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: A circa 1912 look at the Wall Street finger pier from the foot, not of Wall, but Battery Street. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)NOW: Galbraith and Bacon built their pier between Battery and Wall Streets. From this Battery side we see the Edgewater’s south façade. From the Wall Street side one looks directly to the front of the Edgewater, and prior to the hotel, the Galbraith and Bacon pier shed. Consequently, the pier is named for Wall Street.
The Galbraith Bacon dock, like most others built on the Seattle waterfront after 1900, was positioned at a slant off Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way) for two sensible reasons. First, such a dock allowed railroad spurs an easier angle for reaching the aprons to the sides of the wharves. Second, at such a slant the end of a long dock was closer to shore and so did not require unnecessarily long piles to support it.
Having dealt feed on the waterfront since 1891, James Galbraith was the ‘old timer’ in this partnership. Cecil Bacon, a chemical engineer with some extra capital, arrived in Seattle in 1899. Deep pockets helped Bacon persuade Galbraith to make a bigger business with him by adding building materials, like lime and concrete, to the established partner’s hay and feed. In 1900, they were the first signature tenants in the Northern Pacific Railroad’s newly constructed finger pier No. 3 (now 54) at the foot of Madison Street. The partners prospered and soon added to their enterprise this pier at the foot of Wall Street.
An early record of Pier 3 (54 since 1944) and its first tenant Galbraith and Bacon. The photo was taken in 1900, some little while before the photographer, Aders Wilse, return to Norway and the call of his wife who left Seattle first for a visit back to the homeland and then decided to stay.. Wilse then obeyed she who must be. In time he became a Norwegian national treasure, and the photographer to its King and Queen and all their little princes and princesses.The Northern Pacific Docks (mostly) between Fire Station No. 5 at the foot of Madison Street and the Milwaukee Railroad’s Pier 6/57 near the foot of Union Street.
Although I like the featured photograph at the top for how it upsets our prepossession with the picturesque – I mean, of course, the askew yards on the sailing ship and its splotched starboard side – I neither know why the square-rigged Montcalm was tied to the Wall Street pier, nor which Montcalm it was. Many ships bear the name, and probably all were named for Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, who until he was hit with an English musket ball in the Battle of Quebec, was New France’s Commander-in-Chief during its French and Indian War with the British in the 1750s.
Not the Montcalm, but another tall ship holding the same slip to the south of the Wall Street Pier. Photo by Whitelsey.The Galbraith and Bacon Wall Street Pier seen from the bluff.Frank Shaw’s record of the Wall Street Pier while being cleared of the Galbraith & Bacon pier shed. Feb. 26, 1961.Shaw returned to take this snapshot of the completed Edgewater on a gray December 9, 1962.
For some clue on the Montcalm’s condition I turned to Scott Rohrer, an old friend who is also celebrated hereabouts for his sailing and understanding of maritime history. Scott tersely answered, “She’s steel and her crew is scaling and chipping her hull for primer and repainting after a long, apparently rough voyage.”
An early ideal Edgewater when it still had a chance of being named the Camelot.What became of Camelot, Lawton Gowey’s – or perhaps Bob Bradley’s – record of the Edgewater dated May 29, 1963.Either Jean or I recorded this repeat sometime in 2005, I think.
The Wall Street pier, about the size of a football field, was replaced in the early 1960s with what the waterfront long wanted: a big hotel. First sketches of the Edgewater show it as the Camelot Inn. The Edgewater is perhaps best known for the visiting Beatles, of whom the now common fish tale is told that they followed the instructions written on the waterfront side of the hotel and fished from their window. We suspect that a trolling of the bottom might still catch some paint chips fallen a century ago from the worn sides of the Montcalm.
An early and passionate rendering of the planned Edgewater – or Camelot.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Certainly, and beginning again with Ron Edge’s selection of links to other features we have had swimming in the Pacific in the past. Ron has also put up the cover to our illustrated history of the waterfront. I suspect that if it is clicked then several chapter choices will appear. We remind the reader that this Waterfront History is always available in toto on this blog. And was also propose again that when in doubt or squinting that readers should click twice and sometimes thrice.
