Saving Seward Park for the Olmsteds and for Us

There are many side effects caring for a new puppy such as sleep deprivation, that intimacy with poop and pee you'd thought you'd given up years ago and the small cuts on the hands and forearms from trying to get the dog to drop the ball it loves to chase.

But there are also beneficial side effects.  For me, they are the rediscovery of the Seattle Park system where we take the dog for his pleasure and ours. 

East Union and 34th
Google Earth

On this Saturday, we decide to head out for Seward Park where I’ve not been for many years.  First, however, we thought to grab some breakfast at 34^th and East Union, just a block away from the first real house I ever lived in, a classic Madrona two story on 35^th.  One day, in 1968, as we registered to vote at the tiny firehouse, just down the street from our new rental, an alarm came in and the firefighters burst through the tiny lobby and sped off in the lone pumper assigned to the building.  All alone in the little firehouse, we completed our voter forms, left them on a chair and walked home.  We thought the whole thing was pretty cool.  Today, the firehouse is a library.

When I lived there, the neighborhood was nothing like it is today.  It was racially polarized and many of the houses were in disrepair.  In the house we rented, someone had kicked a hole in the living room wall.  Since we didn’t even know what drywall was, we covered the hole with a book case, sort of oddly placed, but it did the trick.  One Sunday afternoon, my wife was leaving the grocery store and a kid poked a gun in her face and took her purse.  Two state legislators living in Madrona had their houses firebombed.  We heard the fire trucks one night and they stopped just a few houses away.  A house on Pine Street, a half a block away from ours, was on fire.  It had been vacant just like the one we were renting a few weeks before.  We thought it was intentional and it probably was.  We walked home shaken, angry and scared. 

There was a laundromat and a small store, Joe’s Market, run by a tough little Chinese guy who had an uncanny ability to spot a bag of skittles sliding into a school bag.  An IGA market, once thriving, was badly slipping and soon became a clinic.  I don’t remember much else on the street, except the going downward theme.  The year 1968 was a tough year for Seattle’s Central District.

The first thing you notice today as you cross the intersection of 34^th and East Union is that there is no place to park.  The Hi Spot, our breakfast destination, is jammed.  There were several other restaurants on the street – Bistro Turkuaz, not open til dinner, Naam Thai on the corner, Pritty Boys Family Pizzeria with a big crowd of tiny soccer players, Soleil -- Ethiopian/Eritrean -- Madrona Eatery and Alehouse and several others.

The parking place we find is next to Al Larkins Park, what happened to the land that remained after the 1968 fire when we lived there.  The Seattle Parks Department finally bought the property and made it into a small park, lovely and simple, and named for a Madrona resident, Alvin Larkins.

Larkins was one of the many black people who came to Seattle to work at World War II.  His contribution to the military was as a musician.  A Navy band, The Jive Bombers, were stationed at Sand Point Naval Air Station and they played everywhere.  After the war, Larkins decided to stay here rather than return to Baltimore.

He was a guy who was picked up by visiting bands to Seattle and played for Sarah Vaughn, Maurice Chevalier and Duke Ellington.  The park was named for him at his death in 1979, thirty years after one of Seattle’s great musical events at the Trianon Ballroom when Ray Charles brought the house down, one of the first he brought down. 

The Jive Bombers
Alvin Larkins is holding the shorter of the two tubas
Sand Point Naval Air Station

Like so many people who came to Seattle at that time, he became as Seattle as Seattle could be.  He was an original in the Rainy City Jazz Band, a well-known post war Jazz group in Seattle and also played his jazzy tuba for the World’s Fair Marching Band.  When the Christmas ships stood off Madrona Beach and the kids on them sang their Christmas carols, he joined with his tuba and his friends to answer them while a huge bonfire roared.  He and his brother, Ellis, accompanist for Ella Fitzgerald and a fixture in the New York City jazz scene, played in the first Bumbershoot, in 1972.  A University of Washington graduate, he taught in Seattle schools and lived on 37^th street, three blocks away from what is now his park.

