(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 8, 2025

How Seattle’s 1892 Metropole Building went from gunfight to the good fight

By Jean Sherrard

On June 25, 1901, a feud between former friends turned deadly at the Metropole Building. Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a brace of revolvers, disgraced former Seattle police chief William Meredith ambushed theater owner John Considine outside G.O. Guy’s drugstore at Second Avenue and Yesler Way.

Once close allies, the two men had become bitter enemies after Considine’s accusations of corruption led to Meredith’s dismissal. Meredith fired first. His shotgun blast missed Considine, tearing through the store’s front doorway and lodging in the ceiling. Considine fled into the shop with Meredith close behind. The two wrestled until Considine drew his own .38 and shot and killed the former lawman, according to contemporaneous reporting in The Seattle Times and later historical accounts. (For an authoritative retelling of this story, visit HistoryLink, where historian Phil Dougherty masterfully lays out the fascinating, if sordid, details)

The encounter lasted less than 90 seconds. Seattle was transfixed. Though Considine was later acquitted, for years passersby stopped to peer at shotgun pellet holes still visible in the drugstore’s ceiling. The violence passed. The city moved on. The building survived—then slowly slipped into a long, silent decline.

Today, nothing remains of the drugstore or the damage. But the Metropole originally known as the H.K. Owens Building, financed by Henry Yesler in 1892 as a brick phoenix rising from the ashes of the Great Fire—still remains, across the street from the Smith Tower. A century after the shooting, it became the site of another fight. Not over vengeance, but purpose.

Following a damaging 2007 fire and more than a decade of vacancy and false starts, the building was purchased in 2019 by the Satterberg Foundation, a

Seattle philanthropic organization that experienced a seismic shift in 2014 when its endowment grew from $4 million to more than $400 million following a major gift. Instead of treating the Metropole as a conventional real estate investment, the foundation chose to make the building itself a tool of its mission, which centers on social justice, equity and community-based work.

In 2018, it had architect Matt Aalfs and his firm, BuildingWork, transform the ruin into a hub for nonprofits with office, child care and community spaces while meeting the strictest possible environmental standards. The renovation achieved LEED Platinum certification, turning a 19th-century structure into a model of modern sustainability. The building is now fully electrified. Old-growth timbers milled in the 1890s have been salvaged and repurposed into stairs and furniture. Daylight reaches deep into the interior, and a structure once sealed and abandoned has been

reopened to the public.

If the shootout in 1901 reflected a young city struggling to establish order, the Metropole’s rebirth signals something quieter and harder: the work of sustaining a city over time. The shotgun pellet holes are gone. What remains is a foundation for the good fight.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video of this column, click here.

See below for a few more photos of the Metropole’s reconstructed interior: