Digging Deep To Upgrade
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 COURTESY OF MICHAEL CIRELLI THEN: Looking northwest from the front porch of the old "Katzenjammer Kastle" or City Hall (now City Hall Park) and across a portion of the Third Avenue regrade to the rear of the nearly new Alaska Building.
PAUL DORPAT NOW: The Alaska Building is now hidden behind the Morrison Hotel, which in 1908 replaced the one-story frame shops facing Third Avenue on its west side between Jefferson and James streets. |
by Paul Dorpat
From this perspective, Seattle's first steel-reinforced skyscraper, the Alaska Building at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street, transcends its neighbors. A likely year for this look at its less-elegant backside is 1905, when the high-rise was only a year old. Beside it on Cherry is the still-young Grand Opera House. The banner across the top of its rear façade claims for it "America's Finest (something)."
The last word of this bragging is hidden behind the façade of the Normandy Hotel that faces Third Avenue at its southwest corner with James Street. By the standards of the 5-year-old opera house and the skyscraper, the hotel is ancient. And it survives today as the only structure in the old business district that was built before the city's Great Fire of 1889. It can be seen with a different façade in the "now" photograph just to the right of the low-income Morrison Hotel (formerly the Arctic Club).
Almost certainly the photographer's motivating subject here is the work-in-progress on Third Avenue. The regrading was approved in 1903. Because both First and Second avenues were bursting with boom-time enterprise, it was agreed that Third should be made more attractive to reach and ride for the expanding retail trade. As the reader may estimate from its sides, this ditch has reached on James Street, at the end of this block, 14 feet deep.
Another photograph, dated June 1906 and recorded like this one from the front porch of the old City Hall, shows trolley tracks being laid at the new grade. The one-story shops facing Third on its west side have been lowered to the new grade.
Paul Dorpat will appear with co-author Jean Sherrard at Town Hall on May 21 to discuss their new book, "Washington Then and Now." The program begins at 7:30 p.m., at Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street.
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