(click to enlarge photos – sometimes TWICE!)

The 1922-23 construction of the Olympic Hotel lured photographers to First Hill to record its grand dimensions while also capturing the central business district’s north end.  By then it had assembled an impressive jumble of brick and terra cotta clad business blocks, much of it retail.  (There was no Smith Tower and no need for one.)

On the far right, at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Stewart Street, the darker bricks of the New Washington Hotel (1908), top the cluster of business blocks at the southern border of the Denny Regrade. Far left, the Olympic, “Seattle’s first elegant hotel” is getting topped-off sometime in the more verdant months of 1923.

Seattle’s “grand hotel” opened on Dec. 7th of that year, a Christmas gift to the city, and only a few weeks following the dedication on Sunday Sept. 23, of the glimmering terra cotta tiled Fourth Church of Christian Science. That classic sanctuary shows here far left – directly below the Olympic.  It was built one hundred and ten feet square, with 1300 seats in curving mahogany pews, and topped by a copper-covered dome, which helped with its great acoustics.

For his or her recording the historical photographer visited an upper floor of the then nearly new Virginia Mason Hospital (1920). For his “now,” Jean Sherrard went to the hospital’s roof and discovered that the church could be found – a mere corner of its dome. (We encourage you to keep looking for it.)

In 1999 Fourth Church received its new calling as Town Hall, which returns us to Jean Sherrard, our weekly “repeater.”

For seven years Jean has been hosting Act Theatre and Town Hall’s Christmas edition of the by now honored series titled Short Stories Live. The Hall started Jean out in the slightly smaller lower level hall, but his productions became so popular that he and his players were moved upstairs into Town Hall’s Great Hall, beneath the high dome.  And on this very Sunday afternoon beginning at 4pm, Jean and three others (including myself invited to represent amateurs) will be reading with a little ham, humbug and Ho-ho-ho, the program of short stories and music that Jean has titled (Another) Rogue’s Christmas.

WEB EXTRAS

A couple of years ago, in preparation for another of our Town Hall Christmas Follies, we took the following photo:

Before I ask Paul our ritual WebExtras question, let me hasten to invite one and all to join us for what promises to be a delightful afternoon. The Seattle actress (and legend) Megan Cole will be joining us; along with our musical guests, the amazing Pineola (Leslie Braly, John Owen, and Josh Woods). For more info, please visit Town Hall’s own website.

And now, Paul, back to blogland with my perennial question – anything to add?

Yes Jean, a few more attractions/features from the neighborhood beginning with one put up on this blog in 2009 and now repeated with some additions.

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Art Critic Sheila Farr describes George Tsutakawa’s fountain at 6th and Seneca as showing a “style that lends modernism with philosophical and formal elements of traditional Asian art, a combination that became emblematic of the Northwest school.” (Photo by Frank Shaw) 

NOW: The original hope that the Naramore Fountain would soften the environment of the Interstate-5 Freeway was later greatly extended with the construction of its neighbor, Freeway Park. For reference, the Exeter Apartments at 8th and Seneca can be seen upper-right in both the “now and then.” (Photo by Jean Sherrard) 

The “Fountain of Wisdom” is the name for the first fountain that Japanese-American sculptor George Tsutakawa built a half-century ago. The name was and still is appropriate for the fountain was sited beside swinging doors into Seattle Public Library’s main downtown branch.  In 1959 it was on the 5th Avenue side of the modern public library that replaced a half-century old stone Carnegie Library on the same block.  Five years ago this “first fountain” was moved one block to the new 4th Avenue entrance of the even “more modern” Koolhouse Library.

As the sculptor’s fortunes developed after 1959 his work at the library door might have also been called “ Tsutakawa’s fountain of fountains” for in the following 40 years he built about 70 more of them including the one shown here at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue and Seneca Street.  Named for Floyd Naramore, the architect who commissioned it, this fountain site was picked in part to soften the “edge of the freeway” especially here at Seneca where northbound traffic spilled into the Central Business District.

Photographer Frank Shaw was very good about dating his slides, and this record of late installation on the fountain, was snapped on June 10, 1967.  Tsutakawa is easily identified as the man steadying the ladder on the right.  Not knowing the others, I showed the slide to sculptor and friend Gerard Tsutakawa, George’s son, who identified the man on the ladder as Jack Uchida, the mechanical engineer “who did the hydraulics and structural engineering for every one of my fathers’ fountains.”

Gerard could not name the younger man with the hush puppies standing on one of the fountain’s petal-like pieces made sturdy from silicon bronze.  However, now after this “story” has been “up” for two days, Pat Lind has written to identify the slender helper on the left. Lind writes, “The young man in the ‘then’ photo is Neil Lind, a UW student of Professor George Tsutakawa at the time, who helped install the fountain.  Neil Lind graduated from the  UW and taught art for 32 years at Mercer Island Junior High and Mercer Island Hight School until his retirement.  His favorite professor was George Tsutakawa.”

