THEN: Charles Louch’s grocery on First Avenue, north of Union Street, opened in the mid-1880s and soon prospered. It is possible – perhaps probable – that one of the six characters posing here is Louch – more likely one of the two suited ones on the right than the aproned workers on the left. (Courtesy RON EDGE)NOW: The sidewalk sites of Charles Louch’s storefronts are now held by tenants of the Harold Poll building, which was built in 1910 as the Hancock Building.
Englishman Charles Louch first crossed the Seattle waterfront, it seems, in 1885, and for many reasons, including the “bag of money” he reportedly carried, prospered and stayed for eighteen years. He returned to England in 1903 with enough American assets to purchase an estate near Southhampton, which he shared with his two single sisters.
A look directly across Front Street (First Ave.) and the Front Street tracks. (Courtesy, MOHAI)The Louch offerings seen from the front door. (Courtesy MOHAI)
Louch first opened a stand for “fancy fruits” on the east side of Front Street (First Avenue) but soon expanded his fare to the “cigars, tobacco, groceries and provisions” that are indicated on the sign above his front door located on the third lot north of Union Street. It is these “groceries and provisions” that are first noted in the 1885-86 Polk City Directory, where Louch is listed as one of twenty-two Seattle grocers.
In the Polk’s citizen section, Louch is recorded as living at the same address, almost surely in the back of the store. Based on the evidence provided by the 1888 Sanborn real estate map, Louch later installed both a “Sausage Room” and a “Smoke House” in his former living quarters. Louch’s ‘1888 Brand’ smoked hams were a long-time favorite and not just locally. During the Alaska Gold Rush, beginning in the late 1890s, many of the hams were shipped north.
A rare look at the waterfront ca. 1897 with the Hotel York escaping the horizon on the right, at the northwest corner of Pike and Front/First Ave. The Louch Augustine & Company waterfront warehouse is on the left. Pike Street climbs the hill as an irregular path. (Courtesy Ron Edge) CLICK TO ENLARGE
In 1888 Louch began promoting his hams by distributing to his customers a mounted photograph of his store, as seen from an upper window of a nearby building at Front and Pike. This second photo featured a panorama of Seattle rising above a roof top sign reading “Chas Louch” and running at a right angle to Front Street. Set on the crest of the roof, the corner of that sign is barely seen here above the “cigars and tobacco” sign that faces the street.
The store’s larger rooftop sign and much of the First Hill horizon from a prospect south of Pike and overlooking Front Street in 1888-9. Rolland Denny’s home is at the northeast corner of Front and Union, lower-right. This first appeared in Pacific on Oct. 4, 1987 and was later included in one of the three “Seattle Now and Then” books, all of them collections of the features.The Louch credit can be carefully read in the sign above the ham-burdened wagon. The Louch wagon is either in a local parade or making a very big delivery of 1888 hams. Someday some bright young scholar will figure out what corner this is. The original print was poorly fixed. (Courtesy, MOHAI)
The city’s great fire of 1889 was also good to Louch and his hams and sausages. As the fire moved north up the waterfront and Front Street it was stopped less than two blocks south of Louch’s grocery. About one-half of the 36 groceries listed in the year’s city directory we consumed. Also in 1889 Louch moved into a mansion-sized Beacon Hill home he had built on Othello Avenue overlooking Rainier Valley.
The Colman building at the southwest corner of Marion and Columbia with the Augustine and Kyer storefront near the middle of the block and the store’s delivery buggies posing in front. (Courtesy, MOHAI)The Colman Bldg first appear in Pacific on March 1, 1987. CLICK TO ENLARGE & READ
After partnering in 1889 with M.B. Augustine, a traveling food salesman from Nevada, the ambitious pair moved into the much grander post-fire quarters of the Colman Building, (still at First Avenue and Columbia Street.) There they became famous for their “upscale” specialty foods and the dozen wagons needed to make free deliveries throughout the city. After Louch returned to England, Augustine took on a new partner and the company was renamed Augustine and Kyer. It grew to five locations, with the last one, in the University District, holding on through the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Christmas inside Augustine & Kyer. (Courtesy MOHAI)Care for a cookie from Augustine and Kyle’s formidable display topped by a happy boy and a happy girl? (Courtesy MOHAI)
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, boys? Yes Jean, more of the neighborhood and also a look up Front Street from Pioneer Square, which is the second Edge-Link that Ron has put in place immediately below. After Ron’s links we’ll pull a few clips from past “now and then” features. They are also from the neighborhood. Well Jean, you know this well, for this week it was you who did the scanning of the clips having nearly completed your inventory of all 1700-plus features on the way to publishing later this year another collection – which might even be permitted the cheesy title “100 Best.”
