Cremona Street is another street created in 1888 as part of Denny & Hoyt’s Addition to the City of Seattle, Washington Territory, part of a series of streets — Aetna, Bertona, Cremona, Dravus, Etruria, and Florentia — that appear in alphabetical order and have the common theme of being locations in Italy. Cremona, or Cremùna in the local dialect, is a city in Lombardy, perhaps best known for its luthiers, most notably Antonio Stradivari.
Cremona Street begins in the east at the Ship Canal Trail and goes ¼ of a mile west to 3rd Avenue W and the entrance to Seattle Pacific University. On the other side of campus it goes a further ⅕ of a mile west from 6th Avenue W to 9th Avenue W.
Born and raised in Seattle, Benjamin Donguk Lukoff had his interest in local history kindled at the age of six, when his father bought him settler granddaughter Sophie Frye Bass’s Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle at the gift shop of the Museum of History and Industry. He studied English, Russian, and linguistics at the University of Washington, and went on to earn his master’s in English linguistics from University College London. His book of rephotography, Seattle Then and Now, was published in 2010. An updated version came out in 2015.
