THEN: Sometime around 1890, George Moore, one of Seattle’s most prolific early photographers, recorded this portrait of the home of the architect (and Daniel Boone descendent) William E. Boone. In the recently published second edition of Shaping Seattle Architecture, the book’s editor, UW Professor of Architecture Jeffry Karl Ochsner, sketches William E. Boone’s life and career. Ochsner adds, “Boone was virtually the only pre-1889 Fire Seattle architect who continued to practice at a significant level through the 1890s and into the twentieth-century.” (Courtesy MOHAI)NOW: During its construction of Interstate-5, the state’s Department of Highways set free the springs of First Hill, a fluid dynamics that required more pumping, concrete and time than expected.
For Jean Sherrard to record his repeat of George Moore’s historical portrait of Mercy and William Boone’s big home required both prudence and pluck. The latter took Jean to the edge of the concrete retaining wall that rises at least forty feet above the north-bound lanes of the Interstate Five Freeway. But it was prudence that kept him from leaning over the edge to reach closer to the prospect that George Moore took in the early 1890s. Both the home site and Moore’s position on Alder are now up in the air.
The Boone home is found in this early-1890s Sanborn map at the center, to the right of the block number 325, and the footprint for the King Country Court House is across Seventh Avenue in block 326. (Courtesy MOHAI) [To read the map – try CLICKING it. ]
The Boone home was constructed at the northwest corner of 7th Avenue and Alder Street in 1885. Boone was almost certainly the architect. During the summer of 1886, The Post-Intelligencer reports in its popular “Brevities” section that the fifty-four year old architect, “while working on his residence yesterday, fell from a ladder and sustained severe bruises about the legs. His injuries are not considered serious.”
The Boone home appears in this ca.1890 detail, which looks east from the King Street Wharf to the First Hill horizon and the Construction there of the King County Court House. The big home is half hidden in the trees and its own dark covering at the lower-right (northwest) corner of the Court House. The dark spreader leaning left from the mast on the right points directly at and even on the Boone home. The Terrace streets steps to the Court House seem to emerge from the smoke stack at the subject’s center. It was climbing those that in part inspired one of the most popular names for the first hill east of pioneer Seattle: Profanity Hill.Another and only somewhat later detail of the Court House also from the King Street Wharf. Here too are the wide but long wooden steps up Terrace Street, on the left, another mast (but no pointing spreader) and the Boone home, also half-hidden in the landscape.
Without committing itself to “First Hill,” the name with which we are accustomed, the January 29, 1886, issue of The Post-Intelligencer referred to the Boone residence as one of the “new buildings on the hill top.” Well into the 1890s the more popular name for this most forward edge of the first hill behind the waterfront was Yesler Hill. A name used in honor of Seattle’s pioneer industrialist – and employer – Henry Yesler. From the time he built his first steam saw mill in 1852-3, it was assumed that he would eventually clear the hill of its timber.
King County Courthouse look northeast from the corner of Seventh Ave. and Alder Street. The Boone home is out-of-frame to the left.
Sometime after the 1890-91 construction of the King County Courthouse, across 7th Avenue from the Boone home, a more playful place name, Profanity Hill, was inspired by the language used by lawyers and litigants who climbed the hill to deny and confess in the halls and chambers of the Courthouse.
The Yesler-Leary building designed by Boone when he was new to Seattle.The Toklas and Singerman Department store at the southwest corner of Front Street (First Ave.) and Columbia Street, destroyed by the 1889 fire.Henry and Sara Yesler’s new mansion was one of the first of Boone’s designs on settling in Seattle. This view looks at it southeast across James Street (and its cable car tracks), and includes the new (in 1891) King County Court House on the horizon. The Boone home is also on the First Hill horizon in the trees to the right of the Court House. (Courtesy, MOHAI)
Married in California in 1871, William, a Pennsylvanian, and Mercie, originally from New York, came to Seattle for good in 1882. That year he designed the landmark Yesler-Leary Building in Pioneer Square. Like the Toklas and Singerman Department Store (Boone’s design from 1887), it did not survive the city’s Great Fire of 1889. The mansion by Boone and partner then, the Californian George C. Meeker, was designed for Henry and Sara Yesler in the mid-80s just survived the greater fire ’89, but not its own on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1901. A few of Boone’s landmarks that are still remembered, but lost, are Central School, Broadway High School, and the New York Block.
