Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Glory Days of "The Silver Slug"



The iconic and awesome Kalakala… Few vessels ever matched it for look and style. After its completion at the Kirkland Shipyards, Kalakala began service between Seattle and Bremerton in 1935. It was an immediate sensation and for a time was the second-most photographed object in America (after the Statue of Liberty). It sailed the Bremerton-Seattle run and other duties well into the 1960’s. Most Seattleites know the story of the vessel languishing on a beach in Kodiak, Alaska as part of seafood processing operation and its eventual “rescue” in 1998. Sadly, the once-revolutionary ferry had trouble finding a permanent home or enough backing for a restoration. The ferry ended up rusting away on Tacoma’s Hylebos Waterway and was scrapped a few years ago.
 
The Colman ferry dock itself has been rebuilt quite a few times due to fire, catastrophic ship collisions and the usual march of progress. In this image both terminal buildings are slated for destruction. The current building will be replaced as part of Seattle’s ambitious waterfront project as a spiffy multimodal transit hub planned for completion around 2021. Behind Kalakala the previous Art Deco style terminal building is, like the ferry, also a relic of the 30s. Both would be history by the end of the 1960’s.
 
But this picture recalls a better time for the streamlined ferry. Here we see its stainless steel exterior gleaming in the sun in a photo taken by Frank Shaw in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Behind, we can see how the Seattle skyline has mushroomed in the last 50 years.

 

Thursday, September 18, 2014

More Time Travel News

http://www.quirksee.org/2014/09/18/cross-time-photos-show-snapshots-of-seattles-past-and-present-side-by-side/

Well, it's not technically time travel so much as time comparison, but you get the idea. The latest coverage to hit the Seattle area news-o-sphere is up on KPLU's Quirksee website. It's really gratifying to see the great response to these images. Seriously -- I only made them for fun, thinking I'd just share them with a few Facebook friends. After they appeared on Reddit things went a little insane, but fun!

 

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Then & Again On The Air!

 
I did a little interview with Evening Magazine, a local news and human interest show on KING-5 here in the Northwest. We talked about my cross-time images and some of the underlying ideas that motivate me to make them.
 
You can see the segment online here:

http://www.king5.com/story/entertainment/television/programs/evening-magazine/2014/09/17/clayton-kauzlarek-seattle-history/15694031/

And yes, they did misspell my last name. It's traditional.

Monday, September 08, 2014

Fully Authorized


It looks like I'm officially an author now. After my dad, Brad Kauzlaric, passed away in 2007 I started making a visual record of his artwork. He was an artist for many years, but there weren't good quality images of most of his work. That naturally enough lead to compiling all the images in a book along with a biography, plus notes sketches and details about how he created and worked.
 
You can find it up on Amazon. I'll probably have a reception and signing wingding over in my home county soon.
 
CK