The latest renovation, completed in 2020, builds upon the unique opportunity of living atop one of Seattle’s most iconic structures, updating the apartment into a fresh and contemporary space that celebrates the character of the building and the particularities of its history and form. In the late 1990s, the neglected and underutilized space was converted into an eccentric apartment with a 20-year lease. The lower portion of the pyramid, now the main level of the penthouse, went through a variety of uses, including serving as office space and a radio broadcasting studio run by infamous Prohibition-era bootlegger Roy Olmstead and his wife Vivian, who was rumored to broadcast coded information for her husband’s rum-running operation during her children’s radio story program. THE PYRAMID LIFEĭespite its enviable position above the city skyline, the base of the pyramid was originally used for a building maintenance office, and the very top of the tower housed a large water cistern for the building’s re-suppression system, which remained into the 1940s. As a young boy, he would hang out in the basement of the building after school, while she worked, and then they’d take the bus back home to West Seattle after her shift.The top level of the two-level penthouse, where the materiality and form of the pyramid are most directly experienced, is programmed as the primary living space with kitchen, living and dining flowing together in a single, open plan. Lalley’s mom, Jeannie Lalley, was an elevator operator at Smith Tower for decades. “I was working part-time after school and then when I got into high school I’d work full time in the summertime and when I graduated I went in full-time.” “I started there when I was 14 and I quit when I was 23,” he said. His very first job was operating elevators at Smith Tower. Redmond’s Thaddeus Lalley thinks that’s a shame. The elevator profession is on the verge of complete extinction. And they will have to find a new line of work because Smith Tower is the only remaining bank of manually operated elevators on the West Coast. So the three currently on staff will be laid off. We will be retaining an elevator operator for Car Seven, which is the only car that actually accesses this 35th-floor observatory.”īut all the other elevator cars, that shuttle the building’s many office workers up to their floors each day, will no longer have elevator operators. “Fortunately, the visitor experience will not change. “We’re doing this to modernize and get up to the proper safety standards this building should be at,” said Smith Tower’s visitor experience general manager Marissa Brooks. They’re switching the elevators from manual to the classic push-button system every other building uses. So that’s why we have glass doors because the elevator operators did need to see where they were going to know what floor they were on and who to pick up.”īut by mid-2018 elevator operators will mostly be a thing of the past at Smith Tower. The button panel was added in 2002, so before then it was just the throttle and the operator. “It is 103 years old, but the cables are new. “This is the original elevator,” said Tiffany, an elevator operator, as she took me up to the 35th floor. Smith Tower was once the tallest building this side of the Mississippi and its bank of elevators are as old as the building itself - built in 1914.
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