Welcome to the first installation of a new monthly column by Meg van Huygen. Each month, she’ll tell the story of a particular building, bridge, or other historic place in the Pacific Northwest—and the people who created them. 

In 2019, when upscale American bistro Ben Paris moved into the freshly renovated State Hotel, its name referenced a slice of now-obscure Seattle history. Between the 1910s and 1970s, sportsman and entrepreneur Ben Paris owned a chain of restaurants that flecked downtown—one of which occupied the same address at 1501 Second Avenue. But despite its lavish interior and elevated comfort food, the new Ben Paris isn’t the most sophisticated thing ever to take up residence here. 

Since its completion in 1905, the neoclassical Eitel Building has occupied the northwestern corner of Second Avenue and Pike Street. With its terra-cotta ornaments and beige brick cladding, it was one of the first high-rise office buildings constructed in downtown Seattle—and one of the most modern buildings in Seattle upon its debut, boasting luxurious amenities, state-of-the-art concrete flooring, and the largest passenger elevator in the Pacific Northwest. 

Fred Eitel arrived in Seattle from Minnesota in 1901, forming the Eitel Land Company with his brother, David F. Eitel, the next year. Soon, the second phase of the Denny Regrade project opened up plenty of land-grabbing opportunities in the downtown area, as more swaths of Denny Hill were hydraulic-hosed into Elliott Bay, and the brothers began buying up parcels in what’s now Belltown and the Pike Place Market neighborhood. In fact, the southernmost border of the second phase of the regrade ended at Second Avenue and Pike Street—the very site chosen for the Fred J. Eitel Building.

Construction began in April 1904, and the idea was to create deluxe offices for the rapidly developing northern part of downtown Seattle—which was then thought of as a sort of a second downtown, in addition to what we now call Pioneer Square. On the ground floor would be two retail spaces, while 95 offices intended for medical professionals would take up the top five floors. To map it out, the Eitels looped in architect William Doty Van Siclen.

The Eitel’s exterior is chiefly brick and terra-cotta. The tan bricks used for the cladding were manufactured by Denny Clay Company, made from disintegrated earth that once composed Denny Hill in the very same spot. It was a study in both utility and opulence, seen today in the building’s very fancy entry vestibule on Second Avenue, featuring an elaborate Renaissance Revival classical portico made of terra-cotta cosplaying as granite. Pairs of Corinthian columns, each with its own corresponding pilaster, support a high decorative archway with indented entablature on the sides, while a panel on the florated frieze announced the building’s name.

The inside was just as luxe for the era—an early rental brochure promised that each office “will have electric light, gas, hot and cold water, janitor service and compressed air, all with the exception of light to be furnished without extra charge.” Although many more high-rises were to be erected in the area over the next few years—particularly after Pike Place Market appeared just a block away in 1907—the Eitel Building was the centerpiece of the urban district that was still being carved into the landscape.

Upon the building’s debut, Max Ragley Drug Company occupied the southeastern half of the ground floor, facing Pike Street, while a 10-cent store operated out of the northern space facing Second Avenue. A mention of “well-known druggist” Ragley was included in rental brochures, to appeal to doctors and other medical professionals, whose businesses were helped by an on-site pharmacist. (Ragley was later replaced by Swift Drugs and then, in 1925, George Bartell’s ninth drugstore in Seattle, which would operate in the space until 1958.) More retail would move in underground as well—the Pike was a “fashionable grill room with a mission similar to the rathskeller,” and it took up the Eitel’s entire basement floor in 1905. 

Fred Eitel made his office on the second floor in the building. But by 1906, the Eitels had already sold it, their dollar-sign eyes now cast upon Bellevue, since they knew the Lake Washington Ship Canal was coming. Fred formed the Bellevue Land Company with F. A. Sutphen and William Norris and started the same process all over again, buying up property along the shores of Meydenbauer Bay and later platting the Lochleven district—which indeed became profitable when the canal was completed in 1916. Eitel went on to help found the Bellevue Water Company in the 1920s, served on the Bellevue School Board, and was one of the impresarios involved in the creation of Meydenbauer Park.

The J. A. Livesley Company added a seventh floor to the Eitel Building the same year it was purchased. The accession is very visible from the street, with two distinct cornices—one original, one additional—creating an ice cream sandwich effect at the top of the structure. The building changed owners a few more times over the years, and the offices were eventually opened to nonmedical tenants: a watchmaker, a typewriter repairman, several psychic readers, a few photographers, many different attorneys, a ballet academy, the Washington Republican Club, and a “doll hospital,” among others. (You know, to fix dolls? Ostensibly?)

