Reframe: Bellevue & Olive
February 8th, 2010 @ 12:03 am by Cliffe | Sorted Reframe |
Here’s a scene from Capital Hill that has changed very little over the years. The Reframe shows Bellevue Ave and Olive Way — a bit of a blast from the past for me since I lived just a block from here a few years ago. A quick Google streetview look around the triangular buildings reveals that it is original (Westinghouse X-Ray at the time). The area around the Columbia Ale billboard looks like it was developed during the 50′s or 60′s. Click for the high res.
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| Bellevue Ave. and Olive Way, July 10, 1945. Photograph courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives. |
Link to Google Street View
Remarkably similar to the view today. It looks like there is a house located where the Starbucks is now. The perspective in the Google is a bit hard to match up. I wonder if the billboard was where the newer building and trees are, or if it extended in front of the apartment house next door?
I think that house is where Starbucks’ parking lot is now. I think the Starbucks building is barely visible to the left of the large house. Would it have been the Plaid Piper at this time?
That house is confusing, perspective wise. It looks like it’s right at the intersection of Olive and Denny. Maybe somone could look it up on HistoricAerials? I can’t get that site to work here at my workplace, or else I would do it right now!
I love that little triangle building that once was Westinghouse.
I adore oddly-shaped buildings.
Does anybody know what business is in the building just to the left of the beer billboard? I can’t make out the sign. The Crescent Tavern is there now.
It’s hard to make out that sign because the lamp post & size but I can see that the last part of the name is downie’s and the bottom looks like Camera or laundromat. Hard to tell with this picture
Interesting how whenever one compares almost any old/vintage picture of Seattle
with the same spot today, there is almost always MORE Trees in the current picture… Pioneer Square is a good example of this.
@Shannon:
The Historic Aerials dataset for 1936 indeed shows a small house where the Starbucks parking lot is now. It was gone by 1968. The house in this shot looks larger, but I think a lot of that mass is the apartment building behind it.
About the house seeming to be in the intersection of Denny/Olive — keep in mind that those old lenses were shaped in a way that they compressed the field of view (behaving like telephoto lenses), while today’s lenses typically are built to do the opposite (show more periphery = wide angle). Witness the Google view, where you can’t even see the bend in the road because it’s “so far away”.
So in the image above, there is actually a severely compressed block or two between the bus parked on the right and the house in question. Denny is actually crossing immediately in front of the bus, I think. There’s a car or truck barely visible on Denny that has just crossed Olive heading west.
the oddly shaped building turned into wingdome and is now the Saint
the nearest car is at the corner of Summit and Howell