Robert Ketcherside

Sherlock Holmes says, "The wheel turns; nothing is ever new." Evidence number one: the First Hill streetcar. Its shiny, new set of wheels will soon turn again on the buried bones of the oldest streetcar on Capitol Hill.

If you're well schooled on Capitol Hill history, you know these origin stories: David Denny began selling and leasing John Nagle's property along Broadway in 1880, and James Moore developed the Capitol Hill area near Volunteer Park after 1900. We're going to talk about the period in between, a piece of early streetcar history that has not been chronicled.

A Ridge Too Far
You may remember our recent article about the Pine Street regrade. Pine Street was part of a "series of radiating regrades [which] carved down and filled in Seattle's topography." We all know that the Jackson and Dearborn regrades cut First Hill away from Beacon Hill, and that the Pike, Pine and Olive regrades made some space between First Hill and Capitol Hill. On the back side, the 12th Avenue regrade smoothed out the connection between First Hill and Second Hill (read the 12th Ave Re:Take). Call it 1901 to 1911.

Before all of that civil engineering madness Seattle was Pioneer Square, surrounded by mudflats to the south, a rise culminating in Denny Hill to the north, and a ridge running from Brooklyn (University Bridge) all the way south to Orilla (I-5/405 interchange). Some smart landowners who had visited San Francisco decided to put a cable car up and over First Hill and Second Hill, and down the back side to Lake Washington -- the Lake Washington cable car on Yesler Way. 1887.

Next over the ridge was the Madison Street cable car, up over the peak of the hill and again all the way to Lake Washington. 1890.

Investors on James Street decided to try something different. They ran a very short cable car from Pioneer Square just up to Broadway. From there, several small streetcars headed to parks to the north (Broadway) and south (Beacon Hill) on the ridge, as well as out to beaches on Lake Washington (Madrona). They called the system the Union Trunk Line. It was paid for by Seattle investors for the growth of Seattle, and everything down to the wheels was built in Seattle. 1891.

First Car on James St. Line [1891] (Courtesy Seattle Public Library, SHP 5131)

The Photograph
Speaking to its provenance, the University of Washington has a copy the photo that is undated. 1890 is the date on the Seattle Public Library's torn but higher quality image. They're only off by a year.

We're looking at the cable car portion of UTL on James Street. Notice how the ground below it is a wide wood road, and not just rails? The cable ran below that, pulling the car up towards the powerhouse at Broadway.

The James cable was built from January to May 1891. A photo of this same car -- #12 Spokane -- just a few feet up the road with all of the same passengers in the same attire was printed in the October, 1891 edition of Street Railway Review. Definitely 1891.

Besides the streetcar, two buildings are visible in this scene at the intersection of James and Broadway.

Up on the right is the old powerhouse, which was destroyed in 1960 to create James Way, the curved connection between Broadway and 12th. You can step on over to Central District News to read an installment of CD Rewind about that. So we can skip that topic.

On the left is Castlemount, one of the few named homes in Seattle's history. It was the first mansion on First Hill, in a peaceful setting that was pretty much ruined by the construction of the junction of Union Trunk Line's branches. Paul Dorpat already covered the house and it's owner, G. O. Haller in Now & Then Vol. 2, and has posted it to HistoryLink. So we can skip that topic, too.

James Street Powerhouse in 1960 (SMA, 63703)

The Broadway Branch
Let's focus on Broadway.

We care about the north spur of the Union Trunk Line. Called the Broadway branch or Broadway line, it ran to City Park and the Masonic cemetery. You know them as Volunteer Park and Lake View Cemetery (discussed in this Re:Take). The streetcar ended at Lynn Street -- then known as Havens -- at the northern boundary of the City of Seattle.

Capitol Hill was hardly settled at all, and more than a decade away from being called "Capitol Hill." In the 1890 directory, the Masonic cemetery is simply described as "East side Lake Union near north end Broadway." And it was still half-wild, as the Street Railway Review illustrates:

A workman who, on 7th of August 1891, was building a small waiting station half way down the line, was chased by a bear that came out of the woods. (October, 1891 p443)

A 1954 Seattle Times article even related the tale that the conductors carried rifles to protect themselves from cougars.

Union Trunk Line had a vision to change that sylvan image. Today the city is building a separated bikeway on Broadway. UTL wanted something much more dramatic, a streetcar boulevard:

The Trunk Line company will not merely build a street railway along Broadway, but will improve that thoroughfare so as to make a splendid boulevard of it, and cause it to become the favorite drive of the city. [To the northern terminus,] the car tracks will occupy fourteen feet between the outside tracks [in the center of the street]. Beyond these... the company will plant shade trees on each side. Beyond these again will be [roadways] twenty-seven feet wide, with broad sidewalks bounding them on the outer side. (Seattle PI, 8/25/1890)

It's not clear how much of the boulevard was actually built. But the article goes on to describe ornate brackets planned for the electric poles. You can see that they were actually installed: one of them is in the center of our picture, with "UTL" monogrammed on each side.

Although David Denny had been busy leasing and then selling John Nagle's land along Broadway, there is little available evidence of any sort of community on Capitol Hill before the Union Trunk Line opened access.

I'll Have My Name in Lights

James D. Lowman (Wikimedia)

There was a long list of men involved in the financing, construction and operation of the Union Trunk Line. Reviewing the Articles of Incorporation, the city franchise agreement, newspaper articles, and other sources reveals a confusing array which makes you wonder who was really running the show. The Street Railway Review helpfully focuses on the officers: E. F. Wittler, president; James D. Lowman, secretary and manager; Joseph F. McNaught, vp; R. R. Spencer, treasurer.

Lowman was a nephew of Henry Yesler, and managed his affairs after 1886. This included a large property north of Roy Street along Broadway. Lowman and Yesler are also listed along with McNaught and Leigh S. J. Hunt as the four men who wrote loans to the Union Trunk Line to subsidize the creation of the Broadway branch.

McNaught was a successful lawyer who was even more successful in real estate. Outside of his Seattle investments, he created the city of Anacortes and built and sold wheat farms on the Palouse.

Hunt was the owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and later got rich (again) with a literal gold mine in Korea. While living in Germany he decided to get involved in large-scale cotton farming in Egypt. He made headlines by falsely claiming that Booker T. Washington was going to help settle workers with a "back to Africa" campaign.

While we're on the subject of restless men with kooky stories, it would be a shame to not mention Ernest Hussey. Hussey was a consulting engineer in Seattle, who took the job of General Superintendent of the Union Trunk Line in 1892 when Andrew Jackson moved on. Hussey was born in 1865 on his father's merchant sailing ship off the mouth of the Saigon River in French Indochina. At the age of three he was shipwrecked with his father for six months in Brazil after their ship burned at sea. He spent his formative years in Yokohama, Japan and left for Boston a couple of years after the Satsuma Rebellion. In Massachusetts he apprenticed under several civil engineers, learning his trade on the job.

All of these men were Seattle pioneers™. Through their investment and efforts, Broadway steadily developed and grew. In 1893's financial panic, though, many of them lost their Union Trunk Line holdings along with their fortunes. One of the men waiting to profit from their loss was Marcellus Harwood Young.

Young Man, 'Cuz You're In a New Town
M. H. Young visited Seattle in 1889, probably just after the Great Fire. He returned to Massachusetts and formed the New England Northwestern Investment Company. This poorly-understood corporation was formed by a group of Massachusetts men to make money in Seattle during the rebuilding and expansion after the Great Fire. Young moved from Boston in January of 1890 to manage it directly.

His name does not appear in any known document from the creation of the Union Trunk Line. Suddenly, though, in 1893 he became president, taking that spot from Wittler. One clue is a 1907 lawsuit, which described him as the holder of Henry Yesler's loan to the Union Trunk Line, and explained that Lowman had sold much of Yesler's real estate holdings under financial pressure. Possibly Young acquired other control of UTL and stepped in to lead the company during the financial collapse.

In 1899, UTL was one of the first companies to sell out to Seattle Electric Company. Jacob Furth methodically purchased every streetcar in Seattle for the national power and rail conglomerate Stone & Webster. UTL was one of only two SEC acquisitions to never enter bankruptcy, a testament to Young's leadership.

Young stayed as one of the executives at SEC, and oversaw the rebuilding and partial dismantling of UTL. The rails were upgraded, and new cars put into service. SEC took advantage of the municipal regrade of Pike Street to run rails directly from downtown, up Pike and north on Broadway, alleviating the need for a transfer at the top of the James Cable. This discontinued streetcar service from James to Pike, commencing a century-long gap in rail connection between the two hills.

