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Pioneer Square’s Triangle Hotel has a new owner

The historic home of Triangle Pub sold for $1.9 million

By Sarah Anne Lloyd
Chris Murphy/Flickr

Seattle’s Flatiron Building, otherwise known as the Triangle Hotel or the Triangle Tavern, sold to a Sammamish developer on Friday for $1.88 million, reports the Daily Journal of Commerce. It’s the first time the building’s changed hands since the early ‘70s.

The building is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a designated Seattle landmark.

The trapezoidal building, tucked alongside the viaduct in the triangle created by First Avenue South and the railroad just south of King Street, is the current home of the Triangle Pub. But when it was first completed in 1910, it was the Triangle Hotel, with eight guestrooms and a saloon below.

According to the National Register of Historic Places, it was part of the “tidelands real estate boom” in the area, when the city was filling in downtown’s swampy areas.

The Triangle Pub in 2008. The 505 First Avenue building cropped up behind it in 2009.
Isriya Paireepairit/Flickr

The building’s footprint is only 731 square feet, although with the basement and the upper floors, the total square footage is about 2,800. At some point, like many of its Pioneer Square neighbors, it became a brothel, but the original neighborhood tavern stayed in operation until 1929, when it became a Western Union branch.

Eventually, though, it found its way back to the liquor business.

Real estate developer Raymond Spencer, governor of the LLC that bought the building, told Puget Sound Business Journal that they “expect to run it as historically intended.”

He told PSBJ that once the viaduct is gone, the building could be turned into a boutique hotel, but that they intend to keep some kind of bar element on the ground floor.

Spencer isn’t the only one with plans for Pioneer Square’s historic buildings. Earlier this month, Unico Properties announced plans for an adaptive reuse of the Grand Central, the City Loan Building, and the Buttnick Building, just to the north along Occidental Park.