Larkins is in the movie "It Happened at the World's Fair" starring Elvis Presley and made in 1962.  The movie ends in a big production scene with the Seattle World's Fair Band following Elvis and the girl he has just won parading through the grounds singing "Happy Endings," a highly forgettable part of the Elvis songbook.  Larkins is in the back in the tuba section that swings by the camera as "Happy Endings" hits the crescendo.  You can also find the great Seattle jazz pianist, Overton Berry, in that scene.  Berry told me once that Larkins was concerned that there weren't enough blacks in the band so he put a tuba around Berry's shoulders. 

"Don't even try to play anything, just keep in step," Larkins told Berry.

After breakfast, we walked the dog around the neighborhood and came upon the Glassybaby ‘hot store,’ just off the intersection of 34^th and East Union, the place they manufacture the hand blown glass votive candleholders that have become such a business and cultural phenomenon here.  I know about them because my daughter and wife talked about nothing else during a dinner a few years ago and because they started showing up in my house soon after in groups of two and three. 

A Seattle housewife with three children, Lee Rhodes, got a bad break when she had a rare lung cancer and spent seven years in a brutal treatment regime.  Her husband once brought home a small votive candleholder he had made in a glassblowing class and Rhodes put a candle in it and thought that if one was really cool that many others emitting the healing light she experienced would be even better.  She designed and had several votive candleholders made and began giving them away to friends.  She slipped into a commercial operation and began hiring people who worked in Seattle’s large glassblowing scene.  The business model she created emphasized hand made products, unusual colors and distribution of ten percent of profits to certain charities and now here they are in my old Madrona neighborhood making Glassybabys for the world.  

Once Rhodes established the operation, someone gave a Glassybaby to Martha Stewart when Stewart needed healing post-prison.  Rhodes appeared on Stewart’s show, the first one after Stewart got out.  Then, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos showed up and loved the product and its branding and bought 20% of the company.  In 2011, Glassybaby sales were at nearly ten million annually and proceeds to the various charities is nearly a million dollars.  They make use of 70 glassblowers in my old neighborhood and are thinking of setting up a hot shop in San Francisco.

Glassybaby’s healing magic was certainly working the day we were there. After visiting, taking pictures and showing off the dog, we walked to the car, took the dog up into Al Larkins Park and put away the feelings from that terrible night in 1968.

On the way out to Seward Park, I stopped at Leschi Park to photograph a small memorial there to Jacob Umlauff, long the head gardener for the Parks Department and frequently its de facto Superintendent.  It sits below a stately Giant Redwood (Sequoia Gigantia) and reads:

“This tree has been dedicated in fitting tribute to JACOB UMLAUFF, head gardener, Seattle Park Department 1914-1941 who planted it with the skilled and loving hands that gave rare beauty to all Seattle Parks”

Leschi was Seattle’s second park, following Denny Park in South Lake Union.  It was created in the year before statehood, 1888.  Privately-owned, it was connected by a trolley car that followed Yesler Way, the skid road that brought lumber to the sawmill at the foot of Yesler in the pioneer days.  The loggers who fanned out along the skid road had by now logged off a great swath of the city, nearly all of it, and their successors were trying their skills at a gentler trade, real estate development.  The park and its connecting trolley were put in place to bring people to a beautiful place so they would buy lots and build houses on them, further expanding the new town.  The park contained gardens, a casino, a small zoo, a diving board.  Soon it became a ferry boat terminus as well. 

Seattle Municipal Archives

Umlauff’s monument is at Leschi probably because it was his first Seattle job in the parks business.  In fact, he no doubt planted the redwood before getting hired by they city of Seattle.  But I have another thesis.  The Leschi of old was his kind of park, one that was ordered, sentimental and thoroughly controlled by the people who used it.  And he worked hard making other parks his kind of park, particularly Seward Park.  His efforts helped undo what the great Olmsted brothers had in mind for Seward Park in their 1903 parks plan.  Umlauff was frequently successful and still drives today’s parks planners crazy. 

