THEN: From boxcars and rooftops to the planks of Railroad Avenue, excitement builds for the ceremonial re-enactment of the S.S.Portland’s 1897 landing with its “ton of gold” on the Seattle waterfront, the city’s first Golden Potlatch Celebration. [Courtesy, Michael Maslan]NOW: The Maritime Building (1910) on the left survives a century later, but the Alaskan Way Viaduct (1953) “has seen better days” and prepares now for its razing.
This subject is, almost certainly, the formal opening of the Golden Potlatch on the afternoon of Wednesday July 19, 1911. To find the ceremony itself we would need to go out-of-frame, far-right, following the attentions of those packed atop the long line of boxcars on the left. This rolling stock was often used as convenient bleachers through the many years that the waterfront, where “rail meets sail,” was stage (or platform) for local celebrations. With his or
Above and below: The Marion Street viaduct over Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) then and now – nearly now.
Posing on the Marion Street viaduct, Mach 3, 1911. The scene looks east.
her back to Madison Street, the photographer looks south on Railroad Ave (Alaskan Way) to the also packed Marion Street overpass. It was built by the railroads to permit safe passage for the hordes of locals and visitors here in 1909 for the city’s Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exhibition (AYP). The Golden Potlatch was, in part, an attempt by local boomers to recapture some of the civic splendor and hoopla that had accompanied the summer-long AYP. And the Potlatch had its own reverberations. As the first citywide, multi-day, summer festival, the several Potlatches were precursors for the now retirement-age annual Sea Fair celebration.
Part of the armada of steamers for the 1911 Potlatch – looking back from the Bay to Railroad Avenue.
Another prospect for watching the opening day ceremonies, from both the windows and the roof of the Maritime Building, on the left, fills the block between Madison and Marion Streets and Railroad and Western Avenues and rises five stories above the boxcars. It was filled with the offices and warehouse spaces for distributing the daily needs for foodstuffs and such brought here from distant lands (like California and Mexico). Built of reinforced concrete with lots of windows for light, the big building’s architect, contractor and builder was Stone and Webster, one of the nation’s great commercial octopi, with its tentacles already active in Seattle’s trolleys, interurbans, and power plants.
The Maritime Building on the right photographed from the Marion Street viaduct to Colman Dock.An artist’s rendering of the Maritime Building appearing in the Seattle Times for June 29, 1910.Railroad Avenue from the Marion Street viaduct during the 1916 “Big Snow.” The Madison Street north end of the Maritimes Building appears on the far right.
A gust from a mid-summer breeze flaps the American flag, top-center on the featured photo, posted above the southwest corner of the Maritime Building. Every corner had one. More evidence of the wind is the woman in the dazzling white blouse heading toward the photographer and holding tight with both hands her oversized hat. However, none of the men here seem worried for their own crowns.
Looking northwest and down on the intersection of Western Ave. and Madison Street from the nearly new Rainier Grand hotel on First Avenue. Note the Madison Street Cable Car approaching the intersection. Beyond the tall ships, a trestle for moving the mud of Denny Hill reaches into the bay. The new Maritime Buildings northeast corner appears far left.A Municipal Public Works department image looking north on Western from the Marion Street viaduct. The Maritime Building is on the left.Lawton Gowey’s June 20, 1965 “repeat” of the Municipal photo above it.
What are they watching? The ceremonial mish-mash of Kings and Queens, and performers acting as Alaskans landing aboard the “ton of gold” ship, the S.S. Portland, followed by a double line of navy ships, tooting Puget Sound “mosquito-fleet” steamers, and northwest yachts. Meanwhile overhead Curtiss aviators Ely and Winter flew back and forth. At two o’clock, the Gold Rush flotilla was scheduled to reach the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock, the largest wooden pier on the coast and in 1911 brand new. With fireworks, fireboat displays, and band concerts from the pier, the rubbernecked folks on the boxcar roofs were entertained until midnight.
