitted the plans for their Queen Anne Addition to the city on September 27, 1909.

The Conklin Place Jean Sherrard recently visited to repeat our featured “then”, begins at the corner of W. Bertona Street and 10^TH Avenue West. Prosch’s Conklin was different, it was cut to the southwest with one long straight block to the center of the addition drawn but never developed.  Had it been fulfilled with homes they would have crossed through the footprints of first four or five residences standing here since 1926, the year this concrete was first given its serpentine pour.

It seems that the new developers were aesthetes allured by the poetic platting and curvilinear inclinations of the City Beautiful Movement.  They named their sensitive acreage the Queen Anne Hill Addition and started building along romantic lines diversely styled residences fit for their curving streets.  The developer’s model home, built in a Spanish style at 3042 10^th Avenue West, survives well kept on the avenues pointed corner with West Etruria Street.  It stands one long block and a few feet south of Jean’s prospect above Conklin Place.  Should you decide to explore this unique addition you will discover that most of the homes showing here on Conklin Place in 1927 or 1928 still hold to their uniquely foot-printed lots.

On February 21, 1926 the F.W. Keen and Company announced in that the building of their new forty-acres residence addition on Queen Anne Hill was underway. “The plat was filed last week.  This is one of the last large close-in tracts suitable for platting.  It will contain 235 lots, with the streets laid out to take advantage of the natural contour of the ground.  The addition has been designated Queen Anne Park.”

To learn much more on the history of this neighborhood, we recommend an essay by the Queen Anne Historical Society’s Florence Halliesen.

WEB EXTRAS

For those enchanted by this lovely prospect, please know that the ‘Now’ view was accomplished with aid of my 21-foot extension pole. A blown-up detail reveals a portion of I-5 and Gasworks Park through the trees:

Anything to add, kids?

Yes Jean but a little late.   I fell to sleep twice at my desk while preparing this and so was not able to coordinate with Ron Edge for more attractions before he he climbed his own stairs to his own nighty-bears.  (I think he embraces our bears although I do not remember asking him about the same.)  It is now 6am.   Ron is usually up by now.  I suspect that he will get the features he gathers into the blog before most of you (dear readers) have left your Sunday Times and visited this blog.   [These uninvited naps of mine are the “gift” of my increasingly ancient metabolism, I figure. ]  I do know that Ron also climbs stairs to reach his bed, unlike you who sleep on the same floor as  your gas oven.

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THE BELOW IS RESERVED FOR RON ONCE HE RISES. 

 

 

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I’m pulled into this clutter of storefront commerce and small hotels that extend through about half of the west side of 8^th Avenue between Pine and Olive Streets. Photographed in 1938, the year of my nativity, it offers attractions that I remember from my youth first in Grand Forks, North Dakota and then – beginning in 1946 – in Spokane.  Following Locksmith Snyder’s many keys and services, far left, are the 35 cent haircuts available from the Eighth Avenue Barber at 1619 8^th Avenue, and Jackson C. Clifford’s Red Front Cigar Store, at 1621.  After that comes the modest front door to the Olive Court Apartments.   There Mrs. Sigrid Fales is in charge, equipped with a telephone.  Most likely, Sigrid was originally from Northern Europe, and as Scandinavian as her nearby neighbors directly across 8^th Avenue, the Viking Tavern and Krono Coffee Shop, both at 1622 Eighth Ave.  And next door to Sigrid is her grandest neighbor, The Swedish Club.

“The Club,” as its many members called it, was the best evidence that downtown Seattle had its own “Snooze Junction” or corner, a variation on Ballard.  From the beginning the Swedish Club was an institutional reminder of the left homeland.  It was a profound and shared nostalgia that ran through its many banquets for fondly remembered traditional gatherings, and its choral concerts, dances, and opportunities for mixing and courting.  Also in a less secular line, neighborhood’s Gethsemane Lutheran, Swedish Baptist, First Covenant, Reformer Presbyterian, and others churches, were all Scandinavian  sourced congregations.

The club was first organized on August 12, 1892 by recently arrived Swedes.  They were young and living in Belltown’s Stockholm Hotel.  It was a name chosen to attract them.  In spite of the economic crash or panic of 1893 and following, the club flourished, largely because there were so many migrating Swedes.  (Migrating Norwegian’s and Danes had their own clubs.)  Using the often generous contributions from members of the burgeoning Swedish community, the Club built its home here on 8^th Avenue on its own terms.  Andrew Chilberg, the Seattle-based vice consul for both Sweden and Norway was a charter member and the Club’s first president.  He was also founder of the Scandinavian-American Bank: Seattle’s Scandinavian godfather.  Chilberg bought the property for the Club’s construction and half-century of use.  N.D. Nelson the partner in Frederick and Nelson Department Store, also helped with the club’s financing and first construction, as did Otto Roselead, the contractor for both the Swedish Club and the Swedish Hospital.  The dark brick façade with its ornamental banding and spiral scrolls or volutes, both seen in the feature photo, were soon added to the original frame structure when the neighborhood was regraded.

The diverse flips in needs and interests that have understandably followed through the club’s now century and a quarter of service are typical for cultural institutions that have their origins in other hemisphere’s.  It has been long since members were more likely to join classes to learn Swedish than English.  Now sponsored group flights to the homeland are fast and for many affordable.   (Thanks to Club president Christine Leander for lots of help with this.)

WEB EXTRAS

In the Hyatt’s glass curtains, from a slightly less oblique angle, we find a reflection of the lovely Camlin Hotel, recently featured in this column:

Anything to add, fellahs?  Lots of past but not lost features Jean – all but two are from the neighborhood or near it but one of the two is named Anderson.  Let us hope that our readers CLICK TO ENLARGE.

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The ambiguity of this waterfront corner is revealed by its signage.  In Jean Sherrard’s “now” the city’s green Pine Street sign only seems to rest on the wire fence in the foreground above the cyclist peddling the red bicycle.  Rather, it stands at the northeast corner of Alaskan way and – what? This is the point where both Pine Street and the linked Stewart Street, Olive Way and E. Olive Street, begin their forty-plus block course or two-plus miles east from the central waterfront (soon interrupted by the Pike Place Public Market) through Seattle’s slim waistline to Lake Washington

Although hard to read in this printing, there is also a sign for Stewart Street fixed to the southwest corner façades of the Olympia Brewery Bottling Works in the featured “then” photograph at the top.  The sign is just above the last wagon on the right, which puts it at the northeast corner of Stewart Street and Railroad Avenue. Perhaps for excitement or distraction during the Great Depression the last street name was changed from Railroad Avenue to Alaskan Way.  Some contending choices were Cosmos Quay, Sea Portal Avenue, Commerce Way, and one that came close to winning the contest, Seatlaska Way.

Hidden behind the Bottling Works was the north portal to the Great Northern Railroad’s tunnel beneath the city. The carving of the hole and blasting of about a dozen squatter’s shacks that were in the way began on April Fools Day 1903.  [See the clip below for a photo and description of this opening.]  The about mile-long tunnel was completed on January 2, 1905. The building of the Holden Warehouse on the left of the feature photo at Virginia Street soon followed and in the spring of 1906 the Virginia Street Dock across Railroad Avenue was built as a near twin to the Gaffney Dock its neighbor to the south.  (They are out of frame to the left.) As piers 62 and 63, both were ultimately cleared of their warehouses for creation of the concert pier that is now being improved for the new Waterfront Park.

Olympia brewer Leopold Schmidt’s bottling plant for his Olympia Beer was also built soon after the clearing of the tunnel’s north portal site of its buildings for mixing concrete and the narrow-gauged railroad used for moving the glacial till and other diggings extracted during the construction of the tunnel.  Throughout the month of August 1908 Olympia Beer inserted display ads in the local papers offering added meaning to its slogan, “it’s the water.”  This water, however, was not from the brewery’s vaunted artesian wells but from Seattle’s Green River watershed.  The ads are headed, “About Bottles” and continue  “First we soak the bottle in a cleaning solution, then it is rinsed, next it is washed three times inside, twice outside and again rinsed.  Then it is examined before being filled and if not absolutely clean it is rejected.”

The work of cleaning bottles for beer was short-lived here.  Prohibition began in Washington State on January 1, 1916.  The delivery horse teams were sold and their teamsters laid off. By the time Olympia Beer was again filling its bottles in 1934 with more spirited waters, the brewery’s building at the mouth of the tunnel had been home to other businesses, most notably Belknap Glass, one of the city’s larger manufacturers of plate glass.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Yes Jean, more of more from the waterfront side of the neighborhood.

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FULL DISCLOSURE 

Below we insert a copy of the original print from which this Sunday’s featured photo was cropped and retouched (i.e. polished).  [Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry, aka MOHAI]

 

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On May 6, 1961, the Central Church of Christ was awarded $61,500 for their sanctuary and its lot at the northeast corner of Boren Avenue and Pine Street.  The jury’s award was $11,000 more than the $50,000 offered by the state’s highway department and $6,500 less than the church’s lawyers requested.

Earlier, on October 20, 1960, another jury had awarded $67,500 for the three lots on the northwest corner of the same intersection.  The decision was only a little more than half of the $112,000 that owner Roy De Grief’s appraisers claimed they were worth. A review of a few of the hundreds of other properties litigated for their involuntary conversions from home, business or institutional real estate into pavement and freeway landscape reveals that divergent evaluations between what was requested and what was given were commonplace during the construction of the Seattle Freeway, as it was first named.

The Church of Christ moved into the church with the truncated tower on the corner of Boren and Pine late in 1952.  Its members could not have known than that in eight years they would lose their sanctuary when the entire intersection was bought out by the state’s highway department for what the courts agreed was a public works necessity: a north-south Seattle freeway.  It was the Seattle Swedish Methodists – aka Calvary Methodist – who built the church

in 1905. Their long-serving pastor, Francis Ahnlund, was born in Norland, Sweden, in 1880, and immigrated to America in 1901.  He answered the church’s call in 1919, moving from San Francisco to the Seattle congregation and preaching on this corner until 1951 when his health forced him to retire after 32 years of service.  That longevity was a record for the Methodist-Protestant denomination. A year later Ahnlund died at home.

As was the practice of many congregations built by and around immigrant communities, Ahnlund regularly led services in both English and the language of the ‘old country,’ which the older parishioners understandably found both more comforting and inspiring.  The two were often split between the morning and vesper services.

Francis and Elizabeth Ahnlund cultivated a family of both faith and finesse.  They had three daughters, two of whom, Sylvia and Norma, were adept organists who helped keep Calvary a “singing church.”  Perhaps as something of a tribute to their father, two of the daughters also married preachers.

The Church on the corner was built in 1905-06 at a cost of $12,000, seated more than 500 persons, and was originally topped by a steeple that extended high above the box tower.  By the likely year of this tax photo, 1938, the steeple was gone.  It was, of course, not removed by the earthquake of November 12, 1939. The early 1960s cutting of the Freeway here was deep. The difference in elevation between the sidewalk shown in the “now” and the freeway pavement below it is fifty feet. The original street grade was somewhere in between the bridge and the ditch.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, guys?  More neighborhood features Jean.  As our Web Master,  Ron and I are hoping you do not tire of our weekly clutters.

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CLIP CLIICK to ENLARGE

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This week we visit the University of Washington’s South Campus. The “then” photo looks north from Portage Bay to the south façade of what was built as the Tokio Café for Seattle’s first world’s fair, the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP). The Tokio was the most southerly of the attractions that opened on the Exposition’s carnival named the Pay Streak, which reached as far as the bay. Practically all the Streak’s approximately fifty attractions were either exotic, like the Tokio, or eccentric, like the Upside Down House.

[above: Looking west over the Pay Streak landing with Portage Bay on the left and the Cafe Tokio at the middle-distance center. The Pay Streak extends out-of-frame to the right. This was photographed on the expos’ New England Day. ]  (Courtesy, U.W. Libraries, Northwest Collection)

With the conclusion of the AYP the Pay Streak attractions were either razed or recycled.  The result was the barren corner of the campus shown here in the featured photo at the top to either side of the seemingly stranded café.  The Tokio, however, was saved.  The University’s athletics department was in need of a new crew house, for what was decreed

in the press as “now the leading sport at state university.”  Actually, rowing took football’s place at the top only after the latter’s playing season was over in November.  In any season, rowing coach Hiram Conibear and football coach Gil Dobie contended for the athletic department’s resources and the presses’ attentions.  To the delight of Conibear and his crews, the Japanese eatery was remodeled for both storing the shells and building the spartan, we imagine, living quarters for the elite students who were selected to train and repeat the smooth and powerful paddling that would ultimately propel them to victory on the waters of the world.