In 1914, Ben Paris opened up a card room and restaurant in the basement of the Eitel, in the Pike’s former unit. Paris was a Texan sportsman, conservationist, and entrepreneur who landed in Washington state in 1906 and set about opening a series of upscale billiards parlors among Seattle, Mt. Vernon, and Bremerton. In 1930, Paris’s best-known establishment would open a few blocks away, at 1609 Westlake Avenue, purveying barber services, men’s clothing, fishing tackle, hunting rifles, and other sports gear alongside meals in the restaurant. Notably, it also included a huge aquarium in the dining room, filled with live bass.

By the late '50s, both Bartell Drugs and Ben Paris left the Eitel, and the decline of the blocks surrounding Pike Place Market commenced around the same time. Tenants fled their offices, as smutty movie theaters and two-bit taverns set up shop on the same block, attracting crime, and the building, which had few vacancies prior, rarely enjoyed full occupancy thereafter. By 1968, just the second floor of offices and the retail spaces at street level and the basement were rented out. Real estate investors Richard and Sandra Nimmer bought the Eitel in 1975, hoping to repair and resell it, but no buyers manifested. By 1978, nothing above the first floor was occupied. Under its new ownership, the Eitel Building fell into disrepair and was soon known locally as an eyesore.

Between 1995 and 2015, the building was perhaps best known to downtowners and office workers as the home of the sketchy, still beloved Osaka Grill Teriyaki & Deli. Affectionately known to longtime Seattleites as “Scaryaki” or “Scary Teri,” no prep gloves were worn here, there were moving cockroaches on the ceiling, and the owner might sell you a stolen iPad along with your spicy chicken box, but the food was still fantastic.

The Eitel remained for sale all the while. Mild damage sustained in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake further dissuaded potential buyers. By 2006, a wig shop, a smoke shop, a nail salon, Scary Teri, and the King County Department of Health's needle exchange as its only tenants, the Eitel Building was a strong candidate for demolition. That is, until the decrepit building was designated as a historic landmark the same year by the Landmarks Preservation Board. This was a calculated response to owner Richard Nimmer seeking to add a 22-floor tower on top of the existing building—he couldn’t modify it if it were a protected landmark. Even then, it took until 2011 for the Seattle City Council to approve the landmark designation, following a lengthy battle between Nimmer, who opposed the rules and recommendations that the Landmarks Preservation Board would impose on his property, and the condo owners at Fifteen Twenty-One Second Avenue, directly to the north of the Eitel, who would lose their southern views if Nimmer built his tower. 

Once the dispute was settled and the landmark status was secured, the property was put up for sale yet again. After many prospective buyers backed out, Nimmer finally sold the Eitel to Lake Union Partners in late 2015 for $5.35 million. The Seattle-based commercial real estate firm socked another $25 million into renovating the whole building, adding a complete seismic retrofit, refinishing the terra-cotta exterior, and building out a 91-room boutique hotel in the interior, executed by Vida Design. The historic building was carefully preserved by architectural firm Weinstein A+U and general contractor Exxel Pacific, including the ornate arched entry on Second Avenue, and a new steel-and-glass canopy was added. Customer elevators were engineered, as well as fresh new mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. The top floor, added in 1906, now houses penthouse suites with private terraces, upon which guests can enjoy the western view of the Market and Elliott Bay beyond it.

The project finished in 2019, and the Eitel Building was grandly debuted to the public once again, restyled as the State Hotel. While the hotel’s lobby and elevator bank take up the northern half of the ground floor, which was one retail space, the southern half is home to the newest incarnation of Ben Paris. The restaurant sports warm teak floors, white tile, and a large-scale custom mural by Seattle tattoo artist Kyler Martz. As a nod to the restaurant-slash-billiards-parlor that once lived one floor below, the new Ben Paris serves similarly unfussy American cuisine—if a little jazzier than the type you might find in a midcentury pool hall—and many cocktail names are references to Seattle history. E.g., the Filson Journeyman, the Boom and Bust, and the Gin Griffey Juniper. 

If you look at a photo of the intersection of Second and Pike when the Eitel Building was young, you’ll see that none of the other buildings survive today. Gone are the old Bon Marché building (razed in 1991 to make way for the Newmark Tower, now occupied by Target), the Romanesque Revival–styled Masonic Building (later the People’s Saving Bank, replaced by a parking garage in 1963), and a no-named two-story retail building (replaced by the Haight Building in 1911, which was demolished to make way for a parking lot for many years, and replaced by the 39-story residential West Edge Tower in 2017). It’s a minor miracle that the Eitel Building is still with us, at 120 years old, to say nothing of being in such top shape. Stop by the next time you’re in the neighborhood, to gaze up at the ice cream sandwich cornices, enjoy the restored ornate entryway, or just have a lovely, berry-studded Gin Griffey Juniper in the bar at Ben Paris. It’s your building to enjoy, Seattle—hopefully for many years to come.