Butler Hotel - Early History

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.