When shown Jean Sherrard’s contemporary recording of the working fountain Gerard smiled but then looked to the top and frowned.   He discovered that the tallest points of its sculptured crown had been bent down.  A vandal had climbed the fountain.  Gerard noted, “That’s got to be corrected.”

WEB EXTRAS

Jean writes: It is nigh impossible to capture the visual effects of a fountain in a photograph. I took the THEN photo used by The Times with a nearly two-second shutter speed to approximate the creamy flow of white water over the black metal of the sculpture.  But there’s another view, shot at 1/300s of a second, that freezes the individual drips and drops.

More particles than waves 

The actual fountain must lie somewhere between the two.

A wider view with on-ramp and red umbrella 

A FEW FRANK SHAW COLOR SLIDES – SEATTLE ART

We have made a quick search of the Frank Shaw collection – staying for now with the color – and come up with a few transparencies that record local “art in public places” most of it intended, but some of it found.  Most of these are early recordings of subjects that we suspect most readers know.  We will keep almost entirely to Shaw’s own terse captions written on the sides of these slides.  He wrote these for himself and consequently often he did not make note of the obvious.   He also typically wrote on the side of his Hasselblad slides the time of day, and both the F-stop and shutter speed he used in making the transparency.  He was disciplined in recording all this in the first moment after he snapped his shot.  Anything that we add to his notes we will “isolate” with brackets.  The first is Shaw’s own repeat of the Naramore fountain at 6th and Seneca.

The look into this neighborhood printed directly below looks northwest from a vacant lot in the block bounded by 6th and 7th Avenues and bordered on the north by Seneca Street.   That put the photographer somewhere near the center of the block seen above, from above.

THE VAN SICLEN APARTMENTS

(First appeared in Pacific, March 7, 1999)

Since the construction of Interstate 5 in the mid-1960s, the Van Siclen aka Jensonia Apartment House has been hidden behind the Eighth Avenue overpass. North of Seneca Street there are now two Eighth Avenues: the overpass and a portion of the original lower Eighth Avenue that still descends sharply to the front entrance of the Jensonia Apartments. That building’s name was changed in 1931. In the older view, the original name, Van Siclen Apartments, is signed across the top of its otherwise featureless south wall.

Architect William Doty Van Siclen left his practice in San Jose, Calif., in 1901 for a 10-year career in Seattle. Working both for others and on his own, he left a variety of structures that have survived. These include two prominent office buildings on Pike Street: the Seaboard Building at Fourth Avenue and the Eitel Building at the northwest corner of Second Avenue. Van Siclen also designed the San Remo apartments on Capitol Hill and the Paul C. Murphy residence in Laurelhurst.

Although Van Siden was also the developer, his apartment complex may have been his last Seattle undertaking. The Van Siclen first appears in the 1911 city directory, the year William, his wife Ida and their daughter Rena moved north again, this time to Vancouver, B.C.

In the 10 years that Van Siclen worked here, the city’s population more than doubled, making the construction of apartment houses a prudent thing to do. The 1911 city directory lists more than 350 apartment buildings; six years earlier it had listed only eight. Of the 70 names in the 1939 Jensonian directory, only three – the stenographer Elise Thornton; Mary Crager, a department manager for the Creditors Association; and Daisy Brunt, listed as a “singer” – lived there 10 years earlier. Only two of the 70 from 1938 (and none of the three from 1929) lived there in 1949.

OHAVETH SHOLEM SYNAGOGUE

(First appeared in Pacific, March 1, 1992)

Sometime in the Winter of 1906 an photographer visited the construction site of St. James Cathedral and recorded this rare panorama of the modest swell of Denny Hill. From this point the doomed hill seems to be intact, but actually its western slope, hidden here, has already been cut away to the east side of Second Avenue. Within a year the landmark Washington Hotel, which here dominates the horizon, upper left, will be razed, and this pleasing variation in the city’s topography will be much further along on its transformation from hill to regrade.

Of the scattering of turn-of-the-century landmarks seen in this wide-angle record, the onion-shaped tops of the two towers of Seattle’s first synagogue appear near the scene’s center. At the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street, Ohaveth Sholem, or Lovers of Peace, is only three blocks from the photographer’s roost at Ninth and Marion.

Ohaveth Sholem’s new sanctuary was dedicated Sept. 18, 1892. Bach’s preludes, played on the synagogue’s new organ, accompanied the ceremony. It was a sign of the congregation’s reformed tendencies – Orthodoxy would no have allowed the organ.

