Published March 2005

City ‘heirloom’ gets new owners

Photo courtesy of Tom Hoban The Marion Building has stood at the corner of Hewitt and Rucker in downtown Everett since 1893.

When I started the fourth grade, my dad gave me a knife. It was this cool little pocket-type knife with a marble finish. Obviously not new, but in very good shape. It was the kind of thing a father gives his son when he thinks he’s ready for a higher level of responsibility.

I shoved it in the pocket of my Toughskin jeans and ran proudly up to school the next day. The first day at recess, I lost it.

Later that evening, when I confessed to my dad, I learned that it had been given to him with the same sort of “ready for responsibility” type of message by his father. I could see how disappointed I made him. A family heirloom now probably lost in the playground lawn. I was heartbroken. I vowed to take better care of things placed in my charge.

In January of this year, my brother and I bought the Marion Building in Everett to accommodate the growth of our real estate businesses. A nicely restored four-story, red-brick building in downtown on the corner of Hewitt and Rucker, it gives off a Pioneer Square sort of look and feel. We’ll be moving into it in April. Like the knife my dad gave me, it feels like a family heirloom.

Feeling a duty to learn what we could about the building, we received a history lesson from local historian Dave Dilgard, which, after two hours, only got to about the 1930s and left us wanting more.

Larry O’Donnell, another history buff in town, did the same. As it turns out, the history of the Marion Building is in many ways a history of Everett and real estate in the downtown area.

The best we can tell, it is the same age as Everett. Dilgard confirms that ground was broken for the Marion Building the same week the first mayor and council of Everett met, in May 1893. The top floor wasn’t in place until the spring of 1894, but Everett’s legendary Tontine Saloon was up and operating in the building by the fall of 1893.

Proprietor Charlie Manning returned from the Alaska Gold Rush early in the next century and lavished substantial sums on his saloon, including elegant fixtures, an ornate ceiling and a stuffed Roosevelt Elk that stood proudly atop the private booths.

The boom-and-bust nature of Everett’s early years is reflected in the change of uses and ownership of the Marion Building.

The builder, Thornton Goldsby, was rumored to be from Marion, Ala., and he may have been of mixed race, which was unusual in real property ownership in Everett at the time. He was driven from Everett by the economic downturn that followed the Panic of 1893.

For the first 17 years, the Marion and the Tontine were synonymous. Everett’s politicians kept local saloons on the north side of Hewitt, and the Tontine was known as the most elegant taproom in town.

But in 1910 a “Local Option” was passed outlawing the sale of alcoholic beverages, and the Marion transitioned into life as a hardware store, with a brothel upstairs as a vestige of its former role in the recreational life of Everett’s “Bayside.”

Many locals today remember the building as Lloyd Hardware. According to Dilgard and O’Donnell, the Lloyds ran a respectable business there for more than half a century, from the mid-’20s through the late 1970s. Not so many remember that it was Milton Goodykoontz who started the first hardware business there when the saloon closed down.

In the 1980s, a buyer converted the entire building to office use, renting some of it to Snohomish County government for its employees. Later, the most recent owners operated a business in the former county space and rented the top floor to a group of attorneys. We’ll be moving our real estate businesses into three of the four floors.

There’s evidence of the Marion Building’s history in many places. We found pictures in the Everett Public Library of World War I soldiers marching in formation in front of the Marion Building as they headed off to war. School kids visit the building on a library-sponsored historic Everett tour that Dilgard hosts.

Names like Rucker, Swalwell and others who carved something out of nothing in this outpost frontier town probably sat in what is today a CAT-5 wired office in the corner overlooking Hewitt.

The structural inspector we engaged during our due diligence perhaps put it best as he gazed warmly at her brick interior: “Oh, she’s solid — and beautiful — all at the same time.” Sort of a description of Everett, it seemed.

The architect for the Marion Building was August Franklin Heide, who designed so many Everett landmarks, including the Snohomish County Courthouse and the residence of Henry M Jackson. Born of German parents in Alton, Ill., Heide was one of the main architects for Hewitt & Colby’s Everett Land Co. in the early 1890s.

Circumstances have given me another chance to prove that I can take care of a family heirloom. But the family this time is Everett. The expectations of our stewardship, it seems, are the same. Thankfully, the Marion Building won’t fit into the pocket of my jeans.

Tom Hoban is CEO of Everett-based Coast Real Estate Services, a property management and real estate advisory company. He can be contacted by phone at 425-339-3638 or send e-mail to tomhoban@coastmgt.com.

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