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The home next door to the south, the Rolland Denny home at the northeast corner of First and Union. First appeared in Pacific December 30, 2001.
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Across Union Street from Rolland, his parents, Arthur and Mary Denny’s home at the southeast corner of Front (First) and Union.
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Looking north on First across Union Street, The Rolland Denny home is behind the stylish couple and the Louch storefront up the way. First appeared in Pacific, April 18, 1993.
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Princess Angeline resting and/or posing on the boardwalk west of Front and Pike. First appeared in Pacific, March 13, 2005.
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EIGHT PAGES from the AUGUSTINE & KYER BULLETIN, from 1912. click to enlarge
THEN: Looking south on First Avenue from its northwest corner with Madison Street, circa 1905. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)NOW: The entire block bordered by First and Second Avenues and Marion and Madison Streets was cleared in the late 1960s for the construction of architect Fred Bassetti’s Henry M. Jackson Federal Office Building, which opened in 1974.
Through the late 1880s this east side of First Avenue – its was still called Front Street then — was distinguished by George Frye’s Opera House (1884-85). This grand pioneer landmark filled the southern half of the block until June 6, 1889, when Seattle’s Great Fire reduced it to ashes. While these were still cooling, Frye hired John Nestor, an Irish-born architect who had designed his Opera House, to prepare drawings for the Stevens Hotel, which we see here also at the south end of the block, which is the northeast corner of First Avenue and Marion Street.
Frye’s Opera House is about to be engulfed by the Great First of June 6, 1889 in this look south on First Ave. (then still Front Street) from Spring Street. The opera house, the tallest building on First/Front, is left-of-center.The above was most likely recorded during the Northern Pacific Railroad’s official photographer, F. Jay Haynes, 1890 visit to Seattle. Hayes climbed to the trestle built across Railroad Ave. to carry coal to the waterfront bunkers built where Ivar’s Pier 3 now stands on its brand new steel pilings. Center-right in the block below the temporary tents, vestiges of the commercial needs following the fire of 1889, a single story structure at the southeast corner of First and Madison will be short-lived. The changes made there for a long life of stage performances required much higher ceilings and added floors for the show girls to robe to disrobe. Central School on the south side of Madison between Sixth and Seventh Avenues tops the horizon at the center.With the Burke Building behind it at Second and Marion, the Stevens Hotel fills half of the block on First Ave., between Marion and Madison, far-left.Like the Wesbster and Stevens studio subject above it, Lawton Gowey’s record looks thru the intersection of First and Marion and the ruins of both the Stevens Hotel and the Burke Building. Less than ten years old, the SeaFirst tower ascends above the Empire Building with its rooftop Olympic National Life neon sign. The Empire/Olympic later provided Seattle’s first great thrill of implosion.
Next door to the north, the Palace Hotel, with 125 guest rooms, opened on the Fourteenth of April, 1903. The owners announced that it was “Artistically decorated and comfortably furnished, and equipped with every modern convenience.” They listed “elevators, electric lights, call bells and rooms with baths.” The owners boasted that their hotel had the “finest commercial sample rooms in the city, which makes it an ideal hotel for commercial travelers.” In the spring of 1905, the most northerly of the hotel’s three storefronts was taken by Burt and Packard’s “Korrect Shape” shoe store. For $3.50 one could purchase a pair of what the partnering cobblers advertised as “the only patent leather shoe that’s warranted.” Also that year, the New German Bakery moved in next door beneath the Star Theatre, which had recently changed its name from Alcazar to Star.