Before the opening of the Montlake Cut in 1916, the crew’s stroking was for the most part restricted to the smaller Lake Union.  On January 28, 1917, The Seattle Times reported, “The Washington crew will row on Lake Union until March 1, when it will row through the canal each afternoon and practice on Lake Washington.  Coach Conibear has issued a standing invitation to all who are interested in watching the boys work to go out in the coaching launch…” The Times report concludes with the last evidence that I could find of Conibear’s oaring kingdom abiding here in the converted cafe:  “The boathouse is at the foot of the Pay Streak of the Exposition.”

Conibear and his crews soon abandoned the Tokio for another useful oddity.  This time a larger shell house was made from a seaplane hangar built by the navy to help with waterways surveillance during World War I.  Set at the eastern end of the Montlake Cut, it never accommodated planes, only shells.  In 1931 the Tokio’s footprint was covered by the University’s first

oceanographic laboratories built in the then popular Collegiate Gothic style with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.  Until 1947 the oceanographers shared the future south campus with grass and sand traps.  The 1947 ground-breaking for the University’s new School of Medicine began the ‘cultivation’ of the University Golf Club’s nine-hole course into a South Campus overflowing with doctors, nurses, oceanographers and other scientists.

WEB EXTRAS

Another heartfelt thanks to the good doctor, Doug Stewart! He rowed me around Portage Bay and we visited some faves…

Anything to add, boys?  Surely more from the neighborhood Jean, and one analogy from Portland, Oregon.  Also, the bottom two links, those on the north end of the University Bridge and at Gasworks Park, include two of the video’s we managed to produce early last year (2016).

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CLUES FOR FINDING THE TOKIO FOOTPRINT 

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This Sunday we, Jean Sherrard, myself, and especially Ron Edge, our collector-cartographer with a devotion to details, hope to convince you that we have discovered the correct location for the footprint of Princess Angeline’s home. Angeline, many of our readers will know, was the daughter of our city’s namesake Chief Seattle. Born around 1820, she was in her prime by the time Euro-American settler-interlopers first arrived here to stay in the early 1850s.  The princess got on well with the city’s founders, and it was one of them, Catherine Maynard, who gave her the royal name.  Catherine, a nurse and wife of the village physician, Doc Maynard, explained that her new name better fit her elevated status. (Although surely the princess’s native name, Kikisoblu, was as euphonious as Angeline.)

Angeline supported herself washing clothes and weaving baskets, which she sold. She also posed for pictures, both candid street shots and prepared portraits.  The latter, like the Edwin J. Bailey portrait shown here, were snapped in studios where the native princess was sometimes – although not here – posed with a mix of props and backdrops that promoted her authenticity.  Through Seattle’s first half-century, the princess was easily the most popular subject hereabouts, and when she could, she charged a fee for posing.

The princess also accepted help and may have expected it.  She enjoyed a free grocery tab at Louch’s Market on First Avenue, which was not far from her home, whose true footprint we will now reveal with the help of photographs.  In 1890 the N.P. Railroad photographer, F. Jay Haynes, took what may be the earliest surviving photo of Angeline’s home.  I first used and misused it for this feature on May 13, 1984.  While Haynes did not peg his portrait of the Princess sitting near the front door of her seemingly windowless shed, I embraced the commonplace belief that her home was somewhere near the waterfront, between Pine and Pike Avenues, and probably closer to the latter.  My mistake was in making it a beach shack by interpreting Haynes’ prospect largely on the basis of the patch of horizon that shows to the left of Angeline’s shed. That is not the beach and Haynes was not looking west but nearly northwest through the neighborhood of small warehouses and squatters’ sheds that climbed the western slope of the now long gone Denny Hill.

We must thank Ron for this correction and also for introducing photographer Frank LaRoche’s setting of the Princess and her dog posing on the front porch of her new home, built for her in 1891 by the local lumberman Amos Brown. Printed to its full width, the LaRoche photograph reveals a wide swath of Belltown landmarks that lead us with the help of Ron’s triangulation to within a few feet of Angeline’s last home.  Although the princess died in 1895, her Amos Brown-made home survived and served at least as evidence until the printing of its footprint in Vol.2. page 127 of the 1905 Sanborn Insurance Map.  To follow Ron Edge’s revealing lines and to explore more photographic evidence of Angeline’s home and the neighborhood, please visit the web page pauldorpat.com.  It is so noted every Sunday, including this one, at the bottom of the feature’s text.

WEB EXTRAS

Just a few special treats to sweeten the (already sweet) pot. First off, a big thanks to David Peugh, through whose condo we were given access to the site; his son Jeff (pictured below) graciously escorted us.

Below, Paul presents the evidence which led Ron Edge to his discovery.

This is meant to be – or will be – a feature about our victory in locating the home site of the daughter of Chief Seattle for whom the pioneer settlers adopted the name Princess (and sometimes Queen) Angeline.  We have known with considerable confidence that her cabins – at least two of them for which we have photographs – were set somewhere near Pike Street, below what has been since 1907 the Pike Place Public Market.  But we wanted the footprint – or close to it.

After assembling perhaps all available clues – maps and photos – Ron managed to find the home, or proper footprint, for this home, and Jean posed him, as it were, on the front porch of Angeline’s home for the NOW, where she posed with her dog more than once, for she for the boom years before her death in 1896 probably the most popular photographic subject in Seattle.

MORE ANGELINE INTERLUDE – 

Included within the frame of this week’s featured photo are the helpful clues for locating the footprint of Angeline’s cabin.  They are listed in yellow upper-left.  Click to Enlarge.

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Both the number and inserted thumbnails should help you orient some of these parts/clues to those notes in the featured photo.  CLICK CLICK CLICK TO ENLARGE

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An unidentified photographer looks north thru (and above) the ruins of Angeline’s older home to the front south facade of her new home. This photo was obviously of great help in finding the footprint.

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Looking north from the roof of the Standard Furniture Co. Warehouse  with Western Avenue on the right.  The landmark tree is number two.   By this WW1 era shot Angeline’s home is gone.  Most of it – perhaps all – would have been out-of-frame to the  bottom.

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The red line is drawn down from the tenement on Front Street at Pine into Angeline’s last home.

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The neighborhood looking north along the waterfront from the King Street coal wharf in 1890.   Construction is nearly the as yet not built central tower of the Denny Hotel, upper-right, on the front hump of Denny Hill.  It straddles Third Avenue between Second and Fourth Avenues a few feet more than 100 feet above the regrades.

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Angeline’s back yard – again.

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Helpful details from both the 1893 and 1904 Sanborn Insurance Maps.   The red circle marks Angeline’s cabin.

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A Google Earth space shot superimposed on the 1904 Sanborn Insurance Map.

The Standard Furniture Co. Warehouse c1905 (now  the Fix/Madore building)

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And a few links to additional related features:

 

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I have been charmed by this landmark since my first visit more than a half-century ago.  It was my oldest brother Ted and sister-in-law Klarese, both now deceased but then recent graduates of the nearly-new University of Washington Medical School, who treated me to a repast served by the Camlin Hotel’s Cloud Room, a “dinner in the sky”.  Although at about the same time, with the ascension of the Space Needle in 1962, the Camlin by comparison was not so

elevated.   The Cloud Room had by then nourished its reputation for both food and service.  For instance, for two years running, 1953 and 1954, the Cloud Room won awards from the then prestigious magazine Holiday.  The Camlin was one of but seventy-five restaurants on the American Continent selected by the magazine for its Annual Restaurant Award.

A feeling for the Camlin’s size still depends upon where you stand.  Go to Ninth Avenue between Pine and Olive Streets and stand in front of the hotel’s entrance at 1619 9^th Avenue.  Look up like Jean has done with his “repeat.” The ninety-one-year-old hotel, with its façade of patterned red bricks laced and banded with terra-cotta tile refinements, stands with its enduring charms before a spreading cluster of new nearby high-rises, which seem busy in a competition for a unique design.  From its upper floors the Camlin Hotel is still in unimpeded contact with the Capitol Hill horizon, Lake Union and the several neighborhoods of the North End.

When the Camlin first opened in 1926 there was as yet no plush restaurant on the top floor, rather there was a penthouse.  The Cloud Room first ventured on high in 1946. The conversion showed good post-war timing for a city that felt somewhat impoverished by its paucity of plush eateries.  This was especially true when Seattle was compared – as it still constantly is – with San Francisco.  From its elevated beginning, the Cloud Room was famous for special meetings and events, an ideal setting for a “bridge tea”, or the Quarterbacks Club, or a celebrity luncheon in 1948 for author Betty MacDonald and her then new book, The Plague and I.

Edmund Campbell and Adolph Linden, locally noteworthy roaring-twenties entrepreneurs who developed the Camlin Hotel, chose the English Renaissance style for their ornate hotel designed by the well-known Portland, Oregon, architect Carl L. Linde.  The ornamentation of the Lind-designed Ambassador Apartments (1922) on 6^th Avenue in Portland can be readily compared to the Camlin.

The hotel’s name (have you figured?) is a neologism made by joining the first syllables in the partners’ last names.  Five years more and the partners would share something nearly as intimate: incarceration in Walla Walla.  By running and juggling the finances of not only the hotel, but also a bank, a network of radio stations and more, their 1920s ambitions eventually landed them behind bars for fraud.  After a few years of “paying their debt” they returned to their families and generally sturdy home lives in the mid-1930s.

WEB EXTRAS

Lots to add, I know, compadres! More will appear this evening… Here are a random few from The Camlin’s storied past. We’ll begin with a handful from the 1984 remodel:

And continue with several shots from the Cloud Room, including a couple from ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’:

And a few more, including the infamous boat in the pool!  One could rent it for the night.

And now, take it away, Ron!

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Surely the subjects here are the logs, although their likely destination, the Western Mill at the south end of lake Union, is also visible.  A water tower, two stacks, and a few long factory sheds are bunched there. Scattered about to all sides are the mill workers’ generally small homes in the community that was started in 1882 by David Denny and his partners.

The silhouette of the hotel named for his brother Arthur Denny (last week’s feature) rises on the horizon far right of the featured photo at the top, where it is considerably dimmed by the industrial haze contributed by a city rebuilding after its Great Fire of June 6, 1889.  The greatest teeming of timber for remaking the city were these logs temporarily parked below Queen Anne Hill.

The featured print at the top is part of a small collection contributed a few years back to the Museum of History and Industry.  The selection is distinguished by panoramas and other subjects wide enough to reveal a variety of landmarks.   The fifteen prints of this collection also expose the elaborate changes in the cityscape that quickly followed the fire.  The economic crash of 1893 slowed the growth, but beginning in 1897 inhibitions were effectively scattered by the Yukon Gold Rush.

The year here is most likely 1890 or 1891. By photo-historian Ron Edge’s studied speculation, the photographer may well have been John P. Soule. One of the small collection’s three-part panoramas of the Seattle waterfront was taken from the King Street wharf, which, with its coal bunkers, was then one the largest structures in Seattle. Ron identified the same pan from the same spot recorded with only a few changes among the vessels. It was, it seems, also recorded on the same day and this time, signed by Soule, who is best known for his many photographs of the ruins left by the Great Fire. (CLICK WHAT FOLLOWS TO ENLARGE IT!!!)

For the photographer, my first hunch was Frank LaRoche, another skilled local with a proven lens and a penchant for recording panoramas. In 1890 LaRoche was hired by a tireless young developer named Luther Griffith to assemble an album of prints showing off his two-mile-long trestle to Fremont. Not by coincidence, Fremont was the name of the Kansas township where Griffith was born. The LaRoch album also features a few new landmarks, like the rebuilt central waterfront and Arthur Denny’s hotel.

