Jesse Marinoff Reyes ( Jesse Marinoff Reyes Design, Maplewood, N.J.)
From the description on the back: “World Famous YE OLDE CURIOSITY SHOP one of Seattle outstanding tourist attractions, 601 Alaskan Way–Pier 51, Seattle, Washington 98104, U.S.A. – Established 1899… Indian Traders, Importers, Curio Collectors. This Indian Long House features an Indian-carved totemic house front. The poles are from the Entrance of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.”
---Paul Thiry---
Despite boasting over a million visitors a year (once considered one of the “Seven Wonders of Seattle,” the only retail shop to be so designated, excluding the entirety of the Pike Place Market), and having this structure as both an iconic and architecturally interesting touchstone—after having suffered several moves since it’s 1899 origin, in 1963, in the wake of the excitement engendered by the World’s Fair of 1962 and designed by the premier Northwest modernist architect Paul Thiry, (also the principal architect of the World’s Fair on the Seattle Center grounds) and modeled on the Northwest coastal Indian “long house” form—when the Ferry Terminal decided to expand yet again in the late-1980s, the Curiosity Shop was moved to an ordinary pier building in 1988. Still a tourist trap and popular institution, but much diminished from what you see here, stripped of its mystery and grandeur. From oddball idiosyncrasies like the “Hat and Boots” or the “Bubbleator” and the old-timer diner “The Doghouse” to such mainstream attention-getters like the Major League Baseball Pilots and the NBA Supersonics, Seattle has a long, easily recounted and sad “history” of what it has lost, usually to shortsightedness, greed, or just plain stupidity. Would anyone just tear down Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water or the Guggenheim? No, I didn’t think so. Take a look at the Seattle Center lately? It was once a minor-modernist masterpiece. Sorry Paul.
My grandfather Nick Marinoff had an unusually carved lamp—like a cross between knotted driftwood and Brancusi—he had done that sat in the window (the one at left in the picture to be exact) for several years. I don’t know if it was sold off or if the Curiosity Shop still has it in storage somewhere. Today, grandpa would be considered a folk or “outsider” artist.
Photograph: Max R. Jensen
C. P. Johnson Card Company
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