THEN: Looking north from Yesler Way over the Fifth Avenue regrade in 1911. Note the Yesler Way Cable rails and slot at the bottom. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: The industrial parts of sculptor John Henry’s Songbird (2011) – a kind of blue bird, perhaps – unwittingly repeat some of the concrete and timber devices used to keep the three hotels on the east side of Fifth Avenue north of Yesler Way from sliding away in the summer of 1911.
We will concentrate first on Jean Sherrard’s ‘repeat’ that looks into the face of Songbird, by sculptor John Henry. The Chattanooga artist visited Seattle twice to study this northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Yesler Way. He determined what we, perhaps, have not considered. “The work would have to interact with the sight lines available, yield to the physical demands of the Yesler overpass and still compliment the architectural design of the building. It would be an exercise of creating a piece with enough strength to command the site yet subtle enough not to overpower its surroundings.”
Jean’s repeat from below the Yesler Way overpass.Looking northwest across Yesler Way to an earlier recording of the Francis and its entrance on Yesler Way, with part of the east facade of the new City Hall (and Jail) showing far left across 5th Avenue. Our Lady of Good Help Catholic Church at 5th and Jefferson shows her steeple upper-right. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)Jean’s repeat looking northwest across Yesler Way.
The historical photo featured at the top, one of several taken by a public works photographer in the summer of 1911, documents the troubles the regraders were having here at Fifth Avenue and Yesler Way. The clipping directly below form the Times for February 28, 1899 reveals that the slipping here was an old worry.
A clipping from The Seattle Times for Feb. 28, 1899 introduces C. P. Dose, the owner of the building at the northeast corner of 5th Ave. and Yesler Way, and his fundamental concerns.(I Click this one TWICE to read it.) The Times report on the left for July 14, 1902, describes the elaborate public work undertaken that year to stabilize the fluid dynamics of this “Profanity Hill” (or later “Goat Hill”) part of First Hill that bulges west from it like a resting tourist.
The featured subject looks north over the regrade mess on Fifth from the work-in-progress on the Yesler Way overpass. Beginning with the Frances Hotel, seen here at the northeast corner, there are two more structures between Yesler and Terrace, the next street north. All three are in trouble. When the responsibilities were at last resolved in the courts, twenty-four structures on Yesler, Terrace, Fifth, and Sixth, were counted as damaged by slides triggered by the Fifth Avenue regrade.
One of Dose’s proposals for securing the neighborhood by making it part of his solution for the growing traffic congestion on downtown streets. Note the Dose proposals a wall as part of his plan to stabilize the hill. That The Seattle Times printed his plans is a sign of his influence. Again CLICK CLICK!!!
Real estate speculator, C.P.Dose, the owner of The Frances, described himself and his neighbors as victims of City Engineer R.H. Thomson’s “cutting off the toe off First Hill,” similar to the little Dutch boy pulling his finger from the hole in the dike. Like others, Dose understood the hill’s abundant fluid dynamics. Those dynamics were high on the list of reasons that most of the original pioneers on Alki Point soon left that dry prominence to build a city on and beside this wet hill. After the cutting off of its toe, Dose concluded that most of the “so-called First Hill” should be carefully removed; otherwise, he advised, “It will all come sliding down.”
A Times clip from Feb. 14, 1907.Times clip from Sept. 10, 1909 with radical proposals.Desperate and failed attempts to save the Allen, the Francis Hotel’s first neighbor to the north on 5th Avenue.Times clip from August 24, 1911.Times clip from August 23, 1911. The Francis is on the far right of the illustration.
If I have read the clues correctly, Dose built his Fifth Avenue Hotel, its first name, for $6,000 in the summer of 1900, soon after relocating his prospering real estate business from Chicago to Seattle. With his son, C.C. Dose, he opened his real estate office in the clapboard hotel and soon became a leader among his neighbors in plotting what to do about their slippery situation. A solution arrived on the 23rd of August, 1911, when all the windows in The Frances cracked as, The Seattle Times reported, it moved “one foot closer to the brink.” The three hotels on Fifth Avenue were abruptly abandoned and soon razed. Dose was comforted in the Mt. Baker Neighborhood. He had been holding onto ten acres there since 1870, when he purchased the lakeside land sight unseen while still in Chicago. In 1904 and 1907 he platted his “Dose’s Lake Washington Addition to the City of Seattle” and in 1912 built his home there, a colonial-style mansion with grand Corinthian columns at the front. It still stands tall at 3211 S. Dose Terrace.
