Triangulating Evidence: A Case for Obsession?
The Nellie & F.S. Stimson / John H. McGraw House (1891 Demolished 1926)
Once located at 1104 First Avenue North (formerly Kentucky Avenue)
Obsessions are said to be bad for your health. On my frequent walks up and down the south slope of Queen Anne, I have done my very best to stop thinking about the interesting intersections of First Avenue N. and Prospect Street and its neighbor a few steps up the hill at Highland Drive.
In any case, whenever I find a curved street or a diagonal in an orthogonal street grid, I am intrigued. I was born, for example, a block west of Broadway in Manhattan, which since the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 has been compulsively orthogonal.[i] Broadway’s diagonal run flaunts the grid. It is said to have been a Native American path. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, also a diagonal, has a similar origin.[ii] That is not the case in my Seattle neighborhood.
In my Queen Anne example, two triangular plots are defined by the diagonal path of Prospect Street. The diagonal connects Highland Drive to a more substantial street, which is also named Prospect; it runs east from Queen Anne Avenue nearly all the way to Aurora. The persistence of the street name is troubling, I admit. It is as if some loony traffic engineer at the old Department of Engineering decided to make fun of the folks living in the neighborhood. I mean there must have been at least one playful traffic engineer in the city’s history!
I’ve already written one article[iii] about these curious triangles that are part of the creation and design of Queen Anne Boulevard whose name may be another joke. While Queen Anne Boulevard is a designated city of Seattle landmark whose name appears on Parks Department signs along the way, there is no street with that name! In fact, that is a quirk of its creation.
The 1904 plan for Seattle’s parks drawn up by John Charles Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers firm called for boulevards to form green belts joining the park system he proposed. Ravenna Boulevard north of the University of Washington is a good example. For odd reasons Olmsted rejected the idea of a boulevard on Queen Anne even though the views are spectacular.[iv] Our Queen Anne Boulevard was the result of intensive lobbying by some of the rich and powerful people who lived in the neighborhood. Ironically, some of them served on the very Park Commission that hired the Olmsted firm. As sometimes happens when rich and powerful folks get involved, they got their way. Consequently, we have a park called Queen Anne Boulevard plunked down on a bunch of streets with other names. The park doesn’t quite encircle the entire crown of Queen Anne. Going clockwise, it begins at Betty Bowen Viewpoint at the east end of W. Highland Drive and ends where Bigelow Avenue N. meets Prospect Street, the long one.
Consequently, the triangles of my obsession are not in the park called Queen Anne Boulevard. Those rich and powerful folks who demanded the boulevard didn’t want a park in front of their houses. Fearing trees blocking their views or just ordinary folks strolling over their well-manicured lawns, they settled on a public right of way for which they would have no direct responsibility. The supreme irony is that approximately two million people visit Kerry Park every year defying for once the desires of the rich and powerful!
For reasons history has chosen not to record, the upper triangle which effectively blocks Highland Drive is owned by the successor to the Department of Engineering now called the Department of Transportation. The lower one, enhanced by elegant stone walls that survived the demolition of the McGraw house, belongs to the Department of Parks and Recreation.
It is this lower triangle that frequently fuels my obsessions and reveals how focusing obsessively on an interest can be dangerous when doing historical research and can lead to serious errors that obscure the truth.
I have long known that the house originally on the triangle was knocked down (apparently in 1926[v]) to connect Highland Drive to Prospect Street and finish the circle of the boulevard. In my earlier article, I included a historic photograph from 1910 showing the garden decked out with flowers from the funeral of Governor John H. McGraw (1850-1910), who served as Washington’s second governor from 1892 to 1896. Although this photograph features the flowers mourners brought to the governor’s funeral, it shows us almost nothing of the house in which he died. Having always thought that a shame, I’ve searched for photographs of the house, but to no avail.
Flowers in the yard on the occasion of Governor McGraw’s funeral in 1910. The corner of the front porch peaks out from right had side of the picture.
You can imagine then my great pleasure then as I poked around in the archives of the Queen Anne Historical Society and unearthed this marvelous sketch of what the label on the drawing called the “John McGraw Res.” I don’t know the provenance of this drawing or anything about the artist Nevin Caplan. Like its neighbor up the hill, the Polson House, which still stands today and which you see above the funeral flowers in the 1910 image, the McGraw house has a lovely short tower on its southwest corner to capture the fantastic view across Elliott Bay. The house in the sketch shares so many features with the Polson House that I was tempted to conclude it is either a fantasy of its artist and doesn’t represent the demolished house or the sketch was mislabeled.
Drawing by Nevin Caplan of the John H. McGraw House. Date Unknown
1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map in Anderson and Meulemans’ The Polson House A History, page 8. The red ‘1’ marks the McGraw House.
Careful comparison of the sketch to the funeral photograph almost sealed the case. In the 1910 photo all we see of the McGraw house is its northwest corner. When we compare that visual information to the northwest corner of the house in the sketch, they don’t seem to match. In fact, the house in the sketch doesn’t show anything like the two stories on the right side of the 1910 funeral photograph. Almost certain that our drawing of the McGraw House is a sketch of the Polson House, I checked with a fellow historian of Queen Anne architecture who pointed me to page 8 of Marvin Anderson’s delightful booklet on the Polson House[vii]. There staring me in the face on the 1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map[vi] the outline of the house at 1104 First Avenue N. matched the McGraw House in the sketch. The two stories, it turns out were set back from the street and not in the same plane as the front porch. Marvin Anderson also provided all the documentation he had gathered on the Nellie and F.S. Stimson house including newspaper articles and listings in city directories from 1892 to 1902. They convincingly establish the house as the Stimson residence[viii]. F.S. Stimson owned the Stimson Lumber Mill in Ballard with his father and his brothers. C.D. Stimson, his brother and president of the company left Queen Anne for the Stimson-Green House on Terry Ave. at Seneca St. before moving to the Highlands.
View to the north to the Polson House overlooking the garden wall of the demolished McGraw House. Photo: author
What started out as an amusing article about my interest in this diagonal street and its triangles ends with a moral. Obsessions may indeed affect your health and risk leading you down winding paths that with extreme diligence can lead to unexpectedly thrilling conclusions. The hypothetical nature of the label on the drawing and the odd angle of the funeral photograph misled me for a while, but we can happily conclude that after all these years of triangular obsessing, you and I now know what the McGraw house really looked like!
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[i] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811)
[ii] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Avenue_%28Chicago%29)
[iv] In the report to the Park Commissioner, J.C. Olmsted laid down requirements for things such as width of his boulevards or that they have a wide green promenade down the middle. Queen Anne didn’t have enough space to meet his boulevard standards.
[v] Seattle Daily Times, 8/29/26, has an advertisement for the salvage of reusable parts of the house.
[vi] Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps once documented annually every single building in the United States to prevent fraudulent claims for building destroyed or damaged by fire. Several are on file at the Seattle Public Library.
[vii] Anderson, Marvin, and Megan Meulemans, The Polson House A History, P. 50, corrects an error in Lawrence Kreisman’s The Stimson Legacy (Seattle Willows Press, 1992) which also led me astray. City directories and newspaper references identify the house at 1104 First Avenue North as the Stimson house instead of the one at 128 Aloha that Kreisman documented. It will take more work to know the history of its ownership.
[viii] Anderson, Marvin, and Megan Meulemans, The Polson House A History. P. 8.