Rainier Club

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Rainier Club
National Register of Historic Places
The Rainier Club

The Rainier Club

Rainier Club (Washington)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
location Seattle , Washington
Coordinates 47 ° 36 '22 "  N , 122 ° 19' 51"  W Coordinates: 47 ° 36 '22 "  N , 122 ° 19' 51"  W.
Built 1904
NRHP number 76001889
The NRHP added April 22, 1976

The Rainier Club is a social club based in Seattle , Washington . The club's building was completed in 1904 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places . The club was founded in what was then Washington Territory in 1888 (the state came into being the following year). In 2008 the club had 1,300 members. The structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 22, 1976.

history

The Rainier Club was proposed at a meeting of six senior members of Seattle Society on February 23, 1888; it was formally incorporated on July 25, 1888. The attendees of the original charter were JR McDonald, president of Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad ; John Leary , former Seattle mayor and land developer; Norman Kelly; RC Washburn, editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ; Bailey Gatzert , former mayor and involved in Schwabacher’s ; AB Stewart and James McNaught. Other founding members were Eugene Carr, Judge Thomas Burke, and William Allison Peters.

The club is named after the British Admiral Peter Rainier . The name was probably chosen because of the rivalry between Seattle and nearby Tacoma , whose citizens tried to enforce the name Mount Tacoma for the mountain now known as Mount Rainier . In 1892, the Rainier Club actually sent a delegation to Washington, DC , to influence Rainier's name for the mountain. The club's emblem was based on the Union Club founded in Victoria , British Columbia in 1877 .

Because the territory's laws did not provide for the formation of a private club in 1888, the Rainier Club was initially established as a guesthouse and restaurant for men. It was re-established as a private club on January 18, 1899, after the now established state revised its law in 1895.

The club's first headquarters were in part of James McNaught's 22-room apartment building on Fourth Avenue (the site now houses the Seattle Central Library ). McNaught was pleased to have a tenant, having accepted the post of director of the Northern Pacific Railroad in St. Paul , Minnesota . The house also served as the city's temporary town hall, along with the armory at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Union Street, after most of the city was destroyed in the Great Seattle Fire in 1889 . This use involved other city leaders in the club.

McNaught and the club did not agree on the terms of the lease for very long, so the club relocated to the Bailey Building for a short time (now the Broderick Building is at the intersection of Second Avenue and Cherry Street ); from February 1893 on, the clubhouse was located in the rooms of the newly built theater (on the site of today's Arctic Building ). The Rainier Club acquired the property at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Columbia Street in downtown Seattle , where it still resides, in 1903. The building was designed by Spokane , Washington architect Kirtland Cutter and completed in 1904. The south wing, which was added in 1929, was planned by the Seattle architect Carl F. Gould ; He also designed the entrance in Georgian style and the ornamentation of the interior in Art Deco , which were created at the same time.

In 1899 the club was the starting point for several members of the Harriman Alaska Expedition . EH Harriman , John Burroughs , John Muir , Edward S. Curtis and Henry Gannett started their expedition to Seal Island and other islands in the Bering Strait and the coasts on both sides of the Strait and celebrated their return here.

Gifford Pinchot was a guest at the Rainier Club on the journey that led to the creation of the United States Forest Service and Mount Rainier National Park . A decade later, Edward S. Curtis, a member from 1903 to 1920, accompanied Theodore Roosevelt on his journey through the new national park. The club owns 35 photo-engravings and 27 platinum and silver prints that Curtis made during this trip.

Club members also included John C. Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm , which planned the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition ( AYP Exposition ). The campus of the University of Washington later emerged from the exhibition grounds . The Olmsteds also played a major role in planning the system of parks and boulevards in the city.

As a private social club, the Rainier Club was exempt from the city and state's early experiments with prohibition , but when liquor was banned nationwide in 1916, the club could no longer sell liquor. During Prohibition, the club passed guidelines on several occasions according to which "under no circumstances is an employee of the club allowed to buy, sell or possess alcohol on the premises of the club". However, the guidelines did not contain any rules on the possession of alcohol by members.

