In response to Paul Dorpat's Wallingford Fisticuffs post, a flashback to a 1952 high school brawl here in Wallingford, Adam asked "Do you know where, exactly, on 42nd or Woodlawn that fisticuffs photo was taken?" Adam guessed "on 42nd looking south at the house on the southeast corner of 42nd and Ashworth." (See map of his guess) Paul and John did their own research on this. "I took John to the scene of the fight," Paul said, "which I had discovered…
Paul Dorpat, Wallingford's official unofficial historian is at it again. This time, he worked with Ron Edge to scan in a huge map of Seattle from 1912, breaking it down into individual PDFs for careful viewing. What's amazing to us is how much the basic layout and grid of the city was already well established by that time (we'd always thought of Seattle as "newer" than that), but it's also fun to see how street names and such have changed. Take…
Paul Dorpat and John Sundsten sent us this classic shot taken in Wallingford, 1952. It appeared in the North Central Outlook along with the story below. BRAINS, NOT BRAWN, is supposed to be one of the essential differences between man and animal. The ability to reason has enabled man to rise above other earthly creatures. But he has never been entirely tamed, and reason failing, resorts to brawn in an attempt to solve his problems. Little boys, like grown men, and…
If you haven't checked out the responses to Paul Dorpat's historical puzzler (he posted photos taken around the turn of the century in Wallingford and challenged readers to figure out where they were taken), you should. It will make you see the neighborhood in a fresh light. And if you entered and won (we chose seven winners in all!), be sure to e-mail your address to [email protected] so we can drop off your prizes. We'll be loading DVD's and jars of…
Last week, Paul Dorpat issued a challenge: he had several pictures taken down near Gas Works in Wallingford from near the the turn of the century (no, not this turn of the century, last turn of the century), and wanted to see if readers could figure out exactly where they were taken. The prizes: copies of Paul's book and jars of honey from Wallyhood's own backyard bee hives. We've had some great and well thought out suggestions (including, as we had…
Occasional Wallyhood contributor and constant Wallingford historian Paul Dorpat wrote us recently with a challenge: Below are two photographs, one map and a Wallyhood reader challenge. The map is a 1912 Baist Real Estate Map that shows the Gas Works Point (aka Wallingford Peninsula) still with the old street names. Part of the challenge is that I will not update the names, but there are enough clues or evidences in the map to make the "translations" or name changes possible for…
Rochelle forwarded us a link to this post by Jonathan Shipley on the Vintage Seattle blog, a look inside life at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N) back when it was a "home for wayward girls": Residents, in those early days, rarely left the grounds, could not excuse themselves from the nuns sharing with them those experiences of sweet virtue. Bars were in the windows. There was strict adherence to scheduled – waking, teaching, working at the laundry downstairs,…