This West Seattle street was created in 1907 as part of the plat of Adams 1st Addition to Fauntleroy Park, filed by John F. Adams (1860–1954) and his wife, Maggie W. True Adams (1864–1941). The document was notarized by Bert Avery Northrop (1880–1963), who was the husband of the Adamses’ daughter Abbie T. Adams (1888–1984). In his Seattle Times obituary, we learn that John Adams was “one of Fauntleroy’s first residents, [who]… came here in 1897. He first was in the grocery business and entered the real-estate business in 1903.… Mr. Adams was known as the ‘mayor of Fauntleroy.’” Meanwhile, Northrop’s Times obituary reports he came to Seattle in 1902 and began practicing law in 1906; he married Abbie Adams in 1909.
Northrop Place SW begins at SW Thistle Street and goes a block north to SW Southern Street.
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.