The city bought out SEC in 1919, and streetcars disappeared from Broadway entirely in 1940. But let's save the Pike-Broadway streetcar story for another day.

Fransioli Home, 1102 Harvard E (Image: Rob Ketcherside)

Viking Ship Burial
When he first came to Seattle, Young lived on Second Hill at the corner of 17th and Spruce. In about 1894 he moved to Beacon Hill, at the corner of 13th S and Judkins. That's now just south of PacMed.

His daughter Josephine Young married Thomas Fransioli in 1901. They lived in a couple of apartments and then built a house in the north Broadway neighborhood (now Harvard-Belmont) when their first child was born. The birth of their second, Thomas, Jr., spurred them to hire a nanny and maid. They were living every young mom and dad's dream.

It got even better. In 1909, Grandfather Young gave up on Beacon Hill. Maybe he wanted to spend more time with his grand kids now that he was retired. Maybe his old house was inaccessible after the destruction of the ridge to Beacon Hill during the Dearborn and Jackson regrades. Whatever the cause, he built a mansion a block away from his daughter at Broadway and Prospect. It's condominiums now. It's also on page 146 of Classic Houses of Seattle, written by Seattle Central's Caroline Swope.

Young Home, 954 Broadway E (Image: Rob Ketcherside)

Soon after moving to North Broadway Young crossed paths with Joseph Glasgow, a character from the very first CHS Re:Take, Hidden Stories of Love. In Bagley's History of Seattle, the pinnacle of Glasgow's career is described as the defense of one Peter Miller. Miller had been convicted of burglaries and murder in and around Seattle and Tacoma. Glasgow had all of the convictions overturned, arguing that Miller had confessed under duress.

One of the homes burgled was Young's brand new mansion in June of 1909, during the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. It was the first of Miller's crimes that resulted in conviction.

Sadly, M. H. Young did not live to see Miller convicted of the burglary for the second time. Young died in January, 1913, and Miller was reconvicted in September, 1913.

But Young died in marvelous fashion. Here was a man that led the Union Trunk Line for almost a decade, and himself lived on and commuted on the line for his entire time in Seattle. Even if he wasn't involved in its construction, he was pivotal to its success. So it is poetic the way that Young died.

He spent the evening with his daughter Josephine Fransioli, playing cards at the home of his friend Howard Thomas at Broadway and Columbia. Around midnight they walked to Pike and boarded the streetcar for the ride home. He and Josephine chatted idly. Suddenly Young gasped and leaned back in his seat. He was dead almost immediately of a heart attack.

Addendum: He Did What?
M. H. Young is best remembered for coining the name of Beacon Hill. Supposedly. But, where's the evidence? Here's a typical citation on the Internet, from the city's page for Beacon Hill Park:

M.H. Young, who developed a street car line to Beacon Hill in 1895, suggested the name for the hill--and thus the playground--after Beacon Hill in his native Boston, Massachusetts.

We already know the streetcar was built in 1891, not 1895. The quote comes straight from the usually-reliable Don Sherwood park history file, so I don't blame the city. But did Young really name Beacon Hill?

Here's what HistoryLink has to say:

Union Army veteran and real estate developer M. Harwood Young (1846-1913) named the hill in 1889 for Boston's historic Beacon Hill and built a streetcar line connecting the neighborhood to downtown.

The Don Sherwood document listed is a source for the article. The only other trustworthy source is Clarence Bagley. In 1916's History of Seattle, Bagley erroneously listed M. H. Young as one of the founders of the Union Trunk Line. Bagley said, "On November 10, 1891, the Union Trunk Line was organized by J. D. Lowman, M. H. Young, E. H. Wittler and associates." The date is wrong. Wittler and Lowman along with a host of other important Seattle men funded, built and operated the Trunk Line. But, Young doesn't enter the UTL paper trail until 1893. So we can't trust Bagley. M. H. Young did not build a streetcar line connecting Beacon Hill to downtown. But did he really name Beacon Hill?

The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods Beacon Hill Historic Context Statement puts it this way:

M. Harwood Young, a Union Army veteran and representative of New England and Northwest Investment Company of Boston, moved to the Beacon Hill area in 1889. Young came to Seattle as an investor with an interest in building Seattle’s streetcar system. Mr. Young gave Beacon Hill its name.

In his obituary in 1913, his family says he moved to Seattle in 1890. Various histories of Seattle say that he moved here in January, 1890. He didn't move to Beacon Hill until about 1894. The name of the company he represented in Seattle was New England Northwestern Investment Company, not that variant. It's strange that in a citation-heavy document, no source is listed for information about Young. This is extremely suspect. But did he name Beacon Hill?

You Have No Reason to Believe
There's one possibility. NENIC could have owned a chunk of property on Beacon Hill, and subsidized the south extension on Broadway. But where is the evidence? Someone on Beacon Hill needs to stop freakin' and figure out who really named Beacon Hill and why.

There should be an easy paper trail if it was Young. During 1889 or 1890 he would have needed to make a major marketing splash with a large real estate development. Otherwise, why would they put "Beacon Hill" on the front of the Union Trunk Line streetcars in 1891?

Getting Closure
At least up here we have a healthy debate about the origin of Capitol Hill. We know it was Moore, we know he was talking about having the state capitol here, and only wonder if he was sincere about that. Down on Beacon Hill they settle for tacit acceptance of a hole-ridden story.

What is completely clear and certainly not up for debate is that the Union Trunk Line was pivotal in developing Broadway from Volunteer Park to First Hill -- as well as developing north Beacon Hill and Madrona. In 1891 these far-flung pastures and woods were suddenly directly connected to the heart of the city.

It was the birth of the neighborhoods we know and love.

Special thanks to Richard Wilkens for sharing UTL documents. Also to the rest of the nascent Seattle Street Railway Historical Society (email seattlestreetrailwayhistory@gmail.com for meeting info). Thanks to Dotty Decoster for spotting the historic photo. And of course SPL and SMA.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• Why Capitol Hill's Bauhaus block matters
• The Carroll, the girls, and the dirt -- Naming an unnamed Capitol Hill alley
• Undermining the Republican Senator from Melrose

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.

The possibility of losing the stores in the "Bauhaus block" (technically, 1535 Bellevue Ave E and the Melrose Building) really troubles me. It's not simple fear of change. And it's more than my love for old buildings and their stories. Can I quantify what's bothering me?

I'll put the conclusion first: we need more, smaller commercial spaces.

Death of Pike/Pine
Back at the end of 2006 I took a tally of the street-facing businesses on East Pine Street from Minor to Broadway.

I was living in Tokyo, and deeply saddened by the impending loss of my favorite places in Seattle: Kincora, Manray, Bimbo's Bitchin Burrito Kitchen, and Cha Cha. Okay, I was living in Tokyo thinking "what a bunch of chumps!" as I watched Seattle undo itself.

I had just wrapped up a historiopsychogeography of the street rises of Tokyo's Akasaka neighborhood. Next, I turned my attention to another Tokyo street form: shoutengai, or commercial streets. This time I was in Koenji. Along the way, I created a business-by-business index of a one-third mile stretch of the shopping street Koenji Look, and of Pine Street, a shopping corridor in Seattle with many similarities.

Let's ignore the whole international comparison for now, and instead contrast Pine Street over 6 years.

bauhaus ne view, originally uploaded by subetsum

Long Live the Remnants of Pike/Pine
There were 44 store fronts on Pine (Minor to Broadway) back then. Despite additional construction, there are only 37 now. While they were all full in 2006, five are vacant today.

Another way to look at it, though, is that 20 of the same businesses are still there almost six years later. That's 54% of the businesses that weren't demolished. But on the Bauhaus block, six of seven businesses - 85% - have weathered the Great Recession. Mud Bay Granary, Le Frock, Edie's, Wall of Sound, Vutique and of course Bauhaus are all still here. Wall of Sound also squeezed in Spine & Crown Books from up the street. Scout replaced Vutique's partner Vu after they consolidated.

It's more remarkable when you consider that the dense activity of Melrose Market didn't exist yet, and the Marion Apartments have sat derelict across the street for the whole time. Something about the Bauhaus block has been extremely attractive to customers.

Today, the Bimbo's block is finally being rebuilt. It took away seven store fronts and will replace it with about four. Let's hope that they do better than the large space that can't keep a healthy business across the street at Press. Press should have 5 businesses the size of Third Man Video. (Aside: I remember a video game arcade on that lot that was demolished but can't remember the rest... anyone?)

