This street, which runs not quite a tenth of a mile from Ellis Avenue S in the west to 13th Avenue S in the east, was named by Angelo Boitano after himself as part of Boitano’s Supplemental Addition to the City of Georgetown in 1906. (Incidentally, if I ever had the opportunity to name a street after myself, I would call it Lukoff, not Benjamin.)
There isn’t much on the internet about him, but apparently he was interested in chestnut growing, and was in a bad buggy accident in 1908.
This short street — just over 300 feet long — runs from Airport Way S in the east to Corson Avenue S in the west. It was established in 1903 as Carstens Street, part of Carstens’ Addition to Georgetown, “filed for record at the request of Thomas Carstens on the 4[th] day of June 1903 at 49 Min. past 9 A.M.” This is the first time I’ve seen the actual time of filing on a plat!
Thomas Carstens, born in 1865 in Husum, Germany, near Denmark, came to the Pacific Northwest in 1884, and in 1890 established a butcher shop with his brother, Ernest, which later grew into the Carstens Packing Company.
Clinton A. Snowden, author of History of Washington: The Rise and Progress of an American State, wrote in 1911 of Carstens:
Mr. Carstens, besides being president of the Carstens Packing Company, is president of the Tacoma Wheat Land Company, president of the Pacific Oil Mills, and director of the National Realty Company of Tacoma. He is a member of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Seattle Commercial Club, Arctic Club of Seattle, Seattle Manufacturers’ Association, Duwamish River Improvement Club, Tacoma Commercial Club, and Tacoma Chamber of Commerce.
This street, which runs just under 400 feet from Yesler Way and 3rd Avenue S in the northwest to S Washington Street and 4th Avenue S in the southwest, cutting a skewed diagonal through the block, is named for Father Francis X. Prefontaine, Seattle’s first Catholic priest. In 1870, he founded Seattle’s first Catholic church, Our Lady of Good Help, on the block Prefontaine Place cuts through today.
Thomas Prosch, who named Conkling Place W after his mother, didn’t neglect to name something after himself. Prosch Avenue W runs about ¼ mile from W Barrett Street in the north to 13th Avenue W in the south. It appears as Prosch Place in Prosch’s Queen Anne Addition to the City of Seattle in 1909. Six years later, Prosch was killed in a car crash that also took the lives of his wife, Virginia; painter Harriet Foster Beecher; and Margaret Lenora Denny, namesake of Lenora Street.
This street runs ¼ mile from 1st Avenue S in the west to 4th Avenue S in the east. West of 1st, it’s S Atlantic Street — its original name — and east of 4th, it’s the beginning of Interstate 90. It is part of State Route 519, a short highway that connects I-90 to Washington State Ferries’ Colman Dock.
Edgar Martínez was a member of the Seattle Mariners baseball team from 1987 to 2004. This stretch of S Atlantic Street was renamed in his honor the year he retired.
Now — why is it Edgar Martinez Drive S instead of S Edgar Martinez Drive, since east–west streets in Seattle have their directional designators at the beginning? I asked Paul Jackson this in 2005. Jackson, who was then the Seattle Department of Transportation’s manager of traffic, signs, and markings, responded:
I appreciate your desire to see our City’s sign system remain consistent.… But ultimately, there is nothing requiring such a naming convention in the Seattle Municipal Code.… In this case, those proposing the street name change wanted to see Edgar Martínez’s name out front. Because this is only a three-block stretch of street (from 1st Avenue S to 4th Avenue S), and does not have any addresses along it, the decision was made to veer slightly from the typical naming convention. The term “drive” was agreed upon to evoke Mr. Martínez’s batting skills at the plate.
This street runs, interrupted by the BNSF Railway, for half a mile from 32nd Avenue W and W Government Way in the west to 23rd Avenue W in the east.
J.A. Jameson, of the New York bank Jameson, Smith & Cotting, was a director of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway. Daniel Hunt Gilman, who filed the plat of Gilman’s Addition to the City of Seattle in 1890, was a founder of the SLS&E, whose tracks, via the Northern Pacific and Burlington Northern, are now part of BNSF.
This street, which runs just over 400 feet from 36th Avenue W in the west to 34th Avenue W in the east, was established in 1905 as part of the Lawton Park Addition to Seattle. It was named after Evan Sidebottom McCord, a Seattle lawyer, and his wife, Elizabeth Chenault Bennett McCord, who were among the nine owners of property encompassed by the plat.
I am certainly not the first person to have been interested in, or to blog about, the origins of Seattle street names. One of the historians whose work I’ve been inspired by is Valarie Bunn, who writes Wedgwood in Seattle History (though she does not restrict herself to Wedgwood).
