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• Kreisman, Lawrence. (1992). The Stimson Legacy: Architecture in the Urban West, Seattle: Willows Press/University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-9631630-0-0, pp. 138-149.

Metropolitan Center

C.D. Stimson's last years in Seattle are strikingly parallel to those of his father forty years earlier in Los Angeles. They are a record of cimmitments to downtown that included his own building projects, his financial support of other civic projects, and his generously given time and energy to various boards and commissions. It was through these involvements that he and his son Thomas made the aquaintance of R.C. Reamer, an architect who would have an important role in designing commercial projects for the Stimsons in the late 1920s.

Stimson was an influential member of the board of the Metropolitan Building Company , founded in 1907 to develop the University Tract lands. The board consisted of eleven members, each of whom had distinguished himself in Seattle commerce and industry. One of these founding members, Mr. George W. Emerson, described the conditions of the site and the mission of the company in these words:

It is seldom given to any body of city builders to act as a unit in the building of the very center of a large city; seldom that a tract of many acres can be found, unimproved, with the retail district of a city of two hundred thousand people bounding it on two sides, and the better portion of the resident district abutting upon the other two sides; a tract comparatively level, with paved and finished streets to the east, west, north and south; where the grading and widening have been done or soon will be, where all things are ready for that extension and for permanent buildings for which tenants wait. In the very heart of such a city, we are called upon to grade and pave our streets and build acres of commercial blocks--to build a city within a city. No grander task has fallen to any body of men, no grander chance to accomplish great results with few mistakes. Symmetry, beauty, adaptability and economy in construction should be easy to attain under these conditions and the city that we build should be marvel among the cities of the world.

Stimson brought to the company his experience in real estate development and business management. He became a stockholder shortly after the formation of the company and, as offerings were made for the buildings to be constructed in the development, he and his family members increased their holdings until they became the largest owners in the company. By 1926, the C.D. Stimson Company held a quarter interest, more than twice as much as any other single stockholder in the organization. His involvement was reflected in his role on the board. Elected to the board of trustees at the annual meeting in 1916, he became vice president in 1922 and president in 1925. He also assumed directorship of the Metropolitan National Bank at the Center in 1917 and was an organizer and director of the General Insurance Company of America (now known as Safeco).

The earliest buildings, the Cobb Medical Center and the White, Henry and Stuart blocks, followed the designs of the New York firm of John Mead Howells and I. N. Phelps Stokes with A. H. Albertson as associate. The buildings were of similar height (11 stories) and materials (brick and terra cotta) in a dignified Beaux Arts style. These and all subsequent buildings provided retail on the ground floors. The Metropolitan Theatre of 1911 deviated from the original plan, as did the Arena in 1915 and Cobb Building Annex in 1921. In January, 1923, the group of office buildings and shops which were variously called "University Tract" and "Metropolitan Building Company" were officially christened "Metropolitan Center."

Stimson and other businessmen banded together in 1922 to support a community hotel. C. D. was appointed chair of the planning committee and reviewed a number of proposals from local property owners before selecting the site recommended by the Metropolitan Building Company. the Chamber of Commerce took charge of financing the $5 million building of the hotel. C. D. was elected vice-president of the Community Hotel Corporation Board of Trustees. When a shortage of funds threatened to compromise the design of the building, C. D. stepped in to purchase additional stocks and bonds in the company, making him the largest single owner in the corporation. His investment resulted in the completion in 1924 of Seattle's grande dame of hotels, the Olympic, a brick and terra cotta faced Italian palazzo designed by the prestigious New York firm of George Post. The hotel name was, in fact, Stimson's preference, an homage to his favorite yacht, Olympic.

The Stimson Building designed by Howells and Albertson was named for C. D. by an appreciative board of directors toward their president. It became the second structure in the University Tract built exclusively for the use of physicians and dentists. Stimson had suggested that use. Its modified-Georgian, brick and terra cotta facade extended the length of Fourth Avenue between University and Seneca Streets. A two-story barrel-vaulted-and coffered entrance lobby panelled and paved with Sienna gray and Tennessee pink marble greeted its users. There were setbacks on the seventh floor that provided terraces for these offices. The top floor also featured semicircular beaded windows and balustrades. Two prominent terra cotta pediments with bas reliefs of Asclepius, God of Healing, dominated the north and south wings of the building. According to the Metropolitan Bulletin description, "Of heroic proportions, befitting the god to whom the Greeks erected at Epidaurus one of the most famous of temples, the great bas-reliefs fill the decorative spaces in the pediments at either end of the building. The head, done in buff terra cotta, is silhouetted against an oval background of sage green terra cotts."

In the midst of these downtown projects, Stimson encouraged and promoted the establishment of Seattle's Fifth Avenue entertainment district--a district not unlike the Broadway District in Los Angeles that his Million Dollar Theatre had inspired. The Coliseum Theatre had started it in 1916; the opening of the Fifth Avenue Theatre by the Metropolitan Building Company in 1926 and the opening of John Hamrick's Music Box Theatre midway between the two in 1928 completed a district that stretched from the Metropolitan Theatre on University Street north to the glamorous Orpheum Theatre at Westlake.