Before the Olmsted brothers came to Seattle and created a master plan for the parks in 1903, there was Edward Otto Schwagerl, the parks superintendent who had been hired away from Tacoma in 1892 and had worked on Wright Park and the great Point Defiance Park.  Schwagerl created a comprehensive plan for Seattle’s parks at a time when the city had but one park, Denny, now in South Lake Union, the site of an old cemetery whose fence was falling down. 

Schwagerl’s idea was to have great parks at the four corners of Seattle – at Alki Point in West Seattle, at West Point on the northwest corner of Elliott Bay, at Sandpoint on the northeast and Bailey Point (Seward) on the southeast.  These great parks would be connected by a series of parkways that would wind through the city, punctuated by many smaller parks in between and along the way.  Even though many people loved Schwagerl’s plan, it was so big no one quite knew where to start. 

A bad economy in the form of the Panic of 1893 took care of worrying about how to start Schwagerl’s ambitious plan and Schwagerl left the park system and Seattle in 1895.

Olmsted Parks Foundation

The Olmsted Brothers pulled together many of Schwagerl’s ideas when they came up with their park plan in 1903.  They also incorporated the work of George Cotterill, the assistant to the great city engineer R.H.  Thomson.  Cotterill, who later served as mayor, had developed a proposal for a series of bike pathways through the city that were used by the Olmsteds as the means of connecting the parks they proposed.  The new plan was adopted in 1903.

There was consensus about what to do with the Bailey Peninsula.  Buy it before the loggers got it and keep it that way for the generations who would like to see the mix of old trees that once covered the entire basin and now were gone.  All gone.

Google Maps

The Bailey Peninsula is a drumlin, the name used for land that is created by the movement of a retreating glacial mass.  The Vashon Glacier period covered Seattle with 4,000 feet of ice 15,000 years ago. When the ice retreated, around 13,000 years ago, it formed humpbacked collections of gravel and other rocky debris that point in the direction of the retreating glacier, which is why so many shoreline formations in Seattle point due north.  Over a thousand years, a thin layer of soil had formed and shards of the post glacial forest cover began to take root.

Audubon

For some reason the odd-shaped piece of land attracted a lot of interest.  Some speculators wanted to build a toll bridge to Mercer Island and another proposal was to cut a channel at its west end so boats plying Lake Washington would save a few minutes of their busy day.  Its fate, however, was to be one of the anchors of the Seattle park system.  But the Bailey family’s perception of its value was considerably higher than the city’s.  They were asking $2,000 an acre and so it took until 1911 for the city to finally condemn the property and bought it for $322,000, or $1,500/acre.  The purchase came soon after the Alaska-Yukon Exposition in Seattle and of course the first name on the list of names was William Henry Seward, the guy who bought Alaska and, because he did, started modern Seattle.

Seattle Municipal Archives

Even at that time, events conspired to erode the Olmsted dream of Seward Park as a timeless image of the pre-European forest cover.  The city filled in the marshy area in front of the peninsula and the construction of the Hiram Chittenden Locks in 1916 lowered the level of Lake Washington by nine feet which created more land that made access by cars easier.  New shoreline plants appeared and some of the timber died to water stress.  Soon there was a large section of lawn fronting the peninsula. This planting and others that followed nearly wiped out the peninsula’s native grasses.

The Olmsteds did not hold a back-to-nature philosophy.  Their ideas for Seattle parks were based on a full mix of different park themes. They thought that some parks were meant to be highly managed and manicured – Volunteer Park, for example -- but they also thought other parks should be designed based upon what they presented initially.  Their firm, Olmsted Brothers, was involved in the development of more than 30 Seattle parks, the most complete Olmsted Park system in the world.  Only one park, one that would stretch along the top of the hill in Madrona, the top of the hill we had just left at 34th and Union, was not finished.  That was left for Al Larkins and Glassybaby.

Jacob Umlauff’s tenure within the Seattle Parks almost matched the 38 years from 1903 to 1941 the Olmsteds worked on the system.  Umlauff came from Austria where his uncle was a circus impresario but he resisted the call of the circus and moved to Chicago.  Longing for a less noisy and confusing place, he is said to have asked the ticket agent for a destination as far from Chicago as possible.  His ticket read Bellingham, Washington.  But soon he was in Seattle managing the private park system at Leschi, Madison Park and Madrona operated by the Seattle Electric Company.  That's when he likely planted that redwood his plaque is in front of.  In 1914, he hired on with the city park system and served until his retirement in 1941.

