Hat 'n' Boots

Two boots that do not match

The two boots in Oxbow Park do not match. One is light blue and stands 21.5 feet; the other is dark blue and stands 24 feet, by the Seattle Times’s 2024 measure. Beside them is a vermilion cowboy hat 44 feet across and 19 feet high, which now roofs the park’s covered picnic shelter. Each boot keeps its door. The light blue boot was the restroom for “cowgirls,” the dark blue one for “cowboys,” and neither has been a restroom since the move. In their working years the hat and boots were billed as the largest in America.

The park covers about an acre at 6430 Corson Avenue South in Georgetown, some three miles south of downtown Seattle. Warehouses and industrial yards hem it in on one side, and it faces a WSDOT parking lot. On the other side are houses with plant-hung porches. The ground lies on an old oxbow of the Duwamish River, a cut-off meander known at the turn of the century as Oxbow Bend, which was later filled in and developed.

Landscape artist Laura Haddad, then a Georgetown resident, designed the grounds with landscape architect Nate Cormier, formerly of Jones and Jones. Recycled steel pieces and lengths of chain are set into the concrete walls near the hat and boots. A mound rises from the field, and Haddad told the Times it was put there to vary the terrain of a flat lot. There is a children’s play area and a community P-Patch with a small green shed and a stack of birdhouses, which grows thick with neighborhood produce in summer. Seattle Parks and Recreation runs the grounds. Hat ‘n’ Boots became a designated Seattle Landmark on June 20, 2023.

A napkin sketch for Frontier Village

The hat and boots began as advertising for a shopping center that never got built. In 1946 Buford Seals and two Army buddies, Don Wallace and George LaMaine, started a chain of surplus stores called the Three GI’s. They borrowed $1,700, and within 18 months the chain was doing $1.25 million a year. Seals left it in late 1948 and began planning Frontier Village, a $2 million center on Corson Avenue for up to 185 independent businesses, with a supermarket and a gas station. A 2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer column said he wanted a cross between the Pike Place Market and the modern shopping mall, with a Western theme. The site was 11 acres of industrial land owned by King County and leased to Seals’s Corson Corporation.

Lewis Nasmyth, a commercial artist, had drawn cartoons and caricatures for the Three GI’s advertisements. “We were just sitting around a diner one day, trying to come up with a different idea for the station,” Seals said years later. “I always liked Western get-ups.” The first drawing was made on a napkin. The Parks department dates Nasmyth’s commission to 1953. HistoryLink says he designed the boots “stitch by stitch and wrinkle for wrinkle in structural steel.” He chose vermilion for the hat and a palette of dark blue, light blue, white and brown for the boots. During construction he was seen crawling over the boots to give them the look of a worn pair.

The sources disagree on who built them. Seals said he and Nasmyth could find no builder, so the two of them and a hired helper built the hat and boots of steel beams, chicken wire and plaster, for $150,000. Landmark records list Albert Donald Poe as architect, Gordon Construction as general contractor and Bennett Campbell as concrete contractor. The 2002 landmark nomination, as quoted by Preservation Seattle, says Poe drew the plans for the permits, Bruce Olsen served as structural engineer and Bennett Campbell, Inc. did the contracting. The community’s own website credited the 44-foot brim to Olsen’s engineering.

On March 20, 1956, Nasmyth received U.S. Patent No. 177,189 for a “new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture.” HistoryLink reproduces his patent drawings for both the office and the restrooms. The 2024 Times, however, said it was not clear whether the patent covered the boots.

Toasters and cowboy attendants on Highway 99

The station stood at 6800 Corson Avenue South, on the corner of East Marginal Way. That road was U.S. 99, then the main highway between Seattle and Tacoma. HistoryLink, the Museum of History & Industry and the Seattle Times of the early 2000s give the opening year as 1955. The landmark nomination article, the community website and the 2024 Times give 1954. The station sold Texaco gas under the name Premium Tex. The office stood under the hat and the restrooms in the boots. HistoryLink counts nine pump islands fed by two 10,000-gallon underground tanks, while the Post-Intelligencer reported more than a dozen service islands. Attendants wore cowboy outfits, and the station gave away gifts, toasters among them.

