Lost Restaurants of Seattle

Introduction

Seattle, the Emerald City: birthplace of Boeing and Bill Gates, home to Amazon, Starbucks and the Space Needle and a hotbed of innovative technology. Vibrant and alive, today, Seattle is considered one of the fastestgrowing, most densely populated urban areas in the country.

It wasn’t always so. In its early years, Seattle was just one of a dozen rain-swept settlements looking to become the commercial center of western Washington. Seattle wasn’t the first town on Puget Sound—that claim belongs to Newmarket (today’s Tumwater), the oldest permanent American settlement on the sound. Nor, for many years, was it the largest. For several decades after being settled, Seattle’s population lagged far behind that of Portland, Oregon, 150 miles south and its main competitor on the west side of the Cascade Mountains. Even landlocked Walla Walla—230 miles to the southeast and from its early days benefiting from inland trade with miners, emigrants and farmers in the rich Palouse country—boasted more residents than Seattle in 1880 (3,588 and 2,533, respectively).

The original inhabitants—the Duwamish tribe and their ancestors—had occupied the region for at least four thousand years when the first Europeans arrived. Archaeologists state that as many as seventeen distinct native villages could be found in immediate vicinity of Seattle, generally close to rivers, lakes or the saltwater bays and coves.

The early European explorers of the north Pacific coast came, looked and left; they weren’t interested in settling and generally spent little time in the area. In fact, the first mariners to visit the northern Washington coast—Spaniard Juan Pérez in 1774 and the renowned Englishman Captain James Cook in 1778—didn’t even discover the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the vast inland sea of Puget Sound; that was left to Captain Charles William Barkley in 1787. The Spanish established a fort named Núñez Gaona at Neah Bay in 1792 but abandoned it after four months. That same year, Captain George Vancouver thoroughly explored Puget Sound; his expedition conferred place names that persist to this day.

Though a few hardy pioneers preceded them, Seattle’s birth is generally ascribed to a party of twenty-two men, women and children under the leadership of Arthur A. Denny who arrived at Alki Beach aboard the schooner Exact on November 13, 1851. In a short time, a village, pretentiously named New York, arose at the landing site. But the location lacked a deep-water harbor for mooring ships, so by mid-April 1852, most of the settlers had relocated to the eastern shore of Elliott Bay, about a mile away, which offered a better harbor. This new settlement was initially called Duwamps, for the local Duwamish tribe, but soon was renamed Seattle to honor Sia’hl, a Duwamish leader who had proven helpful to the early settlers. Chief Sealth, as he later became known, died in 1866.

By October 1852, Dr. David S. Doc Maynard had opened a store in the new town, and Henry Yesler was building a steam-powered sawmill, the first on Puget Sound, at the foot of Mill Street. The sawmill was a surefire business success given its surroundings—one early arrival observed that the whole country around Seattle was a dense forest—and logging rapidly became the mainstay of Seattle’s economic life. Logs felled in the surrounding hills were dragged or skidded along the rough path leading to Yesler’s mill. Legend has it that the path became known as Skid Road and eventually entered folklore as Skid Row, a term applied to the down-in-the-heels section of a city.

An 1860 description by Reverend Daniel Bagley, who arrived in Seattle with his wife, Susannah, in October that year, gives a picture of early Seattle. The town had 182 white residents. Commercial Street was four blocks long; its north end butted up against Yesler’s sawmill at the foot of Mill Street, and its south end jumped off into the bay. (Today, Mill Street is Yesler Way, and Commercial is First Avenue S.) Stores, hotels, saloons and shops clustered in a single row along Commercial between Mill and Main Streets; residences sprinkled the recently cleared hills above the shoreline. A few scattered farms could be found out in the woods. There were virtually no roads out of town—almost all travel was by water.

Seattle has the appearance of a typical raw frontier town in this 1879 view looking north along Front Street. Seattle Public Library, spl_shp_15038.

Seattle was incorporated in 1869; the following year, the census revealed a population of 1,107. In the 1880s, the city experienced remarkable growth and, by the end of the decade, was approaching a population of 16,000. By 1889, Seattle had shed much of its rough-and-tumble frontier town appearance. With its streets becoming lined with substantial brick and wooden buildings, its hills covered with attractive residences, its booming status as a supply point for other Puget Sound towns and a population approaching 18,000, Seattle was maturing into a sizeable city.

It took less than a day to erase most of it.

On the afternoon of June 6, 1889, a pot of glue boiled over onto the floor of a woodworking shop at the corner of Front and Madison Streets. The floor was covered with wood chips and turpentine, which immediately caught fire. Soon, the entire shop was ablaze. In a stroke of bad luck, the shop’s two neighbors were saloons; once the fire spread to them, exploding bottles of alcohol added to the blaze and the entire block of Front Street between Madison and Marion was an inferno. By late afternoon, it was clear that downtown Seattle was doomed—inadequate water supply, hydrants placed too far apart and insufficient water pressure combined to make the fire unstoppable. Several buildings were dynamited in an effort to create firebreaks, but it did no good.

The fire burned until three o’clock the next morning, destroying anything combustible in its path. By the time it was over, twenty-nine city blocks—virtually all of downtown—were a smoking ruin, along with the railroad depots, most of the wharves and several nearby mills. The loss was estimated as high as $20 million (current value: about half a billion dollars). Among the casualties was the splendid Occidental Hotel, valued at $350,000 in 1889 dollars. (The year 1889, in which Washington became a state, also saw devastating fires at Cheney in April, Ellensburg in July and Spokane in August.)

By June 7, Seattle business leaders were already planning the city’s recovery. Tent restaurants were set up to feed the hungry and shelters erected for the homeless. Rebuilding began almost immediately, with major changes made to the city’s building code—no wooden buildings would be allowed in the burned-out area.

City engineers took advantage of the situation to fill in perpetually muddy streets to a depth of eight feet or more, with the second floors of surviving buildings becoming the new street-level entrances. The original street-level entries of businesses became buried, unintentionally creating a future tourist attraction. Half a century later, Seattle Underground began giving visitors the chance to tour some of the original storefronts.

The Southern Restaurant opened in a tent soon after the June 6, 1889 fire. University of Washington Special Collections, SEA1201.

Several other major events shaped Seattle’s growth. Gold was discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1896. The following year, when the steamship Portland arrived in Seattle with a ton of gold aboard, the city came down with a serious case of gold rush fever. As the gateway to the Yukon gold fields, Seattle’s economy boomed; when miners returned (some successful, some not), many stayed in the city. By 1900, the city’s population had reached nearly eighty-one thousand, nearly double the 1890 number.

A major earth-moving project known as the Denny Regrade saw several of Seattle’s hills sluiced into Elliott Bay. The hills had been an obstacle to business growth north of the original downtown; the material filled in low areas south of the business district and created Harbor Island at the mouth of the Duwamish River. In 1909, the city hosted the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition to show itself off; people from all over the country came to visit, and many of them decided to call Seattle home. That same decade, Seattle annexed a number of neighborhoods that had once been independent towns—Ballard, Georgetown and West Seattle, among others—and by 1910, the city’s geographical area had nearly doubled, with the population topping 200,000. Seattle was on its way to becoming a world-class city.

A LAND OF ABUNDANT RESOURCES

Logging may have been early Seattle’s primary industrial reason for existence, but it wasn’t the only one. In addition to trees, the region abounds in edible natural resources, and Seattle, sitting as it is on the edge of a great inland sea, wasn’t long in exploiting them.

Fishing was important on Puget Sound as early as 1852, when salmon from the Duwamish River were being caught and packed for the San Francisco trade. Doc Maynard opened a salmon salting plant in 1853, starting a twenty-year tradition of Indians doing the fishing (mostly from local rivers) and whites doing the salting, packing and selling of the catch.

By the 1880s, river fishing was being replaced by open-water purse seining, resulting in an increased supply of fish for packers and, more importantly, justifying the need for canneries. Seattle emerged as the area fisheries center, as V.E. Tull moved his fish-pickling plant from Mukilteo to Seattle and Jackson, Myers & Company built the first local cannery in West Seattle. The Myers cannery burned in 1888 and again in 1891; reorganized as the Myers Packing Company, the firm built its own factory for manufacturing cans at the foot of Dearborn Street. Even with a capacity of making 40,000 cans per day, the cannery outstripped the supply of cans, as a crew of twenty whites, eighty Chinese and Japanese and an unstated number of women and girls packed 1,284 cases of locally caught fish per day.

