Biography | Jeff Bezos — The Marine Hospital on Beacon Hill That Became Amazon's Headquarters

People treat Amazon's Seattle years as a South Lake Union campus story.

For eleven years the headquarters was this 1933 Art Deco hospital.

The Pacific Tower at 1200 12th Avenue South was completed in 1932 and opened the next year as a U.S. Public Health Service Marine Hospital.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

By the late 1990s the upper floors stood mostly empty while a clinic remained below.

In 1998 the developer Wright Runstad took a long lease on those vacant floors and subleased them to Amazon.com.

Conversion work ran from late 1998 through June 1999.

Amazon occupied most of the tower from 1999 until 2010, about thirteen of sixteen floors.

A medical clinic stayed on the lower levels and still operates there.

Jeff Bezos kept a small sixth-floor office with a fire-exit door and little view.

The company outgrew the building and moved the headquarters to South Lake Union.

The orange brick tower remains a public landmark on the north edge of Beacon Hill, about 350 feet above sea level.

Visitors can stand on the grounds. The lower floors are a working clinic, not a museum of the company.

Photo: Joe Mabel, 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Jeff Bezos in 2005, James Duncan Davidson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.