Early construction on the Henry Jackson “Federal” Building that replaced everything on the block except for a few ornaments saved from the Burke Building. The older Federal Building appears here across First Avenue, and sits there still.(Above) The Seattle Times Feb. 26, 1905 review of the Star Theatre.
On February 21, 1905, The Seattle Times printed “Vaudeville at the Star,” a wonderfully revealing review of the Star’s opening. “Vaudeville as given at the 10-cent theatre may not be high art, but it is certainly popular art . . . The performance started exactly at the appointed time, but long before that a squad of policeman had to make passage ways through the crowd of people on Madison Street.”
The Star Theatre with the Palace Hotel beside it.
The hour-and-a-half performance consisted of nine acts, and The Times named them all. “Claude Rampf led off with some juggling on the slack wire. Richard Burton followed with illustrated songs. Third came the Margesons in a comedy sketch, a little boy proving a clever dancer. Fourth were the dwarfs, Washer Brothers, who boxed four rounds. They were followed by Daisy Vernon, who sang in Japanese costume, followed by Handsen and Draw, a comedy sketch team, followed by Wilson and Wilson, consisting of a baritone singer and a negro comedian, and then by the lead liner, Mme Ziska, the fire dancer. The performance concluded with several sets of moving pictures.”
Lawton Gowey’s recording of the end – and rear end – of the Rivoli, recorded on January 21, 1971.
Until it went dark in 1967, the venue at the southeast corner of First and Madison had many names. In addition to the Alcazar and the Star, it had been called the State Ritz, the Gaiety, the Oak, the State, the Olympic, the Tivoli, and in its last incarnation as a home for burlesque and sometimes experimental films, the Rivoli.
James Stevens standing by his tales.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yup and again with help from Ron Edge who has attached the links below for readers’ ready clicking. The four chosen are, for the most part, from the neighborhood. Following those we will put up three or four other relevant features and conclude with a small array of other state landmarks or “icons” (and how I dislike using that by now tired term, but I’m in a hurry) including James Stevens, the wit who revived and put to good order the Paul Bunyan tales. We like him so much, we have put Stevens next above, on top of Ron’s links.
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Looking north on First thru Madison Street with a cable car intersecting on the right. Note the sidewalk awning of the German Bakery, far right. The Globe Building is on the left at the northwest corner. DOUBLE CLICK the text BELOWFIRST APPEARED in PACIFIC, JUNE 22, 1986. CLICK TWICE – PLEASE
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Clock on the southwest corner of First Ave. and Madison Street.First Appeared in PACIFIC , SEPT. 17, 1995.The Globe when nearly new.Lawton Gowey’s capture of the Globe on Sept. 16, 1981 preparing for its restoration as a swank hotel.
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Post Alley, looking north from Marion Street. The buildings on the right face the west side of First Avenue between Marion and Madison and so look across First Avenue at or into the featured block.CLICK to ENLARGE. First appeared in Pacific, December 6, 1987.The west side of First Avenue between Madison Street (in the foreground) and Marion. The dark-brick Rainier-Grand Hotel holds the center of the block.
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OTHER STEVENS
We might have begun this little photo essay with a portrait of the namesake, Washington Territory’s first governor, Isaac Stevens, but chose instead a landmark on Stevens Pass (named for the Gov), the Wayside Chapel. Lawton Gowey, again, took this slide. We do not know if the chapel has survived the wages of sin and elements.
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ABOVE, Pickett’s record of the Stevens Pass summit with Cowboy Mountain on the horizon, and BELOW, Jean Sherrard’s repeat, which appeared first in our book WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW.
Another Stevens Pass ski lodge. Photo by Ellis
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ABOVE and BELOW: Stevens School in Wenatchee. In the “now” the school has been replaced by a federal building. (This too appears in WASHINGTON THEN and NOW)
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On Alki Point, we’ve been told, across Stevens Street from what is now the Log Cabin Museum, a fitted tent for summer recreations at the beach, and now a street of modest homes.
