Laurie in Admiral is still remodeling, and still turning up pages from copies of The West Seattle Press, circa 1917, the year her house was built. This time it’s from a December edition. Above, a crime; below, a crash:

And a hero:

Plus, of course, ads:

The blacksmith’s address compares to the north side of Talarico’s; the shoe-repair shop, right around Admiral Safeway; Ida the real-estate lady, the north side of the Rite-Aid lot. Thanks, Laurie! (We have a few more clippings in reserve for sometime during the holiday week ahead.)

P.S. If you missed previous stories with some of her finds – see them here and here.

(Click photo to see larger image – the resulting image may also be zoomable)
Laurie in Admiral found more newspaper pages from 1917 during her ongoing remodeling project and – as she did with the ones we featured here three weeks ago – she shared them with WSB. The top story for “The West Seattle Press” on February 14, 1917, involved an uproar over the cost of completing Admiral Way – here’s a closer look at part of the top story:

We’re not sure exactly which stretch of Admiral was being discussed. But here’s a Seattle Municipal Archives photo from less than a year earlier, looking toward Pigeon Point over where Admiral Way begins now:

(Click photo to see larger image on the city’s website)
And here’s one from a different stretch to Admiral in 1916 – though the archives don’t identify exactly where:

Back to the 95-year-old newspaper pages, we have a few other things Laurie shared from her discoveries – three ads, starting with another look at what land cost back then:

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In the Admiral District, Laurie is remodeling her 1917 home … and, after pulling up the old floors, found them lined with 1917 newspapers, with plenty of clues as to the state of the 1917 housing market. Yes, those prices above are the actual full listing prices. 4556 California, the office advertising above, is the address of Cupcake Royale today; the address in this next item currently would place you at California/Dawson, north side of the Rite-Aid parking lot:

Laurie also found the Olympus Theater‘s weekly promotional pages:

The “Olympus Weekly” places the theater at California and Lander in the Admiral District. This December 1917 page touts silent movies starring Mary Pickford, Maxine Elliott, Ann Pennington, and Dustin Farnum:

(Click for a larger view)
The bottom of the “Olympus Weekly” page carried ads for other businesses, including one that tells us which newspaper Laurie found beneath the floorboards:

A check of the 1987-published West Seattle history book “West Side Story” reveals “The West Seattle Press” was published 1908-1918, known by a few other names along the way, including “The West Side Press.” Thanks to Laurie for sharing what she found!

(WSB photo from April 13)
Last month, we showed you the Log House Museum‘s totem pole – actually a story pole, we’re told, so that’s the phrase we’ll use for the rest of this story – as restoration experts Artech picked it up and hauled it off for rehab. We caught up with them a few weeks later to check in:

The museum’s pole is at an Artech-leased facility in South King County, where it has been undergoing work alongside a totem pole that belongs to Highline Community College; that pole is scheduled to be reinstalled tomorrow, while the West Seattle pole is awaiting a reinstallation date.

Both poles (the photos above and below show the one that belongs to Highline) have been undergoing the kind of work that Artech did on West Seattle’s Rotary Viewpoint Park pole before its post-theft/recovery reinstallation in 2010 – everything from getting insect-repellent borate, to repairs, repainting, and oiling, to copper caps.

The Highline pole has something else in common with the Rotary Viewpoint Park pole. According to information that the college kindly dug up for us on request, it was carved and installed at Highline in 1977, under the supervision and guidance of carvers including Robin Young, who carved the Rotary pole. Highline provided this photo of the plaque atop the pole:

It was repainted in 1995 under the guidance of Robin Young’s son Joel Young. The pole, along with another one that had renovation work done on-site at the college, is being fixed up as part of Highline College’s 50th anniversary commemoration. Highline found Artech, the college tells us, because a Google search to find experts in totem/story-pole renovations led them to one of our stories about the Rotary Viewpoint Park pole! Back to the West Seattle pole:

Repainting hadn’t begun yet when we checked in. The 20-foot pole, which used to stand at Admiral Way Viewpoint, is destined for a spot on the east side of the Log House Museum, once its “rehab” work is done and the site is prepared.

