Across the street from 619 Western Avenue is an incredible building.
The red brick exterior, cast iron arched windows frames and a towering stack
house the Seattle Steam Plant.
The steam system was built in 1893, the same year U.S. gold reserves dropped
and triggered a national depression. The resulting Panic of ‘93 hit Seattle hard
with corporate bankruptcies, mass layoffs, bank failures and white-collar crime.
But in the middle of it all, a central steam system was born – quite likely
leveraging much of the rebuilding taking place after a disastrous fire destroyed
much of the city in 1889. The city began to grow and to thrive, and the steam
system, right along with it.
The Seattle Steam & Power Plant was built in 1902.
During the same year, the Seattle Heat and Power Company secured a franchise
to lay steam mains to supply nearby buildings and to generate electricity for the
city and for street cars. The exhaust steam from the electric generating
equipmentwas used to supply steam for building heat and hot water.
The steam system that originally served 27 buildings now serves more than 175
buildings in an expanded service area.
During the 1990’s, Seattle Steam Co. almost doubled the baseload of its system.
Within its service area, including 619 Western Avenue, the company supplies
steam to more than 50 percent of the buildings and heats nearly 66 percent
of the total square footage, due to the large size of customers’ facilities.
Along with the adjacent Old Post Station, this is one of the last working remnants
of the original industrial fabric of the Pioneer Square Skid Road
National Historic District.
The building was built between 1900 and 1902 by Stone & Webster,
the Boston based utility company. Founded in 1889 by Charles A. Stone
and Edwin Webster, both graduates of MIT in electrical engineering,
the company was originally called the Massachusetts Electrical Company.
The firm began by managing utility plants in 1895. By 1902,
it had begun financing them through an in-house securities
department and actually constructing them; therefore this
Seattle Steam Plant must be among the company’s earliest
efforts and certainly one of their earliest enterprises in Seattle.
Stone and Webster had, in fact, maintained a significant
presence in King County since 1898, when it had acquired the region’s first
hydroelectric plant at Snoqualmie Falls and its subsidiary, the Seattle Electric
Company, took control of Seattle area utilities, as well as the
local street car lines. The building has been in continuous use as
a steam plant. In terms of function, the interior of the building
was designed to maximize the use of gravity in the movement of coal.
Coal came into the building through “Hell’s alley,” located at the southwest
corner of the building. From there, it moved to the eastern portion
of the building and was raised by a conveyor to the roof, where it was
emptied into a covered roof monitor and moved in a north-south direction.
From the roof monitor, the coal would be dropped into the coal
bunkers below and then from the coal bunkers to the “water-tube” boilers.
The plant also produced electricity for the streetcars, which had been
operating in Seattle, since before the Great Fire, thanks to two
battery rooms, one in the basement and one at the penthouse level.
The building still provides steam to most of Pioneer Square and to other
areas of Seattle, from Pioneer Square roughly up to
Avenue to the east and between Blanchard Street to the north
and King Street to the south. High pressure steam lines provide steam
to areas east of Interstate-5, while low pressure lines are used
to provide steam to Seattle’s downtown and west of the I-5.
The fact that this is still a working steam plant, in itself, is significant,
since similar buildings throughout the United States have frequently been
converted to other uses The Neo-Renaissance composition,
particularly of the original five bays along Western Avenue,
is especially striking. In addition, the smokestack, which is
visible in many parts of Pioneer Square and Downtown
Seattle, is an important visual marker within the city.
In the context of American urban history, this building is typical of
power production buildings associated with industrial growth
at the turn of the twentieth century and is similar to several
other industrial buildings produced by and administered by
Stone & Webster or its subsidiaries in this period The top floor
is not shown in the original drawings, but appears to have
been added at the end of construction in 1902.
The northern bay, corresponding to the hoistway and one of the
battery rooms, was apparently added in 1935. Both the later
date of design and construction and the functional aspects of the
interior account for differences between it and the symmetrically composed
Neo-Renaissance elements of the earlier part of the façade;
but stylistically, the difference between the two parts of the façade
is not jarring. Aside from the 1935 addition and an enlargement of a
door to accommodate the installation of a new generator, later filled back in,
the building’s exterior appearance has been not been altered since 1902.
This five story building adjoins the more utilitarian one story
Post Station, also associated with the Steam Plant at 619 Post Avenue.
Listed in the National Register of Historic Places since June 22, 1970
