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Overview

This ornate, five-story, masonry building first accommodated the Ripley Hotel and later the Hotel York, on the northwest corner of 1st Avenue and Pike Street. The Hotel York occupied what would become an important parcel of real estate in Seattle's Downtown commercial center: it stood where the Corner Market Building was erected in 1911-1912. Due to vibrations caused by the digging of the nearby Great Northern Railway tunnel in 1903, the hotel's foundations cracked, rendering the building unsafe. It would last only 14 years on this site.

Building History

Architectural duo Towle and Wilcox prepared this unconventional design for Afred L. Palmer's mixed-use hotel and commercial building on 1st Avenue, begun in 1889 and completed the year later. The hotel's first floor was trimmed in rusticated stone along the 1st Avenue facade. Upper floors featured floral spandrel decorations mostly likely executed in terra cotta. The building's parapet displayed a particularly notable array of vegetal tendrils set above Romanesque windows.

The hotel housed a wide variety of people, including the usual assortment of health faddists, medical quacks, psychics and perhaps legal massage therapists, common lodgers in the city's lower-priced inns. Seattle historian Paul Dorpat summarized its denizens: "Judging from the ads, the York’s most sensational renters were health providers who promoted either magnetic healing or massage or both, as with the Chicagoan Miss LaRoy’s 'magnetic scientific massage.' Most persistent were Professors Gill and Brunn. For several weeks in 1902, they provided a growing list of therapies, including osteo-manipulation, vibration, hypnotism, vital magnetism, a 'new light cure,' and psychology for 'bad habits.”' Elsewhere in the hotel, Miss Mooreland, like Miss LaRoy, also from Chicago, provided sponge baths and massage, “a specialty.” The 'well-known trance medium,' Mme. Pederson, shared “'he secrets of your life' and advised 'how to keep out of the pathway of despair.'" (See Paul Dorpat, Paul Dorpat.com, "Seattle Now & Then: The Hotel York," published 11/15/2014, accessed 07/15/2023.

Building Notes

In 1900, Alfred L. Palmer managed the Hotel York. (See Polk's Seattle Directory Company's Seattle City Directory, 1900, p. 536.) A year later, the Hotel York's manager was Mrs. G.F. Parker. (See R.L. Polk and Company's Seattle, Washington, City Directory, 1901, p. 614.)

Thomas C. Hirsch operated a pharmacy in the building's southeastern storefront in 1901. It was replaced by the Hotel York Cafe by 1903. The Empire Laundry was a first-floor tenant between at least 1901 through 1903.

Demolition

The Hotel York once occupied land on which buildings of the Pike Place Market were built later. Damaged by the subterranean vibrations caused by steam engines excavating the Great Norhtern Railway Tunnel, the hotel had to be demolished for public safety. It stood until 11/1904. Several years later, architect Harlan Thomas (1870-1953) supervised the erection of the Corner Market Building here.

PCAD id: 21963