The exterior of the Dunbar Room, a restaurant and bar inside Hotel Sorrento on First Hill, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017. (Genna Martin, seattlepi.com)GENNA MARTIN/SEATTLEPI.COM
"By 1912, a number of hotels had been built just outside Seattle's downtown area for people traveling on business or pleasure. The Hotel Sorrento, which advertised itself as "A hotel in the heart of things" opened on First Hill in 1908. It had Seattle's first rooftop restaurant, a roof garden, and scenic views of the city, the bay, and the mountains. This photo shows the Hotel Sorrento in about 1912. The hotel still stands on the corner of Madison Street and Terry Avenue." -MOHAI. Photo courtesy MOHAI, PEMCO Webster and Stevens Collection, image number 1983.10.9468.1.
Courtesy MOHAI
"By 1910, a number of hotels had been built just outside Seattle's downtown area for people traveling on business or pleasure. The Sorrento Hotel, which advertised itself as "A hotel in the heart of things" opened on First Hill in 1908. It had Seattle's first rooftop restaurant, a roof garden, and scenic views of the city, the bay, and the mountains. This photo shows the entrance to the Sorrento Hotel in about 1921. The hotel still stands on the corner of Madison Street and Terry Avenue." -MOHAI. Photo courtesy MOHAI, PEMCO Webster and Stevens Collection, image number 1983.10.2171.3.
Courtesy MOHAI
The exterior of the Dunbar Room, a restaurant and bar inside Hotel Sorrento on First Hill, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017. (Genna Martin, seattlepi.com)GENNA MARTIN/SEATTLEPI.COM
"By 1910, a number of hotels had been built just outside Seattle's downtown area for people traveling on business or pleasure. The Sorrento Hotel, which advertised itself as "A hotel in the heart of things" opened on First Hill in 1908. It had Seattle's first rooftop restaurant, a roof garden, and scenic views of the city, the bay, and the mountains. This photo shows the Sorrento Hotel's dining room in about 1921. The hotel still stands on the corner of Madison Street and Terry Avenue." -MOHAI. Photo courtesy MOHAI, PEMCO Webster and Stevens Collection, image number 1983.10.2195.3.
Courtesy MOHAI
Harlan Thomas, who lived and traveled in Europe, designed the building. He also designed the Sorrento Hotel in First Hill. Photo by seattlepi.com.
"By 1910, a number of hotels had been built just outside Seattle's downtown area for people traveling on business or pleasure. The Sorrento Hotel, which advertised itself as "A hotel in the heart of things" opened on First Hill in 1908. It had Seattle's first rooftop restaurant, a roof garden, and scenic views of the city, the bay, and the mountains. This photo shows the Sorrento Hotel's tea room in about 1921. The hotel still stands on the corner of Madison Street and Terry Avenue." -MOHAI. Photo courtesy MOHAI, PEMCO Webster and Stevens Collection, image number 1983.10.2171.4.
Courtesy MOHAI
"By 1910, a number of hotels had been built just outside Seattle's downtown area for people traveling on business or pleasure. The Sorrento Hotel, which advertised itself as "A hotel in the heart of things" opened on First Hill in 1908. It had Seattle's first rooftop restaurant, a roof garden, and scenic views of the city, the bay, and the mountains. This photo shows the garden of the Sorrento Hotel in about 1921. The hotel still stands on the corner of Madison Street and Terry Avenue." -MOHAI. Photo courtesy MOHAI, PEMCO Webster and Stevens Collection, image number 1983.10.2171.2.
Courtesy MOHAI
The Sorrento Hotel, on First Hill, is shown then and now.Timera
The Sorrento Hotel was designed by Seattle architect Harlan Thomas to take full advantage of the views of Puget Sound.Scott Eklund/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Scott Eklund
Scott Eklund
Scott Eklund
Mike Urban
Every Seattleite worth their salt knows that Seattle doesn't actually get more rain than anywhere in the country (keep it down though; the San Franciscans are listening).
But can you attest to the varacity of the rest of these Seattle myths and legends? Click through the slideshow to check your knowledge.
JORDAN STEAD/SEATTLEPI.COM
Does Seattle buy more sunglasses than anywhere else?
Nope, this is a myth. KUOW has reported that the Vision Council, an organization for eye doctors and people who concern themselves with eyewear, tracks sales regionally, and says the South buys more sunglasses than the West.
GENNA MARTIN/SEATTLEPI.COM
Is there a gun range under the Seattle Center House?
Yes, actually. The Seattle Center House was opened in April 1939 as the National Guard Armory, and as such had a gun range in the basement. The area is now used for storage, but still has hundreds of bullet marks in the slanted wall where the targets were.
Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com file
Were there actually strippers at Seattle World's Fair?
