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A Center Cut

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PAUL DORPAT THEN: The view looks north on Westlake from its origin at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street. PAUL DORPAT NOW: The Seaboard building, on the far right, has survived the 95 years or so between the two views.

I CONFESS TO having featured this intersection four times — that I remember — in the past 23 years. So here's the fifth, and I wonder what took me so long. There are so many delightful photographs taken from this five-star corner looking north on Westlake from Fourth Avenue and Pike Street. But this scene with the officer probably counts as a "classic" because it has been published a number of times and has not grown tired.

It is only recently that I looked closely at the policeman, and I think I have figured out what he is doing. He is scratching his head. I suggest that the officer may be marveling at the great changes that had occurred in the three years before he was sent to help with traffic on the day this photo was taken. (I'm figuring that this is 1909 or near it.) Heading north for Fremont, trolley car No. 578, to the left of the officer, is only 2 years old, and so is the Hotel Plaza to the left of it. If the officer returns to this beat in a few years, he'll probably know that there is a speak-easy running in the hotel basement.

Westlake Avenue was cut through the neighborhood in 1906 along what its planners described as "a low-lying valley, fairly level, with just enough pitch to give it satisfactory drainage." The plan was to connect it with "a magnificent driveway around the lake." But then some readers will remember that there have been many magnificent plans for this part of Westlake. Beginning in 1960 with the opening of the Westlake Summer Mall — which quickly changed to Seafair Mall — the blocks between Pike and Stewart streets were dreamed over for a quarter century as the best available site for developing a civic center for a central business district that somehow wound up without one.

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