For $3.3M, a historic Tacoma mansion could be yours. Finding a buyer might be tough
Robert Slattery owns a piece of Tacoma’s history. It’s something the 43-year-old real estate investor is proud of.
Six years ago he purchased the historic Blackwell mansion, the nearly 9,000-square-foot former home of William and Alice Blackwell, who arrived in Tacoma in the late 1800s along with the Northern Pacific Railroad and built the burgeoning city’s first premier hotel. Perched on Broadway, overlooking Commencement Bay and with a view of Mount Rainier in the distance, the elegant property dates back to a time when Tacoma’s destiny was yet to be determined. The walls have stories to tell.
Slattery says he’s still taken by the mansion, which has been painstakingly restored over the years to find new life as commercial office space while maintaining its historic charm.
“You just don’t see stuff like this anymore,” Slattery said by phone Tuesday. “I love this building.”
Still, for the right price, the mansion could be yours, Slattery said. He might be smitten with the property, but he’s also in the real estate business, and he knows nothing lasts forever.
Now the only question is simple: Will he ever be able to sell it?
So far, finding a buyer for the estate — which in its heyday welcomed guests like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling — has proven to be a challenge.
Commercial real estate market
While the Blackwell mansion is one-of-a-kind, the obstacles facing Slattery, who relocated with his family to Texas last year, are likely familiar to many downtown property owners.
In May he put it on the market for $3.3 million, but a buyer failed to emerge. He acknowledges the asking price was steep — more than what he paid for it — but he says it was a fair deal for an office building that, when full of tenants, generates significant revenue. Now, with interest rates rising and the market for downtown office properties murky — which Slattery attributes, at least in part, to increased crime in the area and the shift to remote work in many professions — he’s preparing to wait it out.
One day, Slattery believes, he’ll find someone who falls in love with the building just like he did. But the reality, he says, is that it could take years.
In the meantime, Slattery said, he’s unlisted the mansion and turned his attention to finding new tenants for the building’s office spaces, trying to make up for the vacancies created during the COVID-19 pandemic while remaining open to selling the building should a buyer emerge.
“It’s just going to take the right buyer. If I lease up the building again — which is what we’re doing — I’m happy to have it and keep it as part of my portfolio,” Slattery said. “Or, somebody will move in and … determine that they love it and want to buy it, and at that point my buyer is already in place.”
Historical significance
According to Michael Sullivan, a local historian and preservationist, the Blackwell mansion’s place in Tacoma’s history is unquestioned, even if its prospects on the open market are uncertain.
In the late 1800s, Broadway was home to many of the city’s preeminent families and their distinguished homes, and the Blackwell estate was one of many lining the street. Just up the road, Nelson Bennett — who was responsible for building Tacoma’s street car system and the Stampede Pass tunnel — lived in a lavish Victorian Queen Anne-style home with his wife, Lottie Wells Bennett. But it was the Blackwell’s home — which in 1889 cost $30,000 to build, making it the most expensive in the city at the time — where the action often happened, Sullivan said.
William Blackwell was a hotelier who first opened the pioneer era Blackwell House under the family name and later went on to manage the famed Tacoma Hotel, Sullivan explained. His wife, Alice Blackwell, meanwhile, was one of the first central figures in Tacoma’s literary and high society scenes. She helped to champion the creation of the Tacoma YWCA next door and regularly hosted lavish dinner parties in the family’s ornate dining room. After William Blackwell’s death, the home was gifted to the YWCA, which used it as office space for decades. The mansion now shares a wall with the YWCA building next door.
“Broadway used to be mansion row. … All the important people in town lived there, and the Blackwells were definitely part of that elite company,” Sullivan said. “Whenever a big, important celebrity would come to town, they would do a big spread dinner. They had a huge, formal dining room. It was a Gilded Age kind of thing.”
Tour the Blackwell mansion today and it’s not hard to envision the formal parties of yesteryear, even if the building’s transition to Class B office space has changed the aesthetic. The home is anchored by a grand staircase and a library with softwood floors, and its radius-glass windows, eight fireplaces and mahogany woodwork are as stunning now as they surely were more than 100 years ago. The building’s previous owner, famed Tacoma architect Dusty Trail, transformed the mansion’s top floor into a 2,000-square-foot penthouse apartment, boasting a view of the port and the bay that rivals most in Tacoma.
Stating the obvious, Sullivan said there will never be a home like the Blackwell mansion built in Tacoma again.
“We don’t have the patience, we don’t have the materials and we don’t have the memory to be able to reproduce that type of building again today,” he said.
Slattery said he remains optimistic that, someday, someone new will want to buy it.
“I bought the building eyes wide open, knowing that it was not going to be a quick buy and quick sell,” Slattery said.
“I don’t feel stuck,” he continued. “But I am very sober in my understanding that I may need to hold onto this building for a few more years.”
This story was originally published September 28, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
