Montlake’s significance in the rowing narrative is concentrated at the water’s edge, where a former naval hangar became the University of Washington’s shell house. Positioned beside the Montlake Cut as it opens into Union Bay, the building joined the university’s campus to Lake Washington and turned a remote-looking lakeside approach into the working home of a growing crew program.

Setting and approach

The shell house stood on a point of land where the Montlake Cut entered Union Bay on the west side of Lake Washington. Reaching it meant leaving the familiar campus behind: freshmen crossed Montlake Boulevard, passed the basketball pavilion and the excavation serving as the football stadium, then followed a dirt road through open woods and marshland. Other boys were making the same journey. The route’s gradual shift from campus to shoreline made the boathouse feel like a distinct destination, set apart for the work and discipline of rowing.

At the water, the building presented an unusual profile. Its weather-beaten shingle walls slanted inward beneath a gambrel roof, while large windows filled the upper halves of the enormous sliding front doors. A broad wooden ramp descended from those doors to a long dock floating parallel to the shore of the Cut. The placement was practical—the shells could pass directly between their storage place and the water—but it also made the building a visible meeting point between the university and its rowing course.

From naval hangar to shell house

The building had been constructed by the U.S. Navy in 1918 to house seaplanes for the Naval Aviation Training Corps during the Great War. The war ended before it could be put to that use. In the fall of 1919 it passed to the University of Washington, and thereafter served the school’s rowing team as a shell house. Its history thus joined an abandoned wartime purpose to the everyday infrastructure of collegiate sport: a structure intended for aircraft became shelter for racing boats.

Inside, the scale of the former hangar remained evident. Sleek racing shells were stacked four high on wooden racks along both sides of the cavernous room, their burnished hulls catching shafts of light from the overhead windows. Yellow-spruce oars, each ten to twelve feet long and tipped with a white blade, stood in clusters in the corners. The air smelled of varnish and freshly sawn cedar, while faded collegiate banners hung from the rafters. The room’s height, ordered boats, and inherited emblems gave the utilitarian boathouse the atmosphere of a place with its own ceremony and history.

A threshold into the crew

On the afternoon Joe Rantz and Roger Morris arrived, the ramp and a narrow strip of land east of the building were crowded with 175 boys waiting nervously. Most were tall and lean; a smaller group were notably slight. Older oarsmen stood against the building in white jerseys marked with large purple Ws, arms crossed as they sized up the newcomers. The shell house was therefore more than a place to store equipment: it was where the aspiring rowers first encountered the existing team and entered its world of scrutiny, selection, and shared work.

Rantz and Morris stepped into the cavernous room beneath the ranks of shells. At the back, someone worked with a wood rasp in a loft, an understated sign that the boats demanded continuing care as well as athletic effort. The scene places the recruits among the material facts of rowing before their competitive prospects are known: the long oars, carefully stored hulls, and hands-on maintenance that make a crew possible.

Montlake and the wider rowing map

The shell house belonged to a program whose ambitions exceeded its shoreline. In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing drew major crowds and extensive press attention, particularly in the East, where elite private schools treated the sport as a gentleman’s tradition and supplied oarsmen to prestigious universities. Western programs had struggled for recognition and funding, but the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley developed a rivalry that drew tens of thousands of students, alumni, and local spectators to their annual April regattas. Their crews still had limited resources and generally raced one another rather than the eastern colleges that held the sport’s center of gravity.

Montlake gave those ambitions a physical home. The lakeside shell house was where the new recruits gathered and where the rowing program’s boats, equipment, and inherited collegiate symbols were assembled. In the narrative, its role is deliberately modest and concrete: before the crews confront distant rivals and national expectations, they begin here, at the Cut, stepping from campus into a room crowded with shells and the demands of the sport.