Curious Shop Brochure

Joseph Edward "Daddy" Standley opened his first curiosity shop at Second Avenue and Pike Street in 1899, calling it a free museum from the start. By 1904 he had moved to Colman Ferry Dock at Pier 52 — the address printed on this brochure — where ferry passengers waiting for boats to Bainbridge Island or Bremerton became a natural audience. No ticket required; souvenirs paid the rent.

The totem poles advertised here, ranging from two-inch desk pieces to thirty-foot statement carvings, were both the shop's best-known product and a genuine commission economy. Around 1907 Standley developed a working relationship with Nuu-chah-nulth carver Sam Williams; Williams and his four sons went on to produce thousands of poles for the shop across the first half of the twentieth century. Hotels, civic organizations, and collectors across the country bought the larger pieces — the brochure's thirty-foot upper limit was real.

The center-panel map contains two clues that bracket the brochure's print date. "Ivars Sea Food Fire Boats" is marked just up the waterfront from the Curiosity Shop — Ivar Haglund opened his first waterfront stand at Pier 54 in 1938, so the brochure postdates that. The left-panel "Points of Interest" text also mentions Seattle's "floating concrete bridge on beautiful Lake Washington," meaning the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge, which opened July 2, 1940 — the world's first large-scale concrete pontoon bridge and a genuine civic novelty at the time. The shop left Pier 52 for Pier 51 in 1963, so the piece was printed sometime in that roughly twenty-year window.

Ye Olde Curiosity Shop still operates, now at Pier 54 — the same pier where Ivar's began — and remains family-owned. The 1933 Seattle Star named it one of the city's "Seven Wonders," the only retail shop on the list.