The San Marco Apartments building was built in 1905 by developer Bret Farrar, sold at a profit to Cyrus (Frank) Clapp a month later, and has been continuously in use as an apartment building in private ownership since it was built. Designed by architects Saunders & Lawton, it originally provided sixteen apartments above a full, day-lit basement. The apartments ranged from 1-3 bedrooms in size. They were generously proportioned, arranged in three separated sections (with three different addresses) on three floors, and offered both comfort and privacy. Additional apartments have been added in the basement in recent decades. The original apartments, renovated during the 1990s, continue to offer the original configurations with some contemporary upgrades. The United States Post Office has shortened the address to 1205, but this has not changed the building configuration: three entrances around a central courtyard. As this is written in Summer 2013, the San Marco Apartments is the second oldest apartment building still in service on First Hill in Seattle. (1) 

Architects Charles Willard Saunders (1857-1935) and George Willis Lawton (1864-1928), created the San Marco in a "Spanish design . . . [with a] concrete foundation and rough plaster walls...[around a] large center court ... which will be brilliantly lighted at night... " (2) It is difficult to know why they (or the builder) chose to make the configuration around the courtyard have five angles in the building facades, and to fit dining rooms of many angles into some of the apartments. But "Spanish" or "Moorish" architecture must have been "in" since the Summit School, built at the same time (opened 1905), is also considered "Spanish" in design. (3) In any case, the San Marco Apartments were built to be luxurious, to fit into this north First Hill neighborhood among a number of the most elegant of First Hill's "mansions" of the 1880s and 1890s. The apartments have large windows, originally with leaded glass panes at the top in a curious design picked up in the woodwork both inside and out. (Today, only the two top windows in the dormer of the curved parapet have the original leaded glass.) The impression, even today, is something of a palace. Unfortunately, the plans for the building have not been found to date.

It was Alaskan gold, and Bert Farrar's hard work extracting it, that financed the San Marco Apartments. Farrar was born about 1870 and grew up in Bothell. He and his family were involved in logging and he purchased some land for development as early as 1892. But the gold fever caught him, and he went up to the Klondike, sold six claims to a British company, then returned to Seattle and bought the old McNaught Mansion at Fourth and Madison (site of the Seattle Public Library). Then back to Alaska he went, helping to develop Nome. By 1904 he was in Seattle with money to invest. (4) Farrar may have built the San Marco himself. No other builder has come to light in our research, and he had the skill and experience. He and members of his family lived in the building for a year or so after it was open. (5)   Farrar moved on to develop other properties in Seattle, then Kirkland, and after 1923, in Los Angeles where he died in 1960.

In 1904, when Farrar came back to Seattle, the Alaska Building, Seattle's first metal-framed skyscraper opened, designed by Eames & Young of St Louis with Saunders & Lawton locally. Saunders & Lawton were in partnership in Seattle from 1898-1915, individually and collectively very popular architects of the time.  In 1903 they had designed The Summit, at 1118-1120 Madison Street. This was an experiment in design for a specific population: for bachelors who worked in the city. It was originally a hotel, but in 1907 the owners added a three-story addition extending the address to 1120 Madison and apparently converting the building to apartments. (6) (This site is now the McDonalds on the northwest corner of Madison and Summit.) We don't know how Farrar and Saunders and Lawton met, but clearly the architects were aware that this north First Hill area was ripe for development for multi-family dwellings, at least near the Madison Street corridor.

