THEN: Looking north-northeast from the corner of Main Street and Occidental Avenue two or three weeks after the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. (Courtesy the Museum of History and Industry – MOHAI)NOW: The two-story brick structure that was built on the corner a few years following the Great Fire housed the Carrolton Hotel upstairs and a variety of small businesses at the street level. The building was razed first for parking in the 1960s. In 1971 the parking lot was transformed with cobble stones as a part of Occidental Park.
I am writing this on June 6, 2015, the 126th anniversary of Seattle’s Great Fire. Most likely you are reading it about one month later. That places you closer to the 126th anniversary of this subject, which in 1889 was still Seattle’s primary business district, reduced to charred rubble. The scene was photographed, I surmise, late in the month of June or perhaps even in early July.
Some of the same tents and brick piles show in this view that looks northeast across Main Street to Second Ave. (Occidental Ave.). The County Courthouse at Third and Yesler appears on the right and the Yesler Mansion on the east side of Third, high-center. Part of Central School at Madison and 6th Ave. , fills the upper-left corner. (Courtesy, MOHAI)The corner of Second (Occidental) and Main appears with tents, far-left, in this look to the southwest from the front porch of the King County Courthouse, later to known as the Katzenjammer Kastle during its long run as Seattle’s city hall. (Courtesy, MOHAI)The Post-Fire ruins and tents, this time from the Katzenjammer tower. Mill Street (Yesler Way) crosses to the right from the lower-left corner. Jefferson Street meets it from the lower-right corner. West Seattle is on the horizon. “Our corner” of Main and Second (Occidental) is upper left, below the tall ships. The temporary tent that crowds bottom-left in the photo above this one, appears here also at the bottom, right-of-center. A contemporary repeat for this would be taken high in the trees along the west border of City Hall Park.
With the help of the many surviving photographs of the ruins, it is easy to determine from what prospect this scene was recorded. The unnamed photographer stood on Main Street looking north by northeast over Main Street’s northwest corner with Second Avenue (later renamed Occidental.) It is a typical post-fire cityscape that reveals a layering of ruins, temporary tents, and some of the surviving city blocks that were not among the 35 or so destroyed by the conflagration in its seven hours of wind-driven destruction.
First Methodist at the southeast corner of Marion and Third. [CLICK to ENLARGE]
Of the ten or so landmarks with towers that break the First Hill horizon we’ll note but three. First, far left, stands the Gothic spire of First Methodist Church at the southeast corner of Third Avenue and Marion Street. Next, at the scene’s center and farther up the hill, are the two towers of Central School on the south side of Madison Street, where now passes the Seattle Freeway (I-5) ditch. Much closer to the photographer, to the left of the scorched power pole, the Yesler mansion faces Third Avenue, on the north side of Jefferson Street. It was saved with a combination of soaked blankets spread on the roof and volunteers who extinguished the flying embers. Nearby, just right of the same power pole, another battle on the shingles saved the King County Courthouse. After the murder trail then underway was adjourned by Judge Hanford, buckets of water were lifted with a rope borrowed from the flagpole to drench the roof.
Appeared first in Pacific, March 21, 2002. [CLICK to ENLARGE]
By the 10th of June, four days following the fire, over one hundred permits had been issued to erect temporary tents. Like those shown here, most of the tents were stretched on sturdy frames and anchored to heavy planks. Months later some of these canvas quarters were still standing and being used as store fronts.
Looking south to a tideflats lined with rows of pilings placed speculatively as property lines in the hopes that the first state legislature would look upon such squatters and jumpers markings as keys to owning the land below the tides. Second Avenue – now Occidental – is right-of-center. Much of the neighborhood is well along with the construction of brick business blocks, but a cluster of temporary tents endures too. [Courtesy MOHAI]
Most of the pre-fire neighborhood south of Yesler Way was built of wood. Brick structures were rare. So the orderly piles of bricks here [in the featured photo at the top] encroaching on the street, right-of-center, is – or was – an inviting mystery. Except that almost certainly these bricks were salvaged from the wreckage of the large but short-lived Squire Building, here at the northwest corner of
A circa 1888 panorama of the neighborhood south of Mill (Yesler Way) taken from near 6th and Washington before the 1889 fire. Some day we will determine if the brand new and short-lived Squire Building is among the larger business blocks showing right of center.A detail from the 1888 Sanborn Real Estate Map showing the northwest corner of Main and 2nd (Occidental), bottom-right, prepared for the construction of the three-story tall Squire Block, the source also of our piles of salvaged bricks at the corner of Main and Second (Occidental) after the Great Fire.A Pioneer Square neighborhood detail from a 1925 real estate map. We have centered the detail on the Carrolton Hotel at the northwest corner of Occidental and Main.
