The Livingston has survived—and occasionally thrived—across multiple Seattle eras.
A long saga that embroiled the historic Virginia Inn in controversy and resulted in its brief closure finally ended this November, when a group of the tavern’s employees purchased the business and the Pike Place Market Development & Preservation Authority (PDA) repaired the restaurant’s historic neon sign, then restored it to its rightful place.
Why was the restoration of the sign such a big deal? Well, because the restaurant’s previous owner had taken it down and hidden it in his house—despite the fact that the sign, and the building it belongs to, are owned by the PDA. But this recent kerfuffle was just one of plenty more tales that the 125-year-old Livingston Baker Building—which contains both the Virginia Inn and beloved French bistro Le Pichet—has to tell.
Constructed in 1901 at the southwest corner of First Avenue and Virginia Street, the original building was called the Rosenberg Block, bankrolled by NYC clothier Samuel Rosenberg. On January 13, 1901, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Rosenberg had obtained a permit to construct a “handsome five-story brick structure” offering 80 furnished rooms (with 12 “toilet rooms”) along with a saloon, drugstore, and restaurant at the storefront level. The Livingston’s architect was referred to in the P-I story but not named, and unusually, their identity is still a mystery today.
The P-I story explained that Rosenberg had purchased the land parcel as an investment in 1900, as part of “the general movement in real estate and improvements in the up-town district.” Then he decided the city actually needed another hotel, citing the parcel’s prime bayside views as a factor. (He was also a member of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s Bureau of Information, which heavily promoted tourism in the city around the Klondike Gold Rush, and that probably motivated him too.)
The Virginia Inn, as seen with its iconic sign back in place.
Rosenberg is best known locally, of course, for later building the grand Italianate Hotel Sorrento on First Hill in 1909. His first love was agriculture, though, and a year later he traded the whole Sorrento for a Cornice pear orchard in Medford, Oregon. There, he founded an upscale food/gift retailer called Bear Creek Orchards—after his death in 1916, the company was taken over by his sons, who renamed it after themselves: Harry and David.
Speaking of cornices: A northwestern-facing stamp on the Livingston Hotel’s facade, near the oriel window’s cornice, reads Landes Block, implying that it was also at least partially financed by real estate developer and former state senator Henry Landes. (You may know his wife, Bertha, who went on to become Seattle’s first female mayor.)
Five stories high, the building was partly buried in the steep slope that leads down Virginia Street to Western Avenue, so that the basement level is accessible only from Post Alley. Its dramatic round corner oriel window is certainly the hotel’s most fantastical feature, accented by polygonal bay windows on both the First Avenue and Virginia Street facades. The building itself was constructed from wood over a concrete foundation with a brick facade to mask it—likely because it was a violation of the city building codes instated in response to the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, which banned timber construction in the freshly rebuilt downtown area. Local architecture wonk Keith Cote, who runs the Buildings of Seattle profile on Instagram, theorizes that perhaps “this building was far enough away from Pioneer Square, where the new code was more strongly enforced.”
Once open, the hotel was briefly known as the Golden Eagle Hotel, but by 1907 it had changed its name to the Livingston Hotel. (No one alive today seems to know who Livingston was.) Nameless when it started out, the saloon on the ground floor was operated by proprietor William Herdman and included a cigar and tobacco outlet. The storefront directly to the south was variously a drugstore, a soap manufacturing outlet, a shoe repair business, a men's clothing store, a tailor’s shop, and a frame store. Another door south, the Livingston Café occupied the space that Le Pichet does today. The basement level of the hotel was used as storage, while an electroplating plant lived in the sub-basement.
This image of a man pretending to fish for salmon in a pothole became emblematic of the city's early-twentieth-century infrastructure problems.
At the time of the hotel’s debut, this part of the city was not an especially nice place to stay. When the Livingston was completed, the area, sometimes known as North Seattle (!), featured rough, hilly terrain that was still being flattened out by the multiphase Denny Regrade project, and the eastern-facing rooms looked out onto a mountain of dirt and rubble that stood directly across the street. Construction from the project left the barely paved First Avenue pocked with potholes, and the rain transformed the road into a street-shaped mud puddle half the time. A staged photo from 1903, above, features a man pretending to fish for salmon in the massive potholes outside the Livingston Hotel, as a crowd holds signs to protest the street’s poor quality.
A block west of the hotel, the cobblestone street we know today as Pike Place was an unpaved, wooden-boarded roadway spanning between Pike and Virginia Streets. But on August 17, 1907, eight farmers rolled up to the boardwalk to sell fresh produce from their wagons, changing the city forever. The postcard-worthy Main Arcade Building sprouted up later the same year. Although the Klondike Gold Rush had been over for years by then, and Rosenberg himself had long since shoved off to the pear orchards of Oregon, his prescient vision for the location ended up paying off, when a busy commercial market district—and major tourist destination—quickly sprang up all around the Livingston. Kind of a perfect place to build a hotel after all.
