Seattle's Smith Tower, tallest building west of Ohio, is dedicated on July 4, 1914.

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On July 4, 1914, the 462-foot-high Smith Tower, located in downtown Seattle, is dedicated. At the time it is one of the tallest buildings west of New York and the tallest building west of Ohio.

Located at 506 2nd Avenue, the building took three and a half years to construct. The architects were Gaggin & Gaggin (Edwin H. and T. Walker Gaggin) of Syracuse, New York, and the owner was Lyman Cornelius Smith, a typewriter tycoon whose firm eventually became the Smith-Corona Company.

The Smith Tower was built with 1,400 doors, 2,000 windows, and 40,000 feet of moulding. The building sits on 1,276 Raymond concrete piles measuring 22 feet in length. The American Bridge Co. produced the steel in a Pittsburgh plant and shipped it on 164 railroad cars, each carrying about 28 tons. The severe earthquake of 1949 (7.1) caused so little damage that the greatest expense was the fee of the investigating structural engineers.

In height the Smith Tower was gradually superseded by taller buildings. By 1923 it was the tallest building west of Chicago, by 1931 the tallest west of Kansas City, and by 1943 the tallest west of Dallas. It did remain the tallest building west of the Rockies for nearly half a century. At birth it was nearly twice as tall as the previously highest building in town (the 247-foot clock tower of the King Street Station), but by 1985 it was less than half the height of the 937-foot Bank of America Tower (originally Columbia Center.) The Seattle Space Needle surpassed the Smith Tower in 1962, but the Space Needle is not technically considered a skyscraper. In Seattle the Smith Tower remained the tallest building until the SeaFirst Building was constructed in 1968.

Sources:
Shaping Seattle Architecture: A Historical Guide to the Architects ed. by Jeffrey Karl Ochsner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), xxxiii; "Smith Tower" (www.skyscraper.com). See also: Impressions of Imagination: Terra Cotta Seattle ed. by Lydia Aldredge (Seattle: Allied Arts of Seattle, 1986), 7.
Note: This file was corrected in several respects (dimensions, number of floors, superlatives), in accordance with corrections provided by architectural critic John Pastier in the Cyberpedia essay on the Smith Tower on this Website (www.historylink.org).

By Greg Lange , March 05, 2003

Bird's eye view of downtown Seattle with Smith Tower and Elliott Bay, 1920s?
Postcard