COURTESY OF SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY

After the Seattle National Bank Building at the southeast corner of Occidental Avenue and Yesler Way became the depot for the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban Railway in 1903, it became popularly known as the Interurban Building. It is the name now preferred, although it has also been called both the Pacific block and the Smith Tower Annex.

PAUL DORPAT

NOT YET 30, the English-born architect John Parkinson moved to Seattle with fateful good timing. He arrived in January 1889, a little less than a half-year before the business district was kindling for Seattle's "Great Fire." In the post-fire reconstruction, Parkinson's talent for design was soon patronized, and his surviving Seattle National Bank Building displays, to quote the modern expert Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, "a remarkable level of coherence and repose in contrast to the agitated work of so many of his contemporaries."

The most striking feature of this Romanesque landmark is either the lion over the bank's corner front door or the building's color: a coherent red from sidewalk to cornice. At its base, Parkinson used red sandstone shipped from Colorado rather than the commonplace gray stone quarried in the Northwest and used by most of the bank's neighbors.

While Ochsner has the bank completed in 1892, that might have been the year for finishing touches. This view may date from the spring of 1891 when the Pioneer Place (Square) neighborhood was decorated with fir trees — like those on the right — for the May 6 visit of Benjamin Harrison. (The president rode a cable car to Leschi, boarded the lake steamer "Kirkland" to Madison Park, and returned to town on the Madison Cable Railway.)

In this view, a book and stationary store, Union Hardware and the Wilcox Grocery all face Occidental Avenue. The Queen City Business College is on the second floor, while the Washington Temperance magazine and several lawyers have offices upstairs.

After a stint as the first official architect for Seattle schools, Parkinson left for Los Angeles, where he had considerable success.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.