Nonetheless, Seattle didn’t become a leader in the salmon-canning industry. It took development of the deep-sea fisheries off Alaska and advances in refrigeration technology to catapult Seattle into the lead as a major fishing center. As early as 1888, boats laden with salmon, halibut and cod were plying the waters between Alaska and Seattle, but keeping the fish fresh in transit was an issue. By the mid-1890s, though, the problem was solved, and fresh fish were being efficiently transported not only on boats from the fishing grounds back to Seattle but also via railroad cars to markets all over the country. As is usually the case, improvements in technology led to increases in production. In 1890, 250,000 pounds of halibut were shipped; by 1896, the number had risen to 1,500,000 pounds.

Shellfish was also a major part of the seafood industry. Crabs, clams, oysters and mussels were harvested and shipped far and wide. Native oysters from Willapa Bay on the southern Washington coast were being shipped to San Francisco by 1851. In 1899, Eastern oysters were transplanted with success at Puget Sound and along the ocean. By 1910, the Puget Sound oyster beds produced five thousand sacks of oysters of excellent quality, and Washington oysters had become a regular menu item up and down the West Coast and inland as far as Denver.

Farming, however, was a different matter. Relatively little open land was available for farming when the first settlers arrived in Seattle. One such area was along the lower Duwamish River near present-day Georgetown, and by 1853, L.M. Collins’s farm there was growing crops—turnips weighing from twenty-three to thirty-five pounds each, potatoes as much as four pounds each, and onions two pounds each—and also raising and selling apple, plum and cherry trees. By the 1880s, farms were popping up along the eastern shore of Lake Washington and other cleared areas.

Farming was key to the stable development and growth of the area; said one early writer, Without farming there would not be large growth in other lines. But farming required timber to be removed and stumps to be pulled before crops could be grown, and in the immediate Seattle area, land was used for business and residences for the growing city as fast as it was cleared. Gradually, the rate of land clearing outpaced development, making small-scale farming possible; but then came troubles with the local tribes in 1855, which had a chilling effect on farm development. It’s hard to envision today, but settlers living just outside the little settlement lived in fear of imminent attack by the Indians. The cause for the trouble was the usual: relations between white settlers and the tribes, initially friendly, deteriorated as immigrant arrivals increased and pushed the natives off their lands. The war—more like a skirmish—was part of a general uprising by the Puget Sound tribes and put down within year, with the tribes being on the losing side.

After peace was achieved, farms began to appear among the newly logged lands. But large-scale farming and ranching were almost out of the question. A search of 1860s Seattle newspapers finds scarcely a mention of the word ranch, and virtually all early farms were small truck gardens producing enough for local needs with a bit to spare to ship to other markets. Many foodstuffs—whatever couldn’t be sourced or grown locally—needed to be imported. This was particularly true for grain and livestock. Western Washington is too wet to support raising grain, and though individual farms certainly raised livestock such as cattle, pigs and chickens, not enough land was available to make it practical for large herds of cattle. Prices published in a September 1864 issue of the Seattle Gazette reflect the cost of living: potatoes were seventy-five cents per bushel; onions, two and a half cents per pound; cheese, twenty-five cents per pound; eggs, fifty cents per dozen; and butter, forty-five cents per pound. (One dollar in 1865 is about twenty-six dollars today.)

The coming of the railroads dramatically changed the transportation scene. By the 1890s, railroads—up and down the coast as well as transcontinental—linked Seattle to markets for its products. No longer did goods need to be moved solely by steamship, though the transpacific market soon became (and continues to be) a pillar of Seattle’s economy. Then came the automobile and good roads, the federal highway system and the interstates, long-haul truckers and jetliners capable of handling huge amounts of freight. Whatever the dominant mode of transportation, Seattle has been at the center of it.

1

Pioneer Days

The idea of a restaurant as a self-contained, stand-alone business with chairs and tables, a service staff and a fixed menu is a relatively new concept. Opinions vary, but the consensus seems to be that the idea originated in late eighteenth-century France and gradually took hold in other countries. The first genuine restaurant in America, claimed to be Delmonico’s in New York City, wasn’t founded by John and Peter Delmonico until 1837.

Seattle’s earliest eateries were often merely an adjunct to another business such as a boardinghouse, hotel or saloon. There doesn’t seem to have been much difference between a boardinghouse and a hotel in the 1860s; the variations were qualitative (price and amenities) and quantitative (length of stay). In practical terms, they operated on the same principle: providing a lodging place and, optionally, meals. If offered, meals were usually on the European plan (covered in the overall cost of lodging) and almost always table d’hôte—whatever the kitchen was cooking that night, that’s what you got.

It’s generally agreed that the cookhouse at Henry Yesler’s sawmill was the first public eating place in Seattle. Built in 1853, the cookhouse was originally intended for Yesler’s millworkers but before long became the town’s meeting hall, courthouse, jail, military headquarters, storehouse, hotel and church, as well as for a number of years the only place along the east shore of the Sound where comfortable entertainment could be had.

The cookhouse, with its weather-worn roof and smoke-blackened walls, was the domain of Yesler’s wife, Sarah. It’s not recorded what was on the cookhouse’s menu, but if it was anything like its contemporaries in other cities, it wasn’t haute cuisine. When it was demolished in 1866—the last remaining log building in downtown Seattle—the Puget Sound Weekly waxed nostalgic:

It was simply a dingy-looking hewed-log building about 25 feet square, a little more than one story high with a shed addition in the rear, and to strangers and new-comers was something of an eye-sore.…No man ever found the latch-string of the cook-house drawn in, or went away hungry from the little cabin door; and many an old Puget-Sounder remembers the happy hours, jolly nights, strange encounters, and wild scenes he has enjoyed around the broad fireplace and hospitable board of Yesler’s cook-house.

There is some disagreement about its location, but the best information places it on the west side of Commercial Street on the second lot south of Mill Street (today those streets are First Avenue S and Yesler Way). Once located nearly on Seattle’s original waterfront, today the site is over six hundred feet inland.

Yesler’s cookhouse, as it looked in 1866, the last log building in pioneer Seattle. University of Washington Special Collections, SEA1352.

Also dating to 1853 was Seattle’s first true hotel, the Felker House, a two-story structure facing the water at the corner of Front and Jackson Streets. It was built by Captain Leonard Felker, a business partner of town father Doc Maynard but not a resident of Seattle. (San Francisco was his home.) Prefabricated back east and shipped around Cape Horn on Felker’s brig the Franklin Adams, when assembled, it was hailed as the first hard-finished house in the place…two-story, framed, and finished within in lath and plaster.

The Felker House, Seattle’s first real hotel, stood at Jackson and Front Streets. SPL, spl_ shp_22965.

It was for a time a comfortable and respectable public house. But in the mid-1850s, one Mary Ann Conklin arrived in Seattle; the story is that she had sailed with her husband, Captain David Conklin, on his whaling ship to the waters off Alaska until he tired of her constant nagging and abandoned her in Port Townsend. Whatever the case, Mary Ann Boyer (having reverted to her original name) was soon presiding over the Felker House. Though it was said she ran an efficient hotel with clean rooms and good cooking (and a brothel upstairs), Boyer soon acquired the nickname Mother Damnable for her ferocious temper and ability to curse like a sailor in six languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish. The Felker House’s reputation took a downward turn, though it continued to hang on in spite of competition from newer, more sophisticated hotels until it was destroyed in the great fire of 1889.

Details of Seattle’s first ten years of commercial life are sketchy (the first newspaper didn’t appear until 1863), but it’s believed that L.C. Harmon was operating a hotel—possibly called the Union—in 1860. Manuel Lopes, an 1852 arrival and the city’s first black resident, was in charge of the kitchen. By 1864, Harmon had removed to the new, aptly named Seattle Hotel on Main Street between Commercial and Second Streets. Whether Lopes (sometimes spelled Lopez) accompanied him isn’t known.

De Lin’s hotel on Commercial Street also dates from this early period. Proprietor A.P. De Lin offered comfortable rooms, good beds and a table always supplied with the best of every thing the market affords.

At the same time, the first of a series of Occidental Hotels opened on a triangular piece of ground at the junction of Mill and Commercial Streets. The original hotel, a wooden structure, was advertised as a first class house by proprietors M.R. Maddocks, John S. Condon and Amos Brown. The culinary department is under the management of an experienced cook, and the table will always be supplied with the best in the market, said the same ad. By 1867, the Occidental had undergone three changes of ownership; under the management of A.S. Miller, six dollars bought room and board for a week. The wooden building was replaced by a grand brick structure in 1883; destroyed in the great fire of June 1889, it was soon rebuilt.

