Pioneer Building (Seattle)

Chief of the Suquamish – Chief Seattle, also known as Bust of Chief Seattle and Chief Seattle Fountain, is a bust depicting Chief Seattle by artist James A. Wehn. It was commissioned by the Seattle Park Board to accommodate the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and initially sat on a fountain for men, dogs and horses.

The Pioneer Square totem pole, also referred to as the Seattle totem pole and historically as the Chief-of-All-Women pole, is a Tlingit totem pole located in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle, Washington. The original totem pole was carved in 1790 and raised in the Tlingit village on Tongass Island, Alaska to honor the Tlingit woman Chief-of-All-Women. The totem pole was later stolen by Seattle businessmen on an expedition to Alaska and subsequently gifted to the City of Seattle in 1899, where it was raised in Pioneer Square and became a source of civic pride. The totem pole was later damaged by arson and a replica was commissioned and installed in its place in 1940, which is now designated a National Historic Landmark.

The Pioneer Square Pergola is a cast iron and glass pergola in Pioneer Square, a park in Downtown Seattle, Washington, United States. It was built in 1909 to shelter passengers waiting for cable cars on the James Street and Yesler Way lines. The pergola is located at the intersection of 1st Avenue and Yesler Way, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977 alongside the adjacent Pioneer Building and totem pole.The structure originally included an underground public bathroom that was closed after the end of cable car service in the 1940s. After decades of deterioration, the pergola was restored by the city government in 1972 with an extensive renovation and dedicated as part of Pioneer Square plaza. It was rebuilt entirely in 2001 after the pergola was destroyed by a semi-truck collision, costing $3.4 million. The rebuilt pergola has since been reinforced and protected against future collisions, but has suffered damage in other incidents.

The Butler Hotel or Hotel Butler in Seattle, Washington, was one of Seattle's leading hotels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was located at the corner of Second Avenue and James Street, in what is now the Pioneer Square-Skid Road National Historic District. During the Prohibition era, its Rose Room was repeatedly cited for flouting the laws against the consumption of alcoholic beverages. It closed in 1933; the lower two floors survive as part of the Butler Garage. The building itself is also known as the Butler Block, the name over the main entrance.

Merchant's Cafe is a restaurant in Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington. Located at the corner of James and Yesler since 1890, the reportedly haunted restaurant bills itself as the city's oldest.

Diamond Parking is a company based in Seattle, Washington that owns and operates parking lots in the US states of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Florida and Washington and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. It was founded in 1922 by Josef Diamond.

The Hoge Building is a 17-story building constructed in 1911 by, and named for James D. Hoge, a banker and real estate investor, on the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street in Seattle, Washington. The building was constructed primarily of tan brick and terracotta built over a steel frame in the architectural style of Second Renaissance Revival with elements of Beaux Arts. It was the tallest building in Seattle from 1911 to 1914 with the completion of Smith Tower.

The Great Seattle Fire was a fire that destroyed the entire central business district of Seattle, Washington on June 6, 1889. The conflagration lasted for less than a day, burning through the afternoon and into the night, and during the same summer as the Great Spokane Fire and the Great Ellensburg Fire. Seattle quickly rebuilt using brick buildings that sat 20 feet (6.1 m) above the original street level. Its population swelled during reconstruction, becoming the largest city in the newly admitted state of Washington.

Howard House was a contemporary art gallery located in the historic Pioneer Square District in Downtown Seattle. From its inception in 1997 to its closing on June 12, 2010, the gallery fostered the careers of several local, national and international artists. Billy Howard, the gallery's owner, cited slow business as the basis for the decision. Gallerist Billy Howard has been credited with introducing the Seattle art scene to the concept of the alternative space and has championed artist-run spaces. He first began Howard House by hosting performances and site-specific art works in his Capitol Hill home, inviting visitors to see works installed in his stairwell, dining room and bedroom. In an interview with art critic Jen Graves of The Stranger, the gallery's owner said that he will continue to work with artists on a projects basis.

