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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 27, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 30, 2024

Requiem for a corner: From hotel to government to ‘reimagining’

By Clay Eals

The sentiment may sound achingly familiar:

“The wrecking ball is fast changing the face of downtown Seattle. For many of us, it sounds a sometimes sad requiem. Familiar old landmarks are being razed to make way for banks, office buildings and parking garages. Pedestrian barricades and fenced-off sidewalks surround entire blocks in much of the downtown area. At the moment, demolition seems to be the city’s No. 1 industry.”

But the words are not from today. They’re nearly 56 years old, from the typewriter of The Seattle Times’ longtime “Faces of the City” columnist John J. Reddin on Oct. 16, 1968.

The impetus for this installment was the recent demolition of the 160-room, eight-story brick Holland Hotel, at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Jefferson Street. The hillside hotel opened with just six floors in 1910, across Fourth from what six years later became King County’s third (and current) courthouse.

The Seattle Times on March 27, 1910, deemed the Holland “the most up-to-date commercial hotel on the Pacific Coast.” Ads prominently noted its “fireproof” construction, a sure reference to the Great Seattle Fire 21 years earlier. Rates began at $1/day. “Elevator service. … Phones in every room. Pleasant lobby.”

Reddin’s latter-day affection for the hotel stemmed from its street-level Tulip Room, a gathering spot for city and county employees, attorneys, police officers and journalists. “More than just a cocktail lounge,” he wrote, the bar was “a neighborhood institution [that] seemingly attracted more than its share of lawyers and others skilled in the art of freewheeling debate.”

Replacing the Holland Hotel in 1971 was today’s still-standing King County Administration Building. The nine-floor structure has long been praised — and sometimes reviled — for its hexagonal, honeycomb pattern of walls and windows. Some think it the ugliest building in Seattle.

“I can understand those who find this hulking modernist mass to be overpowering and maybe even authoritarian,” writes architectural blogger Paige Claassen. “That being said, I must admit I still find this blocky edifice pretty compelling.”

Nearly empty, it’s been closed to the public since March 2020. Its last occupants will move out by summer’s end, as King County Executive Dow Constantine has deemed the building obsolete. It and seven neighboring structures in his 2023 Civic Campus Plan are set for “reimagining” as a combined commercial, residential and governmental core, possibly including a Sound Transit station.

Transformation is in the wind, so we return to Reddin’s 1968 meditation:

“Not in the memory of modern man has there been so much change in the city’s skyline. But that’s progress. Inexorable. Or so they say.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bob Carney and Paige Claassen for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals’ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you also will find 17 additional images and 24 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.