The Rainier Club was not spared from the Great Depression. After the construction of the south wing in 1929, the number of members soon declined because many members could no longer afford the fees. In the hope of new members, the membership fee was lowered from 500 to 200 US dollars in 1932 and even to 100 US dollars in October 1933. In the course of 36 months, the number of members had fallen from 851 to 615. The club also benefited from the end of Prohibition, as the state's new alcohol laws only allowed alcohol sales in private clubs. Similarly, in 1948 the membership fee was cut back from $ 650 to $ 400 after alcohol sales in Washington were fully reopened.

Half a century after the AYP Exposition , club members played a similarly prominent role in hosting the Century 21 Exposition in 1962. Eddie Carlson , president of Western International Hotels (later Westin ), was a driving force in organizing the World's Fair , and many of the preparatory conferences were held in the clubhouse.

In 1993, then-President of the United States, Bill Clinton, held two Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) ministerial meetings with Japan and China at the Rainier Club. These were the first APEC meetings in the United States and the first high-level meeting with the People's Republic of China after the 1989 Tian'anmen massacre .

Originally the club had only male and only white members. The first member of Asian origin was accepted on November 25, 1966 (the Japanese consul in Seattle was, however, an honorary member of the club from 1923 until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.); the first black member became contractor Luther Carr on July 25, 1978; the first female member was from August 22, 1978 to Judge Betty Fletcher, who was also the first female chairman of the Seattle and King Counties Bar Association.

Other prominent members included several members of the Blethen family, the family that owned the Seattle Times, and art collectors Richard Fuller (founder of the Seattle Art Museum ) and HC Henry (founder of the Henry Art Gallery ).

Prominent guests at the club included Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), John Philip Sousa , Buffalo Bill , William Howard Taft , Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur , General Douglas MacArthur , Babe Ruth , Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary, and members of the early Japanese trade delegations in the United States.

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i The Rainier Club of Seattle Campaign for Funds for Historical Renovation , The Rainier Club, March 2008. Retrieved February 10, 2011 (English).
  2. ↑ Focus database of the National Park Service, accessed January 19, 2011 (English)
  3. ^ A b c Priscilla Long, Gentlemen organize Seattle's Rainier Club on February 23, 1888 , HistoryLink.org, January 27, 2001. Retrieved January 19, 2011 (English).
  4. ↑ Crowley 1988, p. 15.
  5. ↑ a b Crowley 1988, pp. 15-16.
  6. ↑ Crowley 1988, p. 24
  7. ↑ a b Crowley 1988, p. 26.
  8. ↑ a b Crowley 1988, p. 16.
  9. ↑ a b c d Walt Crowley, Rainier Club (Seattle) , HistoryLink.org, January 27, 2001. Accessed February 11, 2011.
  10. ↑ Crowley 1988, pp. 21-23.
  11. ↑ a b Crowley 1988, p. 23.
  12. ↑ Crowley 1988, pp. 23-24.
  13. ^ Clarence B. Bagley, History of Seattle From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time , The SJ Clarke Publishing Company. Chicago, 1916. p. 577.
  14. ^ The Rainier Club of Seattle Campaign for Funds for Historical Renovation , The Rainier Club, March 2008. Accessed February 10, 2011. Text misinterprets Harrimans and Gannett's names with "EA Harriman" and "Henry Gannet."
  15. ^ Nard Jones , Seattle , Doubleday, 1972, ISBN 0385018754 . Pp. 306-307.
  16. ↑ Crowley 1988, pp. 37-38.
  17. ↑ Crowley 1988, pp. 42-44.
  18. ↑ Crowley 1988, p. 44.
  19. ↑ Crowley 1988, p. 52.
  20. ↑ Crowley 1988, p. 49
  21. ↑ Priscilla Long, Rainier Club, Seattle's preeminent private club, admits first African American and first woman in 1978 , HistoryLink.org, January 28, 2001. Accessed February 11, 2011.
  22. ^ The Rainier Club of Seattle Campaign for Funds for Historical Renovation , The Rainier Club, March 2008. The text erroneously names "Robert E. Perry". Accessed February 11, 2011. (English)

literature

  • Celeste Louise Smith and Julie D. Pheasant-Albright, Private Clubs of Seattle , Arcadia (Images of America series), 2009. ISBN 978-0-7385-7072-3 .
  • Walt Crowley , The Rainier Club, 1888-1988 (Seattle: The Rainier Club, 1988)

Web links