Although several of Seattle’s most capable citizens, including the banker Jacob Furth and once Seattle Mayor Bailey Gatzert, were members, the congregation was short-lived. The combination of economic difficulties lingering after the market crash of 1893 and the friction between newly arrived immigrants, who were often considerably more traditional than the more well-to-do and established members, spurred the congregation’s first rabbi, Aaron “Brown, to leave in 1896. Two weeks later the synagogue closed for good. Soon after, however, in 1899, many of the more liberal Ohaveth Sholem members formed Temple De Hirsch.

We will now conclude – nearly – with two more panoramas from First Hill that include within glimpses of Four Church aka Town Hall.  We leave it to you to figure out from what prospect they were recorded.  (Well . . . which one was shot from the Sorrento?)

 

(click to enlarge photos – often CLICK TWICE)

On Monday May 12, 1941 a brass band leading at least three floats moved from Jackson Street south on Maynard Avenue into Chinatown with a parade that trumpeted the life of Dong On Long, the then recently deceased president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Dong, who had lived and worked in the neighborhood for more than a half-century, was famed for his wisdom as an arbitrator in what the Times called “the Chinese colony.”

Here the first float in Dong’s parade, with the beloved citizen’s portrait framed by a memorial wreath and inscribed, “Father” in flowers, passes in front of the Atlas Theatre. Running inside are either “Men Without Souls,” a prison movie with a young Glenn Ford, or “Ebb Tide,” a south-seas adventure staring Seattle’s Francis Farmer.  The welcoming marquee allows that smoking is permitted and that the Atlas never closes.  When it first opened in 1918, Seisabura Mukai, advertised his Atlas as “the finest in the south district . . .Large Capacity, Clean and Cozy, catering a First-Class patronage.” By the year of Dong on Long’s parade it was as likely used as a dark retreat.

Early in 1942 S. Mukai learned that he would be interned with other Japanese Aliens, and so soon leased his Atlas to Burrell C. Johnson, who with second-run double features, kept the Atlas running and warm.  That December Johnson was booked for operating a crowded fire hazard.  On, we assume, a cold Jan 3, 1944, the police routed “scores” of sleepers from the Atlas at 5 in the morning.  The Times reported, “twenty were held for investigation of their draft status.”

James Matsuoka, president of the neighborhood’s community council, advised the city in 1950 that the Atlas created as “atmosphere” that promoted crime, and that its license should not be renewed.  The police described “trouble with pickpockets, some strong arm robberies . . . and prostitutes.”  Johnson pleaded that “It’s a difficult theatre to run – perhaps the hardest in the whole city . . . I’ve been trying to do the best I can.”  He then promptly remodeled the Atlas with new seats, lighting, and candy bar and painted it in mulberry and chartreuse.  That summer the theatre continued its atonement during the International District’s Seafair Carnival.  For the citywide celebration the Atlas showed films with all Filipino and Chinese casts.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Some and not none – but not much.  Sometimes – like this time – our weekend efforts will run out of time.  We will plop in only a few additions, some clippings, and some photographs but neither, I think, supported with former features – merely with whatever captions we can string from them now.  [It is almost one in the morning and we mean to be to bed by 3am.]

OTHER CLIPS

A FEW NEW OLD STREETSCAPES FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD

[The location and date are ordinarily typed and attached – with tape –  along the bottom of the negative.  CLICK TWICE to enlarge.]

MEANWHILE, on Long Beach . . .

(click to enlarge photos)

My hunch is that this smartly named Central Seattle Service Station opened in 1925.  It does not appear in the 1924 Polk City Directory – not as a garage or service station, both of which it was a year later.

One lot south of Marion Street on the east side of 6th Avenue – and now part of the I-5 pit – the station appears in a promotional photograph taken in the spring of 1925. The unidentified photographer aimed east from 5th Avenue through a block empty except for at a covey – or perhaps bevy – of white-uniformed nurses pointing at a big billboard that makes the hopeful, but as it turned out mistaken, claim that “On this Site will be Built Seattle General Hospital.”

Directly above the billboard the gleaming white service station appears at 812 Sixth Avenue, one lot south of Marion Street.  Its own covey of signs offer Associated Oil Products, Motormates Official Brake Service, Cycol products, parking, storage, repairs, cars washed and polished and free crank case service.  Located on the side of First Hill the incline was handy for coasting and starting cars with bad starters – a common problem then – on compression.)

My second hunch is that the close-up of the by then Standard Oil station printed here – and beside it the Crescent Apartments, a tenement row facing Columbia Street – was recorded sometime during the 1930s.  Cars were in need of more service then because so few new ones were being bought during the Great Depression.

