Beauty For All

The Tourist & Trade pictorial section of the Seattle Sunday Times on July 12, 1936 featured a few of the city's noteworthy vistas in an article titled "Beauty For All To Share."

This shot looking north on Lake Washington Boulevard was an alternate to the one used, taken from the same spot a moment later. The caption read: "A glimpse of the nationally famed drive that follows the shore of the lake for several miles, with new vistas and beauties opening up at every turn."

It's nice to say that's still the case 82 years later though the I-90 Floating Bridge would be added to the shoreline seen through the trees just four years later.

A New/Old AYPE Poster

This is a "Then & Again" of a different stripe, though it still combines things from the past and the present.

I've always been fascinated by the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition, the elaborate fair hosted on the grounds of the present-day UW campus in 1909. More info about the AYPE.

I've run across some nice printed ephemera over the years but I've always wanted a poster I could hang on the wall. A few promotional items come close but nothing was exactly what I wanted. So, I gathered some source images and assembled my own.

This was mostly done compositing source material in Photoshop with a lot of tweaking and rebalancing to get the texture and colors right. I did the typography but based it very closely on a ticket from 1909. The airship draws upon photo reference from the AYPE with a little hand retouching and color by me. That lead to making the sky much taller on the main aerial view. I also scaled up Mt. Rainier a bit and fixed numerous holes and stains on the original image.

Some of the items I used to create the poster.

There are plenty of design ideas that would make this poster more dramatic and eye-popping, but those often draw from the last century of design and layout thinking. I was trying to stay faithful to how they might have designed it in that era. I think it mostly accomplishes that.

So, there you go -- A new/old AYP Exposition poster!

Twitterpated!

It only took half a decade, but I finally started posting my cross-time pics on their very own Twitter feed. Feel free pay a visit and follow us there! It's actually not a bad way to look through our library of images. Expect the entire run of Then & Again to appear there over the next few days.

Spanning The Years

 

A recent eBay album purchase contained some great photos of Seattle in the early 1930s. The photographer was a woman from West Seattle who was not only a talented photographer, she was nice enough to date and annotate each picture carefully. Here we see the George Washington Memorial Bridge, better known as the Aurora Bridge around the time it opened in 1932 – Construction debris is still visible and the roadway beneath the bridge is still unpaved. Her note alongside the photo is still true today. “Standing under the bridge gave us a feeling of being in a great cathedral.” This shot was taken facing south just down the hill from the Fremont Troll.

I've been able to identify the photographer in question but so far, I haven’t had much luck contacting her surviving relatives. I hope to credit her work more fully with their permission in future posts.

 

 

Fire & Water

 

Many Seattleites are familiar with the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, but other conflagrations have hit the city over the last century or so. One of the biggest of these was the Belltown Fire on June 10, 1910. It started near the waterfront and swept into downtown Seattle reaching 2^nd Avenue, ultimately destroying six city blocks. Fortunately, the 40 mph winds calmed and Seattle’s signature rainfall subdued the blaze. This was a stroke of good luck, since the city’s newly mechanized fire department was powerless to stop the fire.

Here, we see a shot across Railroad Avenue (present day Alaskan Way) near the foot of Wall Street at the ruins of the Puget Sheetmetal Building (left) and the Glenorchy Hotel (right). The shot also offers a good view of the railroad trestles that crisscrossed Seattle's waterfront before the seawall was constructed.

 

Interurbanity

 

A trolley car from The Puget Sound Electric Railway, better known as the Interurban, parked at its Seattle terminus on Occidental Avenue in the early 20^thcentury (photo Lawton Gowey). The network of privately owned electric trolleys carried passengers between communities from Everett to Tacoma between 1902 and 1928. The system eventually gave way to highways and buses, but the Interurban name lives on in buildings, streets and business names (and a sculpture in Fremont). Speaking of which, the distinctive archway of the Interurban Building provided a handy way to align these two pictures.