WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

COURTESY OF PLYMOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

THEN: Mark Matthews, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, welcomes the parishioners of Plymouth Congregational Church to the neighborhood during cornerstone-laying ceremonies in 1911. Both views look from University Street south to the block between Fifth and Sixth avenues. NOW: The contemporary repeat has been adjusted to show both the street and part of the neighboring IBM Building on the far right.

	PAUL DORPAT

In a passage from the 1937 parish history, "The Path We Came By," this scene is described. "The shabby old frame tenements of the neighborhood, gray with dust from regrade steam shovels, must have looked down in amazement at the crowd gathered there that Sunday afternoon, women in silks and enormous beflowered hats, men in their sober best." From the photo, bottom center, we may add one barefoot boy with his pants rolled up.

While the surrounding tenements were really not so old, they were certainly dusty because this Denny Knoll (not hill) neighborhood was still being scraped and reshaped with regrades. Less than 10 months after this ceremony, the completed church was dedicated on Sunday May 12, 1912. On Monday an open house featured "music, refreshments and athletics" as well as "130 doors — all open."

Fifty years later, Plymouth's interim senior minister, Vere Loper, described another dusty scene. "Wrecking equipment has leveled off buildings by the wholesale around us. The new freeway under construction is tearing up the earth in front of us, and the half block behind us is being cleared for the beautiful IBM Building." Plymouth's answer was to stay put and rebuild. Opened in 1967, the new sanctuary was white and gleaming like its IBM neighbor. The two seemed like a set, in part because the same architectural firm, NBBJ, designed both.

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