(click to enlarge photos)

As I remember, the first question about local history that I was ever asked was. “What became of General Hospital?”  While I did not know, yet I answered, “Has it changed channels?”  I was, of course, alluding to the soap opera, General Hospital. The real Seattle General Hospital had its beginnings in 1895 when a group of women rallied for a second, and protestant, hospital for the city. After two earlier locations, the building in today’s photo opened in November of 1900.

In those early years of acting like a pubic historian, I was repeatedly asked questions about Seattle General. Someone in the enquirer’s family had been born there – or died there.  So what became of Seattle General?  Now I suspect that that commonplace curiosity was generated in part because after seventy years of serving on Fifth Avenue, directly across Marion Street from its spiritual and fiscal advisor, the First Methodist Church, this brick landmark was sold to the Bank of California for about one million dollars.  After the patients were moved to the former Maynard Hospital on First Hill, demolition began on April 29, 1971.  Soon the slender bank, which Jean shows in part with his repeat, took to the sky.  And the old brick landmark?  It was missed.

In October 1975 the governing boards of three Seattle hospitals – Doctors, Swedish and Seattle General – agreed to merge under the name Swedish Medical Center.  To me, a Dane, the Scandinavian choice was a wise one, with connotations of competence, compassion and surely for some, strong broad-shouldered nurses with hair that reflected the sun.  By now we know Swedish very well, but it seems, no one – or only a few – still ask about Seattle General.

It was once typical for local papers to report on the progress of patients, and through its many years, Seattle General garnered lots of news.  For instance, in the Seattle Times for March 26, 1905, we learn under “Society”, that “Mrs. George B. McCulloch, who underwent a successful operation for appendicitis Tuesday, is at the Seattle General Hospital, where she will remain until convalesant.”  News about celebrity appendectomies, like that on April 1, 1903, for Puget Mills owner E.G. Ames, were often headlined in bold type.

Concluding now with the other General Hospital, by now the oldest TV soap opera that is still breathing, perhaps due to its proximity to the latest in expensive life-support devices.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Surely

When Ron Edge gets up at his usual morning hour – around 5 – he will insert a few links that relate to the above feature on Seattle General.   I’ll add a few subjects now (after midnight) but this week they will, I expect, be more about hospitals than Seattle General’s historical neighbors, which, you may have noticed and/or know, included the Lincoln Hotel, the Seattle Public Library, the First Methodist Church, the Rainier Club, the Elks Club, First Presbyterian Church, and certainly many others.  I’ll work an hour or so but then pause to watch the last of 26 one hour episodes of the original and captioned Swedish serial Wallander.

PERRY HOTEL as COLUMBUS HOSPITAL, Southwest corner of BOREN & MADISON: Crossroads of FIRST HILL

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From IDAHO to WAYSIDE

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GENERAL HOSPITAL AMBITIONS of 1925

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Now I’ll retreat from the blog and prepare for nighty-bears with the prelude of a Swedish mystery.  Tomorrow I will return and add a few more health-related subjects.   Thanks for your patience and other’s patients.  (pause)  Up at noon and here come the marines.

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MARINE HOSPITAL (First)

SEATTLE: 1921-1940 From BOOM to BUST

By RICH BERNER

Here is a link to “Boom to Bust,” Volume 2 of Rich Berner’s grand trilogy, SEATTLE IN THE 20^TH CENTURY. Volume 1 covers Seattle history from 1900 to 1920, and Volume 3 treats of Seattle in the 1940s.  Earlier we posted on this blog Volume 1’s second edition, enriched with many additional illustrations.  A similar treatment for Volume 2 is a work-in-progress.  The link below thru the books’ cover is, however, a Ron Edge scanned facsimile of Boom to Bust in its original pagination as first published by Berner’s own Charles Press in 1992.  Sometime this year (2014) we hope to start opening here, page-by-page, the grand illustrated edition of Volume 2.  (We will let you know, of course.)  For now, here is the Charles Press version, in time for the reader to study one of its primary figures, Seattle Mayor John Dore, nor featured below with the few photos following.

MAYOR JOHN DORE – HIGH (ABOVE) & LOW (BELOW)

The often gregarious and pugnacious Mayor John Dore was nearly always brilliant – or very smart.   Mayor twice, first elected with Roosevelt in 1932, defeated by Charles L. Smith in 1934, then elected again in 1936, only to die in office in the spring of 1938, late in is term.

CITIZEN JOHN DORE: on the level.

In between his mayoral terms Dore returned to his vigorous lawyering.  Here (above) he is featured in a Seattle Times collage acting as defense attorney for Margaret Waley, the 19-year old kidnap suspect, charged in the regionally sensational case of the baby Weyerhaeuser abduction.  Facing him is assistant U.S. attorney Owen Hughes.  To prepare for the assembly of this collage, almost certainly both lawyers were asked to pose twice, one with and once without demonstrative gestures.  Hughes was given the gesture, and as it turned out won the case, to the relief of the accused, Mrs. Waley, who Dore described as tricked into the kidnapping by her husband, whom she, however, loved.  The wife, however, feared that if she was found innocent, the case might be appealed by a federal prosecutor under a federal crime that might have demanded her execution.   She was pleased with the guilty verdict, and also given a short sentence.

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GOVERNOR MARTIN signs on for SOAP LAKE and BUERGER’S DISEASE

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Selected from a Times caption in 1934:  Three of the most prominent women of medicine in the Pacific Northwest met yesterday at the conference of the Northwest Hospital Association in Seattle. They are, left to right, Miss Carolyn Davis, first woman elected trustee of the American Hospital Association, and now superintendent of Good Samaritan Hospital, Portland: Miss May Loomis, for many years in charge of the Seattle City Hospital and now superintendent of the emergency department at Harborview: and Miss Evelyn Hall, now serving as nurses’ counselor at Harbor view after scores of years as superintendent of Seattle General Hospital.

(click to enlarge photos)

This low-rise commercial avenue with diverse signs, street awnings, and poled power is Roosevelt Way looking north through 64th Street on Sunday May 7, 1946. It is a typical mid-century American hodgepodge, by now nostalgic. Similar to a few other local intersections then, this one displays one commanding eccentricity, a Van de Kamp bakery’s landmark windmill.

At this northeast corner everything within and without was, to quote the company’s promotion, “artistically decorated in delft blue and white,” except, of course, the baked goods. There were 150 of these, including the “17 kinds of old Dutch coffee cakes,” noted on the sign above the awning. All were “guaranteed fresh every day.” Inside the windmill were the “Dutch Girl” hostesses, who wore flamboyant hats that resembled the wings of a plumpish swan extended for a landing. For the formal opening on August 7, 1929, the company invited all Seattle to visit its “fifteen beautiful stores.” Less that four months later Van de Kamp’s claimed nineteen locations, with an ambitious ad that included a photograph of this Roosevelt store. The company continued to grow during the Great Depression and promoted products into the 1980s, but by then within supermarkets. That is how I remember them, with windmills limited to in-store signs and on logos for its products, many of them by then frozen.

One door north is Brehm’s, a pickle fancier’s deli that got its modest Pike Place Market start in the teens, and like its neighbor the baker, kept growing, reaching “fourteen convenient locations” in 1941. At the north end of this block is Sears, which opened at the corner of 65th street in 1929 and kept selling there for half a century, closing early in 1980. A Seattle City Light neighborhood service center at the northwest corner of Roosevelt Way and 64th Street, on the left at 6401 Roosevelt Way, also opened in 1929. The state later stocked one of its first post-prohibition liquor stores next door at 6403 Roosevelt Way.

The current occupant at the old City light and state liquor corner is the Sunlight Café. Its longevity is impressive. When it took occupancy in 1980 the Sunlight was one of merely three vegetarian restaurants in Seattle. Now there are dozens. I confess to having been routinely comforted by its menu since it first opened. Although he is no landmark windmill, Joe Noone, one of the Sunlight’s worker-owners, is mildly eccentric. Joe is a classics scholar who might be found reading ancient Latin or Greek after creating a generous vegetable tofu sauté or a Sunlight Nutburger.

WEB EXTRAS

Our extras may be sparse this week, but perhaps Ron Edge will add a few links….Ron?

Just a couple related post this week Jean.

(click to enlarge photos)

This Sunday Jean and I return with another vibrant Kodachrome from Frank Shaw’s imagination – and camera.  We know from Shaw’s notes that he recorded this “foot of Madison Street” at 2 on the afternoon of March 4. 1961.

The gentle backlight of a mother of pearl sky comforts both the scene’s centerpiece, the closed Fire Station No. 5, and beside it to the left, the Grand Trunk Pacific Pier.  Between them, and half hidden behind an Alaska Way Viaduct Pier, is a line of red Northern Pacific boxcars parked on the railroad spur that snuggled to the apron along the north side of the wharf.  Transshipment was once the primary business of this waterfront, moving materials between Railroad Avenue (Alaska Way) and the line-up of finger wharfs controlled for the most by railroads.  Now it is entertainment that moves the central waterfront.

When the Grand Trunk opened in 1911 it was by several descriptions the largest wooden pier in world – North America and the West Coast.  Three years later in 1914 it burned to its pilings and was then rebuilt but without its former grand tower for the Harbor Master.

Shaw’s No.5 was the third of now four fire stations at the “foot of Madison.”  Dedicated in 1917 it was described in this newspaper then as “Seattle’s New Building Novelty.”  City Architect D.R. Huntington designed it to roll temporarily to one side when – if ever – it was time to replace the station’s supporting piles. The station was closed in 1959, although the attached dock continued to service the force’s fireboats.

In 1961 the fire department shared its surely dull drawings for the “modern concrete structure” it planned as a replacement.  Unlike this No. 5 it featured neither brick veneer nor ornamental masses. With a sustained howl from the city’s then brand new cadres of historic preservation, a new design by local architect Robert Durham was chosen.  While still concrete, it was less boxish.  Its chilly 15min dedication on Dec. 27, 1963 was serenaded by Ivar Haglund, No. 5’s popular neighbor to the north since 1938.  The “king of clams” wrote a special song for the ceremony; however, the lyrics seemed to have gone missing.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Sure Jean and we will begin again with some links to other and more recent features that cover the neighborhood, ones that Ron Edge will link through their subjects.   I’ll follow that with a few features from long ago – or longer ago.

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FIRST FIRE BOAT: The SNOQUALMIE

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 7, 1982)

         Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889 burned 130 acres of the central business district and left the city’s fire department red-faced. There wasn’t enough pressure to conjure a flood against the flames, and there wasn’t a hose strong or long enough to reach the fire with salt water pumped from the· pay.  When the ‘ smoke cleared the message was obvious. The then mayor, Robert Moran, told the inflamed citizens assembled at the armory at Union Street and Fourth Avenue that rebuilding a city should also include a professional and well-equipped fire department.

         Within a year the city had five new firehouses, an electric alarm system with 31 boxes, and the first fire boat on the West Coast: the Snoqualmie. Designed by William Cowles, a New York naval architect as a 91-foot, coal burning, tug-shaped, the Snoqualmie would did 11 knots and shot 6,000 gallons of saltwater per minute.  When the sealed bids were accepted the low one entered was from Mayor Moran.

         The first fire boat’s trial run was a celebrated affair. On the dock for a look was T.J. Conway, assistant manager of the Pacific Insurance Association. He later announced to the press, “She did very well – splendidly! In fact. l· shall feel justified in recommending a liberal reduction in insurance rates here.” It was happy news for the businessmen on the waterfront. More than 60 wharves and warehouses with frontage of more than two miles had·been put up since the fire flattened everything south of Union Street. With the presence of the Snoqualmie, insurance rates dropped by 20 percent.

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

         The Snoqualmie fought its last fire on Elliott Bay in 1927, the year it gave up its slip to the new fireboat in tow, the Alki. For the next 47 years’ the Snoqualmie continued to helped lower insurance rates – on Lake Union.  Its last service was as a small , freighter between here and Alaska. The last fire the Snoqualmie attended was its own in 1974. She burned for 36 hours off shore of the fuel dock at Kodiak, Alaska.

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ABOVE:  The stern-wheeler Capital City maneuvers at the end of Pier 3 circa 1902, her Seattle port of call.   Courtesy Museum of History and Industry.  BELOW:  In the intervening century Pier Three has been extended considerably to the south (right) and also some to the north (left).  The primary builder of this expansion was Ivar Haglund who first moved onto the Pier in 1938 with an aquarium.  He later purchased the pier. 

CAPITAL CITY at PIER 3

[Renumbered Pier 54 in 1944]

            As the name suggests (on the stern-wheel) the “Capital City” is here either arriving from or returning to Olympia.  She is at the end of Pier 3 (renumber Pier 54 during WW2) early in the 20th Century. 

            The Seattle-Olympia packet, with a half-way stop in Tacoma, was not the one originally envisioned for her.  When the stern-wheeler was built in 1898 during the Klondike gold rush she was christened the Delton and prepared to head north for work on the Stikine River out of Wrangell, Alaska.   Instead she was sold to a Puget Sound company that changed her named and kept her on these inland waters that are ordinarily hazard free – unless a vessel is carelessly steered into something that is also moving. 

            For the Capital City that was the Trader.  In late October, 1902, the two vessels collided off of Dash Point.  With a large hole torn in her hull, the stern-wheeler began to sink.   Quoting from Gordon Newell’s “McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest,” the stern-wheeler’s “Capt. Mike Edward rang for full speed ahead” and aimed for the beach. The steamer’s engineer Scott “in the best tradition of the steamboat engineer, remained at the throttle, waist-deep in water, and the Capital City managed to beach herself on the last of her expiring steam.”   Saved, she was repaired and returned to the Olympia run.   

         What makes the second photograph of the Capital City rare is its depiction of the passengers’ random arrangement at the stern-wheeler’s bow.  Many of these sightseers are probably out for a weekend excursion to the Capital City’s regular ports of call, Tacoma and Olympia.  The “Mosquito Fleet” of small steamers was still  the preferred and sometimes the only way to get around Puget Sound in the early 20^th Century.  Most of the smaller ports had no rail connections. Although the Northern Pacific could get one to Olympia quicker than the Capital City, the ride was neither as smooth nor as exhilarating.  

         A carpenter remodeling a Capitol Hill home discovered the glass negative for this rare second view. The photographer, Lewis Whittelsey, was a bookkeeper for the Seattle Water Department. His identification was traced through the coincidental discovery of two more sources of Whittelsey’s work.  Harold Smith belonged to the same church, Plymouth Congregational, as Whittelsey and had been given two albus of his photographs.  Lawton Gowey – my greatest help through nearly 40 years of studying and publishing – also worked as an accountant for the Seattle Water Department.  Lawton uncovered three more albums of Whittelsey’s work at City Hall years after his death in 1941.

