When Dr. Nathaniel Redpath and his wife, Lucy, built a large house on this site in 1907, the neighborhood south of Sylvester Park was solidly residential. But by the end of the 1920s, everything had changed. The city's commercial core was steadily moved southward, while a desirable new housing district had emerged near the new Capitol. In 1929 the widowed Lucy Redpath sold her land to the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Exchange. Then she literally moved her big house uphill to a prominent corner lot in the South Capitol Neighborhood.

By the mid-1930s a new Pacific Telephone office stood on the old Redpath property. It was designed by noted Seattle architect Carl Gould, who produced at least a half dozen Pacific Telephone buildings - all in a similar "modern" style - in towns across Washington. Though the heyday of Art Deco design had passed, Gould continued to use Art Deco motifs in his telephone company buildings: recessed vertical window bays, geometric brick patterns, cast terra cotta panels with stylized leaf designs.

Olympia's Pacific Telephone building housed the company's local business office, its switching equipment and long-distance operators. It was commonly known as the Fleetwood Building, after a local telephone prefix. Fleetwood telephone numbers are still used in Olympia today, though now dialed as the more familiar numerical prefix "three-five."

In the mid-1990s the Fleetwood Building was remodeled into multiple housing units by the Low Income Housing Institute, a non-profit organization based in Seattle.

The Pacific Telephone Building is located east of Capitol Way on Seventh Avenue. It is listed on the Olympia Heritage Register. The building contains private residences and is not open to the public.

Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building. Olympia Heritage Commission photo.

View of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building looking east from Capitol Way. Ellis photograph from a private collection.