A Pacific clipping from July 1, 1990 showing some of the Potlatch’s Railroad Avenue action, but in 1912, not 1911. [CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE]
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? MOSTLY waterfront features Jean. More to come tomorrow, perhaps. Proofreading too.
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: The driver, lower left, leads his team towards First Avenue up a planked incline on Madison Street. (Courtesy MOHAI)NOW: Looking west towards the waterfront on Madison Street through its intersection with Western Avenue.
I’ll venture that this look across Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) and Elliott Bay as far as West Seattle’s dim Duwamish Head, far-left, was photographed some few weeks after the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, burned everything on the waterfront south of University Street. The fire was ignited by a volatile mix of upset boiling glue and carpenter’s shavings scattered on the floor of Margaret Pontius’s frame building at the southwest corner of Front (First Avenue) and Madison Streets, about a block behind the position the unnamed photographer took to record this rare scene of the waterfront’s revival.
This post-1889 fire claims to show its ruins at the foot of Madison Street. (Courtesy Michael Maslan)
Before the “providential fire” this part of the waterfront was covered with the Commercial Mill and its yard. Built in the mid-1880s on its own wide pier off the foot of Madison Street, this specialist in sash, doors, and blinds was nearly surrounded by stacks of lumber, great contributors to the conflagration. On the night of the ’89 fire, when seen from the safety of First Hill, burningboardsfrom the lumberyard carried high above the business district put on a rare fireworks show.
Photographed by Morford from Yesler’s Wharf in late 1887 or 1888. Madison Street lumber-bound wharf is on the far right, Denny Hill behind the tall ship.
The small warehouse in the featured photo at the top, right-of-center, was built by and/or for F.A. Buck for his business, California Wines, which he advertised with banners both at the roof crest of the shed and facing the city. It seems that the shed was also being lengthened on its bay side. Railroad Avenue is also being extended further into the bay. This work-in-progress can be seen between the vintner’s shed and the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad’s boxcar No. 572. Far left, a pile driver reaches nearly as high as the two-mast vessel anchored, probably at low tide, behind the vintner’s warehouse. This ‘parallel parking’ was not what the city council envisioned following the fire. The city expected and eventually got finger piers that extended into the bay, where visiting vessels were tied in the slips between them.
Railroad Ave. ca. 1903 showing the then new long finger piers north of Madison Street. The shorter piers to the south (left) of Madison were built after the Great Fire of 1889. They would sooner ( or later) be either moved further into the bay on new pilings are replaced with longer piers like the Grand Trunk Dock and Colman Dock.
In the featured photo, the bales of hay stacked both beyond the horses, left-of-center, and at the scene’s lower-right corner, have come to the waterfront either over water, often aboard steamers from Skagit valley farms or over the rails of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway, which had, only recently in 1888, reached both the agriculture hinterlands of King County and the Seattle Coal and Iron Company’s Issaquah coal mine.
The D.H. Gilman engine on the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad line – perhaps in Gilman, later named Issaquah.
The smaller shed in the right foreground of the features photo at the top is outfitted as the waterfront office for the coal company, which in May of 1888 sent from Yesler Wharf, probably to California, its first load of coal aboard the ship Margaret. Within two years the Seattle Coal and Iron Company’s growth, disrupted the wine-sellers quarters. The long shed was removed to allow construction of an elevator and overpass for moving Issaquah coal from the SLSER coal cars above and over Railroad Avenue to the company’s new bunkers that extended into Elliott Bay. The coal bunkers stood over what is now the dining area of Ivar’s Acres of Clams on Pier 54.