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A rail-fan’s CASEY JONES SPECIAL heading east on the future Burke Gilman Recreation trail and over the Stevens Way overpass. It was under this little bridge that those attending the 1909 Alaksa Yukon Pacific Exposition on the U.W. Campus entered the Pay Streak, the carnival side of the AYP. Pacific Street runs by here just out frame at the bottom. Photo – again – by Lawton Gowey. Lawton was one of the area’s most learned Rail Fans.
THEN: In 1910, a circa date for this look north on First Avenue across Virginia Street, the two corners on the east side of the intersection were still undeveloped – except for signs. The Terminal Sales Building, seen far right in Jean Sherrard’s repeat, did not replace the billboards that crowd the sidewalk in the “then” until 1923. (Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: The early-twentieth century promoters of the Denny Regrade – including this part of it in Belltown – expected that the central business district would soon move north and develop the diminished blocks with high rises. Only their timing was wrong. Now, at last, the Denny Regrade is gaining altitudes much higher than those of the lost Denny Hill.
I think it likely that this candid photo of a lone pedestrian on a bright sidewalk was snapped to show off the new streetlights. Recorded by a municipal photographer, the view looks north on First Avenue from its southeast corner with Virginia Street. The city’s first ornamental light standards, of City Light’s own design, were introduced in 1909-10, and on Seattle’s busiest streets featured five-ball clusters like these. Here the elegance of the new lights is interrupted by the somewhat comedic counterpoint of older and much taller power poles – all in the name of progress.
Above and below: First Ave. looking north from Virginia Street during the BIG SNOW of 1916 and recently. On the right, note the HOTEL PRESTON, a later name for the RIDPATH seen in the featured photo on top.
Detail from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map. The Hotel Ridpath appears near the center with the Troy Hotel across First Ave. from it. The Livingston Hotel at the southwest corner of Virginia and First has been home for the Virginia Inn Tavern now for many years. We include directly below an interior from that bar photographed in 2006 with Jean Sherrard and Berangere Lomont, both of this blog. BB was visiting from Paris.Jean and Berangere at the Virginia Inn on Oct. 12, 2006. It was BB’s first visit to Seattle after our time with her in Paris a year earlier. Oh what joy!
This neighborhood was sometimes named North Seattle on early maps, but more popularly it was also called Belltown, for the family that first claimed and developed it. Like many of the first settlers, William and Sarah Ann Bell kept two homes, one in the platted village that was growing to the sides of Pioneer Square and Henry Yesler’s sawmill, and the other on their claim, in order to “prove” it. (Virginia Street was named for their long-lived third daughter, Mary Virginia,1847-1931).
Four pages merged from Seattle Now and Then Vol. 3. Click to enlarge, and perhaps read. The panorama looks north from the back porch of the Bell Hotel at the southeast corner of First and Battery. The still somewhat forrested Queen Anne Hill marks the horizon at the center. First Ave. (Front Street) extends north on the left, and Battery Street runs east, on the right. There also Denny School stands out at the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and Battery. The photo was taken by Morford, courtesy Kurt Jackson. (Click this you will probably be able to read it – if you wish.)
Seattle’s first major public work was the 1876 regrading of Front Street (First Avenue) between Pioneer Square and Pike Street. Soon after it continued with an improved path over the western side of Denny Hill, meant to help the Bells develop their claim. In 1884, First Avenue was lowered and improved north of Pike Street with a cut that allowed the community’s then new horse-drawn street railway to continue north to Belltown and beyond, as far as the lower Queen Anne Neighborhood. Then in 1898-99, this cut was deepened to the grade we see here, leaving a cliff along the east side of First Avenue.
The temporary bluff along the east side of First Avenue, ca. 1902. The view looks north from near Virginia Street.The cliff along the east side of Second Avenue, looking south from near Bell Street. The Moore Theatre and beyond it the New Washington Hotel are evident beyond Virginia Street.
In 1903 the earnest (and long) razing of Denny Hill began by moving that cliff to the east side of Second Avenue. By 1911 the regrading reached the east side of Fifth Avenue with another cliff, and there it rested for seventeen years.