Main Street and Second Ave. (Occidental). In the 1888 Sanborn real estate map this corner lot is captioned “Excavation for Brick Block to be three stories.” For his research on Pioneer Square neighborhood structures, Greg Lange found in the 1889 Polk Directory more than thirty tenants renting quarters in Watson Squire’s namesake block. Once the fire, heading south, reached Yesler Way around six pm, Watson’s renters must have already started gathering what they could before scrambling up First Hill.
A hand-color look north on Second Ave. (Occidental) in the mid-1870s from near Washington Street. The Occidental Hotel, between Mill (Yesler Way) and James Street, interrupted the grid. Jeweler-photographer Bob Bradley did the coloring directly on the 35mm slide, most likely in the 1950s.
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MORE POST-FIRE RUINS, TENTS & RECONSTRUCTION
The serviceable ruins of the Dexter Horton Bank (Seattle First National) show bottom-center at the northwest corner of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) and Washington Street. Some of the skyline in this West Shore magazine rendering can be found in the top featured view on top.The Dexter Horton bank before the ’89 fire, at the northwest corner of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) and Washington Street.And after. For more on this bank, see the last of Ron’s links at the bottom.
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Looking north on Post Alley (or Street or Avenue) from Mill Street (Yesler Way) following the Great Fire. [First appeared in Pacific on April 22, 2007.]=====
Occidental Hotel ruins looking south from Front Street, (First Ave.) north of James Street.First appeared in Pacific, June 6, 2004.
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Yesler Wharf ruins looking east from the end of the dock. Compare the line-up of ruined buildings with those showing in two clippings up.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, fellas? Yes Jean, but first Ron and I – and now the readers too – wish you and yours a happy farewell as you fly away to Europe with twenty-five (about) Hillside students and your protective cadre of instructors to visit first London and then Paris, and surely some of the same sites that you and I explored together in 2005. I will send you – as you have instructed – some shots I took when first visiting the same cities as a teenager in 1955, for your intentions to repeat them now sixty years later – gadz. Perhaps we can sneak them into Pacific – one or two of them. It will depend, I think, on how sentimental the editors are feeling at the time of submission, and the pun is intended. Bon Voyage Jean and carry our love to Berangere, who, I know, will be helping you in Paris. Often I’d just like to move there and follow BB around those ancient blocks with a bag of bon bons and one light weight digital camera.
THEN: During the few years of the Klondike Gold Rush, the streets of Seattle’s business district were crowded with outfitters selling well-packed foods and gear to thousands of traveling men heading north to strike it rich – they imagined. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)NOW: The Henry M. Jackson Federal Building filled the block in 1974
Beginning in 1897 and continuing into the twentieth century, Seattle was in the golden grip of “Klondike Fever,” a hysteria promoted by the Chamber of Commerce and its agent Erastus Brainard, perhaps the highest of hucksters in our history. Through every publication he could charm, Brainerd linked the gold fields of the North, waiting to be gathered by shovel and/or pan, with Seattle. “To speak of one is to speak of the other.”
A Rainier Club portrait of Erastus Brainerd by Ed. Curtis. (Courtesy, Rainier Club)
Here two teams and their drivers pose on the northbound tracks and cable slot of the Front Street Cable Railway. The equine posers are backed by an array of businesses with signs that are both freshly painted and ambitious. For instance, add a Thedinga Hardware to a
Clipped from The Times for Sept. 16, 1897.
Columbia Grocery and you get an Alaska Outfitters. Business district streets were lined with similar opportunists. The likely date is 1898, a year after the instantly famous steamer Portland arrived on the waterfront with its “ton of gold.”
The Portland in port in 1897, having returned with its “ton of gold” to the Schwabacker Wharf with the Pike Street dock to the far (north) side.
This plenitude of miners’ supplies filled many of the sidewalks on Front (First Avenue) and Commercial Streets (First Avenue S.): mostly bags stuffed, for example, with evaporated foods, boots, pots, picks, slabs of bacon, lentils, and several variations on corn (corn meal, pop corn and corn cob pipes at 35 cents a dozen). Some of this piling of sacks can be seen on the far left and also behind the wagons. Two blocks south at Columbia Street, the sidewalk in front of the Toklas Singerman Department Store was piled ten-feet high, eleven-feet wide, and eighty-feet long. Throughout the district many sidewalk trees were sacrificed for sacks.