Central School, designed by Boone, seen looking southeast across Madison Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Note the Madison Street cable car tracks.Broadway High School looking northwest over the intersection of Broadway Avenue and Pine Street, from the Odd Fellows Hall.Boone’s New York Block during its destruction, Nov. 15, 1923.
William died in 1921 one year before his New York Block was razed for another and greater of the terra-cotta buildings that were then favored for the business district. Mercie died in 1923. They were both ninety-one years old. Although without children, Mercie was a leader in local charities, including the Seattle Children’s Home, whose first quarters her husband designed.
[We’ll add pictures of the first and second quarters for the Children’s Home. Most likely it it the first of these that Boone designed – and yet perhaps both. The first was built on property at the southwest corner of Harrison and 4th Ave. N., that was given and chosen by David and Louisa Denny from their donation claim. It is now part of Seattle Center. The second and grander home is on Queen Anne Hill property that is still home for the charity, although now in a newer plant. I worked there in 1966 as a house parent – the most demanding job I ever had. It soon turned me to painting canvases – and houses. ]
Seattle Children’s Home at 4th North and Harrison Street.Seattle Children’s Home on Queen Anne Hill.
WEB EXTRAS
Just paused for a bite in the I.D. and looked down King Street at our very own not-so-leaning tower with the Olympics looming behind.
And the spring rolls weren’t bad either….
I had to include a detail from the clock tower – note the support struts in the windows below (for an interior, flip down through this post from the past).
Clock tower close-up
Anything to add, lads? Sure Jean but first such a luxurious recording or our tower. It takes more than the right gear, light, atmosphere and mobility to record such a shot, it also requires meditation on that golden bar that mysteriously (we agreed) cuts through the tower and illuminates it’s golden clockworks, and so reminds us – some of us – that time is precious and we had better leave this scene and get with it. Here at my desk I have a bowl of Narcissus Daffodils for sniffing the early Spring – while writing.
Again, here are a few relevant Edge-links (named for Ron Edge who pulled and grouped them). Open these links and you will surely find other features with their own lists of relevant links and those links with theirs. The lead photo for the top link looks from the west side of 7th Avenue (like Boone’s home) north across Jefferson Street, or almost two blocks north of the Boones. The next link of the Sprague Hotel at Yesler and Spruce is about two blocks south of the Boones. And, again, so on.
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OTHER BOONE DESIGNS
The Marshall-Walker Block (built 1890-91) on the right at the southeast corner of Main Street and First Avenue South. Long the home of the Elliott Bay Book Store, Allied Arts, and Jim Faber’s office. Jim wrote “The Irreverent Guide to Washington State,” although he was himself a saint.Plymouth Congregational Church, northeast corner of University Street and Second Avenue. You will find many stories that include it, if you key word them with this blog.The Wa-Chong Building in the old Chinatown at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Washington Street, before the Second Ave. Extension. Part of the building survives. Here the Frye Hotel towers above and behind it.The Territorial Insane (they still called them in 1886-7 when it was bu ilt)) Asylum in Steilacoom.
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BEFORE THE BOONES and AFTER
A panorama of Seattle seen from First Hill and painted in the 1870s. It hangs in the New York Public Library – either from the wall or in storage. Church in the shows and near the center of the canvas is the First Baptist Church at the corner of James and 4th Avenue, now site of the Seattle City Hall. Yes that’s the Olympics and not the Cascades, but how sweet it is to be so surrounded.The First Hill Horizon in 1881 from Pioneer Place (Square) during the 1881 memorial service for the slain President Garfield. In the past decade the hill was cleared of its forest and in the following decade it was filled with homes, like the Boones, and institutions, like the Court House. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)The encroaching 1-5 Freeway, upper-left, and Yesler Terrace Housing, upper right. The corner of Yesler Way and 7th Avenue is bottom-right with the old City Light transfer station to the west (left) of it.Freeway Construction showing the construction of the retaining wall below what was 7th Avenue.Freeway construction, recorded by Frank Shaw on April 16, 1964. Shaw looks south thru – or nearly thru – the former site of the Boone home at the northwest corner of Alder and Seventh.
