THEN: The ruins left by Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, included a large neighborhood of warehouses and factories built on timber quays over the tides. Following the fire the quays were soon restored with new capping and planking. A close look on the far-right will reveal some of this construction on the quays underway. (Courtesy, Seattle Public Library)NOW: Nearly completed before the Great Fire, the Gilmore Building’s foundation served as a firewall, stopping the spread of the Great Fire to the north. Soon renamed the Arlington Hotel, and later the Bay Building, the structure was razed in 1974 for development of Harbor Steps.
Of the few photographs taken during the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, and the hundreds more recording the ruins, this one is not typical. Positioned far north of the more sensational ruins around Pioneer Square, the photographer looks south from the Front Street (First Avenue) boardwalk about sixty feet south of University Street. Although no caption accompanies the original print, the photographer would have surely known that “where the fire was stopped” would have been an appropriate description for it.
Another look at the Gilmore Block’s fire-stopping foundation, looking south from the Front Street (First Ave.) boardwalk above it. The still-smoldering ruins suggest that this is the earlier of the two scenes.
The most obvious ruin here (in the featured “then” photo but also in a smaller part in the photo directly above) is the north façade of the Northwest Cracker Company’s brick quarters, standing, somewhat, behind the leaning power pole. Johan Haglund (“keep clam” Ivar’s father) worked there. On the day of the fire, Haglund and his co-workers left before the destruction reached the cracker factory, which was located one lot south of the southwest corner of Front and Seneca. Like many others, Haglund wound up on First Hill watching through the night as more than thirty blocks of Seattle were destroyed.
Looking southeast to “front st. from docks” with the cracker factory’s brick ruin right-of-center. Left of center is a short bridge on Front Street built in 1876 over what was left of the Seneca Street ravine, which was once a native cemetery. Repair on the docks is underway, lower-right, The Stetson-Post ” terrace homes (or apartments) at the northeast corner of Marion and Second Avenue appear far right breaking the horizon.
To the north side of the cracker factory and Seneca Street, the fire’s rubble is mixed with generators of the Seattle Electric Light Company, which shared the northwest corner of Front and Seneca Streets with Puget Sound Ice Company. In the featured “then” photo at the top, the scorched tree that rises to the scene’s center is a puzzle. The leaves on its crown were, it seems, merely scorched and not consumed. Perhaps it was this defiant tree that was most appealing to the photographer. Or was it, perhaps, the new foundation for the Gilmore Block (lower-right), on which construction had recently begun. It was that foundation that stopped the fire’s northerly advance along the shoreline. Off shore bucket brigades successfully doused the fire on Railroad Avenue where (here just out of frame to the right) its two railroad trestles crossed open water.
A detail from the 1888 Sanborn real estate map, which shows the development then along the waterfront and Front Street at the foot of University Street. The footprint for the cracker factory is sketched bottom-center, and the two trestles south of the Schwabacher dock are shown off shore. It was there that the advance of the fire was stopped by a bucket brigade of more than two hundred volunteers. Work on the Gilmore foundation has not yet begun in the ’88 map.Looking south to the city from a building on the west side of Front Street between Pike and Union Streets before the fire in 1888. From this prospect, the open water and two trestles from which the off-shore fire was stopped appear on the far right. Beacon Hill is on the horizon. The dark dock reaching far into Elliott Bay is the King Street Coal Bunkers. The cluster of small warehouses grouped to the far side of Henry Yesler’s mill pond, stand on his namesake dock.The fire ruins looking south over Union Street. Arthur and Mary Denny’s home is far-left. First floor planking on the Gilmore Dock, at the southwest corner of Front and University, is underway. Both Front Street and its bay-side sidewalk have been repaired and the Front Street cable railway is again operating. Gilmore’s waterfront warehouse is also going up on the far right. Its west facade will face Railroad Avenue which is also being repaired with new pilings and planks.