 

The trestle to Fremont was built wide enough to handle promenading pedestrians, wagons, and most importantly, electric trolleys.  After they began running here in the fall of 1890, the trolleys pretty much put a stop to the “mosquito fleet” of small steamers that had delivered settlers and their goods to the growing neighborhoods on the north shore of the lake.  These included, west-to-east, Fremont, Ross, Edgewater, Latona (not yet Wallingford), Brooklyn (not yet the University District), Ravenna and Yesler.  The northeast corner of Lake Union – and so Portage Bay as well – got its own trolley service along the east side of Lake Union in 1891.   Some of this east side line was built on piles, and some on land.  Railroad ties were easier to lay beside the kinder grades of the future Eastlake and Fairview Avenues.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?  We shall not disappoint professor, and we may well repeat.   CLICK ON THE BELOW.

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Gather round. It’s is time to repeat an old story about the commanding Arthur Denny, who, as the older of the two brothers who in 1851 first settled on Alki Point, has been generally considered the city’s founder and sometimes father. Denny first named the hill he owned at the north end of his claim, Capitol Hill. When his Seattle began both to fill in and out, the ‘papa pioneer’ expected that Washington Territory’s legislators, of which he was one, would ultimately flee Olympia and relocate their capitol on his hill and  high above Seattle’s expanding commercial district.  The move seemed a sensible expectation, but proved, however, to be more hunch than hit.  Still, beginning in 1881, Seattle became the Territory’s largest community and stayed so.  That was a mere thirty years after Denny and his party of mostly mid-western farmers with urban ambitions landed on Alki Point.

Denny’s friends and fellow champions were just as pleased to name his hill for him. He was famously sober, steadfast, and demonstrably modest with the exception of his name, which he enjoyed having attached to real estate.  Consequently, in 1888 ambitious friends convinced him to trade his political hopes for his hill into proprietary ones, while changing the hill’s name from Capitol to Denny.

On March 20, 1889, less than three months before the city’s Great Fire of June 6, Arthur announced his plan to build a grand namesake hotel on his hill.  In place of a capitol building he would settle for a Victorian landmark with 400 beds, one-hundred more than Tacoma’s Tacoma Hotel.  Here (in the featured photo at the top) the Denny Hotel is recorded by a Webster and Stevens Studio photographer who is looking southwest from the northeast corner of Virginia Street and Fourth Avenue.  Printed from a large glass negative, it is in the keep of MOHAI (Museum of History and Industry.)  The year is 1903, or fourteen years after construction began, and the hotel was not yet finished.*  A combination of infighting among the investors, the size and expense of the place, and the 1893 economic crash with the doldrums that followed, turned the grand hotel into a “ghost palace”, “white elephant” or “unsightly mass”, all names attributed to it in the local press.

Still empty, the hotel was being polished and prepared for its first guest, President Theodore Roosevelt.  Sometime not long after Roosevelt anointed the landmark, Arthur Lingenbrink, my long-since deceased friend, visited the hotel with his parents and younger brother Paul, all of whom had moved to Seattle in 1903. When the family first approached the city from the south above the Union Pacific’s tidelands trestle, the gregarious ten-year-old Arthur, better

known as Link, was dazzled by the hotel on the hill.  Link kept his eye on the hotel, which by then was renamed the Washington Hotel by its new owner, James Moore, at the time Seattle’s super developer.  The name change did not bother the founder.  Arthur Denny died in 1899.   The short-lived hotel’s demise followed in 1906, when this double-block was razed to its present elevations, early in the regrade of Denny Hill.

WEB EXTRAS

I’ve clambered around atop the Hotel Andra several times to repeat old prospects and my invaluable guide and pal Chief Engineer Brian Cunningham has always been along for the ride. Thanks, Brian!

Anything to add, my dears?  Edge Clips from the neighborhood below and a few more to follow with their dangling texts.

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DENNY/WASHINGTON HOTEL / HISTORY SUMMARY

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Calculating the rate posted on the roof of this “office” shed at 725 University Street, any motorist leaving their car in this lot for longer than half a day would pay thirty cents, not fifteen. Seventy-nine years later this seems comical – and very fair.  The subject was recorded on January 24, 1938, not quite a decade after the 1929 economic crash that briefly shook the order of things before strapping it in the Great Depression.

Like last week’s photo this one (at the top) was also rescued a half-century ago from a tax accessor’s waste basket. 1938 was an especially busy year for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographers.  While these researcher-recorders were busy making a photographic inventory of every taxable structure in King County, they discovered that many were not listed.  The result was two communities: the supportive one in daylight mixed with an untaxed black one. The shed?  We do not know on which side of that ragged line it sits.

The earliest of the aerial surveys recorded for mapping Seattle dates from 1929.  Kept in the City Archive, it shows that this block, bordered by Seneca and University streets and Eighth (climbing First HIll behind the shed) and Seventh Avenues, was mostly crowded with small structures built to the north and west sides of one large one: the Exeter House, which still fills the quarter-block at the northwest corner of Seneca Street and Eighth Avenue. (In this week’s featured photo, the Exeter is just off frame to the right.)  The 1936, and 1946  aerials both show the block filled with cars, the Exeter and this shed.  Counting the cars we can figure that the three parked here are joined with about 250 others.  Together they – the parked cars, the shed and the Exeter – fill the block.

With its last residential listing in The Times, 725 University Street was still a boarding house and not this parking lot office.  The news, printed on October 13, 1936, tells how George L. Swanson, and A.T. Entwisle, a resident at 725, on hearing the screams of a “Miss Collins, walking at Eight Ave. and Seneca Street” responded by tackling a purse-snatcher named Bisbee. The heroes held him there for the Police.  The pathetic young Bisbee explained that he did it “because he was broke.”

At the time, depressed Seattle was also broke, or nearly. In the year of Bisbee’s felony, the Seattle City Council, accompanied over five years by three mayors and dozens of parking meter salesmen, began its earnest debate on parking meters.  With meters the council hoped to inhibit double-parking while counting the nickels and dimes pouring into the city’s general fund.  One meter machine salesman offered contributions to Councilman Hugh De Lacy to help erase the debt left by his most recent campaign.  An ardent clean government socialist, DeLacy reported the proposed perk,

On November 8, 1941 The Times announced that the City had set December 15 as a deadline for completion of the parking meter installation. The writer waggishly added “Having heard much about parking meters in the abstract, we look forward to seeing them in concrete.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, les mecs?

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The Onarga, the mid-sized flats filling the center of this modest row of rentals, was most likely named for the small town founded in 1854 about 90 miles south of Chicago, Illinois.  That was three years after Seattle’s founder-pioneers first settled both on Alki Point and in the Duwamish River Valley.  (Some of them came from Illinois, if not Onarga.)

The street number 1108 for this apartment house on Seventh Avenue is tacked to the front door beneath a sign that reads “Housekeeping Rooms for Rent.”  If I have figured the evidence correctly, these apartments were first opened to renters in late 1903 or 1904; newspaper listings for the Onarga began in 1904.  I am especially fond of a classified ad placed in The Times on September 18, 1904, which reads “$200 CASH and eight monthly

payments $25 each buys the furniture of a six-room well furnished flat.  Large, light rooms, pantry closets, porcelain bath, coal and gas ranges, sideboard, golden oak furniture, French bevel plate dressers, folding and iron beds, Brussels carpets, Bigelow Axminster art squares. Rent $30. 1108 7^th Avenue, first door.” One would then – if I have read this correctly – have found these offered items in an apartment on the first floor.  The Times classified was listed under “FOR SALE FURNITURE – 109.” To my reading the ad’s creators seem to be selling the flat’s furnishings while also offering for rent the large apartment itself.

One of this flat’s best qualities is not noted in the 1904 Times classified.  The Onarga apartments, like its neighbors, were “within walking distance” of practically every urban need and/or opportunity.  They are “close in.” By 1904, after more than two decades of the Queen City’s booming growth, the western slope of First Hill was increasingly filling up with rentals at the expanse of single-family homes.  There was a mix of brick and frame construction among these apartment houses, and, of course, the former were ordinarily larger and classier.  As the map detail shows direclty above, in this block bordered by Seventh and Eighth Avenues and Spring and Seneca Streets, it was all frame, while in

neighboring blocks many of the addresses were grander, some of them high-rises.  Two examples of these are on show in our featured 1938 tax photo, and both are still standing. To the left of the parking strip tree is a sample of the Exeter House Seneca Street façade, with its Tudor Gothic style. And to the right is the well-ornamented Gothic crown of the high-rise Virginia Mason Hospital, which nearly fills the photo’s upper-right corner.   [WARNING!!!  WRONG!!!.  An alert early reader of the Time’s saturday delivery for this week’s PacificNW, made a kind (not unkind) correction.   This is not the hospital but rather the Lowell Apartments at and near the northeast corner of 8th Avenue and Spring Street, and so just south up 8th Avenue and across 8th from Town Hall.  This is embarrassing for me, and rates

in the top ten of the many mistakes I have made since I started this feature now 35 years ago on a wet sunday in January, 1982.   Had my many flubs been then preluded before me I might have run to the Main Branch of the Seattle Public Library for penance and so correction.  The portrait of the Lowell Apts above come’s from SPL’S  prolific Werner Lenggenhager Collection. Lenggenhager has it captioned that the Lowell Apartments were built in 1928 and designed by Harry E. Hudson.  I did not find this in Shaping Seattle Architecture, where Hudson is not noted.  I’ll surely ask Diana James, author of Shared Walls, our history of Seattle’s apartment houses, about Hudson.  At this hour – 3am – she is almost certainly not awake.   The Virginia Mason is behind the Lowell, a short ways up Spring Street from ‘our block’.  It is also somewhat above the Lowell, but not high enough to alert me, and that’s working on an excuse.  Asking now for forgiveness, I’ll share a preferred excuse for this mistake once I think it up, and/or learn of a good escape thru Diana.)

The first heavy poured construction came to the featured block with the dedication of the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist.  Prior its construction in 1923, the northeast corner of the block was undeveloped.  Since 1999 the church building has splendidly served (in my opinion) as one of Seattle’s greatest non-profits: its Town Hall, a kind secular church with little dogma.  And here in the partnership that authors “Seattle Now and Then” you have a close-to-home example of that somewhat spiritual zest: Jean Sherrard, this feature’s photographer-repeater of well-wrought “nows.”  For a dozen years now, Jean has been producing, hosting and performing in Town Hall’s Christmas edition of Act Theatre’s series, “Short Stories Live.”   After a few years he began calling it “A Rogue’s Christmas.”  Every year now someone from Central Casting call’s Jean and asks him to prepare another season’s greetings for Town Hall.  Now that the Hall is getting it elaborate restoration, I do not know where the Rogue will show his tricks.

Continuing: here in anticipation of the webmaster Jean’s question, “Anything to add, buys?” here a few somethings.

First,  A kind of spiritual sampler of Seattle in 1916 includes an example from the Onarga Apartments.  It is sublimely marked in yellow with a blue border.   Please note that this printed list does not include any of the “regular” churches in town.  They have their own section in the paper, which in 1916 could still feature printed sermons by the more celebrity preachers in town like Mark Matthews whose First Presbyterian Church was directly south across Spring Street from “our block.”

Second, the story of the precocious Walter Fogh who lived in the Onarga Apartments in 1922.  The Times clipping is dated November 25, 1922.

Third, using a neighborhood detail from a  business map dated 1925 we find the Onarga Apartments among the four structures identified on “our block.”  The others are the Morningside Apartments next door on 8th Avenue to the east of the “4th C S Church,” which is also named., and the Toraine Apartments facing Seneca Street west across the alley from the C. Scientist.   The Toraine will appear in four of the remaining illustrations that follow before Jean’s query about “anything.”

Fourth

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Anything to add, guys?   Yes Jean and starting with the first of the featured Edge Links below, the one looking northeast across the intersection of 7th Avenue and Seneca Street.  While our featured tax photo at the top concentrates on the Onarga near the center of the east side of 7th Avenue between Seneca and Spring, the first feature below reveals, far-right, the north end of this same east side of 7th.  It also shows the northwest corner of the Toraine Apartments facing Seneca Street from its south side and from this prospect above the corner grocery store, right-of-center.  So please open the link and read the rest.

