Ba-kground: New Seattle history, mostly

Published April 21, 2015

Time Travel to West Seattle

(This article appeared in 2014 in the Westside Weekly. It hasn’t shown up online though so I’m posting it to my own site.) Time Travel…

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Room 59, Alki Hotel

Published April 16, 2015

Room 59, Alki Hotel

This originally ran as a series of articles on the now-zombie website Seattlest in October 2010. The old photos are from circa 1974. I picked…

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Sweden’s Atomic Energy, 1960s Pamphlets

Published March 31, 2015

Sweden’s Atomic Energy, 1960s Pamphlets

In September 1967 my grandfather visited Stockholm for a meeting of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee 45, setting standards for nuclear reactor test…

Old Ballard Street Names, Searchable Table

Ballard was a city of its own until 1907, when the citizenry voted to be annexed into Seattle. Data updated significantly on 8/20/2019. The data…

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Traveling Photography

Published March 19, 2015

Traveling Photography

(This article by me originally appeared on the now-defunct site Indicommons.org, which celebrated the Flickr Commons. It ran in July 2009. Rescued via archive.org) One…

1895 Seattle Street Renaming, Searchable Table

The below table is a catalog of the changes made to Seattle’s street names at the end of 1895. This is a corrected, tabular format…

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Rebuilding Seattle after the Great Fire, All 1890 Structures

Published February 10, 2015

Rebuilding Seattle after the Great Fire, All 1890 Structures

The January 1, 1891 Seattle Post-Intelligencer was full of boosterism. They were so taken up with recounting how thoroughly Seattle had recovered from the Great…

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Seattle’s Beacon Hill, Redefined