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Month: October 2025

The lights are on again at the “Interurban.”

Posted on by Valarie

The Waiting for the Interurban statue is at the intersection of North 34th Street and Fremont Avenue. It memorializes the former rail line, called the Interurban, which went northward through Fremont to the city of Everett. This transfer point at the intersection, where City of Seattle streetcar lines also converged, did much to give Fremont the reputation of being the “center” of things, the Center of the Universe.

The Interurban statue was created by Richard Beyer in 1978. In 1979 Peter Larsen was commissioned to add a pergola with lights. The lights had been knocked out in a 2023 car crash against a nearby power pole (not a crash at the pergola itself.) Now, as of October 2025, the lights have been restored. Our thanks to the City’s signal technician who did the electrical work, and thanks to the Fremont Neighbor blog for the wonderful night photo of the Interurban lights.

The Hall of Giants: The Story of Fremont and the Troll

Posted on by Valarie

In 1990 the Fremont Arts Council sought proposals for a vacant area on North 36th Street which was directly underneath the Aurora Bridge. Immediately the folktale of the troll beneath the bridge came to mind, and this design proposal won acceptance.

The Fremont Troll became so popular that in 2005, the City of Seattle changed the name of the north-south avenue leading to it, to Troll Avenue. This made it much easier for visitors to Seattle to find the Fremont Troll.

Today the Friends of the Troll’s Knoll volunteer group maintain the area around the Troll and they host events in the adjacent green space with other artworks.

When at the intersection of Troll Avenue and North 36th Street, the view from under the bridge downhill to Lake Union is like that of a medieval castle hall, with the arching piers of the Aurora Bridge. The area of the Fremont Troll thus has its own folklore as part of an imaginative Hall of Giants.

A documentary film, The Hall of Giants: The Story of Fremont and the Troll, tells the story of how the troll was built and how it enhanced community bonds in Fremont. The DVD of the film is now available from the Seattle Public Library system although, after coming available in October 2025, there is already a waiting list for it. The film is also available for rent from Scarecrow Video of Seattle.

Who was B.F. Day?

Posted on by Valarie

Benjamin Franklin Day was 45 years old when he and his wife Frances arrived in Seattle in the spring of 1880.  

Born in Ohio, B.F. Day had farmed in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri.  Biographical notes indicate that Day wanted to leave farming because of the hard physical labor. We don’t know why he chose to come to Seattle, but as a former farmer who had raised corn & hogs, B.F. Day would have known the importance of railroads in moving products to market.  In the 1870s-1880s there was constant speculation about railroad routes across the USA.  B.F. Day may have chosen to come to Seattle because he thought that Seattle had a good chance of becoming the terminus of a transcontinental railroad line, and that there would be good economic conditions in Seattle. 

In Seattle B.F. Day worked as a real estate agent and he quickly became involved in civic affairs.  He served on City Council in 1883-1884 and he was one of the original members of the Lake Washington Improvement Company which was organized to create a ship canal.  The Company’s proposed plan was to widen the stream from Lake Union, flowing westward to Puget Sound, so that logs could be floated to mill and coal barges towed by ships.  For this reason, in 1882 B.F. Day began buying land near Lake Union and the future community of Fremont.  He believed that the future canal would cause property values to rise around that area on the western shore of Lake Union, so he bought property as an investment. 

As of 1888 the Fremont area, from Florentia Street (south side of the bridge) up to North 39th Street, was released from legal impediments so that the land could be opened for settlement.  B.F. Day bought an adjacent tract of land just north of 39th Street and built his own house there at 3922 Woodland Park Ave North. 

As of 1888 when Fremont began to be settled, it was a suburb, outside of the city limits of Seattle, and it had no organized school system.  School in Fremont began in a series of temporary locations with parents organizing to pay teachers.  In 1889 B.F. Day paid the rent for a building, a vacant storefront at 36th & Aurora, so that it could be used as a schoolhouse. 

In 1891 Fremont was officially annexed to the City of Seattle, and the Seattle School District made plans to build a new school in Fremont.  As a real estate agent who saw the Fremont community developing, B.F. Day knew that families would be more interested in buying property to settle in Fremont if there was a good school building.  He’d seen other neighborhoods with hastily-built wooden school structures which deteriorated or were not big enough.  B.F. Day offered to donate property on North 39th Street between Fremont & Linden Avenues, to build a school in Fremont, on the condition that the structure would be well-built and permanent, not temporary.    

