THEN: Friends of the Market president, architect Victor Steinbrueck, leads a cadre of Friends marching for Market preservation in front of the Seattle City Hall most likely on March 18, 1971. (Photo by Tom Brownell from the Post-Intelligencer collection at MOHAI)NOW: A new city hall was completed in 2003. Since most of the municipal departments were housed nearby in the 66-floor Seattle Municipal Tower, the new and smaller City Hall serves primarily the mayor, city council, and the city’s law department.
Friends of the Market president and UW architect Victor Steinbrueck, holding the placard asking, “Is Phyllis Lamphere a Friend of the Market?”, marches ahead of his conserving coterie past the front door of City Hall. This protest, one of several City Hall pickets staged by the Friends in February and March of 1971, was most likely performed on Thursday, March 18. Other signs keep to the message: “Urban Renewal Unfair to Pike Place Market” and “City Hall + Investment Syndicate = Urban Removal.” Fittingly, whether intended or not, the style of the signs’ calligraphy resembles the brushwork listing the prices of produce on the cards still regularly seen in the Market’s stalls .
An earlier photo of Friends marching in front of the Seattle Municipal Building – a Seattle Times clipping from Feb. 5, 1971.
On the first Saturday following this parade, its prime target, councilperson Phyllis Lamphere, protested in The Times that she was indeed “a friend of the (Pike Place) market” and then went on to suggest that, as The Times reporter put it, her “Renewal opponents may themselves be the real enemies of the public market, because without rehabilitation, ‘the market will be unable to meet conditions of Seattle’s (building) code.’” Other signs carried in front of City Hall those contesting days of 1971 advised, “Don’t subsidize luxury apartments,” “Removal is not Renewal,” and “The Pike Place Market is Seattle’s History.”
The Seattle Municipal Building looking east on Cherry Street from above 3rd Avenue. It was constructed from 1959 to 1961 using plans created by a Dallas-based firm named McCammon Associates. As at least the story goes, it was a variation on the firm’s earlier designs for a hotel. For someone who can hear the pun, the Dalles firm also worked on the plans in association with Damm, Daum and Associates. The building replacement by the new City Hall showing in detail with Jean’s “now” photos was, for many, an admired developmentA circa 1960 aerial of the Municipal Building Construction with its parking lot to the rear.A fountain that runs beside the stairway off 4th Avenue into the new city hall.
Post-Intelligencer photographer Tom Brownell took the protest photo at the top. We chose it because it also shows the Fourth Avenue façade of the City Hall (1961) that was by then widely understood to be modeled on the cheap after a Texas hotel. Among the prudent fears of the Friends was that the then expected millions from federal sources for urban renewal would be used to replace the funky charms of the Pike Place Market with modern hotel-motel reminders like City Hall. The federal funding was announced on May 15th, and the next day the Friends announced their plans to gather citizen signatures for a proposal to designate most the Market for preservation. Fifteen-thousand legal signatures were needed to get it on the November ballot. The disciplined campaigners gathered more than 25,000 in three weeks. The November 1971 election was won just as readily, with a landslide 76,369 yesses over 53,264 nos.
Seattle Times clipping from November 15, 1964 CLICK TO ENLARGE
When the Friends of the Market was first formed in 1964, it was an arts movement intent on saving the Pike Place Public Market from “sterile progress.” Mark Tobey, one of Seattle’s best-known artists, was a member. Proceeds from his then new book, The World of the Market, benefited the Friends. When the picketing began in the winter of 1971, Tobey was quoted in The Times: “I hope (the market) will only be restored, and not improved through progressive planners.”
Looking up the steps of City HallThe City Hall tower from 4th AvenueThe view NW from the plaza below City HallA view from Smith Tower
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? Yes Jean a few links arranged by Ron and an excuse. This “Saturday-before” has been filled with other events and entertainments and so we (I) did not pull up more neighborhood links to past features that have not here-to-fore appeared in the blog. But Jean this excuse is righteous, for, as you know, the afternoon we spent in the SeaTac city hall delivering a lecture on the history of Highline and more was often enough delightful. Before passing on to Ron’s links, here is an feature that first appeared in The Times on March 6, 1983, about fourteen months after these weekly now-and-thens first appeared in Pacific.
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THE FIRST BAPTIST FACING THE FATEFUL FOURTH AVE. REGRADE
Looking thru the upheaval of regrades on both Fourth Avenue and James Street
Lawton Gowey’s look up Fourth and over James Street on May 19, 1982, with City Hall on the right.
THEN: In this April morning record of the 1975 “Rain or Shine Public Market Paint-in,” above the artists, restoration work has begun with the gutting of the Corner Market Building. (Photo by Frank Shaw)NOW: Jean Sherrard captured the agreeable exterior of the restored Corner Market Building on this spring’s sunny Easter Sunday.Frank Shaw’s black and white negative of the same artists near the corner of Pike Place and Pike Street. When we discover their names we will add them.
Completed in 1912, five years after the opening of the Pike Place Market, the Corner Market Building is set like a keystone at the head of its landmark block bordered by First Avenue, Pike Street and Pike Place. The architect, Seattle’s Harlan Thomas, wrapped elegance around the corner with contrasting brickwork, generous arching windows along the top floor, and at the sidewalk, open stalls for selling mostly fresh foodstuffs.
The corner before the Corner Market Building. The view looks northeast from the “elbow” where Pike Street turns north (left) into Pike Place.
The photographer Frank Shaw dated this, his 2×2 inch slide, April 12, 1975. Joan Paulson disagrees, and in this I join her. April 12th was the Saturday when the nearly week-long “Rain or Shine Public Market Paint-in and Historic Restoration” was fulfilled and celebrated. That morning, before the awards, artists could apply their last brush strokes to their assigned 4×8 foot primed panels, which for the next seven months would serve as both an exhibit and as a construction fence to separate and protect laborers and shoppers from each other.
Another of Frank Shaw’s recordings of the Market murals. Might that be another over the shoulder shot of Victor Steinbrueck watching, far right?Moments later the same lads and the same Frank Shaw.Moments later and with some help from Pop, perhaps. (Frank Shaw)
It was Paulson who put the primed panels and about fifty painters together and, when needed, purchased the art supplies as well. Paulson recalls, “They could start painting on Monday. It rained on Tuesday. Most likely this is Wednesday or Thursday. There’s too much left to do with the panels and too few people for it to be the celebration on Saturday the twelfth.”
Frank Shaw recorded several shots of the front facade looking north across Pike Street.Another
As a chronicler of Pike Place Market History, Joan Paulson notes the unique “bottom-up” energies that made protecting the market a people’s project. connecting historic preservation with urban renewal and its federal funding. Appropriately, a force named Friends of the Market fueled the victorious 1971 citizens’ initiative to “Save the Market.” In most of this, U.W. professor of architecture Victor Steinbrueck was never out of the picture, and here (at the top) in Frank Shaw’s slide, Joan Paulson has found him as well. Far right, in the shade of his straw hat, we may detect over his right shoulder, that the “savior of the market” is working on his own contributions to the “Paint-In.” In Jean’s “now” photo, although thirty-nine years later, Joan Paulson stands at the corner holding up a rolled paperin her right hand.
Joan Paulson explains that the 4×8 mural panels made it possible to both open and move the fence when needed. This, it seems, is later in the week of painting than the colored snap at the top. (Frank Shaw)
On Saturday April 12, at the high noon lunchtime awards ceremony, Steinbrueck was one of the winners. The judges explained that to this special “paint-in artist we give the whole Market to do with as he pleases for the rest of the day, and Roger Downey (one of the judges) will wash his brushes.” With work completed on the Corner Market Building’s exterior in late November, all the “unique-to-the-market masterpieces” came down, including the surviving half of Steinbrueck’s mural, the part not punctured by a beam during construction.
Looking east from the “elbow” in 1919 with the then seven-year-old Corner Market Building on the left. (Courtesy, Municipal Archive)A typically alert Lawton Gowey recorded this portrait of a worn market on Oct. 25, 1974, and so before the restoration.Gowey returned on April 21,1976 to study the consequences. (Lawton Gowey)
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean, a protracted attention to the Pike Place Public Market in 1975 with a selection of photographs scanned from volume 2 of the 5 volumes of Frank Shaw negatives huddled in 18 inches on a shelf to the side of me in this north end crypt. We will attempt to get our choices up before climbing the steps to join the bears, but we may not. If not we will finish it off after seven or eight hours sleep and a late breakfast. The captions here will be minimal. We will elaborate with them alter, and hope some of you may help. (See above. You can comment.) Joan Paulson is also going study them and she, obviously, is the expert for such content as is in what follows. Thanks again to Mike Veitenhauns, Frank Shaw’s nephew, whom I first met forty-plus years ago at Fairhaven College, he a student and I an artist-in-residence. The Shaw snaps that follow will be arranged in no particular order – unless you notice one.
Several self-portraits by Frank Shaw explained as in the “Seattle Center Kaleidoscope, 11:45 Am, Jan. 12, 1978.”Buskers at the elbow (better than blisters on the knee)More buskers at the elbow, and the hint of some order.Looking north on Pike Place – again at the corner – with an early capture of Artis the Spoonman, in white right-of-center.More ArtisSpoonman, Wonder Bridge and She Who Stands Guard.One way to the men’s’ room in 1975.The steps to Lower Pike . . .Ye Olde General StoreRock-n-Roll – or perhaps the blues – on the roof of the Champion BuildingCoke and GoodwillMarket stairway for saving space – and the curves.The Liberty Malt Store and more . . .Drum Circle
A shop of pop shadows
A variation on “I’d rather have a paper doll that I could call my own, that other fellows could not take or steal!” Celebrating Valentines Day in a store nearby.
Mary’s corner, most likely in the basement or low-downs . . .A juggler-busker or busker-juggler, depending upon the number of balls.
A Market cafe I do not remember. I don’t think that it is the Soup and Salad, which was running then.Looking to the north end curve of what the Market calls the “Lower Post Alley” to distinguished it,as Joan Paulson explains, from the Post Alley that runs north from Pike Place.String band spread at the Elbow, again.
The ELBOW EXPOSEDStairs to the Market no longer stepped on.
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RETURNING SUNDAY NIGHT JUNE 1, 2014, AROUND MIDNIGHT
Plumbing fixture and Ten Cent paperbacks near the market – more Frank Shaw in 1975Somewhere near the marketMarket view west across Elliott Bay, with ladderWaiting for the boxcar races on the lower Pike Alley. There may have been more than one boxcar race at the Market in 1975. Here it is raining. In another record of racing limited to gravity motivation, the sun is shining on the Market.Another busker at the Elbow.Busker searching for open tuning.Return to the Dexter GalleryCertainly Soup and Salad, a lower level nutritious dive with a view of Puget Sound, and visited often.The stools at Soup and Salad, after closing for the day or perhaps before opening.Looking north on Western Avenue and thru the old Pike Hill Climb before its big changes in 1976.Looking south on Western from near the foot of Stewart Street.Hot Bread and the Rotary Bakery
More Soapbox fans looking into the curving pit of the lower Post Alley at the first curve. Click your mouse. Do you recognize anyone?On your mark or just beyond it.Return to the roof top band on the Champions Building. Most likely it was entertainment for Soapbox day. The negatives are neighbors in Shaw’s album.Finally – for this feature although not for Frank’s photos – note the Stage One Theatre sign hanging over (lower) Pike Alley. Jean played there, a big role in his teens. He began visiting the Public Market then after school. He was already a talented thespian with a mature baritone and he was tall and so passed for someone older. Jean got an important speaking roll in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – one of Hamlet’s friends, the one who stabs him in the end – and the stories he tells of that production are wonderfully funny and deserving of their own theatre. Perhaps he will share his stories of Hamlet here. Jean is still tall and talented too.Frank Shaw was a long-time member of the Mountaineers Club, and a great part of his collection records this “Charmed Land.” Shaw’s dark self-portrait fits his pantheon and/or his pantheism. Thank you Frank. Again, these have been a few of the photographs he recorded of the Market in 1975. There are many others for other years.
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And Here Follows, THREE APT LINKS Found and Posted by Ron Edge
I have also added a panorama with the Hotel York, which was replaced by the Corner Market building.
Here is the area shown on the Sanborn map of 1905.