It opened, in the Parks department’s phrase, “to a stampede of customers.” Its first week matched the busiest gas station in Washington, and for the next three years it led the state in gasoline sales. At one point, according to the Post-Intelligencer, it sold 300,000 gallons a month while competing stations sold 15,000. The rest of Frontier Village never came, because Seals ran out of money. The only other buildings completed were a warehouse, a display room and a supermarket, Foodville, at 6651 Corson Avenue South, and the market closed after a few years.

Legend has it that Elvis pumped gas for his Cadillac here while filming It Happened at the World’s Fair. HistoryLink puts the stop in 1963. The Seattle Times and the Parks department put it in 1962.

Interstate 5 was completed in 1962 and drew the traffic off Highway 99. The station passed through a succession of owners and closed in 1988, when its rent exceeded its revenue.

Sold for a dollar

The structures stood empty on land that came to belong to the state Department of Natural Resources. The paint faded and chipped, graffiti covered the walls, grass came up through the concrete, and skateboarders climbed the hat to ride its brim. Proposals for the site included a miniature golf course, an espresso stand and a shipping facility. In 1989 Cal Worthington, a Federal Way used-car dealer, tried to buy the hat and boots and move them. John Keister of KING-TV’s sketch-comedy show Almost Live campaigned on air to save them. In the late 1980s Fair Lanes, a Ford Motor Co. magazine, listed the station among America’s greatest roadside attractions, with South of the Border and the Cadillac Ranch. It called the structure “a pop sculpture worthy of (sculptor) Claes Oldenburg at his best.” The hat and boots also appear briefly in the opening credits of National Lampoon’s Vacation.

In March 1997 Kai Schwartz, a Seattle architect who lived a few blocks away, led a march through Georgetown to protest demolition, and every demonstrator wore cowboy boots and Western clothes. His application to make the site a Seattle Landmark was withdrawn for technical deficiencies. In 2000 a multimillion-dollar land swap that could have saved the structures fell apart.

The DNR had no objection to preserving the hat and boots, but it wanted them off its land. In June 2001 workers, among them John Stellman of Performance Abatement Services, stripped stucco from the underside of the hat. They were exposing the steel beams to see whether they needed reinforcement, and a city grant of about $4,500 helped pay for the work. Bruce Olsen, photographed on top of the hat that year, gave his word that the structures were sound. The volunteers said they did not know how they could have convinced the Parks Department without it. Olsen died of cancer in 2002, and his brother told them Bruce was proud to see one of his creations restored. LaDele Sines of the Georgetown Community Council described the landmark to the Post-Intelligencer this way: “When I tell people I live in Georgetown, they go, ‘Where’s that?’ I say, ‘Where Hat ‘N Boots is.’ They know.”

In the fall of 2001 the council won a $100,000 grant from the South Downtown Foundation, but the money could not be released until the council owned the structures. In February 2002 the DNR sold the hat and boots to the council for $1. Allan Phillips wrote up the sale in the Georgetown Gazette-News under the headline “What can you get for a dollar these days? How about a used hat and a pair of boots?” He asked readers for old photographs, especially of the backs of the boots, so the original paint scheme could be recreated. That May a Seattle Times reporter visited the site. The restrooms were full of trash, every pane in the office under the hat was broken, and a faded sticker read “diesel.” Grants and pledges eventually reached $250,000.

Hat first, then boots

In late February 2003 crews began peeling paint and breaking crumbling concrete off the hat. The plan was to sandblast and rustproof the steel framework next and then strip the lead paint from the boots. A banner on the hat promised the move for summer 2003. The Parks Department did not hire a general contractor until that September.

The move came on Saturday, December 13, 2003. The hat went first and the boots followed, about four blocks north along Corson Avenue, while Georgetown residents gathered in the rain to watch. “They were transported and set down as if they were made of eggshells!” said Shannon Donohue, the project’s fundraising coordinator.

The restoration took longer. In March 2004 it was still waiting on a grant check that had been lost in the mail and was being reissued. On January 2, 2005, the community website reported that the park was finished but the hat and boots still had “a way to go.” A later notice on the site read “The Boots are Painted!” It announced a summer day in the park with the City on August 13, with music by a band called Ghosts I’ve Known. It invited passers-by to take a photo of themselves in front of the “most colorful boots in town.”