Dose’s big home in his namesake addition appears here on the far left of the illustrations running below the feature’s header. It dates from August 3, 1913. [Please CLICK CLICK]The Yesler Way slide was included in The Times four page chronology of the big local events of 1911 – although not on this page, which we have chosen for the cartoon. CLICK CLICKAlas, for Dose, The Seattle Times reports on March 25, 1914, that he lost to the city in his attempt to be paid for the loses of the 1911 slide.Looking north to Terrace Street on a muddy 5th Avenue from a soft spot between the new City Hall (the 400 Yesler Building) on the left and the Francis and its neighbors off camera on the right. Note Our Lady of Good Help (and luck) two blocks north at Jefferson.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? A few more Edge Clips from the neighborhood and then some more old features from the same. We will get as far as we can, but then surrender at 2am for the latest climb to nighty bears. (How should we spell it? Bill.)
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RETURNING to OUR LADY OF GOOD HELP – Looking Southeast across the intersection of 5th and Jefferson.
Our Lady at the northeast corner of 3rd and Washington, its original location.
The Prefontaine Fountain at 3rd and Jefferson.The Prefontaine Fountain, 1993.
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Looking north on 5th Avenue from Terrace Street with the sidewalk face of Our Lady of Good Help on the right. 1939
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FOURTH AVE. REGRADE LOOKING NORTH FROM YESLER WAY
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YESLER WAY CABLE’S LAST DAY
“Safety Island” on Yesler Way, 1928.
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Looking west down Yesler Way and its overpass above 5th Avenue.
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First appeared in Pacific, May 5, 2002
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First appeared in Pacific, March 15, 1987.
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First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 26, 1999
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First appeared in Pacific Oct. 12, 2002.The first brick home is found in this look up First Hill below the towered Court House on the horizon. That is Terrace Street with the steep steps climbing to the top of “Profanity Hill.’ Jefferson Street is on the left and Yesler Way cuts through the cityscape. City Hall, aka the Katzenjammer Castle, is left of center, the bright facade with the centered tower. It faces Third Avenue.
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KATZENJAMMER FRONT DOOR on THIRD AVE.
First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 30, 1984
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First appeared in Pacific.
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CITY HALL, 1886
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LATER – RETURN TO FIFTH AND YESLER WAY
On the horizon Harborview Hospital is under construction and the top of King County’s abandoned courthouse has been removed in prelude to it razing. This 1930 look from the Smith Tower also shows off the barren or cleared acres top-center behind the flat-iron shaped 400 Yesler Building at the center. These, some will remember, were roughly developed into a steep parking lot. (See what follows.) Our Lady of Good Help is on the left.March 12, 1957, looking north on Fifth Avenue from the Yesler Way overpass into part of the sprawling and steep parking lot developed on the shaky acres once home to the tenements on Fifth Avenue’s east side. Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive.Also from March 12, 1957 looking southeast through the parking lot to Yesler Way with Fifth Avenue at the base. (Courtesy, Municipal Archives)Two years later, grading the former lot of the Lady of Good Help. The Yesler Way overpass is on the right. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)
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Reaching from Elliott Bay on the far right to First Hill on the left, this pan from the Smith Tower includes the “forsaken” or undeveloped slide area of First HIll’s “Profanity” or Goat” part directly behind and above the dark mass of the 400 Yesler Building in the flat-iron block bordered by Terrace Street, Yesler Way and Fifth Avenue (behind it) on the bottom-left, about one-fifth of the way in from the pan’s left border, CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
THEN: Thanks again and again to Lawton Gowey for another contribution to this feature, this ca. 1917 look into a fresh Denny Regrade and nearly new “office-factory” at 1921 Fifth Avenue. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey.)NOW: Many thanks also to librarian Steve Kiesow, who as a student started with the Seattle Public Library’s Main Branch History Department in 1968 and is still behind the History Desk, on the phone and on-line helping with answers. Kiesow answered our call, and found for us much of the building’s most recent chronology.
