Squibs from District 4
As part of Cathy Tuttle's 2019 primary election campaign for Seattle City Council in District 4, I wrote a number of short pieces on the history of the district for the campaign website.
It seems a waste not to share them with our readers who love anything about Seattle's rich history, and, as I once testified before the Landmarks Preservation Board when endorsing the nomination of the Old Spaghetti Factory, "You can see it from Queen Anne!" So here are all eleven of them. They were published once a week between mid-April and the end of the campaign.
Home of the Good Shepherd
From 1906 to 1973, the Home of the Good Shepherd building on Sunnyside Avenue and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd who ran it provided shelter, education and training for young pregnant women from around the country.
The sisters funded the Home of the Good Shepherd by taking in laundry from the Great Northern Railroad. They did the wash in the space under the truncated smokestack on the southern edge of the property.
In 1973, the City of Seattle and citizen activists prevented the 11-acre site from becoming a shopping center, created a park and gave the building to Historic Seattle to manage.
The Aurora Bridge
State Route 99 skirts the western edge of District 4 and joins it to Queen Anne, Seattle and downtown Seattle over the George Washington Bridge.
Like the bridge connecting New Jersey to Manhattan, Seattle, Washington's bridge opened on February 22, 1932 to celebrate the bicentennial of Washington’s birth. The Seattle bridge quickly adopted the nickname The Aurora Bridge. No surprise there, since it was part of The Aurora Speedway, as the street was first called.
The bridge is a cantilever and truss bridge. According to Wikipedia, it is 2,945 ft (898 m) long, 70 ft (21 m) wide, and 167 ft (51 m) above the water. Its widest span is 475 ft. The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition
Designed by John Charles Olmsted as part of the landscape plan adapting the University of Washington campus for the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, Rainier Vista remains the single most important legacy of Seattle’s first world’s fair.
Despite massive reworking of its southeastern tip when the Montlake Bridge opened in 1925 (remember the eponymous cut opened in 1917), its redesign in the late 20th c. to accommodate a huge underground garage for the UW Hospital and its recent reconstruction as part of the opening of the light rail station at Husky Stadium, the grand view from Frosh Pond to Mount Rainier National Park in the far distance has always been protected and cherished.
Photographer: Frank Nowell. University of Washington Special Collections
Houseboats
Houseboats have been a prominent part of Eastlake for generations. Wards Cove on Lake Union is a privately-held property located on the eastern shores of beautiful Lake Union in Eastlake, Seattle.
The site is located at the intersection of Fairview Avenue East and East Hamlin.
Borrowing the name of its cannery location in Alaska, Wards Cove repaired boats on Lake Union and even had salmon processing and canning operations here. The facility was redeveloped in 2009 and turned into a mixed-use project featuring a 10-slip marina for yachts 75 feet long or greater, two office buildings renovated to include 16,000 sq. ft of office and marina support facilities and 12 new houseboat moorings.
University Village
University Village was built at the southeast corner of Ravenna as an open-air lifestyle shopping center.
The 24-acre (97,000 m²) shopping center was built in 1956 across NE 45th Street on an earlier part of the Montlake, Seattle Landfill (operating in 1911 and 1922–1966). The development took out what remained of the marsh that was created by lowering Lake Washington when the Lake Washington Ship Canal was dug (1913–1916).
Some wetland was later partially restored as the Union Bay Natural Area with the UW Center For Urban Horticulture. Until the early 1990s, the character of University Village was filled with small businesses and the chain stores were all local: Ernst Hardware, Malmo Nursery, Lamonts department store, Pay'n Save Drugs and QFC supermarket. There was even a bowling alley, Village Lanes.
Many of the local businesses began to falter toward the end of the 1980s, however; and in 1993 the owners of the mall decided to sell and more national chain stores moved in.
Gas Works Park
Gas Works Park occupies a 20.5-acre promontory on Lake Union. Between 1906 and 1956, the Seattle Light Company’s gas plant manufactured gas to light the region’s homes.
Of 1400 gas plants that once operated nationally, it is the only one to survive even marginally intact. In 1970, the city hired landscape architecture firm Richard Haag and Associates to convert the plant into a new Seattle Parks and Recreation site.
Kite Hill, first called The Mound, is part of Haag’s work. It is filled with reused rubble. The preservation of towers and the gas production machine including the former Pump House now known as the Play Barn are now among the most admired bits of adaptive reuse in the world.
Gas Works Park opened to the public in 1973.
Google Earth photo
From Streetcars to Light Rail on Brooklyn
As Sound Transit Light Rail rushes to open University of Washington Light Rail Station, we recall that it sits just under the terminus of a streetcar line that brought visitors to the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition on the University of Washington campus over the summer of 1909.
The Seattle Electric Company rushed to get Trolley tracks to the fair for its June 1 opening. It appears that the rush lasted all summer, for on September 24, 1909, the brakes failed on a streetcar hurrying to the exposition from Wallingford, Seattle. With 80 passengers aboard, the trolley jumped the track when its brakes failed at the corner of 40th St. and 14th Ave NE. (14th Ave NE became University Way, that now hosts the University Street Fair and University District Farmers Market.)
The car crashed into three concession buildings across the street from the main entrance of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, killing Frank Hull of Tacoma, Washington and injuring 55 men, women, and children.
Photo: Paul Dorpat, Then and Now
ASUW Shell House
The ASUW Shell House on Union Bay Natural Area sits on the eastern edge of the Montlake Cut. This is where George Pocock constructed racing shells that the The Boys in the Boat powered to a Gold Medal at Hitler’s 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Built to be a seaplane hangar, the strangely shaped structure with flared sides is accessed through giant glazed barn doors that open as wide as the span of airplane wings. Built entirely of wood in 1917 by the U.S. Navy Region Northwest, the recently restored Shell House can now be rented for special events. The Seattle City Council recently designated the Shell House a city landmark.
Historic 1932 image from Washington Rowing Archives George Pocock Memorial Rowing Center
The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway
The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway founded in 1885 by Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman (among others) is famous as one of the longest linear parks in the world. Today we call it the Burke Gilman Trail.
Beginning downtown on what was to become Railroad Avenue and wrapping around the base of Queen Anne Hill on trestles over mud flats, the train line crossed Ross Creek at 3rd Avenue West heading to Issaquah and Snohomish. One stop survives today where the trail crossed Stone Way. The plain board and batten structure houses Solsticio and Nola Seattle Beauty salon.
Magnuson Park
Do you ever run into the odd block of blacktop at Magnuson Park? Here's why.
The Naval Air Station at Sand Point NAS, popularly known as Sand Point, opened in 1923 and was an active military base. It ceased operations in 1970 when the city acquired the site and renamed it Warren G. Magnuson Park after the senator who arranged its transfer.
Dick's Drive In Restaurant
On January 28, 1954, Dick's Drive In Restaurant opened to serve hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes on NE 45th Street. Dick's Drive In represents the quintessential 1950s, and was started by Dick Spady (1923-2016) and two partners, Warren Ghormley & Dr. "Tom" Thomas, whom Spady bought out.
Dick Spady was born in Portland, Oregon on October 15, 1923. He served in the Navy in World War II and attended Oregon State University on the GI Bill. He served in the Korean War as a commissary officer, where he learned a great deal about running a restaurant. Dick offered his employees the highest pay in the industry, provided 100% paid health-insurance coverage to all, and gave employees more than a million dollars in scholarship funds. Spady also gave generous and unremitting support to homeless and community causes and had a passion for Aeolian Organs.
Photo: Cathy Tuttle