WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

The view looks north over West 58th Street (once also known here as Ballard Place) to a mansion whose institutional uses are not obvious because the large rooftop neon sign for the Simpson Bible Institute is seen only on edge from this point of view. After the Bible students moved on to Edmonds in 1977, the site was developed with townhouses.

	PAUL DORPAT

While the dormitory was spartan in the extreme, the mansion — with its large, covered porch, graceful rooflines and diverse windows — retained its external grace. That the inside was carved up to conform to the needs of the Bible college silenced any issue of saving the structure when the college moved out more than half a century later. This view of the mansion was found in a photo album that dates from the late 1920s. Albert Benjamin Simpson, for whom the school was named one year after his death, founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1887 in Nyack, N.Y. He was a "born again" enthusiast for sending missionaries to foreign lands, and students at the Simpson Institute would probably have considered that a great calling.

Judging by its daily schedule, school routines were indeed soul-searching: Students were awakened at 6:30 a.m. for a half-hour devotion. Chapel at 8:30, noonday missionary prayers from 11:30 to noon, after-supper prayers in the dining room, and meditations from 10 to lights out a half hour later.

The Simpson Institute closed in the mid-1950s, but the campus was soon revived with the Puget Sound Bible College. After it, too, moved out for new quarters in Edmonds in 1977, this oversize triangular lot was converted to townhouses.