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Now up the stairs to Nighty-bears – leaving proof-reading until tomorrow. It’s nearly 3am.
Daffodils and dessert recently on artist Julie Paschkis’s’ kitchen table. And those napkins are also of her design.
THEN: The photographer David Judkins arrived here in 1883 and recorded this portrait of “Seattle’s first apartment house” sometime soon after. (Courtesy MOHAI)NOW: The First Interstate Center, renamed the Wells Fargo Center, was completed in 1983, the centennial for Seattle’s first apartment house.
This quintet of front doors, beneath a central tower shaped like a bell and a mansard roof that billows like a skirt in a breeze, was long claimed to be Seattle’s first apartment house. (It might, however, be better to call these row houses, each with its own front door.) The group was built at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Marion Street in 1883*, a busy year in which Seattle also acquired street numbers and fifty-nine new neighborhood additions. It was also easily the largest city in the territory, with a census count that year of 6645 over Tacoma’s 3108, Port Townsend’s 1300 and the 1169 living in Spokane.
* We have learned in the first hour of posting this blog that it also slogs. The date of construction is off. First Dennis Andersen, the regional authority on architectural history, sends from Portland this letter to me here in my Wallingford basement. Dennis writes “Great image of the Stetson-Post townhouse row! But perhaps a small edit for the date, from the Seattle PI. ‘July 30, 1881, p.3 col 1: ‘Moving in. The resident block of Stetson and Post, on Second Street, is now ready for occupancy. Mr. Post’s family have moved into the building on the south. Governor Ferry’s family have got the carpets down and are preparing to move into the one selected by them. The finishing touches are being put on the other three, and they will be occupied soon’.” Thanks again, Dennis. Next, Ron Edge (who also put up the links below, most of them on row housing ) found another PI citation in the National Archives, this one from September 29, 1880, and we attach it directly below. Thanks again, Ron.
An entrance into the construction of the Stetson-Post “town-house row” clipped from the September 29, 1880 issue of the Post-Intelligencer.The Stetson-Post row is easily distinguished in this 1882 photo by Watkins about one-fourth of the way in (to the right) of the left border. Watkins took his panorama (this is but one part of many) from the King Street Coal Wharf. The new City Dock is under construction in the foreground.1884 Sanborn map with the Stetson-Post row lower-left.
Both “Stetson & Post Block” and “French Row Dwellings” are hand-written across the structure’s footprint in the 1884 Sanborn real estate map. It is named for its builders, George W. Stetson and John J. Post. Renting a shed on Henry Yesler’s wharf in 1875, and using Yesler’s hand-me-down boiler, the partners first constructed a gristmill for grinding grain into feed and flour, but soon switched to
Early intelligence of the partners Stetson and Post published in the Post-Intelligencer for February 8, 1878.Stetson and Post Mill photographed from the King Street Coal Wharf.
making doors and window sashes. By 1883 they had the largest lumber mill over the tideflats then still south of King Street. The Stetson & Post mill was equipped for shaping wood into the well-ornamented landmark that was their then new terrace here at Third and Marion.
It seems like this view of the row was photographed from about the same time as the featured photo on top – but what year? Our approximation: 1884. Note the home far left at the northeast corner of Madison Street and Second Ave, the home first of Dr. and Mayor Weed and later of John Leary, who moved from Stetson-Post with Weed moved out – most likely to his home at the northwest corner of Union and First Ave., or Front Street as it was then still called.The Weed-Leary home at the northeast corner of Madison and Second. Compare the bay window here on the Madison Street side, with that in the same home showing on the left of the photograph printed above this one. It has been “elaborated” – extended up to enclose the top floor too.
The Seattle city directory for 1884 has the partners living in their stately building, along with Thomas Burke, perhaps the most outstanding among the city’s “second wave” of pioneers. Other tenants were the dry goods and clothing merchants Jacob and Joseph Frauenthal, who had their own business block near Pioneer Square. The lawyer and future Judge Thomas Burke had his office in the Frauenthal Block.