            A larger sign is above the steamer, fixed to the water end of Pier 3. It promotes the hay, grain and feed business of James E. Galbraith and Cecil H. Bacon.  Bacon was a chemical engineer and capitalist who in 1899 partnered with Galbraith. a hay and feed merchant on the Seattle waterfront since 1891.  In 1900 as principal renters, the new partners moved into this then new Northern Pacific Railroad pier at the foot of Madison Street and began selling building materials like lime, cement and plaster, as well.   The partnership held until 1918 when Bacon left it.  His name was then subtracted from the sign. 

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Above: The Big Snow of early February 1916 may have been the city’s greatest photographic subject – of relatively short duration.   Here Herbert R Harter who described himself as a photographer in the 1915 city directory pointed his camera north on Railroad Avenue from the Marion Street overpass.   (Photo courtesy, Dan Kerlee)  Below: In 1935 when motor vehicles already dominated the waterfront Railroad Avenue got its name changed to Alaskan Way.

SNOW on SNOW on SNOW

            One of the marks for the community’s passage of time is our Big Snow of 1916.  While still celebrated it is, of course, increasingly not remembered.   A very small circle of Seattle “natives” now recalls events of 90 years ago vividly.  

            Not so long ago the 1916 blizzard was still remembered.  Ten years ago during our latter day big snow of 1996, any born and bred local of, say, 90 would have remembered the snowfall that began in earnest on the late afternoon of Feb. 1, 1916.   By 5 pm on Feb. 2 the Weather Bureau at the Hoge Building at Second Ave. and Cherry Street measured 26 inches.  This is still our 24-hour record.   Five hours later the depth reached 29 inches. 

            This view of the historic pile-up looks north up the waterfront from the Marion Street overpass.  Here are the several “railroad piers” built early in the 20th Century with boom-time profits increased by the Yukon/Alaska gold rush of the late 1890s.  Most survive.  The smaller structure right of center is an earlier version of Fire Station No. 5.

            Canada’s Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad built the ornate pier filling the left foreground in 1914.  Here passengers could board the railroad’s own “mosquito fleet’ of sleek steamers for a scenic ride north to the railroads west coast terminus at Prince Rupert and there make connections for “all points east.”   The railroads first pier here was built in 1911 but destroyed by fire only three years later.  This replacement was built in the style of the original designed by Seattle architect James Eustace Blackwell, and survived until 1964, when it was razed for the staging of vehicles waiting to board Washington State Ferries.  

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Then and Now Captions Together – Perilously stuck between the Alaska Steamship pier on the right and the blazing Grand Trunk dock on the left, the smoldering tower of Colman Dock is the centerpiece of this 1914 scene shot from off shore.  The contemporary repeat was recorded with the help of an Argosy waterfront tour boat.  (Historical view courtesy Dan Kerlee)

FIREMAN SPARE THAT TOWER! 

The destruction of the Grand Trunk Dock at the foot of Madison Street on July 30, 1914 was the most spectacular single fire in the history of the Seattle waterfront.  The “single” condition is important, for the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 consumed the entire waterfront south of University Street – about 15 blocks worth.  That inferno did not discriminate.  (Lest someone complain, I have not included the 1910 fire on Wall Street in this ranking because a stiff wind off Elliott Bay kept its impressive incineration to the east side of Railroad Avenue.)   

On the far left – nearly out of the picture – is the 108-foot blazing skeleton of the Grand Trunk tower.  This view of its destruction is unique, for the unnamed photographer has turned to shoot what then may have seemed to be the imminent destruction of Colman Dock. And the fireboats Snoqualmie and Duwamish have joined the photographer to also shoot the dock that is not yet doomed. It seems two of their three visible streams are aimed at Colman Dock, one of them reaching the clock tower that is as yet merely smoldering. 

When its namesake Canadian railroad completed the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock in 1910 it was the largest wooden finger pier on the West Coast.  Four years later its charred piles were recapped and topped with another long and ornate terminal of the same footprint but without the tower. (This somewhat less distinguished replacement survived until 1964 when it was cleared away for an expanded loading lot north of Colman Dock.)

With the fireboats help Colman Dock escaped its neighbor’s fate.  Badly scorched, the top of the tower was rebuilt and survived until this Spanish-style home of the Black Ball fleet was replaced in the mid-1930s with an art-deco terminal in the style of the fleet’s then new flagship, the Kalakala.  

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SNAPSHOT TO MARION STREET

(First appeared in Pacific during the Spring of 2008)

            One of about 300 prints in a family photo album most likely glued to its black pages by Phillip Hughett, the amateur snap-shooter.  Mixed with the family pictures are many Seattle scenes and some of them quite unique like this view across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) to Marion Street.

           The 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Expo, the Denny Regrade, and the startling build-up of the city skyline are Hughett’s favorite subjects, and all are given terse captions, but without dates.  But judging from the internal evidence of the pictures themselves Hughett was snapping Seattle from 1909 to 1911.  In 1911 he is listed as a salesman working for the Standard Furniture Company, and his grandson Jim Westall has him also living in Bellingham and California and performing as a pastor or preacher.  And given Hughett’s inclination to take photographs from the rooftops I can imagine him as comfortable in a pulpit.

           This view the photographer-preacher captions simply “Hoge Building, Seattle Wn.” Like many others, Hughett watched the Hoge’s steel frame ascend in a record time 30 days to its 18 stories, the tallest in town until the Smith Tower outreached it by more that 20 stories in 1913.  Hughett’s album includes a half dozen snapshots of the Hoge ascension from different perspectives.

            It is, however, the intimate early view of the Marion Street Trestle that makes this scene unique.  With a helpful hand from city archivist Scott Cline, we learn that the viaduct to Colman Dock was agreed to in late 1908 by the city and the Great Northern Railroad, and built in time to handle the crush of tourists here in 1909 for the AYP and the many Puget Sound excursions that steamed to and fro from the dock that summer.

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The KITSAP

(First appear in Pacific, 9-10-1989)

         The Kitsap was both trim and dauntless. In 20 years of rate wars, races, collisions, and switching routes, the steamer energetically participated in the wildlife of Puget Sound waterways. At 127&1/2 feet and 195 tons, the Kitsap was an average-sized steamer – about 12 feet longer than the Virginia V, the last survivor of Puget Sound’s “Mosquito fleet.”   The steamer was built in Portland for the Kitsap Transportation Co., one of the two strong arms of Puget Sound navigation. For a quarter century, the KTC competed with the Puget Sound Navigation Co. Oddly, at the Kitsap’s 1906 launching, the presidents for both companies, KTC’s W.L. Gazzam and PSNC’s Joshua Green, were on board.

         Four years later Gazzam and Green traded abusive language when the Kitsap was sent to compete with Green’s much plusher and larger but slower Chippewa on the Bellingham run. Green complained to Gazzam that the fleet Kitsap represented a general threat to business because it taught patrons to expect speed. Green also responded by scheduling a steamer on Gazzam’s Bainbridge Island route. This route-and-rate-war featured at least two bumps between vessels, safety hearings, suspended captains and ruinous effects on Green’s Seattle to Vancouver route. In the rate war that ensued, both companies lowered the fare to Bellingham to a quarter. Smart customers would take either of the competing cheap trips to Bellingham and catch the train from there to Canada. In above view of the Kitsap, the banner strapped to her starboard side reads, “Bellingham-Anacortes-Seattle 25 Cents.”

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

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

         In the 1920s, cars became a factor. In 1925, 40 minutes were cut from the car ferry Washington’s run between downtown Seattle and Vashon Island when the then-new Fauntleroy ferry dock allowed it to make the crossing in 17 minutes. The Washington’s old route from the foot of Marion Street was picked up by the Kitsap, by then renamed the Bremerton. A year later, in November 1926, the Kitsap-Bellingham caught fire while laid up at the Houghton shipyards on Lake Washington, and was destroyed along with two other vessels.

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GORST AIR FERRY

         On June 15, 1929, within a quarter tank of the Great Depression, Gorst Flying Service began its round trip service to Bremerton from Pier 54 “at the foot of Madison Street.” In the beginning its eight-seaters took off from the dock shown here tied to the southwest corner of Pier 3. Remarkably, the service kept on for nearly five years. In his company’s first year Verne Gorst claimed to have carried more than 25,000 passengers on 2,700 round trips across Puget Sound. The time of transit for what Gorst claimed was the “world’s first air ferry” was whimsically calculated as 51 minutes less than was needed by the best of the Black Ball’s ferries to plough the same distance. The reason for this popularity was, of course, both the thrill of the fight and the Navy Yard at Bremerton, then a popular tourist magnet. The early success of Gorst’s service allowed him to build a sizeable covered hangar that he anchored at the water end of Pier 4. It can be seen in the accompanying detail lifted from an early 1930s aerial photograph (below) of the Seattle waterfront.

A detail from the above aerial showing the Gorst hanger at the outer end of Pier 3/54, next door to the Grand Trunk wharf.    When the Gorst operation moved to Lake Union it towed its hanger through the ship canal.  Here, on the right, the hanger floats near the southwest corner of the lake.  It seems to have been somewhat enlarged.

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(click to enlarge photos)

For this Sunday and following it for two more, Jean and I will lean on the substantial record of Frank Shaw, the Boeing retiree who as an itinerate photographer armed with his Hasselblad sensitively helped document this city from the 1950s into the mid-80s.  Many of his thousands of contributions are of landmarks, like this eleventh hour study of what began as the first “permanent” headquarters for Seattle’s first professional fire department.  Well, not so permanent. In 1903 a new headquarters was opened at 3^rd Ave. S. and Main Street

In the first year following Seattle’s “Great Fire of June 6, 1889” the city built five fire stations.  Four were built of lumber for economy, all with impressive towers for drying hoses, bell ringing, watching the city and being watched by it.  One of the five – this one at the southwest corner of Columbia Street and Seventh Ave. – was faced mostly with brick and stone by its architects, Saunders and Houghton. At a cost of $20,000, it was the fire department’s architectural plumb for that year’s bidding.

It may be thought that housing a horse-drawn service on the side of a hill was dim. Not so. This first station needed to reach both the city’s business district below it and Seattle’s first neighborhood of fine (expensive) homes further up First Hill.  When the arched brick bays facing Columbia Street were first opened for fire fighting on Nov. 1, 1890 they faced a grade that was manageable.  North of James Street the block between 6^th and 7^th Avenues was generally relaxed.  For instance, one block south of the station at Cherry Street, Seventh even slumped – lost altitude – going east.

Although for fighting fires the station was closed for good in July of 1937, it continued to perform a variety of public services thereafter including, as the sign on its east (left) façade in Frank Shaw’s recording indicates, headquarters for Seattle Civil Defense.  For instance, scheduled here for the evening of June 6, 1951 was a

“special showing of four films on protection against the atomic bomb.”  Almost certainly the sensitive Shaw was drawn to this corner ten years later on March 4, 1961 not for civil defense but for a farewell with some lamentation.  Frank Shaw loved this building, and made this splendid record of it months before its majestic brick pile was razed for the freeway.

WEB EXTRAS

Our server went down overnight, preventing us from getting this post up until this Sunday morning. While we await Paul’s elaborations, let me post a few shots taken near the same location.

‘Tis to ask at this late hour, anything to add, Paul?
Surely Jean.  We shall fasten a few related features and more.  The server has, you know by now, revived.  Hopefully the homeless, dispossessed of their handy “covered parking” beneath the freeway will find a warm revival in another otherwise free corner of this district.

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STATION NUMBER ONE

(First appeared in Pacific January 5, 1992)

                The fancy brick façade of Seattle’s first dedicated Engine house faced Columbia Street west of Second Avenue.  It was built in 1883 to house the fire department’s Washington No.1 – most likely the steam fire engine posed here with its crew.

                Earlier, the department’s other engine, the smaller man-powered Washington No. 2, was also housed here – in a bar.  In the summer of 1882, when No. 2 attempted to answer an alarm on the waterfront – without horses – the weight of the rig dragged the men holding its pole down Columbia Street and into the bay.  Fortunately, both the firemen and the fire engine were pulled from the water with little injury.

                By the time of the city’s “Great Fire of June 6, 1889”, the Seattle Fire Department had a half-dozen pieces of apparatus, but only one, No. 1 on Columba Street, was horse-drawn.  The ornate brick station that No. 1 left on the afternoon of June 5 to fight the Great Fire would not welcome it home.  Some thirty city blocks were destroyed that night, including this one and all those south of Spring Street and west of Second Avenue.

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ABOVE: In the thirty two years between Frank Shaw’s dedication picture and Jean Sherrard’s dance scene, Freeway park has gained in verdure what it has lost in human use. (Photo by Frank Shaw courtesy of his nephew, Mike Veitenhans.) BELOW: Weekly summer dances are one of the many joyful strategies for returning people to the park.  (photo by Jean Sherrard)

FREEWAY PARK REVIVAL

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 28, 2008)

           By the evidence of his negatives Frank Shaw loved to explore the city from his lower Queen Anne apartment, carrying his Hasselblad camera and economically planning the views he recorded so that he did not waste film — (a discipline that was abandoned by the rest of us with the introduction of the digital camera.)  Shaw especially liked the waterfront, Pioneer Square, parks of all sorts, including Seattle Center, and if there was an important event connected with them, a record of it has a chance of being included in his meticulously organized binders.

           Just so, on July 4, 1976, Shaw entered Freeway Park from its southwest corner off Seneca Street during the park’s bi-centennial dedication.  Carefully, he exposed two negatives. As revealed in Shaw’s record, the architectural clarity of the landscape, in spite of the dedication day crowd, might startle readers who are familiar with the woodsy commotion that has since, perhaps, overdosed this freeway-covering retreat.  From Shaw’s prospect, Jean Sherrard would have been looking into branches.  Instead he moved forward about twenty yards, put his Nikon on his extension pole, and looked down on the couples, most of them “in something white,” enjoying The Ball Blanc. It was an August evening and the group KGB played selections, which Jean reviews as “marvelous subtle tangos – good good good.”

           For about three years Freeway Park has been joined by a growing cadre of boosters: persons and institutions, like Town Hall, Horizon House, Home Street Bank, and other activists in the Freeway Park Neighborhood Association.  They want to repair the park and return to it a daily flow of people and some of the thousand of gallons of circulating water that once splashed through its waterfalls and pools. These regular free summertime “Dancing Til Dusk” dances are an important part of this revitalization, and they each begin with an hour of instruction.  The teachers, and musicians will return again next summer when the floor is again unrolled.

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The obvious continuities between this week’s photographs, above and below, are the monumental twin towers of St. James Cathedral, upper right, at 9th and Marion and far left the unadorned rear west wall and south sidewall of the Lee Hotel that faces 8th Avenue.  Judging from the cars, the older scene dates from near the end of World War Two. The weathered two-story frame building at the scene’s center also marks time.  It was torn down in 1950 and replaced with the parking lot seen in the “now.”

