Werner Lenggenhager photograph collection

Collection

Identifier: 1000-048

Scope and Contents

The collection documents scenes throughout Seattle including significant events such as the 1962 World’s Fair and Seafair celebrations, prominent buildings throughout the city, street views, and architectural details. Lenggenhager also traveled extensively throughout Washington State and documented his travels with photographs of historical monuments and memorials. Over 4800 of the photographs in this collection are available online through our digital collections.

Dates

Creation: 1950-1984

Creator

Lenggenhager, Werner (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

Collection is open and available for use.

Conditions Governing Use

Biographical / Historical

Werner Lenggenhager (1899-1988) was a Swiss immigrant, a Boeing employee, and a hobby photographer who made it his life's work to create a photographic record of Seattle's architecture, monuments, and scenery. Over the course of his life, Lenggenhager gave nearly 30,000 prints of his photographs to The Seattle Public Library. His photographs appeared in two books authored by Lucile Saunders McDonald: The Look of Old Time Washington (1971) and Where the Washingtonians Lived: Interesting Homes and the People Who Built and Lived in Them (1972).

Full Extent

35 Linear Feet (73 boxes)

Language of Materials

English

Metadata Rights Declarations

License: This record is made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons license.

Additional Description

Abstract

Over 30,000 photographs taken by Werner Lenggenhager depicting Seattle and Washington State.

Arrangement

Correspondence, indexes and other paperwork are arranged alphabetically by material type at the start of the collection. Photographs are arranged alphabetically in their original order according to the subjects assigned by the photographer.

Separated Materials

Some of Lenggenhager’s photographs can also be found in our Seattle Historical Photograph Collection and Northwest Photograph Collection.

Processing Information

Acknowledgement of Harmful Content
The Seattle Public Library Special Collections Department is committed to creating an inclusive archive that documents the history of our diverse communities in a respectful manner. Our collections include historic materials that may contain images and outdated language which can be harmful due to issues such as racism, colonialism, sexism and homophobia. This content can provide important insight into the creator and context of the historic materials but can also reveal hurtful biases and prejudices.

We may decide to use or retain harmful language in our description when the terms have been used by the creator(s) of the materials to describe themselves or their community; when we have reused description created by the donor; when we have transcribed information directly from the materials; and when using national standards such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, which allow for standardized searching and retrieval of records. When including language from the original material in our finding aids or descriptions, we will indicate that this material comes directly from the original item by putting the language in quotes or prefacing it with a note that says the description is transcribed from the item or provided by the creator.

We will continually review our finding aids to identify harmful language and encourage you to contact us at specialcollections@spl.org if you find language that causes concern.