“Queen Anne is the most clearly defined of all Seattle’s hills, a miniature mountain rising abruptly from Elliott Bay, the ship canal, Lake Union and the Seattle Center. –“Queen Anne Hill Seattle’s Miniature Mountain,” Seattle Times (Duncan 1979)
“At First Avenue West and West Garfield Street, these Craftsman bungalows are of minor significance individually. As a group, they provide a rhythm and consistency of scale.” Steinbrueck and Nyberg
No one understood better than Victor Steinbrueck and his colleague Folke Nyberg how much Seattle or Queen Anne’s historic working-class housing defined the city. The six identical working-class Craftsman bungalows they referred to in their 1975 poster still stand on West Garfield Street between the alley and First Ave. W. Four of them face north on Garfield; one sits on First Avenue W. while the sixth one backs up to it from the alley. As Steinbrueck and Nyberg suggest, the historic value of buildings often lies more in the urban patterns they create than in their individual distinctiveness.
The pattern Steinbrueck and Folke captured.
In 1975, Victor Steinbrueck embarked on a project with Folke Nyberg and Historic Seattle to identify and publish a series of ten posters inventorying Seattle’s outstanding historic buildings. Queen Anne was lucky to get one of them. In fact, the Queen Anne Historical Society and its volunteers, some of whom are still active today (6/2018), worked on the project. Completing their survey in the early days of the American historic preservation movement, Steinbrueck and Nyberg were hell-bent on recognizing that along with the high-style buildings often favored by the movement, the vernacular ones were those that really defined a neighborhood’s historic character. The poster authors understood profoundly how a sense of place can give meaning to a community like ours. As Historic Seattle notes on its website, “Each inventory includes photographs and brief descriptions of common building types, significant buildings, and urban design elements.” …Continue reading “Our Sweet Queen Anne Cottages”→
Just the other day, I celebrated my granddaughter’s birthday at the former Nile Temple Building watching a delightful play in the Eve Alvord Theatre. The outing reminded me of the building’s interesting history. Now folded into the Seattle Children’s Theatre, the L-shaped building located at the former intersection of Third Ave. N. and Thomas St. tells stories about the evolution of Seattle Center that are fun to remember and best not forgotten.
Offices left; auditorium block right; ‘Smile with Nile’ over entrance. Parking lot in foreground. 1957.
Constructed in 1956 to serve as the headquarters of the Seattle Shriners, the Nile Temple Building is the work of Samuel G. Morrison & Associates. Morrison (1915-1992) designed office buildings in Seattle. Since the Nile Temple had over 11,000 members when they selected this site, I am guessing he too was a Shriner. The Shriners are a fraternal Masonic order, founded in New York City in 1872, and as its name suggests (Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine for North America), to introduced fun into the sometimes-stiff rites of Masonic lodges. Dedicated to fun, fellowship and philanthropy (three mission goals that all start with the same letter), the Shriners are well known for the hat or ‘fez’ members wear and for the hospitals they began building in 1922 to address the needs of children handicapped by polio. Seattle Shriners founded the Nile Temple in 1909. By 1956, they were the largest Shriner temple in the world. The big draw of the Thomas St. location was its proximity to the Civic Auditorium (now McCaw Hall) where the Shriners held conventions twice a year following large parades. Seattle’s chapter invested their resources in the golf course just over the county line at 205th St. at Lake Ballinger.
Looking northeast toward the Armory & a house. 1957.
Originally, single family homes surrounded the site of the Nile Temple. They are visible in the background of the 1957 photographs and give a sense of what Seattle Center looked like before the 1962 fair. The simple two-story concrete block building sports a waving concrete roof line, which may suggest the ‘fun’ in the Shriners’ mission. It may be going too far, but the sign over the main entrance to the building read ‘Smile with Nile,’ and the curved line of the roof might just be a smile. Indeed, the thin shell concrete slabs of the roof line are the building’s must distinctive architectural features. The entrance pavilion to the auditorium/dining facility repeats that happy wavy line which may presage the feats achieved through daring concrete construction by the structural engineers of the Century 21 Exposition, aka the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. The Space Needle, the United States Science Pavilion (Pacific Science Center) and the Washington State Coliseum (Climate Pledge Arena) are examples of the exciting concrete structures developed for the fair.
Looking northwest with wavy roof over doorways to auditorium/dining hall. 1957.