Another Arrow for your Quiver
How can it be good for our city's commerce to displace these healthy stores (with obviously strong or adaptive business models!), and replace them with bigger, pricier spaces that pose challenges to new tenants? How can it be good for walkability?

Of course, the answer is that it is clearly not good for economics or for walkability.

A recent study of the U-Cal Transportation Center found that - duh! - lots of businesses nearby each other encourage people to walk more. But more than that, it's apparently the biggest factor that makes people walk:

Our results show that the number of businesses per acre is the single most robust indicator of whether people are likely to walk in their neighborhood.

(h/t to Jon Geeting for the more readable summary.)

And what we've known for the last 100 years -- 80 if you don't speak German -- is that commercial success increases with concentration. It's called agglomerative economics or spacial density. Back in 1909 they were looking at industrial adjacency. But the same math applies to retail.

To be clear, that math is 1 + 1 = 2.3. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (Actually, it's more like "each part is worth more when summed to a whole".)

If our goal is density, we need to grow up and start thinking about every trip being taken, not just commutes. Having people live near work doesn't address what should be our biggest transportation goal: keeping the economy healthy. Business concentration does.

Bonus Time
Okay, now let's go with the international comparison.

Koenji Look (Photo by Author)

In 2006, Koenji Look had 181 business in the one-third mile stretch between Shin-Koenji Station and Koenji Station. Yes, that's a store every 20 feet on both sides.

That's gross density, so I have not subtracted intersections, parks, or other non-private development. It does include some side streets which have businesses for a few yards, but adding the same frontage to Pine Street only adds two or three stores.

To put that in context, the Bauhaus block has a business every 25 feet. The other side of the street is not commercial, so the effective density is a business every 50 feet of street frontage. Include half of the Melrose and Bellevue intersections to get gross density, and it drops even further, to about 1/65'. So we would need to squeeze in a couple more stores and replicate it on the other side as well to match Koenji Look. And then run that all the way to Broadway. Of course I'm ignoring the third dimension here, cutting Seattle some slack over wide streets.

You can imagine how the density of Koenji equates to walkability and to commercial activity. There is constant experimentation with carts (uncounted in my tally!) and growth into retail spaces and out with second stores or larger quarters elsewhere. The vintage shopping is so good that young people take charter buses from far-flung regional cities to spend a Sunday browsing and buying old clothes.

But, the numbers for Koenji bare out that change is everywhere. 53% of the businesses remain from six years ago, but that means 48 have changed and 29 store fronts no longer have unique tenants (empty, expanded-into or vanished). On the other hand, 10 new addresses are filled.

Another Look at Koenji Look

It's probably too late to hope to ever get business density like this on a street in Seattle. But like the Bauhaus block, maximum agglomeration should be encouraged parcel by parcel anyways.

Here's a great model that a developer could give a shot at. An astounding watering-hole incubator was built a decade ago in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo. They took a small parking lot and turned it into two dozen tiny pubs, bars and restaurants. That city overall is becoming more auto-centric, and the old shoutengai suffer as big box stores on the periphery successively skyrocket and flame out. But Yatai Yokocho, the incubator, is busy. It has spun off larger restaurants and is bucking the trend with droves of walkers.

In Conclusion, The Spoiled Ending
I'd love to sit in Bauhaus and look out the window on a horde of pedestrians where the parking lot next to Pho Tai "used to be". It would certainly beat sitting in a car next to Pho Tai staring at another ugly apartment box with a drug store or liquor store in the bottom, where Bauhaus "used to be".

There are many other good reasons to want Bauhaus and its neighbors to stay in place: sustainability, preservation, character, gratitude, habit. Density is another great reason to leave it untouched. After all, it's already helping us meet a goal of a healthy economy. Why aren't we filling in the empty places and derelict properties instead?

We need more, smaller commercial spaces.

The official name of this spot is the "Alley in Block 34 of the Pontius Addition." That's kind of perfect because it's so abstract. Block-what? Pontius-what? Even if you love secret alleys, there's no way you use platspeak to talk about them.

So let's figure out the true name of this place by delving into the poorly understood discipline of psychogeography. That's the term coined by some French anti-artist in the 1950's for the study of the connection between place and the human psyche.

We'll look at a few of the people impacted by the place in this photo at the time it was taken. Then you should be able to come up with a few candidates for the true name of the alley. Our starting points are the photograph's basic elements: the Carroll, the girls, and the dirt.

May 22, 1909 (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives)

In the last CHS Re:Take, we argued that you should start referring to 12th and Union as Division's Damp Depression. This time, we want you to tell us what to call this alley. Because we know you love alleys as much as we do.

The view is May 22, 1909, looking up the alley from Thomas to Harrison between Bellevue and Melrose. The scene is a derelict public works project, left less than half done and more than a half year behind schedule.

There must have been so much work for the drawn-out Denny regrade and rapid construction of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition that the contractors just couldn't find enough people to do an unimportant alley job.

1912 Baist (Courtesy Paul Dorpat and Ron Edge)

The Carroll
On the right are the windows of the cheaper rooms below view units in the Carroll Apartments. It's on the northwest corner of Thomas and Bellevue. It was just a year old, newly erected in 1908. If you're keeping score at home, the Carroll is on pages 169 to 171 of Shared Walls.

One of the upper floor apartments was the residence of Clara and William Wiley. William was working as a real estate broker, his latest in a string of hustling professions. He was successful enough though to provide for a live-in servant now that their children were grown.

Their live-in, part-time servant -- Teijiro Tamura -- was a full-time political science major at the UW. He was a member of the Japanese student club and the international students' Cosmopolitan Club. Tamura stayed to get his Master's degree and then returned to Japan, where he successfully passed the foreign service exam in 1917.  He worked at the Japanese embassy in D.C., the consulate in Chicago, and he was consulate general in Hawaii. CG Tamura was pushing the imperialist, nationalist party line to Japanese in Hawaii just a few years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. What happened to him after that is tucked away somewhere in the archives of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

You have to wonder if the Wileys knew what became of the man who cooked their meals and ran their errands.

Laura and Mary Virginia in 1915 (Mar 21 1915 ST)

Girls
There were plenty of kids in the neighborhood in 1909. But most of them were a bit older than the two girls in our photo, picking their way down the dirt alley.

The younger girl could be Laura Ketcham, youngest daughter of Albert and Laura Ketcham. Their large family lived in the house just up on the left of the alley, at 314 Melrose. The older girl could be her cousin Mary Virginia Ketcham, who lived further up the street at the three Bellevues. "Cousin" might not be exactly accurate: their paternal grandmothers were sisters, and their paternal grandfathers were brothers. Is there a word for that?

A few weeks after this photograph, little Laura's maternal grandfather General James B. Weaver visited Seattle, staying with the family and heading to the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition with them.

Despite everything else happening in the Queen City, he was front page news for the Seattle Times. Weaver was a national celebrity. He ran for president in 1892 on the Populist party ticket, grabbing four states and 30% of the vote in our nascent King County.

Populist Party poster, 1892 (Wikipedia)

He was one of the most successful third-party presidential candidates in American history, and the media loved hearing his outsider, maverick opinion on current politics. Here's what he told the Seattle Times:

Congress will greatly disappoint the people and from all present appearances will be guilty of a perfidious betrayal of public confidence... The men who control the destinies of the Republican party are pursuing the tactics of Machiavelli -- they obtained power by promises of relief, and, now in power, purpose to do as they please and trust for immunity in the forgetfulness of the people and the increased power of the 'interests' to keep them in position and control. (12 Jul 1909)

Yes, the Populists had a whole bunch of great ideas, but they were also the party of doom-and-gloom rhetoric. If you think the Tea Party or Occupy Movement are pessimistic, go back and read the preamble to the Populist party's 1892 platform. Here are some highlights:

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin... The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

And remember, that was before the financial panic of 1893. And 1907. So you know they only got worse. Or better, depending on your political leanings.

Mary Virginia (1926 Tyee); Laura (1923 Tyee)

General Weaver died a couple of years later at the ripe age of 88. The girls grew up, of course.

Laura graduated from the UW in 1923, went to graduate school in Boston, moved to New York, got married, moved to Las Vegas, got divorced and moved to Long Beach. In California she lived nearby her nephew Hank Ketcham as he became the famous cartoonist of Dennis the Menace.

Mary Virginia missed out on all that. She got a late start at the UW, enrolling in 1926 after Laura graduated. In 1929, she suffered an illness for three weeks and succumbed at age 28. Her photo made it into the UW's annual Tyee as an underclassmen for membership in Daughters of the American Revolution.

