of the nearby Hillman City neighborhood, designated Rainier Beach as the Atlantic City residential development (1905) after the New Jersey resort. He included a park area on the cove, built a pier, bath house, boat house, picnic facilities—and sold the land to multiple buyers when he got around to platting the properties snapped up by eager buyers attracted by the adjacent amenities, as well as allowing multiple street naming rights. The tangled street names were sorted out, the property was eventually returned to park purposes (c. 1912) and the park name has stuck. (Hillman was eventually caught and nominally convicted.) The interurban railway remained until 1936, when it was torn up to make way for automobiles. Of historic buildings, at least two survive. Emerson School (1909), Lakeridge, is an historic landmark, sitting on a hill over Rainier Beach. Emerson is nearly identical to Hawthorne and Greenwood schools, built at the same time. All are brick in Jacobean style. The first public Kindergarten in Seattle opened in 1914 at Emerson School. A notable Emerson graduate was professional baseball player and manager Fred Hutchinson (1919–1964), remembered today with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Seattle Fire Department Firehouse #33 (1914), is a historic landmark, built for a single horse-drawn fire engine. The modified Tudor style was fitted architecturally into the Lakeridge neighborhood (also known as Rainier View). The hose tower was built into the ground rather than built above the roof line. For the horses (1914–1924), the floor of the single equipment bay was sloped to reduce the starting jolt in responding to a fire alarm. Rainier Beach joined Seattle by annexation in 1907. In 1917, the level of the lake was dropped about with US Army Corps of Engineers construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, Pritchard Island (little island, 'tleelh-chus') became a peninsula, the sloughs (actually marshes) went dry. Post World War II, the area became urban. With a sewer outfall near the beaches of Atlantic City Park and dramatic collapses in water quality in the 1950s, the neighborhood benefited greatly with the Metro cleanup of Lake Washington in the 1960s. The African-American population has been slowly increasing in the neighborhood due in large part to the gentrification in other Seattle neighborhoods that has forced many Blacks to move either into the South end of the city or into the south King County suburbs. Today Rainier Beach has a population