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THE WATERFRONT FIRE OF 1910 – at the FOOT OF WALL STREET
Looking west down Wall Street thru the popular ruins.
CLICK TO ENLARGE – A clip from the March 23, 2003 Pacific MagazineThe ruins looking northeast from the waterfront.The 1910 fire’s remains seen west over First Avenue.
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RAILROAD AVENUE LOOKING NORTH FROM WALL STREET
Merged from two negatives, Railroad Avenue looking north over Wall Street.Jean has a colored version of this repeat, and I shall encourage him to find it and following his discovery also erase this caption for the prospect is obvious.You should probably CLICK-TO-ENLARGE this insert.
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QUIZ – SELF-CONFIDENCE WILL BE REWARDED TO THE READER WHO CAN REVEAL FROM WHAT THE HISTORICAL PHOTO BELOW WAS RECORDED.
THEN: In this 1887 look up Columbia Street from the waterfront is the bell tower of the fire station, tucked into the hill on the right. It would soon fail to halt the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889. The station and everything between it and Elliott Bay were reduced to ashes, smoldering bricks and offshore pilings shortened like cigars. (courtesy, Kurt Jackson)NOW: After the Great Fire, the waterfront was extended farther into Elliott Bay, first above pilings and eventually on fill packed behind a seawall.
Charles Morford, who migrated with his parents from Iowa in the spring of 1887, was 20 years old when he recorded this unique Seattle cityscape a few months later. Morford’s subject looks east up Columbia Street from the Seattle waterfront as far as the Coppin water works at Ninth Avenue. The four-story tower’s open First Hill observatory stood 300 feet above Morford’s prospect. The well below it supplied most of the neighborhood, and its bored-log pipes reached down the hill at least as far as James Colman’s mansion. Its Italianate tower also breaks the horizon, here at the southeast corner of Columbia and Fourth Avenue.
We may be confident that the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway baggage/express car, at the bottom, is new. By historian Thomas Prosch’s reckoning in his “Chronological History of Seattle” (1901), the car was delivered in September 1887. This timing is in fine coincidence with the construction scaffolding attached to the Toklas and Singerman Department Store, on the right. The rough lumber is soon to come down. The store was completed on Sept. 28, although the formal opening waited until Nov. 9.
A few days after the opening of the department store, which was then the highest building in Seattle, the railway was also celebrating. On Thanksgiving Day it gave 108 locals a free round-trip ride to its then new end-of-the-line in Bothell.
Included among Morford’s surviving glass-plate negatives are several more of the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern. At what point Morford also became an employee of this railway is unclear. But in the fall of 1887 he would not yet have known that most of his gainful employment here would be with the retail business behind the scaffolding. Morford became a clerk, first, with MacDougal Southwick, the partnership that bought out Toklas and Singerman in 1892. Morford soon became the store’s general manager and one of its stockholders.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? The solo feature that Ron Edge pulled and placed directly below includes several subjects that relate to this week’s feature. The “lead” feature, printed here below, shows the Toklas and Singerman department store completed, and so without the scaffolding that hides its north facade in the prime feature at the top. The reader may wish to search the several other features that can be found by clicking on the link. Please give special attention to one about the 1884 snow as seen looking east up the waterfront from close to the same prospect that Morford used for his shot at the top. Much has changed in these three short years that felt both the lingering effects of the 1883 recession and the general excitement of the completion of the Norther Pacific to the northwest, also in 1883. Seattle’s boom years were at the front door, which is to say, both on the waterfront and heading this way from Chicago, Portland and, resentfully from Tacoma too, across the tideflats south of King Street on rails.
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FOLLOWS NOW (soon) A FEW MORE PHOTOS OF THE WATERFRONT AT or NEAR COLUMBIA STREET
A Peterson and Bros. photograph taken from the end of a dog-legged Yesler Wharf and looking up Columbia Street on the right in 1878. Note the tower for the “White Church” on the right, the Methodist Episcopalian congregation that was the first in Seattle. It sits there at the second lot south of Columbia on the east side of Second Avenue. Also note that for the most part First Hill has been denuded of the virgin forest that still covered this horizon as late as 1872.Seattle’s first church, the “White Church,” and the Methodist Episcopalian parsonage to this side of it on the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Columbia in the 1870s.The waterfront ca. 1885 with an early Colman Dock on the left, Columbia Street on the right, and a short feature essay below (after I search and find it tomorrow), and the contemporary repeat photographed officially – only – in the anxious glow of 9/11 by Shawn Devine, an employee of the Washington State Ferries.