TIMES clip from March 9, 1998
Next door to the south (right) of the Alaska Outfitters, the Yukon Supply Company claims to “sell only the best goods manufactured.” H.H. Peterson, the manager, explained to a Seattle Times reporter, “The city is full of strangers intending on purchasing an outfit for the North, and supplying for a long journey and longer stay is something new to them.” Ready to enable, Peterson would know that by far most of those he outfitted would return from the Yukon, or the Klondike, not enriched but exhausted.
One of the early trials of the Klondike rush was the need to build a boat on the south shore of Lake Bennett before continuing on to the Klondike River.
Far left in the featured photo at the top, a “Frederick, Nelson & Munro” sign tops the rear wall of that still fondly remembered department store, then at the northwest corner of Madison Street and Second Avenue. Silas Munro was the third partner, but not for long. Imagining that the gold fever would soon cool, Munro sold out to his partners and purchased this southeast corner of First Avenue and Madison Street. Both Thedinga Hardware and Columbia Grocery were evicted when their leases ran out at the end of June 1901, and Munro built in place of these single-story storefronts the five-story Palace Hotel.
Silas Munro confirms his ownership of the storefronts shown in the featured photo at the top. This news brevity is clipped from The Times July 4, 1901. The business news at the bottom about the Pacific Meat Co. and the Kellogg Mill Co. is a bonus.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? Ron Edge has two packed links to contributed directly below. Both are of the same east side of First Ave. between Madison and Marion. We encourage our readers to explore them and their own links – some which may be repeated – and so on (and on). We will also slip in some clips from past features having to do with outfitting for the “traveling men” or the neighborhood on Front Street (First Ave.) around Marion Street or near it.
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SOME CLIPS of OTHER FEATURES
Appeared first in Pacific, Feb. 10, 1991.
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Fast service, and some of it light. Note the sign advertising “Portable Aluminum Houses.” . First appeared in Pacific, July 30, 2005.
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The S.S. Ohio at the Schwabacker Wharf preparing to steam off to Nome, Alaska. (Courtesy, Jim Faber)First appeared in Pacific on August 29, 2004 and soon after in Jean’s and my book, Washington Then and Now, of which, please note, we still have a few hardbound copies.
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First appeared in Pacific, July 1, 1990. CLICK to ENLARGE
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There is a journalism convention embraced by larger and more professional pulps that the authors of features do not title them. The title is the most commercial part, a sensational cue for the consumer, and so requires a special marketing sensitivity, which the author cannot be trusted to have or care for. First appeared in Pacific, Jan. 22, 1989.
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Marc Cutler poses in front of the Richards Building in Bellingham, 2004, and as he confides, 11 year later he still “aint dead yet.”
The earliest gold rush hereabouts was to the Fraser River in British Columbia. Many of the argonauts trekked thru Whatcom (Bellingham) on their way to the gold fields, which were a spectacular failure except for the merchants of Whatcom/Bellingham.
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Frye Opera House, ca. 1887. At the northeast corner of Marion and Front (First Ave.) it was one of the grander victims of the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.Lawton Gowey’s record of the same corner (at First and Marion) during the 1967/8 construction of the SeaFirst Tower and before the razing of the Hotels Stevens for construction of the Federal Building.
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Alaskan Painter Sydney Laurence’s landscape of some unidentified part of Alaska – one of many hundreds. Born in Brooklyn in 1865, Laurence settled with his first wife in the artists’ colony of St. Ives, Cornwall form 1889 to 1898. He won an award in the Paris Salon in 1904, about the time he left his family for Alaska. He died in Anchorage in 1940. His work is still popular and dear. Sydney struck it rich in Alaska, with his smaller paintings now selling in auction for around ten thousand and the larger ones for more than two hundred thousand. This Laurence was captured on slide by Horace Sykes, without comment on its size or who owns it.
THEN: The Seattle Times in its lengthy coverage of the then new Seattle Steel in the paper’s Magazine Section for Sept. 10, 1905 – the year this photograph was recorded – noted that “the plant itself is a series of strong, substantial, cavernous sheds, built for use, not for beauty.” (Courtesy, MOHAI, the Museum of History and Industry)NOW: For his repeat Jean Sherrard stood on the Youngstown neighborhood’s SW Yancy Street, a few feet east of SW Avalon Way, shooting north through an industrial park that in the 109 years separating the “then” from the “now” has grown in every available direction for the production of steel.
