THEN: Built in 1910, Ballard’s big brick church on the northwest corner of 20th Avenue NW and NW 63rd Street lost the top of its soaring tower following the earthquake of Nov. 12, 1939. (courtesy, Swedish Club)NOW: Serving Ballard Baptist Church since 1981, minister Don Duncan here stands near the church steps on a bright March morning.A notice for the Ballard Baptist Church from The Seattle Times for Oct. 4, 1947.
There’s a popular and abiding Ballardian legend that when still young and independent of Seattle, the “shingle capitol of the world” had as many bars as churches – or, alternately, as many churches as bars. Most of the dives were on Ballard Avenue, but churches seemed to be on every Ballard block.
For instance: one of the many Lutheran churches in Ballard early in the 20th Century, but one which block, we still do not know. Perhaps a reader will peg it.
This week’s historical photograph was shared by Kristine Leander, the Executive Director of the local Swedish Club. It is but one print of about ninety included in a large album of subjects recorded mostly in the 1920s by Klaes Nordquist, a professional photographer with studios both downtown and on Market Street in Ballard. Many of the prints are of Swedish subjects, such as the Swedish Hospital, the Swedish Business Men’s Association posing at Snoqualmie Falls Lodge – with women – and this Baptist church.
The Swedish Hosptial at Columbia (in the foreground) and Summit, ca. 1920 by Klaes Nordquist, and courtesy of the Swedish Club. (We have a feature or two treating on the Swedish Hospital, should you like to key-word it.Swedish Business Men’s Association at the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge, May 14, 1921. By K. Nordquist, courtesy of the Swedish Club.
When Director Leander and I first thumbed through the album I was startled by the size of this church and the sinking sense that in spite of having an enduring memory for churches, especially ones with soaring towers, and having bumped about Ballard for years, still I did not know it. However, the name came quickly with the help of magnification and Nordquist’s fine grain print. On the reader board to the right of the smaller door, far-right, the name, Ballard Swedish Baptist Church can be read.
The side door to Ballard Swedish Baptist on 20th Ave. NW.
When the tall church was going up (for $20,000) in 1910 on the northwest corner of 20th Avenue NW and NW 63rd Street, the “superstructure” was touted as the “second largest in the state of Washington.” While we may doubt that claim, we are still impressed. In addition to the hundred-foot tower, the sanctuary featured a 900-seat auditorium for the then 200 ambitious and hopeful members of a different congregation, the Second Baptist Church. The Swedish Baptists were meeting two blocks south in a modest timber church built in 1904 at NW 61st Street. Two years after Second Baptist’s dedication of their oversized sanctuary, the congregation was still struggling to pay the mortgage. In three years more they swapped this landmark, still with its tower intact, on 63rd with the flourishing Swedes on 61st. The Swedes , of course, also assumed the debt on the house of worship for which they traded.
An early sketch of the church on the eve of its construction, when it was still the First Baptist Church of Ballard. The Seattle Times clipping is dated August 30, 1910. CLICK TO ENLARGE
In the mid-1920s the church’s tradition of scheduling the Swedish service on Sunday mornings and the English for the evenings was reversed. Of course, by then the church families were raising kids routinely using English in the public schools, and probably at home as well. According to Don Duncan, minister at Ballard Baptist since 1981, “Swedish” was excused from the name in 1934. By the memory of Alice Anderson, the oldest member of Ballard Baptist, the ornate top of the tower was removed after it was damaged in the earthquake of Nov. 12, 1939.
A full page in The Seattle Times for Nov. 13, 1939 about the earthquake that while it did not make note of the tower nor topple it still doomed it. [By Every Means CLICK TO READ]
WEB EXTRAS
I’ll lead off by throwing down a couple of interior photos.
Rev. Duncan is justly proud of Ballard Baptist’s stained glassFlags at the back of the church represent the many nationalities of the congregation
Then I’ll up the ante with a shot of the spare church on 61st!
Swedish Baptist, earlier version
Call, raise, or fold, fellahs?