Still there were lots of cars.  While the population of the previously booming Seattle slowed to a mere 22 percent in the 15 years between 1922 and 1937, the number of motor vehicle increased then by 211 percent.  Then in 1941 more than 50,000 new residents migrated to Seattle’s busy home front for the USA’s first official year in the Second World War.  Boeing built a parking lot near its new Flying Fortress Plant 2 for 5,000 cars.  By then and back here in Central Seattle – and as just noted –  the block once hoping for a hospital had been parking cars for years.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

We shall try Jean, again with a few past  features from the neighborhood.  And we will lead with a detail from our helpful Baist Real Estate Map of 1912.

Then above: The city’s regarding forces reached 6th and Marion in 1914.  A municipal photographer recorded this view on June 24.  Soon after, the two structures left high here were lowered to the street. (courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)  Now below: The corner’s final “humiliation” came as a ditch dug and concrete-lined in the early 1960s for the Seattle Freeway section of Interstate-5. (Photo by Jean Sherrard)

JAMES & VIRGINIA McNAUGHT’S PROMINENCE

(First appeared recently in Pacific and here too, May 2, 2010)

In 1880 or 81 Joseph and Virginia McNaught began building their home at the southeast corner of Marion Street and Sixth Avenue. It sat on a high point – a knoll – that made it stand alone against the sky when viewed from the waterfront. The couple took some kidding about having moved so far east of town.

Soon after following his brother James to Seattle in 1875, Joseph drove a herd of cattle from the Willamette Valley to a beef-poor Seattle. With the profits he then returned east for a law degree and marriage to the good-humored Virginia.  She was known for her wit.  Returning to Seattle the McNaughts became one the city’s most entrepreneurial couples with investments in transportation, mining, shipbuilding, Palouse homesteads, and stockyards.

For much of the two square blocks between 6th and 7th, and Marion and Cherry – all of it part of the I-5 ditch now – First Hill was mostly no hill.  Parts of it even lost altitude before joining again the often steep climb east of 7th Avenue.  With the grading of 6th Avenue, first in 1890, the home was lowered a few feet.  That year it was also pivoted 90 degrees clockwise.  So what is seen here facing north at 603 Marion previously was facing west at 818 Sixth Ave.  The regrade of 1914, seen here, lowered the sites old prominence about two stories to the grade of this freshly bricked intersection.

By then the McNaughts were off in Oregon raising alfalfa hay and living in Hermiston, one of the two town sites they developed.  The other was Anacortes.  Virginia named Hermiston, and it includes a Joseph Avenue.

Following this 1914 regrade the old McNaught mansion was modified and expanded into the porches for eight apartments.  All the Victorian trim was either removed or lost behind new siding.  Through its last years it was joined with its big box neighbor on Marion as part of a sprawling Marion Hotel until sacrificed for the freeway.

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MADISON POPLARS – LOOKING EAST from SIXTH Ave.

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 17, 1985)

In 1910, Madison Street, where it climbs First Hill, was a fashionable strip bordered by better brick apartments and hotels. This stretch of Madison was also lined by what Sophie Frye Bass described as “the pride of Madison Street . . . the stately poplar trees made it the most attractive place in town.” She wrote this in her still engaging book “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.”

The strip was not only popular but populated. Madison was evolving into a vital city link. The two cable cars pictured in this early-century view up Madison from Sixth Avenue started running there in 1890 when the Madison Street Cable Railway first opened service up First Hill and Second Hill and through the forest to Madison Park on Lake Washington. The white sign hanging from the front of the closest car reads, “White City, Madison Park, Cool Place, Refreshments, Amusements.” White City was a short-lived promotion designed by the cable railway’s owners to attract riders onto the cars and out to the lake. White City failed in 1912, but by then the top attraction at the lake end of the line was not the park but the ferry slip and the ferry named after the 16th president of the United States: Lincoln.

Madison’s popular poplars did not survive into the 1930s, according to author Bass. The granddaughter of pioneer Arthur Denny lamented in her book that by then, the endearing trees “had given way protestingly to business.”

In 1940, Madison lamented another loss when its cable cars gave way to gasoline-powered buses. Then, 20 years later, the entire block pictured in the foreground of the historical scene gave way to the interstate freeway built in the early 1960s.

Madison Street was named for the county’s fifth president. Arthur Denny, while platting Seattle’s streets in alliterative pairs, named the street one block south of Madison “Marion” after a young brother, James Marion Denny. Arthur needed another “M.”

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Then Caption above:  Looking northwest across a bench in the rise of First Hill, ca. 1887. The photographer was probably one of three. George Moore, David Judkins or Theodore Peiser, were the local professionals then most likely to leave their studios and portrait work to point a camera northwest from near the corner of Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.  (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)   Jean’s repeat, below, looks from the western border of the Harborview Hospital campus near what was once the steep intersection of Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.