On June 10th, or four days after the fire, The Post-Intelligencer reported that “slabs and sawdust are still burning and sending clouds of smoke over the town.” The following day the paper noted that “photos of the fire are already being sold on the street.”
1889 ruins along Front Street looking north from near the foot of Cherry Street. The central tower of the Stetson-Post terraced apartments appear near the photograph’s top-right corner.
WEB EXTRAS…
…Extras, read all about it! Paul?
Jean, count them, Ron Edge has put up six links with past features that for the most part relate to the Great Fire of June 6, 1889, especially the waterfront north of Columbia Street. Those are followed by a few more older features pulled as scanned Times clippings from our archive of the same.
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The central waterfront in 1890 photographed from the King Street coal dock. The Gilmore Block is at the center of the scene with its corner tower still under construction. The foundation for the Denny Hotel marks the horizon on Denny Hill. Yesler’s Wharf is far right. Only a few post-fire tents can found. The Hotel York at the northwest corner of Pike and Front (First Ave.) shows its south facade on the far left.
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First appeared in Pacific August 30, 1998.
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First appeared in Pacific, Nov. 12, 2000.
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The day after. DOUBLE-CLICK to ENLARGE
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The Gilmore Block, aka Arlington Hotel, aka Bay Building at the southwest corner of University Street and First Avenue.Anders Wilse’s look out of a back window in the Arlington Hotel over the University Street viaduct to the Schwabacher and Post Street wharves in the late 1890s.
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THE GARDEN OF ALLAH
A performance at the Garden of Allah on a lower floor of First Avenue in the Bay Building.First appeared in Pacific, February 1, 1998Frank Shaw’s record of the Bay Building ruins, not from fire by the Harbor Steps planners urge to eventually construct the so-named development that has taken its place. The last of the top (east) portion of the University Street viaduct is seen on the left. Shaw took this on March 11, 1975.A Daily Intelligencer report on the condition of Front Street in the block north of University Street, published on January, 18, 1880. (Courtesy, Ron Edge)
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THE FIRE TRAVELS NORTH
DOUBLE-CLICK TO ENLARGE
Part of the Post-Intelligencer’s report on the June 6, 1889 fire printed the day after. These column inches described the fire’s advance north along Front Street from the site of the fire’s ignition at the foot of Madison Street.
THEN: The “then” photo looks southeast across Union Street to the old territorial university campus. It was recorded in the Fall of 1907, briefly before the old park-like campus was transformed into a grand commercial property, whose rents still support the running of the University of Washington. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)NOW: While civic leaders proposed that the abandoned territorial campus on Denny’s Knoll be converted into a central city park, the University’s regents wanted it developed into properties whose leases would support the school, which with the typically close-fisted legislature, often needed help. The regents won.
Two structures stand out in this 1907 look across Union Street into the old campus of the Territorial University. Both seem incomplete. The ornate one on top with the comely belfry is the Territorial University building itself, stripped of its columns while still awaiting its fate.
Looking southeast at the Territorial University in its original location and with it columns too, and above it without those Ionic pillars and in the place off Union Street and straddling 5th Avenue, as it is in the feature photo..An early portrait of the university with some of the old growth still to the sides.Your investigating eye may – or surely will – find the university’s pergola in this view as well. It looks west on Union Street through its intersection with Sixth Avenue.First visiting Tacoma for a round of conversions, the dynamic Hart and Magann joined a local protest against the staging of Salome at the Tacoma Theatre.Later and not here but in West Virginia, it was revealed that even fervent worship may be offensive, when the farmer E.M.Snyder was arrested for crying “Amen, Amen” with too much zeal.
The lower structure, the palatial hut facing the sidewalk, resembles the warehouse set atop Noah’s ark in a Biblical illustration I remember. In the Bible, all the “animals two by two” were given accommodations. In this shed, however, the critters were mostly Methodists, more than three-thousand could be fit inside, and apparently were. There they would sing and preach — reinvigorating the local congregations, their own faith, and also naming and chastising selected Seattle sinners.