Hotel Seattle, also known as Seattle Hotel and the Collins Block, was located in Pioneer Square in a triangular block bound by James Street to the north, Yesler Way to the south, and 2nd Avenue to the east, just steps away from the Pioneer Building. It succeeded two prior hotels, a wooden and then a masonry Occidental Hotel. It was built in 1890 from the ashes of the Great Seattle Fire and served as a hotel until early in the 20th Century. By the time neighboring Smith Tower was completed in 1914, the Seattle Hotel had become an office building. It was demolished in the early 1960s and the site is now home to the Sinking Ship, a multistorey car park.

The Sinking Ship is a multi-story parking garage in Pioneer Square, Seattle bound by James Street to the north, Yesler Way to the south, and 2nd Avenue to the east, and just steps away from the Pioneer Building on the site of the former Occidental Hotels and Seattle Hotel. After the Seattle Hotel was demolished in 1961, the Sinking Ship was built as part of a neighborhood redesign.It was designed by Gilbert H. Mandeville (engineer) and Gudmund B. Berge (architect) of the Seattle firm Mandeville and Berge, and built in 1965. They also designed the Logan Building and an addition to the First Presbyterian Church downtown, the Ballard branch of Seattle Public Library, and two buildings at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962 (the Alaska Building and the Transportation 21 Building). A writer for HistoryLink described the Sinking Ship as "that skid road parking garage whose nihilistic construction depresses the flatiron block where James Street and Yesler Way meet at Pioneer Square."The parking garage is said to be haunted. It is owned by the Kubota family.The Seattle Monorail Project proposed a monorail station at the site of the Sinking Ship, which it hoped to acquire through condemnation. The Kubota family disputed the condemnation lawsuit, stating their intention to build housing and retail at the site.The garage has been made fun of many times in the past few decades. People were angry that a historic hotel was torn down, only to build what Henry Kubota’s daughter, Doris, called “the ugliest building in all of Seattle.” In 2001, on the garage’s roof, police and city officials watched and did nothing to stop the deadly Mardi Gras riot. Frommer’s travel guide calls the Sinking Ship “the monstrosity that prompted the movement to preserve the rest of this neighborhood. However, in a turnabout of affairs, in 2019, the parking lot was named the "coolest" parking lot in the United States by the design publication Architizer and London-based Looking4.com. “With its unique form and position along the street’s slope causing it to closely resemble the bow of a boat, the Sinking Ship is an iconic site in Seattle,” the contest’s sponsors wrote in a statement.

The Mutual Life Building, originally known as the Yesler Building, is an historic office building located in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood that anchors the West side of the square. The building sits on one of the most historic sites in the city; the original location of Henry Yesler's cookhouse that served his sawmill in the early 1850s and was one of Seattle's first community gathering spaces. It was also the site of the first sermon delivered and first lawsuit tried in King County. By the late 1880s Yesler had replaced the old shanties with several substantial brick buildings including the grand Yesler-Leary Building, which would all be destroyed by the Great Seattle Fire in 1889. The realignment of First Avenue to reconcile Seattle's clashing street grids immediately after the fire would split Yesler's corner into two pieces; the severed eastern corner would become part of Pioneer Square park, and on the western lot Yesler would begin construction of his eponymous block in 1890 to house the First National Bank, which had previously been located in the Yesler-Leary Building. Portland brewer Louis Feurer began construction of a conjoined building to the west of Yesler's at the same time. Progress of both would be stunted and the original plans of architect Elmer H. Fisher were dropped by the time construction resumed in 1892. It would take 4 phases and 4 different architects before the building reached its final form in 1905. The Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York only owned the building for 13 years (from 1896 to 1909), but it would retain their name even after the company moved out in 1916. Though well maintained as an office building into the 1940s under the ownership of the Shafer Brothers, by the 1950s the building was largely vacant and deteriorating, becoming a poster child of the blight facing the Pioneer Square neighborhood and in the early 1960s was recognized as one of the most historically significant buildings on the square. The building became the birthplace of Seattle's historic preservation movement and the first headquarters for Historic Seattle. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 as a contributing property in the Pioneer Square Historic District but was not fully restored until the early 1980s, which returned its use to office space.