Pioneer Square’s Historic Cadillac Hotel Is Also Its Tiniest National Park

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As anyone who’s been on an Inside Passage cruise knows, Seattle has had deep ties to the Alaskan panhandle town of Skagway. During the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, Seattle benefited greatly by functioning as the “Gateway to the Klondike,” where gold diggers loaded up on supplies before pressing their luck in Canada’s Yukon wilderness. Even today, Seattle is the main port for freight and passenger service to Southeast Alaska, which includes tiny Skagway, and every summer, the town relies on a stream of lower-48 tourists who use Seattle as their launchpad.

But weirdly, the two cities are also connected by the US National Park Service. About six blocks of downtown Skagway are part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, along with the nearby Chilkoot Trail and White Pass Trail as well as the ghost town of Dyea, Alaska. But the rest of the park lies 1,600 miles south, in urban Pioneer Square.

The Cadillac Hotel is a survivor of fire, fortune, a few major earthquakes, and the economic swells and recesses of both the city and the neighborhood specifically. Today, the building’s main floor houses a museum dedicated to the Klondike Gold Rush. But its story begins long before the first shovel ever struck Yukon soil.
The Cadillac Hotel was born out of a disaster. In June of 1889, the Great Seattle Fire consumed 25 blocks of the young city’s commercial core, most of which was built out of Douglas fir. Seattle rose quickly from the ashes, though, this time built in masonry, and because the fire led to a housing shortage, the priority was to construct new, affordable hotels. Real estate developer Edward F. Wittler acted fast. At the corner of Second Avenue and Jackson Street, on a site previously occupied by run-down wooden buildings, his new three-story brick building was originally called the Wittler Block and was completed in just six months. Open for business as the Elliott House by the end of 1889, the hotel was intended for laborers—sailors, loggers, longshoremen, and, eventually, prospectors.A  single room went for 25 cents a night. 

Upon its debut, the Elliott House featured a saloon, a drugstore, and an inexpensive restaurant on its ground floor. In 1891, the business was rechristened as the Derig Hotel. Its name was changed to the Star Lodge in 1904, before finally becoming the Cadillac Hotel in 1906. In the 1920s, the Teamsters had an office there, and a quilt manufacturer operated out of the building a decade later.

By design, the Wittler Block was modest and pretty typical of the Victorian buildings that were put up in a hurry after the fire—arched window openings, iron details, and simple decorative brickwork, with 56 humble rooms stacked on three floors above a street-level retail space. Architect James W. Hetherington designed many of the post-fire buildings in the area—the Diller Hotel is another—and the facade bears his light Italianate details.

Proving once again that timing is everything, the Cadillac Hotel was well poised when a ship docked in July 1897 carrying “a ton of gold.” The Klondike Gold Rush transformed Seattle overnight, with businesses like Nordstrom (Sweden-born John W. Nordstrom actually made his fortune in Alaska first, as an investor, before opening his footwear store here), Bartell Drugs, Filson (f.k.a Pioneer Alaska Clothing and Blanket Manufacturer), and various other outfitting stores sprouting up to sell clothing, food, and mining supplies. The flash mob of gold prospectors turned 1890s Seattle into the Klondike’s main supply hub and created a churning local economy, which in turn laid a foundation for the city’s future growth in many sectors. Former stampeders later set up social clubs in downtown Seattle relating to the gold rush, like the Arctic Brotherhood and the Alaska Club—which merged in 1908 to form the Arctic Club and eventually build its walrus-themed, still extant hotel. 

With low prices and a handy location near the waterfront, the Cadillac Hotel became an unofficial HQ for thousands of fortune hunters who poured through the city. When the gold fever faded and most would-be millionaires had gone home emptyhanded, the hotel continued serving low-income lodgers for decades.

A Japanese American couple, Kamekichi and Haruko Tokita, owned and operated the hotel business starting in 1936. Kamekichi was a fine art painter of some local renown, and he lived and worked with his large family in cramped quarters at the Cadillac until 1942, when the US’s entrée into World War II forced the Tokitas into incarceration, first in Puyallup and later in Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. Although the family moved back to Seattle after the war, they’d had no choice but to sell the hotel business beforehand and were homeless upon their return.

In 1970, after a fire at downtown’s Ozark Hotel killed 21 people, the city passed the Ozark Ordinance, requiring sprinklers in all Seattle hotels. But the owners of the Cadillac Hotel couldn’t afford the upgrade and had to close off the upper floors the same year. Many of its residents left their belongings behind, only to be discovered later on by a photographer who was squatting in the hotel.