Another Seattle Times report. This one from Sept. 20, 1907. CLICK TO ENLARGE!Evangelists Hart and Magann confess when closing down their work in the tabernacle that Seattle’s Methodists were something of a disappointment. CLICK TO ENLARGE!!!
Apparently the tabernacle was pounded together in 1907 for the fall arrival of the evangelists Hart (the preacher) and Magann (the singer), noted on its signs. By then the landmark behind it – the University Building – was serving as temporary quarters for the Seattle Public Library. Bo Kinney, the library’s new circulation services manager, shares with us that the decision to move (by skidding) the territorial university from its original foundation, near the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Seneca Street, and ultimately to this site near Fifth Avenue and University Street, was first announced on March 3, 1905. The building was moved to lower the height of Denny’s Knoll and thereby allow for the extending of Fourth Avenue north from Seneca Street directly through the campus at the lower grade, and soon also on Fifth Avenue as seen in Jean’s repeat.
CLICK TO ENLARGE! Spring reporting from the The Times that “Seattle’s Most Historic Building” was being prepared for removal to Seattle’s most progressive creation, the Alaska Yukon and Pacific Expo. on the newer University Campus beside the Brooklyn Addition, now known as the University District. The Times clipping is from May 17, 1908.
In early May of 1908 an appointed and, we imagine, enthused group of UW students started raising the ten-thousand dollars it was thought was needed to barge the original territorial university building to the new – since 1895 – campus north of Lake Union’s Portage Bay. There it was envisioned that Seattle’s grandest pioneer landmark would soon add its fame to the city’s first world’s fair, the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. When this effort of preservation failed, some of the hardwood in the old school was turned into canes, which were sold as souvenirs, mostly to alums. It was figured that through the thirty-plus years of the school’s stay on Denny Knoll, about 5,000 young scholars had crossed beneath the Ionic columns of its main hall. The columns alone were saved and survive as the four white fluted landmarks that grace the University’s Sylvan Theatre.
What we might call the “backside” of the Columns, the side away from the Sylvan Theater, includes, up the way, U.W.’s Anderson Hall, which was donated by the lumbering Anderson family, a former subject of this blog.. . . and the front side of the landmark columns, seen here at night within the Sylvan Theater with Attic goings-on rarely seen by the light of the sun.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? With Ron Edge’s help, yes. Below are some “Edge Links” and then below that some other photographs and more that relate to this old knoll – Denny’s Knoll – that after the carvings or regrades of 1906-1910 is gone. I will also insert some “extras” into the week’s primary text, above. But not much. It is already thirty minutes past midnight, and my late start is, in part, your fault, or rather the delicious detraction of the marinated chicken with mushrooms, seasoned rice and those flowery green veggies that Nixon – or Regan – deplored. Thanks again for dinner, and the time spent with you and Don, your dad, was a delight.
Three Edge Links to pasts post for the reader’s enjoyment.
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DENNY’S KNOLL, FIFTH AVENUE and UNION STREET from DENNY HILL
The greenbelt that swipes through the center of this ca. 1885 panorama from Denny Hill is the northern end of the University of Washington’s first campus. The campus stops at Union Street, As seen here from Denny Hill, Union running left-right is at the bottom of the little forest. The most evident avenue here is Third, which nearly reaches the bottom-center of the pan, and Second Avenue nearly reaches the lower right corner. From this calibration, the reader may cautiously but confidently find here a likely approach for Fifth Avenue south to Union and the campus green. Beacon Hill is on the right horizon, and First Hill on the left. DOUBLE CLICK TO ENLARGE A close-up or detail follows below.
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Looking west down Seneca to the “rear” of Denny’s Knoll. The rolling title “Knoll of Knowledge” was created by a Times header-specialist, who may have jumped when it first occurred to her or him.Looking north across Virginia Street on (or near) Fifth Avenue.
Copied from Seattle Now and Then Vol. 3, the 41st feature.
