View looking east up Pike Street in 1930. The inset is an artist’s rendering of the same area in Seattle’s early days. This is from a layout from the Seattle Times. Photo courtesy Allen. http://www.flickr.com/photos/crackdog/6095361744/in/photostream
Actually that rendering appears to be looking up Yesler Way.Note the original Colman Block on the right where the Olympic Block later stood.
The Coliseum Theatre was on 5th and Pike until the early 90s. That is, in fact, Pike street.
Why was Fat Tuesday on a Thursday in July??
If you look closely you’ll see Ernst Hardware up on 6th Avenue on the north side of the street. And Weisfeld’s and Ben Bridge are across the street from one another on 4th.
The Coliseum Theater appears to be showing the Buster Keaton film “Free and Easy.” One of his first “talkies.”
This previous post is the same view from the top of the street looking towards downtown:
http://www.vintageseattle.org/2010/07/08/upper-pike-1902/
I was talking about the pencil drawing in the middle of the picture, it’s based on a photograph looking up Yesler Way in the 1880s.
http://content.lib.washington.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/seattle&CISOPTR=3077&CISOBOX=1&REC=13
I’ll be damned! You’re absolutely right. I wonder why they put a picture of Yesler Way in the middle of a picture of Pike Street?
Perhaps it was supposed to represent the heart of the city in the old days as well as the present.
^That makes sense.
I finally know what the first five floors of that Italianate building on 5th and Pike look like. The building is currently clad in featureless white and gray marble up to the windowsills of the sixth floor. Most of the windows are blocked in. It might have had a fire at some point or some radical repurposing.
Beorn, that’s the Ranke Building, built in 1926. The building was modernized for Nordtsrom’s-Best in the 1970s, which later became Nordstroms.
I’m pretty sure the building was stripped down to the bare frame to install that ugly stuff
I love those old street clocks, but why did we need 5 of them on the same block?
Matt the E, I count six. There’s a third on the left side, visible to the right of the Ernst signage and above the vehicle approaching. Maybe customer loyalty in those days meant they set their watch by YOUR clock and not by some other shop’s clock. Just a SWAG.
> why did we need 5 of them on the same block?
– Why, to give you more choice over what time it is, of course!
Think of them as the sandwich boards of their day – they’re actually owned by the adjacent businesses – and often moved around town as the businesses moved location. If one business has a fancy clock, a nearby competing business may well want to one-up them – so presto, you’ve got clocks everywhere.
Local historian Rob Ketcherside has a ton of info on the clocks of Seattle, including a map of the ones that are currently left – http://www.zombiezodiac.com/rob/ped/clock/about.html – if you click on the “protect street clocks” link, you can read a document that has some historical information about the clocks.
It was common for jewelry stores to feature clocks in front of them as a way of advertising their work on watches. This was the “Diamond district,” meaning that it was full of jewelry stores. So naturally the street ends up being “cluttered” with clocks.
Great find, [Brendan]. What a goofy collection of laws we (still) have about street clocks. You’re constrained on the size of your clock face, the height you mount it at, the size of its base, and there can (now) be only one per block. And if it’s broken for more than 14 days, the city confiscates it.
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