Lincoln Park
Seattle Parks

Umlauff was a gardener in the true sense.  Every landscape had to be a garden.  All of the parks where he had a true influence look that way.  Many different trees, many non-natives, all with lush mulch and mowed grass underneath, as if the ground were a vase and the trees a bouquet of mixed flowers.  He nurtured Denny Park that way.  One of the truly big parks he is responsible for is Lincoln Park in West Seattle.  Its big fir trees, once a great forest on the west slope of the city, are lovely for sure, but reduced at the same time by the perfect floor of concrete walks and mowed grass underneath.  Trees are a bit like wild animals.  It’s hard to see them in cages.

In an unusual interview in the March 9, 1930 Seattle Times, Umlauff mused on the nature of plants and his responsibility for their vulnerable position in the scheme of things.

“I wish more folks understood,“ he told a reporter.  “There are humane societies for dogs and kittens.  They can cry when they are hurt.  These flowers too are living things and have no way to protest or escape.  Helpless, they are also voiceless.”

With this Disney version view of his photosynthetic charges, it was difficult for Umlauff to adhere to the Olmsted’s vision of a natural forest at Seward Park.  Soon, there was a new parks plan in the mid-1920s that added more grass, tennis courts, a trout hatchery and rearing ponds.  Plantings around the ponds introduced English Ivy to the park.

Umlauff thought the understory in Seward Park inhibited people from enjoying the trees so he grubbed it out, taking with it a rich habitat for animals of all kinds. 

Umlauff also had a program that he hoped would involve young citizens in horticulture.  Kids would gather hollyberries from Christmas decorations and bring them out to Seward Park where they would plant them under his direction.  Umlauff called it a hollyberry kindergarten.  Today’s parks managers hate holly because it is one of the most aggressive invasive species.

A ten year parks plan in 1931 argued that dead timber and brush should be removed because it constituted a fire hazard.  He did not, nor did much of his generation appreciate the positive aspects of fires in managing forests.  All he knew for sure that that fire would hurt his voiceless friends.

Seward Park, 1936
University of Washington Collections

During the depression, the parks department hosted many hundreds of relief workers.  In March of 1936 there were 400 Works Progress Administration relief workers employed at Seward Park and another 600 in the Washington Park Arboretum.  The supposed purpose at Seward Park was to create room in the forest to relocate the trout ponds further up the hill. Residents and defenders of a more natural looking park were appalled when they saw stacks of firewood piling up along the park’s edges.  It appears from reading the clips that this army of workers had gotten out of control and were cutting all kinds of healthy trees.

Amazing Portrait of FDR
on a trimmed Seward Park tree
University of Washington Collections

Word got back to Mayor John Dore that 800-1,000 cords of wood had been assembled at Seward Park and he ordered that the tree-cutting stop unless it had his own personal approval.

“This system of cutting down trees to make artificial parks is all right for Boston or New York where they have no natural beauty,” the Mayor said.  “But out here, it’s just like getting false teeth when you have good ones.”

While Umlauff retired in 1941, the parks department vision of Seward Park remained far different from the Olmsted idea.  A 4,000 seat amphitheater was proposed and built at a grassy swale of blowdowns and cleared underbrush, but other facilities – parking for 2,500 cars, two and a half miles of new roads and 25 acres of new picnic areas came right out of the native forest.

Beginning in the 1970s, the idea of a natural forest regained it primacy. Ultimately, the amphitheater was closed, the perimeter road closed to automobile traffic and the trout rearing ponds abandoned.  What remains of the natural forest exists on the northern two thirds of the peninsula and it is still the largest pre-settlement forest remaining in Seattle.

After we finished our walk, we discovered that we hadn’t the slightest idea where we had parked the car.  After several false starts in all directions, the puppy weighed in.  He dropped to his stomach and refused to move, understanding, perhaps for the first time, that our relationship with him worked both ways.

