Originally known as the 11th Street Bridge, it was renamed May 21, 1997, to honor Tacoma-born Murray Morgan (1916–2000), the best-known Pacific Northwest historian of his generation, and author of "Skid Road", a history of Seattle, Washington. Morgan was a bridge tender on the bridge during the 1950s. In fact, he wrote most of "Skid Road" during quiet periods on the job.
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Thus Maynard was not on the best of terms with what became the Seattle Establishment, especially after the Puget Sound War. He was nearly written out of the city's history until Morgan's 1951 book Skid Road and Speidel's research in the 1960s and 1970s.
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This section draws heavily on Bill Speidel, Sons of the Profits (1967) and Doc Maynard (1978). Doc Maynard and Murray Morgan, Skid Road (1951, 1960, 1982) are especially useful on the events regarding resistance nominally led by Kamiakim in the January 1856 attack on the town.
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It was located at the corner of Second Avenue and James Street, in what is now the Pioneer Square-Skid Road National Historic District.Summary for 601 2nd Ave, Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. Accessed online 23 August 2008. During the Prohibition era, its Rose Room was repeatedly cited for flouting the laws against the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
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Fraternal Order of Eagles (F.O.E.) is an international fraternal organization that was founded on February 6, 1898, in Seattle, Washington, by a group of six theater owners including John Cort (the first president), brothers John W. and Tim J. Considine, Harry (H.L.) Leavitt (who later joined the Loyal Order of Moose), Mose Goldsmith and Arthur Williams.Murray Morgan, Skid Road, Ballantine Books (1960). pp.
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"Demolish City's Skid Road, Murder Protest Demands". Vancouver Sun, 6 April 1962. p.1 In addition to being a major cultural and entertainment district, Hastings Street was also a centre for beer parlours and brothels.Douglas 2002, chapter 1 In 1942, the neighbourhood lost its entire ethnic Japanese population, estimated at 8,000 to 10,000, due to the Canadian government's internment of these people.
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Bill returned again to Portland in 1952 to join his brother Sam Naito in running their family-owned import business, which in 1958 was incorporated as Norcrest China Company. In 1962, they purchased a decaying former hotel (the historic Globe Hotel) in what was then known as downtown Portland's "Skid Road" district, now Old Town, and converted it into a retail store named Import Plaza. The risky move proved a success, as the store thrived, and inspired the Naito brothers to acquire several other vacant or neglected historic buildings in downtown over the next several years and renovate them at a time when most other developers were shifting their focus to the suburbs and abandoning downtown. Bill Naito is credited with coining the name "Old Town" for Portland's Skid Road district, in order to improve the area's image,Levenson, Lisa (July 26, 1997).
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The mountain is flanked by Mount Success to the northeast and Bald Cap mountain to the southwest. There is currently no trail to the summit of North Bald Cap, but access can be gained by following Ball Cap Road, off Success Pond Road, to a swamp at the end of an old skid road to the south of the mountain.J. Joseph. Mahoosucs, J. Joe Hiking Press, 2013.
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The name derives ultimately from Henry Yesler, pioneer mill owner. Yesler Way was originally the skid road on which logs were skidded down to the mill. The southern part of the hill came to be known as Yesler's Hill, Yesler Hill, or Profanity Hill. These names referred roughly to the part of First Hill south of the original King County Courthouse at 8th Avenue and Terrace Street.
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A third founder, H. L. Leavitt, soon bolted to found the Loyal Order of Moose.Murray Morgan, Skid Road, Ballantine Books (1960), p. 144–146. Moore Theatre, Seattle, circa 1907 By 1903, Cort's Northwestern Theatrical AssociationSyndicate Denies a Truce; But Opinion Is That a Sort of Agreement Has Been Made with Cort, The New York Times, November 3, 1910, p. 9. Accessed online December 22, 2007.
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Rainfall on the summit of Black Mountain averages per year, much higher than the Santa Clara Valley which lies in its rain shadow. From its name, Black Mountain's dark summit was once covered with forest or chaparral instead of the current grasslands. Evidence of a large historic Coast Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) forest includes the "Skid Road Trail" in the Stevens Creek valley west of Black Mountain.
