Just wanted to let you know that the Seattle Public Library has released a digital special collection of materials relating to the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. This is a veritable goldmine of A-Y-P stuff for your blog:
http://cdm200301.cdmhost.com/index.php
I’m also including (below) links to my two favorite documents, which might be particularly interesting to you as well, because they contain a lot of photos. I know the Exposition took place on or near the UW campus so I’d challenge your readers to find anything in these photos that has survived to this day. It would be awesome if there’s some small piece of this history hidden on campus somewhere, but I couldn’t find any structures that looked familiar.
Official Guide to the A-Y-P Exposition
General History Complimentary Booklet
Nathan Cosgray
Via E-Mail
11/10/2008
A couple of the original buildings are left, but not many. Architecture Hall (once known as Chemistry Building) is around. The original Women’s Building is also still in use. Most of the structures, however, were not built to last — as Alan Stein told us in this post. The author of this circa 1908 postcard writes that the buildings were to stay after the expo, but was presumably unaware as to how long they’ d stick aroun d.
http://cdm200301.cdmhost.com/index.php
I’m also including (below) links to my two favorite documents, which might be particularly interesting to you as well, because they contain a lot of photos. I know the Exposition took place on or near the UW campus so I’d challenge your readers to find anything in these photos that has survived to this day. It would be awesome if there’s some small piece of this history hidden on campus somewhere, but I couldn’t find any structures that looked familiar.
Official Guide to the A-Y-P Exposition
General History Complimentary Booklet
Nathan Cosgray
Via E-Mail
11/10/2008
This is the site of the A.Y.P. Exposition for 1909. It is at the University Grounds. All the buildings are to be left on the ground for school’s after the fair.
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| 1120 Golf Grounds, Laurelhurst Peninsula and Lake Washington, Washington. From the site of the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition. The Lowman & Hanford Co., Seattle. |
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| Back of postcard, from early 1900′s. |
Very, very cool. Good Wikimedia Commons fodder, too, at least the public-domain stuff. But cdmhost.com? That’s odd….
cdmhost.com must be a hosted service for Content DM. Probably cheaper and easier for the Library than running their own servers. I know somebody a couple of years ago told me Content DM was prohibitively expensive. I wonder if this makes it considerably cheaper, which would lead to more organizations putting their photos online?
I’ve read that they tried to keep the AYP Forestry building as a permanent building, but beetles got into the enormous virgin tree trunks they used as support columns.
Yep, the Forestry Building hung around until it was done in by bug infestation and dry rot. It briefly housed the Washington State Museum (now the Burke Museum) in the early 1920s, but soon after the collections were moved in, museum director Frank Hall discovered that the leaky building was infested with bark beetles.
UW Professor Trevor Kincaid, an entomologist, suggested that a new heating system would kill all the beetles. It did, but it also accelerated dry rot. The structure was closed in 1923, and slowly decayed until it was torn down in 1930.
Here’s a shot of it during demolition:
http://content.lib.washington.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ayp&CISOPTR=1264&CISOBOX=1&REC=7
Another trove of A-Y-P materials: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Alaska-Yukon-Pacific_Exposition. Quite a bit of what is currently there comes from the Argus’s A-Y-P Edition