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Now & Then By Paul Dorpat
Ship To Shore
WITH CLUES from the tower and scribbled negative number, it is possible to compose a general description of this scene. The clock turret, here partly shrouded in the exhaust of the disembarking steamer S.S. Victoria, replaced the Colman Dock's original tower in late 1912. That spring the first tower was knocked into Elliott Bay by the steamship Alameda during a very bad landing. The second clue, the number "30339" penned on the original negative by the Curtis and Miller studio, dates the scene roughly at 1914 or '15. In 1908 the already venerable Victoria was put to work on the Alaska Steamship Company's San Francisco-Seattle-Nome route. Considering that both the ship and the apron of the Northern Pacific's Pier 2 (at the foot of Yesler Way) are packed, it is more likely that the Victoria is heading north for Nome. The 360-foot Victoria was built in England as the Parthia in 1870 and made its maiden voyage that year to New York as the finest ship of the British Cunard Line. With compound engines, it required half the coal of similar ships, and was the first Cunard ship to have, among other niceties, bathrooms. Eighty-six years later the Victoria (renamed after an 1892 overhaul) was sold to Japanese shipbreakers, and in 1956 her still-sturdy, hand-wrought iron hull was salvaged for scrap in Japan. A few readers will remember the Victoria from the Depression years of 1936 to 1939, when she was laid up in Lake Union unable to meet the cost of U.S. fire and safety regulations. At least a few Eastside readers will recall the summer of 1952, when the then-oldest steamer in the U.S. was tied to the shipyard dock at Houghton (Kirkland) on Lake Washington, waiting for an ignoble 1955 conversion into a log-carrying barge. Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.
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