Here (at the top) is print number 12,920, preserved in the library of the Museum of History and Industry’s collection of historical photographs. Like many of the archive’s early prints, this factory scene is mounted with a generous border to protect it from ‘dog ears’ and other indignities. On the border of the stiff board, with the identifying number, is printed the caption: “Exterior view of Seattle Steel Company shortly after it began operation in 1905.”
The Seattle Times 1905 celebration of the city’s new manufacturer. (This printing is included for the design and not the reading – out copy is too small and smudged.)For comparison, another early look at the new Seattle Steel Mill beside Young’s Cover. This prospect looks to the northwest from near Andover Street and the outlet of Longfellow Creek into the tideflats of Young’s Cove. The tide is down. We note that his WS print is the same one used in the 1905 Times clip above. The Webster and Stevens (WS) studio was employed then to do the editorial photography for the afternoon newspaper. (Courtesy, MOHAI – an early print from their Webster Stevens Collection.)
The rising smoke and steam of the featured photo on top confirm that the superheated work of transforming the industrial scraps, piled here on the south side of the factory, into useable steel is underway. Much of it was rolled and stretched into bars used to strengthen concrete, like that used in Seattle’s first skyscraper, the then but one-year-old Alaska Building, which stands, both elegant and sturdy, at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and James Street.
A circa 1905 pan of the waterfront and business districts taken from the top of the Alaska Building when it was new. CLICK to ENLARGEThe Alaska Building at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street.William Pigott in his place, as rendered on page 180 of the 1906 book of sketches titled “Cartoons and Caricatures of Seattle Citizens.” Most likely this ambitious tome was not produced by a “vanity press” with its contents paid for by the book’s subjects. Pigot’s name is misspelled.
William Pigott, the factory’s founder, was variously described as a “devout Catholic” and “patriarchal capitalist.” As soon as Pigott announced his factory plans in 1903, the small neighborhood on the west side of Pigeon Point began to boom with mill workers moving into new but modest homes. Pigott first named it Humphrey after a town where he had earlier lived and worked with steel, but he soon changed the name to Youngstown, after another patriarchal company town with rolling mills in Ohio. Youngstown resisted
A clip from The Seattle Times for April 27, 1907 that elbows its way through some of the confusing complexities of injunctions and annexation in 1907. CLICK TO ENLARGE
incorporation into its much larger neighbor to the west, West Seattle. When Seattle did annex it in 1907, the unincorporated company town came along, most likely for the better sewerage and water. By then Youngstown supported four saloons and a public school, the latter built by the mill. The community also kept its eye on the frequently flooding Longfellow Creek that flowed and too often overflowed through it into Young’s Cove.
A Seattle Municipal Archive recording of the overflowing Longfellow Creek, recorded on Jan. 19, 1919. The view looks north towards W. Andover Street, which is here built atop a low trestle as is approaches the creeks outflow into Young’s Cove. [Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive]And early look west into Youngstown from near Avalon Way. Surely there are some bars among the businesses that line the south side of Andover Street. The Pigeon Point “heights” are on the horizon. The photograph was taken by A. Curtis, or his studio, circa 1908.Looking west from the dirt center of Andover that separates the wagon (or motorcar) planking on the left from the trolley tracks on the right. Here, about two blocks to the west, the company has built over the center-line of Andover Street a modest construction that resembles – at least – an office sited exterior to the plant proper, which here crowds Andover on the right. It is another prerogative of a “company town.” The subject is dated from “about 1920.”Like the subject directly above, this one also looks west on Andover, but also down on it form the neighborhood hotel. The view is date 1919, and by then Pacific Coast Steel’s Seattle plant was operating four open hearth furnaces. It was easily the largest steel-making facility in the Pacific Northwest. [Courtesy, MOHAI]The footprint of the yet-to-be-built steel plant copied from the 1904 Kroll map.
Drawn “from plans only,” a captioned footprint of the factory was printed in the1904 Kroll Seattle real estate map. The map names, left to right, the Stock House, the Heating House (with the smokestacks), the Rolling Mill, and running east-to-west, several attached wings named collectively the Run-out Building and Warehouse. Beyond these the Kroll map notes, “Tide flats, being filled in.” These Young’s Cove tidelands between Pigeon Point, on the east, and West Seattle, on the west, would be reclaimed and covered by the expanding factory. Longfellow Creek is now carried to Elliott Bay via a culvert beneath the fill.