Seattle Friends of Seward Park. Lovely website.

Seward Park Environmental and Audubon Center. Another killer website

Historylink. Memories of Madrona in the 60s and 70s

How Gravity Got Me Off Profanity Hill

I was up near Swedish Hospital on First Hill and still in vacation mode so I started walking back to work the way you walk during a vacation, like a pinball, bumping from one bright light to another.

This gravitational decision-making took me on a new, random route and it paid off within the first couple of blocks away from my usual straight line route.  I was standing at the entrance to a small and completely lovely park I don’t recall seeing before, First Hill Park. 

It sits on less than an acre next to the carriage house used by the Stimson-Green Mansion, the home built by lumberman and real estate businessman C. D. Stimson, designed by the hot architect for rich people at the time, Kirtland Cutter of Spokane.  Stimson’s great legacy was his remarkable daughter, Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, the first woman to buy and manage a television station in the United States and whose intelligence and canny courage saved the downtown real estate holdings he willed her before The Great Depression. 

Historic Seattle

At one time 40 such mansions called First Hill home, one of the lesser ones sketched by Victor Steinbrueck in 1972.  The growth of health care on First Hill – Cabrini Hospital in 1907, Swedish Hospital in 1908, Providence in 1912 and Virginia Mason in 1920 – along with many multi-family buildings taking advantage of the views and proximity to downtown rather quickly replaced the mansions just as the automobile was providing more distant choices for wealthy people in places like Broadmoor and the Highlands.

First Hill with much of its timber
University of Washington Collections

It is ironic that the fancy homes up at Seattle’s highest point were the starting points of Skid Road, synonymous now with street alcoholics, because it was the first source of timber for Henry Yesler’s saw mill located at the bottom of the hill.   In fact, early settlers first called it Yesler’s Hill as the source of the logs that were dragged down an old native American foot path to the bottom of what would become Yesler Street.

Although First Hill is still the official name, it has many other colloquial ones.  Pill Hill, derived from its health care industry, is still common today, though Profanity Hill, attributable to the cursing of attorneys walking up the steep hill in the rain, is no longer in use since the King County Courthouse moved downtown to something close to sea level.  It may be unfair to single out lawyers.  The teamsters pulling logs down the hill sometimes offered a frustrated darn or a shoot.

Further down, just a block off a street I travel frequently, is another place I’d not seen or noticed in my many years in Seattle. It is the McDonald House, beautifully restored in 2000 and with a brand new treatment of its top floor, an old attic lovingly turned into a lookout for a retired pirate.

The McDonald family built the home in 1899 and in 1922 started a dry cleaning business in a structure they built below on the street level.  In this photo, a sign obscures the house.  Is it an advertisement for the cleaning business or was it leased out space that provided additional income to the McDonalds? 

After prohibition, the family moved the cleaning business into the basement of the house above and called it Olive Way Cleaners.  In the old cleaning space on the street, they opened a tavern.  Because there was less room, it seems likely that the cleaning business was now retail only, the clothing sent out somewhere and delivered back to Olive Way.   Did they lease the tavern space?  The cleaning business signage showed more marketing savvy with some meaningful details such as “French Dry Cleaning” while the bar stuck with a generic name – “Tavern.”

Intriguing as well is the ownership of the sporty Nash Metropolitan parked to the left of the stairs leading to the cleaning business.  Is it owned by the McDonalds?  A customer of Olive Way Cleaners?  The tavern bartender?

Today, a skin care services business has inherited the tavern space and 'Scott M.  Logan, Professional Building' occupies the space above.  The property history is spelled out through a little plaque by the door that includes the pictures.  It was installed by Donald Logan and Scott Shea, who appear to be business partners in the rehabilitation and Paul Aiello and Douglas Johnson, the architect and contractor.  What a great gift they have given any citizen who walks along Olive Way -- and to their city as well.  Everyone who lives in Seattle is enriched by knowing that such a lovely thing has been done, even if they will never see it. 

Their plaque tells us that the that the McDonald family lived in the house until 1983. 