If memory serves, that is Caroline Burke coming down the long stairway for her ride, perhaps.Here from about 1887 (I’m growing increasingly anxious about dates) the Stetson-Post appears to the right of the grand mansard-roofed Frye Opera House. Central School at 6th and Madison, appears on the far-right horizon (it burned down in 1888), and the dome of the Territorial University appears on the far left horizon. The city’s “Great Fire” of June 6, 1889 started in the joined buildings on the left with ten windows showing on the second floor. Budlongs Boat House in the foreground was saved by being towed off-shore. [CLICK to ENLARGE]The south facade of Stetson-Post appears on the left in this late-1880s parade scene photographed from Peiser’s “Art Studio.”A Sherrard repeat of the Peiser.Looking back over Second Avenue at Peiser’s Art Studio on the second lot south of Marion Street. Note te tent roof rigged for lighting.
Following the city’s Great Fire of 1889, which the wooden row houses escaped, the city rapidly rebuilt in brick and stone, expanding in every direction, including up. The Stetson & Post Block, which started as an elegant landmark visible from Elliott Bay, was soon hiding in the shadow of a seven-story business block, which was directly across Second Avenue, and named for Thomas Burke. The
The Burke Building northwest corner of Marion and Second, with a corner of Stetson-Post at the bottom-right corner. A. Wilse photographed this most likely in the late 1890s. He returned to Norway in 1900.
row houses then added commerce. In place of the five grand stairways to the five apartments, five uniformly designed storefronts were built facing the sidewalk on Second. And the city’s first row house or apartments (you choose) also changed it’s name to the New York Kitchen Block, after the restaurant that was its principal tenant.
The Stetson-Post with the commercial conversion of its stairs to shops. This dates from 1906 when the Empire Building behind it here at the southeast corner of Madison and Second, was still under construction. [Courtesy, Michael Maslan)A look north on Second Ave. from the roof of the then new Hoge Building, with the Burke Building here on the left, and both the Stetson-Post and the Empire Building filling the block on its east side between Marion and Madison. [CLICK to ENLARGE]
As noted by now far above, the 1884 Sanborn real estate map calls these attached homes “French Row Dwellings.” The Brits called them terraced housing. The many brownstones of New York are similarly arranged, and both San Francisco and Baltimore have rows of their architectural cousins – attached or semi-detached houses that are variations on a theme or several themes. Perhaps the most distinguished of the French rows is in Paris, the Place des Vosges, a 17th century creation.
The Burke and Stetson-Post looking across Second Ave at each other, cira 1903. The Empire is still four years in the future.The Golden Potlatch Parade of 1913, the “Dad’s Day” floats are in the foreground.Two years earlier for the 1911 Golden Potlatch parade, the Afro-American float passed in front of the Stetson-Post.The Stetson-Post and the Empire Bldg made a background for Uncle Sam appearing also in the 1911 Potlatch parade. [Courtesy Michael Maslan]
In 1919 the seventy-five-year-old George Stetson succumbed, as did his and John Post’s wooden block. A dozen years earlier, the critic F. M. Foulser, writing a nearly full-page essay on “How Apartment Houses are Absorbing Seattle’s Increasing Population,” in The Seattle Times for December 8, 1907, imagined the Rainier Block (the last of Stetson & Post Block’s three names) as “some aristocratic little lady of by-gone days, who has been compelled to remain among the influx of vulgarly new associates . . . and drawing her skirts about her, remains in solitary retrospection.” Some day, the essayist mused, “when the owner of the land on which ‘The Terrace of Past Memories’ stands, decides to accept the fabulous sum which is bound to be offered him, the old building will give way to a modern skyscraper.” It took some time. While the first replacement of 1919 gleamed behind terracotta tiles, it was, even when discounting the lost tower, still shorter than the row house. The forty-seven floors of the First Interstate Center followed in 1983.
However hard to read, even with double mouse clicks perhaps, here’s the full Foulser feature from the Seattle Times for December 8, 1907.A fine if modest two-story (or three) terra cotta adorned Watson Moore Stockbrokers home succeeding the Stetson-Post aka N.Y. Kitchen Block aka Rainier, here left-of-center. The Empire Bldg is far left.The First Interstate Bank was the last occupant of the corner, serving from a modern remodel of the ornate tile cover. Lawton Gowey took this on July 26, 1981. And he recorded its wreckage below on February 2, 1982.Looking east on Marion with the barely surviving south facade of the Interstate Bank at the center. (Lawton Gowey, 2/5/1982)In the fall of 1974 Frank Shaw framed the front door of the Pacific National Bank, precursor of the Interstate Bank at the northeast corner of Second Ave. and Marion Street, with the arch saved from the front entrance of the Burke Building with the construction of the Federal Building.