The rest of the Ketcham clan spread out around Seattle, each generation upholding General Weaver's patriotism and their DAR roots through military service in every major American war. Even Dennis "The Menace" Ketcham volunteered to serve, joining the Marines and suffering through Vietnam.

Stanley advertisement (Feb 25 1906 Seattle Times)

Dirt
Laura and Mary Virginia picked their way down the dirt alley. They walked around deep tire ruts, over makeshift plank ramps, next to piles of construction debris.

The alley wasn't supposed to be dirt anymore. Contractor John Stanley had been hired in 1908 to regrade and pave the alley. An article in early April of 1909 chastised contractors for not completing public works projects in preparation for AYPE. This alley was called out for being only 24% done and already 202 days overdue. An update in May said no progress had been made.

John managed his father's firm, William Stanley & Co, and they were simply swamped with projects, public and private. They did streetcar lines, railroads, street regrades, highway paving, and sometimes even alleys. The family had worked together for at least a decade, when William dragged John and his brother Samuel Stanley to the Klondike gold rush.

William Stanley became world famous as one of the richest passengers on the steamer Portland in 1897. The Portland carried the first prospectors to come back from the Klondike in Yukon Territory, and it hauled a legendary ton of gold in its safes. William Stanley had an easy $100,000 -- a couple million in today's money. His story was told widely, and it slowly became caricature of reality.

He's now remembered as a bookseller and a blacksmith. Called "Papa" Stanley, he reportedly went to Alaska at the age of 68. The truth is that he was more of a machinist and civil engineer. He was a blacksmith before joining the Civil War, and then gradually acquired new skills as he moved west, doing work on railroads across the country and even in Hawaii. And he was mature but not elderly when he headed north, only 52.

At the time of our photograph, William was in California sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent. Samuel lived with his family over on 17th just east of Volunteer Park. And John, the object of Seattle Times' ire, lived just down the hill from our alley at Fairview and Mercer.

William Stanley (Broadway High 1924)

John's two children probably knew this alley well. Jacqueline Stanley was an underclassman of Laura Ketcham at Broadway High, and her brother WilliamStanley just a couple of more years back. Their route to school would take them up the Harrison steps and past here.

Hilariously, William went on to work for the City of Seattle's Complaint Department of all places. Maybe if his dad finished the projects on time, there wouldn't be a need to field so many complaints.

Somewhere along the line, William must have learned to fly. At age 37 he volunteered for World War II, and served his country flying unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. These were fighter planes with guns replaced by cameras. He was awarded for service in Normandy, apparently flying in the 10th Photographic Group's harrowing, low-altitude runs in preparation for D-Day.

William returned to Seattle after the war, and took over his parents' house after they passed away. Ironically a public roads project hired another contractor to demolish John Stanley's mansion. It's now the I-5 on-ramp at Mercer.

Name That Alley
You've got the background, so, what should we name this spot? Here's a low bar that you can certainly improve on: Ketcham Flak Alley.

You can do it like Guy Debord, taking a couple of friends and wandering the area and chatting about your impressions of the article. Think about what stands out and share it with us in comments.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• Division's Damp Depression at 12th and Union
• Undermining the Republican Senator from Melrose
• What became of the almost tallest building on Pike?

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS.

It would make a good band name. And it's our vote for naming the old 'hood at 12th and Union: Division's Damp Depression. Read on for the explanation.

This installment starts with a look east out the window of the Broadway Silver Cloud Inn. The UW and the Washington State Historical Society both had this panorama's vantage labeled as Broadway High School. We emailed them to correct it. Because back in about 1905 (say it "ninteen-five" for added hipness) the b&w photo was taken from the top of the original, newly-built Broadway Building at the northeast corner of Broadway and Madison. The Broadway Building can wait for a future article. This time we're focused on the area from Broadway to 13th, Pike to Spring.

[Looking east to] Second Hill, Seattle (Courtesy University of Washington Libraries,CUR283 and CUR284)

The street angling across from the bottom right is Madison. So on the right side is Seattle University today. Union Street crosses it at the center of the photo, and you would expect the Public Storage building to be just to the right of it. Twelfth is a bit subtle at this resolution, so scroll down to get your bearings. The empty spot in the middle along Union is for now the Undre Arms apartments.

Here's a zoom in on the center so we can take a closer look. The yellow arrow points to 11th and Union, the intersection of a dirt road and a dirt path. The red arrow points to the Victorian on 12th which was visible in the 1920 photo discussed in a recent Re:Take. The green arrow is essentially an apartment building, 8 units with six rooms each that were subleased. This was replaced by an auto dealership after the 12th Avenue regrade, and is now Ferrari-Maserati. The pink arrow points to a building blocking off the end of Union diagonally. And the blue arrow points to a building halfway to 13th that is already higher than the top of the turret of the Victorian, showing just how deep the hollow was.

Back in 1905 the neighborhood was the bottom of a hollow depression. First Hill rose to the west, and Second Hill (or Renton Hill or Cherry Hill or whatever) rose to the east. And apparently it was actually, really depressing. When Mount Zion Church moved from 11th and Union, they said their old spot was "too damp and cold." The Seattle Times had some choice words for this neighborhood in a 1908 article, saying it was a bunch of cheap shacks:

Some businesses has already developed along Pine, Pike and Madison from Broadway east, but it is rather of a cheap sort and not such as adds greatly to property values. Taken as a whole, the Twelfth Avenue district looms large in possible development, but shows small in actual improvement. Portions of it have even taken a bad start backward, as for instance around the narrow part of East Union Street, and show a tendency to run to shacks, stables and so forth to the jeopardy of property values. (ST Jun 28 1908 page 65)

12th and Union in 1899 (SMA 1553)

If you look closely you'll notice that Union west of Madison was a dirt road. On maps like this city water pipeline map from 1899, it's clear that Union Street didn't even go through.

Last time reader bryan suggested in comments the topic of Capitol Hill's street names, especially the ones we got rid of. Reader Andreas helped out with a link to the 1895 ordinance that erased the wacky names from the map.

Here's one. If you notice, all of the old names are crossed out on this map with new names written. It makes a handy reference. Union used to be called Division Street. The street was the dividing line between John Nagle's platted properties on the north, and the property of Captain Renton, A. A. Denny and a few smaller plats on the south.

This is The Explanation
Did you catch all that? Division Street ran down in a valley that Mount Zion thought was cold and damp. Hence, Division's Damp Depression.

This was the Scranton of Capitol Hill. An awful, awful, sad place filled with sad, desperate people. Okay, it wasn't that bad. But it was certainly quite different from the lawyers and ranchers on Broadway, or Pike with its politicians or First Hill with retired newspaper moguls and other big wigs.

Rather, Division's Damp Depression was filled with working class people: a cable car gripman, concrete finisher, machinist, janitor, laborer, bricklayer, and saw oiler are just a few examples. With them, many owners of the stores fronting on the Madison cable line lived in the neighborhood as well, including a  Japanese tailor.

Robert James (Bob Lemke's Blog)

A Few Profiles
Robert James lived with his wife and his brother Harry in 1112 Madison, the building with the pink arrow above. Robert and Harry were Seattle pioneers™, arriving as children with their parents in 1888.

Robert's profession is listed as miner in the 1901 city directory, but by the 1910 census he had changed to player. When this week's photo was taken in about 1905, "Bobby" was first baseman for the Seattle Siwashes, who played at a park on 12th at Yesler.

He left to play ball in Bellingham, and refused to report to Indianapolis when his contract was bought out. He came back home to finish his brief career.

After Bobby James' time in baseball ended, he went back to the laboring world. He worked as a shearman for Pacific Coast Steel and Bethlehem Steel in West Seattle for 40 years.

Alma Burgess Osterloh (Seattle Times Sept 8, 1915)

Alma Burgess was one of the depression's residents that left at least a few traces of her life. The 1910 census shows her at age 12 living with her sister and mother at 1409 12th, one of the units replaced by the Ferrari-Maserati Building. They also had two boarders. Alma married one of them, Walter Osterloh, as soon as she turned 18. They moved to Phinney Ridge, started a grocery store and raised a family.

A group of earlier residents in the building shared a unit and commuted together on the cable car to jobs as nurses at the Battle Creek Sanitarium at Second and University. It was a spa, called a bath house back then. They offered 700 different treatments including "Russian baths, needle sprays, hydraulic treatment, salt glows, and massage." Their specialty was an electric bath, described as "twenty-eight 32-candle power incandescent lights inclosed in a cabinet lined with plate-glass mirrors." That sounds like a tanning bed today, but back then it was used to sanitize the entrant.

Thomson's Anti-Depressant
Of course the city filled the whole neighborhood in a few years later during the 12th Avenue Regrade as discussed in the article back in January. Some of the buildings of the old neighborhood were demolished outright, and some were raised on stilts to the new street level. Finally the development of Auto Row with its garages, warehouses and showrooms replaced the homes, boarding houses and apartments lot by lot.

It's no wonder that the archives were confused about where the photo was taken. There's nothing left to recognize. Even the streets have changed.

Special thanks to the management of the Silver Cloud Inn for permission to photograph from a guest room.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• Undermining the Republican Senator from Melrose
• What became of the almost tallest building on Pike?
• The tunnel from Capitol Hill to downtown that never happened

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS.

In 1909, an outhouse teetered twenty feet over the junction of Melrose, Minor and Pike. Recently a CHS Re:Take explained how City Engineer R. H. Thompson filled in the 12th Avenue gully, and it showcased Thomson's thoughts of tunneling to downtown. This is more traditional Thomson handiwork here.

First let's figure out where we are, then let's talk about the owner of the house, and finally it's probably worth figuring out why that house is way up there.

Where are we?
UW Special Collections has an incorrect caption saying this is Bellevue and Pike in 1909. If you've hung out on lower Pike enough, you know that this is not Bellevue. The angles are wrong. Trust your gut. You're looking east north on Melrose and Minor from Pike Street.

Baist Fire Insurance Map, 1912 (Dorpat and Edge)

You probably noticed that the old Butterworth Mortuary - recently Chapel, now Pine Box - is missing here. Well, it wasn't built until 1922. There's nothing left of 1909 in this scene, so you'll need to look carefully at that map up above. The buildings off to the left were on Pine, the row on the north side between Minor and the alley. Those are the parking lot across from the Baltic Room today. Over on the right is an apartment building on the east side of Melrose east of Pine. Today that's another parking lot, the one behind the old mortuary.

(Courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, SEA1305)

Whose house was that?

Frank Renick (Seattle Republican)

That house belonged to Seattle pioneer™ Frank Renick. The trademarked definition of a Seattle pioneer is "arrived in Seattle before the Great Fire." Renick was born in Connecticut and went to school in Concord, Buffalo and Detroit. He arrived in Seattle in 1888 from Kansas City at the age of 24. Like most of the people drawn to Seattle back then, he was restless.

Renick sold fire insurance, starting his firm the year he arrived, before the Great Fire. You'd think that would have been a bad move, but apparently not. With partner J. C. Waltrous he had a vertical business managing properties, renting, buying, selling, negotiating loans and even dealing with logging on timber land.

He was also busy directly in real estate, and with his partner Herbert Upper in 1891 laid down the plat for the Upper & Renick Belt Line Addition to Seattle. The plat specifically claims it was an addition to the City of Seattle, but it was way the heck over across Lake Washington, in south Bellevue just up from Factoria. He bought and sold other property around Seattle, including a number of spots in Pike/Pine.

On the side he dabbled in politics. At the time of this photo he was in his third term in the Washington State House, and at the time of his death in 1921 he was a State Senator. He was perhaps the earliest elected official from Capitol Hill. And he was Republican.

For fulfillment he was interested in photography, joining the International Photographic Association in 1913. More than that, he loved ornithology. He was an avid bird watcher and collector. Here's a letter about wildlife on Seattle's early waterfront that he sent to the journal "Ornithologist and oölogist" in 1893:

In Oliver Davie's book on birds, an account is given of the eggs, etc., of the Black Swift taken at Yesler's wharf on salt water. Would say that I have been here since 1888, when they were claimed to have been taken. I have never seen the Swift on salt water. On Lake Washington (fresh water), a few miles distant, they are abundant, occassionally flying within gunshot. Around Yesler's wharf Purple Martins are plenty and were during 1888. The Swift seems to keep away from habitation, and Yesler's wharf in 1888 was the scene of great bustle and activity. I have watched the Swift and think they breed in hollow trees inland. Mr. S. F. Rathburn and the writer thinks, perhaps, those eggs found in 1888, at Yesler's wharf, were Purple Martins. I would be glad to hear from the owner of the set of eggs.

Bushtits (Flickr user Ken Phenicie Jr.)

He even collected and donated four items which are still in the collection of the Smithsonian Institute. They are one bushtit skin, and three nests with eggs from a bushtit, junco, and white crowned sparrow.

After being elected to the state House of Representatives in 1905 his first proposed law was a ban on bird hunting on Lake Washington and within a mile around it. He claimed it was for safety because of houses along the shore, but he was really aiming for a wildlife preserve. The game warden gave him a jade pin in thanks.

Another legislative milestone was the 1915 Renick Law, which forced cities to use the money they collected for its intended use. No more random projects with left over money from local improvement districts created for regrades, or paying for streetcars with sewer funds. The law was much hated in Seattle, and as you saw above, he had some personal experience.

What were they digging?
The Melrose photo shows the Pine Street regrade nearing completion. From 1907 to 1909, this regrade flattened out Pine Street from 7th to Boylston.

Proposed Change of Grade, c1905 (SPU 76-24-1)

Certainly you've heard of the Denny regrade, which flattened Denny Hill. That started in 1898, and really kicked into gear from 1903 to 1910. As city engineer R. H. Thomson got good at it -- and as extra dirt piled up -- a series of radiating regrades carved down and filled in Seattle's topography from Lake Union to Elliott Bay, through downtown to Dearborn and back around First Hill on 12th. There are a long list of long lost topographical features. After Denny Hill, the most famous are Denny's Knoll (essentially Rainier Square downtown) and Jackson Street Hill (the missing ridge between First and Beacon hills).

Totally forgotten are the features involved in the Pine Street regrade: the Howell Plateau; the Eighth Avenue Ridge; and Pike Street Hill. The Howell Plateau was a stretch of flat ground north of Howell to Denny. Below it a ravine snaked south. There was a ridge on the west of the ravine, cresting at Eighth Avenue and leading down steeply to Seventh as it dropped into the Westlake Avenue Valley. On the east was the Pike Street Hill. On Pine it had a steep cliff at Minor Avenue, but on Pike it was more gradual until a cliff at Summit Avenue. Next time you ride a 10, 11 or 49 bus, imagine the trolley is switching back between peaks as it turns on Bellevue Avenue. (Back then it made the switch on Melrose.)

Topographic Map, 1899 (USGS T-2421 Map and info at UW)

The first attempt to wipe out these glacial remnants was over on Pike Street from 7th to Boylston. After a slight rounding in 1901, the ridge and cliff were flattened and the ravine filled in 1903.

That introduced the steep drop at Renick's house on this side of Melrose. Even with the cut, carts pulled by teams of horses were still forced to climb a steep seven percent grade on Pike for block after block. One icy day in early 1907, horses were maimed and put down after trying to pull loads up the hill from 9th.

It may seem outrageous to claim that horses were killed on Pike, so here's the Seattle Times quote from the front page of January 9, 1907, under the subheading "Seven Shot on Pike in Three Hours' Time":

Local transfer companies estimated that no less than fifty horses had been killed in Seattle in the last three days, resulting from injuries sustained in falling on the icy streets... At the Eyres Transfer Company it was stated today that seven horses were killed within three hours on the Pike Street hill east of Ninth Avenue...

Humane Officer Clark says the injuries to the horses are due almost entirely to the fact that they were not rough shod and that with smooth shoes it was impossible for the animals to keep their feet.

The Pine Street regrade, along with nearby Olive Street regrade, started in the Spring.

Here's the basic math of a regrade. Start with an almost impassably hilly street. Properties on this street will be lower in value than if they were easily accessible. If the street is improved, the property value will increase. So the regrade is paid for by creating a Local Improvement District which assesses each land owner based on the increase in value. Owners with buildings are paid for lost value from destruction or costs for moving or altering a building. As an added bonus for land owners, they are given the opportunity to have their property's height raised or lowered by the contractor at the same cost as the city, a very discounted rate.

Entrapped 1516 Melrose

Not everyone agreed that spending all of this money was a good idea. Each regrade was fought by a group of owners, who were unable to prevent it. Some of them were awarded larger compensation by the courts. Some weren't satisfied, and refused the offer to have contractors modify their property. Over on Denny Hill, where street levels were changed more than 100 feet, Badlands-like towers called spite mounds became iconic in Seattle.

The Pike Street Hill left a few as well. Renick's home stands out here. You can see the 45-degree angle of the rise, after the contractors cut it to 1 foot elevation to 1 foot depth.  Renick continued to rent it out after the regrade, but eventually he caved in. The auto row building now used by Madison Melrose Market replaced it in 1919. There are still a couple hold outs across the street, though, sitting on  the last remnants of Pike Street Hill.

1524 Melrose

You can find more regrade remnants like this around the neighborhood, where property owners thought the hill would be surmountable afterwards. Renick owned another over on Belmont just south of Pike -- it's being sold as studio condominiums now. There's even a fun chunk of untouched hillside between Olive Street and Olive Way below Crawford Place. Then there are all of the deep parking lots around 12th and E Union, from when the sleepy hollow was filled in.

Right now you can see another chunk of old street level at 10th and Union. The wedded warehouse is being demolished and its basement sits on old ground. Best yet, make sure your membership at the Burke Museum is paid up. When they get it out on display, you'll be able to see the sidewalk from Pine Street that Sound Transit dug out of their light rail tunnel last year. It was 35 feet down there. It was at the bottom of the ravine at Terry Street, down at the original street level.

Renick home on Belmont

What happened to Frank Renick?
Immediately after the regrade, Frank moved up on Belmont south of Pike. The yellow building is still there across from the old Willys Overland dealership profiled last time on CHS Re:Take. It's clinging to retaining walls over the cut-out street. One of his daughters married and moved further up on Harvard between Pine and Olive. The other married and followed the regrades to her new home on Beacon Hill.

Frank and his wife Alice were divorced in 1918, so Frank was living alone when he died in 1921. He was asleep in bed when he was overcome by gas fumes from the bedside fixture. His business partner J. T. Waltrous didn't think anything when Frank didn't show up to sign documents. The State Senate wasn't in session.

Finally a concerned neighbor contacted authorities about the pile of newspapers on his doorstep. Luckily, Belmont is still steep enough that you can see to the front porch from the street. The spite mounds on Melrose on the other hand are impenetrable.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• What became of the almost tallest building on Pike?
• The tunnel from Capitol Hill to downtown that never happened
• The social network of Capitol Hill's Auto Row, 1921 and 2012

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.

1909 Seattle Times proposal and 1910 reality (Images: Rob Ketcherside)

In this installment, the old auto row building at 517 East Pike lets us look at what is, what was, and what could have been. We'll even get a peak at what is soon to be -- so metaphysical!

Today it's best known for Kaladi Brothers Coffee and Gay City Health. The space next to them was an interior store until recently, and now it's being remodeled for the coffee shop and clinic to move into bigger digs.

Less well known is that the upstairs is home to building owner Chip Ragen's landscape architecture firm Ragen & Associates. Chip dropped a comment on the recent Re:Take Social Network of Auto Row and mentioned his building. A guided tour ensued.

The second floor still shows signs that it was a mechanic garage. The floors are made of concrete. An old Alenlube grease pump is attached to the ceiling. A pipe runs through the skylight, used to vent exhaust fumes from tubes to joints spaced throughout the wide open room.

Up in the crawl space is an amazing remnant of auto row. Car parts litter the rafters, trapped overhead until they are someday cut out. Ragen & Associates sales manager Craig Nixon sent photos off to car enthusiast friends. They recognized the front grill from a 1929 Ford.

Things get more confusing downstairs. In the back of the new Kaladi space, a set of windows look out on the bottom of fifteen feet of dirt. Belmont rises steeply from Pike Street here, and the hillside was filled in on the back of the building at some point to make the parking lot.

Head downstairs to Gay City Health and things get weirder. We all know the story of Underground Seattle, and even if you haven't done the tour you've certainly noticed the glass blocks in the sidewalk in Pioneer Square, often lit from below. Down there the street level was raised after the buildings were constructed. And that left empty space under the sidewalks.

Well, have you ever noticed the blocks outside of Kaladi? Look under the tables, chairs and planter, and you'll see those same blocks.

Also take a look next to the curb like Chip's doing, below, and you'll see the door for a freight entrance. And man, the foundation is seriously overbuilt down there.

For the last hundred years we've all been stumped about what the eff the architect was thinking. Now with the digitized Seattle Times all is revealed. The answer is quite simple and a bit cool.

In 1909, McLaughlin Realty Company started construction for a new eight-story "bachelor apartment" building called The Michigan at the southeast corner of Belmont and Pike. They ran this image when it was first announced, saying that the "foundation and basement are about completed."

May 30, 1909 Seattle Times, Page 32.

That's the elegant explanation for the out-of-character basement and sidewalk. This will probably come up as an argument for the higher height limits in Pike/Pine being considered now. Sure, if it's built all in brick, with 185 small studio-pods, and sports a communal billiard room, rooftop garden, gym, and Turkish bath. Maybe we could forgive eight floors for that.

McLaughlin ran the image in February and May. Then suddenly in August they ran a photo of a near-complete "Motor Building". They were looking for a tenant for a hurriedly built auto row show room. McLaughlin read the changing winds on Pike Street perfectly. Two days later San Francisco firm J. W. Leavitt announced plans to expand their Willys Overland business to Seattle. They told the Times that they were in the market to buy a building. It was a perfect match.

Overland Model 38 from the 1910 catalog

Let me indulge in a short aside. Willys was famous in my family for Jeeps. My dad had a CJ5 for camping and hunting, pulling stuff and just tooling around town. He picked up an old Willys model, maybe a CJ3A, to tinker with later on. I learned to drive on my mom's Datsun, but my real driving test was getting behind the wheel of those Jeeps.

Of course the Jeep was invented for World War Two. Back in 1910, John North Willys was only two years into his makeover of the nearly-failed Overland Motors. He was astoundingly successful. Leavitt was lucky enough to have the Pacific Coast distribution rights, with stores in SF, Portland and now Seattle.

At the start of 1909, "Overland" in the Seattle Times referred to the Overland Pacific passenger train operated by Southern Pacific. By the end of the year it began to be used equally for the car. After the dealership opened, the train line was a distant second to the automobile. According to ever-reliable Wikipedia, Willys Overland was second in sales only to Ford in the period leading up to the end of World War One in 1918. Who knows how many cars passed through these doors at 517 East Pike.

Arthur Dawson, ST 1/27/1917

A man who could account for part of it was Arthur Dawson. Willys Overland moved him up from San Francisco in 1916 where he was managing a Cadillac dealership. He worked for Willys for a couple years, then headed over to sell Hupmobiles and Chalmers cars at the Patten dealership we saw last time. And then after a couple of other gigs he ended up selling Templars at Greater Motors, from the Re:Take before that. Dawson is the perfect illustration of the social network on auto row.

Each building on auto row has a unique story to tell. 517 East Pike shows its auto roots, but it is also holding onto the fleeting memory of when it almost became the tallest building on Pike Street.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• The tunnel from Capitol Hill to downtown that never happened
• The social network of Capitol Hill's Auto Row, 1921 and 2012
• Life at 12th and Union, 1957 and 2011

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.

12th Ave Regraded, 1920 with pieces of 2012 (Images: Rob Ketcherside)

Righteous indignation has a long history in Seattle. More than 100 years ago, the Eleventh Avenue Improvement Club got pissed off at City Engineer R. H. Thomson's plan to regrade Capitol Hill. In 1908, he wanted to flatten out 12th Avenue from Jackson to Aloha, providing new access to Capitol Hill from Pioneer Square.

Before we dig into the regrade, how about a quick survey of the landscape here looking north from Madison on 12th.

Captain William T. Patten's auto dealership is on the left of the 1920 photograph. The buiding dates to 1913, just after the regrade was completed. Today it's Ferrari of Seattle, and it was Lee Moran's Lincoln dealership in 1957 as featured recently in CHS Re:Take. In an amazing coincidence, Patten's store manager a few years earlier, Arthur Dawson, was working in 1920 down at Greater Motors in the Utrecht building as featured in CHS Re:Take last time. Of course if you're convinced that auto row was a tightly linked social network, it doesn't seem like such a coincidence.

Just next to Patten's was a Victorian home later displaced for an extension of the Ferrari building. In 1920 it already looked out of place, a memory of the neighborhood before 1910's 12th Avenue regrade. Further down on the other side of the street is another turreted building. That's the landmark-aborted 1200 East Pike, still there today.

Demolished Victorian home behind William Patten Motors (1920). In front of Pacific Supply (2012).