Yep. You could find them at "Show Street" which was billed as "naughty but nice" and featured models posing revealing space-age costumes (in keeping with the fair's aesthetic). Fairgoeers could rent cameras to take pictures.
From the book "The Future Remembered" on the World's Fair: "The Seattle Censor Board ordered the show closed at one point. Among its complaints: excessive shimmying and shaking by bare-breasted "space girls." The board he been led to believe would be standing still."
State Archives/seattlepi.com file
Is Nordstrom's return policy really so good that someone once brought a tire in and returned it?
This is a fun one, but no. It's a bit of a twisty tale though: According to Snopes, though Nordstrom is legendary for its return policy and customer service, this legend seems decidedly untrue, even if Nordstrom themselves have egged it on a bit. John Nordstrom himself said he was there, but this was years after Nordstrom insisted the tale was lore. Not only that but the timing of the story never seemed to line up quite right. Home Depot has also laid claim to this tale over the years.
What's up with Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine?
Truthfully, no one really knows. Though there's been some evidence as to how the machine remains stocked, people enjoy the unknown nature of this coke machine. It's a bit like life in that way.
JORDAN STEAD/SEATTLEPI.COM
Did a Seattle police officer really help smuggle booze during prohibition, get caught, go to jail, and become a bootlegger king upon release?
Oh hell yeah! Roy Olmstead (pictured here on the right in the photo with his wife that lead the PI back in 1931 upon his release) learned the bootlegging trade from his involvement in raids and arrests as a Seattle Police Lieutenant. His arrest in 1920 was pretty scandalous, considering that up to that point he had been considered the department's golden boy. He was fined $500 and lost his job but he managed to find new work: devoting himself full-time to being "King of the Puget Sound Bootleggers."
His operation dwarfed any other liquor operations in Seattle, legal or no. His eventual arrest for rum-running, for which he served 35 months in federal prison, eventually made it to the Supreme Court for a major ruling about the wire-tapping efforts feds used to catch him.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Was UW's Red Square intentionally designed with bricks to make student protests harder?
Not as far as any documentation shows. The area was designed to sit above the parking garage underneath it, and the engineers who designed the garage were afraid that if they put grass on top it would leak into the garage.
Though it came about in 1961, just in time for an era known for collegiate protests, it seems the bricks are just a structural (if slick) choice.
P-I File
Does Seattle have more suicides than anywhere else?
Not us. Though we apparently got this rep for being gloomy and rainy, Las Vegas is actually the place with the highest number of suicides in the U.S. Seattle doesn't even crack the top ten, according to Business Insider.
Was there really a duck-eating sturgeon in Lake Washington?
Well, no
. For seemingly decades there was talk of a giant sturgeon running around the area preying on ducks. Sturgeon don't eat ducks, but there has been many sturgeon pulled out of Lake Washington that look like the 640 pound, 11-foot sturgeon above. This one was found on Nov. 6, 1987 near Kirkland, but an 8-foot one turned up as recently in 2013.
JIM BATES/AP
Is there really a PB4Y wrecked off of Magnuson with the bodies of the crew still inside?
Yes and no. No, there are not remains still left in the plane. But yes, there is actually a World War II bomber, sunken in the lake off of Magnuson. The plane was doing a routine training flight from the Sand Point Naval Air Station that sent the bomber crashing shortly after takeoff into Lake Washington. The crew was safely recovered, but after lugging the plane up from about 175 feet of water a shackle pin broke and the plane sank back to the depths. Further salvage efforts were abandoned, and the plane still rests just off the Magnuson's boat ramp under about 155 feet of water.
Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Was Jimi Hendrix kicked out of Garfield High School for ______?
Nope. Depending on when you came up and where you were, you might've heard that Hendrix got kicked out of either having sex with a white girl, or having sex in the hall way, or having sex in the stairwell – suffice it to say it was not for any of these. Hendrix actually dropped out of Garfield when he was 16 to work. He returned seven years later to pick up an honorary diploma from the high school though, spending the years in between in the army and then launching a major music career.
David Redfern/Getty Images
Did Kurt Cobain live under the Aurora Bridge?
No. This is possibly one of those things that just got conflated over the years with people saying that Nirvana got their start in Seattle. But Cobain himself said he lived under the Young Street Bridge (the inspiration for "Something in the Way") in Aberdeen.
file photo
Was Seattle Public Schools' first school founded by prostitutes?
Not really, no. One of the first Seattle teachers was a Mercer Girl (Elizabeth Ordway, pictured here), the nickname given to women who arrived in Seattle by boat. They became known as "mail order brides" towards the middle of the 20th century, which has morphed over the years into "prostitutes."