THE BENCH ON FIRST HILL

(First appeared in Pacific, Independence Day, July 4th 2010)

Long ago when first I studied this look northwest across First Hill I was startled by its revelations of the hill’s topography.   The hill does not – or did not – as we imagine steadily climb from the waterfront to the east.  For instance, here Cherry Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues – the white picket fence that runs across the scene’s center marks the north side of that block – keeps a fairly flat grade and then where it intersects with Sixth Ave. defies all our modern expectations and dips to the east.

James Street, on the left, climbs First Hill between 5th and 6th Streets on an exposed timber trestle.  To the lower other (north) side of that bridge there was an about four-block pause between James and Columbia, Fifth and Seventh, in (or from) the steady climbing we expect of First Hill.  Now in these blocks the flat Seattle Freeway repeats this feature ironically.

There are enough clews here to pull an approximate date for this unsigned cityscape, which looks northwest from near Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street.  It is most likely sometime during the winter of 1887-88.  The best clew is the Gothic spire atop the Methodist Episcopal Church far left of center. There is still construction scaffolding on the south side of the sanctuary, which was completed at the southeast corner of Marion and Third Ave. early in 1888.  On the far right horizon is the big box of Central School – it burned down in the Spring of 1888 – and to this side of it the McNaught big home sits at its original grade on the southeast corner of Marion and Sixth.

In its details this panorama is strewn with other pioneer landmarks including the Western House (the name is on the roof – see the market detail below) at the southeast corner of 6th and James.  It is the large L-shaped box below the scene’s center.  Built in 1881, it was finally named the Kalmar House after a new owner’s hometown in Sweden.  It survived until 1962 when, in what architect-preservationist Victor Steinbrueck called “an act of esthetic idiocy on the part of the city,” it was razed for the Freeway.

The above detail shows the roof crest sign reading “Western House” marked in red.  The view below, while similar to the one above is later – ca. 1890.   It is also photographed from a distance further south on Seventh Avenue.  The Western House, however, has stayed place, holding to its same footprint at the southeast corner of 6th and James, and it has added a new top story.  It appears right-of-center.  Above the Kalmar is the grand bulk of the Rainier Hotel, which is directly across 6th Avenue from the McNaught home.  It appears far right.  The photographer here was F.J. Haynes, the Northern Pacific Railroad’s official photographer (he had his own RR-car) during his first visit to Seattle following its “Great Fire of 1889.”

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KALMAR INN – Southeast Corner of JAMES & 6^th Avenue.

(First appeared in Pacific, April 13, 1986)

In 1962, when Seattle showed the world Century 21, the fair with a “forward thrust,” the late Victor Steinbrueck first published “Seattle Cityscape,” the sketchbook that was to become a local classic. One of Its most lovingly rendered pen-and-ink drawings was of the Hotel Kalmar. In the caption, Steinbrueck wrote: “The only remaining example of an early pioneer hotel is the old Kalmar Hotel at Sixth Avenue and James Street. With Its pumpkin· colored wooden siding end hand-sawn details, It has been e picturesque pert of Seattle’s personality.  Built In 1881, much of Seattle’s history has been viewed from Its wide veranda, but now It is being destroyed to make room for the freeway.”

And destroyed It was, in April of 1962, despite efforts of local preservationists. It was razed “In a rumble of wreckers, derricks end c1amshell loaders,” The Seattle Times reported. For more then 70 years the Kalmar had lived intimately next to a different rumble, one that was regular – the c1anglng struggle of the James Street cable cars as they gripped their way up and down the steep side of First Hill.

Leonard Brand, who with his sister Viola were the last managers and residents of the Kalmar, grew up with the constant noise. In fact, the cable cars had rocked young Leonard to sleep. He was only three months old when his parents moved into the old Michigan Hotel after purchasing and renaming it after his mother s hometown In Sweden.

This week’s scene was probably photographed for the Brands, who are seen posing on the veranda. Leonard is in his mother’s arms and Viola stands by. The Kalmar was the only home these children knew until they were forced by the Freeway to retire to West Seattle.

All attempts failed to save the landmark. Steinbrueck lamented in an article at the time: “When I go back now to many of these places, nothing is left . . . I have only my pictures.” And for now, all attempts to find Victor’s sketch of the Kalmar, have failed. We will either insert it or add an addendum later.  We have promised a few of those in the past – promises we may still keep when the objects of our desire fall into our laps.  Meanwhile, here follows Lawton Gowey’s 11th hour record of the Kalmar, photographed on Jan. 17, 1961.

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NOW and THEN Captions together. The obvious continuities between this week’s photographs 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 Public Library.

NOSTALGIC RECORDER

(First featured in Pacific, Dec. 5, 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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A RON EDGE CODA

This from Ron, and most fitting.  Another aerial that looks directly onto the block and showing most of the landmarks of concern this week, including a still spiffy service station on 6th, the McNaught home, Central School and its annex and part of the row homes on Columbia too – those that anchor at its northeast corner with Sixth Ave.

