The Grand Pacific Hotel (first known as the Starr Building and sometimes the California Block) is a historic building in Seattle, Washington located at 1115-1117 1st Avenue between Spring and Seneca Streets in the city's central business district. The building was designed in July 1889 and constructed in 1890 [Often incorrectly cited as 1898] during the building boom that followed the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Though designed as an office building, the Grand Central had served as a Single room occupancy hotel nearly since its construction, with the Ye Kenilworth Inn on the upper floors during the 1890s. The hotel was refurnished and reopened in 1900 as the Grand Pacific Hotel, most likely named after the hotel of the same name in Chicago that had just recently been rebuilt. It played a role during the Yukon Gold Rush as one of many hotels that served traveling miners and also housed the offices for the Seattle Woolen Mill, an important outfitter for the Klondike. The Grand Pacific Hotel is a substantial four-story brick and stone building designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style and remains a rare surviving example of its kind outside of the Pioneer Square district. The Building was designed by one of Seattle's most important 19th century architects, William E. Boone, and is one of his earliest surviving projects. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 around the same time as the adjacent Colonial Hotel and both are Seattle city landmarks. The two hotels were interconnected during restoration in the early 1980s and today are collectively known as the Colonial Grand Pacific. History Lewis Starr The Grand Pacific Hotel was one of hundreds of substantial brick buildings put up in the aftermath of the Great Seattle Fire. It was constructed as the Starr Building for the estate of the late Lewis M. Starr by his widow and executrix of his estate Eliza Jane Starr. Captain Lewis M. Starr was a prominent west coast mariner and businessman, who by the late 1870s was the regional contractor for the USPS and controlled the principal steamboat business in Puget Sound started by his brother George E. Starr, whose name was memorialized on the line's flagship steamer. Starr would sell the steamship business to the newly formed Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company in 1880, the payout from which he would use to purchase his numerous Seattle real