Jean and Dear Readers. While the former – Jean, for himself and his family – is off to the Islands for a vacation, the latter – Ron and I, while holding to the mainland and working for the readers, will first put up eight or nine links to past Ballard subjects – Ballard and Phinney Ridge. Surely those are not all we have, even of those cozy in our scanned library. Like those in past blog features, these nine will proliferate with their own links and so on and on. We will follow these with a few features so distant (to the rear or ago) that until now they have not made it into this useful, that is scanned, library. All of it will be concluded first with a 1919 clipping of a few church alternatives, and last with a 2006 photograph of three members of the Ballard Sedentary Marching Band, standing in Meridian Park, ca. 2008, and so not in Ballard but rather here in Wallingford, the Gateway to Ballard. And that’s it.
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FOUR MORE CHURCHES RELATED EITHER TO BALLARD OR SWEDES
The Finish-Evangelical Church at 1709, NW 65th Street. This too is from the Swedish Club album.The Finish sanctuary was later converted into a residence and it survives as such. I visited it in the late 1990s as part of a party for a dinner that was remarkable, and is still remembered. The party was also entertained with a performance on the couples grand piano of several Chopin piano compositions, although I can not longer name them. The “now” here was borrowed courtesy of Google Earth, Street Views.
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As the real photo postcard artist Oakes captions it, this is the First Presbyterian Church of Ballard at the northeast corner of Market Street and 17th Avenue Northwest.First appeared in Pacific for the May 10, 1996 issue. If you read it you may note that I used these Presbyterians the same proverbial wit about Ballard’s bars and churches that I used for today’s feature. And I also leaned again on the well-wrought and well-worn hyperbole identifying Ballard as the “Shingle Capital of the World.’ Given a chance I’d do the same for the Buddhists.
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Bethany Lutheran Church at the northeast corner of . This is another contribution by the Swedish Club. Note that this Nordquist print, while similar to the one in the clipping that follows is not the same.This feature first appeared in Pacific April 25, 1999.Looking across Latona to the Bethany Lutheran sanctuary. Given the vintage of the cars of the street, could these repairs on the steeple have something to do with the 1949 quake?
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First published in Pacific on Feb. 3, 2000.Another Nordquist print used courtesy of the Swedish Club.
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BALLARD BRIDGE – FIRST AND LAST TRACK-BOUND TROLLEYS
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First appears in Pacific, Dec. 9, 1990
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A sampler of religious attractions published in The Timesfor Sept. 27, 1919. By Every Means – CLICK TO READ Click Twice on MACS.
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FRESH AND LOOSE from Ballard, this brass quartet has been pulled from the Ballard Sedentary Marching Band before – or perhaps after – a concert at the Good Shepherd’s Bandstand in Wallingford. The well decorated veteran on the left may not be a member of the quartet or marching band. I remember him better from the pubs of Pioneer Square. This dates from about 2007 and was taken during my daily Wallingford Walks then. The photo recalls the maxim “Give a man a horn and he will soon want a uniform.:
THEN: With his or her back to the original Ballard business district, an unnamed photographer looks southeast on Leary Way, most likely in 1936.
NOW: On September 17th last Jean Sherrard took this “repeat” with the 2 Bit Saloon on the far left. It was the last day and night for the tavern, which timed its finale with that month’s Backfire Motorcycle Night in Ballard.
We had two “thens” to choose from, and here follows the alternative.
The alternative also looks southeast on Leary Way to its first curve of three on its way to Fremont.
This week we look south-southeast into a somewhat befuddling Ballard intersection where Leary Way, before curving to the east and ultimately heading for Fremont, meets 17th Avenue. N.W. and N.W. 48th Street. The photographer of this picture was working for the Foster and Kleiser billboard company, whose negatives we have used before, and will surely many times to come, the fates willing. So the intended subjects were the big signs on the far side of the curving Leary Way.
