Pioneer Building and the Pergola

You're standing in Pioneer Square, at the little triangular park where First Avenue meets Yesler Way. Face the big building on the corner of First and James, the Pioneer Building. Look at how it's made. The bottom two levels are rough gray sandstone. Above that, five floors of red brick. Keep that line where the stone stops in mind, because this whole story is about stone.

This corner once held the house and orchard of Henry Yesler. He built the first steam-powered sawmill in the Pacific Northwest, right across the way, and his home was the social center of early Seattle. One plain sentence belongs here too: all of this was built on the homeland of the Duwamish and other Coast Salish people, who were here long before Yesler's mill.