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Stonehenge In Seattle

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COURTESY OF MICHAEL MASLAN THEN: Photographed from a large, high tank, the March 2, 1907, view looks over what is still a construction site at the Lake Union Gas Works. The irregular and largely undeveloped shoreline at the north end of Capitol Hill is across the way, and the University District appears, in part, upper-left. PAUL DORPAT NOW: This was recorded from near the summit of the Gas Works Park mound.

NATURAL GAS first reached Seattle through a pipeline from the Southwest in 1956. The new source made the Gas Works on the Wallingford peninsula (or point) superfluous, and that grand grotesquery of the industrial age was shut down. Six years later, the city purchased the plant site and, with the help of Richard Haag, a landscape architect with a fondness for recycling, found monumental freestanding sculpture in its rusting towers. With the support of the Parks Department, Haag transcended the park plan's many critics. He admonished, "Structures like these will never appear again."

The gas company first moved its gas generating to the north shore of Lake Union from the Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street site where the business was founded in 1873 by pioneers John Collins, Arthur Denny, Dexter Horton and others. In 1906 (or perhaps 1907) the then new "iron Stonehenge" began serving customers within a radius of 30 miles or so.

For its first 20 years on the lake, the company continued to use coal in the super-heating process used for generating gas, and tons of it were routinely delivered by barge until 1937, when the plant switched from coal to oil. During the plant's coal years, its emissions applied a rose-colored filter to Wallingford sunsets.

The "now" photo does not repeat the exact prospect of the "then," which was photographed on March 2, 1907, from the steel skeleton of the plant's first big tank or "gas relief holder." Before the tank was enlarged and moved to what is now the park's parking lot it filled what is now the valley between the park's man-made mound — from which the "now" photo was recorded — and the saved gas-generating towers seen behind a high fence on the right of the contemporary view.

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