We may use it again when we soon respond with “extras” to our Town Hall feature – on the 16th of this month – where, among other uses, we give a last minute reminder that that Sunday Jean’s Town Hall Christmas Stories are being produced – by Jean as “A Rogue’s Christmas” – its his seven year.  Now you know two weeks in advance – thanks to Ron and his aerial.   The show begins at 4pm Dec. the 16th – yes that Sunday!

We might also use Ron’s aerial again for our feature on the Rainier Club’s expansion, for there it is – the club – near the lower left corner.   And so on and thanks to Ron.   (Really click this one to enlarge.)

WEB EXTRAS

(click to enlarge photos)

Nancy Ishii (bottom row second from the left in Jean’s “now”) figures that this portrait of her family’s farm beside the Duwamish River dates from 1934 or ’35.  Appearing in both the “now” and “then” are one uncle, Masao, two aunts, Michi and Sally, and her father, Nobi Ishii.  In cap and tie, the about twelve-year-old Nobi stands at the center of the group of seven in the “then.”  About seventy-two years later he gets to sit – again at the center – in Jean’s repeat.  (We position them all in the captions.)

What seems like magic is what does NOT appear in either subject – the sprawling 1,776,000 square feet of Boeing Plant 2, nor any sign of the nearly 7000 B-17 bombers that were built there.   The Flying Fortress factory’s first 60,000 feet were covered in 1936, a year or so after the Japanese American farmers were posed standing in their carrot patch by Henry Miyake of the International District’s Takano Studio.  Recently, the Wing Luke Museum called on the community to help identify the subjects in their Miyake collection, and many startling discoveries, like this one, followed.

Nancy, a friend, called for some help in “refining” the location of the farm.  With the help of aerial photographs (see below), the Duwamish Waterway bridge to South Park – seen in both subjects – and some fine tuning from Boeing historian Michael Lombardi, Boeing site server, Mike Prittie and Boeing communicator, Kathleen Spicer, we managed to confidently return some of the extended Ishii family to their farm for Jean’s repeat.  Imagine, if you will, Michael, Mike, Kathleen and I, all huddled behind Jean and his camera on the asphalt tarmac that was once Boeing Plant 2, near its southwest corner, and in the Ishii carrot patch.

The Ishii’s rented their acres from Joe Desimone, the South Park Neapolitan immigrant farmer who was also the Pike Place Public Market’s benevolent landlord.  In 1940 with the Boeing factory sprawling towards the farm, Desimone helped the family keep their planted rows beside the Duwamish River, although relocated about one mile upstream.  However, their kindly landlord could not, we know, keep them farming after the shock of Pearl Harbor.

The fate of the Ishii family and their farm during World War Two and after is an often distressing story, but still one with many happy moments and helpful lessons.  If you like, you may follow more of this on dorpatsherrardlomont, the blog noted each week at the bottom of this feature.  This week both Nancy Ishii and I will elaborate.  Just as likely, we will add an addendum later following more gathering of family photos.

BLOG EXTRAS

Below, a few more photos of the Ishii family at Boeing field; the first being a portrait of the Ishii elders who appeared in the original THEN:

Hey Paul, I hear that you and Nancy have a lot to add – tell me it’s so!

Jean, I think so – ultimately.  While I’m adding a few related features from nearly ancient Pacifics, Nancy is also pulling and scanning a few photos of her dad mostly from the 40s and 50s.  They will be the last items I’ll add to this blog, although they will be placed here when we get them.

Nancy suggests that we also show some of the research photos that we arranged in our earliest attempts to place the farm.  She knew that it was somewhere south of – but near – Boeing Plant #2, the one at the east side of the bridge over the Duwamish River to South Park.  Since the farm came first, the plant was a surprise to the family.  As noted above, it was “near” indeed, for the B17 factory eventually took over their garden, farm house, and barn. Here then are a few of the photos that helped us fine-tune the farm.

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(Remembering now that this was composed in 1992.) Six of the surviving seven of Tameno Habu Kobata’s children revisited the site of the family’s flower shop, now spanned by the Interstate 5 freeway.  They are, below and from the left, Kimi Ishii, Louise Sakuma, Mary Shinbo, Rose Harrell, Jack Nabu and John Habu.  Two of the Tameno’s 22 grandchildren are also included – Linda Ishii, far left, and Nancy Ishii, kneeling.  Nancy Ishii is responsible for researching the family history.

CHERRY LAND FLORISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 2, 1992)

In the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, Cherry Land Florists grew from a small grocery store into one of the largest retail flower shops in the International District. These views were photographed in 1941.