In “The Fischer Farm in Meadowbrook,” from 2013, she writes about August and Wilhelmine Fischer, who came to Seattle from Saxony, Germany, in 1888, and lived here until they died in 1940 and 1941, respectively. In 1922, they established what is now Fischer Place NE as Fischer Street in the plat of Fischer’s Highway Garden Tracts. (“Highway” because of Victory Way [now Lake City Way NE, part of State Route 522] and Pacific Highway [now Ravenna Avenue NE]. The latter lost its Pacific Highway designation to the former that same year, and the designation shifted farther west to what is now Aurora Avenue N a number of years later.) I highly recommend this article and her entire blog.
Today, Fischer Place NE runs about ¼ mile from NE 102nd Street and Lake City Way NE in the southwest to NE 105th Street in the northeast.
This Olmsted boulevard was designed in 1910 as Jefferson Boulevard, the entrance to Jefferson Park. It runs about 1⅕ miles from Beacon Avenue S and S Alaska Street in the southwest to S Winthrop Street in the northeast, which also forms part of the park boulevard. After crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way S and Rainier Avenue S, it continues on as S Mount Baker Boulevard, ending at Mount Baker Park.
In 1914, it was renamed Cheasty Boulevard after E.C. (Edward) Cheasty, who died that year. He had been police commissioner, commissioner of the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, and a member of the park board from 1907 to 1910 and 1912 to his death, according to the Don Sherwood Park History Files. He also ran Cheasty’s Store, a downtown haberdashery, from 1888 until his death.
Speaking of his death, it sadly appears that it was due to suicide. He fell from the 10th floor of the Washington Hotel — the same hotel in which fellow businessman Frank B. Hubbell killed himself in 1905.
This street runs just about 1,000 feet from 31st Avenue S in the west to Colman Park in the east. West of 31st Avenue, it’s S Walker Street, and the right-of-way extends through the park to Lake Washington Boulevard S as the Dose Terrace steps.
The 1905 plat of C.P. Dose’s Lake Washington Addition to the City of Seattle has it as Walker Street from 30th Avenue S to the park, but its name was changed to Dose Terrace in 1911 after C.P. Dose, a real estate developer originally from Beckerwitz, Germany.
This short street in the Washington Park neighborhood runs just over a tenth of a mile from Lake Washington Boulevard E in the west to 36th Avenue E in the east, a block south of E Mercer Street.
The Pacific Coast Addition was platted in 1910 by the Pacific Coast Company, whose vice president was J.C. Ford. This was a subdivision of the 1906 Replat of McGilvra’s Addition and Second Addition to the City of Seattle, an abbreviation of its much longer name. The tracts surrounding Ford Place were at that time owned by the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad, of which Ford was president.
As Archives West says in their historical note on the Pacific Coast Company,
The Pacific Coast Company rail, shipping and coal operations served the West Coast from the mid-19th century until its last railways were abandoned or sold in the mid-20th century. Though the company was organized under the Pacific Coast Company name in late 1897, it comprised several existing organizations, most notably the Pacific Coast Steamship Co., Pacific Coast Coal Co., and the Pacific Coast Railway. In Seattle, the Columbia & Puget Sound Railroad, originally the Seattle & Walla Walla, became part of the Pacific Coast Railway in 1916. The several operations of Pacific Coast Co., which also included a cement company and engineering company, played an important role in the development of King County resources and the development of Seattle and outlying communities.
Continuing the story we began in Hubbell Place, we take up W McLaren Street in Magnolia, which runs about 950 feet from Perkins Lane W in the west to 43rd Avenue W and W Ruffner Street in the east.
As was previously mentioned, the ordinance establishing Hubbell Place “accept[s] a deed of conveyance from George S. McLaren, et ux, and Helen Moore Hubbell” for the land. Who was this McLaren, and was he the namesake of W McLaren Street?
George S. McLaren appears to have been on the finance committee of the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, and Clarence Bagley’s History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time notes that he was among the founders of Seattle’s Nile Shrine Temple in 1908. He is mentioned in the press as being an investment manager for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, a founder of the Lake Chelan Land Company, and a representative of the Milwaukee Road in purchasing tideland real estate. And in February 1906, he was apparently one of the local businessmen who proclaimed, in the words of The Seattle Star, that “Something Will Be Done to Lift From the Shoulders of This City the Burden Placed There by the Sunset Telephone Co.,” and managed to get 2,000 similarly minded “long-suffering contributors to the yawning coffers of the Sunset concern” to assemble at the Grand Opera House to determine how best to “[remedy] the existing evil.”
