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Category: Fremont Businesses

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.

The Stoneway Millwork Company at 3620 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the early 1900s the population of Seattle continued to grow, with about 25% coming from other countries. Scandinavians were among the most numerous, and carpentry was one of the most common occupations among them.

Swedish immigrant Abraham Branlund worked at carpentry and then transitioned into “workshop” work of wood components called millwork. Millwork could include baseboards, molding, doors and wall trim. Branlund incorporated as Stoneway Millwork Company in 1926, building a 748-square-foot workshop at 3620 Stone Way. He leased this space from Thomas Hocking of the adjacent fuel & lumber company.

Branlund was in his sixties and as he transitioned toward retirement, he took on business partners and then sold the business to them. The business was renamed Thomas & Caskey, cabinetmakers. Bert Defern Thomas & Albert Caskey were typical new residents of Seattle in that they’d been born in the Midwest and journeyed across the USA to settle in Seattle in the 1920s.

On a dark November night in 1940, Abraham Branlund was, as a pedestrian, crossing Green Lake Way just east of Aurora, when he was struck by a car and killed.

The little building at 3620 Stone Way has been through a lot of transitions in the past one hundred years. In the 1960s the building became a restaurant, first known at Guy & Hulda’s French Mill Cafe. Today it is Tacos El Lago, with bright decor to stand out from the larger building, Public Storage which surrounds it on three sides.

The Hocking Fuel & Lumber Company at 3616 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

Many of us have never seen a lump of coal, nor have we ever been in a building which was heated by a coal furnace. Coal is a sedimentary rock used primarily as fuel.

In Seattle’s early years, coal was considered to be so important that railroads were constructed to retrieve it and carry it into the city. As a rock-like substance, coal is heavy — a five-gallon bucket of coal weighs about forty pounds. In the 1880s in Seattle, cars and trucks had not yet been invented and so the best way to carry coal, was via railroad. The original purpose of the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad was to reach resources such as the coal mines east of Seattle. This rail route is now commemorated as the Burke-Gilman Trail.

Coal was a common fuel source in Seattle up until about 1950, when most houses had converted to oil or electric furnaces. Pictured here as of 1938, was Fremont’s own coal seller, the Hocking Fuel & Lumber Company at 3616 Stone Way.

Thomas James Hocking was born in Cornwall, England, in 1885 and came to Seattle in 1914. He networked with other coal & lumber dealers in Seattle and he joined Fremont’s Doric Lodge, which was a place for businessmen to network and share concerns. In 1934 he was one of a consortium of coal dealers who complained that the City Board of Public Works did not have a fair and open process for bids for coal contracts, for heating City buildings.

The economic depression of the 1930s was hard on businesses. Mr. Hocking found a way to derive more income by allowing another business to build a shop at one end of his property and pay rent to him. The Stoneway Millwork Company at 3620 Stone Way bought lumber from Mr. Hocking to make wood components such as window sashes, railings, doors and cabinets.

Today the smaller building at 3620 Stone Way still stands. It is surrounded by the large Public Storage building at 3616 Stone Way which replaced the former fuel & lumber yard.

Fremont in 1893

Posted on by Valarie

The Sanborn Insurance Company produced this map in 1893, showing the main business intersection of Fremont. For fire insurance purposes, the map was meant to show whether structures were built of wood, brick, or masonry, and how close they were to other structures.

The street names shown here, are the original ones chosen by Fremont’s developers, before standardization by the City of Seattle. “Lake” is now Fremont Avenue, the cross-street “Ewing” is North 34th Street, and above it, Blewett is now North 35th Street. Thomas Ewing was a developer and real estate agent who helped in the organizing of the street grid. Blewett was the name of the people who came from Fremont, Nebraska, and invested in this land tract.

“Canal” is visible, which was really just a streambed called The Outlet, before creation of the present ship canal.

Florentia Street at the bottom of the map still exists, and this is where the present-day Fremont Bridge reaches the south side of the ship canal. A landmark building on that corner of Florentia is the former Bleitz Funeral Home which has been redeveloped as an office building.

For further info:

Fremont first settled in 1888.

Fremont Street Names.

A House and an Auto Shop at 4031 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the 1930s Stone Way still had private homes but was increasingly mixed with light industrial buildings, gas stations and auto shops. Willam Berry of 4031 Stone Way combined two categories: his family residence and his place of employment.

