One of the most storied blocks in Seattle, Pioneer Square between First Avenue South and Alaskan Way, Jackson and King Streets, now occupied by a mix of nondescript old and new condominium, office, and retail buildings like this 1913 King Street Crossing Building (formerly Merrill Place). This block is notable, however, for being about the only piece of dry flat land available when the town of Seattle was platted in 1853 by David Swinson "Doc" Maynard, Arthur A. Denny, and Carson Boren. Most of the original townsite of Seattle around today's Pioneer Square was tideland swamp, picked because it was the only flat land available. As part of Doc Maynard's land claim, this point of dry land was called Maynard's Point.
Maynard sold this block to a sailing friend, ship Captain Leonard Felker. When every other structure in Seattle was built from logs, Felker built the first prefabricated frame house in Seattle, the Felker House. Even before Sears and Roebuck became a feature of Nineteenth Century America, a house kit could be purchased and shipped around the world. Felker shipped his house in 1853 around Cape Horn in his own ship, the Franklin Adams. The Felker House, notable for its two-floor porch on its front facade, became Seattle's first hotel, a substantial two-story frame building comprised of milled lumber and Southern pine floors with interior walls covered in a civilized skin of lath and plaster.
As a ship captain, Captain Felker was too busy to run a hotel, so he hired another good friend of Doc Maynard's, Mary Ann Conklin, famously known by her contemporaries as Madame Damnable, the last part of her name for her prolific multilingual profanity that impressed even the hardened sailors and frontiersmen of her time. The first part of her name for running Seattle's first brothel. She rented the first floor of the Felker House by the day, the second floor by the hour. Sadly, the Felker House succumbed to the Great Seattle Fire of 1889.
1880 photograph by Theodore E. Paiser, courtesy Seattle Public Library Special Collections: