THEN: Looking north from Yesler Way over the Fifth Avenue regrade in 1911. Note the Yesler Way Cable rails and slot at the bottom. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: The industrial parts of sculptor John Henry’s Songbird (2011) – a kind of blue bird, perhaps – unwittingly repeat some of the concrete and timber devices used to keep the three hotels on the east side of Fifth Avenue north of Yesler Way from sliding away in the summer of 1911.
We will concentrate first on Jean Sherrard’s ‘repeat’ that looks into the face of Songbird, by sculptor John Henry. The Chattanooga artist visited Seattle twice to study this northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Yesler Way. He determined what we, perhaps, have not considered. “The work would have to interact with the sight lines available, yield to the physical demands of the Yesler overpass and still compliment the architectural design of the building. It would be an exercise of creating a piece with enough strength to command the site yet subtle enough not to overpower its surroundings.”
Jean’s repeat from below the Yesler Way overpass.Looking northwest across Yesler Way to an earlier recording of the Francis and its entrance on Yesler Way, with part of the east facade of the new City Hall (and Jail) showing far left across 5th Avenue. Our Lady of Good Help Catholic Church at 5th and Jefferson shows her steeple upper-right. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)Jean’s repeat looking northwest across Yesler Way.
The historical photo featured at the top, one of several taken by a public works photographer in the summer of 1911, documents the troubles the regraders were having here at Fifth Avenue and Yesler Way. The clipping directly below form the Times for February 28, 1899 reveals that the slipping here was an old worry.
A clipping from The Seattle Times for Feb. 28, 1899 introduces C. P. Dose, the owner of the building at the northeast corner of 5th Ave. and Yesler Way, and his fundamental concerns.(I Click this one TWICE to read it.) The Times report on the left for July 14, 1902, describes the elaborate public work undertaken that year to stabilize the fluid dynamics of this “Profanity Hill” (or later “Goat Hill”) part of First Hill that bulges west from it like a resting tourist.
The featured subject looks north over the regrade mess on Fifth from the work-in-progress on the Yesler Way overpass. Beginning with the Frances Hotel, seen here at the northeast corner, there are two more structures between Yesler and Terrace, the next street north. All three are in trouble. When the responsibilities were at last resolved in the courts, twenty-four structures on Yesler, Terrace, Fifth, and Sixth, were counted as damaged by slides triggered by the Fifth Avenue regrade.
One of Dose’s proposals for securing the neighborhood by making it part of his solution for the growing traffic congestion on downtown streets. Note the Dose proposals a wall as part of his plan to stabilize the hill. That The Seattle Times printed his plans is a sign of his influence. Again CLICK CLICK!!!
Real estate speculator, C.P.Dose, the owner of The Frances, described himself and his neighbors as victims of City Engineer R.H. Thomson’s “cutting off the toe off First Hill,” similar to the little Dutch boy pulling his finger from the hole in the dike. Like others, Dose understood the hill’s abundant fluid dynamics. Those dynamics were high on the list of reasons that most of the original pioneers on Alki Point soon left that dry prominence to build a city on and beside this wet hill. After the cutting off of its toe, Dose concluded that most of the “so-called First Hill” should be carefully removed; otherwise, he advised, “It will all come sliding down.”
A Times clip from Feb. 14, 1907.Times clip from Sept. 10, 1909 with radical proposals.Desperate and failed attempts to save the Allen, the Francis Hotel’s first neighbor to the north on 5th Avenue.Times clip from August 24, 1911.Times clip from August 23, 1911. The Francis is on the far right of the illustration.
If I have read the clues correctly, Dose built his Fifth Avenue Hotel, its first name, for $6,000 in the summer of 1900, soon after relocating his prospering real estate business from Chicago to Seattle. With his son, C.C. Dose, he opened his real estate office in the clapboard hotel and soon became a leader among his neighbors in plotting what to do about their slippery situation. A solution arrived on the 23rd of August, 1911, when all the windows in The Frances cracked as, The Seattle Times reported, it moved “one foot closer to the brink.” The three hotels on Fifth Avenue were abruptly abandoned and soon razed. Dose was comforted in the Mt. Baker Neighborhood. He had been holding onto ten acres there since 1870, when he purchased the lakeside land sight unseen while still in Chicago. In 1904 and 1907 he platted his “Dose’s Lake Washington Addition to the City of Seattle” and in 1912 built his home there, a colonial-style mansion with grand Corinthian columns at the front. It still stands tall at 3211 S. Dose Terrace.
Dose’s big home in his namesake addition appears here on the far left of the illustrations running below the feature’s header. It dates from August 3, 1913. [Please CLICK CLICK]The Yesler Way slide was included in The Times four page chronology of the big local events of 1911 – although not on this page, which we have chosen for the cartoon. CLICK CLICKAlas, for Dose, The Seattle Times reports on March 25, 1914, that he lost to the city in his attempt to be paid for the loses of the 1911 slide.Looking north to Terrace Street on a muddy 5th Avenue from a soft spot between the new City Hall (the 400 Yesler Building) on the left and the Francis and its neighbors off camera on the right. Note Our Lady of Good Help (and luck) two blocks north at Jefferson.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? A few more Edge Clips from the neighborhood and then some more old features from the same. We will get as far as we can, but then surrender at 2am for the latest climb to nighty bears. (How should we spell it? Bill.)
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RETURNING to OUR LADY OF GOOD HELP – Looking Southeast across the intersection of 5th and Jefferson.
Our Lady at the northeast corner of 3rd and Washington, its original location.
The Prefontaine Fountain at 3rd and Jefferson.The Prefontaine Fountain, 1993.
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Looking north on 5th Avenue from Terrace Street with the sidewalk face of Our Lady of Good Help on the right. 1939
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FOURTH AVE. REGRADE LOOKING NORTH FROM YESLER WAY
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YESLER WAY CABLE’S LAST DAY
“Safety Island” on Yesler Way, 1928.
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Looking west down Yesler Way and its overpass above 5th Avenue.
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First appeared in Pacific, May 5, 2002
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First appeared in Pacific, March 15, 1987.
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First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 26, 1999
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First appeared in Pacific Oct. 12, 2002.The first brick home is found in this look up First Hill below the towered Court House on the horizon. That is Terrace Street with the steep steps climbing to the top of “Profanity Hill.’ Jefferson Street is on the left and Yesler Way cuts through the cityscape. City Hall, aka the Katzenjammer Castle, is left of center, the bright facade with the centered tower. It faces Third Avenue.
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KATZENJAMMER FRONT DOOR on THIRD AVE.
First appeared in Pacific, Sept. 30, 1984
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First appeared in Pacific.
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CITY HALL, 1886
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LATER – RETURN TO FIFTH AND YESLER WAY
On the horizon Harborview Hospital is under construction and the top of King County’s abandoned courthouse has been removed in prelude to it razing. This 1930 look from the Smith Tower also shows off the barren or cleared acres top-center behind the flat-iron shaped 400 Yesler Building at the center. These, some will remember, were roughly developed into a steep parking lot. (See what follows.) Our Lady of Good Help is on the left.March 12, 1957, looking north on Fifth Avenue from the Yesler Way overpass into part of the sprawling and steep parking lot developed on the shaky acres once home to the tenements on Fifth Avenue’s east side. Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive.Also from March 12, 1957 looking southeast through the parking lot to Yesler Way with Fifth Avenue at the base. (Courtesy, Municipal Archives)Two years later, grading the former lot of the Lady of Good Help. The Yesler Way overpass is on the right. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)
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Reaching from Elliott Bay on the far right to First Hill on the left, this pan from the Smith Tower includes the “forsaken” or undeveloped slide area of First HIll’s “Profanity” or Goat” part directly behind and above the dark mass of the 400 Yesler Building in the flat-iron block bordered by Terrace Street, Yesler Way and Fifth Avenue (behind it) on the bottom-left, about one-fifth of the way in from the pan’s left border, CLICK TWICE to ENLARGE
THEN: Like violence in a classic Greek play, the carnage suggested by this 1934 crash scene on the then new Aurora speedway was kept off stage, either behind the city’s official photographer, or in the county morgue. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive)NOW: In the mid-1970s the three- mile long “Jersey Barrier,” named for the state where it was first used, was installed down the center-line of Aurora Avenue, north of the Battery Street subway, to the southern boundary of Woodland Park. Each of the barrier’s pre-cast 20-foot long segments weighed about three tons.
Few Seattle streets – perhaps no other Seattle street – have accumulated such a record of carnage as its first “speedway,” Aurora Avenue. From Broad Street north to the then new Aurora Bridge, the speedway opened to traffic in the spring of 1933.
ABOVE: Looking north from the new speedway’s beginnings just north of Denny Way, and thru one of the city’s busiest intersections where both Broad and Mercer Streets crossed Aurora through traffic lights, years before both streets were routed below Aurora and its only stop-and-go light south of the Aurora Bridge. BELOW: The nearly new Aurora Bridge, the north end of the speedway’s first section, the one opened in 1933, although this record was made later – late enough for the speedway to be extended through Aurora Park.
A traffic expert from Chicago described this nearly two-mile long speedway as “the best express highway in the U.S.” Its exceptional qualities were the six lanes – eight counting the two outside lanes for parking or rush hour traffic – and the speed limit of 30 mph. Still, Aurora had the arterial worries of cross-streets, left turns, and head-on traffic, plus the extraordinary risk of pedestrians negotiating the ninety feet from curb to curb. For these endangered pedestrians traffic engineers built what they called “safety islands.” You see one above (at the top), looking north from the Crockett Street crosswalk in 1934. Just below is the same (if I’ve figured it correctly) island, only looking at it from the north and four years later on Sept. 21, 1938.
