Smith Tower: The First Skyscraper West of the Mississippi

Lyman Cornelius Smith made his fortune from typewriters. The L. C. Smith and Brothers Typewriter Company, which would eventually merge with Corona to become Smith-Corona, put his name on millions of desks across America. With part of that fortune, Smith decided to build a tower in Seattle that would be the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. He did not live to see it open.

Smith Tower was completed and opened in nineteen fourteen, four years after Smith's death. It stood thirty-eight stories and reached four hundred sixty-two feet. For seventeen years, it held the record as the tallest building west of the Mississippi. For several decades after that it remained the tallest building in Seattle, defining the city's skyline in photographs and postcards from the early twentieth century.

The building included a feature that became its own kind of legend. On the thirty-fifth floor, a room called the Chinese Room had been furnished as a gift to Lyman Smith from the Empress of China: lacquered walls, carved furniture, a ceiling of inlaid wood imported from China. At the center of the room sat a carved wooden chair that the building's lore described as a wishing chair. Unmarried women who sat in the chair, according to the legend, would find their wish for a husband granted before the year was out. The chair is still there. The wish, as far as anyone can verify, was not a marketing invention; the lore predates the building's commercial use as a tourist attraction.

The Columbia Center, completed in nineteen eighty-five, took the height record. Smith Tower remains one of the oldest surviving skyscrapers in the western United States, and the wishing chair remains in the Chinese Room.