Smith Tower

A 38-story neoclassical skyscraper completed in 1914, once the tallest building west of the Mississippi, with a 35th-floor Chinese Room furnished by Empress Dowager Cixi.

Smith Tower rose from the corner of Second Avenue and Yesler Way through the vision of Lyman Cornelius Smith, a Syracuse industrialist who had amassed a fortune manufacturing typewriters and firearms. His wife Mary Elizabeth fell in love with Seattle during a visit in the late 1880s and persuaded him to purchase the prime lot. Smith hired the Syracuse architectural firm of Gaggin and Gaggin -- who had never designed anything taller than five stories -- and announced plans for what would become the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. He died on November 5, 1910, before construction even began, but his son Burns Lyman Smith pushed the project to an ambitious 42 stories. When the 462-foot tower opened on July 4, 1914, over 4,000 Seattleites rode to the 35th floor, paying twenty-five cents each for the privilege of standing atop the gleaming white terra cotta landmark.

The crown jewel of Smith Tower is its 35th-floor observatory, originally announced as a Japanese tea room but built in the style of a Chinese temple interior. The room features a carved teak ceiling with 776 semi-precious porcelain disc insets and elaborate blackwood furniture. Legend attributes these furnishings to a gift from China's Empress Dowager Cixi before her 1908 death, though research by local historians has shown the teak was hand-carved by G. Gerald Evans of Philadelphia and the porcelain tiles were crafted in Syracuse during the Arts and Crafts movement. The room's most famous artifact is the Wishing Chair, incorporating a carved dragon and phoenix that together portend marriage. According to folklore, any unmarried person who sits in it will marry within a year. Popular accounts claim L.C. Smith's daughter sat in the chair and married in the Chinese Room a year later, but his only daughter, Flora Bernice Smith, never married -- making the legend itself a kind of ghost story.

The tower's paranormal reputation centers on a woman in a white dress who appears on the upper floors, said to be the spirit of someone who leapt from the observation deck. Her mournful cries reportedly echo through the building, and according to Ross Allison of AGHOST (Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma, the Pacific Northwest's oldest paranormal investigation group), the Wishing Chair may be connected to her presence -- a woman who died of lost love, forever bound to the place where wishes of marriage were made. Staff and visitors have also reported cold drafts in empty hallways, phantom footsteps on upper floors, and shadowy figures roaming the corridors. Scott Brucker of Unico Properties, which managed the tower's 2016 renovation, acknowledged that "a couple of ghosts have lived in Smith Tower since its creation."

The most documented encounter occurred in the 1980s, when a workman was arranging an exhibit of historical artifacts in a hallway. He felt someone creep up behind him and turned to find an older woman inspecting his handiwork. She vanished. When later shown a photograph, he identified the apparition as Bertha Knight Landes -- Seattle's first female mayor and the first woman to lead a major American city, who served from 1926 to 1928. Landes was known for firing the police chief and shutting down speakeasies during her administration, and her ghost may be drawn to a building that witnessed Seattle's Prohibition-era underworld firsthand: in October 1924, Roy Olmstead, Seattle's "King of the Bootleggers," established radio station KFQX with studios in Smith Tower. His wife Elise, broadcasting as "Aunt Vivian," read children's bedtime stories that were rumored to contain coded messages for the bootlegging network -- a legend that has never been proven but persists in the building's lore.

Smith Tower has changed hands twelve times since its opening. Ivar Haglund, the beloved Seattle restaurateur, bought it for $1.8 million in 1976 and was reportedly the only owner to profit from it, selling for $5.5 million in January 1985 just two weeks before his death. The building sits within the Pioneer Square-Skid Road Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its original Otis elevators -- one still operating on its 1914 DC motor -- were among the last manually operated elevators on the West Coast. Today the observatory houses a speakeasy-inspired bar that serves an "Aunt Vivian" cocktail in honor of its bootlegging past, while the Haunted History Ghost Tours of Seattle depart from the tower's base, leading visitors through Pioneer Square's haunted history. The building's management remains notably tight-lipped about its resident ghosts, which only deepens the intrigue.