After Grant McVicar finished service with the Navy in World War Two, he returned to Seattle and went into business with his father. The McVicars rented a brand-new storefront on the west side of 35th Ave NE between NE 85th and 86th Streets. McVicar Hardware operated 1946 to 1986, thriving in the climate of the post-war housing boom with young families fixing up their homes and yards in Wedgwood.
The development of Wedgwood’s first business district began with J.W. (Joe) Shauer, an enterprising businessman who moved his family from Greenwood to Wedgwood in 1918. Mr. Shauer (pronounced shower) paid $1,000 for an acre of property on the west side of 35th Ave NE between NE 85th to 86th Streets. On the corner of NE 86th Street, the site now occupied by Wells Fargo Bank, the Shauers built a one-room house with a screened porch on one side. The house was truly “out in the country,” as it was without running water or electricity; electricity wasn’t brought that far out on 35th Ave NE until 1923.
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North corner of 7500 35th Ave NE struck by this vehicle on January 12, 2020. The driver lost control and swerved off the road.
On January 12, 2020, a car swerved off the road and struck the northernmost corner of the building at 7500 35th Ave NE, in the block to the north of the Wedgwood Safeway. The incident has caused renewed interest in the history of this building. The original building of 1926 was a neighborhood grocery; from 1934 to 1948 it was Ida’s Inn Beer Parlor.
This is the story of Ida’s Inn and the evolution of the business district at the intersection of NE 75th Street and 35th Ave NE.
The Ihrig family across America
The Ihrig family were German immigrants who ended their westward migration when they came to Seattle in 1883. In 1852 Adam & Mary Ihrig had first settled in northern Illinois in a large German farming community. Adam & Mary decided to move farther west in the 1870s. Their tenth child was born while they lived near Albany, Oregon, again amongst German settlers. But the Ihrig family still kept moving, and by the early 1880s they were in Seattle.
Perhaps Adam & Mary thought that there would be more and better opportunities for their family in the city of Seattle, or perhaps their grown sons persuaded them to move. In the 1880s Seattle had a large German immigrant community with its own churches, social clubs and even a German-language newspaper; the Ihrig family would feel at home. The Washington Territorial Census of 1883 recorded that the older Ihrig sons worked in downtown Seattle that year as blacksmiths, butchers & saloonkeepers.
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In the early 1900s very few people lived in the Wedgwood area of northeast Seattle. Many who did come were immigrants or first-generation Americans from Germany, Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands. Others came from across the United States, hoping to get a new start in Seattle.
People who bought land in Wedgwood in the early 1900s were willing to live a rural lifestyle so that they could afford to have their own homes. It was common for people to keep chickens and cows at their Wedgwood homes up until the 1940s.
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Mr. John Guisebertus Hoetmer and Miss Anna Pauline Timmerman were married in Holland in 1906, shortly before joining a group of twenty people immigrating to America. (Holland is a western province of what is now the Netherlands.) Most of the people in the 1906 immigrant group were related to one another through the Timmerman and Lobberegt (pronounced Lob-er-ette) families. The families determined to leave their native land to save their sons from forced conscription into the military. Family patriarch “Uncle Joe” Lobberegt preceded the group to America and agreed to sponsor them for immigration. He had to promise the U.S. government that he would feed the group and see that they learned to speak English.
The Seattle City Clerk’s on-line map of the Wedgwood neighborhood spells it with the extra “e.”
Bud & Dolly Gagnon were the owners of the WedgEwood Pharmacy from 1952 to 1972 (spelled with that extra “e!!”)
The Gagnons saw the drugstore business evolve from old-time traditions into the streamlined service of the modern era.
Note the comments at the end of this article from Gagnon family members and from long-time neighborhood residents.
Beginnings: Bud & Dolly Gagnon
Bud Gagnon served in the Army Air Force during World War Two, and afterward he attended the University of Washington on the GI Bill (education funding for veterans.)
Bud met his wife Dolly in 1948 when he was working at his first job at a pharmacy in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. The Gagnons moved to Kent where Bud worked at a small pharmacy for the first four years of their married life. In 1952 Bud was told by a pharmaceutical salesman that McGee’s Drugstore in the Wedgwood neighborhood of Seattle was planning to sell out. Bud took the opportunity to buy McGee’s store.
This is the second article about the life of Walter S. Wood, an early resident of Morningside Heights in Wedgwood.
In 1927 Walter Wood turned forty years old and he was going full-steam ahead with all of his varied businesses in the Morningside Heights plat of what is now part of Wedgwood in northeast Seattle.
Walter Wood’s city directory listing for 1928 gave his occupation as “real estate, fuel, building materials.” The Wood’s house number was 9428 25th Ave NE, so Walter had given his store/gas station the same number, 9428 Victory Way (Lake City Way.) In 1930 his store’s name was in the city directory for the first time, Morningside Service Station, listed as selling oil, gas and groceries, plus wood and coal for home heating. Since we know that Walter was also serving as Justice of the Peace of Morningside Precinct and he held court right there in his store, it would be fair to say that Walter Wood was doing a real juggling act and trying to keep a lot of balls in the air.
A coal shovel with advertisement of Walter Wood’s place of business at 95th & Victory Way, courtesy of the current owners of the Wood’s house.
In the early 1900s the Wedgwood neighborhood did not yet have a name and the area was quite rural. The Morningside Heights plat from NE 90th to 95th Streets, 25th to 35th Avenues NE, was one of the early sections of Wedgwood to be divided up with lots for houses and promoted by a real estate company, and Morningside Heights attracted young couples who wanted to achieve the dream of having their own home. Walter & Verda Wood were 25-year-old newlyweds when they built their new house in Morningside Heights in 1913.
Prior to the 1940s, the future Wedgwood neighborhood had been known as Morningside. The name came from the promotion of the Morningside Heights development close to NE 95th Street.
The Morningside Heights Apartments at 9425 35th Ave NE.
The neighborhood name “Wedgwood” is the legacy of 1940s developer Albert Balch. As more houses were built and the neighborhood grew in the busy post-World-War-Two period, businesses began naming themselves Wedgwood. Soon Wedgwood became the accepted name for the entire area, not just the sections of houses that Balch had built.
Today the only Morningside references are an apartment building at NE 95th Street, and the Morningside Market at 9118 35th Ave NE. Continue reading
Many aspects of Wedgwood as we know it today have been shaped by the processes of community action. Dahl Playfield at 7700 25th Ave NE is a good example.
Dahl Field entrance from the parking lot. Photo by Valarie, October 2019.
The story of Dahl Playfield began in 1947, when eighty parents of Cub Scout Pack 165 petitioned the city for recreational facilities. They were joined in their effort by the Ravenna Elementary School PTA. They realized that in an era of rapid growth, space for parks and playgrounds had to be set aside before all the land was gone.
The Picardo Farm (now known as the P-Patch) was the original site of interest for a park, but due to a fortuitous engineering error, attention shifted to the land south of the farm, known as Big Pond (or) Ravenna Swamp, between NE 75th to 80th Streets.
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Wedgwood in Seattle History 