(click to enlarge photos)

First introduced last Sunday as a ca. 1905 subject, here is 3rd Avenue and Pine Street a dozen years later on Jan. 23, 1917.   Ron Edge, who found the photograph, also uncovered its occasion by using his Seattle Public Library card and searching The Seattle Times on-line.

Ron determined that this is the first stop on a long funeral cortege that carried the body of fire Chief Fred Gilham from the department’s Headquarters, then at 3rd Ave. S. and Main, to the Chief’s assigned Station #2 facing Pine here at Third.  The white hearse, here uncannily lit by the winter sun, next led a brass band (you can see the horns across Third Ave. on the left) and long lines of uniformed “fire fighters from eight cities in two states,” The Times reported, to First Presbyterian Church for the funeral service.  From there the hundreds of mourners went on to Lake View Cemetery for the interment.

Nearly twenty-five years with the department, Gilham died from effects of a Saturday morning fire that three days earlier crashed the roof of the Grand Theatre on Cherry Street.  Attempting to reach the cries of his men – all of them survived – Gilham became lost in the smoke and fell from a balcony to the theatre floor.

Fred Gilham’s brick Station #2 on the right (of the top photo) replaced a wooden one in 1906. (More on this below.) In 1921 the station moved to its then new quarters at 4th and Battery, and this two-story brick corner was arranged for sales including the United Auto Stage Terminal on 3rd, the Fashion Bootery, and the Smart Shop Ladies Apparel, “we give credit.”   The Bon Marche (in the “now” as Macy’s) replaced the shops and the entire block in 1928-29.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes Jean I have collected a few subjects and as early morning fortitude allows I’ll put them up.  (I mean, I may have to finish it much later this morning and after breakfast.)

First an advertisement for the Seattle Opera House.  It is not dated.  The poor lighting hints that it was copied at a window.  The tableau – I presume – of the Harlem Railroad Bridge tragedy might have used the high ceiling of the theatre’s stage to create the effect . . . unless I am corrected by someone with better understanding of theatre mechanics.

Next a variety of subjects from the neighborhood.

DENNY AKA WASHINGTON HOTEL

The looming presence of the Denny Hotel, looking down on the city from its prospect atop Denny Hill, was a sublime delight mixed with nervousness. Soon after its construction this Victorian showpiece became increasingly more of a specter than a hotel. Planned before the city’s Great Fire of 1889, the Denny was built in the first two years after the fire. Squabbling among its developers – which included city father Arthur Denny – kept the imposing landmark closed and unfurnished.

The sudden crash of the 1893 economic panic kept the doors shut for another 10 years. It took Teddy Roosevelt to unbar them during his brief visit to Seattle in May 1903. Seattle super-developer James Moore managed to both exorcise the dismal record of the hotel – he renamed the Washington Hotel – and fulfill its great promise almost instantly with one good night’s sleep for the president of the United States.

Moore’s hotel prospered through the summer. Consequently, rather than fight the city’s plan to cut into the Hotel’s landscape when it regraded Second Avenue north of Pine Street, Moore announced that he would cooperate and build a block-long-theater along the exposed east side of Second between Stewart and Virginia streets.

Moore’s plan for a blending of the hotel he had saved with a theater to memorialize him failed. Moore got his namesake theater (it survives at the southeast corner of Virginia Street and Second Avenue) but soon lost his hostelry when the razing of Denny Hill lowered the site of the “Scenic Hotel of the West” by about 100 feet between 1906 and 1907. With it went the grass, the Victorian terrace and the view.

The top scene is made especially pleasing by the inclusion of the row of nearly new terraced apartments at the southwest comer of Fourth Avenue and Stewart Street.

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The DENNY aka WASHINGTON HOTEL LOBBY

(First published in Pacific on Feb. 18, 1996.)

This view of the Washington·Hotel lobby was published mid-summer 1903, in an advertisement in the periodical Pacific Northwest. The caption reads, in part, “It is impossible to print more than a hint of the praise that has been spoken of the Washington of Seattle. Suffice it to say that within the two months after the date of the opening, May 16, 1903, the hotel was completely filled each day, and many who had not engaged rooms in advance were turned away.”

This is an architectural shot meant to reveal the glory of the place – the soft chairs, plush Persian carpets, stuffed elk and grand stairway. Most likely the photograph was taken before the hotel’s first patron, President Theodore Roosevelt, registered that spring during his tour of the West.

