Articles

Prepared by Katie Pratt and Spencer Howard of Northwest Vernacular, Inc. on behalf of the Friends of Mount Baker Town Center with funding...

Juneteenth celebrates the ending of slavery in the United States. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,...

“He kept saying, ‘I want a sweet potato pie like my mother made.’” by Mikala Woodward, Excerpted from Rainier Valley Food Stories...

This photo of the just-completed Franklin High School was taken from somewhere half-way up Beacon Hill in about 1913. The Rainier Valley...

Horses hauling logs at Columbia Mill, Columbia, July 15, 1891. Photo property of Rainier Valley Historical Society, Accession Number...

Crowd outside Phalen's Grocery during Rainier Valley Fiesta, Seattle, 1915. Property of Rainier Valley Historical Society, Accession...

Whenever young Bernice Boley had a little money, she’d head over to Vincent’s grocery for some penny candy: this was the 1930s, and a...

Hillman City began as a stop on the Rainier Valley Streetcar line in the 1890s. The area was platted by, and named after, the notorious...

The history of bread goes back some 30,000 years, to the hunting and gathering phase of human development. Fast forward a few tens of...

Audio recording, John Parker describing the Model T Ford he built up from parts of several cars during the 1920s....

Audio recording of John Croce recollecting the Italian School from the Garlic Gulch neighborhood in the 1930s.

Interview of Jack Collier by Buzz Anderson from 1994.

The song "Carry Me Back to Columbia City" sung by the Columbia Pioneers at the 1973 annual meeting.

They came down from Beacon Hill, from the Central District, and from the valley floor. Most came by foot with a friend or two. The...

A culinary history of the Rainier Valley going back 100 years with recipes and stories from our multicultural community. This project...

Written by Rainier Valley Historical Society and published by Arcadia Publications. Where could one find "Garlic Gulch," a stadium named...

Greenwood Gardens Protest | South Seattle Emerald In the 1970s, people had all kinds of ideas about what should go in at 38th and Othello—a police station, a bible college, a Native American cultural center staffed with armed guards and encircled by an electrified fence—but what mattered most to those who lived in the surrounding South Seattle neighborhoods was what shouldn’t be there: the Greenwood Gardens apartment complex. Rising up from a sea of empty parking lots, the o

From the west slope of Beacon Hill, the Lucile Street Bridge runs under Interstate 5 and dives in a massive U over the railroad tracks at the base of the hull, delivering cars, bicycles, and pedestrians onto the streets of Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. Passing over it, the bridge registers as nothing more than infrastructure; interchangeable with any other stretch of cement that gets a person one place to another. But some thirty-five years ago, some people lived and wor

This project was completed in 2011 and was founded by a special project grant from King County 4Culture. One day in the fall of 1988 bulldozers arrived at the corner of 45th and Dawson, just west of the new Whitworth school building., and began raising seven houses in order to expand the school’s playfield to the west. The old Whitworth building had just been replaced and the school’s footprint had shifted to the west, all but eliminating the already cramped playground. The n

We have completed a project researching and documenting the history of community activism in the Rainier Valley. We were interested in tracing the roots of our current community issues and organizations back to the 1970s. Mikala Woodward and John Hoole dug through information at Municipal Archives, the Seattle Public Library, and in a marvelous collection of documents and slides donated by Rodney Herold, co-founder of SESCO (South End Seattle Community Organization). They rec