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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 16, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 19, 2026

Historian locates Ivar and Trump’s grandfather in Pioneer Square

By Clay Eals

A Seattle historian holds forth:

The original name for Seattle’s revered Pioneer Square was Pioneer Place. And Skid Road, the vaunted sobriquet for Yesler Way, is an entire misnomer.

“As far as I can tell, not one log was ever skidded down any street in Seattle,” he says. “It blows people’s minds when I tell them that. I don’t know if Seattle’s ready to hear that.”

The historian, Michael Ostrogorsky, relishes debunking published and oft-repeated legends. He leads tours of his favorite district, Pioneer Square, for which he just self-published a guidebook.

The 208-page volume bursts with 140 photos and maps. Its conversational text reveals startling details. Case in point: our main “Then” from 1956, which looks west along South Washington Street as it intersects with Occidental Avenue South.

Bold capitals indicate an Ivar Haglund café two blocks east of the waterfront and five blocks south of Pier 54, where the restaurateur-promoter opened an aquarium in 1938 and in 1946 expanded it to his enduring and renowned Acres of Clams restaurant. His lesser-known inland Ivar’s, depicted here (dubbed Chowder Corner), began in late 1955, lasting just four years under his helm. Today it’s Baba Yaga, a rock club.

Equally surprising, one-half block east (on the right in the photo) is the Lucky Tavern. At that storefront in 1891, an eatery called the Poodle Dog was purchased, renamed and operated for two years as The Dairy by none other than Fred Trump, paternal grandfather of our current president.

Ostrogorsky asserts that a 2000 biography, “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire” by Gwenda Blair, “simplistically paints Fred Trump’s The Dairy restaurant as a den of iniquity and Fred Trump as a pimp and criminal.” But he adds that “there is simply no historical evidence of any criming that occurred in association with Fred Trump” at The Dairy or at another restaurant he owned in 1897 at Second Avenue and Cherry Street.

The Dairy/Lucky Tavern building became a parking lot in 1969. When Fred Trump ran The Dairy, he lived in a hotel above the storefront that became Ivar’s Chowder Corner. That building’s upper three floors fell victim to the Seattle earthquake of 1949.

Such particulars animate Ostrogorsky.

“We live in a fact-free world, where people get to choose the reality that they want to experience,” he says. “As a historian, I’m here to say the facts matter. Even if people choose not to believe it, there are still facts out there, things that happen. It’s the job of us historians to present those facts, however many heads may explode in the process.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Michael Ostrogorsky for his invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below, you will find 1 additional photo and 11 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.