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A Place Displaced

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COURTESY OF SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY THEN: Werner Lenggenhager, the Swiss-born photographer of this rare look to Capitol Hill along Melrose Place, moved to Seattle in 1939 and soon got a job at Boeing. He continued his decades-long photographic quest of a great variety of subjects all over Washington state, even after he retired in 1966. PAUL DORPAT NOW: With the construction of the Seattle Freeway in the 1960s practically everything in Lenggenhager's 1959 photograph was erased.

IN 1953 BYRON FISH, one of my favorite Seattle Times columnists, wrote a feature on Werner Lenggenhager, then still a Boeing employee who spent his weekends combining, as Fish said, a "hobby of photography and an interest in history."

Many Times readers will still remember how Fish signed his contributions with a primitive cartoon of a smiling fish. His angle was often about the extraordinary in the ordinary, and Lenggenhager fit that.

Through roughly 40 years of walking around with his camera (he did not drive), Lenggenhager photographed landmarks but also "ordinary" scenes like this one. That is Melrose Place cutting through the city grid on its climb from Howell Street, in the foreground, to both Melrose Avenue (on the far side of the apartment buildings top-center) and Olive Street.

Practically everything here was "terminal" when Lenggenhager recorded it in 1959. Perhaps the coming construction of the Seattle Freeway moved him to take this photograph as an act of pictorial preservation. He might have also been going home, because he lived at the corner of Belmont Avenue and East Olive Street. In any case, Lenggenhager made sure his work was saved by giving prints to the University of Washington, the Museum of History & Industry and the Seattle Public Library. This scene was copied from the library's collection, where it is but one of more than 23,000 examples of the Swiss immigrant's contribution to our community's memory.

After the freeway was built, the assessor's tax records, including the photographs, for these structures were foolishly purged. If any readers remember Melrose Place and/or knew Lenggenhager, I would like to hear about it.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle. He can be reached at paul@dorpat.com.