Planned in 1888, construction began on the Denny Hotel (its first name) in the summer of 1889. Through the same months many other buildings – including several new hotels – were also being raised below it, as the city rebuilt after its Great Fire of June 6 of that year.

Inflated building costs, rancor among the hotel’s promoters and the economic crash of 1893 combined to keep the Denny Hotel dark and empty. It loomed above the city for 13 years before Seattle’s greatest early-century promoter, James A. Moore, filled it with furniture and opened it as the Washington. Less then three years later he closed it, persuaded to allow the hotel’s destruction for the razing also of Denny Hill.

Moore’s turreted hostelry looked south in line with Third Avenue, its lobby about mid-block between Stewart and Virginia Streets. The contemporary photograph (when I find it) looks west across Third Avenue and through the elevated former site of the landmark, at about the level of its ground floor. It was recorded from an open window on the ninth-floor stairwell of the Securities Building, about 90 feet above the regrade.

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FIRE STATION #2 – 3^rd & PINE

(First appeared in Pacific Feb. 11, 1996)

Seattle’s Fire Station #2, at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Pine Street, was one of three fanciful frame and shingle stations quickly built after the Great Fire of June 6, 1889. It opened for Captain W. H. Clark’s Engine Company No. 2 on July 21, 1890, two weeks after Station No.3 opened on Main Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues South. Three months later Station No.4 completed the. triad at Fourth Avenue and Battery Street.

The city’s volunteer fire department was demoralized and disbanded by its failures during the ’89 destruction of the business district. Although many of these volunteers were soon hired as professionals by Gardner Kellogg, the city’s first paid fire chief, they resented the weight that insurance companies charges gave to their charged inadequacies, rather than to the failures of mechanics and water pressure in the city’s private water system. The new stations, new rigs and, of course, new uniforms helped some to dissipate these ill feelings.

The top portrait of Fire Station No.2 and its crew was probably photographed between the 1901 publication of the Seattle Fire Department Relief Association’s history of the department – the view does not appear in the book – and the 1903 lifting of the entire station one-half block east on Pine Street during that street’s regrade. The three women posing on the balcony above the steam fire engine, hose wagon and crew pose are probably wives of the fire fighters.

By late 1906 a new brick station was built here and this short-lived frame creation beside it destroyed. Immediately the work of regrading Denny Hill began behind the new quarters. Station No. 2’s last move came in 1921 to its present location at Fourth Avenue and Battery Street, across from the original site of Station No.4, which in 1908 moved north to the future site of the Space Needle.

 

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(This caption also dates from Oct. 2, 2002.) Built in 1890, the Methodist Protestant Church at the southeast corner of Third Ave. and Pine St. was razed when it was still young for the 1913 construction of a commercial building.  There, under golden arches, countless cheap burgers have been sold.  Now the nonprofit Housing Resources Group (HGR) is replacing the upper floors of the Third and Pine Building with 65 unites of low-income housing and renaming it the Gilmore Building after John Gilmore, the retired president of the Downtown Seattle Association who helped found HRG in 1980.

METHODISTS at THIRD & PINE

(First appeared in Pacific, Oct. 20, 2002.)

The first two churches in Seattle were both Methodist, although one was Methodist Episcopalian and the other Methodist Protestant (MP). The Methodists had split in 1830 over how much power to give bishops. In 1865, when the Methodist Protestants of Seattle built their church, the primary difference between it and the other was not doctrine but color. The first church was white and the new MP sanctuary was painted brown. From then on they were known simply as the white and brown churches.

Here, however, the brown church has lightened up. Actually, this is the third “permanent” home for the MP congregation. The original brown church at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street was replaced in 1883 with an enlarged sanctuary. Its new stone veneer skin, however, did not save it from the “Great Fire” of 1889.

This is the parish that the congregation, after worshiping for a year in tents, built in 1890 at the southeast corner of Pine Street and Third Avenue.

Clark Davis became pastor in 1885. He bought the lot and built this church for about $40,000.  Next door he raised a comfortable parsonage for himself, his wife Cleo and their two sons. The Gothic Revival sanctuary could seat 1,000 and often did. Clark was a “go-getter” and in 1896, after resigning his pastorate, he went for and won the jobs of registrar at the University of Washington and secretary to its Board of Regents.

