Many artists, writers, and others in creative pursuits have made their home in the Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle.
The house at 7756 30th Ave NE was designed and built in 1941 by an artist who drew cartoons and portraits for the Seattle Times newspaper.
The next owner of the house was a man who resolved to discover the secret of success in the game of golf, spending many years analyzing the mechanics of the golf swing and writing a book about it.
A “plat” is a section of land, any size, for which a plan of streets and lots is laid out. Plats are given a name by the real estate company or developer. Many neighborhood names are derived from plat names, such as Hawthorne Hills, Inverness, View Ridge, and Wedgwood.
Out in the (future) Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle, there was no neighborhood name in the early 1900s and areas were often known by their plat name. The census of early years listed some residents as living on or near McLaughlin Road.
In the 1920s and 1930s the (future) Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle became the home of numbers of immigrants, most especially from Germany, Holland and Sweden.
The house at 7500 43rd Ave NE in Wedgwood was built in 1910 by German immigrant Gustav Morris. Photo courtesy of the Puget Sound Regional Archives, Bellevue, WA.
East of 35th Ave NE in what was called the Oneida Gardens blocks, many immigrant settlers worked in building trades such as carpentry and plumbing. One of the earliest was Gustav Morris, an ethnic German from Latvia, who built a house at 7500 43rd Ave NE in 1910. Morris worked as a bridge carpenter from 1910 to 1920, during the era when the ship canal and its bridges were under construction.
In the year 1926 Oneida Gardens received an influx of new residents due to the increasing availability of roads, electric & water utilities, and schools in northeast Seattle. Near Gustav Morris’ house, the block between 41st to 42nd Avenues NE was settled by four Swedish families in 1926.
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The area around the NE 75th Street intersection in Wedgwood never had an organized scheme of development. As a result, people who came to live there in the 1920s saw startling changes over the years in everything from road grading to commercial growth.
Northeast Seattle residents near NE 75th Street started out in the 1920s with chickens and cows. By the 1960s their houses were surrounded by stores and businesses.
In 1938 the King County property survey showed a chicken house or barn on what later became the site of the Wedgwood Safeway store. We are looking east with NE 75th Street at the left. Photo courtesy of Puget Sound Regional Archives.
The Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle is defined as from NE 75th to 95th Streets. Wedgwood has a linear commercial district along 35th Avenue NE.
Today’s Wedgwood neighborhood is defined as extending from NE 75th to 95th Streets along the central arterial of 35th Ave NE. These “boundaries” are arbitrary but were suggested by the City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods in the 1980s to help give neighborhoods a sense of identity and pride of place.
Before Wedgwood began to coalesce and gain an identity as a neighborhood in the 1940s-1950s, the area was made up of disparate sections of land under different plat names. This blog post will tell how some plats (sections of land) were developed in an organized way, such as the first Wedgwood plat by Albert Balch. In contrast to what Balch had done, the nearby plat of land owned by the Washington State Office of the Commissioner of Public Lands did not have an overall scheme of development.
The Wedgewood Cottage Apartments are the former “little houses” which were moved to 7318-7320 35th Ave NE, viewed here from the east on 38th Ave NE.
In January 1972 a very unusual house-moving event took place in the Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle. Twelve small houses (600 square feet each) were moved from 40th Ave NE near Decatur School, to 7320 35th Ave NE in the business district of Wedgwood.
Behind a Dairy Queen building near the Wedgwood Safeway grocery store, the little houses were stacked up on a hillside and became an apartment complex. These little houses were the last vestiges of the long-running Shearwater controversy which had begun on the blocks around the present Decatur and Thornton Creek School buildings.
The Welcome to Wedgwood sign on 35th Ave NE at the corner of NE 95th Street.
In the 1940s and 1950s the Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle began to take on its identity. The Wedgwood name gradually came into popular use when local businesses began using it, and it was solidified by the choosing of the name Wedgwood School in 1954.
The neighborhood community club, asked to define itself in 1956, chose the attendance boundaries of Wedgwood School as the official boundaries of the Wedgwood neighborhood, from NE 75th to 95th Streets, and from 25th to 45th Avenues NE.
The Wedgwood neighborhood grew rapidly during the post-World-War-Two housing boom in the 1940s and 1950s, because in those years northeast Seattle still had many vacant lots available for house construction. In addition to new construction, in the 1940s and 1950s it was much more common than it is now, for houses to be moved from one lot to another. Most were moved only a couple of blocks or within a mile, to an available vacant lot.
Seattle Engineering Dept. photo of June 1951 shows the retaining wall in front of the VanderWel’s house at 7512 35th Ave NE. The McGillivray’s Store (Chase Bank building) had not yet been built. The parking sign in the foreground is for the other stores at the corner of NE 75th Street. The VanderWel’s house was moved to 7308 38th Ave NE. Seattle Municipal Archives photo #42951.
In the busy years of development of the neighborhood infrastructure, sometimes houses were moved because of regrading or widening the streets. On at least one occasion in Wedgwood, a house was found to be “in the road” and had to be demolished or moved. Some houses, like that of the VanderWel’s at 7512 35th Ave NE, pictured at right, ended up far above or below the street level due to regrading.
In the 1950s the McGillivray family were building a store next to the VanderWel’s house (the present Chase Bank building at 7512 35th Ave NE.) They purchased the house and had it moved, so that they could use the space for a parking lot for their store.
Another example of upheaval in the development of the Wedgwood neighborhood in the 1950s was that when the Seattle School District chose the location of Wedgwood School, houses which had already been built there had to be moved off of the site. The school property had been part of Albert Balch’s Wedgwood #4, and he continued to build houses near the school after that portion of the plat was taken.
Similar house-moving occurred during the creation of Dahl Playfield at 7700 25th Ave NE. The City of Seattle seized the property by eminent domain, and existing houses had to be moved off of the property.
