Smith Tower: Seattle Builds Up Before the Space Needle
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Before the Space Needle, Seattle's vertical ambition looked like this.
Smith Tower opened in 1914 at a height that made it one of the tallest buildings outside New York at the time.
The developer, Lyman Cornelius Smith, came from a family fortune associated with typewriters and firearms.
The tower's location beside Pioneer Square made sense.
This was still the commercial core near rail, shipping and downtown business.
A skyscraper advertised confidence that Seattle's gateway economy had matured into a major city.
Its elevators and steel-frame construction represented the same technological urbanism transforming Chicago and New York, translated to the Pacific Northwest.
The building also demonstrates how skylines move.
Later downtown growth shifted north.
New office towers rose elsewhere.
The Smith Tower stopped being the city's dominant vertical landmark long before the Space Needle arrived for the 1962 World's Fair.
Yet its survival preserves an earlier Seattle that wanted to be recognized as a conventional metropolitan center rather than an exotic frontier port.
For visitors, the white terra-cotta tower can look almost quaint.
In 1914, it was a statement.
Seattle was telling investors, workers and rivals that the city expected continued growth.
That confidence has repeated through timber, gold supply, shipbuilding, airplanes, software and global commerce.
Boom industries change.
The civic habit of announcing the next boom does not.
Smith Tower is Seattle before aerospace and tech learned to dominate the story.