Historical photo by Werner Lenggenhager, courtesy of Seattle PublicLibrary.
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NOSTALGIC RECORDER

(First appeared in Pacific, late 2004

         In 1949 architects Naramore, Bain and Brady began construction on new offices for themselves at the northeast corner of 7th Avenue and Marion Street. Their new two-story building filled the vacant lot that shows here, in part, in the foreground of the older scene. Consequently if I had returned to the precise prospect from which Werner Lenggenhager (the historical photographer) recorded his view ca. 1947 I would have faced the interior wall of an office that was likely large enough to have once held several draughting tables. Instead I went to the alley between 7th and 8th and took the “now” scene about eight feet to the left of where the little boy stands near the bottom of the older view.

         That little boy is still younger than many of us – myself included – and he helps me make a point about nostalgia. The less ancient is the historical photograph used here the more likely am I to receive responses (and corrections) from readers. Clearly for identifying photographs like the thousands that Lenggenhager recorded around Seattle there are many surviving “experts.” And more often than not they are familiar not only with his “middle-aged” subjects but also with the feelings that may hold tight to them like hosiery – Rayon hosiery.

         Swiss by birth Lenggenhager arrived in Seattle in 1939, went to work for Boeing and soon started taking his pictures. He never stopped. Several books – including two in collaboration with long-time Seattle Times reporter Lucile McDonald – resulted and honors as well like the Seattle Historical Society’s Certificate of Merit in 1959 for building a photographic record of Seattle’s past. The greater part of his collection is held at the Seattle Public Library. For a few years more at least Lenggenhager will be Seattle’s principle recorder of nostalgia.

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FREEWAY LAUNDRY

Above: The grades up First Hill from the Central Business district involved a variety of uneven dips that can scarcely be imagined since the construction of the Seattle Freeway Ditch.  If preserved these old clapboards would have been suspended several stories above Interstate Five.  (Pix courtesy Lawton Below: Jean Sherrard’s contemporary view repeats the presentation of the Harborview Hospital tower, upper-right, while looking north from the Madison Street bridge over the freeway.  Two blocks south of Jean’s prospect Columbia Street climbs First Hill.  The Skyline senior retirement condominiums are under construction, upper-left.    Most of the Lindorf apartments appear above the freeway far right.

         Here is yet another unattributed, undated, and unidentified historical photograph from the neighborhood with yet very helpful clues – this time two of them.

           First is the obvious one, the tower of Harborview Hospital upper-right, which was completed in 1931.  We may compare the tower to a fingerprint, for when Jean Sherrard visited 6th Avenue, which we agreed was a likely prospect for this view of the tower, he first discovered that when he set his camera on 6th about 20 yards north of Madison Street that the basic forms in his view finder of Harborview tower and the tower in the historical photograph lined up.    But it still “seemed” that he was too far from the tower to, for instance, imagine having a conversation in normal tones with the unnamed historical photographer across – I’ll estimate – about seventy years.  Jean needed to move south.

           The second helpful clue is the sign on the wall of the frame building right of center and above the hanging wash.  It reads, “Admiral Transfer Company – Day – Night – Holiday Service.”   The address for Clyde Witherspoon’s Admiral Transfer in 1938 is 622 Columbia Street, which puts it at the northwest corner with 7th Avenue and Columbia.   Now we may move south from Jean’s original position on 6th Ave. to the alley a half block south of Marion Street and between 6th and 7th Avenues.  If Jean could have managed to make it there he would have been suspended sixty feet or so above the center of the Interstate-5 ditch.    Instead, for his second look to the tower he stood on the Madison Street overpass.

           The houses on the left are in the 800 block on Seventh Avenue.  Real estate maps show them set back some from the street.  And whose uniformly white wash is this?   Again in the 1938 city directory the laundryman Charles Cham is listed at 813 7th Avenue.  Perhaps this is part of Cham’s consignment from a neighborhood restaurant.

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EDGE LINKS

As is our happy weekly habit, here are some relevant neighborhood links found and attached by Ron Edge.

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STILL on COLUMBIA  – The BAR

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(click to enlarge photos)

Mathew Partrick Zindorf, the sturdy builder-developer of these namesake apartments, ran a classified in The Post-Intelligencer for Sept. 19, 1909 that trumpeted the qualities of his then modern four-story (with basement) creation on the east side of 7^th Avenue, mid-block between Cherry and Columbia Streets.  Distributed throughout were seventy-one apartments, 40 of two rooms, 28 of three, and 3 of four.  Everyone of them had disappearing beds, tiled and enameled bathrooms, kitchenettes fitted with gas ranges and refrigerators, and every apartment was entered thru the elegance of doors aglow with art glass, and along floors, halls and stairs finished in Alaska marble and art tiling.

The apartment’s accompanying portrait – from about 1911 – reveals that it was lavishly decorated with art tile on the outside as well.  But most importantly, these apartments were made of fireproof reinforced concrete.  It was a point of such gravity to the long-lived Zindorf that the first line in his Seattle Times obituary for April 13, 1952 reads, “93.  Long-time Seattle construction engineer, who built

the first reinforced concreted structure here . . .the Zindorf Apartments.”  Historian Dianna James, author of “Shared Walls,” a history of Seattle’s apartment buildings, doubts it.  She nominates the Waldorf apartment-hotel for that distinction.  Built a few blocks north of Zindorf at the northeast corner of 7^th and Pike and about three years earlier in 1906, in a Times report from 1907, the Waldorf is also described as strictly fireproof . . . built of reinforced concrete . . . There is no wood of any kind, except the flooring.”

Zindorf seems to have had some uncertainty about his namesake apartments before they opened.  In a July 11, 1909 Times classified the developer indicates a willingness “to lease for a term of years” his “strictly first-class building and very close in. . .”  However, the offer did not, it seems, indicate an impasse, for the 1909 Times classified noted above promised that “the apartment house will be ready for occupancy in October.”  Next in the Times classifieds for December 12, a self-acclaimed “first class dressmaker, Mrs. Amsbury, was advertising her services from Zindorf apartment 1-b.”  Early in January a “professional masseur and chiropodist” was offering rheumatism massage in a Zindorf apartment.

A century ago the neighborhood was distinguished by the brick Monticello Hotel, directly across 7^th Ave. from the Zindorf; the Seattle Fire Department’s headquarters, at the southwest corner of

7^th and Columbia; the brick Columbia Bldg. (also showing here), next door at the southeast corner of the same intersection, and nearby both St. James Cathedral and Trinity Episcopal Church.  And being “very close in” to the business district was made nearly immediate by Cable Railways on both James and Madison Streets.  For the second half of its life, the Zindorf has faced the freeway, and heard it too.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yes Jean, but with a confession that we have, again, given most of our time to research and this show-tell (the sensational rewards of research) will suffer some because of it.  We don’t have time for it all it seems, however, Ron Edge’s help is typically redeeming in this, and so below we will include a number of aerials got from Ron and from the edges of other collections. To these we will join a few past features from the neighborhood – most of them linked by Ron – and a few other features pulled from this computer.  Also we will leave much of the interpretation to the readers.  They may feel confident that most likely the Zindorf will figure into what we add – either directly or as a neighbor.   What follows, then, is something of a challenge.  To repeat, we  will begin with the links, continue on then to some aerials and then find a few more neighborly features.  (The last may be added later in the week, depending, this evening, on the nighty-bear*  impulses.)
* Coined and used by Bill Burden to describe or indicte anything that may have to do with going to bed.

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FIVE LINKS

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1950 AERIALS

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The TWO from 1929  CHALLANGE

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We hope to soon include what remains.  But now we climb the stairway to nighty-bears*

* compliments Bill Burden

(click to enlarge photos)

By June 4, 1922, the Sunday this waterfront scene first appeared in The Times under the banner “In Quest of Great Unknown,” its principal subject, Capt. Roald Amundsen, was long known to readers – from pole to pole.  Twenty years earlier with provisions for four years and a crew of seven aboard a converted herring boat, the Gjoa, the “athletic Viking” set out from Oslo, Norway to locate the magnetic North Pole.    While it did not reach the North Pole on this try, this Amundsen’s expedition was the first to complete the Northwest Passage by ship alone in 1906.  The Norwegian’s name then rose to the top of the long list of explorers who had bundled their bodies in bear skins for sailing thru freezing seas in the service of science and self.

Next in 1910 the fearless Viking left Oslo for Antarctica and reached the South Pole Dec. 14, 1911.  Amundsen later reflected, “The area around the North Pole  – devil take it – had fascinated me since childhood, and now here I was at the South Pole. Could anything be more crazy?”

The explorer returned to his fixed fascination in 1918 with the Maud, a Norway- built ship meticulously designed by Amundsen to complete his arctic circumnavigation of the globe by sailing east from Norway across the top of Russia. Victorious with this Northeast Passage the Maud – named for the Norwegian Queen who had helped finance it –reached the Ballard Locks on Sept 11, 1921, and thereby made it onto the first Clemmer Graphic, the local newsreel produced for the Clemmer theatre, one of the larger motion picture houses in Seattle.

The Seattle Yacht Club moored the Maud while Amundsen went lecturing and looking for more sponsors to make another run on the North Pole.  He reached but did not touch it at last on May 12, 1926, and not aboard the Maud but from the airship Norge with his American sponsor.  Piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile, on May 12, 1926, their flyover was the first undisputed sighting of the North Pole. Two years later Amundsen disappeared with a crew of five while trying to rescue Nobile who went down while returning from another flight to the North Pole.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Thanks for asking Jean.  The overnight shutdown of this program pulled me over a timeline of deadlines and I proceeded to work on our next submissive submission to the Times, the one on Lady Rainier, the brewery’s fountain sculpture  yearning now, its seems, to return to Georgetown, having some years back been sent north to South Seattle (&  Tullies) to rest in the landscape by the old Rainier Brewery there (like the Georgetown brewery, it too has been long abandoned by beer), and without her hydraulics.  As you know, although submitted this week it will not appear in the times for about one month.  That is what is called the “lead time.”

Returning now to the north Seattle waterfront in the block between Wall and Bay but most often associated with Broad Street, we have, again, Ron Edge’s help from the sky.  We will insert his polish of both the 1929 and 1936 vertical (map) aerials of the neighborhood and follow them with an elliptical aerial – also from Ron – of considerable detail, showing us the Union Oil installations in 1932, ten years after Amundsen and his Maud’s visit, and four years before the completion of the Seawall as far north as Bay Street.

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MATTULATH’S BUNCO BARRELS

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 9, 1997)

            The thought that pioneer Seattle had some sort of guardian ghost was supported by the young town’s relative prosperity in 1879, when elsewhere on Puget Sound, according to pioneer historian Thomas Prosch, “the times were exceedingly dull . . . the logging business was dead, the fisheries were unprofitable . . . and every trade was depressed or suspended. And yet the town grew right along, and seemed to flourish.”

            The Mattulath barrel factory was one of Seattle’s creations that year.  Built north of Belltown near where Broad Street now ends at Elliott Bay, the big factory was an impressive landmark, its pier extending a good way out form the shoreline.  Here barrels of cottonwood staves were manufactured in “impressive numbers,” most sent to San Francisco and Hawaii.  For two years the plant “gave employment to a hundred men and boys . . . and seemed very successful, but it suddenly collapsed.”  The factory and its wharf were deserted to “decay and ruin.”

            In this chronological history of Seattle, Prosch explains.  “It subsequently developed that the enterprise was a stock-jobbing affair. . .made to appear highly profitable when it did not actually pay expenses, and that the projectors slipped out with considerable money obtained in the doubtful manner indicated.” In other words, a common scam.  Bunco.

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NATIVE CAMP BY ANDERS WILSE  ca. 1899

(First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 5, 2000)

            This photo of dugouts beside a temporary Indian camp on the Seattle waterfront has been published often, but not always captioned accurately.  Pioneer journalist-historian Thomas Prosch’s description of this site as in the vicinity of the “west end of Vine, Cedar and B road streets” is surely correct – or nearly so.  The top of Queen Hill may be glimpsed on the left horizon.  

            For the contemporary photograph I have chosen Broads street – near it.  Before the seawall was constructed here in the mid-1930s, the waterfront had a small point at the foot of Broad Street.  The little bay we see in the older picture most likely extends north from that point.

            For dating this scene, Prosch is not so helpful.  He describe it as a “common scene” between 1882 and1886.  “The canoes were those of Indians on their way from the north to the hop fields of the White and Puyallup valleys.”  Hop farming in the Puyallup and White River valleys did reach its peak in 1882, with large profits that were largely the gift of the Indians’ cheap labor.  At its height, the industry employed more than 1,000 Indians and many came by dugout canoes over long distance from villages far north along the Canadian coast.  The hop-louse infestation in 1899 and plunging prices stopped the boom.

            We learn from MOHAI Librarian Carolyn Marr, that the Norwegian photographer Anders Wilse gave this the negative number 1,010, and it is helpful for dating the subject.  All of Wilse’s negatives between Nos. 1,000 and 1,050 are of Indian-related subjects and at least two of these are copyrighted for 1899.

            The description on the negative sleeve for this image – although not in Wilse’s hand – supports both Prosch’s siting and my own speculations.  It reads, “Indian camp at North Seattle.” In 1899 the foot of Broad Street was still considered part of North Seattle.

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EAGLE COVE

Then ABOVE:  Photographed from a railroad trestle and not a boat this ca. 1909 scene looks southeast from near the waterfront foot of Eagle Street. The brick warehouse on the far right survives as Seattle’s link in the Old Spaghetti Factory chain.   (Photo courtesy Lawton Gowey)

Now BELOW: This “repeat” was recorded soon after the Olympic Sculpture Park was opened in January last year when some of the construction fences were still in place.  The wider “now” view also shows a portion of Pier 70, far right, Alexander Calder’s sculpture Eagle, far left horizon, and in the foreground sculptor-architect Roy McMakin’s “Love & Loss” a mixed media installation made of both profound sentiments and concrete.   

BELOW:  Frank Shaw’s snapshot of the “garden” mixed with concrete rubble along the future site of the Sculpture Park.  Frank recorded this on May 23, 1975.

EAGLE COVE

(First Published, Jan. 2008)

          North of Broad Street, where the waterfront turns slightly north, was once a small cove where the Duwamish often beached their dugout canoes sometimes to walk a worn path to the fresh waters of Lake Union.  We might doubly call this Eagle Cove, first after Eagle Street that ends here and now also for Olympic Sculpture Park’s soaring piece of public art, Alexander Calder’s Eagle.

           The beach is still exposed in the historical scene, which was photographed from the railroad trestle that first crossed in front of the cove in 1887.  Here, a rough collection of modest residences, squatters’ shacks and floating homes are scattered about the two blocks between the beach and Western Avenue, to both sides of Eagle Street.   But this ca. 1909 scene is doomed.   The Union Oil Company purchased and cleared these blocks for the installation of its first waterfront row of tanks in 1910.

