A bonus for the shopping season is that the historic image selected for this month is a large photomural hanging in the Sun Song store at 1122 First, accessible during store hours, and it’s worth the trip.
Dennis Bishop, the owner of the photography studio Bishop Images, donated his time to photograph the mural for our Historical Society so that we could add it to our digital collection, which I am happy to share with you since it is a very rare view of early Snohomish’s working waterfront. The building that is home to the Sun Song is pictured on the left, overexposed in the historic image, and hidden by a tree in today’s view from across the river. It and its neighbor at 1120, home to Java Inn, are surviving examples of territorial-period false front architecture already in place when the first fire insurance maps were published in 1888.
The wooden buildings across the street appear to be in the same style; in fact, this photograph gives us a backstage view of a building with a false front. Note the water barrels on the ridgeline, which was a standard first response to fire in the early days, but more on that later. Looking at the buildings with their backs to us, the 1888 map records that the building on the left carried General Merchandise with warehouse rooms below. Next door was a stove and general hardware business with a tin shop in the rear, then a carpenter business I think. The shorter building next door could be the one labeled “Fish” on the map; and finally, the building with the fascinating ads on the side is labeled “Sal” for a saloon with “Tenemts” on the second floor.
By 1905, every lot on the south side of First Street between Avenues B and C was occupied, structure-to-structure, so that when the fire broke out in the middle of the night on May 30, 1911, in the basement of a restaurant near Avenue B, it spread quickly down the block toward Avenue C.
We can see in this image how the wooden pilings and framing under the buildings would be the perfect fuel for a hot enough fire, while the water barrels probably only helped to spread the fire as it actually jumped across the street to engulf Snohomish’s only three-star hotel, the Penobscot, the white structure peaking over the roofs in our historic image. Also peaking above the roofs is the Burns Block building, the three-story brick building, currently home to Dream Dinners, which stopped the fire from spreading further west, preventing the loss of our two examples of false front architecture.
By the time of the fire, the waterfront must have changed considerably from what is pictured here since the losses listed included damage to the Milwaukee Rail Road trestle being installed along the north bank of the river. By the 1940’s the abandoned trestle was an eyesore, the subject of repeated complaints at city council meetings and it was finally removed. Repeated flooding eventually compromised the second generation of brick buildings that rose on the ashes of those lost to the fire, and they were abandoned when a car dealership’s building collapsed in the late 1940s. But it was not until the mid-1960s before the abandoned buildings were demolished, making way for our present-day Kla-Ha-Park.
Just this year the Historic Downtown Snohomish organization commissioned a study of how we might add a dock to Kla Ha Ya Park, which means that this wonderful historic image of our past is representing a possibility for our future.
On a personal note, this is number 12 of our monthly “Then and Now” series and I wish to thank the editor and publisher of the Tribune for making room for us over the past year, and I hope our relationship will continue for another dozen monthly meetings. The series will be available online at EarlySnohomish.com, a new website project of our Historical Society –- and we are always interested in seeing your historical images of Snohomish.
Published in the Snohomish County Tribune, December 19, 2007.