page_title: Architecture of Seattle
section_title: Apartment buildings
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of Seattle / Residential architecture / Apartment buildings
caption_attribution_description: English: The former Fire Station No. 25, Seattle, Washington (roughly on the border between Capitol Hill and First Hill) now converted to housing. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
context_page_description: The architecture of Seattle, Washington, the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., features elements that predate the arrival of the area's first settlers of European ancestry in the mid-19th century, and has reflected and influenced numerous architectural styles over time. As of the early 21st century, a major construction boom continues to redefine the city's downtown area as well as neighborhoods such as Capitol Hill, Ballard and, perhaps most dramatically, South Lake Union.
context_section_description: Seattle residents in the early years of European-American settlement lived either in private houses, boarding houses, lodging houses (like boarding houses, but without the provision of meals), or generally modest residential hotels. The last of these arrangements began to evolve into apartments houses in the late 19th century, with many of the apartment buildings located near streetcar lines.
  Seattle has very few remaining 19th-century apartment buildings. Two with city landmark status are the Victorian Row Apartments, 1234 South King Street on the border of the International District and Central District and the Wayne Apartments in Belltown. Victorian Row was built in 1891 on a site near its current location, moved in 1909 during the Jackson Street Regrade, and rehabilitated 1992–1993, constitutes Seattle's only remaining structurally unaltered 19th-century apartment building. The Wayne Apartments, originally three row houses, is probably best known for the bars along Second Avenue in a 1911 extension of the building toward the street. The three two-story attached wood-frame rowhouses were constructed some time between 1888 and 1893, and were representative of "a once-common but now extremely rare rowhouse building form in Seattle." Around 1906 the neighborhood was the subject of one of Seattle's many regrades. By 1911, the old buildings had been divided into apartments. They were raised to become the upper stories of a building with commercial buildings at street level, constituting a "regrade hybrid," common both here in the Denny Regrade and in the regraded portions of the International District.
  An apartment building dating from 1903, somewhat structurally similar to the Wayne Apartments, and similarly raised in 1911 to add a commercial ground floor, stood at the northeast corner of 12th Avenue East and East Pike Street on Capitol Hill until it was demolished in 2014.
  Around 1910 Seattle began to see apartment buildings for a wealthier clientele. On Capitol Hill, apartments from the 1910s advertised such features as private baths, gas ranges, refrigerators, telephones, bay windows, hardwood floors, built-in cabinetry, leaded and/or beveled glass, and entry through a marble-floored lobby. The Bamberg (1910), still standing at 416 E Roy Street on Capitol Hill, was designed by architect John Corrigan for brick contractor Charles H. Bamberg. The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods notes that this building of fourteen four-room apartments, with deep eaves and recessed balconies, provides a "good example of the elegant materials and design used to help many apartments blend in to the areas that were primarily single family at the time they were built." The Phoenix (535 20th Avenue East) even offered some apartments with 18 feet (5.5 m) ceilings. Closer to the center of town, where Olive Way curves up from downtown near present-day Interstate 5, are more modest apartment buildings such as the brick-and-clapboard Celeste (1906) at East Olive Place & Melrose, the Lauren Renee (1912, John Creutzer) to its immediate east, and around the corner on Bellevue Avenue the Bel Fiore (1907, Henderson Ryan) with its arched recessed entry. Nearby, the 6-story Biltmore (1924, Stuart & Wheatley) tried to mix economy and luxury. Most of its 125 apartments were (and are) small "studio apartments" with no separate bedroom, but some apartments were considerably larger, and the building features an elegant Tudor Gothic design, a marble and mahogany lobby, and originally included a tea room and had a full staff more typical of a luxury building. Further north, where the west side of Capitol Hill becomes a near-cliff with views across Lake Union to Queen Anne Hill, are view buildings such as the Ben Lomond (1910, Ellsworth Green), "[s]queezed onto a site that appears unbuildable," with 24 large apartments, designed with a children's playhouse on the roof rather than a penthouse apartment; the Roundcliffe (1925, Stuart & Wheatley); and the Belroy (1931, William Bain, Sr. & Lionel Pries), as "bold" in its Art Deco design as in being a luxury build
caption: The former Fire Station 25 (built 1909) on the border of Capitol Hill and First Hill, decommissioned in 1970 and converted into 16 condominium apartments in 1980.
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