Automobiles were only just beginning to appear on the streets of Seattle in 1905. The Pike-Pine auto row corridor had not yet appeared, nor had the regrades along them that made it easy for electric streetcars (and autos) to climb. The major transportation facilities on First Hill were the cable cars from the Elliott Bay waterfront up Yesler (built 1888) and Madison Streets (built 1890), east to Lake Washington.  In 1891-93, the James Street cable line from the waterfront to Broadway was built and connected to electric street car lines going north and south along Broadway. When Seattle High School opened in 1902 on Broadway just north of Pine Street, it was possible to reach school by the Madison cable from ferries either east or west, and to come up the hill from either direction, but likely one had to walk along muddy Broadway from Madison Street to get to school. The San Marco Apartments was not built with provisions for parking cars, but it was, until 1940 when the cable cars were discontinued, a block from the Madison Cable Car line (now an electric trolley bus line to downtown and back). Madison Street became a street with small shops primarily serving local residents -- laundries, dry cleaners, shoe and jewelry repairs, pharmacies, sometimes a grocery, butcher or bakery -- in nodes along the cable car line which carried freight as well as passengers.

Immediately after the San Marco was built, Mrs. Grace D. Stevens built the Clark Hotel right next door to the San Marco Apartments on Minor Avenue. Also three-stories with a basement, early advertising described "a telephone in every room", all 70 of them. The Cark remained a hotel, with a dining room, throughout it's life into the 1960s, when it was demolished to build the branch bank located in a sea of parking asphalt that occupied the entire northeast corner of Madison and Minor, until it too was demolished two years ago for the towering Coppin's Well Apartments. (7)

It is difficult to imagine this northern part of First Hill without hospitals. In 1905, it was: Grace Hospital, a private Protestant hospital venture that didn't work out, had been razed in 1904 to built Summit School. The next private hospital venture, Minor Hospital (named, like the street, after T.T. Minor, a physician and former mayor of Seattle), appeared in 1906 at 1414-24 Spring Street. The building, now part of First Baptist Church, remains though it has been altered. All the other private hospitals in the immediate neighborhood:  Summit Avenue (later Swedish), Virginia Mason, Maynard, Doctors', appeared between 1912 and 1944, along with the Catholic Columbus (later Cabrini) Hospital and several smaller specialty hospitals and clinics. Swedish and Virginia Mason remain.

The early tenants were well-to-do business men and their wives, widows of means with their children, and professional men and women. (Keep in mind that the San Marco has a range of apartment sizes.) We were able to find a few in the 1906 street directory by looking for the address on every page. This list is not complete:

William M. Balcom, Secretary-Treasurer of H.C. Bolcom Lumber Co.

Charles B. Hopkins, U.S. Marshal Federal Building, with his daughters Carrie and Eva

(probably high school students at the time).

William Biglow, President, W. Biglow & Co.

Twyman O. Abbott, Lawyer, 906 Alaska Building and Manager, Pacific Coast

Telharmonic Co.

William I. Ewart, Timber Lands, 814 Alaska Building.

Bert C. Farrar, Mining

William K. Greene, Lawyer, 1116 Alaska Building

David Farrar, with Emma and Levina

Diana James, in her article on the San Marco Apartments notes: "According to the 1910 census, of the ten who responded, there were nine married couples, six of whom had one child living with them. One couple also had a sister-in-law living with them, and another had a mother-in-law. Overall, it was a family-oriented apartment building. Five units had a live-in servant. The men's occupations included several managers, an attorney, a professor of forestry, and accountant, a physician, a bank cashier, and a United States marshal."

In 1923, again reading through the Polk's Seattle Street Directory, we found the following list:

Jennie E. Graham (widow A.B.), Juliet D. Graham, William B. Graham

Gordon G. Thompson and wife A. Louise

Annete Lapell

Henrietta Hamilton, Henrietta Hamilton Co., interior decorator, 905 Loman Building)

Charles M. Roe, insurance, and his wife Jettie K.

Blanche H. Stulfauth

Mrs. Cora Cleveland Malony (Mrs. John F. Malony Sr.) and John F. Malony, Jr, vice president,  Alaska Middle Fork Mining Company

Paul H. Rice, hydrographer, U.S. Navy Hydrograpic Office, and his wife Gertrude M.

Edgar V. Adams, and his wife Annabel A.