           After the fuel facility closed in 1975 these predictably polluted acres were first scrubbed and then sold at a bargain price to the Seattle Art Museum and the city.  The result is another belated fulfillment first of the Olmsted Brothers 1903 description of a Harbor View Park running in part through these blocks and later for Park Commissioner Sol G. Levy’s radical proposal of 1951 that much of the central waterfront be ridded of its wharfs and railroads and seeded for a park.

           The city got its first central Waterfront Park at the foot of Union Street in 1974, but the greener visions of both the famous Boston brothers and the local Levi are better fulfilled with SAM’s new 9 acre sculpture garden especially when enjoyed in its verdant chain with the contiguous (to the north) Myrtle Edwards Park.  Like Frank Shaw – but not as often – I too walked the waterfront in the 70’s and 80s with my camera. The sectioned 76 Sign across a field – perhaps a hazard with carbon pollutants – I recorded at sunset, while wandering thru the nearly abandoned Union Oil site.  I consider it the first piece of sculpture in the new garden, although not one has as yet recognized it as such.  The generous genre is Found Art.

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THE BLUE FUNNEL LINE

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 3, 1989)

            If color were available for this early 1920’s view of Pier 70 it would be dominated by the blue stacks of the Blue Funnel Line’s steamers Protesilaus andTyndareus

            The steamship company was formed in 1865 by two Englishman who named all their vessels after characters of Greek mythology.  The unfortunate Protesilaus was killed as he jumped ashore at Troy, fulfilling a prophesy that the first Greek to touch Trojan soil would die.  Tyndareus was a Spartan king.

            In 1911, the Protesilaus broke all previous records for speed in delivering raw silk from Yokohama to the Northern Pacific wharf in Tacoma.  Seventeen days after the vessel left Japan the fibers were in New York.

            Three years later, returning fro Asia, it was boarded by English officers at Victoria – the first steamer at a Pacific Northwest port requisitioned for war service.  After delivering its cargo to Seattle, the Protesilaus was reworked into a troop carrier.  Following the war it came back, posing for this picture.

            Pier 70 was built in 1901 by the salmon packers Ainsworth and Dunn, and the pier’s shed served, for a time, as a cannery.  It was primarily used as a shelter for the trans-shipment of cargoes like cotton, tea, rubber and soybeans.  The soybeans were quickly delivered directly across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) for refining into plywood glue at  Lauck’s Mill, now the Spaghetti Factory. 

            During World War 2 the odors of Eastern spices inside the pier shed were exchanged for those of Western spirites when the dock was requisitioned as a warehouse fo the state’s Liquor Control Board. Its original pier number -14 – was changed to 70 when the army gave continuous numbers to all Elliott Bay piers near the end of the war.

            The construction work on Railroad Avenue in the foreground has not yet anything to do with the extending of the waterfront’s seawall north from Madison Street to Bay Street.  That pubic work was done from 1934 to 1936. 

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PIER 70 FROM THE BAY

(First published, summer of 2009)

           It is very rare for this little weekly feature to get its present before its past, and yet for this comparison I photographed the “now” view of the water end of Pier 70 before I found the “then.”  Aboard an Argosy tour boat I prudently recorded everything along the waterfront.  That was in 2006 – about.  A sign for the law firm Graham and Dunn, the pier’s principal tenant since 2003, shares the west wall with the pier number.  Although it is not a perfect match with the “then,” it will do for studying the latest remodel of this big wharf at the foot of Broad Street.

           Constructed in 1901-2 for the salmon packers Ainsworth and Dunn, at 570 x 175 feet it was the first large pier at the north end of the waterfront. Here nearly new, it seems still in need of paint and shows no signs of signs and few of work.  On the left, Broad Street makes a steep climb to what is now Seattle Center. The northern slope of Denny Hill draws the horizon on the right.  (It is still several years before that hill was razed for the regrade.)

           Besides Salmon, through its first 70 years Pier 70 was the Puget Sound port for several steamship companies including the English Blue Funnel (as we know from above) and the German Hamburg American lines.  Among the imports handled here were cotton, tea, rubber, liquor (It was a warehouse for the state’s Liquor Control Board during Word War 2.) and soybeans.  The beans were processed across Alaska Way from Pier 70 in what is now the Old Spaghetti Works, although not for a nutritious gluten free noodle but for glue used in the making of plywood.

           Joining the general central waterfront tide from work to play, Pier 70 was converted to retail in 1970.  Still far from the central waterfront, it was no immediate success.  There was then no waterfront trolley, no Sculpture Garden, and, next door, no new Port of Seattle.  By now both the Belltown and Seattle Center neighborhoods above the pier are piling high with condo constructions and conversions and the waterfront foot of Broad is quite lively.

  The same pier at the foot of Broad Street a few years after its 1999 remodel for the short-lived tenancy of Go2Net, one of the many local internet providers that faltered in the new millennium.  (dorpat this time)

THE MCGILVRA ESTATE

(First published in Pacific, March 4, 1990)

         In 1867 John and Elizabeth McGilvra moved into the first ome on the Seattle shore of Lake Washiongton.  Six years earlier, John had been appointed the first United States attorney to Washington Territory.  His friend Abraham Lincoln had given him the job and McGilvra responded by trekking the entire territory twice a year as both federal judge and attorney.  It was an exhausting task for which McGilvra did not seek reappointment, In 1864, the McGilvras moved to Seattle and, once John had completed a wagon road to the their 450 lake shore acres, they moved in.

         This, apparently, is the oldest surviving view of the McGilvra home.  It was photographed around 1880, or about the time the McGilvras began running a sonce-a-day  round-trip stage coach to Seattle.  Most of their paying passengers were persons who had settle somewhere on or near the lake, man of them on the east side.  Throughout the 1880s the McGilvra dock was the busiest on the lake.

         The wagon road and the daily stage were abandoned in 1890 with the completion of the Madison Streete Cable Railway, an enterprise in which the McGilvras made a sizeable investment and which included Madison Park, the grounds for many amusements.  Beisdes a large dance pavilion, lakeside bandstands and boathouse, exotic gardens and promenades, the park included a baseball diamond, and after 1890 connection with the city’s growing system of bike paths.

         In the summers Elizabeth and John’s acres became the site of a tent city raised on platforms provided by the McGilvras.  The couple also allowed the construction of cottages, but not houses, on their land.  It was a peculiar arrangement: the builders were not sold the land but were required to pay a yearly tithe.  One local newspaper of the time described the McGilvras’ development as “perhaps the only feudal estate in the U.S.”  This arrangement held until the 1920s, long after John McGilvra’s death in 1903.

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MADISON STREET CABLE, ca. 1891

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 9, 1992)

         Judge John J. McGilvra, the pioneer who laid out the line of Madison Street, wanted to get to his homestead on Lake Washington the quickest way possible.  So after climbing First Hill and crossing Broadway, Madison street continues on its own way cutting through the city grid.  East of First Hill Madison Street was “first,” and the developing of the grid on Second Hill and beyond it to Lake Washington followed.  McGilvra’s short-cut negotiated the city’s ups and downs with considerable ease, and, of course, still does.  Beginning in 1890, these gradual grades helped considerably in the construction of a cable railway the entire length of Madison from salt water to fresh.

         In the early 1890s passengers enroute to the excitements of McGilvra’s many lakefront attractions, after first passing though still largely forested acres, dropped into the scene recorded here: grounds cleared primarily for the enterprises of leisure.  The view at the top looks along Madison Street from near its present intersection with Galer Street. The Madison Park Pavilion, left of center, and the ball park – the bleachers show on the far left – were the cable company’s two largest enclosed venues.  But the beach itself was an equal attraction with floating bandstands and stages for musicals, farces, and melodramas in which the villains might end up in the lake.

         McGilvra’s fiefdom – he would only lease lots, not sell them – and the railway’s end-of-the line attractions also featured dance floors, bath houses, canoe rentals, restaurants, promenades, a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and a dock from which the “Mosquito Fleet” steamed to all habitable point on Lake Washington. 

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A NEIGHBORHOOD ECCENTRIC

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 20, 2005)

         It is pleasure to have stumbled upon another neighborhood eccentric. This one appears on page 99 of “Madison Park Remembered,” the new (in 2005) and good natured history of this neighborhood by one of it residents, Jane Powell Thomas. The author’s grandparents move to Madison Park in 1900. In her turn Thomas raised three children in the neighborhood and dedicated her history of it to her seven grandchildren. (The historical photo is used courtesy of the Washington State Archive – Puget Sound Regional Branch.)

         Much of the author’s narrative is built on the reminiscences of her neighbors.  For instance, George Powell is quoted as recalling that the popular name for this dye works when it still showed its turrets was the “Katzenjammer Castle.”  Seattle’s city hall between 1890 and 1909 was also named for the fanciful structures in the popular comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids,” and George Wiseman, the Castle Dye Works proprietor in 1938 (when this tax photo of it was recorded) certainly also traded on this association.  

         The vitality of this business district was then still tied to the Kirkland Ferry.  Wiseman’s castle introduced the last full block before the ferry dock.  Besides his castle there was a drug store, two bakeries, a thrift store, a meat market, two restaurants, a tavern, a gas station, a combined barber and beauty shop, and a Safeway.  And all of them were on Wiseman’s side of the street for across Madison was, and still is, the park itself.   

         Studying local history is an often serendipitous undertaking charmed by surprises like Dorothy P. Frick’s photo album filled with her candid snapshots of district regulars and merchants standing besides their storefronts in the 1960s.  Introduced to this visual catalogue of neighborhood characters by Lola McKee, the “Mayor of Madison Park” and long-time manager of Madison Park Hardware, Thomas has made good use of Frick’s photos.  

         “Madison Park Remembered” is now (in 2005) in its second printing, and although it can be found almost anywhere, Jane Thomas was recently told that her book had set a record by outselling Harry Potter — at Madison Park Books.      

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MADISON PARK PAVILION

(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 19, 2004)

         Like Leschi Park, Madison Park was developed as an attraction at the end of a cable railway line.  Both featured exotic landscapes, waterside promenades, gazebos, greenhouses, refreshment stands, garden-lined paths, bandstands, and boat rentals, even lodging.  Leschi’s early novelty was its zoo.  Madison Park’s was the baseball diamond.  (The roof of the bleachers can be seen on the far left of the historical scene.)  

         Both parks featured monumental-sized pavilions with towers on top and great ballrooms within. The theatre-sized room in this landmark could also seat 1400 for melodramas, minstrel shows, musicals, farce, vaudeville and legitimate theatre.   For many years members the ever-dwindling mass of the Pioneer Association chose the Madison Park Pavilion for their annual meetings and posed for group portraits on the front steps.   

         Here the grand eastern face of the pavilion looks out at Lake Washington.  The pleasurable variety of its lines with gables, towers, porticos and the symmetrically placed and exposed stairways to its high central tower surely got the attention of those approaching it from the Lake.  (For many years beginning about 1880 Madison Park was the busiest port on Lake Washington.)  

         However, most visitors came from the city and the real crush was on the weekends for ballgames, dances, band concerts (most often with Dad Wagner’s Band), theatre, and moonlit serenading on the lake — ideally with a mandolin and receptive ingénue looking for pointers on how to navigate a rented canoe.  

         The Pavilion stood for a quarter century until destroyed by fire on March 25, 1914. The attentive eye may note how the Seattle Park Departments playground equipment at Madison Park repeat the lines of the grand central tower of the Madison Park Pavilion. (Historical photos courtesy of Lawton Gowey and Larry Hoffman)

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(click to enlarge photos)

Distributed like figures in a well-stocked sculpture garden, the human pillars in this open field also stir a nostalgia in me for the big shows of my youth: big top circuses, county fairs, and later music festivals improvised in farmer’s fields.  Ordinarily, as here, there were no paved parking lots then, but here there are, as yet, no cars either.

This is an afternoon in July, 1909. Most of these fashionable figures arrived here either on a Madison Street cable car or by small steamer to the Madison Park waterfront.  A few came for the assorted pleasures of the park, which between 1909 and 1913 added the sensations of White City.  The park trees on the left are interrupted by the truly Grand Arch into the enclosed “city.”  Inside and too the right of center are the merry-go-round (the conical roof) and the roller coaster.  Beyond it all is Lake Washington. Most of these strollers are not heading for White City but rather leaving the grandstand of the Western Washington Fair Grounds – behind the photographer.

There between July 17 and August 1, within a white canvas fence that encircled the public, the performers, and the fair grounds new 5000 seat stadium (with 52 private boxes), Cheyenne Bill’s Wild West Show and Congress of Rough Riders put on several sensational reenactments of western stories.  Included were the “Fight Over the Waterhole,” the “Attack on the Overland Stage Coach,” and the “famous Mountain Meadow Massacres and ten other events of equal interest.” Tom Mix, one of Cheyenne Bill’s rougher ropers and riders later become a great star of the silent screen. (Surely many Pacific readers know of him still?) A few of the Sioux Indians who had parts in the show’s “Wild West” reenactments had earlier as young braves “played” real parts in the Battle of Little Big Horn aka Custer’s Last Stand.  Still standing in 1876 after Col. Custer had fallen, they lived to play again.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Well, Jean, we are a bit tardy this Saturday night and so will continue on the morrow.  Then I will continue to put up a few related features from Pacific Mags past, although I  may not finish with them until mix-week.  (Sometime also later this week, or perhaps next week – or next year even – we will attempt to correct the typos, I mean if there are any.) Tomorrow Ron Edge will again assemble a few revealing aerials of the neighborhood that show its development at least between 1912 (with the Baist Real Estate Map) and mapping photos from 1929,  1936, 1949 and 1952.  If I have the dates wrong I’m confident that Ron will correct them.  Here follows an example of how we often “talk” with one another about the “repeats” for Seattle Now and Then – a mix of marked maps, aerials and subjects.

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NOW we will follow with TWO FEATURES that display two landmarks noted in the text on top although not as monumentally as in their own features now below.  First, the use of the same stadium for motorcycle races, and second, some close-ups of White City.

RACING AT MADISON PARK

(First appeared in Pacific, August 4, 2002)

         By my modest calculation the motorcycles on McGilvra Boulevard East in the “now” view are posing very near the spot in the “then” view where cyclists are rushing around the south corner of a fenced track that, in 1911, was part of what was called the Western Washington Fair Grounds.  But this is Madison Park, not Puyallup.

         Before most of the neighborhood was developed for homes adison Park was one of the primary Seattle cneters for recreation and amusement of all sorts, including professional baseball, Wild West shows, carnival booths and rides, dancing, promenading and here motorcycle racing.

         McGilvra Boulevard was named for J.J. McGilvra, the pioneer federal judge who in order to settler there, first blazed a wagon road to Lake Washington at the site of the future Madison Park and its surrounds.