This snap in the billboard survey looks thru the same Leary curve but from the southeast end of it. So it looks northwest on Leary. The date, March 13, 1939 is recorded, bottom-left . [Unless you are not dyslexic, then it is properly bottom-right. Another personal reflection to share: born in the fall of 1938, I was then barely babbling when this shot was recorded, and now nearly 76 years later, I blabber on and on.
On the left of the featured photo at the top, between the Mobilgas flying horse (named Pegasus by the ancient Greeks) and the OK Texaco service station, 17th Avenue N.W. heads north. In the early 1890s, 17th was the eastern border for Gilman Park, an early name for Ballard. In 1936, the likely date of the photo, this intersection was obviously devoted to filling stations, billboards and power poles. The pavement, laid in 1930, is fairly fresh. Unlike the many brick
A Seattle Times clipping from April 17, 1930.A look northwest on the mostly brick Ballard Avenue during the 1916 Big Snow. Note the snow-capped city hall tower beyond the snow-bound trolley. The bank building on the right also had a tower, and it was from that prospect that the next photo below was recorded on a 4th the July ca. 1910. The clipping of that feature follow as well.I have for this moment – a long lapsing one – misplaced the “now” negative for this “then.” But here is the text scanned from a Times clip.First appeared in Pacific Magazine April 5, 1992.
landmarks on Ballard Avenue, one block to the west, the buildings along Leary Way were mostly one- and two-story commercial clapboards and manufacturing sheds, like the one behind the billboards at the scene’s center, again, in the featured photo on top. (Here we will insert three billboard photos taken on Leary Way in the three block run between N. W. Dock Place and Market Street. (They do not all look in the same direction.)
This is captioned in reference to the billboard, left-of-center, which sits “82 feet west of Ione Place.Leary way looking northwest to the billboards at Dock Place. In the distance, across Market Street stands the Bagdad Theatre.The Bagdad then and during a recent Ballard Stret Fair.Looking northwest on Leary Way to its intersection with Ione Place. The caption makes note of its billboard subject as “100 feet west of Ione.” The captions “P-1” and “R126” are references we have not as yet cracked – nor tried to.
Leary Way was named for Seattle capitalist John Leary, who was the first president of the West Coast Improvement Company (WCIC), which through the 1890s shaped Ballard into the “Shingle Capitol of the World.” Writing in 1900, pioneer Seattle historian Thomas Prosch called it the “most successful” real estate enterprise connected to Seattle.The town was named for Capt. William Rankin Ballard, who with Leary was one of the WCIC’s principal developers. Ballard explained that in the first three months of the township venture he made 300 percent profit on the property that he had earlier “won” as a booby price in a “heads or tails” gamble with a friend. Ballard did not live in Ballard, but recounted this from his First Hill mansion.
Not Ballard’s home on First Hill, but Leary’s on Capitol Hill, now home for Episcopalians. (1969 photo by Robert Bradley.)The Yesler Leary Building at the northwest corner of Mill Street (Yesler Way) and Front Street (First Avenue.) Leary’s partnership with Henry Yesler in the 1884 construction of this Victorian showpiece is a sign of his Seattle status then.Scanned from Clarence Bagley’s History of Seattle, Vol. 2
Behind the photographer of the featured photo at the top, the first Ballard street grid, a triangle of about a dozen blocks south of Market Street and west of 17th Avenue N.W., is aligned to the nearby Salmon Bay shoreline. Otherwise, this rapidly growing, confident and, beginning in 1890, incorporated suburb followed the American practice – often written as law – of laying streets in conformity to the compass.
