HistoryLink Tours

Continue walking west along Seneca Street to view another historic apartment building at Summit Avenue. The rain and cloud filled skies of the Northwest inspired the well-to-do of Seattle to make extended winter trips to Southern California. By the mid-1920s, Spanish Colonial revival style homes and public buildings became a way to recall the sunnier climate of Santa Barbara, Hollywood, and San Diego.

It took little time before the 1926 stucco-faced Italianate Piedmont residential hotel on Summit Avenue required expansion to accommodate more tenants. Architect Daniel Huntington had a long-standing love of the Italianate style. But in 1927, following his interest in the handiwork and crafts movements in California, he decided to sheath the street level facade of the Hotel Piedmont addition in a colorful skirt of Malibu tile, manufactured in that beach town in Southern California. The Piedmont contained one of the largest installations of this tile in the region.

In addition to the dining room, the apartment hotel had a music room, a lending library, and “an especially fine radio installation, providing unit control in every apartment.” The apartments had kitchens and dinettes, electric ranges, automatic refrigerators, all-night telephone and elevator service, and use of a large garage staffed with attendants. After many years as The Evangeline, a women’s residence hall for the Salvation Army, the building was converted to apartments in 1987 and renamed the Tuscany. The former tile inset dining room was destroyed to provide additional apartments on the ground floor.