The steel frame for the New Washington Hotel appears on the far left. The view looks west on Virginia Street with the photographer Louis Whittelsey’s back near Fourth Avenue. The structure, upper-right, is at the northwest corner of Third Ave. and Virginia Street. Small although still easily seen near the scene’s center, is the old Central School that was moved to this site in the early 1880s from its original location near the northeast corner of Third Ave. and Madison Street. (see next photo below) It sits here near the northeast corner of First and Virginia and so behind the billboards that crowd the same corner at the far right of the featured photo on top. The structures that seem to extend from the school to the New Washington’s frame, are actually on the west side of First Avenue between Virginia and Stewart Streets. The Alaskan Building breaks the horizon, right-of-center, at the northwest corner of Second and Virginia. You can find it in the 1912 Baist detail printed above, and it is also seen in the second photo below this one, which photo dates from 1908. This scene dates from ca. 1907.In this look south on Fourth Avenue from the Territorial University Building at Seneca, Central School appears right-of-center near the northeast corner of Madison and 3rd Avenue.Dated 1908 at the bottom-right corner, this view looks north from near Stewart Street through the crowds both standing on Second Avenue and sitting in the bleachers on the left. The have probably gathered to witness the parade celebrating the 1908 visit of the “Great White Fleet” to Puget Sound.The Puget Sound News Company building, at the southwest corner of Virginian and Second, “filled the bleachers” sevens years after the 1908 crowd scene above this clipping.
While construction of the brick Hotel Ridpath, center-right in the featured subject at the top, waited for the cliff to be pushed east to Second Avenue, the ornate clapboard Troy Hotel across the street, far left, was built soon after the 1898-99 regrade. The Troy survived into at least the late 1940s. The Ridpath, long since renamed the Preston, I remember almost like yesterday.
The Ridpath/Preston seen from Western Avenue about a quarter-century ago.
In the featured photograph from about 1910, First Avenue’s Belltown blocks were mostly given to hotels and shops and a few vacant lots. Some of the latter were fitted with elaborate billboards, like the one on the right, which is stacked with exotic murals promoting popular habits, like vaudeville, cigarettes and chewing gum.
(Above) An advertisement posted in the May 5, 1916 Times for the Puget Sound Marble and Granite Company, which by then had filled the northeast corner of Virginia and First with its stones.Since 1923 Seattle architect Henry W. Bittman’s Terminal Sales Building has held the southeast corner of First Avenue and Virginia Street.
WEB EXTRAS (featuring story and song!)
Paul, I know you and Ron have much to add. Please do so, but let me interject a touch of Public Relations for our annual Town Hall program ‘A Rogue’s Christmas‘.
Terrifying Santa at Seattle bus stop. Paul Dorpat, 1976
As you well know, this Sunday at 2 PM, you and I, Marianne Owen and Randy Hoffmeyer, will be reading stories and poems from E.B. White, Nabokov, Ken Kesey, and much more, including original music by Pineola, for this event – the eighth we’ve presented in collaboration with ACT Theatre. Join us for an antidotal and deliciously subversive holiday treat!
I’ll be there Jean. Remember you are picking me up. Here, repeating our by now weekly path, are a few relevant past features pulled and placed by Ron Edge. Ron might also come to the Rogue’s show. He took his then 96-year old mother last year.
THEN: In 1913, or near to it, an unnamed photographer recorded this view southeast across the Lower Queen Anne corner of Denny Way and First Avenue North. Out of frame to the left, the northeast corner of this intersection was home then for the Burdett greenhouse and gardens. (We have include an advertisement for them below.) By its own claim, Burdett offered plants of all sorts, “the largest and most complete stock to choose from in the state.” Courtesy, the Museum of North Idaho.NOW: Jean discovered that the lower and larger panel of this correctly chosen window was stuck closed, so instead he extended his camera through a narrow opening to the side of the upper panel and recorded this view, which sees considerably farther south on First Avenue. Thanks to archivist Julie Keressen at Seattle Municipal Archives for discovering that the part of Denny Way seen here was considerably widened to the south in the early 1920s. A combination of that widening and Jean’s extended arm open up the view south on First Avenue and into Belltown.
