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| COURTESY OF NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE |
| John Olmsted's 1903 view looks across University Way and east on 41st Street one block to the university campus. Left of center appears most of the nearly new Parrington Hall, known then as Science Hall. The frame structure on the far left survived at the northeast corner of 41st and the "Ave" until Pacific National Bank (now Wells Fargo) built its Campus Branch there in 1969. |
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| PAUL DORPAT |
In the spring of 1903 while he was first in town planning a system of parks and boulevards for Seattle, the celebrated landscape architect John Olmsted toured the city with his camera and a daybook. His citation for the third of June reads, in part, "To Washington University to make notes and take photographs."
Near the end of Olmsted's visit, university regents invited him to propose a master plan for the 8-year-old campus. In a letter to his wife he reveals that school administrators made him wait "an hour in another room" only to be asked to return soon and report on his terms. "The point is that that will delay me two or three days more here," the homesick Olmsted complains. "It seems if I should never get away!"
The citation in Olmsted's daybook for this scene reads: "Looking east from west side of Columbus Avenue opposite 41st Avenue." Columbus Avenue was the name developer James Moore gave to the future University Way when he opened his Brooklyn Addition north of Portage Bay in 1890. Although Moore did not intend to develop it as the new community's main street, it rapidly became so after David Denny laid tracks up its center in 1892 for his electric trolley to Ravenna Park.
Soon after Olmsted's visit Columbus was more regularly called 14th Avenue (before University Way was chosen in a University Commercial Club contest in 1919), and Brooklyn was dropped first for University Station and later University District.
In 1903 students were trying to take control of student government, the Woman's Municipal League of Brooklyn was campaigning to beautify streets with trees and the Community Club was lobbying to have thoroughfares like the rutted 41st Street shown here widened and graded. Its other concern: stray cows trampling gardens and frightening co-eds.
Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.
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