Road To Ruin

FOR AT LEAST four years, from 1912 to 1915, two successful Seattle photographers shared a studio in the Colman Building. Typically, they inscribed the initials "C&M" along with a picture number in a corner of the large glass negatives. The "C" was for Asahel Curtis, the younger brother of Edward, the more famous photographer of American Indians, and the "M" for Walter Miller, one the city's prolific commercial photographers early in the 20th century.

For this "C&M" print No. 34095, the partners — although probably not both of them — climbed atop a trestle that once crossed Railroad Avenue to service the Galbraith Dock at the foot of Wall Street. Their panoramic look north reveals why, likely in 1915, it was still called Railroad Avenue. Here, north of Wall Street, there was on the bay side but one narrow planked section for wagons, trucks and increasingly the automobiles that used the waterfront to make a shortcut around the Central Business District. The rest is all railroad trestles and the gaps of tideland between them. The trestles, with their gaps and holes from all the wear and tear, were popularly referred to as "man traps."

Until the mid-1930s, when the waterfront north of Madison Street was made over with a seawall and fill behind it, this section especially was open and hazardous.

Ten years after Curtis and/or Miller carried an oversized box camera above Railroad Avenue, this "dangerous disgrace" claimed its first victims. As The Seattle Times reported on Feb. 10, 1925, a coupe carrying Mr. and Mrs. John Peterson and Mrs. Peterson's aunt Mrs. Finch "tore away 30 feet of the so-called guardrail on the bay side of Railroad Avenue . . . when it plunged into the bay."

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