In 1957, the planners of the Century 21 Exposition intended to take the brand-new Nile Temple, the Warren Avenue Elementary school and the full block of the Sacred Heart Parish buildings west of Second Avenue N. by eminent domain. In fact, the Seattle, World’s Fair Commission condemned much of the surrounding land as far south as Denny Way and as far west as First Ave. N. Sixteen property owners, including the Shriners, the school district and the Archdiocese of Seattle which owned Sacred Heart appealed to the state Supreme Court a King County Superior Court decision allowing the condemnation. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of July 8, 1958, the World Fair Commission decided to drop the condemnation suits. Anecdotal though the information may be, the archbishop threatened to unleash countless influential members of the Catholic Church against the plans for the fair, and with 7,000 of its 11,000 members living in Seattle, there were just too many powerful Shriners to confront as well. (Carla Becker and Alan Stein, The Future Remembered, p. 24). The truth seems to be that the commission’s funds were dwindling more quickly than expected as land values had gone up since making the initial plans for the fair. Reducing the physical size of the grounds to about seventy-three acres saved money that would fund required buildings instead. In the end, the fair commission omitted the four blocks that included Sacred Heart, bought and demolished the Warren Avenue Elementary School to make room for the Washington State Coliseum and leased the Nile Temple Building for the duration of the fair.
During the fair, the Nile Temple Building served as the 21 Club for wealthy Seattleites and high-ranking fair visitors and exhibitors. According to Alan Stein and Carla Becker in The Future Remembered, “Members enjoyed dining facilities, meeting rooms, showers and barbershop; switchboard, paging, and stenographic services; and nightly entertainment (p. 243).” The 21 Club capitalized on the 700-seat auditorium, which could accommodate five hundred diners as a banquet facility. That facility, the blocky structure on the building’s northeast corner, is now the Eve Alvord Theatre.
Over the summer of 1962, the Christian Witness Building & Child Care Center filled the former parking lot along Third Ave. N. It was demolished after the fair; however, the city continued to lease the Nile Temple Building until 1979, when it bought the building from the Shriners and leased half to the Seattle Children’s Theatre that was being squeezed out of its site at the Zoo. The other half of the building was leased to the Pacific Arts Center to provide afterschool and weekend art classes for children. Founded in the 1950s by Ruth Lease as the Creative Activities Center, at Seattle Center, it fell under the direction of board members Anne Gould Hauberg and Virginia Wyman, both fierce “believers that creativity is an important and empowering part of all of our lives.”
Looking across the former parking let. Windows closed up on Eve Alvord Theatre. Photo: author.
During the decades of the 1970s and 80s, Seattle Center struggled to define its purpose. The civic center imagined for the fair site had a tough time, for it depended on the city’s annual budget which naturally put the need for new fire engines above more frivolous activities at Seattle Center. Mayors came and went without solving the problem of how to attract organizations and people to Seattle Center. One strategy focused on providing cheap rent to children’s organizations.
The Pacific Arts Center relocated as a result to the Nile Temple Building and managed to operate through the early 1990’s when, unable to pay the rent, the city forced it out. The Seattle Children’s Theatre began moving from the Woodland Park Zoo to the Nile Temple Building in 1987 and started producing plays in the former auditorium/dining hall while conducting classes and setting up offices in converted classrooms. With the addition of the Charlotte Martin Theatre in 1993 and Allen Family Technical Pavilion for rehearsal space, classrooms and shops in 1995, the Nile Temple Building lost its prominent place on the block.
Looking south to where the Charlotte Martin and Eve Alvord Theatres meet. Photo: author.
Today, even though the two new buildings overshadow the Nile Temple Building, it continues after sixty-six years to bring adults and children together sometimes to appreciate the value of the arts as they did at the Pacific Arts Center and sometimes just to have fun as they “Smile at the Nile!”
Oh those wavy smiles! Photo: author.
Sources:
Becker, Paula and Alan Stein, The Future Remembered The 1062 World’s Fair and its Legacy, Seattle Center Foundation 2011.
Seattle Public Library, Special Collections Online, Digital Photograph Collection. Century 21 Digital Collection. Werner Leggenhager photographer of Nile Temple Building.
Seattle Public Library, Magazines & Newspapers Online: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1901-Present. Editions of July 2, 5, and 8, 1958.
Seattle.gov. Department of Neighborhoods, Seattle Historical Sites, Summary for 201 Thomas ST / Parcel ID 1985200185 / Inv # CTR014
Cathy Wickwire, Survey Report: Comprehensive Inventory of City-Owned Historic Resources, Seattle, Washington, 2001, pp. 19-22.
