This short street in the Eastlake neighborhood was created in 1887 as part of Greene’s Addition to the City of Seattle, named for and filed by, among others, Roger Sherman Greene (1840–1930) and his wife, Grace Wooster Greene (1833–1917). Instead of naming a street directly after themselves, they dropped an e and named the north–south streets in the plat for (most of) the colors of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Indigo, and Violet. Only Red has survived to this day.
Red Avenue E begins at E Boston Street and goes around 150 feet north to a dead end.
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.
