THEN: Friends of the Market president, architect Victor Steinbrueck, leads a cadre of Friends marching for Market preservation in front of the Seattle City Hall most likely on March 18, 1971. (Photo by Tom Brownell from the Post-Intelligencer collection at MOHAI)NOW: A new city hall was completed in 2003. Since most of the municipal departments were housed nearby in the 66-floor Seattle Municipal Tower, the new and smaller City Hall serves primarily the mayor, city council, and the city’s law department.
Friends of the Market president and UW architect Victor Steinbrueck, holding the placard asking, “Is Phyllis Lamphere a Friend of the Market?”, marches ahead of his conserving coterie past the front door of City Hall. This protest, one of several City Hall pickets staged by the Friends in February and March of 1971, was most likely performed on Thursday, March 18. Other signs keep to the message: “Urban Renewal Unfair to Pike Place Market” and “City Hall + Investment Syndicate = Urban Removal.” Fittingly, whether intended or not, the style of the signs’ calligraphy resembles the brushwork listing the prices of produce on the cards still regularly seen in the Market’s stalls .
An earlier photo of Friends marching in front of the Seattle Municipal Building – a Seattle Times clipping from Feb. 5, 1971.
On the first Saturday following this parade, its prime target, councilperson Phyllis Lamphere, protested in The Times that she was indeed “a friend of the (Pike Place) market” and then went on to suggest that, as The Times reporter put it, her “Renewal opponents may themselves be the real enemies of the public market, because without rehabilitation, ‘the market will be unable to meet conditions of Seattle’s (building) code.’” Other signs carried in front of City Hall those contesting days of 1971 advised, “Don’t subsidize luxury apartments,” “Removal is not Renewal,” and “The Pike Place Market is Seattle’s History.”
The Seattle Municipal Building looking east on Cherry Street from above 3rd Avenue. It was constructed from 1959 to 1961 using plans created by a Dallas-based firm named McCammon Associates. As at least the story goes, it was a variation on the firm’s earlier designs for a hotel. For someone who can hear the pun, the Dalles firm also worked on the plans in association with Damm, Daum and Associates. The building replacement by the new City Hall showing in detail with Jean’s “now” photos was, for many, an admired developmentA circa 1960 aerial of the Municipal Building Construction with its parking lot to the rear.A fountain that runs beside the stairway off 4th Avenue into the new city hall.
Post-Intelligencer photographer Tom Brownell took the protest photo at the top. We chose it because it also shows the Fourth Avenue façade of the City Hall (1961) that was by then widely understood to be modeled on the cheap after a Texas hotel. Among the prudent fears of the Friends was that the then expected millions from federal sources for urban renewal would be used to replace the funky charms of the Pike Place Market with modern hotel-motel reminders like City Hall. The federal funding was announced on May 15th, and the next day the Friends announced their plans to gather citizen signatures for a proposal to designate most the Market for preservation. Fifteen-thousand legal signatures were needed to get it on the November ballot. The disciplined campaigners gathered more than 25,000 in three weeks. The November 1971 election was won just as readily, with a landslide 76,369 yesses over 53,264 nos.
Seattle Times clipping from November 15, 1964 CLICK TO ENLARGE
When the Friends of the Market was first formed in 1964, it was an arts movement intent on saving the Pike Place Public Market from “sterile progress.” Mark Tobey, one of Seattle’s best-known artists, was a member. Proceeds from his then new book, The World of the Market, benefited the Friends. When the picketing began in the winter of 1971, Tobey was quoted in The Times: “I hope (the market) will only be restored, and not improved through progressive planners.”
Looking up the steps of City HallThe City Hall tower from 4th AvenueThe view NW from the plaza below City HallA view from Smith Tower
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? Yes Jean a few links arranged by Ron and an excuse. This “Saturday-before” has been filled with other events and entertainments and so we (I) did not pull up more neighborhood links to past features that have not here-to-fore appeared in the blog. But Jean this excuse is righteous, for, as you know, the afternoon we spent in the SeaTac city hall delivering a lecture on the history of Highline and more was often enough delightful. Before passing on to Ron’s links, here is an feature that first appeared in The Times on March 6, 1983, about fourteen months after these weekly now-and-thens first appeared in Pacific.
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THE FIRST BAPTIST FACING THE FATEFUL FOURTH AVE. REGRADE
Looking thru the upheaval of regrades on both Fourth Avenue and James Street
Lawton Gowey’s look up Fourth and over James Street on May 19, 1982, with City Hall on the right.
