Holman Road NW runs 1³⁄₁₀ miles from 15th Avenue NW just north of NW 87th Street to the intersection of Greenwood Avenue N and N 105th Street. For its last couple of blocks, it is Holman Road N. Work began on the diagonal street, then known as Holman Road № 1, in 1926 and was completed in 1929. (Holman Road № 2 is today known as Westminster Way N in Shoreline.)
The road’s namesake was Axel Holman (1867–1962), who according to various obituaries was born in Sweden and arrived in Seattle in 1886. A real estate agent and builder in later life, he, according to the July 4, 1962, issue of the Ballard News-Tribune, “built the Sunset Highway [and] helped to build the Milwaukee railroad through the Cascades” as a construction engineer. The March 10, 1947, issue of The Seattle Times reports that “against considerable opposition, Holman was instrumental in obtaining construction of Holman Road No. 1 and No. 2, near the northwest edge of Seattle, and he still has the loving cup presented to him in 1929 by the Ballard Commercial Club in recognition of that service,” and the July 2, 1962, issue of the same paper adds that he “owned a mine in Dawson City during the Gold Rush and in 1897 assisted in plotting the town-site of Skagway. He also laid the first wagon roadbed from Skagway through White Pass to the goldfields.”
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.