Architect John Parkinson was hired, and a two-story brick school was built which opened in May 1892.  The form of the school building was like the letter H so that more sections could be added onto the original.  Fremont grew so much in the 1890s that additions had to be built to accommodate the growing population of school-age children.  Ironically B.F. Day, who never had any children of his own, is best remembered in Seattle history for this school which still serves the children of Fremont today. 

Sources:

Seattle School Histories: B.F. Day School. HistoryLink Essay # 10494.

The Life of B.F. Day, Part One and Part Two, articles on the Wedgwood in Seattle History blog.

The Motorline Land Plats in Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

Fremont was opened in something like a land rush in the summer of 1888, when lots were first offered for sale. The original area of the landowners was from Florentia Street on the south side of the Fremont Bridge, as far north as North 39th Street. Outside of that area, beginning in 1888 other property owners rushed to have their land surveyed and laid out in lots to sell. A cluster of different landowners began naming their sites “Motorline” as they knew that there were plans for a streetcar line on what is now Woodland Park Avenue North.

A plat for a section of land from North 42nd to 45th Streets in Fremont was filed in November 1889 and named Third Motorline Addition. The property owners were two couples, Frank Harvey Winslow & his wife Mary, and John D. Smith & his wife Margaret. The two families may have become acquainted as neighbors, as both lived on West Garfield Street on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill.

Frank Winslow’s life was a classic American story of westward migration. Born in Vermont, he’d lived a few years in Boston where he learned the mercantile business. In his mid-twenties in the year 1861, he went by ship to San Francisco and then to the Pacific Northwest. He found employment as a bookkeeper at the Port Discovery lumbermill in Jefferson County. In 1870 he became a customs inspector and in the 1880s he rose to become US Customs Inspector at Seattle.

Frank Winslow retired in 1889 and it appears that he planned to live from then on, from the profits of real estate investments in Seattle. The Winslows and Smiths combined their holdings to create this plat in Fremont; John D. Smith was a real estate agent in Seattle in the 1880s.

In early years, Seattle property owners were allowed to name the streets in their plat, anything they wanted. This caused streets to have different names along their course. On the right-hand side of this plat map we see that today’s Woodland Park Avenue had been named Motor Avenue. In the 1880s the street had several names, including Boman, for George Boman who lived in the 3500 block.

Finally in 1895 the City of Seattle decreed that the street system would have to be reorganized because there were too many streets with the same names. There was trouble when someone would call in a fire alarm, for example, to “Park Avenue” as there were quite a few. On this map we see that Park was renamed Winslow by the City process. Some names, such as Allen Place substituted for Vermont Street, did not have to do with this plat but was simply done to make the street consistent with adjacent plats of land. The designation of Motor Place was moved to the small segment of street between 42nd and 43rd Streets.

Sources:

Seattle street renaming process, Fremont street names.

Port Discovery Mill, Jefferson County, Washington.

Find A Grave: This free resource often has biographical info posted. You can read more here about the life of Frank Winslow.

Geary’s Radiator Shop at 4900 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

Geary’s Radiator Shop represents the transition of Stone Way from its early semi-industrial businesses such as lumber yards, to today’s restaurants, offices and tall apartment buildings. Today this site has a restaurant (Bamboo Village) and a veterinary clinic. In the early 1960s Mr. Geary sold this property to a developer, who built an office building. It was a real estate office before becoming a restaurant.

Erwin C. Geary was born in Montana, the sixth of eleven children of an Irish immigrant father. Erwin worked on the family farm until he was nearly thirty years old. He married in 1937 and then he & his new wife travelled to Seattle to find work opportunities. A friend, Guy Sanderson, had also farmed in Montana and then established several barber shops in Seattle. He gave Erwin Geary a job at an excellent location, the barber shop on First Avenue at Union Street in downtown Seattle. The location was just a few steps from the Pike Place Market and would have had a lot of shoppers who would stop by for a haircut.

By or before 1950 Erwin Geary was able to own his own business, the radiator shop on Stone Way. We don’t know how he felt about selling the property circa 1960, but perhaps the sale of the site was something that was financially advantageous.

At age 65 in 1972, Erwin Geary was driving on the Alaskan Way Viaduct when he was killed in a head-on collision with a wrong-way driver.