Emma F. Branagan

Paul Donaldson, Sunday editor, Seattle Post Intelligencer

William Patrick, manager of the San Marco Apartments, and his wife Matilda J.

William H. Payne, manager, P.B. Yates Machine Co., and his wife Della C.

Frances M. Plummer, George H. Plummer, land agent, Northern Pacific Railway, and

his wife Emma L.

By the end of the 1920s, the San Marco Apartments was surrounded by apartment buildings and hotels. The Piedmont Residential Hotel was first built in 1926, expanded in 1928 as the new Piedmont Hotel (along with the wonderful Malibu Potteries tile work along the facades), and has occupied the southwest corner of Seneca and Summit ever since. It is now the Tuscany Apartments, visible north of the parking lot across the street from the San Marco. 

Next door to the San Marco Apartments, 1223 Spring Street, perhaps the most elegant of all the neighborhood apartment buildings, was completed in 1929. Now condominiums, this building really is the palace of the neighborhood, with large flats (only two on each floor) and a spacious penthouse, a garage for automobiles, and a roof garden. 

The Gainsborough, elegant with terra cotta shells and other decorative embellishments, was completed in 1930 at the southwest corner of Minor and Spring (across Minor Street from the San Marco Apartments). It remains elegant with it's canopy. The apartments are now condominiums. 

Many other apartment buildings, churches and hotels were built in the neighborhood, and both Swedish and Virginia Mason hospitals were built and growing. Maynard Hospital, across the street from Summit School on Summit Avenue was beginning as well, although Minor Hospital was repurposed at the end of the 1920s. Family houses continued to be occupied, but were sometimes rentals or even lodging houses. Seattle University, just east of Broadway was also growing, although it did not become a university until much later. First Hill was still very much a part of downtown, and downtown was moving northward up to Pine Street. The 'teens and "twenties were times of consistent street regrades throughout the city, and Denny Hill was disappearing as electric streetcars were climbing the hills and connecting the neighborhoods just outside of the growing downtown business core.

Once the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, there was less building activity. Houses, many of them built before the turn of the century, began to disappear to be replaced by the hospital expansions and automotive service stations. The World War II years brought a terrific housing shortage to the city, as workers flocked from all over the country to the shipbuilding, airplane, and other war related industries of our port city. Hospitals and hospital services expanded as well. The hotels and boarding and lodging houses were packed with people, but there were no funds for repairs or renovations.

After the war, the neighborhood was flooded with students, many of them G.I.'s who attended Seattle College (University), the University of Washington, and the new commercial art school on Broadway (precursor to the Seattle Art Institute) across the street from Broadway High School. 

Just this past week, this writer had the opportunity to chat with a visitor to Swedish Hospital whose husband was among those veterans, living at the San Marco with his parents, attending the U.W. The Patterson family, I was told, and stories about the lively Christmas and Thanksgiving family celebrations here, along with the "1209 Club" as the tenants of the time called tenants of the east wing of the San Marco in the late 1940s. Another Swedish visitor some months ago, told stories about being married here in the San Marco (also in the 1209 portion), and living here while he was a student at Seattle University and later taught there during the 1960s. While researching Maynard Hospital a few months ago, this author also "met" another San Marco tenant from the 1970s, who was a nurse administrator of that hospital and wrote its history in a manuscript now on file at the University of Washington. (Betty T. Parry, 1907-1987). It is not unusual for any of us who are current tenants to be stopped on the sidewalk and told stories about what it was like to live in the San Marco in the past by passersby. 