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While pursuing his “repeat” for this week’s feature, Jean Sherrard discovered what he described as a “coincidence of good works” on this pioneer corner.  Its location can be figured and so found twice in the older photo, which dates from the mid-1920s.  First, the address is scribbled on the wall, top-center, with chalk or perhaps whitewash.  It reads “98 Main St.”  The second clue is the rusticated block of granite that sits on the sidewalk, bottom-left.  It has been part of the footprint of the New England Hotel since 1890, when its frame hostelry was rebuilt with brick, concrete, and stone following the incineration of thirty-plus city blocks, including this one, during Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.

In the featured “repeat” on top, the two men posing above the building’s sidewalk well are both smiling.  They are, first, Martin Johanson, holding the broom in the “then,” and about ninety-two years later the also friendly Tim Harris, who has unfolded the first issue of Real Change, the newspaper he founded. The paper’s web page describes itself as a “weekly progressive street newspaper written by a pro staff and sold by self-employed vendors, many of whom are homeless.  The paper provides them with an alternative to panhandling.”  When first printed as a monthly in 1994, Harris described it as published by the “Real Change Homeless Empowerment Project.” (We both strongly suspect that many PacificNW readers have patronized Real Change, and hope so.)

Martin Johanson, the man with the sweeper’s broom, was also a founder, and the Millionair Club that he first opened on this corner in 1921 continues to find work – and much else – for the unemployed who seek its services.  The Club has long since moved north into Belltown, and so up and away from the basement of the New England Hotel.  If you use the Club and/or support it with a donation

or, perhaps, a bid at one of its auctions, you are a member.  You can figure some of its services on the signage held above the well.  Reading from the top “Free Supper here each Sunday 6;00 p.m. This Place Open From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Daily, 8 a.m. to 7p.m. on Sunday.”  The Club’s basement also served as a performance space for speakers, readers, and performers.  Nearby at 112 Main Street the Club also ran a restaurant with a nutritious menu that was both cheap and/or free to those with tickets gained from working.  The Club’s first quarters were also fitted with beds.

By using the internet there are, as one might expect for two such well-known and respected services, many sources to learn more about the work of these zestful contributors to our local culture.  With both you would do well to begin with their own web-pages, https://www.millionairclub.org for the Millionair Club and www.realchangenews.org/ for the magazine or tabloid with what it describes as a “compact format.”  Real Change is admirably forthright with its statistics.  Its weekly circulation is about 16,000.  I know from experience, having edited hereabouts a weekly tabloid a half-century ago, that what is printed on the cover can make a surprising difference in how many copies are sold on the street.

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Anything to add, lads?  Certainly Jean, starting first with another offering of Real Change  followed by a variety of past features pulled by Ron and I from our stock of scanned examples.  (And now Jean we will ALSO plead – please – once again – for some dear reader to help us in this.  We ask help in scanning the remaining weekly features. As you know well Jean we are disastrously non-profit and so must plead aka beg.  But we have all the clips from The Times  collected and in proper order, about 1800 of them since Seattle Now and Then started appearing in Pacific on a rainy mid-winter morning in 1982.  We have the scanner too to deliver for use with the clips.  One (or two) boxes will hold it all.  So please have a little mercy for your dutiful history hacks and help us complete this opera.   So far we have roughly 500 of the about 1800 features scanned.  Please help fulfill this blog with the growing sum of its abiding features.  The clips, scanner and grateful instructions are standing by.  

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BACK ON THE CORNER

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THE ILLUSTRATED IVAR

IVAR AND JIM

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1967 – 1977 – 2017  The Golden Anniversary for the founding of HELIX

ODD FELLOWS Hall on Capitol Hill, site of many benefit concerts in the 1970s including a 10th anniversary celebration of the 1967 founding of HELIX, the weekly tabloid hinted about near the end of this week’s feature.

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When the featured historical photo is enlarged there is a surprise waiting in this wetland dump. All the men, I count eighteen teamsters grouped with their trash wagons across the pond, are looking directly at the photographer, most likely James Lee.  For many years Lee was the official photographer for the city’s Public

 

Works Department: our own municipal photographer.  (Beginning in 1983, we have used many of Lee’s records in this weekly feature.)  In the week’s featured photo, Lee – we are confidently assuming – looks northwest through the block bordered by Valley and Aloha Streets, and Eighth and Dexter Avenues. That solitary motorcar parked at the southeast corner of Dexter and Aloha (upper-left) may well be Lee’s.

James Lee had other shots to take this October 29, 1915, a Thursday with light rain.  All had something to do with the city’s solid waste services. This week’s feature is a record of a civic dump and numbered, we assume by Lee, 3147.  Two numbers back, 3145, is the by now often published close-up of a refuse wagon (like the ones grouped here across the water) picking up trash from residences on Capitol Hill’s Belmont Avenue. With 3141, Lee looks into this same littered pit, but from Dexter Avenue and near to what we have imagined is his car.  Upon reflection, it seems that these three print numbers do not indicate the likely order of Lee’s snap-shooting that Thursday.  Why?  It would been wasted effort to expose a negative here at the southwest corner of Lake Union 3147, then climb the hill for an appointment with a dray on Belmont 3145, only to return again to the dump for 3141.  Reverse the order and it is still slipshod.  The photograph numbers were, we propose, given in the dark room without much clerical concern beyond the day’s date.

These years were a stressful time for garbage in booming Seattle.  The city, which had only recently started collecting solid waste for delivery to its nine managed dumps, also built five garbage incinerators between 1907 and 1914.  These “refuse destructors” were disappointing.  Meanwhile, the tide-stirred dump named Puget Sound was ever inviting.

The concrete box in the Featured photograph, behind and to the right of the eight posing wagons, is the Municipal Transfer Station. It was built for Seattle’s first public-owned trollies, which started running in 1914 on Dexter Avenue between the business district and Ballard’s Salmon Bay.  (We featured it with a now-then on April 23, 2000, and have attached it directly above.)  The station, delicately designed with arched windows and an ornamental banding of colored tiles at the cornice, is probably the work of Daniel Huntington, then the City Architect.  The transfer station bears a small resemblance to Huntington’s much larger Seattle City Light Steam Plant, near the southeast corner of Lake Union.

Moving up Queen Anne Hill in the featured photo at the top, note the steep grade separation to the left of the transfer station at the northwest corner of Aloha and Dexter.  The first lines of residences beyond this cut and up the hill were short-lived. They were sacrificed for the Aurora Speed Way in the early 1930s.  But on the horizon, left-of-center, stands the enduring outline of one of Seattle’s more majestic landmarks, the former Queen Anne High School.

Probably of greater interest to Seattle children on this Thursday were Van Camp’s Trained Pigs performances at the Grand Theatre.  After dancing, boxing and drinking milk from nursing bottles, these trained baby pigs were “passed through the audience for the children to pet.”  The Grand was packed for all the little pig shows on both Thursday and Friday.

The Browns lived on Dexter Avenue near Denny Park and  so also near the swimming hole behind the Westlake Viaduct.  Here they are, the entire family, cuddling at home.   The father, William LeRoy Brown, was a clarinetist with the “Dad” Wagner Band and a plumber too.   He was a resourceful photographer and we have use many of his negatives in this weekly feature over the past 35 years.

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Anything to add, guys?   Plenty from the surrounds Jean.  Many of them have been seen hear earlier, but we now have cheerful news of our intentions to scan the rest of the 1800-plus features produced with the now-and-then parade over the last 35 years.  Gosh it would go forward with greater speed and merciful grace if we could find a volunteer or two among our readers to help with the scanning.  And we have an extra scanner on loan from Ron Edge.

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A BRIEF RETURN TO DEXTER AVENUE

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WHILE MUCH OF THE ABOVE, the regrades, construction,  swimming,  was going on, everyone was also preoccupied with the First World War.  Here is a parodic clip from The Times for October 28, 1915.   Give note, for instance, to poor Texas and neglected Nevada.

 

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This week a monumental bust of James J. Hill, aka “The Empire Builder”, has been pulled from a new book titled Seattle Public Sculptors. The author, the Nordic Heritage Museum’s museologist and collections manager, Fred F. Poyner IV, has written with clarity and considerable detail about twelve artists who created “Seattle’s first ‘Golden Age’ of public monuments, memorials and statuary.”  Many of these works, including Finn Haakon Frolich’s baronial bust of James Hill, date from 1909, the year of the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s first worlds fair.

Frolich was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1868 “to a family of means.” We may readily imagine him as a fearless – or impetuous – adolescent, for by Poyner’s well-footnoted recounting, the young Finn Haakon took to the sea at the age of nine and kept to it until 1886 when he jumped ship in Brooklyn.  After answering a classified ad in a daily pulp, Frolich began his education in sculpting, working for several years in studios, including those of the sculptor Daniel Chester French in New York and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Paris.

The thirty-year-old artist first visited Seattle in 1898.  He failed in his first attempt to found a school of design here, but ten years later he returned to many successes. These included establishing his Beaux-Arts Workshop studio in the old Territorial University Building, which still stood on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle, and taking on students, including those who attended his “live modeling in clay” demonstrations performed for audiences on stage at the Alhambra Theatre.

Frolich’s grandest success’, which occurred in 1908, made him the Director for Sculpture for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, held on the new campus of the University of Washington.  The responsibilities included many works of art, including the sculpted likeness that James Hill’s friends described as “so faithful a likeness, down to the minutest detail of resemblance and personality, as to be startling.”  Six-feet-high, Hill’s statue was caste in bronze in New York, and placed on the twelve-foot-high granite pedestal displayed in the featured photo at the center of the fair’s Klondike Circle.  Its ceremonial unveiling was handled by John A. Johnson, the governor of Minnesota, Hill’s home, and it was the Minnesota Club that had gathered the last support needed to pay for it.

In 1953 Frolich’s James J. Hill was moved about a quarter-of-a mile from Northeast Sevens Way to East Stevens Way, where its back faces More Hall (1948), the University’s School of Civil and Environmental engineering.  In the interest of function as much as form, More Hall was given large windows by its architect, John Paul Jones.  It is from these windows that Frolich’s otherwise hidden bronze plaque of James Hill’s steamer The Minnesota (once the

largest vessel on the Pacific Ocean) can be seen with pleasure and for the few who discover it also some surprise.  Attached about hip-high to the rear of the granite pedestal, the plaque is obscured by hefty shrubs.  However, at the front of Frolich’s Hill, another of his bas-relief bronzes honoring the “Empire Builder”, a rendering of a “GNRR” steam engine, can be easily seen exiting a tunnel in the Cascades.

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Let me add the photo we intended to run with the column – that of Fred Poyner standing at the statue’s original location.

Anything to add, lads?  Yes and the usual support from past features and perhaps more, although this bounty will need to wait for tomorrow (Sunday) or Monday, for we are tired early at 4:30 am and hanker to climb the stairs to bed and nighty bears.

For the first feature we will slip in one with another of Frolich’s AYP women.

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DEAR READER – We have more to share, which we will return with tomorrow late evening.   Now we are going to bed.  We may deserve it.

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I sparked when first shown the left half of this ca. 1929 panorama of the Swedish Hospital campus.  Although not placed side-by-side, both parts are included in an album of about 100 photographs taken by Seattle/Ballard professional Klaes Nordquist.  Most of the photos are from the 1920s and have Swedish subjects.  Kristine Leander, the current Executive Director of the thriving Swedish Club, introduced me to the album.  She has recently donated the collection to the stewardship of the Museum of History and Industry both for safe-keeping and public access.

It was only recently that I recognized that the Nordquist album also held the right half of the panorama printed here. The combined view looks south-southwest from Nordquist’s prospect near the northeast corner of Summit Avenue and Marion Street. The original three-story hospital sits one block south at the northwest corner of Summit and Columbia.  Both in the featured panorama and in the photograph printed directly above, it is the ornate structure below the water tank, which is half-hiding behind the chimney at the pan’s center.   (Jean and I first featured this “Summit Avenue Hospital” in PacificNW’s November 8, 2014, issue.  It is repeated below as the first link among those placed by Ron Edge for the week’s’ feature.) Far right in the panorama stands the hospital’s first over-sized addition, planned in 1925 and completed to seven floors in 1929.