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A writer for HistoryLink described the Sinking Ship as "that skid road parking garage whose nihilistic construction depresses the flatiron block where James Street and Yesler Way meet at Pioneer Square." The parking garage is said to be haunted. It is owned by the Kubota family. The Seattle Monorail Project proposed a monorail station at the site of the Sinking Ship, which it hoped to acquire through condemnation.
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Established in 1902 on the second floor of the Furuya Company building in Seattle's Pioneer Square–Skid Road Historic District, the first class of the Japanese school was headed by Yoshio Shibayama with a class of four students. By 1907 there were a total of 48 students. In 1913, the school moved to its current location at Weller and 16th Street. By 1920, the school had grown to seven teachers and 251 students.
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During the Depression, hundreds of men arrived in Vancouver in search of work. Most of them later returned to their hometowns, except workers who had been injured or those who were sick or elderly. These men remained in the DTES area – at the time known as Skid Road – which became a non- judgemental, affordable place to live as the main downtown area of Vancouver began to shift westward. Among them, drinking was a common pastime.
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A lynching in 1882 drawn by A. W. Piper. The 1882 lynchings are well described in Murray Morgan's book Skid Road. The events involved a mob defying an armed sheriff, successfully disarming the sheriff's deputies, and assaulting Judge Roger Sherman Greene, who attempted to slash the ropes by which the lynching victims were to be hanged. Judge Greene, while not doubting the actual guilt of the lynched men, was later to write that "the lynchers were co-criminal with the lynched".
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In 1973, Vancouver city planner Peter Davies decided what was needed to address some of the DTES' health and social problems (high rates of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases related to poverty) was a democratic organization. He enlisted the support of Eriksen, Jean Swanson and Libby Davies, who organized DERA. The group's mandate was to build a democratic voice within the neighbourhood. The organization required its members to be residents of the community, which for many years had been known only by the pejorative Skid Road.
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Most of the year he and his family lived on the upper floor of the company boarding house and he ate a simple, largely traditional Japanese diet. Even the summer house with its commanding view, surrounded on three sides by a verandah, was quite modest on the inside. The interior of the second floor was never finished or used. Despite his austere lifestyle and strong Christian beliefs, Ronald Takaki writes that Furuya's fortune may have had significant roots in the underground economy of Seattle's Skid Road.
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The Drive was originally a skid road for dragging logs to the harbour. It was named "Park Drive" but renamed "Commercial Drive" in 1911, possibly to avoid confusion with other Park Drives in Vancouver. Commercial Drive ends in the south at 16th Avenue, the former end of Vancouver/start of City of South Vancouver, when it diverts to Victoria Diversion and eventually Victoria Drive. A limited light industrial Commercial Street carries on to 22nd Avenue, and around the Selkirk school there, until 54th Avenue as a residential street.
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Evidence of a large historic Coast Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) forest includes the "Skid Road Trail", which was once traversed by 19th-century loggers who used oxen to drag huge firs and smaller Tanbark oak (Lithocarpus densiflorus) trees along "skids" which were flat-topped logs doused with water to reduce friction. Today, seedlings sown by second growth Douglas-fir forest can be seen advancing up into the preserve's grasslands in an example of forest succession. The preserve's grasslands include California poppy, checker mallow, purple owl's-clover, bluedicks, and blue-eyed grass.
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Bandleader Vic Meyers and others kept the speakeasies jumping through the Prohibition era, and by mid-century the thriving jazz scene in the city's Skid Road district would launch the careers of such luminaries as Ray Charles and Quincy Jones. In 1924, Seattle's Sand Point Airfield was the endpoint of the first aerial circumnavigation of the world. The historic flight helped convince Congress to develop Sand Point as a Naval Air Station. The Great Depression hit Seattle hard. For example, Seattle issued 2,538 permits for housing construction in 1930, but only 361 in 1932.
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By the 1950s and '60s, the entire Pioneer Square district had fallen upon hard times. Many of the buildings, which were barely 60 years old, sat empty and decaying, and were slated to be torn down and replaced with parking garages. The Seattle Hotel was the first to be razed, which prompted the citizens to initiate a campaign to preserve the district. The rest of the buildings were spared the wrecking ball, and Pioneer Square–Skid Road Historic District were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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The first such boom, covering the early years of the city, rode on the lumber industry. During this period the road now known as Yesler Way won the nickname "Skid Road," supposedly after the timber skidding down the hill to Henry Yesler's sawmill. The later dereliction of the area may be a possible origin for the term which later entered the wider American lexicon as Skid Row. Like much of the American West, Seattle saw numerous conflicts between labor and management, as well as ethnic tensions that culminated in the anti-Chinese riots of 1885–1886.