This detail, pulled from the 1893 Sanborn real estate map, shows the coal bunkers on the left and the trestle (for the coal) over Railroad Avenue and to the coal facilities between Railroad Avenue and Western Ave. The next photo below looks up Madison from that trestle in 1890 or 1891. (I’ve forgotten for this “fog of blog” moment.)The Northern Pacific photographer F.J.Haynes look east up Madison Street from the coal trestle that passed over Railroad Avenue to the coal pier at the foot of Madison. (Courtesy, Tacoma Public Library)Looking north on the waterfront with the dark timbers of the Madison Street coal bunkers showing right-of-center, ca. 1898.F. J. Haynes ca. 1891 look at the waterfront from a vessel on Elliott Bay. Madison Street is just left of the bright navy vessel at the center. On the horizon above it is Central School at the southeast corner of 6th and Madison. Is it brand new, and so it the King County Court House on the horizon, far right. (Courtesy Tacoma Pubic Library)Another 1890s look down on Railroad Avenue south from the Madison Street coal trestle. The several afternoon shadows of the short pier sheds along the waterfront then appear on the right.Another early post-fire Haynes view of the waterfront, this one most likely from the Madison Street coal wharf. The competing King Street coal wharf and bunkers reaches into the bay at the scene’s center. Yesler’s post-fire wharf is marked left-of-center. (Courtesy, Tacoma Public Library)
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? For sure Jean. Of the five waterfront links that Ron Edge has attached, the first one especially is filled with Madison Street relevance – and more. That is there are many other features embedded for the reader to release merely by clicking on it (and the others). And may they also remember to click on the images to enlarge them for studying details. That’s why we scan them big for the blog.
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One of Muybridge’s early motion studies, and not a Seattle subject necessarily. Like all else, CLICK to ENLARGE
THEN: Looking west on Madison Street from Seventh Avenue circa 1909. (Courtesy, Washington State Museum, Tacoma)NOW: Aside from the Dover Apartments at 901 6th Avenue, that can be found above the trunk of the red sedan in the foreground, the skyline from the Seattle Tower on the left, to The Renaissance on the right, is new with high-rises that reach far above the frame of Jean’s repeat.
The Lombardy Poplars that once lined much of Madison Street from Fourth Avenue to Broadway made First Hill’s favorite arterial “the most attractive place in town.” That is on the pioneer authority of Sophie Frye Bass, found in her delightful book of reminiscences, “Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.” Here the photographer A. Curtis looks west-southwest, through the intersection of Madison Street and Seventh Avenue to Central School, on the left, and the Knickerbocker Hotel, on the right. Central School opened in 1889
Looking southwest from the same intersection of 7th Avenue and Madison Street with younger winter-leafless poplars.
with Seattle’s first high school installed on its third floor. Sixty years later the school’s landmark towers were prudently removed after Seattle’s 1949 earthquake.
This ordinarily busy intersection is oddly vacant in the feature subject, crossed by neither motorcar nor team. However, the pavement bricks – no doubt slippery – are layered with clues. A combined mess of auto oil, horse droppings – and what else? – marks them.
Above and below, looking east on Madison Street from Sixth Avenue. Rising high at the center, the Knickerbocher is nearly new in the ca. 1909 photograph above by Arthur Churchill Warner. The poplars are long since stripped away in Lawton Gowey’s recording from June 19, 1961. Knowing Lawton, I’d say that he was capturing a last look thru the block before it was razed for the Seattle Freeway.
A Seattle Times clipping from Jan 5, 1963 featuring a look north from the Knickerbocher roof to the advancing work of the freeway. CLICK TO ENLARGEThe Smith Tower’s prospect into the neighborhood on June 21, 1961. Near the subject’s center only the long auxiliary structure along Marion Street survives. From there to the left and beyond parked cars covering the footprint of the destroyed school, the Knickerbocker still rises. This is another Kodachrome slide by Lawton Gowey.From Madison Street, Frank Shaw’s 1963 look thru the rubble that was contributed by the hotels, including the Knickerbocker, along the north side of Madison Street. Lawton again.The third of four First Presbyterian sanctuaries, and the first one built on the east side of Seventh Avenue, between Madison and Spring streets. Lawton Gowey recorded this on Feb. 6, 1967, the year and winter season that the Seattle Freeway was dedicated. Gleaming west facade of the Christian Scientists (now Town Hall) at the southwest corner of 8th and Seneca, appears far left. Behind it is the Exeter House, at the northwest corner.