         Motorcycle historian and collector Thomas Samuelsen, who leads the pack in the “now” scene, has identified the racer at the head of the pack in the historical scene.  He is Archie Taft, one of the Northwest’s great early enthusiasts for wind in your face.  The photograph was first published in a motorcycle periodical of the day.  The original caption reveals that here Taft established a new state record for the distance on a two-lap dirt track. 

         An enlargement of this photograph and many more are included in the Museum of History & Industry’s presently (in 2002) most popular exhibit, “Fastest Corner in the Northwest: Motorcycle Racing Around Seattle 1910 to 2000.”  The exhibit was mounted in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Museum of Motorcycling, with a lot of help from its members, including Samuelsen.  Besides the photos, racing memorabilia and readable interpretations, the exhibit features 12 historical motorcycles, most driven repeatedly to victory by a pantheon of Northwest winners.

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Now & THEN Captions together: Part of the roof of the Madison Park Pavilion shows bottom left in the historical photograph, and it was the Pavilion’s tower that allowed this soaring view south into the gated amusement part of White City.  The contemporary photograph was a low-elevation compromise taken from a Madison Park playground slide with the camera extended on a monopod.

WHITE CITY

(First appeared in Pacific, January 28, 2005)

         For all its physical aplomb – especially the grand front gate shown here – White City at Madison Park was more fizzle than dazzle.  

         The amusement park began with a cartooned proposal.  In a 1906 advertisement that features a detailed birdseye sketch of the place, Emile Lobe, the Secretary for Borderland White City Company, announced, “Happy Days will follow the building of Seattle’s Big Amusement Park, a local enterprise that is now building on the shores of Lake Washington, south of Madison Street,”

         Lobe, who was also known locally as a fine violinist, was fiddling here as well.  His illustrated promotion listed a June 1 opening while it promoted “White City Bonds . . . Not a speculation, but a certain money maker . . . the best investment offered thus far in 1906.”  But White City did not open any summer soon and is only listed in city directories for the years 1910 through 1912.  Through a short life its most popular amusement was the miniature “Lake Shore Railway” that was frequently stuffed with adults as kids yearned for the next go-round.

       Admission to White City through its grand gate cost ten cents.  The carnival also had a roller coaster, a Ferris Wheel, scheduled performances and a few sideshow oddities.  Some of these were brought over from the Pay Streak, the carnival part of that grander Seattle “White City”, the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition after it closed.  The AYPE was held on the campus of the University of Washington during the warmer months of 1909.

1912 Baist’s Map

1929

1936

1946

1952

This week we return to 1946 (for many of us, not so long ago) and share another example of temporary U.W. student housing rushed to order after World War Two.  Unlike last week, these dorms are for singles, not marrieds.  (Any notion that the two sexes could live under the same on-campus roof was then distant.)

Appearing first in The Times for Wednesday, Jan. 30, 1946, this press photo was captioned, “First of 24 new housing units, these dormitories are shown being settled on their new foundations on the UW campus between Engineering Hall and Frosh Pond.”  Last Sunday’s “units” for the married vets of Lake Union Village were shipped by rail from Richland. These were readily barged from Renton, up the Cedar River and Lake Washington to the edge of campus, from where they were carefully hauled on trailers to here near the center of campus.

Judging from a 1946 aerial photograph the two units seen here to the rear have found their proper footprints, while the unit in the foreground still awaits its last move.  The 24 units can be easily counted in the same aerial, assembled into four parts as regular as arms at the top of a telephone pole.  Squeezed as they were between the permanent brick Guggenheim, Johnson and Physics halls, they successfully disrupted the collegiate Gothic temper of the university’s churchly campus.  Thankfully, the five dorms were temporary, although thru their mere seven years the prefabricated dorms were absurdly named with the grand but regionally routine tags Chelan, Rainier, Olympia, Cascade and Baker Halls.

Pacific readers are invited to explore on-line the 1946 campus with its temporary prefabricated dormitory crush.  The noted aerial is generously featured near the top of the blog that is regularly listed at the base of this feature.  There you will also readily find the timely narrative noted and quoted last week, Richard Berner’s “Seattle Transformed,” our city’s history through World War 2 and well into the Cold War.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Surely Jean.  First, Ron Edge has put up a link to Rich Berner’s third volume “Seattle Transformed.”  It, again, covers Seattle history from 1940 to 1950 and so through World War 2 and well into the Cold War.  (Please be patient.  This is an entire book you are about to download.  And free too!  Once completed – in a few minutes – save it into its own folder for future delving.)

Ron also has a sizable collection of aerials of the campus and has included a selection of those.   At least two them show the “Frosh Pond Housing” from the sky.   And I’ll look about for other illustrations and/or features that circle the Pond where once upon a time Freshmen were baptized.

1909 Panorama of Portage Bay and Capitol Hill shot from the AYP’s tethered balloon.  Lake Washington is on the far left, the Latona Bridge, far right.   Bottom right the Seattle and International Tracks (originally the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad and now the Burke Gilman Trail) run thru the fair and north of the AYP’s carnival, the Pay Streak.

1923 is our circa date for this view to the east.  The University Bridge is bottom right.  Here it still leads to its old trolley and vehicular access to the campus on 40th Avenue.  The Campus Parkway is a thing of the future.

1937: Note the nurseries upper right, future acres for University Village.

(This one is for you – date it!) Clues include work on the east wing of the Suzzallo Library, upper-right.  The University Bridge, upper-left, shows it modern profile with the concrete piers that replaced the original wooden ones in 1932/33.

ca. 1947 with the new U.W. Hospital at the center, but still to the upper-left some of the golf course it uprooted.   Frosh Pond peeks from behind the seaplane’s pontoon – it seems.

Ron Edge dates the above and below, circa 1946/47. Both include the 1946 Frosh Pond housing.

Above and below, both showing the Frosh Pond housing as well as Union Bay Village – the vets’ housing featured last week.

1958 above – and you can find the 1957 contribution to the University Village.  Ron claims that you can blow this one up and find the Burgermaster.

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The CAMPUS BAPTISMAL

By campus lore the baptismal potential of the Alaska  Yukon Pacific Exposition’s Geyser Basin was discovered soon after  “Seattle’s first world’s fair” closed in the fall of 1909.  A gang of  sophisticated sophomores corralled a few naïve freshmen grazing on  the lawn in front of Denny Hall and after some serious deliberation  threw them into the circular pond that is now one of the very few surviving artifacts from the AYPE.  Thereafter Geyser Basin became Frosh Pond.

The accompanying splash is but one of an unnumbered roll
of dunking photographs.  There are, of course, many more stories.  A
few are legendary – like the springtime afternoon ca. 1965 when
students launched about a dozen faculty into the pond en masse – or  nearly.  One of the lecturers prudently jumped in voluntarily.
Among the christened was a visiting German professor who brought with him a more deferential tradition about the behavior of students towards faculty.  Another honored member of this exclusive baptism  was the now Emeritus Professor of Architecture, Norman J. Johnston who told me the story with considerable delight and wrote an account  of it in his book “The College of Architecture and Urban Planning 75 Years at the University of Washington, A Personal View.”

For a time following the Second World War veterans
returning as freshman reversed the tradition and threw sophomores in  the pond, but this did not last.  Consider the poor freshman John
Stupey, who on his birthday, a freezing Dec. 10 1960, was dragged by “friends” from his warm bed in Lander Hall at 5:30 A. M., carried to  the pond and tossed on the count of three.  Reaching the pond Stupey first broke through the ice and a moment later lost his pajama  bottoms on the bottom.

Frosh Pond has also been used for log rolling and in the
hottest days of summer school spontaneous swimming.  At about six  feet the water is just deep enough for bobbing and safe shallow
plunging.  But no more.  In a security measure apparently not related  to 9/11 the UW Police Department started citing swimmers for  trespassing.  In the face of tradition the assistant chief explained
profoundly, “The purpose of the fountain is decorative.  The fountain itself is not a swimming pool.” What were they thinking?

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Above are six of the seven primary structures surrounding the Cascades of the Arctic Circle at the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Expo., Seattle’s “first worlds fair” which also helped develop the University of Washington’s “Interlaken Campus.”  Below – the left – is the seventh building, the one devoted to Agriculture.  The long-time north end photographer named Price recorded this subject.

GEYSER BASIN in the ARCTIC CIRCLE

(First appeared in Pacific, June, 27, 1982)

            In1907, a decade after the first rush north for gold, workers started transforming the still in many places wild University of Washington campus into a civilized stage.  Seattle was ready to celebrate its success in outfitting and exploiting Alaska and the Yukon, and it hoped Asia would join the list.

            When the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition (AYP) opened on Jun 6,1909, the centerpiece was the Arctic Circle, shown at the top in a photograph by Frank Nowell, the AYP’s official photographer.  Here a semicircle of seven structures surrounded the Cascades and Geyser Basin.  The temporary buildings were designed in a variation of what was by then typical Beau Arts exposition style: neoclassical colonnades supporting great arching roofs decorated with profuse details.  The seven buildings were named, from left, Agriculture, European, Alaska, U.S. Government (the domed centerpiece behind the fountain), Phillippines and Hawaii, Oriental and Manufacturing.  Agriculture, the seventh building, is out of frame to the far left, but we have featured it with its own frame directly below the Nowell subject.  Under this cosmopolitan cover was a cornucopia of mostly local enterprise combined with products from the trans-pacific region Seattle hoped to tap. 

            The Hawaii Building, in Howell’s photo just to the right of the fountain, advertised the fertility of the islands with what The Times reported were “gigantic piles of fruits including a pyramid of coconuts and a pineapple 30 feet high composed of small pineapples cunningly arranged.” 

            The centrally placed U.S. Government Building featured at its entrance a marine hospital operating room with masked, life-size figures so real that the scene sent “shivers up the backs . . . of the bewildered visitors.” The Alaska Building, to the left of the Federal Building had a somewhat predictable display of $1 million in gold dust, nugget and bricks. Security measures for the display were advertised as much as its dollar value.

            The Agriculture Building (again, “below the above Howell”), included the first display of clams ever shown at an exposition.  And across the Arctic Circle in the Manufacturing Building was a telephone switchboard and four workers handling the telephone company’s business.  The building also displayed the “disappearing bed” which, the inventor asserts, will revolutionize domestic architecture by making bedrooms unnecessary.”

Many visitors preferred to simply stroll the grounds or on clear days to just sit around and watch crowds mill about the Arctic Circle, usually in their Sunday best.  And some, like those relaxing in Nowell’s photo, would look across the formal gardens and down the Rainier Vista to what the AYP publicists promoted as “the only real mountain an exposition has ever had.” Did PR miss Mt Hood at the Lewis and Clark Expo in Portland?

            But the Arctic Circle was not the whole show.  It was the center of elegance intended to raise the standards of popular taste.  Meanwhile, the popular taste was most most likely satisfied down at the sideshow of primitives and exotic carny attractions called the “Pay Streak” where those with pop proclivities would often pay extra not to be elevated.

            Exposition visitors went back and forth between the crowded excitement of the Pay Streak and the meditative pace of the dazzling “white city”” that surrounded the Geyser Basin.  At night this bright model of civilization instantly crystallized into the heavenly city on the hill when the elaborate covering of electric lights were turned on.

        The AYP had its beginning in 1905 when Godfrey Chealander of Seattle returned home form Portland’s Lewis and Clark Exposition with his Alaska exhibit.  With help from then Seattle Times City Editor James Wood, Chealander’s desire turned into a 108 day affair that attracted nearly four million paid visitors.

            In the contemporary scene, below, the Geyser Basis in the same, but now called both the Drumheller Fountain and Frosh Pond.  The temporary classical plaster of the Arctic Circle has been replaced by a more permanent brick architecture of Academic Gothic.

(click to enlarge photos)

In “Seattle Transformed,” the last of his three-volume history of Seattle in the 20^th Century, Richard C. Berner, gives his scholarly summary of the housing crises that greeted “the freshly discharged veterans” of World War Two. The retired University of Washington Archivist explains that Seattle’s dire straits in 1945 were built (or rather not built) upon the war’s own shortages.  Many of the thousands who had earlier come to Seattle to build ships and bombers had great difficulties finding affordable beds.

In spite of those discomforts, at war’s end most of these “visitors” wanted to stay in Seattle or in the charmed land that surrounds it.  Of the 5,352 families questioned by the Seattle Housing Authority, 4,841 answered that they wanted to make this their permanent home.  However, the need for constructing affordable housing got little help with peace. When the War Production Board lifted restrictions on construction materials, developers quickly purchased the released bounty, directing it for the more lucrative construction of commercial structures and upscale housing, of which these uniform huts at Union Bay Village are not examples.

For every patriotic reason imaginable – including Apple pies in the war surplus ovens – married veterans in pursuit of an education also needed to be sheltered.  Here in 1946 the solution for a least a few of them and their families came  – to not avoid the pun – as fallout from Hanford and Richland where these nifty quarters were first constructed for those who built the first atom bombs without knowing what it was they were doing.

The lucky vets at Union Bay Village knew what they were doing.  However, even with their $90 monthly GI-Bill, and cheap rents, they still needed extra part time work to raise their families.  At night they studied – here in the “Ravenna lowlands” near the north shore of Lake Washington’s Union Bay until 1981 when the Village was razed for another designed community – Laurel Village – with spiffier quarters but also still with controlled rents, late night study and insistent children.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Sure Jean, and again more from the neighborhood.  But first I will register my pleasure and admiration for the song, singing and playing by Pineola that you contributed to the blog one insertion before this.  We will hope that readers who have missed it will go visit it, perhaps first.  They [you] will find it below – at the bottom – the next post in space although the penultimate one in time.  [I honestly learned the meaning of “penultimate” while taking a course in classic Greek at Concordia Academy in Portland Oregon, 1958.]

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TOWN of YESLER

[First appeared in Pacific March 24 1996]

            In “A History of Laurelhurst,” author Christine Barrett included the above photograph of the mill town Henry Yesler founded on Lake Washington’s Union Bay in 1888.  Most likely Yesler’s cousin J.D. Lowman, who was by then largely in charge of the Seattle pioneer’s business affairs, was responsible for naming the new town site after his older relative and benefactor. 

            Most of the Lake Washington shoreline was then still sided by old-growth timber.  The building of a mill town on Union Bay was made easier the preceding fall by the completion of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad from the Seattle waterfront as far as the bay, and soon the new railroad continued north to Bothell and from there east into the Cascade foothills and eventually north to the Canadian border at Blaine.  The SLSSE carried logs to the mill and milled timber from it. The railroad, of course, also helped build both the mill and its town.

