This West Seattle street was created in 1941 as part of Allan MacLean’s 1st Add’n to the City of Seattle, filed by Allan and Nellie MacLean; H.S. and Marie A. Kelsey; and, on behalf of Carroll Hillman and Hedlund Inc., J.L. Carroll and Clarence A. Hardesty. The narrow plat only had room for one newly named street, and apparently the Kelseys got that honor.
Marie Agnes Cunningham (1914–1976) and Horace Stephen Kelsey (1903–1961) appear to have gotten married the year before filing the plat. According to Mr. Kelsey’s obituary in The Seattle Times,
He was in commercial construction work until retiring in 1948.… He owned and built the Barbee Shipyard and Mill in Ballard, the Stanwood Shipyards and the Kennydale Shipyards during the war. He also constructed hundreds of houses in South Seattle.
Kelsey Lane SW begins at SW Barton Street between 21st Avenue SW and 22nd Avenue SW and goes ¼ of a mile south to the city limits at SW Roxbury Street.
Born and raised in Seattle, Benjamin Donguk Lukoff had his interest in local history kindled at the age of six, when his father bought him settler granddaughter Sophie Frye Bass’s Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle at the gift shop of the Museum of History and Industry. He studied English, Russian, and linguistics at the University of Washington, and went on to earn his master’s in English linguistics from University College London. His book of rephotography, Seattle Then and Now, was published in 2010. An updated version came out in 2015.
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