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Forwarders can haul small short pieces out, but if mature timber is to be thinned, a skidder is one of the few options for taking out some trees while leaving others. While selective logging can be done badly in a host of ways, taking some trees while leaving some may be a preferred alternative to taking all the trees. The skidder can also be used for pulling tree stumps, pushing over small trees, and preliminary grading of a logging path known as a "skid road". A positive thing about the skidder is that while wood is being yarded (pulled), tree particles and seeds are cultivated into the soil.
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The Union Trust Building is a commercial building in Seattle, Washington, United States. Located in the city's Pioneer Square neighborhood, on the corner of Main Street and Occidental Way South (Occidental Mall), it was one of the first rehabilitated buildings in the neighborhood, which is now officially a historic district. In the 1960s, when Pioneer Square was better known as "Skid Road", architect Ralph Anderson purchased the building from investor Sam Israel for $50,000 and set about remodeling it, a project that set a pattern for the next several decades of development in the neighborhood.Marcie Sillman, Downtown: The First Downtown , KUOW-FM, March 12, 2007.
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The term "skid row" or "skid road," referring to an area of a city where people live who are "on the skids," derives from a logging term. Loggers would transport their logs to a nearby river by sliding them down roads made from greased skids. Loggers who had accompanied the load to the bottom of the road would wait there for transportation back up the hill to the logging camp. By extension, the term began to be used for places where people with no money and nothing to do gathered, becoming the generic term in English-speaking North America for a depressed street in a city.
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The fountain, designed by Olin L. Warner of New York, is named after pioneer druggist Stephen G. Skidmore. Naito Parkway (ex-Front Avenue) is named after the late Bill Naito, a longtime Old Town-based businessman and developer, who with his brother Sam Naito in the 1960s helped to halt the decline of the area—then known as Portland's "Skid Road"—by opening a retail store, buying and restoring old buildings in the area, and convincing others to invest in the district over the next several years. Bill Naito died in 1996. Businesses located in Old Town include Dan and Louis Oyster Bar (in the same location since 1907) and Voodoo Doughnut.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, early establishments open to homosexuals were concentrated in areas of ill repute. Pioneer Square, also known as "Skid Road" or "Fairyville," with its bars, clubs, and cabarets probably was the center of early public gay life in Seattle. The Casino, opened in 1930 on the corner of Washington Street and 2nd Avenue, was known as "the only place on the West Coast that was open and free for gay people", and where same-sex dancing was allowed. The Double Header above The Casino, opened in 1934, was possibly the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the United States until it closed at the end of December 2015.
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Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Shane Tutmarc carries on a family musical tradition: his great-grandfather Paul Tutmarc, also from Seattle, has been credited as the inventor of the electric bass. Seattle has long had a rich musical heritage, as many of rock's top names since the '60s have hailed from the area. In the mid-20th century the thriving jazz scene in the city's Skid Road and Central Districts launched the careers of such luminaries as Ray Charles and Quincy Jones. Both Jones and, later, Jimi Hendrix attended Garfield High School, and in the '60s, such garage rock/proto punk bands as the Sonics and the Wailers emerged, and in the '70s, Heart.
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The Frye and Henry families put on public display the collections that would become the core of the Frye Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery, respectively. Nellie Cornish had established the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in 1914. Australian painter Ambrose Patterson arrived in 1919; over the next few decades Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Irving Anderson, and Paul Horiuchi would establish themselves as nationally and internationally known artists. Bandleader Vic Meyers and others kept the speakeasies jumping through the Prohibition era, and by mid-century the thriving jazz scene in the city's Skid Road district would launch the careers of such luminaries as Ray Charles and Quincy Jones.
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Yesler arrived in Seattle from Ohio in 1852 and built a steam-powered sawmill, which provided numerous jobs for those early settlers and Duwamish tribe members. The mill was located right on the Elliott Bay waterfront, at the foot of what is now known as Yesler Way and was then known as Mill Road or the "Skid Road," so named for the practice of "skidding" greased logs down the steep grade from the ever- receding timber line to the mill. In running the mill, Yesler built the city's first water system in 1854. The system was made up of a series of open-air, V-shaped flumes perched on stilts that started atop First Hill and ran down past Yesler's residence and to the mill.