David Sires’s What-Cheer House opened in 1865. Renamed the Sires Hotel later that same year, it was among the first Seattle hotels to operate on what it called the restaurant principle. Though meals were at fixed hours—breakfast from 6:00 to 11:00 a.m., lunch from noon to 2:00 p.m. and dinner from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.—persons arriving by boat were accommodated at all hours. The hotel boasted that the table will always be supplied with the best the market affords, prepared and served up by an experienced cook. Sires didn’t stay long in Seattle; in 1866, he moved to Port Townsend, a growing town forty miles to the northwest on the Olympic Peninsula, and operated the Pioneer Hotel there for many years.

By the 1870s, change was in the wind. Some hotels, such as the New England Hotel (run by the same L.C. Harmon who was in business in 1860) and the American House, continued to operate on the European plan. Newspaper ads, however, show that some hotels were starting to separate the businesses of serving meals and providing lodging. Also, by that time the idea of a restaurant as a distinct and separate business was starting to catch on. The Central Hotel, for instance, advertised lodging and meals separately: twenty-five cents per day for each.

Among the first to be billed as such was Matthias Monet’s Seattle Restaurant and Coffee Saloon in 1864. Monet, an African American, arrived in Seattle from Oregon and was soon in business opposite Yesler, Denny and Company’s store on Commercial Street. In his newspaper ads, he stated, in the flowery language of the day, that due to his long experience in the culinary art, he hopes to give general satisfaction, and to merit a share of the public patronage. By 1865, he had changed the restaurant’s name to the Connoiseur’s Retreat Oyster Saloon and Chop House and had taken on William Hedges as a business partner. The partnership didn’t last long; by 1866, Monet was back to being the sole proprietor. He opened a hotel, the Railroad House, in 1869. It was apparently still in business at the time of the 1889 fire.

The elegant Italianate-style Occidental Hotel, as it looked circa 1885. Author’s collection.

An 1865 ad for Matthias Monet’s Connoiseur’s Retreat. Seattle Weekly Gazette.

Restaurants sprang up at a rapid pace in the 1870s. The North Pacific Chop House and Coffee Saloon opened in 1872, offering chicken, ham and eggs, pig’s feet, oysters and sardines at all hours—day and night—at fifteen cents and up. Owners M. Walker and A. Castro promised to always have on hand meats and fish of every description, the best variety the market affords. Two restaurants with similar names—the Bank Exchange and the American Exchange—were in competition with each other the following year. William Rickards, who appears frequently in notices of early Seattle restaurants, had been associated with the Bank Exchange, a saloon-turned-restaurant; in 1873, he set himself up in business as the American Exchange, a fine restaurant and oyster saloon for ladies. It’s not explicitly stated but apparently understood that ladies did not venture into restaurants—let alone saloons—of that day, so Rickards’s establishment of a female-friendly eating place was unusual.

William Grose (sometimes spelled Gross) opened Our House Restaurant in August 1876. Grose, an African American born in Washington, D.C., had arrived in Seattle in 1861; his wife, Sarah, and daughter Rebecca joined him soon after, becoming Seattle’s first female black residents. Grose’s restaurant/boardinghouse on Mill Street advertised meals and beds for twenty-five cents each. A successful businessman (he also owned a barbershop and dealt in real estate), Grose was the city’s wealthiest black resident by the 1890s.

Manuel Lopes, Matthias Monet and William Grose were some of the earliest of Seattle’s black restaurateurs but not the only ones. In 1889, John Randolph opened a café after the fire, and James Orr followed suit in 1890. In the 1890s, Thomas C. Collins and Allen Dean operated Collins and Dean’s Restaurant, and two black women, Olivia Washington and Elizabeth Thorne, managed successful cafés on the eastern edge of the city.

The Saddle Rock Chop House and the Puget Sound Refreshment Room made their appearance in 1877. Van Wie & Knudson of the Saddle Rock Chop House (chop house was the common name for what we would today call a steakhouse or grill) promised the best of fare on short notice. Charles Keil took over in the following year and upgraded the name to the Saddle Rock Restaurant. It was located on Commercial Street. The name is a bit of a puzzle since there’s no geographic place called Saddle Rock in the vicinity of Seattle.

The Saddle Rock Restaurant opened in 1877 and was rebuilt after the June 6, 1889 fire. Choir’s Pioneer Directory.