I love your site! I live across the street from the “Forgotten Capitol Hill Mansion”, and can’t tell you how excited we are to see its restoration. We in the neighborhood, had long ago given up hope that this beautiful old home would be saved. What a gift.

Your piece on the 6th Church Christ Scientist was also of interest because it was designed by my Grandfather, Gerald C. Field, (not Gilbert C. Field, his son, and my father). As a young twenty-two year old architect fresh from New York, he joined the firm of Bebb and Mendell, and designed hundreds of NW buildings over his fifty year career. One of my favorites, The Jolly Roger Roadhouse, mysteriously burned to the ground shortly after attaining historic statis. I donated most of his drawings and blueprints to the UW, but I do have a photo of the church taken when it was first built, and a copy of his original drawing of the building.

Pamela Field Generaux
Via E-Mail
9/2/2009

“Poor children! Beaten about in the great tempest of the world, they have known nothing but suffering; they have never experienced the sweetness and charms of virtue.” - Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Founder of the Good Shepherd Order

“The unfortunate women” lived there. “Fallen girls.” “Troubled teens.” “Wayward women.” “Keepsakes for Heaven.” It was the Home of the Good Shepherd. Piousness was of great import for the girls send there by the courts or families that knew of nowhere else to turn. Morality was taught, spirituality instilled.

Residents, in those early days, rarely left the grounds, could not excuse themselves from the nuns sharing with them those experiences of sweet virtue. Bars were in the windows. There was strict adherence to scheduled ““ waking, teaching, working at the laundry downstairs, eating meals, bed. Oh how coveted were those Sundays when they could have “parlor” ““ a time in which appropriate visitors could see them.

Routines were adhered to religiously. A former resident remembered, “We were assigned one day a week to take our bath and wash our hair. We washed our underclothes and socks every night and hung them over a bed rail. The dorm monitors would always check to see that you had washed your clothing.”

Everything was monitored. Toiletries were lined up in a specific order in their small nun-appointed cubbies. One girl at each table, during meals, was sent for food for the entire table. Butter was served only on Sundays. Nuns sat on platforms overseeing the meals, when they weren’t censoring the girls’ mail. Nuns oversaw the girls scrubbing floors, weeding the grounds, polishing woodwork, attending Mass. At the laundry, girls were assigned to shaking, sorting, pressing, folding, and packing the clothes. The commercial laundry was how the orphanage and wayward girls’ home made their money. Their major customers included the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads, along with several downtown hotels. Classes were held Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, that’s if they weren’t already working the kitchen, or in the altar bread room making host for the parish, or in the sewing room making uniforms, or pursuing beautician certification, or at church services. Everything was monitored until the home officially closed for good in June of 1973.

It opened in 1890, as five Good Shepherd nuns arrived by train to Seattle. They opened an orphanage house for orphans and girls leading an immoral life on First Hill. The orphanage grew. The nuns then looked to the newly platted Wallingford and bought property. The new home was designed by the architectural firm Breitung and Buchinger (who also designed Seattle’s The Academy of the Holy Names and the Saint Alphonsus School, amongst other structions) and opened, on 4649 Sunnyside Avenue, in 1907. It housed 171 children.

Those children lived on those grounds, and went little place else. There were two wings in the building ““ those that were orphans and those that were wayward. They were kept apart. “There was a good side and a bad side,” remembers one resident, “the Angel Guardian side on the right as you go in and Sacred Heart side on the left. On the left side”¦they did the laundry and that sort of thing. There could be some real hard girls over there.”

In 1926 the orphans were transferred to a home in Laurelhurst, leaving the “Sacred Heart side.” And there they stayed, in later years, behind barbed wire, opaque windows and security systems. All the while, they worked at schooling, chores, their everlasting souls. The nuns were not to use corporal punishment, however. Good behavior was rewarded. Perhaps that meant recreation – like roller-skating, square dancing, swimming (a pool was built in 1959 that’s been since filled in), ping pong.

The 1960s saw declines on most all levels for the school. There were less girls admitted. There was less need for the commercial laundry. There was less supervision even. Some girls were even allowed to walk, unsupervised, to the University District on Saturdays. The laundry closed for good in 1970. Boeing, having given large financial donations to the Home, was having financial difficulties of their own and cut back. The maintenance of the building grew overwhelming and so they closed. Seattle bought the property in 1975, the building was transferred to Historic Seattle and is now used as a multi-purpose community center, complete with schools, non-profits, small businesses, and, sometimes, the quiet footfalls of women who once lived there themselves.

Jonathan Shipley
9/18/2009