Will She Get Home?

One thing I've noticed in this week's mad dash to the deadline (and beyond: fifty pages on Southeast Seattle's post-war history were due November first; I turned in the last of them yesterday) is that news coverage of the complaint, the controversy, the protest, or the impending showdown, is almost always far more comprehensive than coverage of the resolution or its aftermath. Articles with headlines like "School Board to Vote Tonight on Nutty New Scheme" abound, and can be perused years later in online databases. But you'd be surprised how hard it is to find out how the School Board, or the City Council, or the Landmarks Commission, or whoever -- actually voted that night.  And even if some reporter gleefully ran back to the office to file her story on how, in a dramatic six-hour hearing, the scrappy little neighborhood organization managed to stop the Goliath condo development in its tracks, you often have to go look at the site yourself to discover that three years later, with far less fanfare, Goliath prevailed and the condos were built.

My final Southeast Seattle essay was written so under the gun that some of this follow-up research was, I'm ashamed to say, conducted in the dead of night via Google Earth. That old Van Asselt School they said was a fire trap back in 1949? Still there. What's at the bottom of the hill where Bob Griffin used to go ice-skating in the 1930s? Pixelated warehouses and light industry, it looks like.

But there was one story that demanded an in-person, on-site inspection. 

A couple of months ago -- back when I was slowly accumulating the eight-inch stack of articles and photographs and property records and other information that I just funneled desperately into twelve pages of (hopefully) coherent text in three days flat -- I spent an hour or two trawling the City's archives for photos of the rickety old Lucile Street Bridge. No luck on the bridge, alas, but I did come across several pictures of a group of Girl Scouts scrambling up a muddy slope in 1952.

Now, you have to understand that the City's photo collection mostly consists of the Engineering Department's exhaustive documentation of paving projects, sewer construction, code violations, and downed trees. There are rarely any human beings in these photos, and they are never captioned beyond the bare basic info ("Wilson Ave. Paving Operation."). It's not that they're dull, far from it: sometimes you can almost hear the hardhats calling out across the decades: "Dude, get over here with that camera. You have got to take a picture of this." But among all those stave pipes and streetcar rails, these blurry, cracked photos with their wry-pathetic titles definitely stood out:

Knee Deep

One slim board

These were white boots.

Will she get home?

According to the catalog, these images had accompanied a petition urging the City to improve Lucile Street between 19th and 20th Avenues. I didn't expect to include this story in my essay, but I added the pictures to my file just for my own entertainment, and continued my Lucile Street Bridge sleuthing. 

Fast forward to the wee hours of Monday morning, when the Girl Scouts in their muddy boots suddenly soft-shoed their way into a paragraph I was writing about infrastructure improvements on South Beacon Hill after the war. I had thrown together a couple of sentences before realizing I had no idea how their precocious foray into civic engagement had turned out. Surely Lucile Street had been paved by now? I wasn't sure. Google's satellite photos only added to the mystery: Lucile peters out at 20th, and re-emerges at 18th; the hillside in between is shrouded in trees. 

Street View, while mind-bending as ever, failed to enlighten me further:

There was only one way to find out if the Girl Scouts had ruined their lovely white boots in vain. Daylight found me (45 minutes before the essay absolutely, positively, had to be submitted) peering groggily at this unpromising scene:

Most of you know I'm not the sort of person who will be deterred from a serious mission by a silly little bit of crooked, defaced signage. I forged past the sagging chain link fence and on down the path. 

It was pretty clear these concrete stairs were a vast improvement over the "one slim board" travelers used back in the Dark Age of 1952. Whether they had been constructed in direct response to the Girl Scouts, I couldn't say. But it was nice to imagine their plea had something to do with it. 

About half-way down I came across a pair of orange cones...

... at the top of a set of stairs in progress.

Below that, a rail replacement project seemed to have been abandoned half-way through.

By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs and looked back, my initial sense of vicarious Girl Scout triumph had wilted a little bit. Somehow, even though I knew these unfinished stairs and railings were not the first to grace this hillside, I still couldn't shake the notion that, 58 years later, their little improvement project still wasn't done. Not only that, it seemed pretty clear to me that even after the work is completed and the cones and red tape are taken away, it would be hard to argue that the view in 2010 represents an aesthetic improvement over that of 1952. 

But then I imagined those girls -- grandmothers now -- coming down the stairs toward me, beaming with pride, clutching the shiny new galvanized handrail as they carefully placed one white boot, and then the other, on the step below. That image was enough to carry me on my weary way -- back to the car, back to the computer, to the end of my essay -- and on to the next knee-deep slog through the mud.