In short, he does appear to have been, as The Hood River Glacier described him on August 10, 1911, “one of the leading business men of Seattle,” whose death “of ptomaine poisoning caused by eating canned mushrooms at a dinner at Tacoma” must have come as a great shock to the community.
As for W McLaren Street? It’s part of the Magnolia Heights subdivision, which was platted in 1907.
I thought it possible that George S. McLaren and W McLaren Street were related, but couldn’t be certain — nothing appeared in historical newspapers to definitively link the two. Then I looked him up in AncestryLibrary.com, which Seattle Public Library cardholders can access for free. And there it was! His probate records from 1911 contained an inventory of his assets, and among them were a “note of Magnolia Heights Co. for $333.33, dated September 5, 1907” and a “note of Parry Investment Co., for $155.64, dated July 17, 1907.” (Incidentally, both were valued at nil, though his total assets amounted to $367,228.76, or about $9.5 million in today’s money.)
As you can see in the newspaper advertisement above, the Parry Investment Company marketed lots in Magnolia Heights, which was platted by the Magnolia Heights Company. I’m willing on that basis to say that George McLaren’s name lives on in W McLaren Street.
Hubbell Place does not appear in the original plat of the area, A.A. Denny’s Broadway Addition to the City of Seattle (1890). When it was established in 1906, it ran only one block, diagonally from 9th Avenue and Union Street to Terry Avenue and Pike Street. Today, however, it begins farther southwest, at 7th Avenue and Spring Street, making its full length just about ⅓ of a mile. (The extension came about because of the construction of Interstate 5 through Downtown — the frontage road on the east side of I-5 connected to the existing Hubbell Place and took its name in 1966.)
The ordinance establishing Hubbell Place “accept[s] a deed of conveyance from George S. McLaren, et ux, and Helen Moore Hubbell” for the land. Et ux is simply Latin for “and wife.” But who was this Helen Hubbell — and, for that matter, who was this George McLaren? Could he be connected with W McLaren Street in Magnolia? (We’ll take that up in a subsequent post.)
Searching for any city ordinance mentioning Hubbell, we come across one “granting permission to Frank B. Hubbell, his heirs and assigns, to lay down, maintain and operate steam and water pipes in and across certain streets and alleys in the City of Seattle for the purpose of conducting steam and water,” passed in 1905. Yet in 1907 it was repealed, and in 1909 a similar ordinance was passed “granting permission to Helen Moore Hubble [italics mine]” to do the same thing. (This franchise expired a number of decades later.) Why might this have happened?
Apparently, Frank B. Hubbell died in 1905, only a few months after he married Helen. As the (Walla Walla) Evening Statesman reported on October 28 of that year, under the headline ‘Seattle capitalist commits suicide’,
Mystery surrounds the suicide by gas last night of Frank B. Hubbell, one of the most prominent real estate men and capitalists in the city. His bride of three months, who occupied separate apartments in a fashionable hotel, discovered him unconscious on the floor of his room this morning. Hubbell was worth half a million dollars and his financial standing was gilt edge. He came from New York a few years ago. Three physicians failed to save his life and he died at 10 this morning. No cause is known for his suiciding. Hubbel [sic] when found had the gas tube in his mouth. Domestic and not financial troubles, are believed to have been the cause. Hubbell had under way some of the greatest public improvements in the history of the city. He has constantly been drawing on eastern capital to accomplish his plans.
Though the Evening Statesman did not believe financial troubles to be the cause of his suicide, The Yakima Herald reported in 1910, under the headline ‘Closing of Hubbell estate solves suicide mystery’, that he owed $135,000 to Seattle banks, could not pay without putting his fortune at risk, and so decided to kill himself to keep his creditors at bay and preserve his estate for his wife. (That figure corresponds to $3.5 million in today’s money. The Herald went on to say that his total estate amounted to $650,000, or about $16.8 million.)
Frank and Helen Moore Hubbell had one daughter, Helen Frances Hubbell, who apparently died a few months after her 17th birthday in a car accident. She was born in May 1906, 6½ months after the death of her father. The elder Helen died in 1948 at the age of 70.
This street, which runs about ¼ mile from Lake Washington Boulevard E to the beginning of the Foster Point Trail, all within the Washington Park Arboretum, was without a name until 1968, when it was named for the island in Union Bay to which it led. (It remained unsigned until a few decades later, however. There was no sign at the intersection until at least the 1990s, as I know since my parents’ house was at the south end of the Arboretum and I drove or biked by there weekly, if not more often, while I was growing up.)