While Seattle was building long piers with landmark towers on the central waterfront and first staging Golden Potlatches, the week-long summer festivals that began in 1911, on city streets, an alert and now nameless photographer produced a collection of sharp negatives enamored with schooners, steamers and Potlatch parade floats.
The window shot at the top, however, is unique for her or him. From the northwest corner of First Ave. N. and Denny Way, the subject looks southeast from a fourth floor window – perhaps the photographer’s apartment.
This detail pulled from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map has Denny Way running along the bottom. The Regent Apartments are show – although not named – near the map’s lower-left corner at the northwest corner of Denny Way and First Ave. North. Not counting the fire station (far right, on a site now supporting the Space Needle), there are eleven brick buildings (the red ones) scattered among the wooden ones in these 21 lower Queen Anne blocks. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]
The Regent Apartments were built in 1908. From the prospect, here at the top, one got an unimpeded view of the razing of Denny Hill for the Denny Regrade until 1910, when the Raymond Apartments, whose rear wall is seen here kitty-corner and beyond the billboards, opened its 37 two-room units to renters. The Regent was considerably larger with 59 units. These two apartment houses were part of the earliest brick reconstruction of this “North Seattle” neighborhood that had been swiftly built of wood during Seattle’s first boom decades of the 1880s and 1890s.
The Raymond Apartments, here renamed the Wm. Daniels Apartments, rise above a trolley turning west onto Denny Way from First Avenue. The reader may decide if the couple, clutching their purses and packages and watching the trolley, are preparing to board it or waiting for it to pass by, allowing them then to cross Denny Way.. The Regent/Arkona Apartments are just off the photo’s border to the left, behind them.With his back to the Arkona, Lawton Gowey recorded this look down First Avenue on November 2, 1968. The date is penned on this slide’s cardboard frame, but not for another of Gowey’s Kodachrome cityscapes, the one immediately below. (It was unlike him not to write down a date.) We can tell from the distant skyline that the snap below is later than the one above.Ivars sign here still holds to the north facade of the Raymond Apartments. Included below with the Link named “Sharred Walls” is a feature on the Raymond – seen from the front.The sign to Ivar’s Fish Bar on Denny Way. The variety of menus was something he introduced in the 1950s with his first drive-in housed in a converted Capitol Hill gas station on Broadway Avenue at Thomas Street..
The Regent’s managers did not promote this view south into the business district but rather that to the west. A Dec. 15, 1912, classified ad for the Regent reads, “Commanding a view of the Sound and being within easy walking distance of the city, or excellent car service, this building is exceptionally well located. The apartments are first class and modern in every respect. Three rooms at $15 and $20. Four rooms, $27.50 and $30.”
The 15-year-old Regent was sold to California investors, and pictured in the January 28, 1923 Sunday Times. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]
In 1925, after the apartments were sold to a San Francisco investor for “a consideration of $110,000,” the name was changed to the Arkona. This was short-lived. After John and Winifred Paul purchased the Arkona Apartments in 1927 for $150,000, they whimsically changed its name to Pauleze. Winifred died there in 1932, but Paul continued living in and managing their apartment house until 1957, when he too died, but not the punning name. It remained the Pauleze until the late 1970s, when, for reasons we have not found, the name Arkona Apartments was revived.
Jack Paul’s obituary as is appeared in The Seattle Times for Dec. 6, 1957.
In the mid-1980s, with the help of Dave Osterberg, a friend who was then the development manager for Environmental Works, acting as guide for the transfer, the collection of negatives of which this subject was one, “came home” to Seattle from the Museum of North Idaho. With a donation to the museum from Ivar Haglund, the negatives were purchased for the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.
