Oberlin Avenue NE is another one of the “university” streets in the Hawthorne Hills subdivision, created in 1928. It was named for Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and runs around ⅕ of a mile from 45th Avenue NE in the northwest to Princeton Avenue NE in the southeast.
Born and raised in Seattle, Benjamin Donguk Lukoff had his interest in local history kindled at the age of six, when his father bought him settler granddaughter Sophie Frye Bass’s Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle at the gift shop of the Museum of History and Industry. He studied English, Russian, and linguistics at the University of Washington, and went on to earn his master’s in English linguistics from University College London. His book of rephotography, Seattle Then and Now, was published in 2010. An updated version came out in 2015.