On the far right was Chanslor & Lyon, one of the many automotive related businesses that supplemented the dealers. Chanslor & Lyon started in San Francisco, entering the Seattle market in 1908 by buying out Platt Automobile Supply in Belltown. They moved to their new building here in early 1920, just a few months before the photograph. Today, of course, this is Trace Lofts with High 5 Pie and other contributions to the 12th Avenue foodie network.

High 5 Pie and Chanslor & Lyon Automotive Equipment

In the foreground, the bricked, level street was a decade old. Back in 1908, the neighborhood, represented by the Eleventh Avenue Improvement Club, was not interested in raising this intersection 12 feet.

So what did they want? A tunnel. Until the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project, everyone loved tunnels in Seattle.

Their counter-proposal was a tunnel under Union Street from Broadway to what's now Freeway Park over I-5. It would connect Broadway and the backside of First Hill with the growing commercial district around 5th and Union. Obviously they lost. But they almost got both.

After Thomson moved to Capitol Hill in 1909, he came to agree with them. Although the regrade was already underway, Thomson ghost-wrote* into the 1911 Plan of Seattle:

The ever-increasing traffic around the north end of First Hill over Pike and Pine Streets clearly points to a time when travel will be seriously congested, and this, with no opportunity for opening up additional streets with as favorable grades, justifies the belief that a tunnel route for teams will become an economic necessity in the comparatively near future. The most favorable route for such a tunnel is from the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Union Street to the intersection of East Spring Street and Eleventh Avenue.

Twelfth from Union and Madison, 1920 (Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives)

It didn't happen in 1911 and tunnel discussion died for awhile. It came back in the Roaring 20's, with plans even being drawn up and several attempts to secure funding and support continued until 1930. The Union Street Tunnel was brought up again during World War Two, when the city council amazingly asked the Army to build it as a giant air raid shelter.

12th Avenue is not the sexiest regrade. It didn't make it to HistoryLink's profile of Thomson or Wikipedia's summary of that profile. It got a whole sentence in the 1978 book Public Works in Seattle. Partly there were just too many regrades to list. Also, 12th Avenue ruins the entire regrade image -- no hill was knocked down.  But it was significant as the last regrade that Thomson executed before leaving city government in 1911. By that point Seattle had more dirt than it knew what to do with. So, he joined the newly-formed Port of Seattle, which was busy building islands.

* I may be alone in thinking R. H. Thomson "suggested" much of the Plan of Seattle to his good friend and out-of-towner Virgil Bogue.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• The social network of Capitol Hill's Auto Row, 1921 and 2012
• Life at 12th and Union, 1957 and 2011
• Berlin Bakery Beatdown at 9th and James, 1905 and 2011

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.

"The new home of the Greater Motors Corporation is situated at the intercrossing of Pike, Minor and Melrose. The main entrance is so located that it is visible looking west on Pike Street for quite a distance. The location is considered one of the choicest on automobile row."*

We're standing around the corner from Melrose Market and the upcoming Melrose Square. And we're talking about that arched building in the distance. Today it's Utrecht art supplies and Volvo of Seattle. In 1962 the building was Lee Moran's Fiat dealership, International Motors. It's also been used to sell Mazda, Datsun, Citroen -- and Packard, which is shown here in 1921.

But it was built for the short-lived Greater Motors. Just a few months after placing their first order of Templar automobiles, plans were afoot for their new home. Seattle clothier and real estate tycoon Moses Prager built Greater Motors' garage and sales room on the west side of Seattle's booming auto row, on the corner of Melrose and Pike.

In1921 Six Arms -- just to the right of Utrecht -- was a tire company that outfit Packard on a record-setting run. And later it was the storefront of Packard's chief rival, Peerless Motor.

1919 Templar (Wikipedia)

Seattle's early automobile industry is clearly a great example of a network society, apparently a juncture of local financiers to fund new corporations, wealthy local customers, and the machinists and mechanics inventing and maintaining cars across the country.

Pike/Pine's new overlay district looks at auto row as a flat list of extant structures with one historic and one present use. The landmarking process is more informative. For example, Packard's earlier home at 12th and Pine got the full treatment in 2007, with essays on automobile row, the architect and owners and lists of modifications and other relevant facts.

Stories and lists are fine for expressing the basic information of a landmark form, but they're poor ways to explore linked, structured information and discover new knowledge. Consider auto row as a multidimensional network with supernodes, strong and weak links. The building is the connection through time between many firms. Each of those firms are connected through owners and employees to other firms.

Greater Motors is an interesting example. Moses Prager and the owners of Greater Motors -- Arthur G. Cohen, and L. M. Cohen (if not manager A. R. Dawson) were all Jewish. They began selling Templar automobiles after one of Dawson's trips to Ohio netted them the distribution contact. Before that, the group was known as Daniels Sales Agency, local distributor of Daniels automobiles. DSA itself was formed as an expansion of a Portland firm. All this occurred in a matter of months.

It's impossible to answer right now whether the Jewish ownership group is unique and whether they had statistically more Jewish customers than other dealerships. We also can't verify whether the newspaper's claims that 1124 Pike's architectural design was unique, groundbreaking and efficient. We need at least a date-sorted list of buildings, looking at immediate followers. Did they mimic the design, with a central office area that served new sales, used sales and the garage? Better yet, what about companies that employees of Greater Motors went to work for or came from?

Pike west from Broadway, 1921 (Courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, SEA0475)

Especially strong connections bubble up into the flat data in the preservation district and landmarking processes. For example, if a building still exists, the architect and builder are treasured pieces of information. These provide context to the importance of the building in relation to other parts of the city.

Here's the story form of the Utrecht building, for the record.

Architect Louis Svarz designed commercial buildings around town including De Honey's Dance School, now the Public Storage at 13th and Pike. Greater Motors was his first big splash. He also did the Ranke Building down at 5th and Pike.

Moses Prager went on a buying binge in 1920. He sold his home on Spring and Boren to the Catholic Archdiocese (now home to the Seattle Archbishop), bought a mansion on 14th, and bought the Seneca Building downtown.

Seattle Archibishop Residence, Spring and Boren

Dawson, for his part, was manager of the local Willys-Overland distributor before Daniels, and apparently left Seattle after he became regional distributor for Templar.

It requires hours of note-taking to connect the dots between people and places in the Pike/Pine auto row. There are cross-sectional views by auto maker, like the Nash.  But what we need is a database, like the Pacific Coast Architecture DB. Focused and specific to Pike/Pine auto dealerships, and tracking the movement of managers, mechanics, and the web of financial and political influence. It won't replace the need for accessible stories and summaries by the likes of Paul Dorpat and HistoryLink. It will just make those stories better.

* Quote Seattle Times May 16, 1920 page 49.

Thanks again to Brendan McKeon for comments and advice.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• Life at 12th and Union, 1957 and 2011
• Berlin Bakery Beatdown at 9th and James, 1905 and 2011
• Seward's Foliage in Volunteer Park, 1912 and 2011

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.

Fast fact: Sir Mix-a-Lot's favorite store Ferrari of Seattle was a Lincoln-Mercury dealership from 1948 to 1963.

This Re:Take is held in place for us by Pike/Pine historian and CHS contributor Brendan McKeon. He's printed out a copy of the slide which I found in a box in an antique store's bargain bins. Disturbingly, I recognized the intersection immediately, even with just the dim skylight as illumination. This is 12th Ave E and E Union, right where E Madison cuts through diagonally.

Lee Moran Co.
The car at the stop sign on 12th is screaming late-40s, but dealership owner Lee Moran has painted "HERE NOW - THE BIG M TURNPIKE CRUISER" on his storefront window. The Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was only sold in 1957 and 1958, so there's a date for the photo.

Written on the border of the slide is the caption "Lee's Place, Seattle, Wash." in a very familiar fashion. Perhaps it was taken by a friend?

Sensing a story, I grabbed a couple of other slides from the same box. One labeled "Front Moran House" I discovered was taken at 1140 Parkside Drive East in Broadmoor. The other labeled "Callista - Lee - Mrs Schill" turned out be Callista Schill Moran, Lee Moran, and Margaret Schill. That's Lee, his wife and his mother-in-law.