COLMAN DOCK AND THE WATERFRONT ca. 1886 (text to come)
Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889 reaches the foot of Columbia and the depot for the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railway, and will soon consume it and everything south of it to the tideflats.
Columbia Street looking west from the waterfront in the first year following the 1889 fire. The new Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern depot is on the right, and the rear facade of the new Toklas and Singerman Department Sore rises five stories behind it. Photo taken by the Northern Pacific Railroad’s official photographer, F. J. Haynes. (Courtesy, Tacoma Public Library and Murray Morgan)Horace Sykes’ (or possibly Robert Bradley’s) look east up Columbia Street from the top of the new – and as yet not used for traffic – Alaskan Way Viaduct aka Freeway in 1953.
THEN: Looking west from First Avenue down the University Street viaduct to the waterfront, ca. 1905. Post Office teams and their drivers pose beside the Arlington Hotel, which was then also headquarters for mail delivery in Seattle. (Courtesy, Gary Gaffner)NOW: Jean notes, “The Lin family, visiting Seattle on a near-Spring day, takes in two views from the Harbor steps – one looking over my shoulder at the Seattle Art Museum and the other of a cherry blossom-framed, if blustery, Elliott Bay.”
Here we stand – about a century ago – with an unidentified photographer recording five U.S. Postal Service teams and their drivers. The year is about 1905, six years after the Post Office moved from its previous headquarters on Columbia Street here to the Arlington Hotel. Larger quarters were needed, in part for sorting mail.
The Arlington Hotel with tower, looking southwest through the intersection of First Ave. and University Street. Below: the hotel sans tower from a postcard.
On the left (of the top photo) is the hotel’s north façade extending west from the corner of University Street and First Avenue. Above the sidewalk on First, the hotel reached four ornate brick stories high with a distinguished conical tower at the corner, not seen here. To the rear there were three more stories reaching about forty feet down to Post Alley. First named the Gilmore Block, after its owner David Gilmore, for most of its eighty-four years this sturdy red brick pile was called the Arlington, but wound up as the Bay Building, and it was as the Bay that it was razed in 1974.
Frank Shaw’s record of work-in-progress on the razing of the Bay Building. The subject looks east from the viaduct on University Street to the Diller Hotel on the southeast corner of First and University.The caption that came with this look west on the trestle dates it Sept.8, 1946. It was photographed from a prospect near that used by the “more historical” photographer who recorded the subject at the top.Frank Shaw dated this August 18, 1973, which should be a sufficient clue for some curious reader to figure out what movie is being shot here. It is a quiz. Answer correctly and win the glory, or satisfaction if you prefer, of being right.
By beginning the construction of his hotel before the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, Gilman performed a considerable, if unwitting, service. The south foundation of the structure was formidable enough to stop the fire from reaching University Street. Off shore, a chain of volunteer fire fighters, passing buckets of water pulled from Elliot Bay, stopped the fire’s northerly advance as well along the off-shore quays and trestles built of pilings for warehouses and railroad tracks.
A sidewalk view revealing the savior-wall at the base of the south facade following the June 6, 1889 “Great Fire” that consumed most of the Seattle waterfront – to the tides – and over 30 city blocks. The view looks south-southwest. The north facade of the ruined cracker factor at Seneca is seen in part at the top-left corner.
Free mail delivery started in Seattle on September 11, 1887, with four carriers. Remembering that booming Seattle’s population increased in a mere thirty years from 3,533 in 1880 to the 237,194 counted by the federal census in 1910, we may imagine that this quintet of carriers and their teams were a very small minority of what was needed to deliver the mail in 1905. Behind the posing carriers, University Street descends on a timber trestle above both Post Alley and Western Avenue to Railroad Avenue (Alaska Way). Most likely some of the mail was rolled along the trestle both to and from “Mosquito Fleet” steamers for waterways distribution.