Ten years earlier Tameno Kobata, her husband John, and their eight children – six from her first and deceased husband, Teiji Habu – moved into the storefront at 905 Jackson St. The flowers, which at first were kept behind the fruits and vegetables, eventually took over, and the Kobatas’ little food store became their Cherry Land.

The business was mostly the mother’s doing – the father helped support the enterprise by working a second job as a waiter at the Seattle Tennis Club. The family lived in cramped and often chaotic quarters behind a partition in the rear of the store. A barrel with water heated on a wood stove by fuel scrounged from the neighborhood was the family bath, and the living quarters’ few beds were shared with privacy provided only by blankets hung for partitions.

The oldest girls, Kako and Mary, soon became skilled flower arrangers, and the younger children helped de-thorn roses, fold corsage boxes and prepare ferns for wreaths – after they had completed their homework.

In the sidewalk scene (on top) Tameno Habu Kobata and her second son, John Habu, pose between the flower boxes. John, who left home in 1935 at the age of 14 to make his own way in Chicago, returned “amazed” in 1940 to find his family’s flower shop flourishing. Within a year, with his help knocking away walls, Cherry Land expanded to the entire building.

After Pearl Harbor, the business instantly withered. The fear and hysteria of the early days of World War II brought internment for the Habu-Kobata family and 125,000 other Japanese Americans.

At war’s end most of the family was back in Seattle. When their industrious mother, Tameno, died unexpectedly in 1948, sons John and Jack returned to Seattle for her funeral and stayed. In the years after her death Tameno’s many children started a variety of local businesses, including three flower shops – among them a Cherry Land Two.

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Above: The Japanese Buddhist Temple on the north side of Main Street east of 10th Ave.  The “now” scene below was scanned from the clipping used in Pacific when the feature was first published in 1992.  Like many other “now” scenes not shown with these repeats, it is somewhere nearby in “stacks of decades” but not near enough to be easily found.  The temple site, like much of this Profanity Hill neighborhood was developed into Yesler Terrace in 1940.  Although now 20-years past I remember well the anticipation of the children as they waited for me to shoot the picture.  Although Jean Sherrard was not there in 1992, he was many years earlier a resident of Yesler Terrace when he was a tot.  Many doctors-in-training, like Jean’s dad Don, moved with their families into Yesler Terrace during, at least, part of medical school.  For teaching purposes it was close to King County(now Harborview) Hospital.

JAPANESE BUDDHIST TEMPLE on MAIN STREET

(First appeared in Pacific, July 12, 1992)

When the Japanese Buddhists dedicated their first Seattle temple in 1908, the congregation was seven years old and yet there were nearly 500 members. Meeting at first in a rented house on Main Street, east of Sixth Avenue, the congregation built their temple four blocks east, on Main just east of Tenth.

The title for the property and the charter for the church were signed by two trusted Caucasian citizens because racist federal laws then prohibited citizenship and ownership of real property by Asian immigrants. This discrimination was compounded by the Alien Exclusion Act of 1924, which barred Japanese immigration to this country. The congregation continued to grow, however, with the families that were its members.

The temple was included in the old Profanity Hill neighborhood that was ultimately condemned to enable the construction of Yesler Terrace. The congregation then again built on Main Street – further east. In its last years, the wood-frame temple was regularly vandalized by patriots who mistook a Buddhist symbol over the temple’s front porch for the Nazi swastika.  (You can find the ancient design in the top photo used for this feature.  It is above the Temple front door.)

The congregation dedicated its present temple at 1427 S. Main on Oct. 4, 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor came two months later. Within hours, the congregation’s leaders were detained and the church plunged into turmoil. With the infamous Executive Order 9066, the temple was shut down as the West Coast Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese ancestry were interned. During the war, the temple basement was used for storage of the interns’ belongings; after the war, the church helped to resettle its members.

One temple event well-known to the greater community is the ·Bon Odori Festival. Printed directly above, the night scene of the costumed celebrants in front of the temple is from the 1932 Bon Odori, the first held at the temple. Since 1955 the community event has been included in Seafair. The public is invited to this year’s [1992] Bon Odori at the temple next weekend, July 18 and 19.

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COLLINS PLAYGROUND – 1909

(First appeared in Pacific, May 31, 1992)

The American playground movement reached Seattle in 1907 with the  development of a three-acre site between Washington and Main streets and 14th and 16th avenues. It was named Collins Playground, after John Collins, a former city mayor who died in 1903.

The site was chosen because of its surrounding rainbow of races, nationalities, and religions. Progressives of the time believed supervised play in well-appointed playgrounds would encourage creative and peaceful recreation among the races and sexes. The movement’s advocates were assertive about providing girls equal opportunities for physical culture.