Foster Island is known by the Duwamish tribe, who once used it as a burial ground, as Stitici, or ‘little island’. It was named by the settlers for Joel Wellington Foster, who came to Washington in the 1870s from St. Joseph, Missouri. He is said to have donated the island to the city in one HistoryLink article, but another says the city bought it in 1917.
This street runs nearly 6 miles from the north end of the University Bridge in the south (at Eastlake Avenue NE and NE Campus Parkway) to Aurora Avenue N in the north, just shy of Seattle city limits at N 145th Street. It runs north–south for most of its length, but starting at NE 125th Street, its last 1½ miles cut a northwest–southeast diagonal across the street grid, making it Roosevelt Way N once it crosses 1st Avenue NE between N 133rd and N 135th Streets.
Originally 10th Avenue NE south of NE 125th Street, Roosevelt received its current name in 1933. According to local historian Feliks Banel, this was first proposed in 1927 by businesses in the Roosevelt district, itself having taken that name earlier in the decade in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt, who died in 1919. Nothing came of it for six years, but in 1933 they tried again and asked that 10th Avenue be renamed after both Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been elected president the previous November. As Banel notes in his piece, The Seattle Times had this to say:
This change, we assume, must be pleasing to local Democrats of all sorts and shades. At the same time, due to the incidence of somewhat tenuous family ties, it cannot be at all displeasing to Republicans. The name of Roosevelt has high standing in both political parties, as indeed it has throughout the world. Even now it is quite certain that those who may traverse our Roosevelt Way in years to come will neither know nor particularly care whether it was named for Teddy or for Frank.
As for its diagonal stretch, it appears on old King County maps as M. Roy Sayles Road (County Road 2240), Golf Way, and State Highway 1J (predecessor of today’s SR 513). It ceased to be a state highway in 1991. As for when it, too, became Roosevelt Way, it’s difficult to tell as King County doesn’t have as good a system for looking up ordinances online as Seattle’s. It appears as Roosevelt Way on a 1966 map in local historian Rob Ketcherside’s maps album on Flickr, but as Golf Way in another one from 1947. As the area in question wasn’t annexed into Seattle until 1953, the name must have been changed by the county sometime between 1947 and 1953 in anticipation. (The 1933 Seattle ordinance is the only one on file relating to Roosevelt Way’s name, so this must have been a county change.)
As for M. Roy Sayles, The International Confectioner’s January 1915 issue reports that he, along with Annie B. Sayles, C.M. Sayles, and W.H. Rogers, founded the Rogers Candy Co. in Seattle in 1915; and Golf Way almost certainly comes from the road’s proximity to the public course at Jackson Park, which opened in 1928.
This cul-de-sac, which runs about 300 feet from the end of 35th Avenue just south of E James Street, was named by journalist and real estate developer C.T. (Charles Tallmadge) Conover after himself. Unlike many developers, he didn’t do this when his plat (“Conover Park”) was first filed in 1907, but rather 15 years later when a new street was established in the subdivision. Perhaps his most lasting achievement was Washington’s nickname, “The Evergreen State,” which he coined in 1890.
This Queen Anne street runs 1½ miles from the meeting of 4th, Dexter, and Westlake Avenues N in the east (at the south end of the Fremont Bridge) to the 15th Avenue W interchange in the west. Some businesses in Fishermen’s Terminal have W Nickerson Street addresses, such as Chinook’s at 1900, but these few blocks of Nickerson are Port of Seattle roads that cannot be accessed directly from the public street.
Nickerson Street was named by Alfred A. Nickerson and Elmyra Nickerson, husband and wife, in their plat of Ross 2nd Addition to the City of Seattle in 1888.
This very short street in the Laurelhurst neighborhod — just over 200 feet long — was created in 1962 as part of the Webster Point plat. Why it’s a road rather than a place, lane, or court, I’m not sure — roads in Seattle (of which there aren’t many) are usually longer, such as Windermere Road NE, Holman Road NW, and Military Road S. It has the distinction of the lowest-numbered address on a north–south street north of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, as far as I am aware — 3000.
The plat and road are named for Webster Point, at the very southern tip of the Laurelhurst peninsula, which itself was named for Henry A. Webster, who once owned the land. This Webster appears to have been the Indian agent for the Makah tribe at Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula.
This street, which runs a mere 200 feet from 4th Avenue to Yesler Way in front of City Hall Park, is named for George W. Dilling, who was mayor of Seattle from 1911 to 1912.
