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From Pier To Pyre

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COURTESY OF DAN KERLEE THEN: Perilously stuck between the Alaska Steamship pier on the right and the blazing Grand Trunk Pacific Dock on the left, the smoldering tower of Colman Dock is the centerpiece of this 1914 scene shot offshore. I have left the brilliantly white Mosquito Fleet steamer for a more knowledgeable reader to identify. PAUL DORPAT NOW: This contemporary repeat was recorded with the help of an Argosy waterfront tour boat.

THE DESTRUCTION of the Grand Trunk Pacific Dock at the foot of Madison Street on July 30, 1914, was the most spectacular single fire in the history of the Seattle waterfront. The "single" condition is important, for the city's "Great Fire" of June 6, 1889, consumed the entire waterfront south of University Street — about 15 blocks worth. That inferno did not discriminate. (Lest someone complain, I have not included the 1910 fire on Wall Street in this ranking because a stiff wind off Elliott Bay kept its impressive incineration to the east side of Railroad Avenue.)

On the far left — nearly out of the picture — is the 108-foot blazing skeleton of the Grand Trunk tower. This view of its destruction is unique, for the unnamed photographer has turned to shoot what then may have seemed to be the imminent destruction of Colman Dock. The fireboats Snoqualmie and Duwamish aimed at least some of their spray at Colman Dock, one stream reaching the clock tower that is as yet merely smoldering.

When its namesake Canadian railroad completed the Grand Trunk dock in 1910, it was the largest wooden finger pier on the West Coast. Four years later its charred piles were recapped and topped with another long and ornate terminal of the same footprint but without the tower. (This somewhat less distinguished replacement survived until 1964, when it was cleared away for an expanded loading lot north of Colman Dock.)

With the fireboats' help, Colman Dock escaped its neighbor's fate. Badly scorched, the top of the tower was rebuilt and survived until this Spanish-style home of the Black Ball fleet was replaced in the mid-1930s with an art-deco terminal in the style of the fleet's then-new flagship, the Kalakala.

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