THEN AND NOW: Juanita School and 100th Ave, About 1914

Today's busy 100th Avenue at NE 132nd in Juanita is hard to envision as dirt, but here it is back in 1913 or 1914, according to records from Kirkland Heritage Society where the photo is archived.

Both buildings on the left and right are long, long gone, yet surprisingly, their legacies live on in two current structures at the same sites still used for the same purposes.

On the right is the four-room Juanita School, built in the summer of 1913. Today it is the site of the Lake Washington School District's , most recently modernized in 2005.

On the left, the east side of 100th, is a wood structure built as the Woodmen's Hall, later converted to a church. Juanita historian Jerry Rutherford of Bothell says it burned in the early 1950s.

"My husband was a volunteer fireman," she says. "The darn thing caught fire and he went up there and helped fight the fire."

It wasn't saved, but the another structure replaced it and is still there, today's .

This locale is the scene of a lot of Juanita history, Jerrry says. It is the location of the current , built in 1917 as the Juanita Improvement Club just a few years after this shot was taken, and for years apparently used as a grange hall.

The club is immediately south of the school on the same side (west) of 100th, about where the small wood building is on the right in the old photo. Jerry says it's 45x45 foot hardwood floor is "the best dance floor in the city."

And it is still used for dances.

Apparently the school shown here was not the first on the site. The original was a two-story structure built in 1904. A lot of the children who attended both structures in the early years were from Finnish families who settled Finn Hill just west.

Just across the street used to be a what Jerry calls "a forest of magnificent fir trees that lined the road (132nd)." They were cut down to make way for the grocery store that stands at the site today.

You can still hear the disappointment in Jerry's voice today. The developer, she says, promised to leave the trees.

But they are gone, like so much of the region's native coniferous forests.

At least when the elementary was modernized, the school district gave a nod to the site's past by covering a play area with a structure similar to the old school house shown here. Check it out in one of the "Now" photos to the right.