The Pine Street Regrade (1903-06) lowered this comer 10 feet and converted the church basement into its first floor. With regrades on Third Avenue and Denny Hill coming at them, the parishioners sold their comer for $100,000 and moved in 1906 to a new stone church on Capitol Hill. As soon as the Methodists moved out, the Third Avenue Theater moved in.

 

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HOLE IN THE HILL

This curious look into the Denny Regrade peers north across Pine Street.  The photograph was recorded mid-block between 3rd and 4th Avenues probably in either late 1906 or early 1907.   The brick paving on Pine Street was laid soon after the street was lowered about twelve feet at 3rd Avenue. Completed in the Spring of 1905 the Pine Street regrade was prelude or practice for taking away the rest of the hill: the two humps of it north and south of Virginia Street.

The two regrade “inspectors” sitting on the planks to the right of the power pole are looking north into what little remains of the south hump.  Only a few months earlier Denny Hill had risen 100 feet higher than shown here and held above it the grand architectural pile of Gothic towers and wide porticos first named the Denny Hotel.  Because of its lordly prospect this landmark was publicized through its brief life as “The scenic hotel of the West.”

Another but more modest landmark missing from this hole is the old North School that opened in 1873 directly in front of the knees of the “inspectors.” The school closed in 1887 the year Fire Station #2 was built next to it to the west.   The arched doorway on the left is the eastern bay of Fire Station.  Some of the dirt taken from this part of the hill survives a little more than one block east beneath Nordstroms.  It fills what was the swap at 5th Avenue.

The distant row of houses at the scene’s center is imminently doomed.  They face 4th Avenue from its east side directly north of Stewart Street.  The ornate structure with the small tower, right of center, has been moved temporarily from harms way to the east side of 4th Ave.  It was originally built on the west side of Fourth.

The narrow gauged railroad engine on the right of this early-20th Century Denny Regrade scene can be imagined as plowing into the Bon Marche’s window display near the corner of Pine Street and 4th Avenue – except that the Bon was built in the late 1920s, a quarter of a century after this week’s historical photograph was recorded.

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PLUMMER BLOCK at THIRD AND UNION (Southeast Corner)

(First appears in Pacific, Dec. 13, 1987)

In 1889 Edward Plummer, the 29-year-old son of the deceased Seattle pioneer Charles Plummert, used some of his inheritance to purchase the southeast comer of Third Avenue and Union Street from another pioneer, Sarah Denny. Plummer financed the $32,OOO asking price half in cash and half via mortgage. The site had formerly held John and Sarah Denny’s home.

After the Great Fire of 1889 accelerated the city’s spread north the opportunistic Plummer quickly erected an ornamental two-story frame lodging and commercial building and named it immodestly after himself. “The building was a gold mine.” the Post-Intelligencer observed later. “Plummer’s revenue is said to have been no less than $850 in rentals each month. By the time that turn-of-the-century description was printed,  the corner had been purchased as the site of a new combined federal post office, customs house and courthouse.

The government paid $174,750 for the corner but Plummer didn’t get a cent of it. The P-I noted that “like many other property owners who were caught in the crash that came in 1893, Plummer thought the golden stream would never stop flowing and used his income in speculation. One morning he woke up bankrupt. Plummer thereafter “earned his living by hard labor” the newspaper reported, working for the city’s water department as a coal passer and then a pick-and-shovel hand.

Plummer’s building, however, was saved by moving it up the center of Third Avenue to the southwest junction with Pine Street. Plummer’s name,  however, was stripped from its corner tower, and the building was renamed the Hotel Federal.

 

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Above: The southeast corner of Third and Union before the post office was built and after the Plummer Building was moved two blocks north up Third Avenue. Below: The dismal glass curtain Post Office below has had its skin modified – and improved – since this shot of it was taken a few years back.

BEFORE The POST OFFICE, & AFTER The PLUMMER BLDG.

(First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 15, 2002)

It is likely that the intended subject in this scene is its vacant lot. In 1901 the federal government paid Seattle clothier Julius Redelsheimer $174,000 for this comer. A year earlier he purchased it for a mere $60,000 from Sarah Denny, the widow of John Denny, the father of Seattle founders Arthur and David Denny.