THEN: This “real photo postcard” was sold on stands throughout the city. It was what it claimed to be; that is, its gray tones were real. If you studied them with magnification the grays did not turn into little black dots of varying sizes. (Courtesy, David Chapman and otfrasch.com)NOW: After a rescue in the early 1970s, this former city hall survives as the 400 Yesler Building. Behind it rises the Fifth and Yesler Building, a recent addition to the Pioneer Square Neighborhood skyline.About thirty years ago, or more, I took the above shot of our subject for reasons I no longer remember (if I needed one.) The prospect then was close to Jean’s now, but not so colorful. And there on the far right the Grand Union Hotel still stood on the east side of Fourth Avenue.Here’s a THEN of the same intersection, which moves closer to Jean’s position, or reaches beyond it to the sidewalk for a look up Terrace Street, or rather an impression of it through the windows of the Yesler Way Cable car which in this ca. 1940 shot is handing on to its about last cable. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)
Otto Theodore Frasch was one of boomtown Seattle’s most energetic postcard photographers in the early twentieth-century, when the public interest in sending and collecting postcards with “real” photographs on them was especially popular. Local collectors generally cherish postcards with the “O.T. Frasch Seattle” credit and caption.
In this look east on Yesler Way, where it still crosses above Fourth Avenue, Frasch also printed the names of three of Seattle’s primary civic buildings on postcard No. 173. First, left-of-center, is the triangular-shaped City Hall, the photographer’s primary subject. It was the brick replacement for the comically named Katzenjammer frame city hall, nearby at Third and Yesler, located in what is now City Hall Park. Earlier than No. 173, Frasch had made another postcard that included both municipal buildings on Yesler Way. Its number, nineteen, is early for the Seattle-based photographer.
The Katzenjammer Castle (now City Hall Park) with the new City Hall, up Yesler on the far right, Frasch’s No. Nineteen. We will add his No. Eighteen next.Apparently this is Otto Frasch’s first record of City Hall (the 400 Yesler Building) near the end of its construction.
Otto and Mary Frasch came here from Minnesota in 1906. Elsie, their first daughter, was born on the way. A charming picture of the three is included on the Otto Frasch website otfrasch.com, which is web-mastered by Elsie’s great-grandson, David Chapman. More than 500 images of Frasch’s Seattle and surrounds are featured, including the coverage of Luna Park (the family lived nearby on West Seattle’s Maryland Avenue), the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition in 1909, the city’s Golden Potlatch parades from 1911 to 1913, and the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet, all of which are worth a visit to the site. With Otto Frasch’s magnum opus of more than 1000 ascribed numbers, webmaster Chapman’s shepherding of the site continues with new discoveries.
Luna Park and Duwamish Head seen from one of its thrilling and/or amusing rides.A two-card panorama of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition’s fitting on the UW campus in 1909, photographed by Otto Frasch from the Capitol Hill side of Portage Bay.
This “real photo postcard” No. 173 (the featured photo at the top) most likely dates from 1908. Although barely visible in this printing, a monumental “welcome” sign for the Fleet stands high on First Hill to the left of the King County Court House dome, which resembles a wedding cake. City Light is the third landmark noted in the caption. With its own rooftop sign and two ornate towers, the citizen-owned utility stands above the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Yesler Way. From Frasch’s prospect they escape the horizon behind a screen of power poles beyond, and to the right of City Hall.
City Light’s sub-station on the north side of Yesler Way at the west side of 7th Ave. (now over the freeway pit) in a photo not by Frasch but by a city photographer who has dated it Jan. 20, 1914 at the bottom right corner. In the City Light link included by Ron Edge below, you will find an attached feature with short essay on this sub-station with an earlier photo of it.Frank Shaw recorded this look across Yesler to the Grand Union Hotel on March 7, 1963, or still eighteen years before the structure was razed on a city order. To this side of hotel is the Cadillac and ironic addition or a radical juxtaposition, both once popular art-crit terms?Verily, the Grand Union Hotel’s destruction as recorded in The Seattle Times for May 15, 1983.
Otto Frasch did not include in his caption the private Grand Union Hotel, on the far right of the featured photograph on top. Opened in the fall of 1902, it survived for eighty-one years. The May 15, 1983, issue of this newspaper includes a photograph of the hotel’s destruction under the caption, “Going Going Gone.” The Grand Union “came down without a whimper, ending years of anxiety by the city over the lack of stability in the turn-of-the-century building.”
The Desert Magazine of February 1941 reveals that years after leaving his real photo postcard business in Seattle Otto Frasch was still busy dealing, only then “desert colored glass” out of Los Angeles. (Note the third miscellaneous down.)
