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Now & Then By Paul Dorpat
From Old Home to New
WHEN IT WAS built in 1890, this steep-roofed Victorian was but one of the 2,160 structures raised in Seattle during that first full boom year after the city's "Great Fire" of 1889. Far to the north of the burned business district, the Cascade Neighborhood home was "already somewhat retardataire for its time." That description is from Dennis Andersen, one of Seattle's more productive architectural historians. Andersen discovered this photograph in the 1970s when he was taking care of the University of Washington Library's collections of historical photography and architectural ephemera. It is one of several photographs held there that were recorded (ca.1911) along Eastlake Avenue by James P. Lee — for many years the Seattle Department of Public Works photographer of choice. The historian's "retardataire" remark refers principally to the ornamental parts of the structure, its fanciful roof crest and the beautified bargeboards of its steep corner gable. (We know from a photograph taken of its rear façade as late as the 1950s that those wheels with spokes were attached there as well.) Andersen both reflects and laments: "It looks like a pattern-book house to me and really more at home in the 1870s or early 1880s. Also the protruding corner bay is an unusual feature that may have been added to enliven the design a bit. It's a great photograph of a house that we are sorry to see is gone." At the northwest corner of Eastlake Avenue and Republican Street this delightful but mildly anachronistic residence survived until 1961, when big changes across Eastlake — the construction of the Seattle Freeway (Interstate 5) — razed it for a three-story commercial structure that was for years home to the Fishing and Hunting News. Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.
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