            This and practically all surviving early photographs of the area north of the then future Lake Washington Ship Canal were taken by a photographer who signed his negatives “Conn.”  He also taught school in a north end that was still mostly undeveloped.  This view dates from the early 1890s.  Conn sights his camera to the northwest, along the tracks that led from the SLSC mainline to the mill.  On the right, the earliest homes and businesses of the town of Yesler are grouped between Northeast 41^st and Northwest 45^th Streets to the sides of 36^th Ave. Northeast, its principal avenue – its “Main Street.”  The line of white smoke behind the settlement is probably drawn by a locomotive heading north on the SLSE line – now the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail. 

            Yesler’s first mill on Union Bay was destroyed by fire in 1895.  In 1916 this old wharf was exposed when Lake Washington was lowered nine feet for the opening of the Ship Canal.  A second mill, which produced shingles, burned down in the early 1920s.   The neighborhood, of course, survived, transforming from a mill town into a well kept addition of often modest homes, many of them homes for persons connected with the University of Washington.

YESLER SCHOOL

[First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 2, 1997]

            Fire stations, churches and schools were common photographic subjects when cameras were still relatively rare.  Schools especially, since photograpahers, first itinerant and later resident, could hope to make as many prints from their negatives as the number of students posing in them.  It was, however, a hope rarely fulfilled unless, of course, the school’s administration was somehow involved in the negotiations.

            Here are the two photographs of the old Yesler School with which I am familiar. There are probably others secreted or forgotten in albums and attics.  This too appears in Christine Barrett’s book, “A History of Laurelhurst.” 

            Yesler School opened in the early 1890s to serve, of course, the families connected with old Henry Yesler’s nearly new company town on the north shore of Lake Washington’s Union Bay.  The site of Yesler’s downtown mill, the first spine in Seattle’s economic backbone (or heart in its thorax), was by then much too valuable for mere log cutting.  In 1888 Yesler moved his saws to this north shore of Union Bay, under the coaxing of his nephew and business manage, J.D. Lowman.  Getting to the mill town was made downright easy a year earlier with the laying of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway, again, now the Burke-Gilman Recreation Trail.

            The Yesler School did not close until 1918.  By then the mill town students –most of them from working families – probably sat side-by-side with those from a nearby neighborhood its promoters promised would be “the chief aristocratic section of the city.”  They called that 100-acres enclave of designer wealth Laurelhurst.

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UNIVERSITY VILLAGE

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FOLLOWS three Village-related photographs taken by photographer Doyal Cudjel for promotion of what the sign says: a Homecoming Express every ten minutes between Greek Row and University Village.  Cudjel has dated his snapshots, Oct. 7, 1959… (We suspect that these subjects are also cheerleaders.) Note the sign on the front of the bus in the last of the three shots.  It promotes KVI’S “New HI-FI”

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(click to enlarge photos)

These Amelia Apartments – 16 of them – were, it seems, first noted in a Seattle Times classified ad on Sept. 4, 1910.  The agent, John Davis and Co., was one of the super real estate dealers of the time with 61 apartment buildings, “in all parts of the city.  Davis advised, “simply step into our office and tell us what kind of a place you want.  We will endeavor to meet your every requirement.”  Seven days later on the 10^th the agent admitted his first renters here into 104 17^th Ave. East.

The Amelia was conveniently built beside the Yesler Way Cable Line, with its musically clanking cars reaching the corner every 3 minutes during busy hours. The Amelia offered 3 and 4 bedroom apartments; large, light rooms; modern conveniences; linoleum bathroom and kitchen floors, gas ranges, large closets, cupboards and coolers.”  Agent Davis declared it “very desirable.”  In 1912, depending on size, the rent ran between twenty and twenty-seven dollars a month.  By 1914 the Amelia’s Apt No. 4 was used by a practitioner offering “woman-to-woman” consultations about a “dependable remedy for every married woman” that the personal “women’s ad” left unexplained.  (Was it proven techniques on how to be rid of one’s husband?)

Until their internment during the Second World War, this was a neighborhood where Japanese Americans integrated with Seattle’s Jewish community and a miscellany of many others.  Here on the corner is Beckerman’s Delicatessen, also a Jewish center where, for instance, in the spring of 1926 one could pick up tickets for the famous singing cantors Mordecia Hershman and Zavil Zwartin appearing in concert at the Masonic Temple at Harvard and Pine.  Across Yesler Way and out of frame to the far right was the synagogue for the Bikur Cholum Congregation, now home for the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute.

Although I confess that the subject seems earlier to me, perhaps this scene dates from 1926, the year that the Jewish labor organization named the Workmen’s Circle, gathered with workers from throughout the city for a Labor Day Monday afternoon of music, speeches, dancing and games at Renton’s Pioneer Park.  Most of this is promoted across the banner that stretches here over Yesler Way.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul? Yes and staying close to Yesler Way.   We will go as far up the hills, First and Second, as we can before surrendering to those patient nighty bears.  We will be following the route of the old Indian Path to Lake Washington, which the first settlers were please to find and follow in their exploration of the ups and downs behind their waterfront claims.   I do not mean to include any additional features, unless I am surprised by one.  Just pictures with short captions.  But as prelude –  readers who remember last Sunday’s coverage of the new book LOST SEATTLE by Rob Ketcherside, will find below these additions something put up earlier today: The longest caption in the history of this blog and written by that First Hill picker-scholar Stephen Edwin Lundgren.   Stephen gave most of an afternoon to giving a decent caption to the historical photo featured last week – the one on the cover of Lost Seattle – and he has dated it sensitively and, I’m convinced, properly too.

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While we did not make it to 17th Avenue and the Amelia – or beyond it – we will return later today* with a few more looks to the sides of Yesler Way.  But now we will take the steps – two flights – to the last reading of the day followed by the comforts of nighty bears, so comforting for these colder nights.

* While we surely did not “return later today with a few more looks to the sides of Yesler Way,” we will now begin to watch for and collect them and add them at some future date (perhaps a Sunday).   

Here’s another fine contribution from our Stephen.  [Click twice to enlarge and so the better to follow Stephen’s points.]  He must have given most of an afternoon to polish my “1904” date – a fleet speculation – for the Curtis photo that Rob Ketcherside (or his editors) chose for the cover of his new and first book “LOST SEATTLE.”   Thanks again to Rob for a fine addition to the local canon and thanks to Stephen too for his admonishments.  [Somewhere I have a portrait of Stephen, which I’ll add later.  The rest is Stephen’s.]

Rob – CONGRATULATIONS!   Hardcover,  no less and in color.   Far better than Arcadia . Good show!

Checked it out at University Bookstore who reported that it’s been flying off the shelf today. Sales!  And Publicity by Paul. Very good.

My, my, nostalgia. My wife and I took in the Music Hall shows a couple times, Julie Thompson and her first Svengali, Jack McGovern, including at his other venue, the now China Harbor. So much else, I can remember it well. Thanks for not mentioning my Dad in the Kalakala story.

The Yesler Hill and the Courthouse story are very good and accurate. You are hereby adjudged an honorary Profanity Hill expert now. The hanging may proceed. Sez Judge McCann, who was the police court judge. Next case!

You even knew about the secret 1928 City Council ordinance to level the entire hill. Pretty damn obscure. I bet Richard Conlin voted for that. Before he voted to create Goat Hill. Pity he was replaced by a Wobbly.

Now as for the cover harbor photograph – Where’d you find it? Corbis? Hah. They don’t create anything.

what makes somebody think it for 1904 as date for this partial panorama? I don’t think so.

Since you didn’t ask. And didn’t state that in the book, fortunately.

I am more inclined to 1905, even more likely mid1906, having tentatively identified some of the ships in the harbor or at wharf and found what are perhaps contemporary photographs of the Moran Bros Co shipyard – all three “anonymous,” one a AYPE era colorized postcard, and two of them sourced to Joe Williamson, who collected earlier photographers’ works (My bet is Asahel Curtis for all of these aerial views, esp the colorized verson, although Frank Nowell is a possibility, as he was known to climb rooftops and courthouse towers at the time )

One of the white curving prowed steam schooners is very surely the revenue cutter Grant (three masts and tall steamer stack, it was a coaler, to the right), moored as was usual at one of the harbor buoys.  It spent a lot of time at these in the final years up to its surplus sale in late 1906, its iron hulled geriatric engines condition usually keeping it within Puget Sound. The other white hull is another 19th century federal revenue steam cutter,  I have several suspects that were active here at the time. It shows up at the launch of the Nebraska.

The 4 stack torpedo boat destroyer is most likely the USS Perry (Bainbridge class) which also spent a fair amount of time in Puget Sound waters 1904/1905, as part of the Pacific torpedo boat fleets guarding us from errant Russian and/or Japanese fleets. Or British.   I was hoping it was the USS Decatur but that was elsewhere in the SE Asian fleet at the time.

Paul would remember a similar torpedo boat destroyer in a harbor, included in one of the works of nostalgic art donated to the MOFA last month. Probably the Decatur “opening up” the Japanese ports.

On the very far left within the coal smoke is either the USS Nebraska being fitted out after its October 1904 launch, before its late 1906/7 delivery to the US Navy OR another battle cruiser which was also moored at this dock, the armoured cruiser USS New York (3 stacker). I’ve seen a Times photo of this cruiser but missed noting the publication date, as if one can trust the Blethen press as being accurate.  As noted above, there are three existing photographs of that ship from somewhat aerial perspective, one including the full-length postcard of the SS Orizaba et al, and two others  which show the stern and bow of same, and including the 3 stack warship etc. It very much resembles your harbor shot edge.  See attached montage.

However, here’s  the curveball, or sinker (more appropriately).  The 1889 launched tropical steamer SS Orizaba, single raked stack, two masts, is said to have first arrived in Seattle June 1, 1906 after its purchase by the Northwestern Steamship Co for the Alaska trade and then made her first trip to Nome, arriving June 25 and returning with $750,000 of gold. On Aug 7 1906 her name was changed to the SS Northwestern.  At some point c1909 its cabins were expanded, enclosed/rebuilt (Alaska is not the Caribbean!), it was transferred to Alaska Steam and it continued its storied if notorious Alaskan career for three decades as the most often sunk,  beached, refloated, and eventually in 1942, bombed West Coast/Alaskan ship. What survived is still in Dutch Harbor.

So I’d go with summer of 1906 – the Nebraska was still at the Moran yards, the destroyer Perry still hanging around, and the cutter Grant often moored in the harbor. The Hanford building on the corner of First and Cherry wasn’t finished until sometime later in 1906, so that is the outside of the timeframe.

Ironic aside: if indeed the Orizaba and the New York were at the same shipyard in 1906, they both died 35 some years later in the Pacific War (New York scuttled in Manila Bay December 1941, the Orizaba/Northwestern in Dutch Harbor May 1942), and both remain where they lay. The iron hulled mechanically failing Grant sank in a storm up in northern Canadian waters in 1910 after being converted to a fish freighter, and the torpedo boat Perry was eventually scrapped after WWI.

Collegially, as I get back to my own work

Stephen Edwin Lundgren

such as revisting Gorden Newell’s work, with Lost Ships of the Pacific Northwest

Orizaba/Northwestern’s career :   Alaska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered

Side note: The Grant ended its career with two involvements with the salvation of survivors and later resurrection of the victims of the doomed steamer Valencia off the British Columbia coast. But that’s another story, mine.

Can’t help you with the street clocks. I don’t wear a watch anymore.

Does anybody really know what time it is? or really care?

Paul: bottom line, I say photo is June 1906 not 1904. Sez me and Ace Curtis. He sez send him two bucks for the publication fee. Payable to his account at Dexter Horton downtown. And who the hell is Mr. Corbis? I still got the plate somewhere in the root cellar unless it ended up on the greenhouse roof.

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On the recent afternoon of one of our inconstant autumnal days Jean Sherrard joined author Rob Ketcherside on the roof of the Alaska Building to repeat the ca. 1904 subject that Ketcherside has placed on the front cover of his first book, the new “Lost Seattle.”

What by now is lost here?  Besides West Seattle, most of which is hidden behind a deep cloud bank, Jean’s look west from the top of Seattle’s first skyscraper (1904) is missing most of the long wall of brick structures that in the decade following the city’s “great fire” of 1889 were squeezed along the east side of First Avenue to both sides of Cherry Street.  Surely many Pacific readers will remember when these ornate red brick beauties were replaced with the big buff parking garage, showing here on the right.

It could make you nostalgic, and those pining feelings are surely what the many titles included in the London publisher, Pavilion’s series on lost cities (Including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and many others) is, in part, counting on.  And it works.  Ketcherside has chosen his subjects well for this polished hard back, and orders them by decades, beginning with the effects of that “great fire” in 1889.

The new book’s subjects are a mix of local classics and the author’s favorites.  For instance, Ketcherside’s sidewalk display of Seattle’s old street (aka Jeweler’s) clocks is a refined pleasure and, again, not a little nostalgic.  (Surely many Pacific readers could be of some help with the author’s continuing research on the subject of these “pedestal clockworks.”  Readers with pictures of street clocks and/or stories to share may contact him at roket@gwu.edu.)

Besides working full time managing programs and programmers for a computer services company, and raising a family, Rob has taken an active roll in the local heritage community.  For instance, he is an appointed member of the Mayor’s Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board.  Happily for us and himself, Rob Ketcherside continues his research and writing.  Let’s support him and go out and find his Lost Seattle.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?  Certainly Jean, and as has become our custom we begin with Ron Edge’s help with links (pictures to tap) that will take our readers to a few other relevant features from the neighborhood.

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If one gives little attention to the homes on the hill and none to the junk dumped into this waterway then these adventurous young boys captaining their crafts might remind Pacific readers of their own youthful adventures or of those shared with them by Mark Twain. This, however, is not the Mississippi, but one of the last evidences of the mudflats south of King Street where for millennia twice every 25 hours – about – the waters of Puget Sound sloshed as far east as Beacon Hill, here on the right.

This summer subject was first printed in The Times on August 24, 1945, the day that Gen. Douglas MacArthur announced that an advanced party would land in Japan two days later to prepare the way for occupation.  A half-century earlier the reclamation of these tideflats began in earnest.  There is with this vestige no longer any direct connection to the tides, and so no chance that these lads will drift into the shipping lanes.  Most likely this is a catching basin for run off – a big one.   In a 1946 aerial photograph it can be measured reaching thru most of this 660-foot long block east of Airport way and between Holgate and Massachusetts Streets

The Times headline for this subject (on top) does not celebrate youth and its summer recreations, but reads, “Where Death May Be A Playmate.”  The paper shared Seattle Police Chief Herbert Kinsey’s claim that his forces were frequently called upon to rescue children who fall into this pond. A survey of tragic accidents since the first of the year named five children who had downed in backyard lily ponds or in Seattle’s wetlands like this one – although not in this one.  William Norton, City Council’s chair of its public safety committee, speculated “between 50 and 60 small children have met death in such ponds in recent years.” If true, this home front statistic is at once grotesque and fantastic.

Throughout most of the Great Depression one of the lesser Hooverville communities of shacks scavengered by homeless men crowded the west shore of the pond (to the left). Roughly one hundred of them can be counted in a 1936 aerial (not reprinted here).