When compared to Nordquist’s pan, the formidable jumble of walls stacked in Jean Sherrard’s recent “repeat” is a concrete metaphor for the relentless adjustments needed by Swedish Hospital through its first-century-plus of often manic growth.  One can easily ponder the extent of that growth by visiting the hospital’s own webpage.  While sometimes slippery with public-relations prose, it is packed with this grand health service’s accomplishments.  For an independent narrative of the Swedes on First Hill, Jean and I recommend Historylink, the on-line encyclopedia of Washington State history. (One can link to it at http://www.historylink.org/File/9572.  The essay was authored by Jennifer Ott, Historylink’s Assistant Director.  With David B. Williams, Ott is also co-author of Historylink’s timely new book Waterway, the Story of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal.)

Finally, we will note two nearby landmarks in Nordquist’s pan that in the late 1920s had not yet removed for expansion of the Swedish Hospital campus.  The north façade of the nearly block-long Otis Hotel, far left in the featured panorama is described in a Times classified for June 24, 1928: “This popular residential hotel, 804 Summit, opposite Swedish Hospital is being thoroughly renovated … private phones, excellent meals, splendid location.”  Across Summit Avenue, at its southwest corner with Marion, nestles the

professional home for six eye, ear, nose and throat specialists.  W. Marbury Somervell, at the time one of Seattle’s best-known architects, designed this two-story red brick jewel that opened in 1906. Thirty years later, the clinic was moved on rollers down Marion Street to make room for the expanding Swedish Hospital. For this discovery I wish to thank Ron Edge, already noted above, a friend with both zest and talent for eleventh hour research.

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Here’s a little mystery I found just after snapping the ‘Now’ shot for this feature. Just below the Nordstrom Tower, there is an obstructed view from the sidewalk of a trio of old Corinthian (so they appear to me) pillars, just below the skyway. There are no plaques identifying them and no indication of their former use and location. Dear readers, we invite you to solve the mystery…

Anything to add, boys?  Yes Jean, and most relevant is the first link, our earlier feature on Swedish Hospital..  May the dear readers open it first.

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This coming Thursday August 17^th, John Stamets’ 1986 panorama looking east on Pike Street from the Pike Place Market, printed here, will be exhibited in the Market from 6:30-8:30 PM near where Jean Sherrard took his contemporary parallel earlier this summer.  A mere thirty-one years separate John’s and Jean’s subjects where Pike Street elbows north into Pike Place. We have chosen this subject in part to honor our brilliant old friend whose civic record of photographic achievements was well chosen and utterly unique.  John Stamets died suddenly on the weekend of June 7-8 2014, near his office and basement laboratory in the University of Washington’s Gould Hall where he had been teaching architectural photography for many years.

The featured photo at the top – looking east from the market’s philanthropic pig – appears on page sixty-five of John’s 1987 book “Portrait Of A Market.”  Although now out of print, you may find a used copy with a little web exploring. All of the book’s seventy-three subjects are pans recorded with his Widelux camera, and each takes its own page.  This leaves room for the often evocative captions authored by Steve Dunnington, whom the book’s publisher, Cathy Hillenbrand of The Real Comet Press, explains is a “journalist and co-owner of the Pike Place Market newsstand.”  Thirty years ago or so,

you may have bought a publication from him here at the southwest corner of what remains one of Seattle’s most cherished landmarks: the intersection of First Avenue and Pike Street.  On the Thursday afternoon of August 17, both Dunnington and Hillenbrand will be on hand to share in what is also the Market’s 110^th Anniversary Celebration.

I first met John Stamets in the 1970s on Capitol Hill, we then both rented apartments on 13^th Avenue.  John, a Yale graduate, was then the progressive tabloid Seattle Sun’s last editor and also its last photographer.  Among his many projects that followed were an elaborate colored survey of “Flesh Avenue,” the name sometimes used for First Avenue south of the Market before its gentrification, a masterful collection of portraits of his riders when he was driving a cab, and the oversized record of the business district through its changes in the 1980s and after.  John was also famous for his serendipitous knack for recording the unannounced 1987 collapse of the new construction on the Husky Stadium (he was biking by) and the fall of the Hammering Man at the somewhat new Seattle Art Museum’s entrance in 1991.

This coming Thursday’s unique tour begins at 6:30 pm in in the Market Arcade. (Here is a link, www.pikeplacemarket.org/stametsexhibit  hashtag: #StametsExhibit.)  Each of the twenty featured subjects will be attended and interpreted by a member of the sponsoring organizations, including Friends of the Market, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority, and the King Conservation District.   Later this year, the selected Stamets Market panoramas will be put on permanent exhibit in the Market Commons, part of the new addition on the west side of Western Avenue.

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Anything to add, lads?  Yup Jean and more of the similar, although Ron Edge’s excavations from recent blog contributions (about the market and such) will need to wait on his rising to, we hope, a wet Sunday the 13th.  Meanwhile here follows some old features from the neighborhood.  (Thanks for your stirring Meridian Street block party this Sat. the 12th..  Did you have time to also take some snaps of that joyful congregating of North Green Lake familiars and visiting friends Berangere, our fellow blogger, and her family?)

[Ron is awake, while I am off again to nighty-bears.  The champion of that aka good-night, Bill Burden, is also in town this weekend for visits with Berangere and her family, and tasting Jean’s roasted duck at  the Sherrard’s welcoming banquet on the elegant roof of their garage on Friday last.  So here follows, and just in time, Ron’s links to recent posts.]

 

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Set five-or-so blocks east of Puget Sound and 200 feet above it, Gatewood Elementary School is also only a half mile west of – and about 320 feet below – the highest point in Seattle. At 522 feet above the tides this elevated area is appropriately called Highpoint, and like the school below it, its two water towers face Myrtle Street.

In Jean Sherrard’s “now” Myrtle interrupts the northward extension of 44^th Avenue SW, bottom-left.  In the historical photo we can detect the rails and timber ties of the trolley line that spurred the building of both homes and families in this part of West Seattle.  The streetcars began running south from The Junction at Alaska Street

and California Avenue in 1907.  The tracks turned west on Myrtle and soon after passing the school turned south past the Kenney Home (treated in this column for June 19, 2016)  to reach the nearby Fauntleroy neighborhood and its pier for ferry and mosquito fleet connections with all of Puget Sound, most importantly with Vashon Island.

In spite of the school’s name, no great gate was built to open for admission into these woods.  Rather, the school is named for Carlisle Gatewood, a developer who platted two residential additions nearby: Gatewood Acres and Gatewood Gardens. (You can find them in the Baist Map detail printed above.)  Liking, perhaps, the picturesque qualities of the name, the Seattle School Board kept it for its neighborhood school, which opened in 1910 on the campus’ original 1.67 acres.  The first year’s attendance of 268 students indicates that the school was needed – perhaps desperately.  While the 1922 addition by architect Floyd A. Naramore was later demolished, the original schoolhouse was saved and designated a city landmark in 1988.

Certainly, by many tastes, the Tudor-styled Gatewood School is beautiful.  The architect Edgar Blair was 35 when he moved here in 1906. Three years later he succeeded the prolific James Stephen as the official Seattle school architect. Blair also kept busy. As we learn from the repeatedly helpful UW Press tome Shaping Seattle Architecture, he drew the plans for many other schools with which the reader may well be familiar. His more than 35 school designs (originals and additions) include three Seattle high schools, Franklin (1910-11, above),  Ballard (since replaced) and West Seattle.

Gatewood is but one part of the undulating neighborhood that looks west across Puget Sound from the long and laid back western side of West Seattle.  The five miles from Duwamish Head to Fauntleroy is worth an unplanned exploration.  Across Puget Sound the string of Olympic Mountains summits with their sunsets are the benchmarks for what is also alluring about the western side of West Seattle.  In 1924 the enduring gift of this panorama inspired a sentimental majority of the West Seattle Commercial Club to profess “We feel that the term West Seattle covering the west side is confusing.”  In its place the business boosters proposed a new “blanket term to cover the entire west side.”  The term, elegiac but short-lived, was “Olympic Hills.”

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Anything to add, les mecs? Yes Jean more wallowing by Ron and I mostly in West Seattle or on the way to and from it.   But something  is new.  When we select an appropriate feature that was first published in Pacific before we started our weekly printing of this blog, me will now feel free to mix it with any more recent blog feature with which it mixes well.  For instance four inches below we have snuggled the first illustrated writing we did on Sea View Hall, not so long ago on January 23, 2000, hand-in-hand with our recent treatment of the same structure.  We hope you will find that not too much it lifted from the old narrative into the new.   We decided to do it twice because of our love for Clay Eals, our old friend who until recently was the executive director (or some such status-saturated power-title) for the West Seattle Historical Society.   Start clicking.

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When first glimpsed, this week’s “then” charmed me with a classical restraint that is softly repeated, upside down, in Squak Slough.  Especially satisfying are the comely barn, the blooming fruit tree and the saw-tooth horizon strung with surviving fir trees that for reasons only known to sawyers were earlier rejected by the clear-cutting lumber jacks. We are also puzzled why the unnamed photographer chose to have the farmhouse roof rise above and seemingly out of the barn.  They seem to be attached, but, of course, are not.

Although minimal, the caption penned on the negative is, of course, most helpful.  It gives the indigenous name for the waterway we are now more likely to call the Sammamish River.  Wondering where on the slough/river and by whom this farm was built, Jean and I sought expert help by first printing this Sunday’s photo in our blog dorpatsherrardlomont.  Dean Jowers, a Redmond Historical Society volunteer, read the posting and took the challenge. With a print-out of this farm-scape in hand the retired operations manager, with a talent for details and spatial relations, hiked the fourteen miles that the slough courses between the two big lakes: Sammamish and Washington.  In the beginning of his search, Jowers confesses, “I started at the wrong end of the river and was first wrong three times.” But then with the help of a 1919 topographical map, he found the horizon line.  It registered the slight dent – or slump – above the farmhouse seen in the featured photograph at the top.

In Jean’s repeat, Dean Jowers poses for the “now” with, left-to-right, Margret Turcott and Sue Kienast, both energetic members of the Bothell Historical Society. They confirm Jowers’ research. This a little more than two miles above the Slough’s outflow into Lake Washington.  The “then” photo was taken years before Lake Washington was lowered nine feet in 1916 with the building of the ship canal. In spite of the drop, the slough is still slow moving.

This is John & Christina Blyth’s Farm.  At the urging of her brother Mattias Bargquist, the thirty-three year old Christina emigrated from Sweden in 1884. She soon met her future husband John Blyth, who was her brother’s friend and “next door” neighbor across the Slough. Perhaps there was some romantic maneuvering and conjugal conspiring involved in this meeting, for John accompanied Mattias on the lake steamer that first delivered Christina from Seattle to their farms facing across the Slough.  John soon married Christina in their family home on March 11, 1885.  Margaret Turcott tells this and other Blyth and Bothell stories well in her new book titled “Bothell” to be published this coming August.  Dean Jowers suggests that the bridge showing on the right was built by these intertwined families for their friendly visits.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, fellahs?  Yes Jean, we will not disappoint you.   Like candidates in a voters guide or totem figures on a pole we will stack below some features, old and older, that might lead one directly or eventually to the little river that runs between Bothell and Redmond.

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Here stands historian Fred Brown holding his new book and farmer Jess Jensen holding the roped reins attached to his four cows. The two-legged animals pose near one another and the intersection of NW 58^th Street and 8^th Avenue NW, although across about a century of time.  Before Ballard’s 1907 annexation into Seattle, 58^th was named Times Street (not knowing other or better, I propose that it was named for this newspaper). Resting comfortably at the base of Phinney ridge, Eighth Avenue, then called Division Street, served as Ballard’s eastern border.

Jesse and Kjerstine Jensen were Danish immigrants who built their home in Ballard in the 1890s. Like most of Ballard’s first flood of citizens, Jesse easily found hard but sustaining work with a lumber mill on Salmon Bay.  He signed on with one of the largest, the Ballard Stimson Mill.  Soon, however, the couple built their Ballard farm, raising primarily chickens, pigs and cows.  Kjerstine handled the business of the farm.  The milk was both sterile and popular, selling at a nickel a quart.  Anna, the couple’s daughter, recalled “My mother sold quite a lots of chickens, young fryers.  They’d come and get them and she’d kill them (the chickens) right while they (the customers) were there (waiting).”