In 1911, Mayor Dilling took an empty lot that until two years earlier had been the location of the Katzenjammer Castle, Seattle’s second city hall, and converted it into what is now known as City Hall Park — originally named Dilling Park in his honor. In 1916, the municipal offices moved once again, to the newly constructed King County Courthouse, then known as the City–County Building, across the Jefferson Street right-of-way from the park. They remained there until 1962, but the park retains the “City Hall” name.
In a letter dated March 29, 1937 from A.C. Van Soelen, corporation counsel for the city, to the Board of Public Works, regarding the ability of the city to restrict parking on Dilling Way, he writes that “Dilling Way apparently never was established or named by ordinance or other action of the City Council and was opened up or paved in 1915 or 1916, presumably in lieu of Jefferson Street which was closed between Third and Fourth Avenue though never formally vacated,” and suggests that the city council “affirmatively declare its policy” regarding the street by passing an ordinance. Such an ordinance was passed shortly thereafter, making the name of Dilling Way official. (Interestingly, that ordinance refers to the street as a “private way,” but the county’s quarter section map shows it as a public road. That same map shows that the walkway in front of the courthouse is still, technically, Jefferson Street.)
This 4-mile-long thoroughfare runs from the west end of the West Seattle Bridge to Brace Point, passing Morgan Junction, Lincoln Park, and the Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal on the way. It was named for Fauntleroy Cove, location of that terminal, from which riders depart for Vashon Island and Southworth, on the Kitsap Peninsula.
Fauntleroy Cove was itself named after Robert Henry Fauntleroy by George Davidson, Fauntleroy’s future son-in-law. They were both members of the U.S. Coast Survey. He is one of three Fauntleroys whose names appear on Seattle street signs — Ellinor Drive W and Constance Drive W are named for Mounts Ellinor and Constance in the Olympic Mountains, themselves named by Davidson after his future wife and sister-in-law, respectively.
This street, which runs, with interruptions, for 2⅓ miles from Queen Anne to just short of Elliott Bay in Magnolia (though it is platted for several more blocks west over the tideflats) is named, as I learned from the Ruffner Family Association, for Presbyterian minister William Henry Ruffner. A slaveholder who “advocated the gradual emancipation and colonization of the state’s African Americans”, he was also, according to Encyclopedia Virginia, “the designer and first superintendent of Virginia’s public school system.”
How did this “Horace Mann of the South” end up with his name on a Seattle street? Apparently, in addition to being an educator, he was also a geologist, and so was hired by Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman (of Burke–Gilman Trail fame), two of the founders of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway, to spend just over five weeks in 1887 surveying the area, the results of which were published in the SLS&E’s promotional book A Report on Washington Territory two years later. When it came time in 1890 for the plat of Gilman’s Addition to the City of Seattle to be filed, Ruffner’s name appeared on the map.
The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern became part of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1892. Today, the Interbay Car Shop of the BNSF Railway, successor to the NP, is located at the corner of W Ruffner Street and Gilman Avenue W.
What better way to start things off than with SW Seattle Street?
SW Seattle Street is a minor residential street in West Seattle that runs about ³/₁₀ of a mile from 42nd Avenue SW in the east to Sunset Avenue SW in the west.
It might seem strange that such a short street would be chosen to bear the city’s name — it was the only one to do so until 2010, when the first two blocks of Airport Way S were renamed Seattle Boulevard S — but this has more to do with unimaginative naming than with civic pride.
On August 4, 1869, Ike M. Hall — the executor of the estate of Norman B. Judkins — filed the Judkin’s (sic) Addition to the Town of Seattle, located just southwest of where the interchange between I-5 and I-90 is today. From north to south, the east–west streets are named Norman, B, Judkins, Addition, Town, and Seattle.
Portions of the original Seattle Street were vacated over the years (for example, in 1900, 1957, and 2000), and the construction of I-5 took care of the rest. However, when the city annexed West Seattle in 1907 it changed the name of Maple Street to W Seattle Street as part of rationalizing the street grid… and so the name lives on.
(The city itself, of course, was named after Si’ahl [siʔaɫ], better known in English as Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish Tribes.)
In Seattle, east–west streets have the directional come first, and north–south avenues have it come last. The Wikipedia article “Street layout of Seattle,” which I helped write, has a more comprehensive description of Seattle’s addressing system, including the answer to this question:
In 1961, city ordinance 89910 “established a standard system of street name designations” so that in almost all cases streets within a given zone would carry the same directional. West Seattle avenues already carried the SW designation.
Writes of Way © 2019 Benjamin Donguk Lukoff. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Benjamin Donguk Lukoff and Writes of Way with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
