Introduction
It is impossible to tell the story of the Camlin hotel, without telling the story of Seattle. These two stories are intertwined.
Early history of Seattle
The founding of Seattle is usually dated from the arrival of the Denny Party in 1851. The next April, Arthur A. Denny abandoned the original site at Alki in favor of the better protected site on Elliott Bay that is now part of downtown Seattle. Around the same time, David Swinson "Doc" Maynard began settling the land immediately south of Denny's.
When Henry Yesler brought the first steam sawmill to the region, he chose a location on the waterfront where Maynard and Denny's plats met. Thereafter Seattle would dominate the lumber industry.
The logging town developed rapidly into a small city. Despite being officially founded by the Methodists of the Denny Party, Seattle quickly developed a reputation as a wide-open town, a haven for prostitution, liquor, and gambling. Some attribute this, at least in part, to Maynard.
Real estate records show that nearly all of the city's first 60 businesses were on, or immediately adjacent to, Maynard's plat.
Seattle was incorporated as a city on December 2, 1869. At this time, the population was approximately 1,000.
Railroad Rivalry with Tacoma
On July 14, 1873 the Northern Pacific Railway announced that they had chosen the then-hamlet of Tacoma over Seattle as the Western terminus of their trans-continental railroad. The railroad barons appear to have been gambling on the advantage they could gain from being able to buy up the land around their terminus cheaply instead of bringing the railroad into a more established Pacific port town.
Seattle made several attempts to build a railroad of its own or to get one to come. The Great Northern Railway finally came to Seattle in 1884, but it would be 1906 before Seattle finally acquired a major rail passenger terminal.
Seattle in this era was an "open" and often relatively lawless town. Although it boasted newspapers and telephones, lynch law often prevailed (there were at least four lynching in 1882), schools barely operated, and indoor plumbing was a rare novelty. Potholes in the street were so bad as to cause at least one fatal drowning.
The history of labor in this period is inseparable from the issue of anti-Chinese vigilantism. In 1883 Chinese laborers played a key role in the first effort at digging the Mountlake Cut to connect Lake Union's Portage Bay to Lake Washington's Union Bay. In 1885-1886, whites and Indians, complaining of overly cheap labor competition, drove the Chinese settlers from Seattle, Tacoma, and other Northwest cities.
In an era during which the Washington Territory was one of the first parts of the U.S. to (briefly) allow women's suffrage, women played a significant part in "civilizing" Seattle. In the 1880s, Seattle got its first streetcar and cable car, ferry service, a YMCA gymnasium, and the exclusive Rainier Club, and passed an ordinance requiring attached sewer lines for all new residences. It also began to develop a road system.
The relative fortunes of Seattle and Tacoma clearly show the nature of Seattle's growth. Though both Seattle and Tacoma grew at a rapid rate from 1880 to 1890, based on the strength of their timber industries, Seattle's growth as an exporter of services and manufactured goods continued for another two decades, while Tacoma's growth dropped almost to zero. The reason for this lies in Tacoma's nature as a company town and Seattle's successful avoidance of that condition. The fire
The early Seattle era came to a stunning halt with the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889. The fire burned 29 city blocks (almost entirely wooden buildings; about 10 brick buildings also burned). It destroyed nearly the entire business district, all of the railroad terminals, and all but four of the wharves.
The city rebuilt from the ashes with astounding rapidity. A new zoning code resulted in a downtown of brick and stone buildings, rather than wood. In the single year after the fire, the city grew from 25,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, largely because of the enormous number of construction jobs suddenly created.
Still, south of Yesler Way, the open city atmosphere remained.
Leader of the Northwest: 1900 -- 1915
The gold rush led to massive immigration. Many of Seattle's neighborhoods got their start around this time. Downtown Seattle was bustling with activity; as quickly as previous inhabitants moved out to newly created neighborhoods, new immigrants came in to take their place in the city core.
Once the obvious extensions of downtown had been made along the flatlands to the north and south, streetcars began providing transportation to new outlying neighborhoods. A massive effort was made to level the extreme hills that rose south and north of the bustling city. A seawall containing dirt from the Denny Regrade created the current waterfront. More dirt from the Denny Regrade went to build the industrial Harbor Island at the mouth of the Duwamish River, south of Downtown.