WEB EXTRAS
Hey Paul, where’s the beef?
Jean we will answer your beef question at the bottom (the last) of the LINKS LIST that Ron Edge is putting up of subjects that are, again, mostly relevant to this week’s feature. We encourage readers to start clicking and keep at it as long as they can – at least until they reach the beef. Here we also note that our beloved mentor Richard Berner is having his 95th birthday this December 31, aka New Years Eve. May we remind readers that we have on the front page of this blog Berner’s first of three books that make up his trilogy of Seattle in the first 50 years of the 20th Century. It is included in the books button. Appropriately, at least for his birthday, that takes Vol. 1 up to 1920, the year that Rich was born – on its last day. We have also pulled the little biography we wrote about Rich a few years back and copy it to the bottom of whatever else we come up with before climbing the stairs early this morning to again join the bears. If my copy attempts fail, you will find that vital Richard (his vita) on this blog with a key word search. Good luck to all of us.
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BERNER’S BOOMTOWN
(click to enlarge photos)
We are pleased now to introduce Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration, the first of Richard C. Berner’s three books named together Seattle in the 20th Century. When the details, stories, and insights are explored with a close reading, Berner’s accomplishment is by far our widest opening into Seattle’s twentieth century, the first half of it, from the 1900 to 1950. Those fifty years were also the second half of Seattle’s first hundred years, if we begin our counting with the footsteps of mid-western farmers settling here in the early 1850s.
Richard Berner, a recent portrait
Volume one was first published in 1991 by Charles Press, and the publisher – “Rich” Berner himself – made a modest list of its contents on the back cover. We will repeat it. “Politics of Seattle’s urbanization: dynamics of reform, public ownership movement, turbulent industrial relations, effects of wartime hysteria upon newfound civil liberties – all responding to the huge influx of aspiring recruits to the middle class & organized labor as they confronted the established elite. Includes outlines of the economy, cultural scene, public education, population characteristics & ethnic history.”
For this “printing” we have added many captioned illustrations, some of them copied from news reports of the events Berner examines, and we have almost always succeeded in placing each next to the text it illustrates. On-line illustrated editions of Volume 2: Seattle 1921-1940, From Boom to Bust and Volume 3: Seattle Transformed, World War 2 to Cold War will follow – but not at the moment.The collecting of illustrations and putting them in revealing order with the narratives for Volume 2 and 3 is still a work in progress.Readers who want to “skip ahead” of our illustrated presentations of Berner’s three books here on dorpatsherrardlomont can find the complete set of his history as originally published in local libraries or through interlibrary loans.
How Rich Berner managed it is a charmed story. He undertook what developed into his magnus opus after retiring in 1984 from his position as founder and head of the University of Washington Archives and Manuscripts Division. Between the division’s origin in 1958 and his retirement Rich not only built the collection but also studied it. Berner worked closely with Bob Burke, the U.W. History professor most associated with the study of regional history who first recommended Berner, a University of California, Berkeley graduate in history and library science, for the U.W. position. Together, the resourceful professor and the nurturing archivist shepherded scores of students in their use of the archive. Rich Berner is the first to acknowledge that he also learned from the students as they explored and measured the collection for dissertations and other publications. By now their collected publications can be imagined as its own “shelf” of Northwest History.
News clipping showing Rich C. Berner “as curator of manuscripts for the University of Washington Library.”
Rich Berner showed himself also a good explicator of his profession. His influential book, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical Analysis was published by the University of Washington Press in 1983 and was awarded the Waldo Gifford Leland Prize by the Society of American Archivists. Composing this historical study on top of establishing and nourishing the University’s Archive and Manuscripts Division may be fairly considered a life’s achievement, but, with his 1984 retirement Berner continue to work in the archive at writing his three-volume history. He published Volume Three in 1999, and so, continuing the charm of this entire production, he completed Seattle in the 20th Century before the century (and millennium) was over.
Rich & Thelma
(Lest we imagine this scholar chained to his archive we know that with his wife Thelma, a professor of Physiology and Biophysics in the U.W. Medical School and the first woman appointed Associate Dean of the UW graduate school, this famously zestful couple managed to often take to the hills and mountains.)
Rich was born in Seattle in 1920- the last year explored in this his first volume.His father worked on the docks as a machinist, and for a time was “blacklisted” by employers because of his union advocacy.During the depression, while Rich was attending classes at Garfield High School, his mother ran a waterfront café on the Grand Trunk Pacific’s pier at the foot of Madison Street.