The Knickerbocker was built in time for Seattle’s first world’s fair, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific-Exposition, held on the UW campus. Advertised as “strictly modern,” the hotel’s ninety rooms were for the most part taken as apartments. In 1911 weekly rents were three dollars and up. Included among its more sensationally newsworthy residents in the half-century before the hotel was razed for the Seattle Freeway, were a forger, a three-and-one-half year old boy deserted by his parents, and a Knickerbocker manager who – it seems – murdered his wife. And the hotel’s visitors featured more than one robber.
A dated construction scene on Presbyterian’s over-sized sanctuary, looking here at the front door facing the corner of 7th Ave. and Spring Street. (Courtesy Michael Maslan)Nearly new and presently four Corinthian columns to the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Spring Street.Lawton Gowey’s look east on Spring Street to First Presbyterian on April 19, 1966, and without its two original domes, one of which was home to the church’s radio station, another pulpit for any preacher, but most importantly its builder, Mark Matthews. Lawton was also a Presbyterian and for decades the organist at his church on Queen Anne Hill. He died of a heart attack in 1983 while preparing for another Sunday service.
On the brighter side, in a letter to the Times editor, Knickerbocker resident Carol Cornish expressed her thanks that living at 616 Madison put her “close-in” to downtown opera and concerts. In her letter from Oct. 28 1940, Ms. Cornish also included a culture-conscious complaint about concert audience behavior. “I hate to be stuffy, but the shallow, careless frivolities of the so-called smart set often fill us unaspiring social plebeians with a definite distaste.” During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Times, awarded the Knickerbocker Hotel by including it in its “Business and Professional Ledger.” After the Second World War some hotel rooms were outfitted with dark rooms for rent to amateur photographers. And through much of the 1950s, the Knickerbocker was home to the Seattle Chess Club.
West on Madison from 9th Avenue along a line of healthy, its seems, poplars. Part of the Knickerbocker at 7th avenue appears on the far left.
Writing her little classic “Pig-Tail Days” in 1937, Sophie Frye Bass, granddaughter of Arthur and Mary Denny, mourned the loss of both the poplars and the First Hill neighborhood of her childhood. “The fine residences and stately poplars have given way protestingly to business.”
A news clipping from The Seattle Times on June 26, 1903, reports or claims that the Madison Street poplars are doomed to disease. CLICK TO READThe Northern Pacific Railroad’s photographer F. Jay Haynes recorded this look up Madison Street from the waterfront most likely in 1890. Central School at 6th and Madison is on the right, and no Poplars as yet run a line between the school and Madison. The central tower of the McNaught mansion, facing Fourth Avenue near Spring Street and the more slender tower of Providence Hospital, left of center, escape the horizon.Most likely Robert Bradley took this look east on Madison from the Alaskan Way Viaduct before it was opened to traffic in the spring of 1953. Here, as well, no poplars are showing above Madison’s distant horizon.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Sure Jean. Between the two of us, Ron Edge and I have collected seven links to earlier features that relate to this subject with Central School and the Knickerbocher. They may also include subjects in their own “Web Extras” that are far afield of Seventh and Madison, and there may be some repetitions between them. But all are placed with good will while remembering still my own mother’s encouragement that “repetition is the mother of all learning.”
![THEN: From boxcars and rooftops to the planks of Railroad Avenue, excitement builds for the ceremonial re-enactment of the S.S.Portland’s 1897 landing with its “ton of gold” on the Seattle waterfront, the city’s first Golden Potlatch Celebration. [Courtesy, Michael Maslan]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/potlatch-watch-above-railroad-ave-now-mr.jpg?ssl=1)
![NOW: From boxcars and rooftops to the planks of Railroad Avenue, excitement builds for the ceremonial re-enactment of the S.S.Portland’s 1897 landing with its “ton of gold” on the Seattle waterfront, the city’s first Golden Potlatch Celebration. [Courtesy, Michael Maslan]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/golden-potlatch-now.jpg?ssl=1)
