This street was named as part of the 1907 plat of Loyal Heights, filed by Edward B. Cox and Harry Whitney Treat, and Treat’s wife, Olive Marion Graef Treat. Then, as now, the lots abutted a wooded (“sylvan”) area surrounding an unnamed creek that begins between Golden Gardens Drive NW and Forest Hill Place NW just north of NW 87th Street and flows to Puget Sound, heading into a culvert just south of Whitney Place NW and continuing under NW Esplanade and the BNSF Railway mainline to the privately owned North Beach.
Sylvan Place NW begins at the intersection of Loyal Avenue NW and Golden Gardens Drive NW and goes around 400 feet northeast, where it turns into Cyrus Avenue NW.
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.