Hotel Sorrento

History

Gold built the Sorrento. In 1897, Seattle clothier Samuel Rosenberg helped sell the city to gold seekers as the place to outfit for the Klondike. HistoryLink calls the hotel he went on to build “evidence that this was a very lucrative business strategy.”

The Sorrento opened in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood in May 1909, just in time for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the fair Seattle held that year. The architect Harlan Thomas designed it as a seven-story luxury hotel in an eclectic Italianate style, a lavish Italian oasis on a Seattle hill. Its top floor gave the city its first rooftop restaurant, with views west over Elliott Bay to the Olympic Mountains.

The city grew up and blocked the view. In 1969, the 50-story Seattle First National Bank building was finished downtown, the first of the towers that rose between the hotel and the water. Within a decade, the Sorrento’s western views were gone. Seattle named the hotel a city landmark in 2010.

Hauntings & Lore

Alice B. Toklas, the ghost the Sorrento is known for, was made famous by her life partner, Gertrude Stein. Toklas was the subject of Stein’s book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Despite the title, Stein wrote it herself, in Toklas’s voice, and published it in 1933. Toklas’s tie to the hotel is thinner than the story suggests.

Alice B. Toklas in Room 408

Toklas did live in Seattle. KOMO, a Seattle TV news station, reported in 2016 that her family had a home near the hotel’s site while she studied music at the University of Washington. They moved back to San Francisco at least 10 years before the Sorrento opened. In 2023, the Seattle Times put her visits to the hotel at “Probably 0.” It traced the haunting to a rumor that the hotel stands on the site of her childhood home.

That hasn’t kept her out of the stories. The Ticket, the Seattle Times’ entertainment guide, says she has been “spotted gliding around room 408 in flowing white gowns.” Guests, it says, also report flickering lights, phantom footsteps, and cocktails that vanish at the bar. KOMO’s story says she occasionally moves drinks in the Dunbar Room, the hotel’s restaurant. It also says, “Room 408 — for an unknown reason — seems to be her favorite.”

Ask for Room 408.