Early history
One of Seattle's most elegant hotels, the building that was to become the Butler Hotel was built shortly after the Great Seattle Fire. [2] Some years prior, Hillory Butler had owned and operated a truck garden on the quarter-block lot practically center of town and lived there in a small house. One of his conditions for the erection of a major building on his property in 1875 was that it would bear his name in perpetuity. [3] [4] The pre-fire Butler was a three-story wooden building. [5]
Building plans for the new Butler Block were announced July 3, 1889, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer , less than a month after the fire. Designed by the short-lived partnership of Parkinson and Evers, it was built as an office building, the Phinney and Jones Building, for Guy C. Phinney and Daniel C. Jones. [2] The English-born John Parkinson of Parkinson and Evers had just arrived in Seattle from Napa, California, after the fire, and was for several years one of Seattle's leading architects, before moving to Los Angeles after the Panic of 1893. [2] Seattle neighborhood Phinney Ridge is named after Phinney, one of the city's leading businessmen of the era. [6] Jones, in contrast was a foulmouthed frontiersman who apparently carried a gun in each hip pocket. [2] The new hotel opened in 1894 under the management of two German immigrants, Dietrich Hamm and Ferdinand Schmitz. It included a large dining room which was managed by Mr. Hamm. It was divided into both men's and women's sections. Included also was a grill room featuring fresh seafood and shell fish. Hamm and Schmitz operated the hotel until 1903, at which time Edward Sweeney of the Seattle Malting and Beverage Company secured the lease, forcing the retirement of Hamm and Schmitz.§ [7]
Prohibition
In the Prohibition era, the Butler's Rose Room "became synonymous with the city's informal night life". [1] Victor Aloysius Meyers—later a Washington State politician—held forth as a bandleader, [1] as did Jackie Souder. [12] The young Bing Crosby tried out to sing at the Butler, but was told he needed more experience. [1] John Edmondson Prim, later a founder of the Seattle Urban League and the first African American judge in the State of Washington, worked there as a waiter. [13]
For many years, the Butler paid little or no attention to the laws against alcoholic beverages. "Liquor," Seattle businessman Henry Broderick explained decades later, "was not sold by the House, but in some devious, if not exactly mysterious way, whiskey had a habit of arriving at every one of the nearly one hundred tables in the establishment." [14] As Seattlife magazine would comment in 1939, "... it was all in the course of an evening's fun to have the prohibition agents swoop in, seize partially concealed bottles of liquor from under the tables, perhaps arrest an employe (sic) or two, and then depart amid boos and not-too-subtle insults." This went on for roughly a decade, until in early 1929 the Butler was prohibited from allowing dancing after 9 p.m. In May 1929 the Rose Room was ordered closed for a year. When it reopened in 1930, amid the deepening Great Depression, things were simply not the same. [1]
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Victor Aloysius Meyers was an American jazz bandleader and politician. He served for 20 years as the 11th Lieutenant Governor of Washington and an additional eight years as the tenth Secretary of State of Washington.
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