A Stream Line

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The original print for this scene is preserved with its variation — a second print of the same log, stream, bridge and gun, but of a different person — in the air-conditioned library of the Museum of History & Industry. In this scene, a woman sits on the bridge aiming the rifle. In the other, a man or older boy stands merely holding it.

If the man and the girl were not the photographers, A.P. Dukinfield may have been. It was Dukinfield, a printer, who donated the snapshots to MOHAI in the 1950s. In 1910, the year typed in his caption, he lived on 11th Avenue Northeast, a stone's throw from this stream he calls "Duke Creek under Ravenna Blvd, an outlet of Green Lake." I know this outlet as Ravenna Creek. Green Lake historian Louis Fiset doesn't know of any Duke, and neither do I.

Likely, this is the stream that once flowed gently from Green Lake to the Ravenna Park ravine and on to the lush wetlands of Union Bay, now mostly the parking lots of University Village. Photographs of the stream in the park abound, but this is the only view I've ever seen of the creek near its source.

Given the scene's scrubbiness, it was probably taken closer to Dukinfield's home and Cowen Park than to Green Lake. By 1910 the lake was surrounded with manicured dwellings — no longer a suburban community. The reader of 2002 might find the Nov. 26, 1903, issue of the Green Lake News revealing: "Every businessman of common sense knows that the farther away he gets in the evening from his daily commercial association the better off he is . . . As to the women, it is a safe assertion that the majority, if given their own free choice, would live out in the suburbs, away from the nerve-distracting tumult and hubbub of the city."

Paul Dorpat's two-hour videotape on Seattle's early history, "Seattle Chronicle," is $29.95 from Tartu Publications, P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.