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.

[3] 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.

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 estate holdings and build a mansion in Oakland, California,[ii] as well as becoming proprietor of the Ætna Iron Works in San Francisco.

[6] He spent the next decade traveling up and down the coast from his home, buying and developing investment properties and businesses in Seattle as well as Portland, Oregon, where he helped establish a bank and where another one of his brothers, A. M. Starr was mayor.

[7] Prior to the fire this property was occupied by a four-story (two stories above 1st Avenue, two below) brick building built in 1885 by lessee David Gilmore for his newly established bakery the Northwestern Cracker Company.

[10] Due to the dramatic slope of the property towards Elliott Bay, the four-story building had two additional floors below 1st Avenue, facing Post Alley, which housed various industrial enterprises.

The Galt Brothers, a tile and fireplace accessory dealer,[11] would first occupy the space in 1891 and The Seattle Woolen Mills would locate their offices in the lower floors during the Yukon Gold Rush.

[18] In 1931 the building was nearly gutted by an early morning fire originating from one of the basement floors, then occupied by a wholesale fish company, that vented through the hotel's central court, where flames were said to shoot 75 feet into the air.