Originally published in the Queen Anne/Magnolia News on October 20, 2011.
The Uptown Theater has been a neighborhood anchor since 6:30 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, May 26, 1926, when the 749-seat silent movie house opened. Today, the building contributes significantly to the historic fabric of our Queen Anne community.
The theater is the work of Victor W. Voorhees, one of Seattle’s most prolific architects of the first half the 20th century and who, like most of Seattle’s early designers, had no training in architecture. This black box of a theater had plenty of room for an orchestra, a piano player or other musical accompanists of the era and giant 35mm projectors whose lamps generated so much heat that they had to be vented through the roof.
That booming 1920s epoch we remember for its flappers, Charleston dance and bathtub gin sometimes makes us forget that Seattleites were rooted in their neighborhoods where multiple taverns, social clubs and movie houses entertained local residents. Our neighborhood had the Uptown in lower Queen Anne and the Queen Anne Theater (originally the Cheerio) on the top of the hill where the Gilbert Apartments are now. The Cheerio borrowed the Queen Anne name in the late 1920s following the demolition of the 1911 theater located at Boston and Queen Anne Avenue.
Of nearby neighborhood theaters, only Magnolia’s 34th Ave West many are gone. but Ballard’s Bay, West Seattle’s Admiral, the University District’s Varsity and Neptune all survive. (An earlier version of this article included the Guild and the 45th in Wallingford, but they have been demolished). In the good old days before TV, Seattle neighborhoods coalesced around going to the movies, and every kid spent wintry Saturday afternoons at double features.
John Hamrick built the Uptown, which was his fifth Pacific Northwest film venue. He opened the cinema with a flourish showing The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore and (his wife) Delores Costello, but not before Carl Weber’s live orchestra played John Philip Souza’s The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Architect Voorhees designed a rather simple building with grand and somewhat Baroque scrolls flanking the second story windows. A row of four windows now hidden behind the 1953 marquee by B. Marcus Priteca (the West Coast’s most important early 20th c. movie house designer ) were the façade’s most prominent feature. Visitors today see no signs of the second story toilets, the waiting room behind those four windows, or the barbershop once located on the south edge of the modern ticket booth.
In 1984, the restaurant on the corner of Republican Street and First Avenue North (Do you remember Tony’s Italian Restaurant or it’s more famous successor Le Tastevin?) was demolished and replaced by two additional theaters with 473 seats. The southern and eastern façades were preserved and now serve as a sheltered place where moviegoers queue up. At the same time, architect Voorhees’s original theater shrank by some 234 places making room for a bigger lobby, lobby level bathrooms and a candy and popcorn counter.
The Uptown is one of many American movie houses around the country bearing the name. Here in our Queen Anne neighborhood, the theater shares its name with the commercial district it anchors. It is yet one more signal of the theater’s importance and why its preservation is such a thrill.
Today, dressed up with fantastically restored neon lights, a new paint job and some deep, deep cleaning, the Uptown reenters our neighborhood’s life under the daring leadership of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). SIFF not only produces the largest and best film festival in the world, but is now dazzling us with a variety of year-round programs at the Uptown, the Egyptian on Broadway and in its new headquarters in the Film Center. It is located in the former Alki Room on the Seattle Center campus at the corner of Second Avenue North and August Wilson Way (formerly Republican Street).
Over and over again we see nonprofit cultural organizations giving new life to our historic commercial districts. SIFF’s work at the Uptown, supported in part by the Queen Anne Historical Society (yet another not-for-profit cultural organization making things happen in historic Queen Anne) is a striking example.
In 2022, we observe the 60th anniversary of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair/Century 21 Exposition, which opened April 21 on the grounds originally known as Potlatch Meadows and now home to Seattle Center.
On May 30, 2012, nine prominent Seattle structural engineers directly involved in the design of iconic buildings that remain today at Seattle Center — including the Space Needle, Pacific Science Center, the Coliseum (now Climate Pledge Arena), and the Monorail — assembled and offered observations on their work.
The Structural Engineers Foundation of Washington hosted the recording session, featuring Dick Chauner, Jack Christiansen, Gary Curtis, Victor Gray, Norm Jacobson, Tom Kane, Bob Mast, Fred Pneuman, and Einar Svensson. The film also references some of the architects and contractors who played significant roles in the design and construction of the Fair. Watch recording HERE References: *Century 21 World’s Fair Structural Engineering *Queen Anne Community on the Hill Chapter 13: “In Our Time — 1950-1993”