Marked “1953” with a post-it at the top in Elliott Bay, here far below we find the crowded steel mill filling Young’s cove a mere half-century since Pigott devised his plans and began rounding up and purchasing permits and real estate to build Seattle Steel. The mill is below the subject’s center, and also below Spokane Street, which comes from the far right where it crosses the West Waterway before passing below Pigeon Point, wrapped in its greenbelt, lower-right, on its way to West Seattle, on the left. Note the verdant acres, bottom-center, where Longfellow Creek passes through the Youngstown neighborhood as far as Andover Street. From there the creek has been redirected to reach Elliott Bay thru covered culverts.A detail from a 1909 map of Seattle marking both Youngstown and Youngs cove. Seattle Steel is noted with its footprint. [Courtesy, Greg Lange]The plant and the neighborhood in a detail pulled from the 1912 Baist Real Estate Map. Note how the tideflats of Youngs Cove have been drawn for sale, reclamation and development – to and by the steel manufacturers.
Many years ago I first featured Seattle Steel in the Pacific Northwest Magazine. Here’s a clip of it from the Sunday Times.
Pacific Northwest readers may recall the Pacific Magazine’s recent May 25th cover story on this factory. See it online at http://bit.ly/1y2SKBF. Or click on the next image below.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul?
Yes Jean, and some of it is inserted above your request – or will be – illustrating this week’s text itself. As for LINKS there is but one this week, and it reaches back merely a few weeks to the feature SPOKANE STREET from WEST SEATTLE. Ron Edge will put it up next. If explored, this single link will lead the dedicated reader to many more features – more than twenty of them – that relate to the neighborhood widely considered.
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FOLLOWS
I found the prints below while doing research for a legal case years ago. It had to do with responsibilities following damage from the flooding of the Longfellow Creek across Andover Street and into the industrial park, lighted like the inferno and spreading harrowing noises, now run by Nucor Steel Seattle. The prints were all part of an exhibit, which, I figure, was shown at MOHAI, for it is, after all, a museum for both history and industry.
Pacific Coast Steel, about 1915 and after the large additions, left-of-center, were in place, reaching Andover Street on the far right. Youngs Cove is still visited by the tides, and the photograph was taken over the Longfellow Creek outlet, and looking west to a West Seattle skyline that still mixes tall trees with new homes. (Courtesy, MOHAI)This dark interior of the early plant’s 12-inch rolling mill dates from about 1910. We can imagine the mix of warm light from the furnaces with the cool blue light falling from the mill’s high windows.
Ingots – all in a row – are here top cased in the open hearth pit, which was first opened soon after Pacific Steel too over Seattle Steel in 1911. [Courtesy, MOHAI]An early crew at Seattle Steel takes a break from its heavy labor at the rolling mill. [Courtesy, MOHAI]An example of the scrap steel – on top – that is turned into ingots – at the bottom – with the help of great heat and the men in the middle. These, however, are not from Seattle or Pacific or Bethlehem Steel, but from a smaller Seattle competitor, Northwest Steel. [Courtesy MOHAI]Work on constructing a factory “shed” to house a new rolling mill. Dated 1920, by then Pacific Coast Steel’s Seattle branch was the largest steel making facility in the Pacific Northwest. [Courtesy MOHAI]Bethlehem Steel purchase Pacific Coast Steel late in 1929, the year, also, of William Pigott’s death and the start of the Great Depression. South (left) of Spokane Street there is nothing tidal in Youngs Cove to be found here. [Courtesy, MOHAI]Another aerial of Bethlehem Steel, this one looking to the southeast with Spokane Street on the left. It is dated tentatively ca. 1955. Avalon Way is bottom right, and the climb on Andover east up to Pigeon Point is upper-left. The building on the right, with the five mostly smoking stacks, housed the open hearth furnaces where scrap steel was transformed into “new old steel.” Soon after this aerial was recorded the plant would be closed for installation of electric steel making equipment, in 1958. [Courtesy, MOHAI]Steel framework in place during the construction of the electric furnace building in the late 1950s when two 100-ton units were installed, doubling the plant’s annual ingot capacity from 250,000 to 500,000 tons. [Courtesy MOHAI]The lid is opened on a new electric furnace to accept its first “charge of scrap” in the company of men in hardhats and, it appears, some suits. [COURTESY MOHAI]The MOHAI caption for this print expresses itself. “Always a dramatic sight . . . steel poured from an electric furnace at Bethlehem’s Seattle Plant.” [Courtesy, MOHAI]In 1972, Bethlehem built this “baghouse” air pollution control system adjacent to the electric furnace shop. [Courtesy, MOHAI]