At the same time as the city was expanding dramatically, the city planners began to put in parks and boulevards under a plan designed by the Olmsted Firm, providing numerous parks and about twenty miles of boulevard which link most of the parks and greenbelts within the city limits. Much of the ambience of Seattle today derives from this project.
World War I and after
In 1910, Seattle voters approved a referendum to create a development plan for the whole city. However, the result, known as the Bogue plan, was never to be implemented. The unused plan had at its heart a grand civic center in Belltown and the Denny Regrade connected to the rest of the city by a rapid transit rail system, with a huge expansion of the park system, crowned by a total conversion of 4000 acre (16 km²) Mercer Island into parkland. However, the plan was defeated by an alliance of fiscal conservatives who opposed such a grandiose plan on general principles and populists who argued that the plan would mainly benefit the rich. Growth during this period was almost all in wartime shipbuilding and lumber, and there was very little growth in new industries. When the war ended, economic output crashed as the government stopped buying boats, and there were no new industries to pick up the slack. Seattle stopped being a place of explosive growth and opportunity.
Seattle first began to be an arts center in the 1920s. Australian painter Ambrose Patterson arrived in 1919; over the next few decades Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Irving Anderson, and Paul Horiuchi would establish themselves as nationally and internationally known artists.
By mid-century the thriving jazz scene in the city's Skid Road district would produce such luminaries as Ray Charles and Quincy Jones.
The Camlin Hotel
The Swedish Connection
In the year of Seattle’s Great Fire, in Des Moines, Iowa, Adolph Linden was born. His father, Frederick, a Baptist Minister, and his mother, Christina had come to the United States from Sweden just a few years before. Soon moved from Des Moines, Iowa, to the parsonage of the First Swedish Baptist Church, at 820 Pine Street, now the parking lot next to the Camlin. By age 16, Adolph had already finished High School, had already worked in the lumber industry, and was working as a banker. One Sunday, while attending services at his family’s church, he met a young woman from Michigan. Ester Anderson, the daughter of a traveling shoe salesman from Michigan was on a four month trip with her father when she met Adolph at Sunday Services. “I really don’t know what she saw in Adolph.” Says Jim Linden, the couples Grandson “She was beautiful, and he was, well, kind of homely.” Love prevailed, and the two were wed in September of 1910. The two settled on Boylston Ave, and Esters family moved out the following year.
Aaron Anderson, Ester’s Father, had done well in shoes, but he did better in timber. He soon owned one of the largest timber companies in the state, was Director of the National City Bank of Seattle, and President of the Puget Sound Savings and Loan, the bank that Adolph worked for.
In 1923, Aaron Anderson died, leaving his Vice President to take over, one Adolph Linden. Adolph’s new Vice President was a gentleman by the name of Edmund Campbell. Campbell, Linden’s senior by 19 years, had started doing business in Los Angles in the 1880’s, with a delivery service, but a disease that spread through his horses had caused him to move to Seattle, and go into banking.
A year after his father-in-laws death, Adolph was doing well for himself. He purchased a Georgian-style mansion in Lake Forest Park, and sank over $100,000 into improvements. In 1922, Campbell and Linden had gone into business together outside of the bank. They had formed an investment group, and in 1925 they began the “Camlin” Investment Group. “Camlin” being a contraction of their surnames.
The first order of business, open a ritzy hotel in downtown Seattle. On October 31st, 1926, the Camlin Apartment Hotel had its official opening. The Seattle Times at the time stated “the exterior effect of the Camlin is such as to make it stand out from all parts of the city. Instinctively, the though is born of the magnificent view of the Sound and Olympics which is to be had from the lofty windows in the rear of this edifice. Nothing has been spared in the way of expense in its construction. The Camlin stands as a monument to seat’s development, a mark which equals anything to be found anywhere on the Pacific Coast” On the day of the opening, other events of note happened around the world. Illusionist Harry Houdini died in Detroit. A young man was beaten
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