Re:Take: Taller than Oklahoma City

Re:Take is local history buff Rob Ketcherside's weekly look at the Emerald City now and in days of yore through photos dug out of the city archives. Ready for a cliche landmark construction photo? Read on!

It still leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, doesn't it? Admit it. You miss the Sonics.

Did you know that the Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi for quite some time after it went up in 1914?

Did you know that it's still as tall as the tallest building in Oklahoma City?

Of course, we've moved on and built better things. We have sixteen taller buildings. That includes the world-famous Space Needle, which gave Elvis vertigo.

There's no denying our loss, though. We have a great downtown. But "Downtown" Freddie Brown's link from Google now leads to a broken page of the so-called history of the Thunder. They've stolen our basketball team, but they can't steal our history.

Back to the tower... in Brown's All-Star year, 1976, practical jokester and seafood restauranteur Ivar Haglund pulled the greatest non-joke in Seattle history. He bought the Smith Tower. Then he raided the UW Special Collections for photos to restore its crumbling facade. And he left a pile of cash to placate the librarians.

"The money will be used to preserve some rapidly deteriorating prints made 75 to 100 years ago. Now, thanks to Ivar, [the librarians] can keep clam..."

We should miss Ivar even more than the Sonics.

More over at Flickr.

(Quote Seattle Times, October 5, 1976 page 9; photo courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives, February, 1913.)