Home Architecture Tour: Seattle's Boom Years on Three City Blocks

Between 1920 and 1960, Seattle grew from a backwater lumber town to a major center of manufacturing, retail, and commerce. The numbers tell the tale. In 1920, the population of Seattle was 315,000. By 1960, the city was 557,000 strong.

The rapid population rise was no doubt fueled by the rise of the aerospace industry leading up to and through World War II. But it was also fueled by a growing national awareness that the Pacific Northwest was a beautiful place to live with abundant water and wonderful access to nature, and was a nice base of jobs with growth potential.

It’s hard to imagine what living in Seattle was like in those critical four decades. There was no freeway, for one thing, but also no Seattle Center or Space Needle or professional sports stadiums. The tallest building in the city during those years was the Smith Tower. 

It’s hard to get a feeling of the physical appearance of the city at that time by looking downtown; the landscape has simply changed too much. And historic photos don’t give you a sense of how people lived.

A great way to get insight into the life and times of the average Seattleite during those years, and to get a nice view of how the city expanded at the same time, is to take a tour of residential architecture.

The SunBreak Historical Architecture Team has plotted out a three street tour of three distinct mid-century neighborhoods in North Seattle.

We start in the 1920s and 1930s with a tour of a street in Ravenna. Start at the corner of NE 80th St. and 21st Ave. NE. From there, head south for one block.

The first thing you’ll notice is a wonderful sense of scale and beauty. This is the kind of street that real estate agents would describe as "Storybook." Nearly all the houses on this block were built in the '20s and early '30s, and few here have changed much in the last 80 years.

The prevailing style in residential architecture at the time was "revival," designs that mimicked earlier styles such as Colonial, Renaissance or Gothic. The houses on this street are brick Tudor style and they are charming. Most have three bedrooms, one or two baths and a full, unfinished basement.

Most do not have second floors, and, in the ones that do, the second floors usually have a slightly smaller scale in terms of ceiling height or door frame height: door frames here might be as short as six and half inches. The reason for the lower scale is that the architects, or more likely the builders, designed houses that had high street appeal, then fit the rooms in where they could. Check out the rooflines and the design embellishments like turrets, archways and high-peaked roofs.

You can’t help but admire the quality of the workmanship throughout the block. These homes saw families through the depression, helped raise the soldiers that went off to fight the Second World War and have served generations of families since.

One thing to notice: there are no street-facing garages. This was among the last of the pre-car eras and garages were very small, tucked away on back alleys, up the end of long driveways or absent all together.

In the 1930s, Seattle’s city limits weren't that far from here. Drive north from the starting corner and a half block up you see an abrupt change in house styles and even the line of the street: It takes a jog to the left and it's like you are in a different place.

Now, head up to Wedgwood and start at NE 82nd and 31st Ave. NE. This street has a totally different feel from 21st Ave. NE. Following the end of World War II, Seattle had an influx of returning veterans. Many were returning home, but others were new arrivals hoping for work or a safe place to raise a family. Some were soldiers who were trained or stationed here during the war and were impressed enough to come back to live.

Seattle wasn’t alone. There was a large Western migration after the war. Men in the war had traveled out of their hometowns and seen the country, maybe for the first time. After the war, they spread out around the country.

Seattle was in a bit of a pickle finding room for all those veterans. Almost overnight, Wedgwood was born. What you see on this street are the cute little VA homes, mostly built in the 1940s, that were originally built for returning Veterans or newly-mobile families looking for a new start. There is a wonderful similarity to all the homes, which are in a style that is often called "Cape Cod."

These are small homes, usually two small bedrooms, a small kitchen, a dinning room, a living room. one bath and maybe an unfinished basement. Because these homes, which are all over the North part of Seattle, are so small, many have been vastly remodeled, or torn down to make way for new larger houses. But this is not the case on 31st Ave. NE. This street looks about the way it must have looked in 1946, or '47. The wheel chair ramps on several homes suggest some people have been in these homes for some time, perhaps even original owners.

You’ll quickly notice how different they are from modern homes. There is a small, narrow one-car garage; post-war families were not wealthy and a car was a luxury. Inside, closet space is small because men usually wore a grey, black or navy suit and woman had a small wardrobe.

The men and woman who put Seattle on the map in the '70s and '80s were raised in such houses. They were beneficiaries of a lifestyle that took pride in modest ownership, hard work, and clean safe neighborhoods. These were children of the austere--the kids shared the extra room. These are the kind of homes that George Bailey made in It’s a Wonderful Life, the foundations of the baby boom.

As men returned to work, and as woman slowly, painfully joined the workforce, good times ensued. The 1950s saw swift but hard won economic growth and prosperity.

As the tour continues, head over to NE 73rd St. and 44th Ave. NE to see residential life as it was lived in the 1950s and early 1960s.

On this beautifully maintained block in the View Ridge neighborhood, you get a feel for the utopian, American Dream homes of this era. Nearly all the homes on this block and the surrounding blocks are in the "California Ranch" style of architecture. Three nice-sized rooms up, two bathrooms, generous living and dining rooms, and, compared to the houses on the previous two stops, a nice-sized kitchen. Most had a finished "rec-room" basement, probably wood paneled.

Outside, you’ll quickly notice that carports are more common than garages (the garages you see are most likely later additions). Owning a car in the 1950s was a status symbol that you wanted your neighbors to see. Your car said a lot about you.

Façade brickwork is ubiquitous, and many of these homes have some original landscaping which favored large lawns and smaller scaled plants and shrubs.

These were the homes of professionals who gave birth to the '80s and '90s entrepreneurs that currently define our city.

What might strike you about this three-block tour is how residential needs have changed so drastically from these homes during this time. Buyers now, fed a diet of insanely boring shows like House Hunters on HGTV, want giant closets, huge bathrooms, and enormous kitchens, and are indifferent to formal dining rooms. Today, most families grab a meal here and there.

For most of the past century, a bathroom was a place to quickly get in and out of. No one expected a home spa experience. You did your business, got out, and got on with your life. And families didn’t have the excess money to buy the goods that would fill the storage demanded by today’s buyers. Current consumers have so packed their closets and crawl spaces that their possessions have spilled over into a massive storage locker industry, something that no one dreamed of in the 1940s or '50s because no one needed it.

As these trends continue, it will put pressure on buyers in these three blocks to expand or rebuild these homes, and that is a normal process and not something to be scared of. None of the homes are, or should be, on the historic register. Most of them have long outlived their expected lifetimes.

But they tell us a story of how Seattle came to be the city it is. They speak of the hopes and dreams, and hard work that won the day here. Head out on a little trip, and pay homage to life as it used to be, before something else takes its place.