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Top: View looking west to Yesler's Mill at the end of the street (see smokestack) and nearby cookhouse; the tall pole in the road on the right is where the Pioneer Square pergola stands today, (1874) Bottom: Yesler's Mill, stores, and taverns on Skid Road (Mill Street, now Yesler Way) At first, Alki was larger than Seattle. "It was platted into six blocks of eight lots... and most of them had buildings on them that were in use. There weren't eight level, usable blocks in all of Seattle".Speidel (1967), p. 31 However, when Henry Yesler brought "financial backing from a Massillon, Ohio capitalist, John E. McLain, to start a steam sawmill once he had isolated the perfect location for such a structure",Speidel (1967), p.
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He began writing theatre songs in his early twenties for Empty Space Theatre, for a series of outdoor park shows produced throughout the 1970s and '80s, including titles such as Carlo Goldoni's The Venetian Twins, Voice of the Mountain, Deadwood Dick, Gammer Gurton's Needle, The Sidewalks of New York, and many others. He provided songs and theatre material for productions at most of Seattle's then- extant theatres, including Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT Theatre, Skid Road Theatre, The Group Theatre, and others. He co-authored, with A. M. Collins, the long-running rock musical Angry Housewives, which played for seven years in Seattle, breaking all long-run records in that city. Although primarily credited with music and lyrics for that production, Henry contributed in part to the script as well.
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LGBTQ Seattleites had long congregated in Pioneer Square, often interchangeably termed "Skid Road," and had built up a community in establishments such as the Double Header, the Casino, and the Garden of Allah (just north of the neighborhood). When the notoriously unsavory neighborhood, which houses many notable works of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, was targeted for urban renewal (and perhaps even prior), the Seattle Police Department engaged in extortion, allowing illegal homosexual practices and cross-dressing to continue only in bars which paid them off. The payoffs did not always guarantee security, and in 1966, citing alarm over the city's widespread image as a bastion of gay culture and tolerance, SPD planned a major house-cleaning of the gay bars in Pioneer Square. The gay community then began to migrate out of Downtown Seattle.
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Excavation of a corduroy road from the 16th century in Oranienburg, Germany Corduroy road in wet season Cape York Peninsula, Australia. 1990 Corduroy roads were used extensively in the American Civil War, between Shiloh and Corinth after the battle of Shiloh.Grant, Ulysses, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Chapter 26 (1885) and in Sherman's march through the CarolinasGrant, Ulysses, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, (c) 1885: Chapter 62 In the Pacific Northwest roads built of spaced logs similar to widely spaced "army track"army track were the mainstay of local logging practices and were called skid roads. Two of these, respectively on the outskirts of the milltowns of Seattle and Vancouver, which had become concentrations of bars and logger's slums, were the origin of the more widespread meaning of "skid road" and its derivative skid row, referring to a poor area.
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His business came to involve wholesale, retail, and import-export. Besides being a major supplier of Japanese foodstuffs in the region, he opened an Oriental fine arts store in 1895, which eventually came to be located at 1304 Second Avenue (today, part of the site of Benaroya Hall, Seattle's symphony hall), and started the Furuya Construction Company, mainly a labor contractor, which helped build the Great Northern Railway, the Milwaukee Road and the Oregon Short Line. The rear of the Furuya Building at 216 South Second Avenue features prominently in this 1936 photo of flooded streets in Seattle's Pioneer Square--Skid Road neighborhood. In 1900, a headquarters was built to his specifications at 216 South Second Avenue, mainly for his grocery and Japanese art products business, and became a focal point of Seattle's then- thriving Nihonmachi or Japantown.
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The next day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, operating out of temporary facilities in the wake of the fire, reported incorrectly that the incident began in "Jim McGough's paint shop, under Smith's boot and shoe store, at the corner of Front and Madison streets, in what was known as the Denny block"; This is an update of the earlier a correction two weeks later said that it "actually started in the Clairmont and Company cabinet shop, below McGough's shop in the basement of the Pontius building", but the original error was often repeated, including in Murray Morgan's bestselling Seattle history book Skid Road (1951). The pot was tipped over by John Back, a 24-year-old Swede. The fire soon spread to the wood chips and turpentine covering the floor. Back attempted to douse the fire with water which only served to spread the fire further.
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