[Click to ENLARGE] The swath of destruction along the waterfront seen from the northwest corner of Front Street (First Ave.) and Union Street. The rebuilding has obviously begun, and while the business district and waterfront are building, several business have temporarily taken to elaborate tents. The Gilmore/Arlington at First and University appears here at the panorama’s center where the hotel’s construction has laid a floor on its foundation. (Courtesy, Lawton Gowey)
After the post office moved three blocks to the new Federal Building at Third Avenue and Union Street in 1908, First Avenue between University and Seneca Streets continued as a block of hospitality with seven hotels.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? A few variations from the neighborhood, Jean, beginning with a look south on First Avenue through University Street.
Another Gowey contribution. Lawton dated this slide May 23, 1969.
FIRST AVENUE SOUTH THRU UNIVERSITY STREET
Lawton Gowey dated this Oct. 25, 1974.
By April 19, 1976, Lawton’s date for his slide, the block is gone.
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Either Horace Sykes or Robert Bradley (they were friends in the Seattle Camera Club) recorded this look east on University Way in 1953 when the viaduct was opened to the club before, of course, the traffic. Here in the shadows at the bottom we see that the viaduct has been cut off at the east side of Western Avenue.Lawton Gowey’s up-close portrait of the viaduct’s stub, again looking east across Western Avenue, this time in 1982.
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WHERE THE UNIVERSITY STREET RAMP REACHED RAILROAD AVENUE
Looking west down the University Street ramp or viaduct in ca. 1900 towards ship impounded for and moving supplies for the Spanish American War. On the far right the Sung Harbor Saloon appears again, this time from behind. (Courtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.)
[NOTE: The NOW describe directly above has not been found, or rather a good print or the negative for it stays hidden.]
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WESTERN AVENUE LOOKING SOUTH FROM THE UNIVERSITY STREET VIADUCT
Another A. Curtis record, this one looking south on Western Avenue from the University Street ramp. The south end of the rank of hotels that crowd the west side of First Avenue between University and Seneca Streets rise above the narrow block of warehouse and manufacturing sheds that fill the block between Western and Post Alley (aka Post Avenue.)
Recorded from a back window of the Arlington Hotel, the subject looks northwest across the University Street viaduct to the industry to either side of Western Avenue and Railroad Avenue, circa 1899. The Schwabacher Dock, far left, faces Railroad Avenue. Next to it is an earlier version of the Pike Street Wharf, soon to be replace by what we still have as the city’s aquarium.
[ANOTHER NOTE: The “Contemporary photo noted in the paragraph directly above may have joined the other “now” subject missing above it. ]
The hole as Frank Shaw recorded it on March 11, 1975 and as many of us still remember it. Here the SeaFirst Tower still holds the majesty it grabbed with its topping-off in 1968.March 11, 1975, Frank ShawLandscaping, Nov. 21, 1975 (Frank Shaw)Terracing the hole, also Nov. 21, 1975 by Frank Shaw.October 25, 1974. Standing now almost in memoriam, the skin like a skull and the wits within nearly removed. “Thine are these orbs of light and shade; / Thou madest Life in man and brute; / Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot / is on the skull which thou hast made.” Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (Lawton Gowey)Less than three years later, a sampling of Friends of the Rag head south on First Ave., with the landmark Myres Music at 1216 and across First Ave. from “the hole,” during the Fat Tuesday Parade on Feb. 18, 1978. (Frank Shaw)
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Here – if Ron Edge reads his mail on awakening Sunday Morning – we may find a link for the story feature we published here on the Buzby’s Waterfront Mill, which was nearby at the foot of Seneca Street. After the story of Buzby and his pioneer flour, we follow Jean and his students off to Snoqualmie Falls for another now-then. After a few more digressions, the linked feature returns to the “hole,” above, for more of Frank Shaw’s photos of it. This may all transpire soon for Ron arises about the time I join the other bears here for another long winter’s sleep.
![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)