Years earlier, this southeast comer of Third Avenue and Union Street was the home site of John and Sarah. After her husband’s death, Sarah sold the comer in 1889 to Edward Plummer, the son of another Seattle settler.  Plummer put up his Plummer’s Block, an ornate, two-story business block that brought him good rents until the “Panic of 1883” bankrupt first his renters and then Plummer himself.  His namesake cashcow then reverted to Sarah.  (This is recounted in the feature printed on top of this one.)

The government chose the comer, in part, because real-estate agents proclaimed: “Our site is perfectly level and will not have to be filled or excavated. More important still, it will not be affected by a regrade on Third Avenue.”  In this they were wrong. When the Third Avenue Regrade interrupted construction of the classical post office, the width and elevation of Third were changed sufficiently to require steps to ascend to the lobby from a narrow sidewalk.

On one of the longest planning and construction schedules set for any local building, the job of building the Post Office ran from 1901 to 1909. By then the Armory, facing Union on the left, was replaced with a brick business block while Plymouth Congregational Church on the right was only two years from being replaced by Alexander Pantages’ namesake theater. Many locals will still remember the beau-arts post office and terra-cotta clad theater. The classical post office was replaced with an undistinguished glass-curtain one, and a parking garage long ago dislodged the theater.

 

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ELLIS ON THIRD

(First appeared in Pacific, May 10, 1998.)

Perhaps Washington State’s most prolific postcard photographer was a Marysville schoolteacher who was persuaded in 1926 to stop preparing for classes and instead purchase a photography studio in Arlington. J. Boyd Ellis might have dedicated himself to wedding work were he not convinced by an itinerate stationery salesman to make real photo postcards of streets, landmarks and picturesque scenes that the salesman would peddle statewide. Postcard collectors such as John Cooper, from whom this week’s scene was borrowed, are thankful. .

It’s fairly easy to date this home front street scene, which looks south on Seattle’s Third Avenue from Pine Street. Across the street and just beyond the very swank Grayson women’s apparel is Telenews, a World War II entertainment oddity that showed only newsreels. The marquee promises “50 World Events.” We can figure the date from the headline emblazoned there: “YANKS TAKE BIZERTE!”

On May 7, 1943, the North Africa campaign was all but over when Allied forces marched into Bizerte on the north coast of Tunisia. Five days later about a quarter million Axis soldiers capitulated.

Across Third Avenue at the Winter Garden – most of the marquee is visible at far right – James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” is playing. The vaudevillian George M. Cohan’s life story was one of the period’s great patriotic hits. It is likely that both the newsreels and the song-and-dance biography were well-attended. With war work running around the clock, many theaters, including the Winter Garden, never closed.

This is Ellis scene No. 1011; Cooper has more than 3,000 Ellis cards. For the collector Ellis is a great confounder, for he used some numbers more than once. Ellis’ son Clifford carried on his father’s recording into the 1970s. Cooper suggests that their most popular card shows a young Clifford riding a geoduck. That card is still for sale.

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THE WINTER GARDEN

(First appear in Pacific, July 13, 2003.)

In 1979, the 59-year-old Winter Garden theater, on the west side of Third Avenue mid-block between Pike and Pine streets, was closed and remodeled for a Lerner’s store. A downtown branch of Aaron Brothers, an art-supply chain, is the most recent proprietor.

In the summer of 1920 one of the last remaining pioneer homes on Third Avenue was razed for construction of the Winter Garden. This mid-sized theater of 749 cushioned seats was made exclusively for movies – not vaudeville. The Winter Garden opened early in December, taking its name from a famous New York City theater, the successor of which staged the 15-year Broadway run of “Cats.”

The proprietor of Seattle’s Winter Garden, James Q. Clemmer, was the city’s first big purveyor of motion pictures. He got his start in 1907 with the Dream Theater where he mixed one-reelers with stage acts. Eventually, he either owned or managed many if not most of the big motion-picture theaters downtown.

Except for a few weeks in 1973 when the IRS closed it for nonpayment of payroll taxes, the Winter Garden stayed open at 1515 Third Ave. until 1979. In the end it was known simply as the Garden, a home for X-rated films where the house lights were never turned up. Here it is in 1932 showing a remake of a 1919 silent film, “The Miracle Man.”

In the late 1950s, when television cut into theater attendance, many of the downtown theaters, the Garden included, played B-movies in double and triple features. In 1962, an eleven-year-old Bill White would walk downtown from his home on Queen Anne Hill and spend the quarter his mother gave him for bus fair to watch movies in what he describes as “the dark comfort” of the Embassy, the Colonial and the Garden. White, whose mom thought he was at the YMCA, grew up to be an expert on films and a movie reviewer.