If Fred and Jesse could have bridged the century here at the corner, the historian might have first asked the farmer for the names of his cows. Surely they all had them. While paging through his book and pausing at page 58 where this snapshot of Jensen and his bovine quartet is printed, the historian Brown would not have missed the chance for asking the builder-farmer for the photo’s date.  Perhaps it was 1907 or soon after.  One of the first freedoms lost that year with Ballard’s annexation into Seattle was a cow’s liberty to wander the neighborhood.  Here Jesse has his milch cows roped.  Perhaps they are regulated, posing together not in Ballard but in Seattle. Whichever. Brown notes that the Eighth Avenue in the snapshot is still more an inviting pasture for the couple’s cows than a paved arterial.

Brown clarifies the telling title of his book, The City is More Than Human, with a subtitle, An Animal History of Seattle.  For now, I cannot think of a good analogy for his history except to note that once you have read The City Is More Than Human, you may feel that you have been talking with its subjects: beavers, cougars, cattle, cows, horses, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens and salmon.

If you have pets, children with pets, back yard chickens (properly cared for, they are allowed), or an active good will for animals, you may well want to read this book.  Author Brown suggests that it may both help you “see how animals fit into history” and also spur you to “consider how to live amongst animals today.” (To note its own pedigree, Brown’s book is published by the University of Washington Press with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment.)

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, dawgs? YUP JEAN links galore or more of the same, we mean features, old and not-so-old that touch on this week’s subject and its Ballard home.

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MISC-INTERSPECIES ILLUSTRATED

 

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While I do not know the exact date for this portrait of Margaret Denny’s First Hill home, it can be compared to another and similar photograph that appeared in the “Real Estate and Business News” section of The Seattle Times for July 1, 1901.  The newspaper’s caption reads, in part, “The accompanying halftone is a representation of the new Denny Home … one of the most sightly spots in the city.” I think in this instance “sightly” means both “good to look at” and “good to see from.” Understandably, the latter connotation was used repeatedly for promoting the Marlborough House Apartments, seen in Jean Sherrard’s repeat, which succeeded the Denny home in 1928.  From the Marlborough’s ten stories one could take in panoramas of both the Cascade and Olympic Mountains and the continued proliferation of other First Hill apartments as they more often than not replaced single-family homes, some of them near-mansions similar to the Denny Home.

The Times’ caption for its 1901 halftone continues, “The building was erected according to designs prepared by architects Charles Herbert Bebb and Louis Leonard Mendel … It is of brick and is of the Elizabethan Gothic style of architecture.” In their essay on Bebb and Mendel in “Shaping Seattle Architecture,” a UW Press book, architectural historians David A. Rash and Dennis A. Andersen credit Bebb and Mendel with building “the most prominent architectural practice in Seattle during the first decade and a half of the 20^th Century.”  First Hill was increasingly dappled with their creations. In the spring of 1900 The Times credited Bebb with drawing Margaret Denny’s new home, adding that it was “perhaps the handsomest dwelling commenced this year.”

Both the featured photograph at the top and The Times halftone look to the northwest corner of Margaret Denny’s home.  Addressed at 1220 Boren Avenue, it rests on Lots 1 and 4 of Block 116 in Denny’s Broadway Addition – the southeast corner of University Street and Boren Avenue.  Arthur Denny, Margaret’s father and a Seattle patriarch, named the former street in the 1850s. He hoped to build a university – and did – in the early 1860s:  the University of Washington.  Boren Street was named for the family name of Mary Ann Denny and her brother Carson.  Arthur and Mary Ann Denny are most often described as the “Founders of Seattle” and their six children – younger daughter Margaret Lenora included – helped promote them as such. In 1901, two years after Arthur’s death, Mary Ann accompanied Margaret to their new First Hill home.  The industrious daughter, an astute business woman, at the time was collecting rent then from several renters, including The Seattle Times for the new plant it was building on Denny property downtown at Second Avenue and Union Street.

Mother Mary Ann Denny died late in 1910.  The funeral was held on the first day of January 1911, here in their First Hill home.  Four years later the 68-year-old `Margaret Lenora Denny drowned in the Duwamish River with three others, after the chauffeured car they were riding in plunged into the river from the bridge at Allentown.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, amigos? Si  For his Edge Links we conspired to include 25 links that related to the neighborhood.  Twenty-sixth concludes the list not for any relevant to the Denny Home but for the sad stroke that recently closes Wallingford’s Guild 45 Theatre.

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MORE FEATURES

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This public works photograph looks into a regrade trench marked on its sides by the claws of the two steam shovels shaping the pit. The teams with their wagons wait patiently to be rattled while being filled with Ice Age droppings.  From another photo, also recorded on February 20, 1911, we know that at least two more wagons are here out-of-frame to the right. All are pointed north down the center of

Fifth Avenue at its new grade.  Ultimately, of course, Fifth Avenue will be hard-paved – it is in the contract – but not for the comfort of horses.  They prefer the mud.  After a wagon’s turn comes up and it is filled, its team will turn left (west) down the freshly dug cut on Cherry Street to the paved avenues below, proceeding to make its assigned delivery, perhaps on the tideflats.  The teams will try not to slip.

We can estimate the speed of this digging with a photograph published in The Seattle Times on March 30, 1911, “printed” above.  It aims in the same angle as the featured photo from the west side of Fifth Avenue, but The Times photographer has moved on and followed the shovels’ work to the north side of Cherry Street.  The stately home, near Columbia Street, seen in the featured photo at the top  in the clear light just to the left of the shovel’s exhaust also appears in The Times published photo, where it is, however, set on blocks preparing for removal to some friendlier lot.  The helpful Times caption also offers some context and statistics for this regrade.  The Fifth Avenue Regrade reached from Washington Street to Madison Street and moved 190,00 cubic yards of earth at 49 cents a yard. (We may, again, sympathize with the horses.) The contracts for grading, sewerage, water mains, walks, lights and (to the horses potential distress) paving, came to $270,000.

Later in November, 1911, the work was stalled when the contractors Marks, Russell and Gallagher (their name is signed on each steam-shovel below the operator’s window) stopped digging until the city agreed to indemnify them from any further slides that might damage buildings along what was left of the Fifth Avenue Regrade.  By then seven structures had been wrecked, most of them near Yesler Way. (The THIRD of the Edge Links that follow this little essay will open another feature that concentrates on the Fifth Avenue slides at Yesler that accompanied the regrading of Fifth Avenue nearer its start.)

Public works watching was a popular pastime during the early 20^th-century regrading years.  A line of regrade watchers seen in the featured photo on the right stand on or near Cherry Street. Soon, however, these spectators will have their platform upset when the shovels continue their clawing to the east (right) as far as Sixth Avenue where Cherry Street reaches a natural steppe, or plateau, that paused First Hill’s climbing for one block, as far as Seventh Avenue.

In this block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues the regraders exposed but did not upset the Kneeland House (aka the Leland Hotel), a red brick hostelry at 511 Cherry Street.  It was three-stories high with thirty-six rooms and set on the south side of the street just west of the alley.  The cutting on Cherry left the hotel about thirty feet higher, and with this difference came a tragedy.  On the fifteenth of November, renter Ella Johnson, with her helper Nettie Herserma, when lowering furniture from the hotel into the new cut, the hotel’s railing gave way. The women were delivered to the Wayside Hospital in the Bonney Watson hearse, which doubled as an ambulance when not busy with “loved ones.”  Struggling with a broken back, Johnson died, while Herserma recovered.

[from The Times for Sept. 21, 1912.  ASK HEAVY DAMAGES – Judgment for $100,000 for the death of Mrs. Ella J. Johnston was asked in the superior court yesterday afternoon against George Nicholls, owner of a building at 511 Cherry Street, which Mrs. Johnston rented.  On November 15 last a porch rail gave way beneath her weight and she was precipitated thirty feet to the ground, sustaining a broken back, from which injury she died later.  James T. Lawler, administrator of the estate, brought one suit for $50,000, and the three minor children of Mrs. Johnston joined in another for a similar amount.]

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mates?  Many relevant links Jean – most either from the neighborhood or of other street regrades.   Note, again, there is more on the Fifth Avenue regrade in the third of the twenty-seven  “Edge Links” stacked immediately below.

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This Sunday’s feature is another witness to photographer Frank Shaw’s interest in the changes to our cityscape that came with the building of the Seattle Freeway on the western slope of First Hill.  Through its construction in the 1960s, this part of the I-5 Freeway kept to a block-wide swath between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Shaw dated this example of his Hasselblad’s work December 6, 1962, a mere fifty-seven years ago.

PacificNW first visited this block with another now-and-then feature pulled from the Shaw collection that showed the sunlit façade of the same brick and stone building whose back fills most of this week’s feature.  Located at the southwest corner of Columbia Street and Seventh Avenue, it was the Seattle Fire Department’s new headquarters built soon after the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. We may speculate that the preservationist in Shaw took his earlier photo in admiration of his subject’s substantial architecture, as well as it distinguished past.  Dated August 6, 1960, it was first printed in Pacific on Sunday, January 19, 2014. (Shaw’s colored shot of the fire station and the 2014 feature that interpreted it, are included below as the first of the many Edge Extras that follow Jean’s question below “Anything to add, blokes?)

The more “in your face” subject in the feature at the top is the collapsing rear stairway of the three-story apartment row that in time strung five addresses together on the west side of Seventh Avenue, north from its corner with Cherry Street to the Monticello Hotel.  Construction of the row began in the late 1880s, but not at the corner.  Footprints of its first two flats, the most westerly units of the row, are drawn in the 1888 Sanborn Fire Insurance map.  (Included here two illustration up.)  These two were built on the largest of the row’s five lots, and their roofs distinguished them from the addresses beginning at Cherry Street.  It seems fitting that the

often generous flow from the First Hill springs that supplied pioneer Seattle are shown rushing across the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Cherry Street in the 1878 birdseye view of the city.  Perhaps the centuries-old fluid dynamics at this corner had something to do with the eleventh-hour settling of the Coo Coo’s back porch.

The recent revelation of the row’s last name, Coo Coo, seems to us both appropriate and surely silly.  The name of the apartments and the tavern at the corner appear in my copies of the Polk City Directory for 1938 and 1950.  In the 1938 edition the Coo Coo’s proprietor, George H. Thomas, lives at 701 1/2 Seventh Avenue, and so perhaps above the Tavern listed at 701 Seventh Avenue.  We learn from a Times clipping for May 12, 1944, that both George and his wife Ethel had their tavern license suspended for twenty days for their “purchase of improperly stamped beer from an unlicensed wholesaler.”  This, I’m guessing, was a profitable racket learned during Prohibition and continued afterwards.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, blokes?  Yup Jean, and its again more features (relevant or appropriate)  that we unload on your digity-dock.  

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Long ago, years before The Times first encouraged me in late 1981 to submit these “now and then” features to Pacific, I came upon this street scene while gently thumbing through a stack of vintage Seattle photographs.  I was stirred by the unnamed photographer’s composition.  Was it the church on the left, or the classy Schoenfeld Standard Furniture billboard beside it that was first intended for recording until, that is, four motorcars reached the intersection and put a lock on it. Did the photographer then sacrifice the church’s steeple and dip her or his camera to record the roofs of the two parked cars and the Detroit square dance that has formed in the intersection of Olive Way and Terry Avenue?

Perhaps this is less a dance than a tableau of vehicles pausing for something or someone to unclog the jam they have created.  The man in the dark overcoat at the photo’s center is standing very near the right front fender of the small coupe that is clearly prevented from continuing east on Terry by the classy sedan on the left.  We suspect that the latter is waiting to turn north – and left – on to Terry. Meanwhile another sedan at the far right, heading west on Olive Way, waits for the coupe to get out of the way.  The man in the overcoat may believe that he has the right-of-way.  We know the drivers’ rights.  Note the two stop signs: the one, bottom-right and the other standing across the intersection in the narrow parking strip.  Clearly, the right to cross here belongs to the vehicles, the sedan on the left and the sedan entering the intersection far right, on Olive Way

 

FOR COMPARISON, ABOVE AND BELOW – TWO LOOKS EAST ON OLIVE STREET FROM THE ELEVATED PROSPECTS OF DENNY HOTEL on top of Denny Hill (FIRST) AND THE NEW WASHINGTON HOTEL, built as Second Avenue and Stewart Street following the regrade.  With a careful search the south facade and steeple of the Reformed Presbyterian can be found in the second photo (below) but not in the older look (above) east on Olive.    Olive begins at the recently regraded bottom of the photo below where it separates from Stewart Street at Fourth Avenue.  Again, Gethsemane Lutheran with its shining white facade can be spied  five blocks east on Stewart Street at Ninth Avenue. The Volunteer Park standpipe breaks the Capitol Hill horizon on the left.