The sloping Collins site was divided into three terraces. The lower level was dedicated to field athletics such as baseball, and the upper to basketball, tennis, handball and gymnastics. The middle level was reserved for younger children, and had a wading pool, swings, teeter-totters and sand boxes .

For nine days in the month of August 1909, Collins Playground was made a deposit station for the Seattle Public Library. Of the 465 books involved, 1,409 loans were made and the librarian, Gertrude Andrus, made sure that the children read them. She also read stories to a total of 340 children – in the sandbox. This, most likely, is Andrus with her back to the camera. The experiment was a success and the service continued.

In 1976 the Seattle Buddhist Church, which since 1941 has been directly across Main Street from this sandbox, purchased the playground and developed its middle level into Wisteria Plaza. The elegantly landscaped terrace features an arching bridge above a rock garden and, shown here at the sandbox site, a Tsurigane Doh or, roughly translated, a bell pergola.  [If I am not able to readably find my negative for this repeat from 1992, I will, again, scan the Pacific clipping and insert it.]

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With the construction of Interstate 5, Maynard Avenue north of Main Street was abandoned. Kobe Terrace Park, named for Seattle’s Japanese sister city, and the Danny Woo Community Garden have since been developed on the site. In the contemporary photo (copied, again, from the Times clipping), the athletic 82-year-old Lulu Kashiwagi has climbed upon the park’s gazebo or observation tower, which looks down the center of Maynard Street into the International District.

JAPANESE BAPTISTS

(First appeared in Pacific, May 24, 1992)

The Wing Luke Museum, 25 years old this year [1992], has mounted its most ambitious exhibit ever. Named for the decree that interned 120,000 mostly West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, Executive Order 9066 is an eloquent survey of a century of Japanese settlement on Puget Sound.

The view printed here of the Japanese Baptist Sunday School appears near the beginning of the museum’s fluently ordered space. Most of these children are Nisei (second-generation Japanese), U.S. citizens born here to immigrants. Many, perhaps most, of them will have had their own families when they were forced into internment 32 years after this scene was photographed.

This is the Sunday school class of 1910, or so speculates Lulu Kashiwagi, historian for the Japanese Baptist Church. Lulu’s mother, Misa Sakura, sits at far left. The baby propped on her lap is most likely Lulu – born that year. Lulu’s older sister Ruth is behind her, held in the arms of a family friend, Mrs. Mimbu. Three of Lulu’s brothers are also in the scene.

Seattle’s Japanese Baptists trace their origins to a night school conducted by their first pastor, Fukumatsu Okazaki, in the community’s first Japanese lodging house, and then in the basement of its first restaurant. This industry soon developed into a Japanese YMCA and in 1899 incorporated as a church. The Rev. Okazaki is pictured here, top center, holding the “J” card.

Churches were the most effective hosts for Japanese workers fresh off the boats. They helped the understandably anxious sojourners find lodging, steered them to suitable employment, conducted English-language classes and offered both the warmth and security of a caring group for immigrants who had left their traditionally strong family support behind them.

Here the Baptist’s Sunday School is posed on Maynard Street. The tower of the King County Courthouse on First Hill tops the Scene. In 1908 the Baptists were forced from their sanctuary at Jackson and Maynard Avenue by the Jackson Street regrade. Within two years they” moved into a second home, again off Maynard at 661 Washington St. This part of the International District is still predominantly Japanese.

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EVACUATION – MARCH 30, 1942

(First appeared in Pacific Sept. 5, 1999)

On Dec. 10, 1942 the Associated Press released a story headlined “Arrows of Fires Point to Seattle.” Later reports, either buried or not printed, noted that white farmers clearing land near Port Angeles started the fires. The result of this and other hysterical news stories following the bombing of Pearl Harbor was an incendiary to the imaginations of West Coast locals, many of whom fully expected Japanese planes to appear suddenly over Duwamish Head.

The bombs were dropped instead on the families of Japanese Americans, both aliens living here (Issei), often for decades, and their children born into American citizenship (Nisei). In “Seattle Transformed,” Richard Berner’s recently published history of Seattle in the 1940s, the author’s unadorned telling of these routinely tragic stories reveals their exceptionally personal dimension. Berner also details the “administrative” side of this moral collapse: the general abdication of democratic courage by public leaders in the name of “military necessity.”

Because of their proximity to the Bremerton Naval Yard, the 54 Japanese-American families farming on Bainbridge Island were the first local group uprooted. Here on March 30, 1942, their guarded line is led across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) to the train waiting to carry them to the arid isolation of Manzanar, Calif. (Camp Minidoka in southern Idaho – the eventual destination for the majority of the interned families from the Seattle area – was not yet ready.) Of course, neither the Italian nor German populations living along the Atlantic seaboard were evacuated en masse to whatever deserts might have been prepared for them in Ohio or Indiana.

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