Paul Dorpat, longtime Seattle historian, dies at 87

When local historian Paul Dorpat walked around Seattle, he saw things rather differently than perhaps you or I would.

Known for his long-running Now & Then weekly feature in The Seattle Times, which juxtaposed historical photos of the city with contemporary views of the same location, he once wrote that "my vision of the now becomes more and more regulated by the then. In some uncanny sense, I now perambulate in the then - especially on the streets of the inner city. Like dreaming while awake, when I climb Madison Street from the waterfront I pass the Frye Opera House at First Avenue instead of the Federal Building …"

Dorpat, who for so many years helped Seattleites see our city through the lens of history, change and constancy, died May 27 in Shoreline after a long illness. He was 87.

"He was one of those rare individuals who reshaped how we understood ourselves," said Jean Sherrard, Dorpat's longtime friend and Now & Then collaborator. "I think he created a way of understanding our regional world that took delight in the stories of individuals, not just the great swoops and warps and woofs of enormous events, but the details - the tiny, almost unnoticed portions of a photograph."

"Not every city in the United States has a Paul Dorpat," said Feliks Banel, local historian and former deputy director of the Museum of History & Industry. "I don't think everyone realized how lucky we were to have someone like Paul … Nothing about Paul's writing or his columns is esoteric or obscure, it's history for a mass audience. And that's a great gift … it tricks you into becoming a windshield historian yourself. You're always looking around, going, I wonder what that looked like 100 years ago."

I've seen a lot of people online referring to Paul as an institution and that's really how I think of him," said Seattle Times Executive Editor Michele Matassa Flores. "His name became synonymous with local history, and he leaves a great legacy of teaching people a lot about the world around them. We were lucky to have him here so long at The Seattle Times.

The man who made historians of all of us was born in Grand Forks, N.D., in 1938, the son of a preacher, and grew up in Spokane. Dorpat made his way to Seattle in the 1960s to attend graduate school in philosophy at the University of Washington; though he didn't finish his doctorate, philosophy remained a passion throughout his life. Finding his way into media, Dorpat co-founded the Seattle underground newspaper The Helix in 1967 and spent three eventful years at its helm, playing a key role in a notorious Duvall fundraiser in which a piano was dropped from a helicopter. In 1968, he was among the organizers of the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair over Labor Day weekend, an early inspiration for Bumbershoot.

But what would become his life's work began almost casually, as a favor. As his friend and fellow historian Clay Eals describes in his introduction to the book "Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred," a college pal of Dorpat's was looking to reopen Pioneer Square's historic Merchant's Café in the 1970s, and asked Dorpat if he'd mind looking into its backstory. Dorpat agreed - and the rest, as they say, is history.

Dorpat's first book of Seattle history - more of a pamphlet, really - came out in the fall of 1981: a sepia-toned publication for the Mayor's Small Business Task Force titled "294 Glimpses of Historic Seattle: Its Neighborhoods and Neighborhood Businesses." Priced at $2.94 - a penny per glimpse - its first print run instantly sold out after a Seattle Times column brought attention to it. Eventually 40,000 copies were sold, with the proceeds going to charity. "What this is," Dorpat told The Times of the book then, "is like a great game of hide-and-seek. There are always new discoveries."

The book, a charmingly quirky collection of annotated photographs and vintage advertisements, was interspersed throughout with Dorpat's inimitable storytelling. "During the 1890s," one passage read, "the clear-cut southern slope of Queen Anne Hill was being lined with naked rows of homes yearning to be mansions."

And it led to what became Dorpat's arrival on Sunday breakfast tables all over town: the Now & Then weekly feature, which began its long run in The Times' Pacific NW magazine on Jan. 17, 1982. The first installment showed a downtown photo from 1919, after a parade welcoming back the city's 63rd Coast Artillery regiment of the U.S. Army for its service in World War I, and a recent photo of the same downtown location. In the story, Dorpat wrote, "We hope that your response to this series will do more than simply strengthen a presumptive pride in the present and more than indulge a nostalgia for the past."

Dorpat continued to write the series for nearly 38 years, with the format never wavering (though its length changed from two-page spreads in the early years to a smaller footprint). Seattleites were enchanted by the juxtapositions of the past and present, making the feature a favorite. For the first few decades, Dorpat took most of the "now" photos himself; in 2004, Sherrard became the series' photographer and collaborator.

Dorpat eventually published several collections of Now & Then in paperback form, as well as, with Sherrard, a "Washington Now & Then" collection and a "Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred" hardcover volume in 2018, a year before he retired from the weekly feature. (Now & Then continues at The Times, now written by Eals and Sherrard.) His books also include "Building Washington: A History of Washington State Public Works," written with Genevieve McCoy.

In a 2019 farewell, Dorpat noted that in the early years he delivered his typewritten stories to The Times by car, and that "my best fortune has been the frequent one of meeting many readers and being introduced by them to subjects often pulled from their own collections."

Over the years, Dorpat amassed a vast collection of photos, documents and other historical artifacts, kept in the basement of his Wallingford home. As his health began to fade, Dorpat made plans to donate the collection to The Seattle Public Library. Eals, helping him catalog the items, spent six weeks in the basement in early 2018, counting a total of 309,746 objects.

"It's not only a very valuable thing to see what remains from the earliest eras of the city, but to see what replaced it," said Sean Lanksbury, manager of Special Collections Services at SPL, whose team is slowly processing Dorpat's archives (some of which can now be seen online, as the Paul Dorpat Collection).

Though best known for Now & Then in The Times (and the additional archive on his website called Seattle Now & Then), Dorpat's influence and interest covered multiple spheres. He was a filmmaker, an artist and a musician, with what his nephew Norm Dorpat remembers as a lovely singing voice. He spent years working on a never-completed biography of Ivar Haglund, tentatively titled "King of the Waterfront." He seemed to know everyone: The late author Tom Robbins, the story goes, wrote a significant chunk of his novel "Another Roadside Attraction" while crashed for a time on Dorpat's couch.

And, with Walt Crowley and Marie McCaffrey, Dorpat co-founded the nonprofit HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of local history that went live in 1999. Dorpat contributed numerous articles for the site, including a detailed 10-part history of Seattle's waterfront.

Friends and family describe a man of endless curiosity and enthusiasm: a big personality who was a magical storyteller, a person unable to wait in a Costco line without launching into conversation with whoever was in front of him. "To borrow from 'Oklahoma!' " Sherrard said, "Paul was a man who couldn't say no - or more precisely, a guy who always said yes."

"What he retained until the end was this banter with people," Eals said. "He loved asking you questions, he loved just talking about most anything, and arguing and challenging."

A memorial service for Dorpat will take place later this summer. For those wishing to make a donation in his honor, his friends suggest The Seattle Public Library Foundation (to which donors may request that the funds be used toward cataloging of the Dorpat collection) or HistoryLink. Dorpat is survived by his wife, Genevieve McCoy, and many nieces and nephews, numerous friends and countless Seattle Times readers who found in him a wise and delightful guide.

In an affectionate remembrance in 2000 upon the death of one of his mentors, local historian Murray Morgan, Dorpat wrote, "Ultimately, of course, all of us will catch up with him. The death of any good friend or cherished mentor is a reason for both calling on the support of fond memories and continuing with the resolve to live on."

Correction: This obituary has been updated with the correct place of Dorpat's birth.

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This story was originally published June 4, 2026 at 6:41 AM.