The Pergola is also listed on the National Register as part of a smaller
grouping which includes the Pioneer Building and the Totem Pole, all
located in Pioneer Place.
Designed by architect Julian Everett, this open air structure has become
the symbol not just of Pioneer Place, but of the entire Pioneer Square-
Skid Road National Historic District. It was built, in part, to greet the
many visitors who came to Seattle for the Alaska Yukon Exposition, located
on the new campusof the University of Washington. The Pergola served not
only as a shelter,but also as the upper part of the underground comfort
station, frequently described,because of the elegance of its design
as the “Queen Mary of Johns.”
Both parts of the project were completed in November, 1909 with
finishing touches tothe “superstructure” completed during the week of
January 15, 1910.
The whole project was described in glowing terms in 1910 in
Pacific Builder and Engineer: “The man of travels will find nowhere in the
Easternhemisphere a sub-surface public comfort station equal in
character to that whichhas recently been completed in the downtown
district of Seattle..” There was initialresistance to the Pergola and the
comfort station by the local Seattle press andowners of property near it,
before construction.
Once it was completed, it washailed as a wonderful addition to an area still
considered an important commercial
center: “Three of the four nearest street corners are occupied by banks,
and thefourth by the city ticket office of one of the transcontinental
railroads. Two of thecrosstown and the Tacoma interurban car lines
terminate within a block of it; it isalso passed by a large majority of the
Puget Sound and coastwise steamship passengers.It is on the base of the
triangle, the apex of which is occupied by the totem pole that has made
Seattle famous.” The architect of the Pergola and comfort station,
Julian Everett studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This suggests a new trend in Seattle in the 1900s, when architectural
practitioners of some education and sophistication began to arrive in Seattle.
During the decade before, many of the architects came into the field of
architecture through the building trades and/or had received no formal
educationin architecture. Julian Everett had an independent practice in
Seattle from 1904 to 1922. Aside from the Pergola, he designed
Pilgrim Congregational Church (1905-6) and Temple de Hirsch (1906-08),
which has been destroyed(aside from one small portion), both in Seattle.
By the 1970s, the Pergola itself had fallen into disrepair and its canopy
was covered with sheet metal. After carefully researching the structure,
Ilze Jones of Jones & Jones Architecture and Landscape Architecture did a
restoration of the Pergola, based on original drawings, interviews and
photographs in the Webster Stevens photograph collection.
In 2000, an errant Fedex truck clipped the Pergola, reducing it to a heap of
beautiful cast-iron parts. The City of Seattle hired Seidelhuber Iron Works,
thought to have been the original fabricators of the Pergola, to recast certain
elementsand reconstructthe Pergola. The restored structure was designed to
withstand future earthquakes, with new steel structural elements hidden
inside of the originalcolumns and vent columns.
These new structural elements are then tied together below ground by a
commonfoundation. The added structure has also been designed to make
the entire structure seismically safe.