Rich in uniform
During the war Rich served with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division.Following it with help from the GI Bill he matriculated at Cal-Berkeley with degrees in both history and library science.It was also in Berkeley that he first met Robert Burke, then Director of the Manuscript Collection of the Bancroft Library. Rich worked part time there.
For Seattle, as for any city of size, there is a “canon” of publications that are necessary reading for anyone wanting to get a grip on local history. The first half of the Seattle Canon may be said to begin with Pioneer Arthur Denny’s Pioneer Reminiscences of 1888. The pioneer canon receives its own magnus opus with the combined works – multi-volume histories of Seattle and King County – of Clarence Bagley, himself a pioneer. That Berner was already attending Seattle’s T.T. Minor grade school in 1926 when Bagley was still three years away from publishing his History of King County is evidence of the “Boomtown” included in the title of this Berner’s first of three books on Seattle history.
With rare exceptions the books included in this first part of the Seattle Canon were published by their subjects, like Denny’s still revealing Reminiscences, or under the direction and/or support of their subjects, like Bagley’s still helpful volumes.They are generally “picturesque histories” written to make their subjects seem more appealing than they often were.The stock of motives for “doing heritage” are there generally supportive or positive, showing concern for the community, admiration for its builders, the chance to tell good stories, and often also the desire to learn about one’s forebears although primarily those truths that are not upsetting.Not surprisingly, and again with rare exceptions, these booster-historians and their heritage consumers were members of a minority of citizens defined by their wealth, race and even religion.It would be a surprise to find any poor socialists, animists or even affluent Catholics among them.
Part Two of the Seattle Canon may be said to have popularly begun with Skid Road, historian-journalist Murray Morgan’s charming and yet still raking history of Seattle. Published in 1951, the year of Seattle’s centennial, it is still in print, and has never been out of it. Richard Berner has dedicated Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration to Morgan.The post-war canon is often corrective of the sins of the pioneers.The works of Morgan and many others, certainly including Berner, are not generally clothed in the pious harmonies of their predecessors, the ordinarily stress-free narratives expected of those who were writing under the “pioneer code.”
In our opinion Rich Berner’s three-volume Seattle in the 20th Century is the greatest single achievement of our Seattle Canon – “part two.”It has the scope and details required.It is profoundly instructive and filled with the characters and turns of fate that any storyteller might admire and wisely exploit.Within Berner’s three books are the wonders of what they did, the touchstones of their devotions and deceptions, their courage and hypocrisy, meanness and compassion.Certainly, it has been our pleasure to help illustrate this the first volume and to also continue on now with volumes two and three.
Paul Dorpat 10/1/2009
Archivist-Antiquarian as Young-Equestrian posing in front of the Berner family home on Seattle’s Cherry Street.Student at Seattle’s Garfield High SchoolRich Berner’s father, top-center: machinist on the Seattle waterfront.“High school or college, I’m no longer sure.” – Rich BernerRich Berner, second row third from left, posing for a group portrait of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division at a Colorado camp during the Second World War.With Thelma on Mt. StuartThelma & RichThe Robert Gray Award from the Washington State Historical Society
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FOUR MORE of the 400 YESLER WAY Building
A Webster and Stevens Studio photo of City Hall from the same (or about the same) time as the Frasch photographs on top. (Courtesy, the Museum of History and Industry)Lawton Gowey dated this slide May 24, 1970.Gowey shows up on the eve of restoration with the sidewalk barriers and protection in place along the north side of Yesler Way. Gowey dates this February 7, 1977.
Frank Show and his Hasselblad look down on the broken and abandoned City Hall from the often slippery side of First Hill (the Goat Hill part of it) standing near the west side of Sixth Avenue. He dates his transparency January 31, 1973. A sign on the roof promotes Stevenson for judge. After 21 years practicing law here, Robert H. Stevenson, 47, determined to run for one of the open positions on the King County Superior Court on the Sept. 19, 1972 ballot. His campaign had a populist touch advocating a system in which individual judges could be sanctioned by the public for “bizarre or arbitrary actions.” Neither did Stevenson like it that federal judges were appointed for life-time appointments. The Bellevue citizen was of the opinion that all candidates for the bench should be tested for psychological fitness and go through a screening designed to reveal any emotional problems that would interfere with their time in the robe. The sign on the roof of the 400 Yesler Building was one of the expenses of his $3,000 campaign. Apparently, removing the sign after the election was not. From a reading of The Times archive, it does not seem that Stevenson won.