A FEW MORE HOOVERVILLES, without explanation

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WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   A few more from the neighborhood and its hydraulic puzzles, Jean.

Jean here, with a quick note on behalf of dorpatsherrardlomont. Our server has once again become somewhat unstable, preventing the addition of the usual Web Extras which accompany ‘Seattle Now & Then’. We apologize for this disruption of our regular service, but will try our best to get things back up and running smoothly as soon as possible.

(That last concerned “interruption” came from Ron Edge, but the disciplined Edge soon fixed the problem and we are back.)

Directly below is a feature from Jan. 2012 that had its own timing puzzle.  The view from Denny Hill is part of the first panorama of the city recorded from there, and it also reveals in the distance the unfilled tideflats (or lands) south of King Street.  Following this Feature are – as is our custom – several more that dwell on the neighborhood.  Each of the subjects – and their extras as well –  are reached through a single appropriate image, most likely the primary image used when the feature was first presented.   Any reader aroused to study these tideland subjects should also browse the Pictorial History of Seattle’s Waterfront.  Handily it is posted on this blog.

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Here an unnamed pioneer photographer has chosen a prospect on the southwest slope of Denny Hill to look south through what was then Seattle’s “north end.”  This may be the first look from an elevation that was understandably for years after – until it was regraded away – a favorite platform for recording the city.

The photograph was taken mid-block (block 27 of A.A. Denny’s 3rd Addition) between Pine and Stewart Streets and First and Second Avenues.  Jean Sherrard’s now is adjusted to both use and relish the alleyway that runs thru the center of the block.  The historical photographer stood a few feet left, behind (or embedded in) the concrete wall, and somewhat closer to Pine Street.  He was also thirty or forty feet above Jean, for this part of Denny Hill was graded away between 1903 and 1905.

By a mistake of my own I’d considered 1875 a most “deserving” date for this subject, but I preferred 1876, a boom year for Seattle, and an annum that “explains itself” with Seattle’s first city directory.   I was wrong by three or four years.  The date here is the blooming months of either late 1872 or early 1873, and the evidence is in two churches – one showing and the other not.

Second Avenue angles through the center of the scene.  On August 24, 1873 Plymouth Congregational Church dedicated its first (of now four) downtown sanctuary on Second a little ways north of Spring Street.  It would – but does not – appear above the roofline of Arthur and Mary Denny’s barn, here right-of-center at the southwest corner of Second and Union.

Appearing – but barely – also above the Denny barn, but to its right, is the Methodist Protestant Church near the northeast corner of Second and Madison.  In 1871 its pastor Daniel Bagley gave it a “remodel,” a second floor with mansard windows.  Both additions are showing.

In “This City of Ours,” J. Willis Sayre’s 1936 school textbook of Seattle historical trivia, Sayre makes this apt point about the Second Avenue showing here. “In the seventies it had narrow wooden sidewalks which went up and down, over the ungraded surfaces, like a roller-coaster . . . The street was like a frog pond every winter.”

WEB EXTRAS

I thought I’d throw in a related picture with a short sketch. City alleys provide us with back doors, service entrances, garages – but also occasionally reveal darker aspects. Looking for this week’s ‘now’, I took several photos up and down the alley between Pine and Stewart, and snapped ( and eavesdropped on) two kids, boyfriend and girlfriend, just arrived from a small town by bus. Something heartrending here, with that little pink backpack bobbing down the alley.

Anything to add, Paul?

This time Jean’s question is rhetorical.  We have had such a time with this blog and its “server” that it is ordinarily impossible to get on it.  The chances are that what I am writing here will not be saved.  I’ll keep it brief.  It seems we must find a different server.  This may take a while.  Again, if any of your have suggestions in this regard please share them with us.  Meanwhile please check the blog daily – if you will – but know that nothing new might appear, and  you too may not be able to open it, for instance for browsing through past features.   Hopefully we will escape these problems early in February, and come back with a site that is confident and stable.

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Both born in Germany in the early 1840s, Otto Ranke and Dora Duval, met, married early and soon immigrated first to Chicago, ca.1862, and then on to Seattle by 1881.  The couple raised four children while Otto, a skilled contractor, also raised many of the then boomtown Seattle’s more imposing structures, including the Yesler-Leary Building and the Boston Block.  (The former in Pioneer Place was destroyed by the city’s Great Fire of 1889, and the latter survived it, barely.)

Otto was known for his singing, and Dora for her dancing.  Together with their children and other local talents they produced theatre and light opera, often here in their big home on the northwest corner of Pike Street and Fifth Avenue.  With the help of a theatre coach imported from the East, the couple staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience at the Frye Opera House on Dec. 30, 1888.  The place was nearly packed to witness the performance by the Seattle Juvenile Opera Company.  Surely many of its members had parents in the audience.

The record of the posing Ranke family – or part of it – at the top, dates from ca. 1884.  Another look at the home – down from Denny Hill – in 1885 shows it nearly doubled.  By one report that enlarged pioneer clapboard had 11 rooms.  In 1889 the prospering Rankes joined the by then smart move of Seattle’s “better-offs” to First Hill.  They purchased there the southeast corner of Madison Street and Terry Avenue, and built a truly baronial mansion ornamented with carved panels, Oriental rugs, stained glass, and oil paintings for all the halls and eleven bedrooms.

Otto did not live long enough to enjoy the family’s new mansion for the musicales and theatrics he almost certainly had planned for it.  He died of a “throat ailment” in 1892.  Dora lived on until 1919 – and well off.  In 1907 her vacation to Europe included a one-year stay in Paris.  (This may be the first time I have truly felt envy for one of my subjects.) The four-story Ranke building that replaced this home on Pike included a venue large enough for masquerade balls.  Long accompanied there by the city’s popular and long-lived Wagner’s First Regiment Orchestra, the balls at Ranke’s hall became a local tradition.  The brick Ranke Building was razed in 1927 for a “higher and best use” of the corner.

FOUR More TIMES classifieds Heralding ENTERTAINMENTS at the RANKE in the First Cold Days of the 20th CENTURY

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Mistah Dorpat?  Certainly Sur Sherrard!  A few shots and subjects from nearby along Pike Street, and a visit (again) to the nearly royal Ranke Manse on First Hill.  Here first is the 33rd installment of the often leaned-on Time series from 1944-45, EARLY-DAY MANSIONS by Margaret Pitcairn Strachan.   Some of the stories will be familiar to you from my and other’s borrowing, but please do double-click here to see Strachan’s work.

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(above) Looking west on Pike from had the home been preserved in the front lawn (remembering that Pike was widened) of the Ranke’s 1884 home.

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LATER

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Let us now celebrate Goat Hill, the latest of the imaginative names given to First Hill or parts of it since the original settlers first climbed it in 1852. They named it then for its obvious distinction.  The about 366 foot high (near Broadway and James) ridge that lifted from the central waterfront like a green curtain of firs, cedars, hemlocks and alders was the first hill to climb and cross when either trailblazing east to the “big lake” eventually named Washington, or wisely following the “Indian Path’ that reached the lake roughly in line with the present Yesler Way.

I learned of the “Goat” tag only recently when railroad historian Noel Holley shared with me the photo printed here.  His friend, Wade Stevenson while visiting Seattle from Othello, recorded it from the Smith Tower. Noel figures “it was about 1960.”  This, then, is a late look at First Hill’s western face before the freeway was cut across it.

Another friend, First Hill historian Stephen Edwin Lundgren, first confirmed the hill’s newest moniker and then directed me to what we may fairly call its creator: Jim Napolitano.  While working on King County’s newest additions to the hill – a multi-story parking garage at 6^th and Jefferson and the County’s new Chinook Office Building at 5^th and Terrace – Napolitano, a Major Project Manager for King County – heard enough variations on the same amused complaint “You needed to be a goat to get up there!” that he suggested that this new public works campus be named for the goats.  And so it is now a new Goat Hill garage that clings to the steep southwest corner of 6^th and Jefferson.  (I knew the cheap thrills of that free but challenging dirt parking lot for I often used it in the 1970s while visiting city hall for research.)

Through its mere 162 years of development and complaints, First Hill – or parts of it – has had many names including Yesler, Pill and Profanity.  This last was a folk creation of the late 1890s when lawyers and litigants started using “bad language” during their steep climb to the King County Courthouse which sat then on the brow of the hill about 300 feet above Pioneer Square.  Now we have another ascribing folk name for the part of First Hill west of the I-5 Freeway and south of James.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, old goat?  Surely Jean, and we will start with a few goats, beginning with a goat on goats, one of the many Kodachromes left with us by Horace Sykes, whose transparencies we shared with the “Our Daily Sykes” feature that we ran for at least 500 days – we hope without missing any.   Here first is a Sykes that we did not use, waiting we were for some Call of the Goat.   Following that we will introduce a Wallingford goat on Eastern Ave. and accompany it will be a pony on Eastern Ave. as well and it’s own Pacific feature.  Both of these neighborhood animals came from my neighbor Frank Debruyn, now passed.  While his pony made it into Pacific on Nov. 15, 1992, I  assured Frank that his goat would be used as well – sometime.  Now’s the time Jean – and Frank.

Following the farm animals, Ron Edge will put up more links to related stories that have appeared on this blog previously.  Most of these are on First Hill subjects.  As with music these features are their own motifs and so gain new resonances and harmonies when mixed with other features.  That, at least, is what we hope.

EDGE LINKS

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WEDDED BLISS BORN ABOVE

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Above and below INTERSTATE FIVE (aka The Seattle Freeway) building south through Goat Hill in the early-mid 1960s.

In 1976 Ivar bought what he described as his “last toy” – the (about) 42-story Smith Tower, which as a child in West Seattle he watch ascending across Elliott Bay.  Ivar was born in 1905.  The tower was dedicated nine years later.

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WADE STEVENSON’S WATERFRONT

Wade Stevenson also recorded the waterfront from the Smith Tower observatory, and included prints with those he gave to his friend Noel Holley.  We print them now beside Jean’s recent coverage of the same sections of the waterfront nearest the Smith Tower and Pioneer Square.  We will include a few other examples, as well.

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On the Sunday morning of June 30, 1963, Frank Shaw loaded his Hasselblad camera with color film, and climbed a narrow driveway off 7^th Ave. between Pike and Pine Street approaching the center of Block 66 of the Denny Addition.  Although surrounded by hotels including the Waldorf behind him and above him the towering Art Deco landmark, the Roosevelt, (seen here across 7^th Avenue), Shaw focused instead on this fading gray pioneer, for more than 70 years the clapboard home of the Anthony family. It was built ca.1887 on a 60×100 foot lot that the German immigrant Ferdinand Anthony purchased directly from Seattle’s “father-founder” Arthur Denny.

Anthony began his pioneer book binding business in the Frye Opera House in the early 1880s. Eventually the family business was moved into a long shed built for it behind their home.  (Here the bindery is out-of-frame to the right, but it is included in two of the five transparencies of the home site that Shaw exposed this Sunday.  We will attach them, with captions, following the text for this feature.)  As his many surviving cityscapes confess, when Frank Shaw, a Boeing quality control inspector, was not out climbing with the Mountaineers, he liked to walk the city taking pictures of what he characterized for Bob Geigle, a friend at Boeing, as the “what is.” Shaw was a “realist” with his camera, who typically found something old more embodied than something new.

Robert Shaw consistently dated and named his negatives and transparencies.  He did not, however, keep a photographer’s diary, and so we don’t know what he knew about the Anthony family – if anything.  Following their father Ferdinand’s death in 1919, Robert, age 33, and his younger sister Julia continued to run the binding business, although Julia also gave 42 years to teaching in Seattle schools.  Thru their many years on 7^th Ave. Robert Anthony had denied a parade of agents with cash offers for his property, explaining that it “suited” him as is. Robert died less than half a year after Robert Shaw’s visit.  The Anthony “compound” was soon razed in 1964, at first for more parking. Julia passed in 1970.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   As always – almost – a few more samples from the neighborhood, illustrations and, this time, also four past features.

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DANIEL & MARY JACKSON’S BIG HOME

(First printed in Pacific, July 17, 1988.)

            The history of Seattle’s big homes began in earnest during the 1880s boom. Moneyed families, including the Yeslers, began building oversized homes right in town next door to smaller bungalows. As the town quickly grew into a city, First Hill developed as an almost exclusive neighborhood of mansions.

            Later, the dispersal of First Hill society proceeded in many directions, including Lake Washington, Capitol Hill and walled-in enclaves such as Broadmoor and the Highlands. Today, there only a few surviving big homes on First Hill.  Its transformation to apartments and clinics is long since completed.

            The D.B. Jackson home was an exception to the practice of the rich gathering in plutocratic enclaves. It was neither in town nor on the hill. Sited at the southwest corner of Pine Street and Eighth Avenue, its construction in 1888 placed it at the expanding northern border of the city in a neighborhood lightly settled with workers’ homes and duplexes.

            Captain Jackson was a lumberman, working through the 1870s as manager of the Puget Mill Company’s fleet of tug boats. The Jackson family home at Port Gamble is preserved there.

            In 1882, Jackson formed the Washington Steamboat and Transportation Co. and won the mail contract for Puget Sound ports. This enlarged the so-called “Mosquito Fleet” of small steamers buzzing about the Sound. In 1889, Jackson expanded his operations into the very successful Puget Sound and Alaska Steamship Co.

            The Jackson big home was begun by Fred E. Sander, a local trolley promoter, in 1888, but it was the Jacksons that finished it.  The Mansion was lavishly appointed with stained glass, hardwoods, plush carpets and frescoed ceilings.  It had 14 rooms, and each with its own fireplace, but the captain had little time to enjoy it. He died in 1895. His wife, Mary, lived on in the big home for another 20 years before moving to Captiol Hill in about 1914. Nearly back-to-back, she was neighbors with the Anthony family for a quarter-century.  Mary Rowell Jackson died in 1927 at the age of 92, leaving 20 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren, including Sen. Dan Evans.

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The FIRST AERIE – EAGLES at 7^TH & PINE

(First appeared in Pacific, 8-25-2002)

            In 1904, after renting space from the Masons, the burgeoning Eagles moved into their own hall at the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Pine Street. In the less than five years since their founding, they had added more than 1,000 members and enough cash to purchase the comely hall and crown Aerie No.1 with an eagle.

            The Eagles were organized as an afterthought at a secret meeting of Seattle theater impresarios, John Considine and John Cort included. The group had met to plot ways of breaking the Musician’s Union strike against their houses. After deciding to fire their bands and use pianists alone to accompany variety acts, the founders then formed The Independent Order of Good Things and selected for a motto “Skin Em.”

