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Old King Coal

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COURTESY OF SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY THEN: This scene looks from the waterfront toward King Street, taking in the shoreline and the little bluff. PAUL DORPAT NOW: Moving perhaps 100 yards to take this scene allowed us to avoid the obstruction of a building and get closer to the site of the "native land" that still appears in the "then" scene. The historic shoreline is now a few feet east of the Alaskan Way Viaduct on the north side of King.

BETWEEN 1877 and 1903 the King Street coal wharf was probably the most popular platform from which to study the city. Fortunately, a few photographers took the opportunity to record panoramas stitched from several shots. This view is the most southerly of four photographs that probably date from the spring or early summer of 1882. The photographer was the prolific "anonymous."

The scene looks east toward the block between Jackson Street on the far left and King Street on the right. King was then still a railroad trestle built above the tides, and all the structures that appear on the right side of this view — the railroad shops and a lumber mill — are also set above the tideflats. The white hotel on the far left with the wrapping porch, shutters and shade trees is the Felker House, the first Seattle structure built of finished lumber.

Two of what we may kindly call the hotel's "urban legends" survive its destruction in the "Great Fire" of 1889: First, that it was the town's original whorehouse. Second, that its overseer — Mary Ann Conklin, aka "Mother Damnable" — turned to solid stone sometime between her death in 1873 and difficult resurrection in 1884 when her body was hauled to a second grave. Believe it or not, her features were intact.

Two more semi-solid points — both about the "native land" shown here: First, it is still a quarter-century before the ridge on the horizon would be lowered 90 feet with the Jackson Street regrade. Second, the tide is out and the small bluff above the beach is the same on which the Duwamish tribe built its longhouse. There, the Indians looked out on the bay probably for centuries before Captain Felker substituted whitewashed clapboard for cedar slabs.

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