A heating plant would be built in the basement as well as a water cooler to supply drinking water to all the tenants, that would be fed by a 12,000 gallon tank in the pyramid roof of the tower.
The building would be equipped with eight high-speed elevators that could carry an estimated 22,000 passengers per day. With a steel-frame and concrete structure, the building would be clad in granite at the base, and the rest in gleaming white terra cotta that would, according to local media, "cast the rays of the sun in a blaze that should be seen 15 or 20 miles". Gaggin, who returned to Seattle in October 1910 with the final plans for a 467-foot, 42-story (22-story base, 20-story tower, at his son's suggestion) building that would incorporate all the modern features of the Metropolitan Life and Singer Buildings. With L.C.'s health declining and other business interests in New York requiring his attention, he put construction of the $1,000,000 building in the hands of B.L. Gill and the city council, the proposed Smith Tower would be the third tallest office building in the world behind only the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower and Singer Building in New York City. With the passage of a bond to purchase the city hall site and assurance from mayor Hiram C. With construction proposed to begin in June 1910, instead came the announcement that month that Smith would be willing to build to an unheard of 40-floors (35-story base, 5-story tower) on the condition that Seattle's city hall and civic center not be moved uptown from their property at 3rd Avenue and Yesler Way on the adjoining block. 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. 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, 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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