Burns' idea just fitted his plan and so it was done.' Smith said he believed he had better make the building so high that there would be no danger of anyone approaching it in his time. Smith shared Burns' enthusiasm and both were surprised when at dinner the night of his return, Mr. Smith returned home, he found that his son Burns Lyman had been studying skyscrapers in New York and was all-out for 21 stories capped by a 20-story tower. Decades later, The Seattle Times recalled that 'They sparred with each other about their plans, each wanting to build a little higher than the other, but both agreed finally that 14 stories was about the right height. Smith went to Washington to see his properties and to meet with John Hoge, another wealthy Easterner who was planning a downtown skyscraper. This real estate seems to have been a passive investment for more than a decade, but eventually Mr. Clise visited the elder Smith in Syracuse, and sold him eight separate Pioneer Square properties, sight unseen, in what was said to be the largest sale of Seattle property in the city's history up to that point. In the early 1890s, local real estate mogul J. had prospered making fine shotguns (under his own name and the names of others, although he had no connection to Smith & Wesson, a handgun manufacturer) and typewriters (L. It was more a product of New York than of Seattle, a supremely optimistic gesture by Lyman Cornelius Smith, a Syracuse industrialist, and his son, Burns Lyman Smith, who first visited Seattle in 1888, and later convinced his father to see the city for himself. The reality of this structure is fascinating enough without such overstatements. Indeed, the Smith Tower is the subject of more exaggeration and misinformation, on both a popular and scholarly level, than perhaps any other high rise building anywhere. It was built far higher than Seattle's then-booming economic circumstances warranted, but not as tall as widely claimed over its 90-year history. Oddly proportioned yet also strikingly impressive, it is one of the most improbable high-rises of the twentieth 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.)Īt the time of its 90th anniversary, it has been physically eclipsed by 15 taller Seattle buildings, but this gleaming white terra-cotta monument has never lost its cultural position as the Northwest's best-loved skyscraper. This territorial hegemony steadily shrank as higher buildings marched westward: By 1923 it was the tallest west of Chicago, by 1931 the tallest west of Kansas City, and by 1943 the tallest west of Dallas, but it did remain the tallest building west of the Rockies for nearly half a century. It was originally one of the tallest buildings in the country outside of New York, and was the tallest west of Ohio. When Seattle's pyramid-capped Smith Tower officially opened on July 4, 1914, its greatest claim to fame was its 462-foot height.

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