A page from The Seattle Times for March 10, 1910, which includes an advertisement for The Burdett Company nursery that was directly across First Ave. North from the Regent’s front door. The detail from the 1912 Baist Map printed above reveals that this verdant concern filled most of the block north to John Street. CLICK TO ENLARGEAn early 20th Century look up First North from Denny Way. My notes advise “about 1903.” If so then still five years before the construction of the Regent/Ankona. The long lot on the far right is home for the Burdett nursery.Here too we look north on First Avenue North thru Denny Way. The Ankona is on the left, and here as well Lawton has not dated his slide – unless he has and I missed it. (That seems more likely.) Here the traffic is two way, but not so in the Gowey slide directly below. Time has passed there. With the Ankona on the left and still looking north on one-way First Ave. North with traffic heading only north in 1971,
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, dear Paul? At first – and perhaps last – look Ron and I have found a dozen links to past features, all from within the still brief life of this blog: a few years. They are packed with Queen Anne – both upper and lower – history.
The first of these twelve includes brief illustrated essays on sever other Seattle apartment houses, including the Raymond, which is the pie-shaped brick apartment at the corner of Warren and First that partially blocks the view from our window above into both the regrade and the central business district. Following the links I’ll hang a some more images from the neighborhood, either before climbing to nighty-bears, or tomorrow. Meanwhile there is enough included in the dozen links below to keep one engaged for a long as it once upon a time took one to sit thru “Meet the Press.”
THEN: Frank Shaw’s pre-preservation visit to First Avenue South on February 26, 1961. He looks north from Main Street. (photo by Frank Shaw)
NOW: Jean Sherrard’s return for his repeat gives equal exposure to the preserved landmarks lining both sides of First Avenue South.
Here, for the third week running, we belatedly thank Frank Shaw for another cityscape he chose to record with his Hasselblad camera on one of his winter walks in 1961. Standing off the curb of First Avenue South on the evidently idle Sunday of February 26, Shaw aimed north from Main Street through the two blocks that were for Seattle’s first half-century the principal commercial strip for this ambitious town. Commercial Street, not First Avenue South, was its name until the city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889. Following that destruction, some of the avenues in the burned district were widened and here south of First Avenue the descriptive name “Commercial” was abandoned for the commonplace First Avenue.
On this Sunday in February, Shaw could safely step from the curb during his hometown sight seeing. For his repeat Jean Sherrard made the prudent choice of standing on the planted median strip. This landscaping was one of the charmed improvements made later on First South during the polished restoration of Seattle’s Pioneer Square Historic district – about twenty blocks of it.
Standing at the center of First Avenue South also allowed Jean to show us the sandblasted vitality of those enduring landmarks that stand to both sides of the historic street. What Shaw saw in 1961 was brick walls slathered with carbon grime and cosmetic colors and the often neon names of the street’s many taverns, single room occupancy hotels, hardware stores, loan-pawn shops, cheap-suits shops, and a few missions.
Judging from my familiarity with his many photographs, I’m confident that Frank Shaw delighted in this subject’s primary tension – that between this historic street of worn landmarks and the nearly new Norton Building (1959), which fills the center of this cityscape. Here, with its glass curtain walls, is Seattle’s first oversized demonstration of austere international modernity looming above this worn (but not worn out) old town neighborhood like a lower court judge with clean fingernails looking down from his high bench at the morning line-up of drunks, pickers and survival improvisators.
Now, a half-century later, we know the verdict. First Avenue South and many of its neighbors were saved. A mix of heroic forces for historic preservation had it over the cadre of Seattle politicians and developers who proposed razing both our Pioneer Square neighborhood and our community market at Pike Place in the name of “urban renewal.” They envisioned mostly more Nortons and convenient parking lots. And Frank Shaw would be there through it all recording many of the heartening victories for preservation.
WEB EXTRAS
This week, extras will run late, we fear. We’re engineering a switch to new servers and expect several bumps along the way.
Nevertheless, one ‘Where’s Waldo’ treat: for the eagle-eyed, spot friend of the column, John Siscoe, poised at the street corner in the ‘Now’ photo, only a few feet from the doorway of his delightful Globe Bookstore.
Back in the 80s and 90s, John and Jean worked together on the Globe Radio Repertory, producing radio theatre for NPR PlayhouseIf you have the chance to visit, be sure and ask John about the Duchy of Grand LIchtenstein
That’s it for now. But we’ll be back on a new server next week (cross our fingers).
