Philip Augustus Marquam acquired the lot at the corner of SW Sixth and Morrison from William W. Chapman in 1854 as payment of $500 in legal fees.

It yields the palm to only one on the Pacific coast, the grand opera house in San Francisco, and that only to a small degree as regards size.

"[4] Another critic described it as "rather gloomy and cheerless, like so many of the office structures designed under the spell of the Richardsonian Romanesque...It has no doubt all sorts of faults.

Pittock and his son-in-law, Frederick Leadbetter, intended to remodel the building to serve as headquarters for the newly organized Northwestern National Bank Company.

In a letter to the editor of The Architect and Engineer, one writer stated that "...as Portland advanced from a sleepy overgrown village to a half-grown city, the building became a home for quack doctors and patent medicine fakers..." and that the bricks used in construction were soft and of poor material.