farm near Conway in the early 1900s. He moved to Bellingham in 1905 where he remained until his death in March 1906 at age 70. In November 1900, the building was purchased by Anton Stander, who had struck it rich during the Yukon Gold Rush. Stander's wife, who had convinced him to buy the property, would sue him for the building during the couple's scandalous and highly publicized divorce in 1906. Unable to fill all of the building's office space, subsequent owners leased entire floors as lofts or to light manufacturing firms. The Northwest Fixture & Electric Company, who during the gold rush supplied miners with electric motors and generators for mining and lighting, occupied the upper floors between 1894 and 1900. J. Kobi & Company manufactured toiletries on the fifth floor until moving to their own building in 1923. By the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth and certainly into the 1920s, the Holyoke was a gathering place for Seattle musicians and artists. When she opened her studio in the Holyoke in 1902, Nellie Cornish, who later founded an arts school in Seattle, today's Cornish College of the Arts, listed among the building's artists Louise Coman Beck, violinist Vaughn Arthur, baritone Magnus Schuetz, and drama teacher Frank Egan, who with Rose Egan later founded the Egan School in Los Angeles. The Robert Morris Social Club held regular dances in the building. The Seattle Musical Club gathered in the building and suites on the building's second floor were used for practice sessions and discussion of musical theory. Other social clubs opened up in the building including the Lonesome Club that advertised, "Strangers and lonely people welcome." Restoration to the current day Over the years little had been done to alter the building's facade. Fire escapes were added to the building's North facade and later enlarged in 1919 under the supervision of architects Lawton & Moldenhour, among other interior upgrades and the storefronts were gradually modernized, all of which has since been undone. Likely as a result of the 1949 Olympia earthquake, most of the granite that originally finished the building's brick cornice has been removed. Following its induction into the National Register in 1975, the Holyoke Building's owners, Harbor Properties, owned by prominent Seattleite Stimson Bullitt, proposed a nearly $1 million renovation that would convert the then mostly vacant building into a vibrant mix of air-conditioned offices and