Though they were technically brought to Seattle by Asa Mercer during the Civil War, probably for the purposes of marriage, they were technically there to even out the man/woman ratio that was askew all over the nation at the time (in the East, from the war; in the West, from frontier life). Many of these women went on to be teachers in what eventually became SPS.
/ Museum of History and Industry
Is "Jeremy Bunker" in Ft. Ward about the kid from that Pearl Jam song?
No. This legend sprung up around Bainbridge and the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy," which describes a boy who killed himself. Local myth had it that Jeremy was a local who shot himself in the bunker in Ft. Ward, named the "Jeremy Bunker," and now haunts the place. Eddie Vedder has said that the song is about a boy in either (or both) Texas and California.
Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
Is there a tunnel running under Queen Anne Hill?
Yes, but don't expect it to help you get to Fremont any easier. The tunnel was for the counterbalance trolley that used to run up Queen Anne Ave. N. until 1940 when trackless trolleys and buses took over. A worker, W.W. Wiley shown here in a 1940 P-I archive photo, would hook a cable to the counterbalance when the streetcar was going up the hill.
seattlepi.com file
Is there a tunnel under North Aurora?
Yep, though it's really a pedestrian underpass that has been closed for years. As Casey McNerthney reported: "You can find it at the intersection of Aurora and North 79th Street, on the north side. It was created in the early 1930s - Aurora opened in 1932 - for easier pedestrian travel on the old highway. But it closed after problems with drugs and prostitution in the area."
Casey McNerthney/seattlepi.com file
Did a Japanese Glenn overfly Seattle in June 1942?
Nope, but it did land those responsible for Seattle's air defenses during World War II in hot water for a little bit. The Glenn's were used twice later in 1942 to drop incendiary bombs on forests in Oregon (in an attempt to cause devastating forest fires).
So when a U.S. Navy interrogator heard from a Japanese staff officer after the war that a Glenn had launched a reconaissance mission against Seattle that went unrecorded, the news spread about the "close call." However, this has since been attributed to an error in interpretation during the initial interrogation.
Was Padelford Hall intentionally built confusingly to help protect UW staff from rioters?
Probably not, but maybe. The building – which houses faculty across a few departments and features many idiosyncasies like hallways that lead to dead-ends and don't connect between towers – has quickly become notorious among UW students for its utterly perplexing layout.
A profile from UW's alumni magazine Columns attributes this to a couple things: UW architecture was going through some experimentation, the unusual site of the hall created didn't lend itself to a standard design, and the firm's previous work included designing prisons.
Walt Crowley, a local history buff and UW student during the '60s, told The Daily that he thinks there's some credence to the idea that Padelford was "certainly not designed to conducive human habitation," and arguably "intended to withstand and discourage student protests."
That the giant plate glass windows of UW's collegiate Gothic style are gone, does seem peculiar, but so far no one's turned up anything that this is deliberately designed to defend from protesters. The building did receive an American Institute of Architects Seattle merit award for design when it first opened in 1967, though!
It's not clear why the ghost of writer Alice B. Toklas is said to walk the halls of Seattle's oldest hotel.
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The upscale Hotel Sorrento, located at the intersection of Madison Street and Terry Avenue in the First Hill neighborhood, opened to the public 110 years ago this week, coinciding with the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition which began on June 1, 1909.
At the time of its opening, the hotel was lauded for its broad views of the shore and the city. Designed by Harlan Thomas, Hotel Sorrento was a luxury dwelling complete with arched windows and doorways, wide eaves and a hipped roof, typical of the Italian Renaissance style, commonly seen in the town for which it was named.
The hotel remains open today, 110 years later, in the same place and with much of the same splendor thanks to restoration work performed in the 1980s.
But the hotel does have some more recent additions, of sorts, depending on who you ask.
A ghost appearing to be Alice B. Toklas has been seen wandering the halls of the hotel, especially around Room 408. She has been seen dressed in a white or black shroud and is said to have caused lights to flicker and drinks to move around in the Dunbar Room.
But it's unclear why she would haunt the hotel. She was born in San Francisco in 1877 and moved to Seattle in 1890 to study music at the University of Washington. Her family's Seattle residence was close to where the Hotel Sorrento stands, but her family returned to San Francisco more than 10 years before the Sorrento opened. She died on March 7, 1967 in Paris, France after being ill for several years.
It's unlikely Toklas, who has been credited with inventing the pot brownie, walked the hotel's halls while she was alive. Still, her presence in the hotel is strong enough that the Sorrento was named one of the country's 13 most haunted hotels by USA Today in 2015.
The hotel also appears to be fond of its permanent resident. On Oct. 26, 2018, the hotel hosted a dinner event in her honor. A prix fixe dinner inspired by recipes from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook was served before guests were given a tour of the property ... including the sites of recurring hauntings.