A survivor, the Stetson and Post Mill Company began promoting a “new plan” of delivering a “home from the forest to you.” It was a success. The company explained, because of its “ability to furnish the materials at prices well within reach” This, they explained, was possible because “the company owns its own timber, windows, doors, frames etc., employs no solicitors and sells for cash direct from the forest.” In 1926 Stetson and Post published a pattern book to encourage locals to build a variety of homes that were named, for the most part, after Seattle’s neighborhoods. Below are two examples. None of the forty-five or more “carefully devised plans” featured row-houses.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean Ron and I though it most appropriate to feature a few past contributions that include some row houses. The last feature picked is the first we did on subjects included in Diana James recent history of Seattle’s apartment houses. It is titled, you will remember, SHARED WALLS.
And now we are going to climb the stairs to join the bears, so we will proof this after a good – we hope – night’s sleep.
THEN: Local candy-maker A.W. Piper was celebrated here for his crème cakes and wedding cakes and also his cartoons. This sketch is of the 1882 lynching from the Maple trees beside Henry and Sara Yesler’s home on James Street. Piper’s bakery was nearby (Courtesy, MOHAI)NOW: Jean took his repeats looking across James Street from both the open roof of the “Sinking Ship Garage” and from one of its screen-protected windows. Although somewhat high, we chose the former
If you are inclined to write a history of Seattle then you must include the three bodies hanging here between two of Henry and Sara Yesler’s maples on the early afternoon of January 18, 1882. The trees were planted in 1859; and they appear first as saplings in the earliest extant photo of Seattle, which was recorded that year. By 1882, the shade trees were stout enough to lynch James Sullivan and William Howard from a stanchion prepared for them between two of the Maples.
Yesler’s home at the center with James Street to the right of it, typically dated 1860. The forest at the top encroaches on 5th Avenue.A year and a half after the lynching Henry and Sara Yesler pose in front of their home at the northeast corner of Front (First Ave.) and James Street on July 4, 1883. The hanging trees are on the right. [Courtesy;, Northwest Collection, U.W. Libraries.)Henry liked to whittle.
As ordered by the judge, the accused couple expected to be returned to jail when their preliminary trail in Yesler’s Hall at First Ave. and Cherry Street was completed. Instead the vigilantes in attendance covered Territorial Supreme Court Judge Roger Sherman Green with a hood, bound the guards, and dragged like the devil the doomed couple up the alley to James Street. There the leafless maples suddenly exposed their terrifying landscape to Sullivan and Howard. Soon after being violently pulled from court – in a few pounding heart beats – these two prime suspects of the daylight killing the day before of a young clerk named George B. Reynolds, were lifeless and their swinging corpses played with.
A map of Seattle in 1882 idealized by it’s real estate. (CLICK to ENLARGE)Watklin’s 1882 panorama of Seattle from Beacon Hill, as it is framed and explained on a page of Prosch’s picture album of pioneer Seattle preserved in the University of Washington’s Northwest Collection. Below is a detail pulled from this pan, which includes a fat red arrow indicating the location of the 1882 lynching.
During his 1882 visit to Seattle, Watkins also used the King Street Coal Wharf to record a panorama of what was by then the largest city in Washington Territory. In this one of the panels from his pan, the location of lynching is below the top of the pile driver stationed right-of-center. The entire pan is printed next.Most – perhaps all – of Watkin’s 1882 pan of Seattle and its waterfront, taken from the King Street Coal Wharf. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]Watkins was visiting from California. Peterson, the photographer of this look up the waterfront, also from the King Street coal wharf, had a studio in Seattle. Most of its was portrait work, but his art for cityscape was hereabouts the best of the time. This is tentatively dated ca. 1882. The wharf building commotion in the Watkin’s pan has as yet not begun. (Click to ENLARGE)
In a few minutes more, the by now hungry mob pulled from jail a third suspect, a “loafer” named Benjamin Paynes, who was accused of shooting a popular policeman named David Sires weeks before. For a while the hanging bodies of the three were raised and lowered over and over and in time to the mob’s chanting, “Heave Ho! Heave Ho!” Children who had climbed the trees to cut pieces of rope from the cooling bodies tied them to their suspenders or, for the girls, to the pigtails of their braided hair. It was, we are told, for “show and tell” in school.
