OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Google Streetview (new tab)

Overview

When built, the Toklas, Singerman and Company Store #4 was one of the tallest and grandest business blocks in the city, suggesting the increasing prosperity Seattle enjoyed just before the Great Fire of 1889. Occupying a southwest corner lot on Front Street (later renamed 1st Avenue) and Columbia Street, it stood as a majestic bookend for a row of new masonry retail/office blocks, built in the fashionable Italianate Style, that replaced more ramshackle, false-fronted, wood-frame commercial buildings during early-mid-1880s. The two new buildings to the south housed a number of businesses, including the Lace House, a womenswear store that opened in 02/1888 and the Merchants National Bank. A false sense of security surrounded this stout-looking group of brick and stone buildings; these new buildings of the 1880s were conceived to resist the frequent fires that consumed so many wood-frame businesses of the three previous decades. Unfortunately, the Toklas, Singerman and Company Store #4 stood for all of one year, before it was swept away in the Great Fire of 06/06/1889.

Building Notes

This imposing Toklas, Singerman and Company Building #4 preceded the post-fire Toklas, Singerman and Company Building #5 on this Front Street and Columbia Street site. The new store had rich Romanesque stylistic details and three stories with an exposed basement as the grade dropped on Columbia. Particularly notable was the arched stone trim above windows on the first and third floors. The facade was divided into three bays, the central one crowned by a decorative pediment rising above the parapet. An article in the Northwestern Real Estate and Building Review described the organization of the store. The first floor contained dress goods, domestics, notions, ladies' furnishings, clothing and hats. On the second, one found cloaks, millinery, children's clothes and ladies' shoes. The third story contained sales floors for carpeting, the fourth for the storage of carpets and the sewing of carpets and shades. The Northwestern Real Estate and Building Review said of the 1889-1890 store: "The Toklas-Singerman Block is justly considered one of the finest fire-proof buildings in Seattle, and it is as full of activity as a beehive in summer-time. Besides the sub-basement, there are five stories, with a total area of over one acre and one-third. It is undoubtedly the busiest and most profitable acre and one-third in the northwest. Over one hundred picked salesman gathered from the largest cities in the United States are actively engaged in supplying the wants of the ever increasing throng of customers surrounding their counters." (See "Toklas, Singerman & Co.," Northwestern Real Estate and Building Review, March-April 1891, volume 1, number 2, p. 5.)

Demolished

PCAD id: 16248