William Berry had been born in Illinois and came to Seattle as an eighteen-year-old in 1903, hoping to find employment in what he had heard were Seattle’s good economic conditions. William was on the early, leading edge of the automobile service industry. He learned auto mechanics and worked at one of the car dealerships on “auto row,” on Pike Street on Capitol Hill.

By 1917 Berry was able to move into this house on Stone Way with his wife Blanche. Berry established his own auto service shop with the help of an investor (Kinghorn, name noted on the sign). William & Blanche lived in this house until their deaths in the 1950s.

In the early 1960s all the houses on this block, including the Berry’s, were demolished and some single-story retail and office buildings were built. Former stores and offices on this block were Avo Electronics, Big Tree Bikes, Dance Fremont, and some clinics including acupuncture and chiropractic. In the past ten years these smaller buildings have given way to five-story apartment complexes with retail shops at street level. There are no longer any single-family homes on Stone Way in Fremont.

Sources:

Genealogy & City Directory listings.

Photos: On this blog page, click on the Menu tab, and Photos, to see the collection. These photos are from the survey of all taxable structures in King County, which was conducted circa 1938. The photos themselves are kept at the Puget Sound Regional Archives, repository of the property records of King County. The photos are sorted by plat names. The writing on the above photo, “LaGrande Extension,” is the plat name with the notation of Block D, Lot 3. The new building in place of the Berry house, has the same property description.

The 3401 Stone Way Gas Station

Posted on by Valarie

Cars began to appear in Seattle in the early 1900s but it wasn’t until the 1920s that cars became affordable and the numbers of them increased.  Companies such as the Golden Rule Bakery in Fremont, acquired fleets of vehicles to use for deliveries.  The rise in car use in Seattle naturally caused an increase in gas stations along arterial streets like Stone Way. 

In the 1930s the gas station at 3401 Stone Way, pictured here, was operated by Olaf Johnson, an immigrant from Norway.  He lived in the Fremont Hotel, which was lodgings on the second floor of the Fremont Building at 3429 Fremont Avenue (the same building that is there today).  Mr. Johnson would have taken his meals at any of the nearby cafes such as the Fremont Cafe at 702 North 34th Street. 

In about 1940 another immigrant, William Henry Batten from England, acquired this business and renamed it the Cheerio Service Station.  Mr. Batten, born in 1889 in Cornwall, had served with the British Army in the First World War, 1914-1918. Mr. Batten may have wanted to change his life and make a fresh start after the war.  He & his wife immigrated to the USA in 1920 and he worked as an auto mechanic.   

At the onset of the USA’s entry into the Second World War, in 1942 Mr. Batten was required to fill out a draft card, even though he was 53 years old and not expected to serve in the war.  Along with the description of his height & weight, on the draft registration card it was noted that Mr. Batten had a bullet crease along the left side of his head, an indication of a close call during the First World War. 

In the 1950s a younger man, Eskil Hannus, helped run the Cheerio Service Station & mechanic shop.  Mr. Hannus was born in Idaho in 1914, of parents who had immigrated from Finland. 

Today at this site is Stoneway Court line retail shops.   

Sources: 

Genealogy & City Directory listings. 

HistoryLink Essay #957, “First Automobile Arrives in Seattle on July 23, 1900,” by Greg Lange, 1999. 

The Washington Mantel Company

Posted on by Valarie

Beginning in the 1920s, Stone Way in Fremont was lined with many construction-related companies.  There were suppliers of brick & tile, carpentry, cement work, electricians, painting, plaster & stucco, and flooring contractors.  

In 1925 with co-investors, Frank Ostermeyer opened the Washington Mantel Company at 3425 Stone Way.  The designation of “mantels” (the shelf above a fireplace) was not inclusive of every kind of work the company did.  Over the years the company also dealt in brick, tile and stucco materials as well as their original business, slabs of marble or granite which were used for smaller installations such as fireplace mantels.  The “secret” to their supply of materials was that the building was owned by the Braida family, workers in art mosaic, marble, granite and terrazzo, who lived back-to-back with the Washington Mantel building. 