Standing alone on a Denny Regrade lot, a reinforced concrete shoebox with a 30×109 footprint and a red brick veneer, stands at 1921 Fifth Avenue. In the 1880s a pioneer wagon road leading to Queen Anne Hill passed by here. That was long before the regrade, but with half-closed eyes we may imagine the wagon crossing this sloping northeastern corner of Denny Hill very near the roofline of this sturdy box, or a few feet above the Monorail seen in Jean’s “now.”
From the eastern slope of Denny Hill, looking south thru the future Virginia Street (near the fence) on what is close to the future Fifth Avenue ca. 1886 – long before the regrading of Denny Hill. ( You will find the feature for the above pioneer photo in one of the images used as links below. You must explore.)Denny Hill from First Hill circa 19O3, the year the Denny Hotel then renamed the Washington, first opened. The intersection below it, right-of-center, is Fourth Ave. and Stewart Street. The rear of the then future “box” on 5th would be barely out-of-frame to the far right in the dark landscape. The row of residences facing Fourth north of Stewart are featured in the subject that follows, photographed by A. Curtis looking east and north from the hotel.Wallngford is far off on the north side of Lake Union, here on the far left horizon. Stewart street is on the right, and Fourth Avenue runs left-right at the base of this A. Curtis photograph from ca. 1904. Capitol Hill covers most of the horizon.
All the signs in the second floor windows are for political publications, including the Washington Democrat, whose name is also on the front door. But by 1918 all had moved away, including the Democrats. The likely date here is 1917, or two years after 1915, the year tax records say this box was built. Peeking over the roof is a clue. It is a late construction scene for the terracotta tile-adorned Securities Building, described on line by its owner Clise Properties as completed in 1917. The Clise Investment Company was one of the building’s first occupants.
A Seattle Times advertisement for the first section of the Securities Building, dated April 30, 1915.A Seattle Times clip for Oct. 1, 1916.Another Securities Building ad, this one listing the tenants, including the Clise Investment Company. The Seattle Times date is Christmas Eve, 1916.
Besides the publishers, the early user history of the building included a furniture dealer handy with hardwood billiard tables and fumed-oak davenports. In 1928 the place was remodeled for the auto-renter Aero-U-Drive-Inc, with a wide door cut at the sidewalk to move cars in and out of the long garage inside. Upstairs on the second floor was the Colony Club, one of the many speak-easies that the State Liquor Control Board announced in the spring of 1934 that it would soon padlock. John Dore, Seattle’s brilliant and sometimes bellicose mayor, gave the prohibition police no help, announcing to the press, “We have matters of greater importance and dearer consequence to consider than closing up speakeasies.” Hizzoner was thinking of that year’s waterfront strike.
The WPA tax card, printed in 1937.Looking northwest thru the block in 1937 with the Orpheum Auto Hotel next door to the car rental in the “box.”In 1939, north from Olive thru Stewart and the block to Virginian.A remodeled 1921 Fifth Ave. with Singer the tenant. The tax photo is dated April 28,1949.
The surviving 1949 remodel with glass bricks was for a new business, Singer Sewing Machine. After the sewing, Uptown Music sold guitars and rented school band instruments in the 1970s. In 1980 the glass-adorned box was rented for the Reagan-Bush Washington State Headquarters. The Republican Party was replaced with partying. Two music clubs paid the rent, the Weather Wall and Ispy. In 2008 the latter was promoted as an “Urban Comedy Jazz Café.” And so it figures that next year the little – for the neighborhood – shoebox may, if it likes, trumpet its centennial.
Uptown Music announces that it is leaving 1921 5th with, of course, a moving sale.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yup Jean, Ron is going to post a few past features that relate to this neighborhood with relevant subjects – many of them on 5th Ave. – and a few irrelevant subjects mixed in.
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Fifth Avenue looking north from the top of what remained of Denny Hill after the regraders reach Fifth and stopped in 1911. Soon after this image was recorded for Seattle Public Works on March 8, 1929, work began on razing what remained of the hill east of Fifth Avenue. (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive.)Frank Shaw with his back close to the “Box” looks thru the Monorail to the Orpheum Theatre on March 17, 1962Close again to the “box” here for a “Remember the Pueblo” demonstration on Dec. 7, 1968.
![Dose's big home in his namesake addition appears here on the far left of the illustrations running below the feature's header. It dates from August 3, 1913. [Please CLICK CLICK]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/xxxx-st-aug-3-1913-dose-mansion-grab-web.jpg?ssl=1)
