Gaggin arrived in Seattle with blueprints in hand and an official announcement for a 26-story building that would not only be the highest west of the Mississippi, but the highest outside of New York City. Smith chose the Syracuse architectural firm of Gaggin and Gaggin to design his tower and in February 1910, Edwin H. After consulting with Clise about what kind of building Seattle's economy would bear, his son, Burns Lyman Smith, convinced him to build instead a much taller skyscraper to steal the crown from rival city Tacoma's National Realty Building as the tallest west of the Mississippi River.
ĭuring a trip to Seattle in 1909, Smith began planning a 14-story building for the Bailey Corner. Smith, who saw great potential in the site, made no immediate plans to build, but would visit Seattle to inspect the property. Bailey (Builder of the nearby Broderick Building), who had built a 1-story brick building on the lot following the Great Seattle Fire with intentions of building something more substantial before the Panic of 1893 struck. Among those properties was the odd shaped lot at the Northeast corner of Yesler Way and Second Avenue, then known as the Wirth Corner (or Bailey Corner) which L.C. was soon the city's biggest taxpayer and the largest individual owner of Seattle real estate in the country. Among his largest clients at the turn of the century was Syracuse, New York millionaire industrialist Lyman Cornelius Smith and his brother Wilbert Lewis Smith who, through Clise, purchased and developed numerous buildings in Seattle's Pioneer Square district. Prominent local attorney James Clise, who represented numerous capitalists in New York and Boston was responsible for many of the land transactions that saw numerous new office buildings built in the city. In the wake of the Klondike Gold Rush, Eastern financial interest in Seattle was at an all-time high. History Smith Tower construction, February 1913 It was designated as a Seattle landmark in 1984. Smith Building until the Smith Tower became its official name in 1929. The tower is named after its builder, the firearm and typewriter magnate Lyman Cornelius Smith (unrelated to Horace Smith of Smith & Wesson), but its construction was largely overseen by his son Burns Lyman Smith after his father's 1910 death and would remain under the ownership of the Smith family into the 1940s. West Coast for nearly half a century, until the Space Needle overtook it in 1962. It remained the tallest building on the U.S. It was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River until the completion of the Kansas City Power & Light Building in 1931. Completed in 1914, the 38- story, 484 ft (148 m) tower was among the tallest skyscrapers outside New York City at the time of its completion. Smith Tower is a skyscraper in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States.
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