The Yesler Estate Cashes Out Its Corner of Pioneer Square
Administrators ask the court to let them sell the Yesler Building at Commercial Street and Yesler Avenue to New York's Mutual Life, in a deal worth roughly half a million dollars.
If the court allows the petition of the administrators of the Yesler estate, which was filed in the superior court a few days ago, a big transfer of property belonging to the estate will be made.
The administrators have entered into an agreement with the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York to sell the Yesler building — in which the First National Bank is located, at the corner of Commercial Street and Yesler Avenue — at the price named in the petition. Other transfers, it is said, will be made, the total sum involved being about $500,000.
“A big transfer of property belonging to the estate will be made.”
Commercial Street is First Avenue South now, and the corner of Yesler Way is the middle of Pioneer Square — the block the Yesler estate carved out of Henry Yesler's original claim and his sawmill town. When the estate's administrators sold that corner, they handed a piece of Seattle's founding ground to a New York insurance company for half a million dollars. Out-of-state institutional money buying up Seattle's best corners is not a new story here; it is the original one.
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