There are so many great stories about Queen Anne and Seattle’s future. They range from the role of wealthy women in creating Seattle’s civic institutions, to the importance of unions in constructing this city and to the architects who came west to design, among other buildings, places for the care of injured, sick and sometimes abandoned children.
Easily recognized by anyone who regularly walks the neighborhood, this photo shows the 1910 construction site of a local landmark. Between 1908 and 1953, Children’s Orthopedic Hospital called this block home. It is now Queen Anne Manor and serves seniors. Here, we’re looking west from Warren Avenue North, with Boston Street to the right and Crockett to the left.
Signs of the times
The photo features three buildings — the Fresh Air Cottage, the new hospital under construction and the construction shack next to it — and nine people. The nurse in white works in the cottage, the hospital’s first permanent home.
Hospital founder Anna Herr Clise (1866-1936) and her 23-woman board of directors selected the site after a long search for a hilltop location on a convenient streetcar line far from dirty downtown. It was just the location to speed the recovery of the 12 children the cottage could serve at any one time. When it opened in 1908, fresh air breezes, such as those floating up from Elliott Bay, were an important part of hospital cures.
In addition to the nurse, there are eight people in this photo, five of whom were probably patients. Three of the five boys are on crutches. Another has his foot wrapped in a dark material over a cast. The boys on crutches probably had their broken legs repaired or tuberculous arthritis in their joints. (This was not an uncommon malady at the time). Of course, they could have been treated for polio. (In fact, during his successful presidential campaign, the nation’s most famous polio victim, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stopped here in September 1932.) There are no visible signs of the fifth boy’s ills, while the woman behind the hillock in dark clothes remains a mystery.
The two men on the scaffolding appear to be having lunch near the unfinished first-story entrance. It will soon perch above the basement level, up a curving stair that the boys on crutches would surely have a tough time navigating. The men may not be doing the brick work, but as the sign on the constructions shed tells us, they were union men.
It is easy to pick out the Flemish bond of the brick stretchers and headers just behind the men (in Flemish bond, long and short sides of the brick alternate with the short brick centered over a long brick). The bond suggests this is a masonry load-bearing building, but it’s probably not.
Through the window, you may be able to pick out tough, steel-reinforced, concrete piers that really hold things up (check out a high-resolution photo at www.qahistory.org) and had enough residual strength to support the addition of a fourth floor in 1921. When the fourth floor was completed, the hospital had 78 beds in open, airy wards.
Demolition, then addition
Records haven’t yet revealed who designed the top floor, but the three original ones were the work of W. Marbury Somervell (1872-1939) and Joseph S. Coté (1874-1957). Trained in the Beaux Arts tradition at Ivy League schools (Somervell, Cornell; Coté, Columbia), they provided booming Seattle with architectural symbols for its new civic institutions. The two men arrived in 1903 to supervise construction of St. James Cathedral for the New York firm of Heins & LaFarge and stayed.
In 1928, the Fresh Air Cottage was torn down when architect Abraham H. Albertson (1872-1964) redesigned and expanded the building. Like Coté, he trained at Columbia and came to Seattle in 1907 to prepare a development plan for the Metropolitan Tract.
One of Albertson’s best-known works is the Northern Life (now Seattle) Tower (1927-29). On Queen Anne, he also did the Smith residence at 619 W. Comstock St. (a designated city landmark) and St. Anne’s Convent (1930).
Unlike the austere flat roof on the original building, Albertson’s addition boasts a graceful, hipped roof covered with barrel-shaped tiles. Terraces for the children to breathe fresh air on dry days and many windowed sunrooms are among its features.
Under a triple-arched porch along Warren Avenue, Albertson dressed up the new building entrance with bright, terra cotta decorations, including fanciful capitals each of which sports playful squirrels holding up the entablature. Sick children surely loved being welcomed by these happy critters, while colorful terra cotta plaques — many with bas-relief sailing ships — provided playful distractions from disquieting casts, braces and crutches.
From child care to adult care
Almost from the very beginning, hospital trustees established a policy of accepting any child, regardless of race, religion or parents’ ability to pay. For 40 years, the school district ran Children’s Orthopedic Hospital School in the buildings as an annex to John Hay Elementary School.
It served between 1953 and 1968 as a King County health department clinic, then for county offices and the morgue until 1980, when it became a retirement home.
Children’s Orthopedic Hospital then became Queen Anne Manor, with its open wards converted to private apartments. The frolicking squirrels on those Warren Avenue capitals and an expanded roof garden visible from Boston Street now cheer up memory-care patients in freshly remodeled spaces named for the hospital’s founder and called Anna’s Garden.
MICHAEL HERSCHENSOHN is president of the Queen Anne Historical Society (qahistory.org). To comment on this column, write to QAMagNews@nwlink.com.