It was the summer of 1889, and Tacoma was in chaos. The commercial district of its main rival, Seattle, had just burned to the ground, and Tacoma was emerging as the economic hub of the Northwest. 

The city’s population had already increased by over 3,000 percent in just under a decade, from 1,098 residents in 1880 to around 35,000, and now that the Washington Territory had acquired statehood, it was about to surge even more. In fact, so popular was the burgeoning city that a few years earlier, senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut introduced a bill for formation and admission of the State of Tacoma into the Union—before the name was roundly vetoed and changed to “Washington.”

Tacoma’s rapid growth was largely thanks to the city’s new connection to the Northern Pacific Railway, linking the West Coast to Minneapolis. When the track was completed in 1883, Tacoma got its nickname, the City of Destiny—meant literally, as Tacoma was the final, westernmost destination on the line. Seattle, meanwhile, wouldn’t be connected to the railway network for another decade.

The city’s shipping industry was thriving in this era as well. Not-yet-world-renowned English author Rudyard Kipling visited in July in 1889, referring to Tacoma in a letter as "literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest.”

Dr. Henry Clay Bostwick was a Tacoma early adopter, landing in 1876 to become the city’s first practicing physician. He went on to help found the city’s first bank, the Western Trust Company of Tacoma, in 1889. The bank needed a grand house to live in, and the waves of new Tacomans needed housing too. Bostwick thought he would kill two birds with one stone.

What he came up with, the Bostwick Building, is still one of Tacoma’s best-loved architectural faves over 130 years later. With its bright yellow-and-red facade and unusual wedge shape, it’s unmissable, standing at the crucial triple intersection of Ninth Avenue, St. Helens, and Broadway (formerly C Street), at the south end of Downtown Tacoma’s Antique Row.

Construction began on the flatiron-shaped Bostwick Hotel during that same chaotic summer of 1889. This area would soon become the heart of the city’s theater district, with the debut of the Romanesque, fortress-like Tacoma Theatre the same year. The Bostwick was designed by Tacoma-based architects Oliver P. Dennis and John G. Proctor, whose other work included the Pierce County Courthouse and the original Puget Sound University (now the University of Puget Sound), along with many private residences. 

The hotel as well as the other retail spaces on the ground floor—collectively called the Bostwick Block—opened to the public in 1890, with the Western Trust Company of Tacoma originally occupying the main retail space and three floors of hotel rooms above it. The Bostwick quickly developed a reputation as one of Tacoma's most fashionable and popular hotels, with luxuriously furnished rooms and steam-powered heat—the height of modern technology in the 1890s.

Oliver and Proctor employed both Classical and Romanesque styles. Along with its eye-catching shape, the building features a pattern of recesses and bays, with the alternating square-shaped bays each capped with a gabled roof. A parapet along the top of the building connects the gables, forming crenellations that look like medieval battlements.  A classic Victorian frieze runs along the top. The Bostwick’s exterior features moldings and panels that one usually sees in interiors, although this decorative treatment was partially covered up by a layer of stucco as early as 1924. In addition, two bays were removed from the northern end of the building, the facade was reworked, and some extra windows were added to the storefronts on the ground floor. But otherwise, the outline and essential concept of the building are pretty much the same as they were in 1889.

Just three years after his namesake hotel was completed, Dr. Bostwick skipped town, following the nationwide financial crash now known to history as the Panic of 1893. During this catastrophic economic downturn, Tacoma’s quick-won fortune tanked so hard and so fast that some dubbed it instead the Panic of Tacoma. In the ensuing seven years, the population of Pierce County shrank by 30 percent, 14 of Tacoma’s 21 banks folded, and the Northern Pacific Railroad that put the city on the map declared bankruptcy and went into receivership.

“Tacoma, damaged so deeply by the depression in so many different ways, had perhaps the most difficult time recovering,” wrote John Caldbick on historylink.org. “It was unable to straighten out its municipal finances until mid-1900, and would never again seriously compete with Seattle for regional dominance.”

Although the Western Trust Company only lasted a year before folding, the Bostwick Hotel stayed open after Bostwick's departure. The hotel would enjoy renewed success from its location near the existing Tacoma Theatre as well as the Pantages and Rialto Theatres, which sprang up in 1918. 

Starting in 1893, the hotel was used as a meeting place for the Loyal Legion of the United States, an early group for Civil War veterans. Apocryphally, the tradition of standing and taking one’s hat off during the national anthem was begun here by General Rossell O’Brien on October 18 of that year, and the Bostwick Block pops up frequently in discussions on the origins of this custom. (Others have argued that the ritual dates back to as early as 1851, when, according to witnesses, statesman Daniel Webster attended a concert by opera singer Jenny Lind, and rose to his feet as she sang "The Star-Spangled Banner," prompting a trend among the audience.) The Daughters of the American Revolution, however, gave the credit to Rossell via a plaque that was erected on the side of the Bostwick in 1970 that still stands there today.

The hotel was renovated in 1932 and renamed the Brant Hotel. The ground-floor space has been home to a malted milk shop, Reed’s Hats, Gunderson’s Jewelry Store, Buchanan’s Shoes, and Smith’s Flower Shop, among many other businesses. In the mid-’80s, the stucco exterior was painted yellow with red trim, which quickly became dingy, with dirt no longer camouflaged by its previously dark walls. 

In 1999, the Bostwick Block was added to the Tacoma Register of Historical Places, to mark the diverse ways in which it’s contributed to the neighborhood and the city. It’s also located in the heart of Tacoma’s Old City Hall Historic District, a region of Downtown Tacoma that’s home to a handful of historically significant turn-of-the-century buildings and was added to the United States National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

Since the mid-1990s, she’s been in her coffee shop era. The Bostwick’s ground floor hosted Grounds for Coffee between 1993 and 2000, and after that, it was a Tully’s until 2018. Greg Petry bought the Bostwick Block that year and decided to try his own hand at coffee-slinging, opening the Bostwick Cafe, which closed in 2023. Years earlier, the empty space also got to cosplay as a pizzeria in the 1990 dark comedy I Love You to Death, with Kevin Kline running the eponymous Joey Boca’s Pizzeria, alongside his movie wife Tracey Ullman, out of the fake restaurant in the pizza-slice-shaped building. The upper floors also star in the film, as the apartment building owned by Kline and Ullman’s characters. (I Love You to Death was shot entirely on location in Grit City, in fact; here’s a list of all the famous Tacoma spots that got cameos.)

When Bostwick Cafe closed on the ground level in 2023, the building got a much-needed bath and fresh paint job, and it’s looking as vivid and golden as ever these days, in butter-yellow with brick-red accents. The big ground-floor space is home to Cremello Cafe today, an upscale coffee shop with big potted trees and a well-loved red grand piano from the previous coffee shop incarnation. The upstairs floors are still apartments, with 10 studios and 10 one-bedrooms for rent. Other retail shops on the Broadway side of the building include Destiny City Tattoo and Vessel Vintage Collective, an antique store. 

As Tacoma faces another, slightly slower population boom, the Bostwick Building continues to greet its new residents with timeless class and style (and subjectively cheap housing). Rudyard Kipling totally called it.