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CINEMA PENITENTIARY

We have asked Bill White to let us print a dark – or flickering – confessional excerpt or two from “Cinema Penitentiary,” his early education in the motion picture theatres of Renton, first, and then Seattle.  And he has agreed.  Here’s Bill who was writing reviews regularly – both film and music – for the Post-Intelligencer before it cashed in.

Here are two excerpts from my movie house memoir, “Cinema Penitentiary.”   The manuscript runs 90,000 words and covers the years 1958-1981. These selections are from the early chapters, and are set in and around the Garden Theater.

At the corner of Third and Pike, I felt like a gnome caught between two giants. I peered through Kress’s glass doors, and saw a machine popping fresh popcorn in the center of a display featuring vertical glass tubing filled with marvelous candies.   Then I looked across the street to Woolworth’s and wondered if it too was like some imagined, idyllic theater lobby, filled with the smell of popcorn and the sweetness of a candy factory.  The crosswalk light changed, and I was carried further up Third Avenue in the current of Saturday afternoon’s shopping crowd.  Then I was in front of the theater. From the outside, The Garden seemed fancier than The Embassy, if only because of its larger marquee. Since I didn’t want to worry my mother by arriving home four hours late, I waited until the following Saturday to go inside.

The Garden was like the Roxy theater in Renton  in that it combined adult and family fare.  But instead of getting a preview of “Butterfield 8” before a Jerry Lewis movie, the Garden often double-billed the adult feature with a family movie.   After seeing “Peyton Place” and “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,” I walked up Pine Street to 4th Avenue and discovered The Colonial. It was smaller that the Garden, and also offered   double features for a quarter.

Since “Peyton Place” had been over twice the length of two horror movies, it was already getting close to the time my bus was scheduled to leave Second and Madison, so I shouldn’t have gone in, but I paid my quarter anyway, figuring that if I just watched one movie, I would be able to catch the next bus, and wouldn’t get into much trouble.

One of the things I noticed about the adults in these theaters was that they rarely arrived at the beginning of a movie.  They came and went as they pleased, so I did the same, coming into the middle of  “Battle Hymn,” which had Rock Hudson as an ex-bomber pilot who rescued over 1,000 people from an orphanage that was in the path of invading Chinese during the Korean War to atone for having killed 27 children in an accidental bombing of a German orphanage during World War Two.

At the Garden, I was no child among parent-like people, but one of the anonymous figures taking refuge in a movie theater. The woman who sold me the ticket never told me I was too young to see the features inside.  I paid my quarter, got my child’s ticket, and went inside where the secrets of the adult world were brought into the open where I could contemplate and try to understand them.

In the summer of 1962, I was learning more about my father from “Home From the Hill” than I had while playing center field for the little league team he used to coach.  He had put me in center field because I was a lousy ball player and did not have many opportunities to embarrass him way out beyond the batting capabilities of most of the kids. Once in a while I would fumble a pop fly, but there was always the sun to blame for my lack of hand to eye co-ordination. My inability to hit the ball was another issue, one that could not be so easily explained away.

“Don’t be afraid of the ball,” the coach would yell at his sissy son, like some French officer in charge of the firing squad telling the Spanish prisoners not to be afraid of the bullets. When I realized that I was just as likely to be hit by the ball by standing there dumb as by swinging the bat, my father’s estimation of my athletic abilities was fractionally heightened.  “Go out swinging, boy!” he would cry, seeing no shame in failure if the failure was the failure of action and not the result of passivity,

Unlike Robert Mitchum in “Home from the Hill,” my father had no bastard son to take on hunting trips.  He had no source of secret pride.  The only manhood he had was his own, and violence toward those weaker than he was the easiest expression of that manhood.  Maybe if my mom had also been a drunk, my father wouldn’t hit her so much,” I thought while watching “Days of Wine and Roses.”  Although the movie was about alcoholism, it didn’t have much to tell me about my dad’s drinking.  This drinking between a man and a woman created a different world from that of an alcoholic family man.