As I cross Interstate 5, a window in an apartment building to the south has something to say. It is a complicated message delivered in two panels.  The word McNeil in the upper left hand corner certainly draws the eye, with the current Seattle zip code separated by Compton and Cali.  There is a small, four legged stick figure next to the word Bootz.  Could this be a heart washed up on Puget Sound?  And what is that gold color mean in the container above the heart?

This is a complicated citizen living here, speaking out to the infrequent pedestrians, somehow wanting to be known, to communicate, to be heard over the roar of the freeway.  I snap the picture and silently wish him luck. 

Further down, I come to one of my favorite spots in Seattle.  It is the plaza of the new federal courthouse, a must stop in the summer, a stand of birches fronting the high rise courthouse.  It is a peaceful, comfortable space where a lunch time crowd forms from the adjacent community as well as the bailiffs, judges, lawyer and law enforcement crowd. There are many elements to the design, all infused with the security purposes we’ve become used to, but somehow this design disguises them in the form of little waterfalls, formal steps, a pair of sturdy bollards. 

One summer day last year I saw Bob Lasnik, one of the judges, reading a document while sitting in the sun on one of the steps.   I liked that.  Federal judges seem to have been put so far away from the rest of us.  To see them at work beside us is somehow useful, putting an actual person, someone like us, into the reality of laws, consequences and finality.

The Washington State Supreme Court has adopted a terrific program to make its judges more accessible.  As a group, they visit communities around the state, hold public receptions and often conduct a formal session in some gymnasium or other community building while visiting. 

The park is nearly empty now on an overcast, slightly cool day.  I begin to focus on the statue in the plaza, a piece of black rock, narrow at its base in a small grassy circle and rising to thirty feet or so.  It speaks, I think, to some sort of striving, a struggle somehow against something powerful.  I wonder if the hose reel stationed below the steps is any less a statue.  It struggles as well, wrapping up so much water capacity in so little space, always ready to roll forward or in reverse.  Suddenly I'm considering it a mobile justice dispenser, at work and decorating federal courthouse plazas across the country -- functional, purposeful, elegant, in its way.

While waiting for my coffee at a stand down the street, I check on President Lincoln’s day, 150 years ago, in 1862.  There are several sites that provide this information and I go to www.thelincolnlog.org .  This website is compiled and managed by several organizations and is a daily chronology of Lincoln's entire life with supporting documents and references to other documents.  On this day, General McClellan is much on Lincoln's mind with yet another request for reinforcements.  Lincoln meets with Secretary of War Stanton to discuss the military situation and, issues orders sending General Irvin McDowell toward Richmond to help shore up the defense of Washington, DC.  Lincoln treats McClellan gingerly. 

He distrusts him, is suspicious of his judgment, particularly his cautious warmaking and his voracious appetite for more troops.  Lincoln fears that forces protecting the capital will somehow be sucked into McClellan’s growing but stationery force, leaving the capital poorly defended. He also knows by now that McClellan is considering a campaign for the presidency.  Think of Mitt Romney serving as President Obama’s top general! Lincoln takes the unusual approach of ordering McDowell to cooperate with his superior, McClellan, but apply his own judgment to McClellan’s orders. 

“You will retain the separated command of the forces taken with you; but while co-operating with Gen. McClellan you will obey, his orders, except that you are to Judge, and are not to allow your force to be disposed otherwise than so as to give the greatest protection to this capital which may be possible from that distance.”

These orders surely are from Lincoln the lawyer, not Lincoln the great writer. 

General David Hunter
oldpictures.com

This was a busy day for the President.  A few days before, General David Hunter had, on his own judgment and without consultation with the President, declared the slaves in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida free.

General Orders No. 11.---The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States---Georgia, Florida and South Carolina---heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free. DAVID HUNTER.

The President was not ready to do this and certainly unprepared for one of his generals to do this on his own initiative.  Lincoln’s strategy at this time was for the United States to purchase the slaves as a means of liberating them.  The Emancipation Proclamation, though certainly an option then, was not yet, in his mind, the right course to salvaging the whole country.