            At the founders’ second meeting they settled on “Eagles” for their name and dropped the bellicose motto for a merely secular maxim: “Not God, heaven, hereafter, but man, earth, now.” By one critic’s description, about a third of the original management “were the toughest crowd that could be dug up in Seattle.” At the Eagles’ 50th-anniversary celebration, William A. Fisher recalled, “When they initiated me, I almost resigned. The ceremonies were so rough I was on the shelf for three days.”

            Part of the reason the Eagles grew at a record rate was because so many of them were entertainers who were always on the move. They also dropped the hazing. John Cort, the first president, explained: “We want to make life more desirable by lessening its evils and promoting peace, prosperity, gladness and hope.” Theirs was a politics of populism and patriotism. At one time or another the order promoted workers compensation, Mothers Day, old-age pensions and, briefly, a guaranteed annual income.

            Twenty-two years after the Eagles in 1903 settle into their first permanent hall at Pine and Seventh, the club then moved two blocks south on Seventh to a much larger terracotta tile clad home at the northeast corner of Union and 7ths. That they sold the old hall for $231,000 was noted in a 1925 by a Seattle Times business reporter as an “outstanding example of the increase of real estate values in the district north of Pike Street.”  They originally paid $11,500 for it.  Another Bartells Drugs became the primary tenant of the converted hall for “man, earth, now.” 

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THE ‘Y’ OF HOWELL AND OLIVE LOOKING EAST FROM 8^TH AVENUE.

 (First printed in Pacific, June 23 1996)

            Little block 28 of Sara Bell’s Second Addition is one of those pie-shaped oddities that offer relief from the predictable space of the American urban grid.  The buildings on them seem to put on a show – sometimes, like here, pushing their faces into the flow of traffic.

            Like the others of this flatiron class, what this three-story clapboard gives up in space it makes up in facades.  Surely every room within is well-lit.  Photographed here Nov. 18, 1910, this building also shows up in panorama recorded from the summit of Denny Hill 20 years earlier. (We will include it – when we find it.)

            This mixed-class (retail and apartment) structure thrusts its forehead into the five-star corner of Olive Square.  Here Howell Street, on the right, originates from the intersection of Eight Avenue and Olive Way.  After Yesler Way running west from Broadway, Olive is the second odd tangent that enlivens the otherwise monotonous street configuration of Seattle’s central Business district.

            The scene was probably recorded by the Public Works Department’s photographer, James Lee, which may explain the photograph’s enigmatic purpose as a record of something having to do with public use rather than private or architectural glory.  Still this vain little clapboard is a pleasure – although it may be an idle one.  The bright sign taped to the front door is a real-estate broker’s inquiry card.  The only other sign showing is hung on the left over the sidewalk on Olive way.  It is for the Angelo, the residential rooms upstairs.

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ALL BUT 2 of the 7 SUBJECTS that FOLLOW, INCLUDE AT LEAST A GLIMPSE of the WEST FAÇADE of the ANTHONY FAMILY HOME mid-block on the East Side of Seventh Avenue Between PIKE & PINE STREETS.  This is a TEST – WITHOUT THE ANSWERS.  FAMILIAR as you are by now with the ANTHONY HOME, we are confident that if you SEEK YOU WILL FIND!

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The Seattle Times special attention to Seattle neighborhoods reached Greenwood on Sunday Oct. 11, 1925.  This look east on N. 85th Street from Palatine Avenue was the largest of five neighborhood scenes that the daily newspaper grouped on page 26 within a decorative montage.  The generous feature included many inches of copy – about 35.  The headline for the story runs above this street scene and reads, “North End District is Growing at Amazing Pace” and continues below it, “Star of Seattle Empire Goes Steadily Northward; Hundreds Demand Homes.”

Seattle first reached this corner officially in 1891. With an act of territorial bravado the city annexed much of the north end where stumps still far outnumbered citizens. Hardly a road then, 85th Street was agreed to by vote as the expanding city’s new northern border, but with exceptions.  Ballard, the “shingle capitol of the world”, kept to itself, and the Webster Point peninsula dividing Lake Washington proper from its Union Bay was still many years from being promoted as the exclusive Laurelhurst, which was first annexed in 1910.

In 1910 Trollies first reached N. 85^th Street on Greenwood Ave – one block east of the Times photographer’s position.  Here 15 years later the city still stops at the centerline of 85^th.  Consequently, the structures on the left have only King Country addresses and taxes and would remain so until Jan 4, 1954.  P.M. Morrow built the almost finished frame and brick veneer building here at the northeast corner of 85^th and Palatine with plate glass storefronts, apartments upstairs, and a movie theatre – the Grand – at his building’s eastern end.

Morrow also owned a truck farm behind the Morrow Block. Earlier that summer – in 1925 – Morrow explained at an open Greenwood meeting called to consider annexation into Seattle that he was against it. “I didn’t come out to avoid high taxes . . . I came out in the spirit of the pioneer to pick up better and cheaper land and to blaze the trail.” Morrow concluded, “We on the outside have contributed largely to Seattle’s growth.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Sure Jean, in spite of the troubles we are having with this program, we may start with Ron Edge’s help.  He has pulled 4 past features that are relevant to the Greenwood Neighborhood, meaning in or near it.  Then as time and this machine allows I’ll add some others below the Edge Four.   For those, just click the pictures.

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As Jean’s “repeat” reveals, the recent prize-winning remodel of the HUB (the University of Washington’s Husky Union Building) is an air-conditioned delight. While its atrium of glass and limestone reaches for the roof it also extends to nearly the length of the building.

The HUB was built in 1949 on the former site of the surreal Forestry Building, which was hammered together for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP). In its bigger parts that state financed oddity was built from unhewn fir logs picked from the forests of Snohomish County for their “symmetry and soundness.” Five and one-half feet thick and forty feet long, the logs required two flat cars each for delivery to the building site over a special railroad spur laid thru the AYP campus.

Ignoring the Forestry Building’s classical ambitions, a local reporter, on first seeing architects Charles W. Saunders and George Willis Lawton’s rendering, concluded, no doubt with considerable satisfaction, that it would surely be the “largest log cabin in the world.”  The Fair’s directors were quick to “squelch these popular postcard notions” with their own best construction. “The Forestry Building will not be a log cabin building, but a building of architectural lines and design constructed largely of logs.”

The “Temple to Timber” opened on June 1, 1909 with the rest of the fair.  Although lavishly appointed with the artifacts of forestry and a few freaks too, like a pair of dice that were six feet through, – “the kind of dice we roll in Washington” – this “Greek temple done in rustic” was an example of a museum overwhelming the exhibits inside it.

The real photo postcards above and below were recorded after the AYP when the Forestry Building lived on as the State Museum.

Predictions that “such a building should stand for a century” were disappointed by the several families of wood-eating beetles who found living under the bark nourishing, although ultimately not replenishing.  In danger of collapse, the Forestry Building was razed in 1931.

WEB EXTRAS

I have a few photos I took wandering the re-invented HUB. Surely, you must remember the mural, which it seems, remains in place, although the walls surrounding it have changed. Light now streams down from windows above on a sunny day:

The other photos reveal a more open HUB with balconies and floating staircases, some of which can be seen below (click on thumbnails to enlarge):

First impression – lots of space and light, perhaps sacrificing a certain mundane coziness. What say you, Paul?

For most of the parts we will share more looks at and into the Forestry Building.  Still I will admit to having enjoyed the “mundane coziness” too of the old Hub.  This surely has lots to do with the dances, and stage shows I enjoyed there in the late 1960s primarily.  For instance I danced with then still the flex-of-prime to the music of Country Joe and the Fish for their first visit to Seattle.  That was in the winter of 1966-67 – unless I am corrected.  More recently I attended a concert of mixed-gender glee-music (I’ll call it) performed by students from Bellingham, Western Wash University including my friends Marc Cutler and Leslie Smith’s son Alexander.  The windowless room were not a bother, and the low-ceiling lobby was, as you put it, quite cozy.  The comforting deep chairs helped with that.  Returning to the Forestry Building and a stereo of its big room we can see that it too could show lots of “space and light” somewhat like the new HUB.

I first wrote about this “Temple of Timber” now nearly 30 years ago for the Pacific issue of Feb. 26, 1994.  Ron Edge’s helpful scanning of all three of the early collections of the Pacific features – Seattle Now and Then, Vol.1, Vol.2 & Vol.3 includes the below as the 29th feature included in Volume One.  [Click TWICE to enlarge the text below.]

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First we note the photographer’s caption at the lower-left corner of the “then.”   It reads, “1^st Shovel at Conveyor 5^th Ave. & Battery St.”  And at its lower-right corner the subject is also helpfully dated May 11, 1929.

Most likely the photographer was James Lee, the skilled Dept. of Public Works employee, whose industrious recordings of Seattle’s regrades also include film.  The one-reel documentary “Seattle Moves a Mountain” was constructed of Lee’s footage of this the last of the many regrades on Denny Hill.  The digging went on from 1929 into 1931.  (You may have seen all or parts of Lee’s footage on either Channel 9 or, even more likely, the Seattle Channel.)

Here after a seventeen year pause at the cliff it had carved along the east side of 5^th Avenue, the Denny Hill Regrade began anew in 1929 using this last time a belt to convey what remained of the hill along an about 2,500 foot long ride above Battery Street to the waterfront. The George Nelson Company, the regrade’s contractors, promised that the “huge conveyor belt” would be constructed of “sound-deadening equipment . . . so that when the dirt starts moving there will be as little noise as possible.” Sure.

Every working day about 10,000 cubic yards of the dwindling hill were dumped from the belt onto barges, which in turn were towed off shore for the capsizing of their loads into Elliot Bay. In time the dumping had a comedic effect.  The submerged pile-up of a reconstituted Denny Hill silently reached an elevation that was a danger to shipping. It required dredging.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?   Yup Jean – but most of it tomorrow.  Do your remember the sand man?  I hardly do, but now it is 2:30 Sunday morning and I am ready to climb the stairs once again to “Nighty Bears” and will only return to this until I have rested all my winks in the sand traps of that man.

Bless us tho, Ron Edge has put up just below a seven-combo of pans and aerials of the our primary subject: the work connected to the last of the Denny Regrades, the one from 1929 to 1931.  To get the full-size value out of Ron’s images you must really click them – sometimes twice.  They are linked to is own server, and what you will get is the bigger because of it!!!  Tomorrow after breakfast (which for this sleeper means around noon) I’ll add some interpretations for Ron’s seven overdetermined aids and then add a few more pixs and old features from there as well.  Now away.

[Not quite.  After composing captions for Ron’s aerials and pans below and then “saving” then some ghost in this connected erased them.   Ron, Jean and I got the same results.   The lost captions went lost – without explanation.   Now we will try again, but most likely not so long as first.   Remembering here as well that we were not able to put up the rest of this feature including many more pictures with captions because the program declined to do what it had been doing with regularity, we will surrender and wait.  Later when we are confident of the programs stability we will but up an extended Addendum for this Seattle Now & Then named “First Shovel at Fifth and Battery.”   Among its many photographs will be one captioned “Last shovel at Fifth and Battery.”]

(Click these pans TWICE to enlarge.)

Both the above and below aerials were apparently commission by the real estate agent W.A. Irwin, whose name is printed on both.  Perhaps Irwin specialized in Central Business District properties – many did – and north end properties as well.  Note how the aerial above puts Seattle’s “center of population” in Edgewater, more familiarity on or close to the border between the Fremont and Wallingford neighborhoods, ca. 1927.  Irwin has put the numbers 1-thru-12 on a few properties perhaps as a quiz. We recommend that you use it so.  At the bottom of Ron’s six pixs we will include the answers.  The white line reaching north from the “Regrade District,” is meant to mark  – imperfectly – the new speedway, Aurora.  It leads to the high bridge across the Lake Washington Ship Canal at least for years before it was dedicated in 1932.

Here, center-right, the habitat of what was then called the “Old Quarter” is dark with its old clapboard homes and tenements and Denny Park (the darkest part).  Fifth Avenue  runs up and left from near the center of the subject.  To the right of 5th is what is captioned “1. The Regrade District” in the aerial above this one.  To the left of 5th lies the still sparingly developed Denny Regrade: the first and larger part of that long effort that ran with many interruptions at least from 1883 to 1912.  The longest pause came then with a cliff along the east side of 5th Avenue that held its place until 1929, the year this aerial was recorded by the Pierson Photo Co..  Near the center of this subject is the oddity of the tall brick tower of Sacret Heart Church standing naked – as it were – at the corner of 6th Avenue and Blanchard Street.  ( We will interrupt Ron’s aerial with a close-ups of the church with the tower and without it.) Also showing here is the long line of the Battery Street conveyor, which runs out of the aerial on the far left.

[Click the clipping below TWICE to enlarge for reading.]

Above: Here Ron has “stitched” together many details from the 1929 aerial survey of Seattle.  Ron explains “The fit together well enough.”  This grouping gives an illusion of height which the survey did not reach.  The flight lines were taken at relatively low altitudes, especially when compared to the 1936 and 1946 surveys that followed this one, which was the first of many.  The aerial reveals very well that system of moveable conveyors that spread into the regrade acress from their “collector,” the man conveyor that from on Battery from the waterfront and the block between 5th and 6th Avenues.  One of the imperfections of the 1929 survey were slim slices of the city missed by the flyers because of their low elevations.  It is for this reason, Ron explains – and regrets, that it was not possible to show the special wharf at the foot of Battery Street where self-righting scows, built by the Seattle Public Works Dept., collected the hill’s remains from the conveyor for bumping off-shore.  To make up for it we will interrupt, again, with a sea-level coverage of the wharf and scow combo.  (In the addendum to come later we will print the story that originally accompanied this photo.)

(Below)  Looking south from near 6th and Battery, late 1929.   The corner of 5th Avenue and Blanchard Street is far right.

(Above) Left to right from the Chief Seattle Garage at 508 Denny Way (its north side) to a long look south on 5th Avenue towards the Central Business District.  The pan was taken from the Davenport Hotel at 5th and Vine.

(Above) The best surviving clue here is the sliver of the structure showing on the far right, the northeast corner (at the alley) of what is now named the 5th Ave. Court at the southeast corner of 5th Avenue and Blanchard Street.   The Battery Street conveyor – its east end between 5th and 6th Avenues – appears far left.  Below the Queen Anne Hill horizon, left of center, is the temporary grade of Denny Hill north of Denny Way, the last part of the hill to be removed.  The arty block lettering selected for the picture’s own superimposed caption shakes with the thrill of its “1,520,000 cubic yards of earth removed since February 1, 1929.”

ANSWERS To The IRWIN QUIZ

1. The Denny Hill Regrade acres for 1929-32

2. The Medical Dental Building

3. Times Square

4. Bon Marche

5. Frederick & Nelson

6. New Washington Hotel

7. Securities Bldg. (3rd and Stewart)

8. Yale Bldg.

9. Antlers Hotel

10. Chantecler, soon (1928) site of Northern Life Insurance