After operating anonymously for a handful of years, the tavern inside the hotel found its name by 1908: the Virginia Inn. When Prohibition was passed into law, the saloon temporarily changed its name to the Virginia Soft Drink Parlor. Upstairs, meanwhile, the Livingston didn’t remain a hotel for long. Its rooms gradually became inhabited by permanent residents.
The Livingston Building (top right), turned out to be located in the perfect spot after Pike Place Market opened.
This conversion to apartments would later become somewhat significant. But first, let’s go back in time again. In 1904, the two-story wood-framed Baker Hotel was constructed right next to the Livingston. It was the same kind of building, only on a smaller scale: a hotel with a storefront at the bottom. Today, we call that mixed-use. But instead of turning into apartments when the hotel business crashed, the Baker had a different destiny—between 1933 and 1941, it was a well-known brothel run by notorious Seattle madam Nellie Curtis.
In 1977, after decades of steady economic decline in the neighborhood, the Livingston and Baker buildings were both purchased by the Pike Place Market Preservation & Development Authority. The PDA rebuilt the Baker with a brick facade to match the Livingston and then combined the two, creating the Livingston Baker Apartments, with a total of 96 rental units, mostly rated for low-income Seattleites.
In 1978, the lower floors of the Livingston side became home to the Pike Market Community Clinic—now called Neighborcare Health at Pike Place Market—as well as the Pike Place Market Senior Center, two crucial social service agencies that still aid downtown’s low-income and elderly communities.
The Virginia Inn was a hard-drinking dive for decades, including in the 1970s, as pictured here.
Back to the Virginia Inn—the oldest continually open restaurant in the Pike Place Market Historic District, by the way—and its recent victory. The longtime hard-drinking downtown dive evolved when Patrice Demombynes and Jim Fotheringham bought the business in 1981. The pair brought in microbrews and devoted the walls to works by local artists, and the bar soon became a postconcert go-to during Seattle’s grunge era and began attracting an artsier crowd than before (but still retained some of its trademark scruffiness). The “V.I.,” as it’s known to regulars, also expanded into the former frame shop next door under Fotheringham and Demombynes’s ownership, effectively doubling the space. Although the menus have gotten bougier and brunchier since the duo sold it in 2019, it’s a no-less-gorgeous place for a lazy lunch, and the sunlight still glints off the bay and washes the whole street corner in pale orange—perhaps in the same way that Samuel Rosenberg appreciated when he decided to build a hotel there.
When longtime coworkers Manny Sarabia, Marissa Mohr, Jackelyn Batingan, and Amber Quezada banded together to buy the tavern earlier this year, they went digging in the city archives and learned a few more mysterious stories about the V.I. For example: the secret history of a female owner who was never acknowledged.
The Virginia Inn might be looking fresh with its new ownership group, but that doesn't mean its old ghosts have all departed the premises.
“I think it was in the ’20s,” Quezada says. “One co-owner promised to take care of his dead business partner’s widow. And so he put her on as co-owner of the Virginia Inn. But she wasn’t legally allowed to own it for some reason. So, when I went to the archives, I was like, ‘Wait, there’s another person being named as owner, but it’s a woman’s name?’”
At the time, Quezada says, both the Market and the city flat-out refused to acknowledge that the woman co-owned the tavern. “They would always just address the male owner. The Market and the city didn’t even think she existed—she was on the letters to the business, but when you actually opened up the letter, it was like, “Dear Mr. So-and-So.’ That’s why it’s so important that women co-own this place now!” And openly, no less.
Quezada then cheerfully lists all the different ghosts that haunt the tavern, including one that she thinks is another of the bar’s former owners, who allegedly died in his business partner’s arms in the tavern’s office. “Well, I forget his name, but apparently, since that day, the partner’s hair went white, even though he was young.” She reports sensing his presence in the office pretty regularly. Quezada also lays out a wild tale about how there’s a ghost who zips through the dining room on a bike—the spirit of someone whose ashes are hidden in the wall, she says.
“So, there’s this ghost that I usually see, like, late night or early morning, when I’m alone, that would just zoom by really quickly, in my peripheral vision. So I was telling a table of four people about this, and they were like, ‘Oh. That might be our friend,’” Quezada says. “And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And they go, ‘Do you know about the body in the wall?’ And I’m like, ‘You guys. Did you murder your friend? What is this about?’
“So, apparently, they don’t remember where, but there used to be a loose brick in this wall in the dining room. And so, their friend, he actually passed away when he got run over when he was riding his bike, sometime in the ’80s. And they dumped his ashes inside the wall, behind a brick. So they were like, ‘No, that’s totally him on his bike, going by quickly.’”
Quezada says she would love more info about this story, if anyone happens to have any. As well as which brick his ashes are behind. Supposedly. Or for that matter, any other mysteries that the V.I. has yet to reveal to its newest—but no less historic—hosts.