Seattle By Air 1979
May 15th, 2009 @ 12:18 am by Cliffe | Sorted Photo Exposure
Vintage Seattle reader Jerry Cox was kind enough to send in a batch of super hi-res photos he took of Seattle and surroundings by plane in April 1979. He was just about to embark on a two year Church sevice project and these have been in storage since then. I’ve left the photos hi-res, with each weighing in around a meg. Big thanks to Jerry for writing in and sharing with all of us. Take it away.
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| Downtown Bellevue in foreground and Seattle in background. April, 1979. Photo by Jerry Cox. |
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| Evergreen Point Bridge (520), looking west. April, 1979. Photo by Jerry Cox. |
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| Boats off of Evergreen Point Bridge (520). April, 1979. Photo by Jerry Cox. |
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| Seattle Center and Puget Sound. April, 1979. Photo by Jerry Cox. |
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| Downtown Seattle, looking southwest. April, 1979. Photo by Jerry Cox. |
May 15th, 2009 @ 5:39 am
Is that a reservoir in the foreground of the downtown Seattle photo? Is that still there? Anyone remember anything about it?
May 15th, 2009 @ 6:30 am
That reservoir is Cal Anderson Park between Pine & Denny on Capitol Hill. It’s covered now.
May 15th, 2009 @ 8:40 am
Greg, they covered the resevoir up after 9/11 to prevent any bioterrorism “water spiking” activity, if I remember correctly. Odd that no other reservoirs were covered up, though!
May 15th, 2009 @ 9:47 am
In the upper left of shot 4, you can see the P-I globe in its original spot, where Group Health recently vacated. A sad reminder…
May 15th, 2009 @ 10:10 am
Nice find here. I found the photo of Downtown Bellevue to be particularly interesting, since I have done a fair bit of research on the history of the Eastside.
May 15th, 2009 @ 11:16 am
Shannon — they’re in the process of covering up the others, too: http://www.seattle.gov/util/About_SPU/Water_System/Projects/Reservoir_Covering_Program/index.asp
May 15th, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
I noticed that on Google Earth a while back. They have historic sattelite imagery that you can cycle through and watch it progress through the stages of cover up. Pretty neat for us map nerds!
May 16th, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
The way the boats are lined up near the entrance to the Montlake Cut, I’d venture to guess that these pics were taken on Opening Day of Boating Season.
May 16th, 2009 @ 8:24 pm
I was startled to see the tower of Sacred Heart church gleaming white on the hill beyond Vuecrest (Viewcrest?). I haven’t seen or thought about it in decades, but it seemed like for a while there you could always see it no matter where you were, even down in the Enatai area where I lived. It seemed to be aligned with a number of the main N/S roads, so that you were always seeing it there like Oz at the end of the trail. Wasn’t even my church, but the sight of it now brings back nice memories of being nested in my community, before the world got quite so large.
May 17th, 2009 @ 6:54 pm
I am the one that took the pictures - first sorry I did not take time to clean them up. These are the actual slides.
I just checked the PI website and it states in a caption in a pic that opening day of boating season was May 6, 1979.
I took this plane ride in April. Boating season was approaching as we had a nice spring that year.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/162927.asp?source=rss
I was using my brand new Yashika camera that day. Was trying to get the best shots without wasting too much film.
Glad I could share.
May 17th, 2009 @ 9:37 pm
One more thougjt tonight. You will note that the Space Needle does not have the newer lower level restaurant. That was added in 1982.
In the same picture you will see that the watervront still has the work look about it. This is before it changed over to a lot of the shops and tourest attractions.
This is when the Seafirst Bank Building was still the tallest building in Seattle. You can see this in the picture also. This was until 1985 when the Columbia Tower was built.
We used to call it “The box the Space Needle came in”
This is a favorite picture of this group. As for the Kingdome picture. I was around and watched it being built. Though it had its flaws, I miss the memories of things whe had done there.
Thanks for all the comments on my pictures. Great memories.
May 18th, 2009 @ 3:43 pm
I believe the boats are lined up for the first UW Crew team competition of the season. I saw something similar to that lineup last month (April).