Harry C. Arthur, Jr. had been General Manager of West Coast Theatres, Inc., the largest intra-state theatre circuit in the world, when he took over as President of Pacific Northwest Theatres, then the largest circuit of theatres in the Pacific Northwest. By 1926, the corporation had absorbed the Jensen and Von Herberg chain of over 40 theatres (including Stimson's Coliseum) and was rapidly adding new theatres, to include the Fifth Avenue in Seattle, the Broadway in Portland, and the Mt. Baker in Bellingham. The Stimsons became the largest local subscribers to the debentures and common stock of the company; Thomas D. Stimson was one of three vice-presidents and he and his father C. D. sat on the board of directors.

Architect R. C. Reamer had been hired by the Metropolitan Building Company to design what would become the Olympic Hotel. The United Hotel Corporation, which was slated to operate the hotel, refused to sign the lease unless its company architects, George Post of New York, drew the plans. Reamer lost the commission, but the Metropolitan hired him as house architect, a position that provided him with important commissions downtown. His first major work as the Skinner Building of 1925-26 along Fifth Avenue between Union and University streets. It represented a successful adaption of the Italian Renaissance to an office block. The subtle, dignified character of the sandstone-faced building, with its mock loggia and tile roofing, belied the exotic and extraordinarily colorful interior of the Fifth Avenue Theatre within--the largest and the most authentic example of traditional Chinese timber architecture and decoration oustide of Asia.

They spent $1.5 million to evoke the Temple of Heavenly Peace in the Forbidden City and a Ming dynasty royal audience hall dominated by a great dome. The one difference--and it was significance--was that all of the rounded posts, stenciled beams, layered brackets, dragons, birds and flowers were made of plaster, cleverly disguised to pass as wood. It was largely through the knowledge and skills of Gustav Liljestrom, chief designer at S. and J. Gump in San Francisco and an expert in Chinese decoration, that the project succeeded so well.

The opening night program educated theatregoers to the splendors around and above them:

Perhaps its most imposing feature is the great dome, as elsewhere throughout the theatre, its symbolic themes borrowed from Chinese legends, its motifs from Chinese poetry. Coiled within an azure sphere and surrounded by glowing hues of cloud-red, emblematic of calamity and warefare; blue, of rain; green symbolic of plague; black, of floods; and gold, of prosperity--is the Great Dragon, guardian of the heavens and foe of evil spirits. He is, indeed, the brooding genius of the place, his presence shadowed and multiplied in varying shapes and forms throughout the structure.

Poetry and legend were not only the province of the architecture but of the architect as well. In a misty, romantic homage to R. C. Reamer, the program painted him in almost God-like terms as "Weaver of Dreams." The view presented was that architects, endowed with creative genius and trained to recognize and interpret the architecture and decorative styles of every culture, could pick and choose among them to come up with the perfect building.

From kings he borrows, and from dynasties, dipping into the coffers of the past for his materials. To the castle of a Saxon monarch he goes for staunchness and solidity, to a temple of Ilium for beauty, to be fashioned into forms of majesty and grace. A Grecian urn yields him a perfect line, a Pompeiian frieze, perhaps, a rhythmic pattern. In a Byzantine seraglio or a Mohammedan mosque, he may find his colors, and from the palace of a Chinese emperor take what he desires of richness and magnificence, of poetry and symmetry, of works of structural skill and exquisite craftsmanship, with which to materialize his vision. Then, with a genius that is all his own, he shapes it, out of his inner consciousness conjuring it into the thing of coordinated beauty that stands forth, at last, an edifice. Thus does he create--the Weaver of Dreams, designer of this building and this theatre--R. C. Reamer, the Architect.

The theatre's opening was a major event, drawing crowds comparable to the population that gathered on Armistice Night, 1918, in the downtown streets. Those fortunate enough to attend the performance would have enjoyed a variety of cinema, live music, and stage shows. The program featured guest organist Oliver Wallace on the ascending Wurlitzer: a filmed travelogue; Lipschultz and his syncopating soloists in a musicale, appropriately entitled "Orientale"; a scenic poem filmed by Robert Bruce; the Fanchon and Marco stage show featuring Boyce Combe and the Sunkist Beauty Revue; and the feature film that night, Cecil B. DeMille's "Young April."

With the Million Dollar, the Coliseum, and the Fifth Avenue drawing thousands of patrons, Stimson was quick to recognize the financial advantages of motion picture theatres. In August, 1923, he had purchased lots on Fifth Avenue in the block south of his Coliseum. Grote Rankin Company was located at the north corner, and Stimson purchased from that family the Sun Building, a two-story terra cotta-faced retail and office building, and an adjoining mid-block lot then occupied by a three-story brick rooming house built in 1904. He leased the latter to John Hemrick, local theatre entrepreneur, for the purpose of building a movie theatre, the Music Box. Hamrick had already built several silent motion picture houses, the Colonial Theatre at 1515 Fourth Avenue in 1913, and the Blue Mouse, across the street from Stimson's Fifth Avenue property, in 1920.

Completed and opened in 1928, the Music Box Theatre was reported to be the first in Seattle designed exclusively for sound motion pictures or "talkies." Hamrick had witnessed the tryout of the Vitaphone sound system invented by Bell Laboratories while visiting New York City in 1926. He had installed it in the Blue Mouse in 1927 and, confident that it was the next great step in the evolution of motion pictures, had his new theatre specially designed to accommodate Vitaphone and Movie tone system.

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