In July, 1886 the Yesler’s moved up James Street to their mansion facing Third Avenue. It was sided at the corner with Jefferson by an orchard large enough for lots of apple sauce and branches for crimes and punishments, although none were used so. Sara died in 1887 and Henry in 1892.
Although there were several photographers in town, none of them took the opportunity to record – or expose – a lynching. Who would want such a photograph? Judging from the local popularity of these killings of accused killers, probably plenty. A few weeks following the stringing, Henry Yesler was quoted in Harpers Weekly, “That was the first fruit them trees ever bore, but it was the finest.” It was Seattle’s first really bad nation-wide publicity.
Right to left, Yesler, Gatzert and Maddocks, made a Christmas tradition out of carrying together greeting cards to their friends in town, and probably getting their fill of seasonal snaps in return. Below is a portrait of a younger Henry – a Henry who looks fit for wrestling with Puget Sound’s first steam saw mill.
In Andrew William Piper’s cartoon of the event, the easily identified Henry stands in the foreground busy with his favorite pastime: whittling wood. The cartoonist Piper was a popular confectioner who loved dancing and singing with his wife and eleven children. He was also a practical joker and the first socialist elected to the Seattle City Council. We don’t know if Piper also joined the local chorus of acclaim for the hangings. Judge Green more than objected. Once free of his hood, he rushed to the lynching and tried to cut the ropes, but failed.
On the far right of his cartoon, the cartoonist-confectionaire Piper has included the sign of the Chronicle, a newspaper located in the alley behind the Yesler back yard. It was up this alley that the victims were rushed to their lynching. Printed next is a transcript from an 1883 issue of the Chronicle, which describes a resplendent new saloon in the basement of the new Yesler-Leary Building at the northwest corner of Front (First Ave.) and Yesler Way and so also at the foot of James Street.
An excerpt from the August 23, 1883 issue of the Chronicle.The Yesler-Leary building at the northwest corner of Yesler and Front. Like the rest of the neighborhood, including the Yesler’s hanging trees, it was destroyed during the “Great Fire” of 1889.Twenty-six years later, the lynching block on James Street, between First and Second Avenues in 1908. The photo was recorded from the Collins Building on the southeast corner of Second Ave. and James Street. The Collins survives and well too. On the left is the northeast corner of the Seattle Hotel. It was destroyed in the early 1960s for the “Sinking Ship Garage.” The side below the Pioneer Building, right-of-center, where they lynching was done in 1882, is here crowded with locals and tourists in town for the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet. A few of the dreadnoughts can be seen in Elliott Bay.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean, and most of it, again, links to past features related to the place and/or the subject. Most of extras – if one takes the opportunity to click and read – will be the several links that Ron Edge will be soon putting up directly below this exposition. Then, after the links, we will probably continue on with a few more features – if we can find them tomorrow (Saturday) night when we get to them. We should add that we do not encourage lynching of any sort, or for that matter capital punishment. It is all cruel, pathetic and even useless. Yes – or No! – we do not agree with the wood whittler Henry Yeslers. We have imprisoned within quote marks our title “finest fruit” borrowed from him.
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NIGHTY-BEARS SKUFFLE
Again, we have reached that nighty-bears (copyright) moment before we are finished, this time with lynching-related extras. Until we return in the morning – or sometime tomorrow – to continue dressing our figures, here is a James Street related skirmish I photographed in the early 1980s. This, we hope, will momentarily satisfy the urges for sensational news we may have nurtured. The 1882 lynchings were a few feet behind me, a century earlier.
![The Stetson-Post and the Empire Bldg made a background for Uncle Sam appearing also in the 1911 Potlatch parade. [Courtesy Michael Maslan]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/potlatch-parade-1911-uncle-sam-clown-stetson-empire-bldgsweb.jpg?ssl=1)
