Seattle Now & Then: The Denny Hotel

jrsherrard

6 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: The Denny aka Washington Hotel on the double-block of Denny Hill’s southern summit. The view looks southwest over the intersection of Virginia Street and Fourth Avenue. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

NOW: Once lowered about 100 feet, the blocks between Stewart and Virginia Streets and Second and Fourth Avenues were developed with a variety of post-Victorian structures, including the New Washington Hotel (now the Josephenum Apartments) at the northeast corner of Steward Street and Second Avenue. It is the brick early 14-story high-rise at 1902 2nd Ave. here right-of-center.

Gather round. It’s is time to repeat an old story about the commanding Arthur Denny, who, as the older of the two brothers who in 1851 first settled on Alki Point, has been generally considered the city’s founder and sometimes father. Denny first named the hill he owned at the north end of his claim, Capitol Hill. When his Seattle began both to fill in and out, the ‘papa pioneer’ expected that Washington Territory’s legislators, of which he was one, would ultimately flee Olympia and relocate their capitol on his hill and high above Seattle’s expanding commercial district. The move seemed a sensible expectation, but proved, however, to be more hunch than hit. Still, beginning in 1881, Seattle became the Territory’s largest community and stayed so. That was a mere thirty years after Denny and his party of mostly mid-western farmers with urban ambitions landed on Alki Point.

**Looking south on Third Avenue from the front (south) summit of Denny Hill during the construction there of the Denny Hotel, later renamed the Washington Hotel. (Courtesy, Dan Kerlee)**

Denny’s friends and fellow champions were just as pleased to name his hill for him. He was famously sober, steadfast, and demonstrably modest with the exception of his name, which he enjoyed having attached to real estate. Consequently, in 1888 ambitious friends convinced him to trade his political hopes for his hill into proprietary ones, while changing the hill’s name from Capitol to Denny.

Main lobby of the Denny Hotel. The grand entrance was to the left (south) and the registry desk to the right beside the steps that led to four flours of accommodations. (Courtesy, University of Washington, Northwest Collection)

On March 20, 1889, less than three months before the city’s Great Fire of June 6, Arthur announced his plan to build a grand namesake hotel on his hill. In place of a capitol building he would settle for a Victorian landmark with 400 beds, one-hundred more than Tacoma’s Tacoma Hotel. Here (in the featured photo at the top) the Denny Hotel is recorded by a Webster and Stevens Studio photographer who is looking southwest from the northeast corner of Virginia Street and Fourth Avenue. Printed from a large glass negative, it is in the keep of MOHAI (Museum of History and Industry.) The year is 1903, or fourteen years after construction began, and the hotel was not yet finished.* A combination of infighting among the investors, the size and expense of the place, and the 1893 economic crash with the doldrums that followed, turned the grand hotel into a “ghost palace”, “white elephant” or “unsightly mass”, all names attributed to it in the local press.

**Above and below: Looking north over the Steward Avenue “ditch” to the decorated hotel at the time of its opening in 1903. (Courtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Northwest Collection)**

**The May 23, 1903 issue of the weekly The Seattle Mail and Herald. (Click to Enlarge)**

**The Denny Hotel from Second Avenue looking north. (Courtesy Dan Kerlee)**

Looking south of Third Avenue from Blanchard Street (near the northern summit of Denny Hill) at the rear of the as yet unopened or renamed Denny Hotel. The Northern Pacific photographer F. Jay Haynes, most likely recorded this in in 1892, and so still eleven years before the hotel was first opened to Theodore Roosevelt and his entourage as the Washington Hotel.

**Looking north on Third Avenue from the rear of the Denny Hotel. Queen Anne Hill is on the horizon. (Courtesy, Lucy Campbell Coe) CLICK to ENLARGE**

Still empty, the hotel was being polished and prepared for its first guest, President Theodore Roosevelt. Sometime not long after Roosevelt anointed the landmark, Arthur Lingenbrink, my long-since deceased friend, visited the hotel with his parents and younger brother Paul, all of whom had moved to Seattle in 1903. When the family first approached the city from the south above the Union Pacific’s tidelands trestle, the gregarious ten-year-old Arthur, better

**Arthur Lingenbrink in his basement studio on Capitol Hill.**

known as Link, was dazzled by the hotel on the hill. Link kept his eye on the hotel, which by then was renamed the Washington Hotel by its new owner, James Moore, at the time Seattle’s super developer. The name change did not bother the founder. Arthur Denny died in 1899. The short-lived hotel’s demise followed in 1906, when this double-block was razed to its present elevations, early in the regrade of Denny Hill.

**James Moore, the local super-developer who first opened the Denny Hotel in 1903 and renamed it the Washington Hotel.**

**First printed in The Times on May 14, 2000.**

WEB EXTRAS

I’ve clambered around atop the Hotel Andra several times to repeat old prospects and my invaluable guide and pal Chief Engineer Brian Cunningham has always been along for the ride. Thanks, Brian!