Ye Olde Curiosity Shop
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop is a store founded in 1899, on the Central Waterfront of Seattle, Washington, United States. It is currently located on Pier 54. Best known today as a souvenir shop and museum, it also has aspects of a dime museum, and is an important supplier of Northwest Coast art to museums. As of 2008, the store has been owned by four generations of the same family. In 1933, the Seattle Star named Ye Olde Curiosity Shop one of the "Seven Wonders of Seattle", the only shop on the list. The other six Wonders were the harbor, the Ballard Locks, the Boeing airplane factory, the Seattle Art Museum, the Pike Place Market and the University District's Edmond Meany Hotel (now the Graduate Seattle hotel). Owners The shop was founded in 1899 by J. E. "Daddy" Standley (born February 24, 1854, in Steubenville, Ohio). He had already traded somewhat in curios and Indian goods as a grocer in Denver, Colorado. When he moved to Seattle in 1899, he encountered a boom town supplying and benefitting from the Klondike Gold Rush. He founded the business in 1899. An exhibit at the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in Seattle drew tourists, scholars, anthropologists and collectors and was enormous publicity for his already somewhat famous shop. It also won Standley a gold medal in the category of ethnological collections. Standley's shop presented a jumbled mix of curiosities and significant art objects. He collected and sold what came his way, but also had local Native American artists make objects to his specifications. He sold genuine Tlingit totem poles, but also replicas by carvers descended from the Vancouver Island-based Nuu-chah-nulth tribe, who were living in Seattle, and even inexpensive souvenir totem poles made in Japan. A flair for the bizarre and grotesque led him to include items such as shrunken heads from the Amazon (some of them definitely genuine, others probably not). In addition to the shop, Standley built a home he called "Totem Place" on a estate in West Seattle. The estate's collection of totem poles, whale bones, and other curiosities replete with a Japanese-style teahouse and a miniature log cabin drew sightseeing tourists. In 1937 Standley, at the age of 83, was hit by a car on Alaskan Way, the road along the Seattle waterfront, and his leg was broken. He never fully recovered, although he remained active in the business to within 4 days of his death on October 25, 1940. Standley's son Edward joined the shop in 1907 and worked there until his death in 1945. Russell James first joined the business in 1912 and eventually married Standley's daughter. Except for his service in World War I, James worked there until 1952. Standley's grandson Joe James began working in the shop in 1946, and operated the business for over 50 years. Joe James's son Andy and daughter Debbie were also involved in running the business from at least the 1980s. The shop's current owners, the aforementioned Andy James and his wife Tammy,