And They're Off!

FOR THE FEW years that the photographer Otto T. Frasch explored the streets of Seattle, he managed to publish postcards of many of the city's landmarks. The results are often the best records of early-20th-century boomtown Seattle that survive.

This view is unique for Frasch. It is less a landmark than an event, or the beginning of one. Sometime after the 1902 opening of the Meadows Racetrack, the Seattle Electric Co. devised this cheap way of transporting betting men to the Georgetown track in a style accustomed to cattle. The passengers busily boarding this odd train do not require plush seats or even closed cars to enjoy their journey to the excitement of racing and its promise of riches.

With its covered grandstand and stables, the one-mile Meadows track was built in one of the many serpentine curves that were the Duwamish River before it was straightened into the Duwamish Waterway. The 1907 incorporation into Seattle of loosely regulated Georgetown put a muzzle on the medley of vices sometimes associated with gambling, and with the 1909 state ban on gambling the track's chargers moved to other pastures. The Meadows site, once on a floodplain, is now one small part of an industrial gerrymander: the "Boeing Bulge" that pushes well into the city's southern border.

Frasch photographed these traveling men sometime after the mid-block construction of the Seller Building in 1906. The vacant lot (far left) at the corner of King Street and First Avenue South was filled in 1913 with the Hambrack Building, a name hardly remembered as it, the Seller and the Pacific Marine Schwabacher Building at Jackson Street are now all part of the flashy "high-tech office campus" called Merrill Place.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.