Seattle Historical Sites

This four unit apartment flat in the Squire Park neighborhood, between First Hill and the Central Area, was constructed in 1927. The Squire Park area developed between 1890 and 1910 as a residential neighborhood with single family homes and scattered apartment buildings. The nearby Yesler Way cable car line to Lake Washington opened in 1888 and transit lines and related commercial and residential development continued to expand,  as Seattle experienced a major population growth following the 1898 Alaska Gold Rush and into the first decades of the 20^th Century. The 1920s was a particularly prosperous time and developers invested heavily in apartment construction, particularly in neighborhoods served by transit lines and other services and amenities, to meet the demands for housing. This is a fairly typical example of a well-constructed 4-plex which would have served as housing for middle class or professional tenants.  

This 4-plex apartment building is rectangular in plan, of masonry construction, and has a hipped roof with shallow eaves and brick cladding over a concrete basement garage. The garage bays, consisting of 4 bays with roll-up doors, are at grade with the street and driveway and are prominent features of the primary south elevation. Above the garage the south façade is symmetrically arranged, with a slightly projecting central porch with wooden railings and a hipped roof supported by four square columns. The roof shelters the four separate wooden entry doors to each of the units. On each side of the entry bay are large picture windows of newer vinyl sliding sash. Similar windows are on the second story above, and two smaller double hung vinyl sash windows are directly above the porch. Windows on the primary facade have shutters. All other windows are also vinyl sash. The rectangular plan, hipped roof, brick cladding, symmetrical facade  and porch features are characteristic of the colonial revival style, which was one of the many popular architectural revival styles of the era.