The President rescinded Hunter’s order a few days later causing a great clamor.  I learn that Hunter rode with the dead president on the train back to Illinois and served on the military commission that tried and convicted the assassins. 

Rosenbach Library and Museum

Later in the day, of May 17, 1862, he writes a brief letter to Mary Motley, a young woman then working in Washington, DC.

Executive Mansion,
Washington, May 17, 1862.

Miss Mary Motley—

A friend of yours (a young gentlemen of course) tells me you do me the honor of requesting my autograph. I could scarcely refuse any young lady—certainly not the daughter of your distinguished father. Yours truly A. Lincoln

Mary Motley’s distinguished father was John Lothrop Motley, an historian and diplomat who had just been named United States Minister to Austria. Later, in the Grant Administration, he would become Ambassador to the Court of St. James. William Cullen Bryant would write a poem to mark his death in 1877.

Cornell University

Motley carved an interesting niche in the American academic world, writing an extremely popular history about Holland, “The Rise of the Dutch Republic.” He had a ‘your faithful friend’ relationship with the German politician Otto van Bismarck, with whom he went to law school in Berlin.

The three Motley girls, their father and mother were excellent correspondents and their letters offer a chatty portrait of royalty across Europe not only from the point of view of the famous historian, but also of his daughters and wife.

I chased Mary Motley down and discovered that she would meet a man while her father was British Ambassador and marry him, a young British aristocrat, Algernon Thomas Brinsley Sheridan, in 1871.  He was a lineal descended of Thomas Brinsley Sheridan, the author of the classic “School for Scandal.”  Over the next 15 years she would have seven children with Sheridan, one of whom was killed in the Boer War.  At some point, Lincoln’s letter to Mary Motley would be acquired by Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library.

By now I've tossed my coffee cup and am in completely familar territory، passing places I go by several times a week.  I pause to take a picture of the bar where my wife and I met fourteen years ago, almost to the day.

A minute or two later, after turning left under the monorail, I hear an opera singer and know I'm close to home.  It comes from a condo a couple of blocks from ours.  The building owner plays opera with speakers directly above the little portico that fronts to the street.  He plays opera here because he believes it improves security.  He doesn't think the street toughs like opera and, come to think of it, I've never seen a street tough lounging there.

About the sources of this story

I walked this route on May 17, snapping photographs along the way with my I-Phone.  However, I was unable to do any writing until the Memorial Day holiday when I engaged in the completely selfish and pleasurable process of following most every Internet clue to its conclusion, all the time the new puppy sleeps on my lap, near my bare feet or at my side, on a towel covering the couch we've agreed is off limits.

The two sites I used for Lincoln’s activities on May 17, 1862, were The Lincoln Log and the thoroughly amazing Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. Their collection of letters and other materials comprise 'Today in the Civil War', its tribute to the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. This is a beautiful and worthy site. Also, the late Maurice Sendak was a trustee of the library and they have a loving tribute plus many Sendak materials available on-line.

The dog and I really fell in with the Motleys and spent a fair amount of time chasing them down and reading their letters in two books available on line. An easy and nifty presentation is a compilation of letters done by daughter Susan, who also married into the British aristocracy, and carries the improbable name Susan Margaret Stackpole Motley St. John Midmay. 

What’s the aristocracy without an absolutely killer website about them? The Peerage told me everything I needed to know about the Motleys and the people they married, including, quite often, their street address.

Plugging in my charger once again, I wandered around the Seattle Parks System. Don Sherwood came to Seattle in the fifties and hired on as a junior engineer in the Seattle Parks Department and was soon creating sketch maps of the parks, often adding historical data in hand-written commentary on the sketches. His collection of information on each of Seattle’s parks is completely available on the Internet and a great jewel that needs betterexposure. We’ll visit Don’s work in a later blog.

I also discovered Linnea Westerlind’s blog “A Year of Seattle Parks,” in which she decides to visit each park in the city over the course of a year and provide a description and commentary. We had a kinship on this day. On May 17, the day I was discovering First Hill Park, she was discovering Peace Park, near the University Street Bridge.