The Officer at Third and Columbia, Seattle

The Seattle Chamber of Commerce produced this fold-out brochure to move visitors around the city — pairing a street map with a catalog of scenic drives and a specific address for in-person help: the Tourist Information Desk at 3rd and Columbia Street in downtown. Four named routes fill the interior panel:

• Lake Washington Drive — 59 miles around the lake's eastern shore, through Kirkland and Renton and back into the city
• Queen Anne Boulevard — across the residential hilltop, with views west to Puget Sound and northwest to what the text counts as 172 San Juan Islands
• Marine Drive — along the waterfront to Alki Point, where the party that became Seattle's founders first landed in 1851
• Magnolia Boulevard — above Puget Sound to Fort Lawton, then an active U.S. Army post covering 600 acres on Magnolia Bluff; the Army transferred most of that land to Seattle in 1972 and it was dedicated as Discovery Park in 1973

The phone number "MAin 5060" pins the piece to a specific era. Named telephone exchanges — where "MAin" signals the two-letter dialing code "MA" — were standard in American cities from the 1920s through the late 1950s. Seattle's numbers ran as two letters plus four digits; on March 16, 1958, the city converted to two letters plus five digits as a prelude to all-numeric dialing. "MAin 5060" is a four-digit number, placing this printing before that cutover — most likely the late 1930s or 1940s based on the typography and design.

The illustration of a uniformed officer, captioned "Courteous HELP and INFORMATION FROM POLICE OFFICERS," was a fixture of mid-century American civic promotion: the beat cop recast as a walking information kiosk for motorists navigating an unfamiliar city before reliable roadside signage existed.