The grid of eastern Ballard – or Freelard aka Ballmont – revealed from on high in this April 25, 1947 aerial, courtesy of Ron Edge. Upper right is Leary Way’s last or most southeasterly section before turning (at the top) east into Fremont “proper” on 36th Street.That last (or first) curve on Leary where from this prospect near 39th Street it turns east into Fremont on 36th Street..Queen Anne Hill neighborhood just west of Seattle Pacific College, seen across the ship canal and from a Fremont prospect near 39th Street and 2nd Ave. N.W. and so also above the curve where Leary merges with 36th Street. nd
On Leary Way, another disruption of the greater Ballard grid follows soon after Leary passes east under the north approach to the Ballard Bridge. (The bridge’s trusses appear at the far-right.) At 11th Avenue N.W., Leary Way turns to the southeast cutting the shortest
Looking northwest to the Leary Way curve between N.W. 47th Street and 11th Ave. N.W.. Again, the photograph’s own caption is preoccupied with its billboard.
possible route to Fremont through a somewhat treeless neighborhood of grid-conforming streets, snuggly lined with well-tended workers’ homes. There are cherished alternative names for this neighborhood just east of Ballard or just west of Fremont. It is sometimes called Ballmont, and other times, Freelard. Of course, both are good-natured popular names meant to calm anxieties along a border between neighbors.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Pro forma, Jean. First a few links pulled by Ron Edge from past features followed by a stand-alone but not forlorn feature from the neighborhood: its Carnegie Library. By this time some of the Edge Links will surely have been employed in this blog before, repetitions (we repeat) we are proud of and play like musical motifs in different contexts or on different staffs. Remembering my mom – again again – “Repetition is the mother of all learning.” Thank’s mom.
THEN: From the Fremont Bridge, this subject looks east northeast* across the torrent that followed the washout of the Fremont Dam in the early afternoon of March 13, 1914. Part of the Bryant Lumber and Shingle Mill appears left-of-center. The north end of the Stone Way Trestle appears in the upper right corner. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archives)NOW: In the mid-1950s the former Bryant Mill site was converted into an industrial center, but it took until the 1990s for the site’s extensive architectural make-over to begin. On the Wallingford horizon many of the surviving homes predate the 1914 washout.The Stone Way Bridge from the Westlake Ave. and Queen Anne side. Across the bridge, above the center of the subject, the large box factory of Western Cooperage stands out.South from 34th Street on December 27, 1997 into construction for the new tenants of the old Bryant Lumber Mill site east of the Fremont Bridge
Two sensational news photographs appear on the front page of the Friday, March 13, 1914, issue of The Seattle Times. One is of the historic and deadly Missouri Athletic Club fire in St. Louis. The other from Portland, Oregon, shows a “flame-wrapped” steam schooner drifting along the docks on the Willamette River “starting a new blaze at every place she bumped.” Also sensational, standing above it all, the day’s headline reads FREMONT BRIDGE DESTROYED: Flood Threatened By Breaking Of Lake Union Dam.
Front page – top half – of The Seattle Times March 13, 1914 issue.
[CLICK to ENLARGE]
The Seattle Times next day – March 14. 1914 – report.
Soon after the Fremont dam, constructed to control the level of Lake Union, broke in the early afternoon, the bridge did too. It was a little late for The Times to get a picture in that day’s evening addition. However, over the weekend, The Times featured several pictures of the flood, including one that was very similar to the historical photo used here. Both photographers stood precariously close to the open center section of the Fremont Bridge that was swept away towards Ballard about two hours after the dam’s collapse. The Times 1914 photo was taken later than this one, for in the newspaper’s illustration the water level is lower and the dam’s surviving wing gate pilings, also seen here, stand out more. Employed by the city’s public works department, “our” photographer took several shots of the washout and its unsettling effects.
During its nearly day-long outpouring, Lake Union dropped about nine feet. Beside the bridge, at the lake’s north end the worst damage was to the railroad trestle along the north shore. At the south end of the lake the greatest casualty was the big new dock built by the then thirty-year-old Brace and Hergert lumber mill. Stacked with lumber, the exposed pilings supporting the dock gave way early Saturday morning. Nearby, on the lake’s east shore, those among the “houseboat colonists” who had dared to keep to their floating homes were awakened by the crash. By noon the houseboats tied to the shore were resting on the lake’s bottom at an angle that was good only for reading in bed. Also by noon on Saturday it was clear that Ballard would not be washed away.