Callista - Lee - Mrs. Schill, 1957

1140 Parkside Drive East in 1957

"Lee's Place" at 1401 E Union

Death of a Salesman
Lee Moran was vice president in charge of exhibits for Century 21, but died tragically just weeks before opening day of the world's fair. By 1962 he expanded his car dealership to Fiats (the "poor man's Ferrari" of their day) which he sold down in the Utrecht building by Melrose Market at Pike and Melrose and Minor. Lee was the Fiat distributor for all of the Pacific Northwest, and in March of 1962 he attended a Fiat conference in New York. His flight back to the vacation home in Palm Springs was ill-fated, however. American Airlines Flight 1 crashed into Jamaica Bay, killing 100% of the 95 people on board (even the 1%).

How did Lee's photos suddenly end up in an antique store in 2011? I ran across the answer in this obituary:

Callista Schill Moran Ostrander, March 22, 1908 ~ July 7, 2010

... Her greatest love, however, was to travel the world and experience the richness of different cultures. She developed a great interest in photography... During the last few years of her life, she spent her time creating detailed albums documenting her many trips. She wanted her legacy to be a visual history captured with her camera...

Callista, thank you for holding on to this photo of 12th and Union all this time. We're sorry you didn't make it to a 103rd year and catalog the few decades that you spent with Lee.

Visual History
Here's a photo of Callista touring the Hudson River in New York in 1968. She looks fabulous in her fur-trimmed red jacket. You can just make out the Empire State Building on the far left. There are a few more photos of New York, and a ton from an uncatalogued trip to Australia, over at Hunter's Antiques in Uptown. Look for the boxes marked "Mrs. Moran" or "T. Ostrander". Let me know if you find a photograph of Capitol Hill and we can piece together its history.

Callista in NY, 1968

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• Berlin Bakery Beatdown at 9th and James, 1905 and 2011
• Seward's Foliage in Volunteer Park, 1912 and 2011
• Martian Pipeline Posse on Broadway, 1899 and 2011

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.

1905 meets 2011 (Image: Rob Ketcherside)

Kafe Berlin's new home is one of the most important, and least well remembered historic buildings left on First Hill. It's on the National Register of Historic Places, but the facts are all wrong. So National Park Service, prepare for a beatdown -- history style. (Really more of a light slap followed by a pinch on the cheek.)

613 to 619 9th Avenue, on 9th between Cherry and James, was built by Thomas Prosch. Prosch was one of the fabled Sons of the Profits. These guys got rich off of early Seattle as an outpost of the American empire which was spreading quickly across the Pacific. His story -- and our building -- was tied through the gold rush to the statue of William Seward we saw last time, and Samuel Archer's Klondike hidden story of love.

Prosch was a newspaper man from a newspaper family. He came to Seattle in 1875, sold the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1886 for a fortune, and then dinked around as a local historian before dying in a car accident in 1915. Here's more from HistoryLink. When he sold the P-I he bought a chunk of property up on First Hill at 9th and James and built a home for his family. He put up our building right next door, one of First Hill's first commercial buildings.

The stage is set to begin the beatdowns.

Beatdown #1
NPS says that Prosch constructed our building in 1886, at the same time as his house. I say it was 1893.

Here is the source of their date, a property card written in 1937 and on file at the Puget Sound Regional Branch of the Washington State Archives. Phil Stairs, a research assistant at the archives says in e-mail, "An independent researcher has determined that at least one third of the dates are completely wrong and some are off by a few years." That's a shaky place to hang your hat.

My dates come from Seattle Times articles ranging from the 1910s to the 1970s, including the obituary of Prosch's daughter and last remaining heir in 1973. A 1966 article on the building's history mentions the debate between 1886 and 1893 but specifically points to the property card as the only evidence of 1886. In addition, I've searched through digitized city directories and find no business on the block until magically Prosch's Hall appears in 1893.

These differences may seem esoteric or quibbly, but Seattle was changing fast. Prosch himself wrote, "The changes of the preceding few years were among the most remarkable in the experiences of the cities of the world... During the period from 1887 to 1893, Seattle increased its population four times and more from 12000 in number to 55000." 1889, the year of the Great Seattle Fire, stands like a barricade between the two dates. Was it built in 1886, the year of the Anti-Chinese Riots, the year that Montlake joined Seattle, the First AME Church opened, and the first electric light bulb was lit here -- or was it 1893, as the first transcontinental train arrived in Seattle, the first basketball team formed here, and financial panic gripped the nation? Was half of John Nagle's Capitol Hill land claim on sale, or the whole thing? Was it before or after sodomy was outlawed in Washington State? Context matters.

Beatdown #2
How was the building used? Upstairs was a meeting and performance ballroom creatively named Prosch's Hall. The official word is that downstairs was used as "offices". Yawn, I'm going back go bed! No, there was at least one real business here. Those old Seattle Times articles all mention a bakery sometime before 1898. The city directories support them, showing that Bate W. Alexander and John W. Searight ran a bakery and lived in this building in 1897.

Those are the seeds of a great story. Think about it: Kafe Berlin has brought a pastry oven to 613 9th for the first time in 113 years. That's a big number for Seattle! It's like reintroducing the grey wolf, or teaching a tribe their forgotten language. And we're talking about real people, so who were Alexander and Searight, why did they live together, what kind of bread did they make, and who might their customers have been? These are the kind of pre-hospital tales of First Hill that are hard to come by.

(Image: PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection, MOHAI)

So what happened to the bakery? Well, in 1897 gold was discovered in the Klondike, and freighted by the ton to San Francisco to be officially melted down, purified and weighed by the government at the U.S. Assay Office. Seattle wanted that gold and in 1898 convinced Congress to put a new Assay Office here. Thomas Prosch played a pivotal role, and was rewarded with a high-paying, high-security tenant. The United States government rented Prosch's Hall to locate their Assay Office. The bakery was displaced.

End of story right? Here comes another.

Beatdown #3
The NPS page says that the building was sold in 1935 to Deutches Haus, an organization for Seattleites of German heritage. Again, this was extrapolated from the property card which says that a remodel was done in 1935. But contemporary newspaper articles show that the building was purchased by the Order of the Sons of Hermann two years earlier, in 1933. They then banded together with the German Society and other groups in 1934 and finally opened Deutsches Haus in 1935.

The difference is huge in world history with the march towards World War Two. In 1933 Adolf Hitler was first appointed Chancellor of Germany. By 1935 he had already ordained himself Führer. In 1933 there were acts of vandalism against Jews in Germany. Contrast that with 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws removed all rights from Jews.

I am certainly not claiming that the members of the Deutches Haus were Nazis. Indeed, in 1941 a spokesman profused, "We are not Nazis. We are Americans and we are pro-America, but we are also humanely sympathetic with [prisoners of war]. They are our kin." So it's important to know what events affected their thoughts of Germany as they purchased and remodeled this building.

Enough? Not quite.

Beatdown #4
The NPS page says this building was a "social center" during World War Two. They word-smithed the Seattle City Landmark Nomination application which called it an "entertainment center." What in the heck is that? The truth is that it was a civilian-operated Officer's Club.

There's an untold -- unresearched, really -- story here. The United States declared war on Germany on December 11, 1941. With faint echoes of the illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans, the U.S. government went after German Americans as well. For example, UW grad and local ski- and mountaineering-hero Hans Otto Giese had his citizenship revoked. One piece of evidence used against him was his role in founding the German Society of Seattle and Deutsches Haus. The government was even more concerned about his brief membership in the pro-Nazi Friends of New Germany, which later became the German American Bund. Occassional GAB meetings in the upstairs hall marked Deutsches Haus as the only Washington State location monitored by the Committee on Un-American Activities.

Deutsches Haus itself was closed down at some point in 1942. It didn't make the Seattle Times, and I haven't yet dug up a date. Somehow an umbrella of Seattle women's groups got control of the building, and redecorated it as the Seattle Officer's Club. There's no word in the Seattle Times about what actually transpired there. And also no word on when it was returned to the German Society after World War Two -- sometime before the end of 1947. These are all worthy areas for research by local historians.

Since city staff put together the City Landmark nomination in 1983, there has been a whole lot of copying, pasting, and rewording in the telling of the history of 613 9th Avenue. There are so many interesting and unexplored angles to this building, though. The National Parks Service has just been one of many preservation organizations, historians and travel writers who have skipped the opportunity to find and share these stories.

Hopefully history will be corrected in the future.

In case you missed them, here are the last few Re:Takes on CHS:

• Seward's Foliage in Volunteer Park, 1912 and 2011
• Martian Pipeline Posse on Broadway, 1899 and 2011
• Hidden Stories of Love on John and Broadway, 1934 and 2011

Local history expert Rob Ketcherside shares his vision of the past and present with his Re:Take series of works on CHS and other Seattle sites.