(Student journalist Nicholas Trost, on assignment for WSB, shot this video tour before ex-FS 37 was vacated)
Seven months after the City Council gave final authorization for the sale of city-landmark former Fire Station 37 at 35th/Othello – vacant for a year and a half – it’s on the brink of being bought. We’ve tracked the sale process through the listing and the March/April open houses; April 20th was the deadline for offers – but senior vice president Arvin Vander Veen from Colliers International, handling the sale of ex-FS 37 and another one elsewhere in the city, tells WSB they asked a small number of prospective buyers for a second round of offers, and those are due today. Why a second round? we asked. His reply: “Because several offers were high and very close to each other, so we went back to a few for a best and final offer.” (They had said they wouldn’t accept offers less than $250,000.) The circa-1925 building is expected to become a private residence, in no small part because – as pointed out in a city report we excerpted last year – the site is zoned for single-family housing. Proceeds from the sale are to go back into the city’s Fire Levy program.

(Click for larger image)
When Lynn Sweeney Pedersen accepted “Emerging Business of the Year” at last Wednesday’s West Seattle Chamber of Commerce Westsider Awards, for her family’s The Grove/West Seattle Inn (WSB coverage here), she noted its history – opened as the Mar-Lyn Motel 50 years ago for the Seattle World’s Fair. Today, The Grove shared this 50-year-old postcard view of the Mar-Lyn. While the motel’s configuration hasn’t changed much, if you look closely, you’ll see some fun details (phone booth, drink machine, cars)…

Last night, e-mail came in from Terry Hammonds, a Florida resident who was visiting Seattle for the World’s Fair in 1962 and took the photos during a helicopter ride. Terry was a “Texas college student on my first road trip” at the time. Terry offered the photos, available via Flickr, if we were doing a ’62 retrospective (as so many are, in honor of the half-century anniversary). We thought you might be interested in the view of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and even this one of West Seattle and Harbor Island, from a distance:

Of course the big news at the time was the brand-new Space Needle:

(Click any of the photos to see the largest size via Terry’s Flickr feed.) Thanks! We love receiving photo surprises to share. P.S. Did you know that West Seattle (Duwamish Head, in particular) was one of seven sites considered as a possible World’s Fair site for that year?

Another West Seattle totem pole is headed off for refurbishment work, done by the same experts who helped get the Rotary Viewpoint Park totem in shape. WSB was at the Log House Museum this afternoon as the crew from Artech, with help from Alki Lumber, picked up the pole that’s been unceremoniously lying on the ground behind the museum for a while. As our video clip above shows, it was a painstaking process to get the pole onto the truck in just the right spot:

It will take about a month to get the pole dried out and treated so that it’s ready for touchups. Once it’s ready to return, it will be placed upright on the west side of the museum, according to director Sarah Frederick:

This is the totem pole that used to be at the Admiral Way Viewpoint, as explained in our story last December (which also includes a photo of how it looked when it stood there; more history here). Grant money will take care of most of the refurbishment costs.

12:20 PM: The “for sale” sign is now up at the former Fire Station 37 (35th/Othello). The city process of putting it on the market – since it’s been replaced by a bigger new station a few blocks south – has been under way for a long time (here’s the 47-page city analysis); last month, the city announced it had chosen Colliers to handle the listing. What the new owner can do with the ex-station and its 9440-square-foot lot will be limited, since – as the sign points out – it’s in a single-family zone, plus, the building is an official city landmark. We haven’t found the listing online yet, but have messages out to the brokers whose names are on the sign.

12:59 PM UPDATE: Arvin Vander Veen from Colliers replied to our question about the asking price among other things:

We are gathering all of the pertinent materials … now and will be ready in about one week to blast it out. There is no asking price, only a minimum bid of $250,000. We are going to have two open houses coming up, and then in April we will call for offers from all of the people that fill out the Confidentiality Agreement needed to receive all of the due diligence materials. All offers must be noncontingent, all cash with proof of funds attached, from which we will pick the buyer and close escrow immediately.