[Courtesy, MOHAI]
Fortunately for the several trolley lines that served Fremont, Wallingford, and Green Lake, as well as the interurban to Everett, the long temporary trestle crossing from Westlake to Stone Way, seen here in part on the right, did not collapse. Traffic that normally crossed at Fremont was redirected there by Carl Signor, an alert neighbor with a hay, grain and flour store located near the south end of the Fremont Bridge. The bridge collapsed soon after Signor’s timely signal.
WEB EXTRAS
Much to add this week, Paul? Indeed, Jean and starting with an Edge-link to an opening day subject for the Fremont Bascule Bridge, followed by another beginning with the odd story of a crashed trolley in Fremont. And following these pulls by Ron Edge, we will string out a variety of photos of the Fremont Bridge thru time and from different prospects, beginning with a few from Queen Anne Hill. This chain will also feature a few construction shots of the bascule bridge, which is, of course, the one we still cross. We hope to be able to date them all – or nearly.
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I have pulled this from SEATTLE NOW & THEN VOL. 1, which was first published in 1984 and then reprinted about three times. I lived off it. Hopefully the text is accurate. On rereading old features I have found a few bloopers, I confess. Usually mistakes of directions. Still, question authority. This appeared first in the Feb. 12, 1984 issue of Pacific Magazine.
[CLICK to Enlarge and make it readable – we hope.]
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The FREMONT BRIDGE from QUEEN ANNE HILL
Probably the earliest extant panorama of Fremont from any prospect – circa 1891. The early low bridge is hard to make out through the atmosphere of the mill.The still “low bridge” in 1903, looking north again from Queen Anne. A feature for this subject is included as the 58th “story” in Seattle Now and Then Volume Two.An Oakes “real photo” postcard of what is still the “low bridge,” from Ca. 1907. Phinney Ridge is on the horizon with the forest of Woodland Park on the right.Construction of the new “high bridge” in 1911. Directly below is a detail showing the work-in-progress on this lifting of the grade, at 34th and Fremont.
Looking north into the same wide-body construction on the Fremont Bridge and dated June 21, 1911. This is somewhat earlier than the subject above it, which shows that the bridge has been considerably widened on its east side while here the “east lane” is still at the original elevation, on the right. (Courtesy, Municipal Archives)
The clip from Pacific on Nov. 28, 2004. [Click to Enlarge]Date March 18, 1915, this is the last of the old and short-lived high bridge. The disrupting work on its bascule replacement ran from 1915 until its opening in 1917.
The upheaval of early construction, again looking from the Queen Anne end, dated May 10, 1915. [Courtesy, Municipal Archive]=====
Early Army Corps work on the canal, looking east to the low bridge, ca. 1903.Improvement on the Fremont Dam ca. 1903, looking east to the “Wallingford Peninsula” where the gas works were implanted four years later in 1907. Note also the view of the dam directly below from 1907. There the gas works can be found along the north shore of Lake Union. [Courtesy, Army Corps]The Fremont Bridge looking east from the “low bridge” circa, 1907. Western Cooperage is on the far left, but the temporary Stone Way Bridge is still four years ahead.A trolley car heading for Fremont, crosses the “low bridge” as seen from the lower bridge that crossed the channel above the here bubbling Fremont Dam. Ca. 1907.
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March 3, 1915, from the Fremont side looking southeast to the “high bridge” repaired after the 1914 collapse, but here soon to be razed for construction of the bascule replacement.The Fremont spillway constructed with the 1914 repair of the collapsed timber high bridge. Dec. 11, 1914 Below is the “now” of this pair that first appeared in Pacific on July 7, 2006.
A record of the spillway (not spilling) from the Queen Anne side, with lines drawn indicating the expected level of the canal once the locks are closed and the canal is flooded. Again, that is the old pre-bascule short-lived high bridge beyond. [Courtesy, Army Corps]Looking southeast through the open wings of the brand new but not yet opened to traffic Fremont Bascule Bridge.
