History
In 1911, King County voters first turned down, then approved plans to build a new structure for county government. The site settled on had once been owned by city founder Henry Yesler.
Architect A. Warren Gould proposed a twenty-three story tower to handle anticipated growth in county functions, but the county commissioners preferred a more modest beginning. Starting in 1914, a five-story steel frame and reinforced concrete structure was built, and dedicated May 4, 1916 as the five-story City-County Building. In 1930, six floors were added, and later a three story 'attic'. Modernization efforsts in 1967 added air condition and heavily modified the appearance of the building. In 1987, the King County Courthouse was registered as a King County landmark, which limits the style of future remodeling of public areas to restoring the original appearance.
After the 2001 Nisqually earthquake the Courthouse was seismically retrofitted. The extensive damage done to older buildings in the area by the 6.8 quake pushed the County to move forward with this project. Upon completion, murals and a treatment of the marble floor on the first floor of the Courthouse were noted decorative touches.
Read more about this topic: King County Courthouse
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)