1913 Bekins Map of Seattle, Washington

A large and detailed 1913 indexed folding map of Seattle, produced by the Seattle Engraving Company for Bekins Moving and Storage. It presents the city at a moment of self-confidence, when skyscrapers, public works projects, and the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition four years earlier announced its ambitions to the world.

A Closer Look

Highly detailed and thoroughly indexed, the map covers the entire city of Seattle and then some, with streets listed at left and bottom in accordance with the surrounding grid. A street and avenue guide at right clarifies the numbering and order of streets. Aside from roads, streetcars and interurban railways are denoted with dotted and bold black lines, respectively. Bekins' warehouse at 12th Ave. and Madison is represented with a green star; concentric circles emanate from it at one-mile intervals. Large numbers throughout indicate city wards. The verso includes photographs of Bekins facilities, promoting their convenience and safety.

Sitting Pretty in Seattle

This map was published when Seattle was booming, in the wake of the Klondike Gold Rush and the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in 1909. The gold rush had brought a flood of migrants to the city, helping it recover from a devastating fire in 1889. To accommodate the rapidly growing population, a range of ambitious public works projects were undertaken, including levelling some of the city's largest hills, digging a canal from Lake Washington to Puget Sound, and building the largest artificial island in the world at the time, Harbor Island, at the mouth of the Duwamish River. The firm of Frederick Law Olmsted was contracted to design impressive parks, linked by tree-line parkways running throughout the city. One year after this map's publication, Smith Tower was completed on Pioneer Square at Yesler Way and 2nd Ave.; it was the tallest building on the West Coast until the construction of the Seattle Space Needle in the 1960s.

Publication History and Census

This map was produced by the Seattle Engraving Company for Bekins Moving and Storage in March 1913. Though not credited as such here, it appears to be based on a map published the previous year by the Kroll Map Company, an entirely plausible scenario given Kroll's predominance in the map publishing industry in Seattle. It is the earliest map of Seattle published for Bekins, which went on to sponsor maps of cities throughout the Western U.S. in the following decades. One other variant of the map exists, which is identical save for the image used below the copyright at left. In either case, the map is only noted among the holdings of the University of Washington and Washington State University.