I’m very pleased to be posting the first user submitted
Reframe feature! Ever since I started Vintage Seattle, I’ve been hoping that people would write in with bits of history from their neck of the woods and now this is starting to happen in earnest. Great stuff. Scott Durham of the
Central District News Blog wrote in with this Reframe of 23rd and Marion.
Take it, Scott:
I’m also a Squire Park resident and thought you might be interested in this picture I found a while back. It shows the building at 23rd & Marion that is currently all boarded up and recently posted “For Sale”. That property was a functional barber shop in OK shape until an out of control car ran into it one night 3 or four years ago.
It’s been a mess ever since, and now I assume it and the neighboring property will sell and be replaced by townhomes.
And now that I look at the picture more closely, I see something in the distance that doesn’t exist in our current world. If you look up Marion, you see the Immaculate Conception Church as it exists today. Move across the horizon to the left and there’s an outline of a large building, directly above the white awning of the grocery.
I can’t
imagine what that could be. Perhaps it existed on the property that now has the DSHS complex across Cherry from Providence Hospital.
Here’s two pictures – one repeats the historical scene, and
one focuses on the grocery property itself. Why would anyone ever remove the nice high gables from the attached house? It boggles the mind, especially since the original house appears to have matched the row of historical Victorians that still exist on the west side of 23rd.
Scott Durham
January 7, 2008
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Marion St. looking west from 23rd Ave., June 12, 1920. Image courtesy Library of Congress, U.S. Copyright Office. University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections Division.
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The same shot reframed in January 2007. Image courtesy Scott Durham.
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Close-up of wh at used to be a corner grocery store, more recently a barber shop. Image courtesy Scott Durham.
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