The Braida house at 3408 Woodland Park Avenue is one of only a few residences in Fremont which have been historically landmarked. The house started out in 1901 as a one-story structure.  John Braida bought the house in 1915 and had it raised up so that the ground floor became his workshop, and the original house, now on the second floor, was the Braida family residence.  Braida was an influential worker in the prosperous building boom of the 1920s in Seattle.  One of his well-known works is the elephant which is at 8800 Aurora Avenue, at the Aurora Rents business (formerly the Aurora Flower Shop). 

Franklyn Peter Ostermeyer was born in 1899 in Pleasant Hill, Missouri, where his German immigrant grandparents had settled in the 1870s.  After Frank was born, his parents began a western migration. Along the way, Frank’s sister was born in Colorado.  The family settled in Tacoma, Washington, in the early 1900s where Frank’s father worked at the shipyard. 

By the time Frank was 25 years old both of his parents were deceased.  Frank married and the couple moved to Seattle where Frank started working at Washington Mantel Company in 1925.  Work went well until the onset of the economic depression of the 1930s, when work became hard to find.  When people don’t have money, the construction industry comes to a near standstill.  During the 1930s Frank Ostermeyer added several sidelines, such as a stucco manufacturing, and he also became an installer for sawdust burners, a kind of stove for heating with sawdust.  In 1938 the name of Frank Ostermeyer appeared along with others in a newspaper ad for “guaranteed” good workmen. 

We may say that working with brick, marble, stone & tile needs an artistic application.  In his sixties, Frank Overmeyer became a noted artist of oil paintings, with exhibits in local galleries.  His son Denis became an art instructor at Shoreline Community College. 

In 1973 the former Washington Mantel building at the southwest corner of 35th & Stone Way was transformed into the workspace of a maker of custom-built bicycles. 

Sources: 

Braida house, 3408 Woodland Park Avenue on the Seattle Historical Sites Index. 

Fremont’s Elephants including the 8800 Aurora Avenue North sign at Aurora Rents.

Genealogical and newspaper references. 

Robinson Tile & Marble Company:  John Braida worked together with this company.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 28, 1938, page 17, advertisement for workmen: brick & tile, carpenters, cement work, electrician, painting, plastering & stucco.  Frank Overmeyer was listed as a “guaranteed good worker” in brick & tile. 

The Golden Rule Bakery

Posted on by Valarie

The Golden Rule Bakery was a major employer in Fremont from 1920 to 1964. It started with one production plant at 4450 Fremont Avenue and expanded into a second building at 3665 Stone Way where the company could park its one hundred delivery vehicles. Stone Way Electric occupied the building at 3665 Stone Way from 1974 to 2000. Both of the Golden Rule buildings have been demolished.

The Golden Rule Bakery was founded by an Irish immigrant, William Henry Pemberton, and two investors. Shortly after starting the business in 1918, Pemberton was arrested for refusing to fill out a draft card. World War One was winding down and, at age 29, Pemberton was unlikely to be drafted into active war service, but he still refused to sign a card, because he said he was a conscientious objector. Pemberton was jailed until 1920. His co-founders of the bakery carried on with the business until he was released.

The bakery was so successful that they built a second production facility in 1922 at 3665 Stone Way. But beginning in 1925, the company came under intense pressures of the growing labor movement in Seattle. Workers of many kinds, from waitresses to factory workers and delivery drivers, were organizing. Labor leader Dave Beck and the Teamsters were accused of trying to intimidate the delivery drivers of Golden Rule and were also accused of a plot to blow up the Golden Rule building at 4450 Fremont Avenue.

Pressure intensified in 1936 when labor leaders organized a boycott of Golden Rule products so that stores would no longer carry that brand. At this critical moment, company president William H. Pemberton died at age 47 on May 9, 1936. Four weeks later, the Golden Rule employees voted to unionize.

Sources:

Genealogy records; newspapers.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, February 24, 1931, page 15, and February 28, 1931, page 3: Bomb plot thwarted at the Golden Rule production plant at 4450 Fremont Avenue.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, April 17, 1936, page 12: Dave Beck & the Teamsters organization were charged with making attacks on the Golden Rule delivery drivers.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, May 12, 1936, page 14: Funeral for W.H. Pemberton, president of the Golden Rule company.

University of Washington Civil Rights and Labor History page: Labor organizing events of the year 1936 in Seattle.