![Looking south to a tideflats lined with rows of pilings placed speculatively as property lines in the hopes that the first state legislature would look upon them such squatters and jumpers markings as keys to owning the land below the tides. Second Avenue - now Occidental - is right-of-center. Much of the neighborhood is well along with the construction of brick business blocks, but a neighborhood cluster of temporary tents endures too. [Courtesy MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/tideflat-post-fire-fm-near-2n-james-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![A Seattle Municipal Archive recording of the overflowing Longfellow Creek, recorded on Jan. 19, 1919. The view looks north towards Andover Street, which is here built atop a low trestle as is approaches the creeks outflow into Young's Cove. [Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/x-flood-1919-jan-19-andover-flood-4.jpg?ssl=1)
![Like the subject directly above, this one also looks west on Andover, but also down on it form the neighborhood hotel. The view is date 1919, and by then Pacific Coast Steel's Seattle plant was operating four open hearth furnaces. It was easily the largest steel-making facility in the Pacific Northwest. [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/5-looking-west-over-andover-street-to-the-steel-plant-with-the-west-seattle-horizon-beyond-it-the-view-dates-from-1919-by-then-at-the-end-of-world-war-i-four-open-hearth-furnaces-w.jpg?ssl=1)
![A detail from a 1909 map of Seattle marking both Youngstown and Youngs cover. Seattle Steel is noted with its footprint. [Courtesy, Greg Lange]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/x-map-1909-youngs-cove001-copyweb.jpg?ssl=1)
![Ingots - all in a row - are here top cased in the open hearth pit, which was first opened soon after Pacific Steel too over Seattle Steel in 1911. [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/6-ingots-cased-in-the-open-hearth-pit-ca1914-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![An early crew at Seattle Steel takes a break from its heavy labor at the rolling mill. [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/7-crew-break-at-the-120inch-mill-at-seattle-steel-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![An example of the scrap still - on top - that the men with tongs - at the middle - turn into ingots - at the bottom - with the help of great heat. [Courtesy MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/7b-northwest-steel-rolling-mill-seattle-scrap-ingots-tooweb.jpg?ssl=1)
![Work on constructing a factory "shed" to house a new rolling mill. Dated 1920, by then Pacific Coast Steel's Seattle branch was the largest steel making facility in the Pacific Northwest. [Courtesy MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/5b-1920-construction-of-building-to-house-rollingmills-pacific-cost-steel-coompanys-seattle-plant-was-by-then-the-largest-steelmaking-facility-in-the-pac-nw-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![Bethlehem Steel purchase Pacific Coast Steel late in 1929, the year, also, of William Pigott's death and the start of the Great Depression. South (left) of Spokane Street there is nothing tidal in Youngs Cove to be found here. [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/8-aerial-k-nw-in-1930-when-bethlehem-puchased-the-pacific-coast-steel-coweb.jpg?ssl=1)
![Another aerial of Bethlehem Steel, this one looking to the southeast with Spokane Street on the left. It is dated tentatively ca. 1955. Avalon Way is bottom right, and the climb on Andover east up to Pigeon Point is upper-left. The building on the right, with the five mostly smoking stacks, housed the open hearth furnaces where scrap steel was transformed into "new old steel." Soon after this aerial was recorded the plant would be closed for installation of electric steel making equipment, in 1958. [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/4-aerial-ca1955-lk-se-over-bethlehem-stee-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![Steel framework in place during the construction of the electric furnace building in the late 1950s. [Courtesy MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/9-steel-framwork-for-electric-furnace-building-late-50sweb.jpg?ssl=1)
![The lid is opened on a new electric furnace to accept its first "charge of scrap" in the company of men in hardhats and, it appears, some suits. [COURTESY MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/10-first-charge-of-scrap-into-1of2-new-electric-furnaces-ca-1958-web.jpg?ssl=1)
![The MOHAI caption for this print expresses itself. "Always a dramatic sight . . . steel poured from an electric furnace at Bethlehem's Seattle Plant." [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/11-heat-of-steel-poured-form-electric-furnaceweb.jpg?ssl=1)
![In 1972, Bethlehem built this "baghouse" air pollution control system adjacent to the electric furnace shop. [Courtesy, MOHAI]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/12-bethlehems-baghouse-1972-air-polluion-control-addition-web.jpg?ssl=1)