Looking south along the not-so-safe center-line of Aurora towards the Crockett Ave. safety island. Below, is a detail from the same 1938 negative.A detail of the subject above it.
No pedestrian was injured in the mess recorded at the top. It was made around 2:30 in the morning on January 19, 1934. Rather, it was 37-year-old Carl Scott who, heading south from the Aurora Bridge in his big Packard, crushed the north reinforced concrete pole of the safety island. The Times, then an afternoon daily, explained front page: “Autoist Dies Instantly in Terrific Crash.” Photographers from both The Times and the city’s department of public works reached the island after Scott’s body had been removed, but not the scattered parts of his sedan. In the accompanying photo at the top, the city’s photographer aimed north with his back to the intact south pole, possibly with its red light still blinking. Interested readers will find The Times photos in this newspaper’s archive for the date of the crash. (Ask your Seattle Public librarian – the archive can be accessed with a computer and a library card number.)
Some of The Seattle Time Jan. 19, 1934 coverage of Carl Scott’s crash and death.The same section of speedway recorded in the primary photo at the top.A long Seattle Times clip from Dec. 8, 1937, which seeks and finds a variety of local opinions of what to make of and do about the “safety islands.” CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE
After a few more speedway accidents and deaths (see more clips below), The Times turned from seeking advice on how to improve and protect these imperfect pedestrian bulwarks to a campaign for getting rid of these targets for “the brotherhood of bad drivers . . . careless, reckless, defective, drunken and sleeping.” Headlines for the December 2, 1937, issue read, in part “Stop Murder On Aurora – Center-Pillars Are Death Magnets.” The following March, after another motorist lost his battle with a safety island, the newspaper’s librarian calculated that thirty-eight persons had died in Aurora Ave. traffic accidents since the highway was opened in 1932. Eighteen of these were killed hitting “safety” islands. By then, Times reporters were instructed always to put safety in quote marks when running with island, as in “safety” island.
Most of Times reporter Robert A. Barr’s Feb. 14, 1973 summary of safety island history on the eve of the installation of the “Jersey Barrier” down the center of the by then forty year old speedway. Directly below is a detail of a section of center-stripe that was meant to alert drivers with a grid of raised bumps. This subject dates from July 25, 1945.The installation of this bumpy center strip failed to stop the carnage.From The Times, May 30, 1949.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads?
Jean as sure as something has to give, we will too. Below, Ron Edge has again put up some fertile links: eight of them, and we may add one or two more tomorrow. If you click to open the first of these, which features the Arabian Theatre, it will include (as we hope some of you will already anticipate) its own “web extras.” We will name these added features as lures to clicking. They are illustrated stories about the nearby intersection of Aurora and 84th Ave., a feature about the swath of clear-cutting that ran through Woodland Park in prelude to cutting the park in two with the paving of Aurora Avenue. Next you will find the story of the Twin T-P’s restaurant, a local landmark which was razed in the night, unannounced. Green Lake’s northwest swimming beach follows, and then also the story of Maust Transfer’s original flatiron quarters (before moving to Pier 54) at Winona and 73rd.
Continuing our promotion of links, the Signal Station story below, includes within it features about two once cherished speedway cafes: the Igloo, and the Dog House. It includes as well features on the Aurora Speed Bowl and the pedestrian overpass between Fremont and Wallingford – although some Fremont partisans will insist that it is between two Fremonts: Central and East. And as a lesson in our oft-quoted mother’s truism that “Repetition is the mother of all learning.” Ron has included down below the overpass link on its own. It will surely have other links within it. After the links we will finish with a few more Times clips and more speedway photos too. A trip to nighty-bears follows, and eight hours more some proof-reading too.
Not to click for more story – only to enlarge. The subject here is below the viaduct and on its east or Wallingford* side. * aka East Fremont.
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Roughed at its foot but not fallen, an Aurora Safety Island on Dec. 3, 1937. (Courtesy the Seattle Times)Today’s Traffic Lesson on March 27, 1939.Looking south on Aurora thru Roy and more safety islands on Dec. 8, 1938. {Click to Enlarge]A Seattle Times clip from January 22, 1940.Aurora, looking north towards Ward Street on June 19,1940.The Seattle Times, August 18, 1941A City Light Clerk’s shunned solution.North towards Valley and Aloha, on August 26, 1940Again near Crockett, this time two injured. In The Times, August 25, 1950.I suspect but cannot prove that such a press photo as this that depicts or reveals or exposes a dying victim that has met an irresistable object, including a safety island, is rare. The photo was printed in The Times on July 28, 1950.
![Dose's big home in his namesake addition appears here on the far left of the illustrations running below the feature's header. It dates from August 3, 1913. [Please CLICK CLICK]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/xxxx-st-aug-3-1913-dose-mansion-grab-web.jpg?ssl=1)