That Saturday gathering in northeastern West Seattle was on one level about a plaza –

… but it was really about the people. This corner of West Seattle, now towered over by the high bridge, is Riverside, for decades a home to fishing families, mostly Croatian immigrants, whose descendants have mostly moved on, but won’t let the history (as detailed in the plaque inscription) be forgotten:

They gathered Saturday for the dedication of Riverside Memorial Plaza; the word “memorial” took on an added poignancy, for one of the plaza’s tiles bears the name of Jennie Plenkovich:

That’s the maiden name of Jennie Jaramillo, laid to rest earlier this week at age 75. As noted in her published obituary, she was a founding member of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, which overflowed with mourners for her memorial Mass just yesterday. Her uncle Frank Zuvela was a driving force behind the Riverside plaza project, and he was keynote speaker Saturday:

You can visit the Riverside Memorial Plaza at 17th SW/W. Marginal Place (map). Read more about it, and Riverside history, here, here, and see photos from Riverside days gone by, here.

(Jerry Vandenberg and friend. Photos courtesy Nicole Vandenberg, via SWSHS)
This morning, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society is providing more information on a big event this Saturday (you might have seen the Seattle Times [WSB partner] preview this weekend): “Come Home to Riverside,” noon Saturday at 17th SW/West Marginal Place (map). Riverside is a historic neighborhood by the bridge, an early West Seattle fishing community dating back more than a century. With descendants of those original families (many of them Croatian immigrants), SWSHS has created the Riverside Memorial Plaza, which will be dedicated at the event. From the announcement:

The project is the idea of Frank Zuvela, Joe Popich, and Mike Budinich, all sons of first-generation Riverside residents.

The property was donated by businessman Mike Budinich. The design and labor was contributed by Jerry and Ron Vandenberg, who grew up in Riverside in the 1940s.

Zuvela and Budinich both were born in Riverside; the Vandenbergs moved there in childhood. Here’s a photo of the Budinich store in Riverside, one of two grocery stores in the area, which extended credit, vital at the time because fishermen did not have year-round income and needed to borrow during the inbetween times.

Ahead, the full text on the memorial plaque, as provided by SWSHS:Read More

Looking for a moment of Friday afternoon distraction? Just got this link from the “BIG Map Blog,” of which we’ll confess we hadn’t previously heard. They have posted the 1891 “Territorial Growth of Seattle” map in a cool zoomable/scrollable viewer. Large swaths of the peninsula are unmarked – looks like this was part of “the last frontier.”

Story and photos by Katie Meyer
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

A pumpkin, photographs, and plats on a map were some of the items shared when attendees at Saturday’s Southwest Seattle Historical Society meeting were introduced to Michelle DelCarlo‘s concept of a “pop-up museum.”

DelCarlo, a University of Washington graduate student in Museology, explained how her themed pop-up museum can influence how museums see themselves, and can assist them in creating a deeper relationship with their community. An informal, interactive pop-up museum helps museums engage people – it’s DelCarlo’s “experiment in community building and the creation of meaningful experiences.” The mission is to create conversations between people of all ages and all walks of life.

(Michelle DelCarlo, left, at the start of her “Thanksgiving” theme pop-up museum)
A pop-up museum is based solely on the content provided by the people who show up to participate, and after it ends, everyone takes their items home with them. The theme for the meeting at West Seattle (Admiral) Library was “Thanksgiving” and SWHS meeting participants had been asked in advance to bring something that was meaningful to them, and write on a small sheet of paper ( the “label”) why that object is meaningful, then place the object and label on a table.

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Know someone with a great West Seattle story to tell – or maybe you have one yourself? “Telling Our Westside Stories” is about to get going, and the Southwest Seattle Historical Society needs your help to find the “storytellers”! Here’s the official announcement:

What was it like growing up next to the Duwamish River? How often did you go to Alki Beach? Did you catch fish in the creeks? Did you ride your bikes up the West Seattle hills? Did you think the ravines were scary?

The Southwest Seattle Historical Society is launching an ambitious three-year project of Telling Our Westside Stories. The project will engage youth of the various neighborhoods of southwest Seattle in talking to elders to find out how they have experienced life in southwest Seattle over a period of many years and elders talking to young people and finding out how they experience the same neighborhoods in a different time. Youth will ask questions about living on the Duwamish Peninsula, about work, and about home.

The resulting exhibits will feature interactive maps with audio clips from the interviews and exhibits that travel to area libraries, schools, community centers, and retirement centers.

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