I did learn one thing from that movie, though.  I learned that when a serious movie was made about adult problems, it was usually shot in black and white.  The opposite was the case for movies about troubled adolescence.  Whereas the cheap JD movies came out in black and white, the important ones, like “Rebel Without a Cause” were in color.  I guessed this was a way of telling the audiences that, even though the movie was about bad kids, it wasn’t just for thrill-seeking teenagers, but for the contemplation of serious-minded adults.

Inane war movies like “Marines, Let’s Go” were in color, but the ones with ideas, like Phil Karlson’s “Hell to Eternity,” about how the attack on Pearl Harbor affected the friendship between a white kid and a Japanese-American family, were in black and white.  Musicals were almost always in color, as were Westerns.  “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance,” which I saw with my father in a South Dakota drive-in, was in black and white.  This bothered me. Years later, when I was reading books on Hollywood directors, I discovered that movie had bothered a lot of people, but for different reasons.  It was dismissed as an “indoor western,” which meant, I guessed, that it lacked the rock formations that distinguished many of John Ford’s Westerns. That didn’t bother me, though, because I saw it at an outdoor theater, surrounded by the black hills of Dakota.  I think it failed because   the adults did not consider it a serious enough Western to warrant its being filmed in black and white.

 

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A few of the ornaments or details above have not survived into the below – like the two newsboys standing in the niches above the first floor.

PUGET SOUND NEWS COMPANY Bldg.

(First appears in Pacific, June 4, 2006.)

In “CARL F. GOULD: A Life in Architecture and the Arts,” authors T. William Booth and William Wilson tell us that when the aesthete Gould took his eclectic talent into company with Charles Herbert Bebb, it was a splendid marriage.  The architect-engineer Bebb brought to the new partnership a portfolio stuffed with influential . political and commercial contacts.

Bebb also carried a number of projects from his former prosperous partnership with Lois Leonard Mendel. Among these was the “ensemble” of buildings at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, the splendid Beaux Arts Times Square Building (a former home of The Seattle Times), and the less ambitious but still tasty Puget Sound News Co. building seen here on the west side of Second Avenue, second lot south of Virginia Street.

Gould and Bebb joined their complementing talents in 1914, the year Gould also founded the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. The following year the university named Gould head of the department, and awarded Bebb and Gould the commission to plan the UW campus into the field of mostly Gothic landmarks we cherish today. With its Gothic ornaments, the terra cotta-faced Puget Sound News Co. building can be easily imagined on that campus.

Booth and Wilson put the construction date in 1915, though the tax records have it one year later. A tax assessor’s photo of 1937 includes the north facade, where we learn the nature of this “news” company. The company sign reads (without benefit of commas) “The Puget Sound News Co. Wholesale Booksellers News Dealers Stationers School Supplies Holiday Goods.” They might have added “Postcards,” for a quick internet search of the company name brings forth many examples of regional postcards for sale that were published early in the 20th century by the PSN Co.

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BELLTOWN SCHOOL

(First appeared in Pacific, May, 12, 2002.)

Here is Belltown school, but when the photo was taken is uncertain. The draft of “Building for Learning, Seattle Public School Histories, 1862-2000” gives a “circa” date of 1880, and that will do. It is exactly halfway into the life of this sturdy but stuffed schoolhouse at the northwest corner of Vine Street and Third Avenue.

Belltown School was built during a bit of a boom in 1876. Austin Bell, namesake for it and the neighborhood, sold the comer property to the school district for $200, and for another $2,642 a local contractor named M. Keezer put up this two-story structure.

At Third and Vine, the new schoolhouse was only eight blocks north of North School, on Pine near Third. (A photograph for that is attached directly below.)  The psychological distance, however, was greater, for Denny Hill then still stood between them.

By 1882 all of Seattle’s public schools were overflowing. At a January mass meeting in Yesler’s Hall, “10 gentlemen and five ladies” were appointed to visit and describe the schools. At North School, teacher Miss Sandersen declared that for her 40 seats she had 74 students, and that if any more enrolled she would “commence hanging the little fellows on the hooks on the walls of the room.” The air at North School was so stale that the newspaper reporter who tagged along noted that more than one of the visitors left with a headache.

The investigating committee concluded that if changes were not made, the city’s schools would soon become a “disgrace and a stench in the nostrils of all public-spirited citizens.” The following year the 12-room Central School was opened at Sixth and Madison, and in 1884, after another multi-room school, Denny School, was built nearby at Fifth and Battery, Belltown School was closed.

 

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