VintageSeattle.org

On a cold morning in the dawning days of the 21st century, a national historic landmark collapsed. It was 5:45 in the morning. The streets around Pioneer Square were quiet, dark, cold, as a man, Peter Benard, drove a US Xpress Enterprise truck. Inexperienced, he drove the 18-wheeler into a historic iron and glass pergola, destroying it. It collapsed in a heap. The driver left unscathed and the truck didn’t have much damage at all. The pergola, the driver might have known after the reports starting leaking out about its destruction, after the TV news crews started to descend on Pioneer Square, was that it had been standing since the early days of the 20th century.

It was 1909 and Seattle was a’bustle. Workmen had just completed building the world’s largest artificial island, Harbor Island, at a stout 350 acres. In the International District, locals could see kabuki for the first time staged at the recently opened Nippon Kan Theater. The Anti-Tuberculosis League of King County is founded. The Sorrento Hotel opens, inviting guests of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Suffragists hold a convention. John Miler is Seattle’s mayor. The Seattle Turks of the Northwestern League are winning baseball game after baseball game fielding stars like Lee Magee, Pug Bennett and Ralph Capron and, in Pioneer Square, on September 23, 1909, the “Queen Mary of the Johns” is opened – the nation’s most elaborately appointed underground restroom. Above the bathroom stood the pergola, used as both a stop for the Yesler and James Street Cable Car Company and as a graceful feature to the bathrooms below. The pillars in the pergola were hollow, used as ventilation for the bathrooms below.

It could accommodate 10,000 patrons a day. The underground toilets were of the highest class. “The man of travels will find nowhere in the Eastern hemisphere a sub-surface public comfort station equal in character to that which has recently been completed in the downtown district of Seattle,” noted Park Board secretary Rolland Cotterill. “In the United States there are very few that will be found equal to it.”

Indeed – for sub-surface public comfort stations it was unrivaled. Designed by MIT graduate Julian T. Everett, who also the architect of Seattle’s Leavington Hotel and the Pilgrim Congregational Church, and build by general contractor Thomas Flynn at a cost of $24,505.85, the bathrooms were elegant and extravagent. Underground, there were bathrooms for both men and women, both free and paid. The all included toilets, wash basins, urinals (for the men), and sinks. Both men and women could lounge in the anteroom that had oak chairs and shoeshine stands. Men could purchase cigars. The stalls were marble. The fixtures were brass. The walls were white-tiled and the floors were terrazzo. The toilets were flushed thousands of times a day, more on Sundays when the saloons closed.

And above that, the pergola sat. “The canopy is a combination of cast-iron posts with ornamental bent iron brackets, cornice and ridge line,” noted Seattle’s weekly publication Pacific Builder and Engineer. 65,000 total pounds of iron works were used in the pergola. The supporting columns weighed 500 pounds. The ventilation columns weighed 2,000 pounds. “The entire roof of the canopy,” the paper continued, “is covered with wire glass, which was installed by the Westlake Sheet Metal Works.”

The toilets were used again and again and again until World War II when they were closed and capped over. The pergola was restored in the early 1970s with a large donation from the Casey family. James Casey was one of the founders of United Parcel Service. UPS was established in Pioneer Square two years before the “Queen Mary of Johns” was opened. In 1977 the pergola, and the Tlingit totem pole nearby, were designated national landmarks. Then, in January of 2001 it was shattered to the ground. The company that caused the destruction helped pay for its restoration. That work fell to the Seidelhuber Iron and Bronze Works who used almost all the parts that had crumbled to the ground, welding pieces back together that broke apart, recasting salvaged pieces, reworking and redoing the entire structure.

The rebuild cost $3.9 million. Heidi Seidelhuber said at the reopening of the pergola in August of 2002, “The accident will have been a gift in disguise to the city if we can make the pergola survive longer because of the work we have done.” It will stand, then, in the 21st century and into the 22nd.

Jonathan Shipley
11/28/2009