Both the man in the overcoat and the driver in the coupe (with his elbow hanging out of his rolled-down window) have, it seems, their eyes on the driver of the big sedan.  Perhaps the two pedestrians crossing Terry Street, on the left, are walking briskly to escape any developing collision.  Everyone involved might have been comforted by what is written on the door of the coupe, which, although hard to decipher in this printing, reads “Seattle Health Dept.”

When I first saw this packed subject, I knew that I could easily return to the intersection with my own camera because of a clue on the horizon at the top-center: the Gethsemane Lutheran steeple on the southeast corner on Boren Street and Ninth Avenue. For decades it was across Ninth from the bus depot.

By the 1920s this was a neighborhood of churches, some new, and others decamped from their original and fiscally more valuable pioneer locations, in what became the central business district. The Reformed Presbyterians dedicated their church on Olive Street in 1894. They had also purchased the corner lot at Terry Avenue and probably collected rent from the billboard company.  The church was later lifted and fitted with a basement for a kitchen and Bible School classes.  Eventually most of the neighborhood churches either closed or relocated to more distant residential neighborhoods where the land was, again, cheaper.  The Reformed Presbyterians, also known as the Church of the Covenanters, moved in the 1940s to the Ravenna neighborhood, where they to continue to worship.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, bubba?  Jean this bubba-blog business is by now routine.  How many years have we been at it?  Only you carry the keys to these mysteries.  So we start again with a few Edge Links – 25 if them – pulled from past blogs by Ron Edge for the Horatian instruction of our readers, and follow it with a few more distant (in time of publishing) features scanned from clips.  We proceed, we keep hinting, hoping that some happy reader will help us scan the rest – about 1200 of them – perhaps  for a break from your surfing or injurious habit.   By now we know that for many of you these added layers and  metalayers within them are becoming increasingly familiar to the attentive readers we imagine among you – bless you.   Finally, please search for the Gethsemane Lutheran Church steeple repeated in the first three of Ron’s links.  It also appears in the featured photo at the top.

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BELOW: Later – note the Washington State license plate from 1938, the nativity year for one of us.

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180 DEGREE VARIATION 

Here gain is Werner Lenggenhager on Melrose Place North, but this time looking in the opposite direction to the north and in the summer with the Place now dry and looking like it has been so for a while.    We do not known which of the two Werner shot first.   We used this one a few years back in our book Washington Then and Now, and the summer comparison also appeared in Pacific, but before they added color to our pages – and many others – in the magazine.   

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Again, for this Sunday “repeat” (at the top) Jean respects the historical prospect of the featured photograph and returns to it – barely.  To really repeat the prospect of the featured photographer, Werner Lenggenhager, would require a hovering drone or the guiding and guarding of a phalanx of the Washington State Patrol Troopers accompanying Jean north of Denny Way to the narrow green belt of shrubbery between the Seattle Freeway’s lower south bound lane and its higher north bound lane.

What Jean did instead was take to the closest prudent prospect: a position above interstate-5 on the Denny Way overpass.  From there, looking south, his “now” reveals an electric cityscape of high-rises and cumulous clouds standing above the north-bound late-morning traffic.  It is an eye-popping contrast.  Within a few seconds of an I-5 driver heading north under Denny Way they will pass by Lenggenhager’s “alley-scape” position in the mid 1950s. It is about a block and a half north of Denny Way.  (We found it with the help of aerial photographs.) The sensitive perambulator was then exploring what he knew was the doomed block-wide strip between Eastlake and Melrose Avenues, then recently condemned for cutting the Seattle Freeway.

The Austrian Werner Lenggenhager moved to Seattle in 1939 and was soon working at Boeing.  He lived on nearby Olive Street just up the hill. As already not above, this is not the first time we have followed Lenggenhager to this alley.  On July 28, 2001 “now and then” featured him looking north at it in the summer when the mud had turned to dust.  Next Spring (2018) when Jean and I hope to publish a book featuring an idealized “best of” collection of one hundred picks from the by now nearly 1800 “now and thens” printed in Pacific since the feature started early in 1982, we will want to include one or the other  (mud or dust) of Lenggenhager’s nostalgic preludes to the Seattle Freeway.

Werner Lenggenhager retired from Boeing in 1966, giving him more time to explore both Seattle and Washington State with his camera.  Parts of the many thousands of prints that make up his oeuvre are kept in public collections, including those at the University of Washington Library, the Museum of History and Industry and the Seattle Public Library.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys?  Yes Jean more faithfully ours and the  readers’ Edge Links that will click us about the neighborhood and beyond, followed by a few more from more ancient features.  For those you’d best click-and-enlarge to read them – sometimes twice.

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CLICK CLICK the ABOVE to Read Read

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This week’s feature may be the earliest surviving look into Ballard.  Beyond that we know little about the photo’s intimate parts. We wonder who lived in any of the about thirty minimal structures that can be barely distinguished through the soft focus and smoke.  The white vapors are most likely from stump fires. The photo’s focus may be the responsibility of the age of the print, the camera, or the person who held it.  We don’t know the photographer’s name, nor are we certain of what the community was called at the time of the recording. However, “Farmdale” is scribbled on the flip side of the worn print I first studied.

Farmdale was Ballard’s first and short-lived name.  In 1889 Ballard got its second name, Gilman Park, and the once forested acres that gently sloped south to the north shore of Salmon Bay were divided into hundreds of residential lots and a few larger ones for the factories that were soon strung along the Salmon Bay shoreline.  Daniel Hunt Gilman was one of a quartet of robust capitalists who organized the ambitiously named West Coast Improvement Company to develop the site.  The place was extraordinary fit for building a community for sawyers not farmers. Judge Thomas Burke,

 

another of the ruling quartet, was happy to give up his bucolic visions of gardens in Farmdale for factories.  In four or five chop-chop years the mill town became “The Shingle Capitol of the World,” and more often than not it smelled like Cedar. With its 1890 incorporation, came the third try at naming, and the citizens chose Ballard.  It was given in thanks for William Rankin Ballard the steamboat captain who before the railroad made it to Salmon Bay regularly delivered settlers and their needed supplies to its shores.  Capt. Ballard was another of the company’s quartet.

Of the two waterways shining in the featured panorama at the (very) top, Salmon Bay is, of course, the nearer one.  The other is Elliott Bay.  The wide headland on the horizon is West Seattle.  Right-of-center, its highest elevation is “High Point,” the top of Seattle. (The high point tanks were included last week in a Bradley snapshot taken from South Alki Beach.  They appear on the horizon.)  High Point is about 9 miles south of the Ballard waterfront and about 510 feet above it. Magnolia is on the right, and Queen Anne Hill on the left, with the lowland, Interbay, between them. Left-of-center, at the southwest corner of Queen Anne Hill, the old growth trees of Kinnear Park stand out – and up. For a formality of one dollar, its namesake sold Kinnear Park to Seattle in the fall of 1887, about the time of the featured photo.

Our featured photo is also printed on page 24 of the illustrated history “Passport To Ballard, The Centennial Story.”  The caption there reads, “The Gilman Park community on Salmon Bay, on the eve of incorporation.  This is one of the earliest known photographs of the community.  Old notes identify the street as 22^nd Avenue NW.”  Jean and I think this likely.  We choose NW 57^th Street as the repeat for the graded path and planked boardwalk that runs – ca. 1889 – behind the surviving fir tree on the left.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  TaTa Jean the same routine.  We start with a few recent relevant links that Ron has pulled from the blog itself, and then add a few more that we have scanned for some reason or other from our old clippings.  Some day soon we hope to find a phalanx of well-armed volunteers who will scan them all.

EDGE LINKS BELOW

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Back when the beaches of West Seattle offered a remote respite from the raucous rebuilding of downtown Seattle, an outpouring of tents, shacks, camps and cottages welcomed visitors for a salty stay. One of the sturdiest of these was in the neighborhood called South Alki, now more plainly Beach Drive. This unique structure was – and still is — called Sea View Hall.  It was not really a hall and didn’t sport a view of the sea. But the no-less compelling vision from this 1904 vertical-log home was of Puget Sound, a vista that remains today from the second and third floors over the rooftops of houses that sit closer to the water’s edge.

One year after its 1904 construction in then-unincorporated King County, it hosted “one of the dainty weddings of the season,” the bride being Marguerite Rose Maurer, daughter of the builder, John Mauer. as reported in the Nov. 5, 1905, Seattle Sunday Times, “The house, which is one of the prettiest on the point, was elaborately decorated and lighted only by candles.”  With its “Adirondike styled logs set vertical rather than horizontal like the “Birthplace of Seattle” Log House museum.  The Lodge and the Museum, with the rustic Bernard Mansion (long the Homestead Restaurant), are Alki Point’s three surviving log houses.

The Sea View Lodge soon became a cherished landmark on South Alki warranting its own colored postcard.  One example kept in the archive of the Log House Museum and dated June 17, 1911, reads invitingly “This is a good town having parties here every week.  Big time here on the 4^th, firing up the street already.”

Our featured “then” photo dates from 1954, five years before Benny Goltz with her two sisters moved into the Hall when their mother, Margaret, acquired it.  Benny recalls, the place was then nearly “falling down” so much that banks wouldn’t loan her mother money to purchase it. But “Mom fell in love with it,” tapped her savings and hired a carpenter to return again and again to “straighten it up.”  Benny was married at Sea View Hall in February 1968.

This week’s feature is our return to Sea View Hall, having first marked it with the postcard photo for a “now and then” on Jan. 23, 2000. (Its is printed here three or more illustrations up.) We revived our interest because after years of careful restoration and renovation of the Hall and its colorful grounds, it is ready for its starring role in the annual “If These Walls Could Talk” home tour of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society. The tour will be both a wonderfully unique exploration of Sea View Lodge and a fundraiser for the 33-year-old organization that promotes the heritage of the West Seattle peninsula and operates from aforementioned log house-turned-museum.   Runs from 3 to 5 p.m. next Sunday, June 4, rain or shine. The South Alki address for Sea View Lodge, 4004 Chilberg Avenue, is fittingly one block off  the beach and Weather Watch Park.

Those attending (by $10 donation for members, $15 non-members) will be welcomed by proprietors Terry Mann and Glen Poor, as well as volunteer researchers and greeters including Ann McClary, Sandie Wilkinson, Dora-Faye Hendricks, Bobbie Meehan, Molly McNees, Brad Chrisman, Bethany Green, Mary Beth Hatfield. Displays will detail the history of the home and its once-quaint tourist surroundings. For those wanting the benefit of a full presentation on Sea View Hall, plus refreshments and old-time ukulele music, a VIP session is on tap earlier in the afternoon. You can learn more at loghousemuseum.info.

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WEB EXTRAS

Just shot a gathering of West Seattle High School alums on the 100th anniversary of its opening. Another in a long series of Clay Eals extravaganzas he calls “group hugs.”

Here’s a pretty high resolution version for your enjoyment:

Anything to add, fellahs?   Yes Jean and we will begin with a question.  How do you reach these heights?  I know you purchased a new extender pole of 22&1/2-plus feet for you heavy Nikon,  Add to that your about nine-foot reach and perhaps a ladder too, with a wide-angle lens – was that the piggybacking that did it?  Or did Clay deliver a cherry-picker to you?

[JEAN ANSWERS HERE:            ]

Somewhere in the bunch of related features below, most of them from West Seattle, you will find one that looks at the same front facade of West Seattle Hi.  It was graciously shot by Clay Eals years ago – when the story was first published.   It was not the first time that Clay helped out with his camera – or more –  for this feature.  Surely there cannot be many others through the history of West Seattle who have given as much exuberant help to its culture as has this director of the West Seattle Historical Society.   I first met Clay thirty-plus years ago when he was the editor of the West Seattle Herald.  I gave him minor help with preparing Westside Story, his and the newspaper’s illustrated history of the peninsula.  I’ve been fond of him every since.

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FIRST a bundle of EDGE CLIPS followed by a few more from ancient features with a reminder from Eda Garena, my mother (also called Cherry) “Repetition is the Mother of All Learning.”  (Note: she may have shared it with Horace.)

