Early History
One of Seattle's most elegant hotels, the building that was to become the Butler Hotel was built shortly after the Great Seattle Fire. Some years prior, Hillory Butler had owned and operated a truck garden on the quarter-block lot practically center of town and lived there in a small house. One of his conditions for the erection of a major building on his property in 1875 was that it would bear his name in perpetuity. The pre-fire Butler was a three-storey wooden building.
Building plans for the new Butler Block were announced July 3, 1889 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, less than a month after the fire. Designed by the short-lived partnership of Parkinson and Evers, it was built as an office building, the Phinney and Jones Building, for Guy C. Phinney and Daniel C. Jones. The English-born John Parkinson of Parkinson and Evers had just arrived in Seattle from Napa, California after the fire, and was for several years one of Seattle's leading architects, before moving to Los Angeles after the Panic of 1893. Seattle neighborhood Phinney Ridge is named after Phinney, one of the city's leading businessmen of the era. Jones, in contrast was a foulmouthed frontiersman who apparently carried a gun in each hip pocket.
Read more about this topic: Butler Hotel
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)