January 10, 1917. This look was photographed some few days before the one above. [Courtesy, Army Corps]=====
Early work on the north pier being prepared for concrete, March 23, 1916.Some of the hardened results on the north pier, April 8, 1916.An “aerial” panorama (perhaps shot from the tower showing above the south pier in the photograph two above this one) looking west down the canal to a Ballardian sky of mill smoke and airborne lefse particulates on May 4, 1916.Here the daring photographer has turned around (again on May 4, 1916) to look west over the Stone Way Bridge and the smoking Gas Works to a Capitol Hill horizon. Note the generations of Westlake (25 years worth) off-shore, hugging the shore and taking it on the right. Dexter descends to the bridge, far right.Work on the south pier, July 7, 1916. The Bryant mill is on the left and the Stone Way Bridge on the right.The South Pier from the north end on Aug. 17, 1916.
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“THE BUSIEST BASCULE IN THE U.S.A.”
Until the Aurora Bridge was completed in 1932, the bascule at Fremont was busy enough to be considered the busiest bridge of its kind in the U.S.A.. With the University Bridge, it was one of the two primary funnels into the north city and beyond. Here the “outbound traffic through Fremont” in the late afternoon of June 27, 1923, for the most part avoids the center of the street and the tracks for the several trolley lines – including the Seattle-Everett Interurban – that then used them. In the mere fifteen years between the opening of the bascule and that of the flyover Aurora Bridge, Fremont prospered as a mill town and roadside attraction.The congestion on August 15, 1923.. . . and sometime in 1924 (if memory serves) when the serious talk about building a high bridge was itself arising from warm to hot, photographs like this were produced as evidence for the state legislature. [Courtesy, Municipal Archives]The Aurora Bridge under construction seen from the Fremont Bridge.Thin traffic on the Fremont Bridge, looking north into Fremont, April 18, 1939. Within two years the trolley rails will be removed.
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FREMONT HISTORICAL SOCIETY
If you find Fremont history alluring, as do I, you may want to join the Fremont Historical Society. I took this portrait of its first members at its first meeting in the summer of 2004. They are, left to right: Julie Pheasant-Albright, Audrey LIvermore, Roger Wheeler, Paul Fellows, Helen Divjak, Heather McAuliffe, and Carol Tobin. The second picture below it was taken within a year (or so) at another FHS meeting, that in the Fremont Library. At the bottom, the front page for the FHS web is added to help with your perhaps first search into Fremont history: finding and contacting the society.
UNDER THE BRIDGE, JUNE 15, 1917 QUIZ. Which end?
* CORRECTION: The caption to the topmost photo – the primary one for the feature – incorrectly described it as looking northwest. Actually, it looks northeast or to make a finer point of it, east-northeast. Although I knew the correct direction I wrote it wrong and the regrettable truth is that I am too often using left for right and north for south and so on and on. It might be that in this week’s blog, through its many pictures with directions, I have done this stupidly more than once. My editor at the Times has complained to me more than once about this. However, one direction I always get correct is up and down, and for that exception I am proud. When readers correct my either dyslexic or careless/spaced-out mistakes they sometimes do it with such cosmological concern that it would seem for them that the world would sit askew until my directional malaise is twisted back to health. And now once more, and something like Atlas, I have leveraged the world back it its original pose with the north pole pointing to heaven and Wallingford, where I live, northeast of Fremont and much else.
![[Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/1-houseboats-stranded-1914-dam-break-lk-union-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![Improvement on the Fremont Dam ca. 1903, looking east to the "Wallingford Peninsula" where the gas works were implanted in 1907. Note the view of the dam directly below from 1907. The gas works can be found along the north shore of Lake Union. [Courtesy, Army Corps]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/5-1903-fremont-dam-ca03-then-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![A record of the spillway from the Queen Anne side, with lines drawn indicating the expected level of the canal once the locks are closed and the canal is flooded. [Courtesy, Army Corps]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/xx-1914-dec-11-fremont-spillway-op-side-1914-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![January 10, 1917 [Courtesy, Army Corps]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/xx-1917-jan-10-fremont-bridge-1-10-1917-lk-se-f-fremont-web.jpg?ssl=1)