MOTHER DORPAT SOMEWHERE IN MONTANA

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RON’S LINKS FIRST, followed by a few OLDER LINKS

 

 

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Jean Sherrard’s and my plans to photographically repeat the inside of Seattle Center’s Mercer Arts Arena (originally the Ice Arena) were interrupted by the recent decision to tear it down.  The arena would seat about 5000 – when not flooded for skating.  It was dedicated in 1928, and so by antiquarian standards did not qualify as “antique.”   And yet in its mere 89 years, the Arena did manage to live within two skins.

The birthday suit of concrete dated from 1927 and showed some “Minimal Romanesque” ornaments like arched windows, decorative trim, and four gargoyles that faced Mercer Street above the Arena’s entrance.  These adornments were subdued with Century 21’s architect Paul Thiry’s 1961-2 wrapping (also minimal) with bricks.  They were laid for a modern polish thought more fitting for the “forward thrusting” Fair.  The changes of course were not necessary for the Fair’s performers using the arena like Lawrence Welk, the Century 21 Horse Show, the Mormon Pageant, the Ringling Bros and Shrine Circuses, and the Ice Follies, to name a few.

The immigrant history for the future Seattle Center began in the 1850s with pioneers David & Louisa Denny. By the 1870s the young couple had nurtured a garden to feed their growing family and also much of Seattle.  Beginning in the late 1920s Seattle’s Civic Center grew atop this garden. Its three largest structures, a sports field with covered bleachers, the Arena and the Auditorium – all of them labeled as civic – were bunched south of Mercer Street in what were formerly the Denny’s garden acres.

The Center’s larger parts had all been nurtured from a modest grant bequeathed in the early 1880s when the Denny’s were still tending their gardens.  The gift to the city was made by a gregarious bar owner named James Osborne. Over nearly a half-century this spirits’-borne endowment gathered a cash pile high enough to raise what the public house owner had wished for, a public hall owned by the public.  The bonus legacy of the Arena was fitted with a floor for the center’s many “Ice Events.” These included amateur and professional hockey, gala ice shows, and extended hours of public skating like that recorded in this week’s featured photograph. Of course, there were skates to rent, instruction to be had, and organ music to accompany nearly a half-year of public gliding.   At the start the floor was frozen five months a year.

The recent razing of the Arena did not raise much commotion.  In his KIRO radio commentary, Feliks Banel, the station’s zestful historian, quote’s Seattle historian David Rash characterization of the Arena as something of an “orphan.”  Rash points out what many others have sensed since Century 21, that the mix of the Arena’s uses – for the most part pop concerts and for the Seattle Opera convenient practice space – with storage – the Arena has had “no built-in constituency of regular users or devoted fans to speak up for it.”  Banel notes, “It’s been offline for so many years.”

WEB EXTRAS

Let me provide a close-up detail from the ‘Now’ photo – above the arm of the yellow tractor, a last glimpse of the original seating:

Anything to add, lads?  Coitenly and silly too, Jean.

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MORE AREA ICE

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Intermittently, Kodachrome slides by Lawton Gowey may be expected with this weekly feature.  Lawton was a good friend with whom I often compared and shared photographs.  He began his clicking with his father before the second World War and continued exploring Seattle with his camera until his death in the mid-1980s.  Lawton was both a creator and a collector, and Jean’s and my illustrated lectures – what we used to call “slide shows” – are elaborately enriched due to Lawton’s many interests, including this one of Seattle’s waterfront and its diverse navy.

Lawton worked as an auditor for Seattle City Light, at the northwest corner of Third Avenue and Madison Street, about five blocks east up First Hill from this Elliott Bay slip between Piers 55 and 56 at the foot of Seneca Street. His office was an excellent prospect from which to keep an eye on the waterfront. It was Lawton’s helpful practice to consistently and clearly name and date his subjects on the borders of his slides; for the featured photo at the top the caption reads “The Nippon Maru, Pier 56, June 29, 1965.”  It was the last full day of the Japanese training barque’s visit to Puget Sound before it returned to Tokyo by way of Honolulu.  Capt. Isao Kieda, the ship’s master, thanked the 29,849 persons (by his count) who had boarded his ship during its stay.  “My young cadets have been deeply impressed by your good will and kindness.”

Parked to the reader’s side of the Nippon Maru in the featured photo at the top are two vessels belonging to Lynn Campbell’s Harbor Tours, long since renamed Argosy.  Campbell was stocked with zest, and long-lived.  Self-taught, he lectured his passengers on waterfront history or anything else that came up.  Following WWII, he started a tugboat business hauling logs across Puget Sound that soon developed into the popular showman’s affordable and interpreted floating tours, most of them around Elliott Bay and/or between it and Lake Washington. Campbell’s daughter Charlotte, a wharf rat, was often aboard.  She recalled that in the early 1950s, “This was a working waterfront.  Train cars backed into docks.  The bows of great ships loomed over our heads.” That soon changed.

By 1965, the year of the Nippon Maru’s visit, Seattle’s waterfront was well into its metamorphosis from traditional maritime work into a midway of cafes like the Cove and import curio shops like Trident – both seen here on the south side of Pier 56. Ted Griffin’s Waterfront Aquarium had opened on the bay-end of Pier 56 for the 1962 Century 21 World’s Fair. The general scramble hereabouts to fill the entertainment holes left by the Fair when it closed in the fall of 1962, included the ambitious Griffin’s aquarium followed in 1965 by his Namu.  Griffin’s well-reported convoy pulled Namu, a net-caged killer whale captured in Alaska, down the inside passage to a new pen at the water end of Pier 56.  Griffin paid for the prized critter out of a gunnysack filled with $8,000 in loose change he had gathered from friends and businesses on the Seattle waterfront. Along the way, news of Namu spread rapidly (and professionally), and an excited flotilla of naturalists, reporters, and happy hour celebrities formed, with nothing more pressing on their schedules than to follow a killer whale to Seattle.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, guys?  Dearest Jean Randal Sherrard, and hoping I have got the spelling for you middle name correct.  Ron Edge, I, and our readers – I’m confident – wish  you a happy 60th Birthday – so Young!   And so fit.  Here we will insert a late photo of Elvis Presley that dates surely from before his death at the age of 42 in 1977.   We will also hang from (or below) Elvis a photo of you about seven  years ago (so around age 54) we’ve pulled from a promotional card for one of the many Rogue’s Christmases you have produced at Town Hall.  And let the reader know that you look even better now, having lost many pounds at the hands of no one or nothing but your own diet that includes some nearly magic low-cal jello. And now you exersize as well – exploring the city for …

… pictures at an exuberant and often enough joyful pace as you repeat – and re-repeat – 100 locations for the “Seattle Now and Then, Best Of” book that we hope to have completed and delivered to its readers sometime this coming October.   And yet Dear Jean feel confident that should some other concern press upon you at school or somewhere else off the Cougar Mountain Campus of Hillside (dear reader, the school is described in a bug near the top)  we can always postpone for a season or even a year.  For now, though, we pause at the waterfront.  Stay happy , healthy and salty – enough.

Here’s the topper – another happy mass of Edge Clippings of apt and old features.

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In line and alert, members of the Fremont Historical Society stand for Jean Sherrard’s “repeat” on the southbound lanes of the Fremont Bascule Bridge. The FHS members have just adjourned from their April meeting (the second Saturday) in the nearby conference room of the Fremont Public Library.  The historians met in part to consider where to stand for the “repeat” of this week’s featured “then” and together study the inviting jumble of meanings included in the older photograph.  The leading goals are, of course, to discover or uncover the “where” and “when” of the photograph, which, judging from the shadows, was recorded around noon.  Although it came with no caption, the members easily knew, and in unison, that his was Fremont Avenue.  They were less secure regarding its uncertain elevation.  That will take more time.

Early during the members joint research someone noticed the sign exhibited, upper-left, in the second floor corner window of the clapboard business block.  It reads “Mabel Canney, Piano”.  Searches of city directories revealed that Mabel, and probably her piano, were located here in 1908 and 1909 but were then followed in 1910 by her younger sister Ella Mae.  This, of course, strongly suggests that the Canneys were a musical family, but also that this subject looking north on Fremont Avenue was photographed sometime when one, or both, of the sisters was in residence there.

With the help and confirmation of other photographs, plus city maps – especially the real estate maps of 1908 and 1912 (as seen for inspection eleven photographs above) – and directories, the deliberating FHS membership could eventually calm the uncanny feeling that something was a kilter here.  Through the years of building the Lake Washington Ship Canal, 1911-1917, there were big grade changes here.

In the featured photograph at the top in this first block south of the intersection of Fremont Avenue and Ewing Street, now 34^th Street, Fremont Avenue was cut off and dropped below a retaining wall.  In the process, both the mercantile building with the Canney piano on the left, and the mill warehouse on the far right, were settled to rest below the deck of the new but short-lived Fremont Bridge constructed in 1911-12.  That was not the bascule bridge, which opened in 1917, but its penultimate span that reached N. 34^th Street and the Fremont Business district at the new and still holding elevation.   The investigating Society also discovered that the railroad track, which curves across the bottom of the subject, was kept to pass below the new Fremont Bridge.  It was the Seattle and International Railroad spur that reached Fremont’s main employer, the Bryant Lumber Mill, to the right and behind the unnamed photographer.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?   Yes Jean, those directly below that Ron Edge put up earlier this evening, and eventually a few more relevant features that I’ll pull from the archive after breakfast.   It is 5:19 AM Saturday morning now, and I’m going to bed.  Remembering  now and in honor of Bill Burden its parent the kind good night “Nighty-Bears.”  I climb the stairs.

 

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From his climb to the cornice of the eighteen-story Medical Dental Building, Jean Sherrard has thoughtfully returned with some frosting, one of the building’s crowning terra-cotta ornaments.  Peeking at the bottom-right corner of Jean’s repeat, resembling a lampshade, it is one small part of the building’s elegant skin.

First imagined by its mix of professional (physicians and dentists) developers as a “real medical center in Seattle,” the polished and ornate Medical Dental Building was dedicated in 1925.  With its ceramic tile cladding and more, the tower would be interpreted as an example of the late Gothic Revival, which, as it turned out, was a style about to lose its popularity.

Looking north, from its tower, Westlake Avenue can be followed to Denny Way, where it elbows slightly to the northeast to complete its arterial duty to both Westlake and eventually Eastlake at the south shore of Lake Union.  Westlake was sided by the triangular blocks and buildings fashioned in 1906-7 when it was cut through from Pike Street to Denny Way.  Its landlords briefly named this new and direct approach to the north “The Big Funnel”.

Jean’s thoughtful inclusion of the decorative ornament encourages us to extend our short review of the architectural history of this retail neighborhood at the north end of Seattle’s central business district.  It began in earnest in the early 1880s with a few retailers scattered about the slopes of the by then clear-cut Denny Hill.  The businesses were mixed with modest residences – some in rows – and tenements, all made from lumber milled on the shores of Elliott Bay and Lake Union. Aside from the built-for-show blocks around Pioneer Square and on Front Street (First Avenue N.) the fancier construction of this  metropolis began only after its cinder-scrubbing by the Great Fire of 1889.  Seattle began then to earnestly boom and build, often with bricks and the encouragement of better insurance rates for those who embraced both the new ordnances and bricks.

As for grace and style, terra-cotta tiles became nearly a necessity for any proud developer in the new twentieth century, until the expense of it became forbidding in the thirties with the Great Depression and/or too fussy for the more functional modernist tastes.   One sizeable resister to modernity, “the Old Quarter,” appears here in the featured photo on left of Westlake and to this side of Denny Park’s greenbelt, also on the left.  This is the last of the Denny Hill neighborhood.  In 1911 it was left to molder when the Denny Hill Regrade reached Fifth Avenue and stopped.  It remained dormant until 1929 when everything in this triangle was razed, including the low rents, just in time for the Great Depression.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boyos? Sure Jean and by now we know the march.  Ron Edge and I put up a sturdy parade of part features that relate to the week’s primary subject or concern or thereabouts.   (Here I had hoped to include the original latin for “Repetition if the Mother of  All Learning” but my computer has lost my “Google Translate” capacities.    For the moment.)

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