The same year, in 1970, Pioneer Square was designated as Seattle’s first historic district, and the whole district was admitted to the National Register of Historic Places. But preservation measures came slowly, and for decades, the Cadillac Hotel waited its turn for repairs. Various businesses still operated out of the main and basement levels, though. In 1986, a funk/R&B club called the Hollywood Underground moved into the basement, and by New Year’s Eve 1992, the legendary Fenix Underground and its ground-floor Fenix Café had taken over, spotlighting PNW bands like the Gits, Jumbalassy, Hit Explosion, and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood had fallen into decline, and although the ground floor and basement floor were occupied, the upper floors of the Cadillac sat largely vacant, patiently awaiting updates. Lucky thing, too.

It was a 6.8-magnitude earthquake that booted the Cadillac to the top of the waiting list. On February 28, 2001, at 10:54 am, the Nisqually quake cracked streets, crunched chimneys, and wrought widespread damage to structures across the city—including many historic Seattle buildings, especially those made of porous, unreinforced brick. Among the hardest hit, the Cadillac Hotel became something of a poster child for the catastrophic damage to the city, as it sat for weeks behind a mountain of its own crumbled bricks that had toppled from the facade. The roof had partially collapsed as well, and its main structural beams were compromised. As an added insult, in the weeks after the earthquake, the top floors were exposed to the elements when parts of the cornice failed, and pigeons soon roosted inside, causing further damage to the hotel’s interior. The building was red-tagged—deemed unsafe to enter—and its owners requested permission to demolish it.

What followed was a tug-of-war between economics and preservation. Although the upstairs had long sat derelict, the Cadillac was still one of the few remaining buildings from Seattle’s post-fire renaissance, and a main stage during the city’s lavish gold rush era. It was in a designated historic district and held serious historic value. After a push by several local preservationists to save it, nonprofit Historic Seattle successfully negotiated to buy the building in 2002 for $2 million, kicking off an ambitious restoration project that would take four years to complete. The hotel underwent a complete seismic retrofit and interior rebuild—walls were stabilized, a new roof was installed, shattered windows were replaced with historically accurate frames, and the building was brought up to modern safety and accessibility codes. Interesting items were uncovered in the process, like antique bullets embedded in a bannister. Although one of its two staircases had been taken out years earlier—which increased overall weakness in the structure, it should be noted—care was taken to preserve the hotel’s grand central staircase as faithfully as possible.

Meanwhile, the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park had had an outpost in Seattle beginning in 1976, but it wasn’t at the Cadillac Hotel. The park’s Seattle unit was first in the Union Trust Annex at 117 Main Street, around the corner from its present site. But the museum’s space was limited there, and along with the increased square footage at the Cadillac, the NPS saw a more historically resonant and architecturally rich setting to tell the story of Seattle’s role in the Klondike Gold Rush. The NPS leased the Cadillac Hotel in 2005 and moved its museum in at Second and Jackson following the extensive renovations.

Although less, ahem, expansive than its sister sites in the Alaska panhandle, the park’s Seattle unit still serves a huge role in telling the story of the Klondike. Established in 1976 by an act of Congress and totally free to visit, the museum documents not only the origin story of the raiding of the Yukon gold fields but also the ways in which it shaped Seattle—offering immersive exhibits like a full-size replica of a miner’s cabin, an industrial-grade sewing machine of the era used to make canvas gear, a scale to weigh even the most minuscule gold nuggets and flakes, and an interactive exhibit for visitors to try their hand at gold panning. One exhibit profiles people who made and lost fortunes in a trice. Photos, diaries, gear, and other personal effects of the stampeders’ are also on display, some of them in the rooms where they once slept. 
The diverse mix of people who made the trek is also honored: Among the well-caricatured white male prospectors in beards and flannel shirts, there were also Indigenous people, Black Americans, women, and immigrants of many different extractions. The museum also explains the ways in which Indigenous communities along the route to the Yukon were impacted.

In March 2025, the Seattle unit of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park appeared on a list of 34 national parks that were in danger of having their leases terminated due to funding cuts by the Trump administration, and as of last week, the museum is closed during the government shutdown. 

Although Historic Seattle still owns the Cadillac Hotel and the building itself is not at risk, it isn’t currently known if the NPS will be permitted to renew their lease there for another five-year contract. The Alaska contingent of the park is not at risk, since the NPS owns those properties, rather than leasing them from another organization.

The Cadillac Hotel is more than a shell for all these stories; it’s a story itself. Poetically, the building could be considered a symbol of the cycles of destruction and renewal that have defined Seattle, from fire to fortune, from earthquake to preservation, from economic decline to boomtown renaissance. Although its future as a museum and educational center is shaky right now, the building itself is still a precious example of Victorian architecture that’s been restored essentially to its original state, and unlike its prior periods of decline, we can probably expect it to be occupied by something or another going forward. With luck, though, this uncertainty will be another small blip in the road that the Cadillac will overcome, and the historic hotel will continue to link us to our city’s rich, golden past.