COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF HISTORY & INDUSTRY

The streaked lights from the headlights of passing cars in the night shot of a new Benaroya Hall seem to repeat the trolley tracks in the 1904 photograph of the Walker Building at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and University Street.

	PHOTO BY JAMES FRED HOUSEL, COURTESY OF SEATTLE SYMPHONY

The first Seattle Symphony Orchestra was a 24-instrument ensemble led by the violinist/conductor Harry West. Probably most of the players also taught students, who were often excited to learn, given the great importance then of live music. Most likely many of the players also performed in one or more of the theater and restaurant orchestras that then stocked the energetic Seattle music scene.

It is one of those most common of ironies that the orchestra would eventually wind up in Benaroya Hall, its first permanent home, directly across Second Avenue, 95 years after West first raised his baton. This season, of course, the symphony celebrated its centennial at Benaroya Hall, but also at New York City's Carnegie Hall during a four-city East Coast tour this past spring.

Readers who know their downtown will remember what a strange corner this was in the few years between the razing of the Walker and the raising of Benaroya. Plans for a 60-floor scraper, as part of a proposed Marathon Block, were abandoned because of the massive overbuilding of office space at the time. In its place a wide sward was planted, and near its green center a temporary entrance to the bus tunnel resembled an opening to a civil-defense bunker.