Cadillac Hotel
The Cadillac Hotel has historically been notable as an example of an early workingman’s hotel in Seattle. Today, however, it is best known for the severe damage it suffered during the Nisqually earthquake of 2001.
Construction on the Cadillac Hotel building began immediately after the Great Fire of 1889, at which time it was one of only two brick buildings on Jackson Street. The building opened in 1890. The main floor housed a bar, drugstore, and cheap restaurants. The Derig Hotel occupied the upper floors. The hotel would have catered primarily to single male workers. Though long gone now, in the building’s early years a railroad line ran just one block away, carrying passengers and freight to and from Elliott Bay.[1]
Western Washington sits on top of three active fault zones: the Cascadia subduction zone, the Seattle fault zone, and the Benioff zone. The Cascadian subduction zone has the potential for the most powerful earthquake and the Seattle zone, which stretches twenty-five miles from Restoration Point on Bainbridge Island to Lake Sammamish, poses the most direct danger to Seattle, but most of the Pacific Northwest’s earthquakes originate in the Benioff zone.[2]
The February 28, 2001 Nisqually earthquake, which originated in the Benioff zone, had a magnitude of 6.8 and caused more than a billion dollars of damage in the city. The quake dislodging the Cadillac Hotel’s freestanding brick pediment that once sat at the center of its Second Avenue façade. For an entire year, the building’s owners and Seattle preservationists argued over whether the structure could be salvaged. Along with several other buildings in the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, the Cadillac Hotel has since undergone significant seismic retrofitting.[3]
[1] “Summary for 319 2nd AVE / Parcel ID 5247800715,” Seattle.gov (2004), http://web6.seattle.gov/DPD/HistoricalSite/QueryResult.aspx?ID=1457613048.
[2] David Williams, The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle (Portland: WestWinds Press, 2005), 29-31; David Williams, Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 21.
[3] “Summary for 319 2nd Ave.”
Credits and Sources:
Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.
“Summary for 319 2nd AVE / Parcel ID 5247800715.”Seattle.gov, 2004.http://web6.seattle.gov/DPD/HistoricalSite/QueryResult.aspx?ID=1457613048.
Williams, David B. The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle. Portland: WestWinds Press, 2005.
Williams, David B. Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015.
