This is a view of White Center in 1924 from the intersection of 16th Avenue Southwest and Southwest Roxbury Street, looking southwest.
The street scene you see was the way things looked in 1924. And 26 years later when we bought the White Center News from then publisher Dean Phares, the historic intersection was not too different.
Roxbury Street, the city limits for Seattle, served as the dividing line for the blue laws, which forbid drinking on Sundays.
Omar Schau bought the bakery where it stands in the picture and eventually retired and turned it over to son John who learned the bakery business and did the driving of a delivery truck to Burien and West Seattle stores. He is now residing at the Providence St Vincent home in West Seattle.
His sister Helen was once owner of the Hideaway Restaurant on the same block shown.
The main street was and still is16th Southwest, but the trolley tracks which led to Burien were torn out and there was only a strip of concrete down the middle with huge puddles on both sides til 1952 when Omar Schau arranged a local improvement district and the county paved the road on both sides south to 108th Southwest.
The feed store shown here later moved to 17th Southwest next door to the White Center News where we had moved into the shell of a Chinese restaurant, which we had bought and moved from 16th Southwest after it had survived a fire.
We hired contractor Carsten Strand to remodel it.
One day a woman came in thinking our door was an entrance to the feed store, which preceded Don Malo’s auto rebuild, and wanted to buy a salt lick and a bale of hay.
When we asked the county to put some planters on the newly widened main street, they put in some cement posts to keep cars from running through them at night.
We found out the culprit was our own circulation manager, who was plowing through the planters when he got plowed himself.