Over on the Wallingford / Fremont Facebook page, Denys Howard posted this old photo of a poster from a cabaret that used to sit along the Wallingford / Fremont border:
This photo is the northwest corner of N 36th St and Woodland Park Ave N, in East Fremont. At times in the past, what are currently two businesses on the ground floor were a single space.
In the early 1980s, it housed a cabaret called the Kit Kat Club, with its lobby on the corner and the performance space on the right.
My housemates and I would go down there every week or two to enjoy the always-changing show. Great times.
The poster is the spring schedule from 1982.
A couple of other folks followed up with photos from Paul Dorpat’s great Now and Then blog of the same location, but dating back to 1912:
There are so many spots around the neighborhood with odd, out of place architectural features (like the “store front” at 42nd and 2nd Ave NE, it’s nice to see the photos make it all make sense.
There was an interval in there, when that was “Wright Brothers” bicycle coop. The way I remember it, that would have preceded the club. Wright Brothers (Charles Hadrann) moved from there to what had been an Ace hardware on Fremont Ave, and then to his current location farther west on 36th. It’s a shame the window details have been obliterated.
I have one of those photos they took back in the 1940’s of all the houses in Seattle from the city archives, and there’s a bike on my front porch!
It’s amazing they stripped all the character out of that once beautiful building. Nice roof line with overhang, gone. Huge storefront windows, gone. Decorative wood trim mid building, gone.
I wish the Seattle council would’ve had more foresight back in the day to work with zoning and historical society to preserve the character of our old neighborhoods.
There are and should be limits on what can be preserved. The amount of regulation and resources needed to reserve things like this is huge, and while this building is interesting, but it’s really not that special. It looks like that Walrus and Carpenter building today. If this is a landmark that has to be preserved, then vast majority of the cities around the world should have started developing centuries ago.
Booooo….
Do you want to pay for the cost to ensure things never change, or do you want to regulate it so things can never change? Neither are easy. Be real.
And really this is neither old nor special. Just nice.
I’d sure like to see stuff like that preserved, but doesn’t it make you wonder … what happened? Why the best we can do is hang on to the scraps that are left to us from a century ago? When today, no one would think of building anything much beyond a basic box, you can hardly blame owners of this old building for stripping off inconvenient details and box-ifying it. Why make it the old building owner’s burden to preserve the gracious, decorative architecture of the past, when no one else cares about such things today? Part of the urgency of historic preservation today, is the reality that we’re defending not just a historic style, it’s the last vestige of a time when people cared.
It’s a money thing. There is no lack of nice looking houses. How much people care often depends on the price.
The house in the picture isn’t exactly pretty. Nobody will travel to admire it. It’s just better than what it is today.
Survivor’s bias – you’re saying that hardware store, on the old streetcar line I believe, is one of those places where some architect decided to go all out and create something exceptional? Ha.
It would be stretching it to say nothing of merit has been built since WWII. I wouldn’t count Pagliacci’s (N 40th?), but the Shannon and Wilson building farther up Woodland Park at 38th, with the hyperbolic paraboloid thin shell concrete roof, might count, though perhaps more as a memorial to what happened to architectural esthetics.
In the building at 36th you can see another consideration besides exterior esthetics – inside that building with the glazing intact, daylight illumination was pretty good even in winter, but today’s occupants prefer artificial.
Careful, MB. Start throwing the “character” word around and you’re likely to trigger the YIMBYs and they’ll start start calling you racist.
Cue tj, Bryan and the rest of the spiral-eyed anti-car gang to swat down this idea!
If you like car so much, how about start building some multi-level garages around the neighborhood? I would support that.
You may not steal my comments r ecomments phrase. ( comments re comments if done in a mean, ongoing deliberate denigrating manner will result in a variety of possible actions which have been previously discussed and posted.
TJ and the rest of the bike lane zealots can’t help being a wet blanket. Even on an interesting story about a cool old building thats a part of our neighborhood’s history.