When funds finally began to become available for new construction and reconstruction in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the city-state-feds embarked upon a major construction project: building the Seattle Freeway, now called Interstate-5. First Hill was cut off from downtown by a river of traffic located in a ditch and reconnected by a few bridges. Many buildings were lost, and some businesses and activities that could not survive in the remaking of downtown came up to First Hill. (The Polyclinic was among these, as was the Evangeline Residence of the Salvation Army which moved for a time into the Piedmont Hotel/Tuscany Apartments.) The historic restoration and landmark legislation and movement of the 1970s resulted in an application to make the San Marco's immediate neighborhood a designated historic district. But this effort seems to have been lost in an administrative shuffle, although the paperwork is still on file with the State of Washington. Failing an historic district, landowners responded in various ways during the next decade or two: many apartment buildings were renovated to become condominiums, historic renovation was conducted for the Stimpson-Green Mansion and for the Broderick House (now home to Historic Seattle) both on Summit Avenue. While Summit School was closed as a public school, the building was rescued by the private Northwest School.

The San Marco Apartments was also renovated, sometime during the late 1980s or early 1990s. Mostly it was a case of modernizing the kitchens, adding washers and dryers on the stair landings of the old "back stairs" which were closed off, and a nice job of repairing and repainting the exterior. Most of the windows were replaced. It is probably also at this time that the steam heat (radiators and a furnace) was replaced with room controlled electric heaters. New apartments were created in the basement. Many odd little features remain. We recently found the old maid's call buttons buried under a few dining room floors about where it is likely one would put a dining room table, for instance. The actual call boxes are gone, as is whatever the doorbell system may have been before the electronic one was installed. On the outside of the building, one can still see the screened and boxed structures that were once ice boxes.

There are many good resources about the building of apartments in Seattle, especially Diana E. James Shared Walls; Seattle Apartment Buildings, 1900-1939, McFarland & Co., North Carolina, 2012. The quotation above is from p. 128. A number of articles on www.historylink.org, Washington State's free on-line encyclopedia cover both First Hill and several buildings mentioned above, including the Tuscany Apartments/Piedmont Hotel. Paul Dorpat and colleagues continue to study and present photographs from the past, see (http://pauldorpat.com/seattle-now-and-then/the-gainsborough/) for the Gainsborough, but also note the 1912 Baist map and dozens of other essays, including the one on Grace Hospital. Walk-in- and-visit historical presentations of note are located in the 1111 Madison Building lobby and in the Cabrini Tower lobby on the east side of Boren just south of Madison. Historic Seattle, located in the Broderick House at the southwest corner of Minor Avenue and Seneca Street not only houses a library of historic materials, but also conducts tours of First Hill and will be publishing a history of First Hill next year. Also next year, a new edition of Shaping Seattle Architecture, edited by Jeffrey K. Oschner is due to be published. The Seattle Room at the downtown Seattle Public Library has many valuable historical materials, as does the Special Collections of the University of Washington Libraries. The historic Seattle Times is now online and searchable through The Seattle Public Library website as well. We recommend the Cable Car Guy online as a source as well, http://cable-car-guy.com/.

Footnotes and quoted sources not yet attributed:

(1) The oldest, the Saint Paul, at 1302-08 Seneca Street, was built in 1901 by builder Edwin C. Burke to designs by Tacoma architects Spalding and Russell. It was the first purpose-built apartment building in Seattle. Burke and Ferrar subsequently teamed up as developers of Kirkland. See James listed above. An original advertisement for the San Marco Apartments, including a photograph, appeared in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer publication called Prosperous Washington, compiled by Harry Hume, published in 1906, on page 108. A copy of the book is on reference at both The Seattle Public Library and Special Collections at the U.W.

(2) Seattle Daily Bulletin, Feb. 20 1905, p. 1. 

(3) The Summit School is now a landmarked building on Summit Street between Union and Pike Street; a part of The Northwest School.

(4) Mimi Sheridan, "Making of a Hometown: How Burke and Farrar Built Kirkland", manuscript from the author. Thank you.

(5) Polk's Seattle Directory, 1906.

(6) Special thanks to Jacqueline B. Williams for the history of The Summit apartments.

(7) Seattle Times, Oct. 15, 1905, p. 37. 

1. Written by Dotty DeCoster, San Marco tenant, August 2013.relationships.