Reference: The Golden Rule Bakery is mentioned in the book, The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. The main character, Joe Rantz, re-encounters his father Harry in Seattle where Harry is working as a delivery driver for the Golden Rule Bakery. Page 160-161: Joe goes to the Golden Rule Bakery in Fremont and meets up with his father for the first time in more than five years. His father, Harry, was a vehicle maintenance worker for the delivery trucks at the bakery. Page 210: Harry Rantz was living on Bagley Avenue in Wallingford while Joe was in college at the University of Washington.

Coast Carton Company, 4133 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the past twenty years we have seen a complete transformation of Stone Way from a light-industrial area to an avenue of modern apartment buildings.  There are still a few old buildings.  Coast Carton Company at 4133 Stone Way, was built as a box factory in 1912 and the building now has retail storefronts. 

In 1906 James L. Norie of Pennsylvania traveled with his father-in-law, Joseph Kaye, to explore the timber resources of the State of Washington.  They had read newspaper accounts that major timber companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Laird-Norton had left Minnesota and moved to Washington in search of new forests of trees.  Joseph Kaye was also in the lumber business and wanted to try to find a new supply.  He bought a lumber mill in Pilchuck, a mill town near Arlington in Snohomish County, about 40 miles northeast of Seattle. 

A few years later, J.L. Norie brought his family to the Pacific Northwest and operated a lumber mill in Sedro-Woolley, Skagit County. Next, the Norie family moved to Seattle.  Instead of working directly with timber, in 1912 Norie set up a secondary business:  the making of paper boxes from softwood trees such as pine and fir.  Norie built a box factory at 4133 Stone Way (southwest corner of 42nd Street). 

All of James Norie’s family, his parents and siblings, moved to the Pacific Northwest as did those of his wife Martha Kaye Norie.  James & Martha’s son worked at Coast Carton as did James’ nephew Robert, Robert’s wife Lena and daughter Katherine. 

James Norie outlived two wives and continued to manage the box factory until he was in his seventies, in the 1950s.  In 1964 at age 86, Norie attended a reunion at the old ghost-town of Pilchuck, Snohomish County.  He took sick and died in Seattle, two weeks after the Pilchuck reunion. 

Sources: 

Genealogy listings including Find A Grave. 

Plat name: the notation “Elders Orchard” on the Coast Cartons property photo, is the legal description of the plat name. The photo was taken circa 1938 in a survey of all taxable buildings in King County, for property tax assessment.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 8, 1937, page 19:  J.L. Norie’s first wife, Martha, was killed in a car wreck. 

Seattle Daily Times, October 25, 1964, page 98: Lucile MacDonald column about Pilchuck, a vanished town in Snohomish County. 

Fremont’s Pocket Desert

Posted on by Valarie

In Fremont, our neighborhood known for its eccentricity, a small mystery has been hiding in plain sight. The Fremont Neighbor blog has written the following inquiry:

“On the grounds of what is now the Fremont Foundry event venue, 154 North 35th Street, sits a modest postcard-sized plaque reading simply “Fremont Pocket Desert.” No one seems to know its origin story.

The plaque’s location is particularly intriguing given the property’s colorful history. This is where sculptor Peter Bevis, the same visionary who brought us the Lenin statue, once pursued his dream of creating an artists’ community.

Bevis, who died in 2015, was a passionate sculptor who used money earned from commercial fishing in Alaska to slowly build the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry starting in 1979. By 1987, the nearly 22,000-square-foot building housed 11 live-in spaces where artists could work. Back then, Fremont called itself an “Artists’ Republic,” and Bevis believed he could create a true artistic mecca.

But like many of Bevis’ ambitious projects, including his doomed quest to save the art deco ferry Kalakala, the artists’ community eventually faded. By 2012, as tech companies moved into Fremont and the neighborhood’s bohemian character shifted, Bevis sold the foundry for $2.1 million. Currently the building serves as an upscale event venue.

So where does the “Fremont Pocket Desert” plaque fit into this story? Was it one of Bevis’ artistic statements? A remnant from the building’s days as a working foundry? An inside joke among the artists who once lived there?

The plaque’s cryptic message feels entirely in keeping with both Bevis’ unconventional spirit and Fremont’s tradition of playful installations.”

Do you know the story behind Fremont’s “Pocket Desert” plaque? If you have any information about this small but intriguing piece of Fremont history, please reach out to the Fremont Neighbor blog: Home – Fremont Neighbor