page_title: Seattle Times Building
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Seattle Times Building / History
caption_attribution_description: Item 175426, City Light Slides (Record Series 1204-04), Seattle Municipal Archives. English: Seattle Times building, Seattle, Washington, U.S. circa 1970s.
context_page_description: The Seattle Times Building is the former headquarters of The Seattle Times, located in Seattle, Washington, United States. The three-story building was occupied by the newspaper from 1931 to 2011, replacing the Times Square Building. It was originally built in 1931 and later expanded to accommodate more office space and larger presses.
  The exterior and roof of the Seattle Times Building were designated a city landmark in 1996. Designed by Robert C. Reamer with elements of the Art Deco and Moderne styles, the reinforced concrete building was representative of early 20th century architecture in Seattle.
  The newspaper moved out of the building in 2011 and sold it in 2013 to Onni Group, a Canadian real estate developer, who plans to build four residential skyscrapers on the site and adjacent parking lot to the south. Onni plans to preserve the building's facade and integrate it into the podium of a 240-foot-tall building, converting it into a rooftop balcony. Demolition of the building began in October 2016, after incidents involving squatters on the property.
context_section_description: From 1916 onward, the Blethen Building near modern-day McGraw Square was the headquarters and printing plant for The Seattle Times, one of Seattle's two daily newspapers. The newspaper had been founded in 1896 and moved from two previous offices and printing plants, each time relocating further and further north of the city's historic central business district. By 1930, the newspaper's circulation averaged over 100,000 copies per day and the strain of its growth had caused the location to run out of office space and present logistical problems with printing and distribution, especially as Stewart Street, used by delivery trucks and nicknamed "Times Alley", had grown to become a major thoroughfare for automobile traffic.
  In the summer of 1929, The Seattle Times Company unveiled plans to build a new complex of buildings along Fairview Avenue in the Cascade neighborhood for their new offices and printing plant, to be a modern class A office with 120,000 square feet (11,000 m²) of floor space. The old building was built to be readily converted into a traditional office building; previous plans had called for the building to be raised to nine stories to accommodate the newspaper's growth. A groundbreaking ceremony was held by the newspaper's staff and the Metropolitan Building Company on September 26, 1929, both of whom expected the project to be completed the following year. The building's foundations were designed and built to support a possible 20- to 30-story skyscraper above the three-story office. The $1.25 million project (equivalent to $21.01 million in 2019) was partially funded through $600,000 in bonds advertised in the Times. Construction on the site began on June 9, 1930, with major excavation by general contractors Teufel & Carlson.
  To prepare for the moving of printing presses, the Times began publishing shorter versions of its dailies in December 1930. The newspaper began publishing at the new building on March 2, 1931, using a press capable of printing 40,000 copies per hour. The new facility was heralded as "the finest plant yet built for an American newspaper" by the paper's publisher, C.B. Blethen; other newspapers from around the state of Washington congratulated the Times on their move and complimented the building and plant on their modernity and functionality. The building's location on Fairview Avenue gave rise to a nickname, "Fairview Fanny", coined by Teamster columnist Ed Donohoe to refer the newspaper's reputation as a stodgy and slow-to-change paper.
caption: The Times Building facing John Street in the 1970s, featuring the golden Times logo installed in 1947
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