Text by Patrick Bell.
We have a short history lesson of a long time Seattle Oldsmobile dealer for today’s feature; Riach’s. A lesson prompted by the image above, which seems to have been recently unearthed. Since I have been employed at several dealerships, and hung around at many more, I find this quite fascinating. So climb aboard for a ride to twentieth century Seattle.
John Riach (1895-1981) was born in Scotland and immigrated with his family to Victoria, British Columbia when he was 17. In 1919 he moved to Seattle, Washington, and went to work for the Willys-Overland Company. It became Tyson Oldsmobile in 1920, and Riach rose through the ranks to become vice president and part owner. The dealership had relocated a few times, but by the mid thirties it had settled down at 12th & Pine.
Central Oldsmobile, as caught by a tax assessor in 1943.
In 1937 Riach opened his own Oldsmobile dealership in an existing building he had remodeled at 1017 Olive Way, about a mile away from Tyson’s. He called it Central Oldsmobile. In December of 1941 Charlie Tyson passed away, and Riach bought out his share. A few months later in early ’42 he renamed it Riach Oldsmobile. This was, of course, right at the time the U.S. had been thrust into World War II, and new passenger car production had ceased.
Riach’s son, John Donald Riach (1924-1997), who went by his middle name, joined the family firm in 1949 after graduating from college. A Rambler franchise was added in 1958, and located at the 12th & Pine location along with Riach Oldsmobile. They set them up as two separate dealerships that happened to be in the same location. Apparently that changed, as I found a ’62 newspaper ad listing them as well as “Central Rambler at 1013 Olive Way” as two of ten area dealers. That was the only other information I could locate on the Rambler angle.
Our opening image shows the corner of one of their sales lots. The information I researched said the Riach’s obtained several pieces of property around the Olive Way facility for extra room as they grew, but I am unable to determine the actual location of this one. I don’t find any evidence of a curved uphill street in the neighborhood. But, Interstate 5 construction was beginning during this time period, and it cut through the city within a block or two of the dealership. So the location in the image may no longer exist. On this side of the billboard are three Oldsmobiles, a ’58 model in the right corner, a ’60 Dynamic 88 Holiday Scenicoupe below the sign, and a ’54 4 door sedan behind it. Hiding behind the sign was a ’60 Ford Galaxie, and the first car parked on the street looks like a Jaguar.
The letter shown in this apparent magazine ad is a testament to John Riach’s sales and management abilities. It was written in 1944, well into the third year of no new cars, and praises Oldsmobile’s programs that helped dealers survive the war years. The building in the ad was the 12th & Pine location, and that building is still there, at least as of November of ’21.
Here is a sales brochure from the dealership, featuring the 1959 models.
And the back page detailing the specifications for that year.
Oldsmobile was selected as the official car of the 1962 Seattle’s World Fair. With Oldsmobile’s “Rocket” theme, they made a good pair. Featured was a line up of new ’62 models provided by General Motors through Riach Oldsmobile. The first one was a Ninety-Eight Holiday Sports Sedan. You can see the special “FAIR” license plates with “RIACH” frames. The photo was dated November of ’61 and the in process construction of the Space Needle was in the background. From the left was Ewen Dingwall, managing director of Century 21, Donald Riach and Brooks Biddle, both of Riach Oldsmobile. Biddle was actually Donald’s brother in law and went on to become an area dealer himself.
A Honda 600 Sedan, the only model available in the early seventies.
The two Oldsmobile shops were consolidated into one at the Olive Way property in 1964, and the name was changed to Riach-Central Oldsmobile. Then in 1970, they were offered a dealership by Honda, who at that time only had the 600 Sedan in their line up. They accepted the offer and then there was a Riach-Central Honda. Donald Riach was quoted as saying the Honda sales began “very quietly”, until they took off when the gas crisis hit and the first Civics arrived.
The Olive Way facility in the early to mid eighties. It did not change much on the outside in the nearly fifty years it was occupied by the Riach’s.
The family sold the Honda franchise (the only one left), but not the property in 1986, marking 66 years of a Riach in Oldsmobile sales and service. In 2014 the family trust sold the property to the Washington State Convention Center for expansion room, and Honda of Seattle soon moved to a new facility south of downtown.
As a side note, the tall building in the background is what is now known as the Olive Tower Apartments. It was built in 1928, and was one of Seattle’s first high rise apartment buildings. It survives and is now affordable housing. Interstate 5 was built on the other side of it from the view of the last image, and in fact a piece of its property was taken for highway construction. If you have driven south through downtown Seattle you have driven right by it.
That closes today’s brief overview on an Oldsmobile (Rambler and Honda) dealer in Seattle. Thanks for joining in, and have a great day.
Great history of a long-time Olds dealer. A bit sad for me as my Cutlass went onto an auto transport for a trip to a new owner. I founded an OCA chapter in 1984 and have had 22 vintage Oldsmobiles. It’ll be my last vintage car, the end of an era.
Thanks for the history. Interesting how things change.
I purchased a new 71 Cutlass at Ralph Schomp Olds in Englewood, CO. They too, had just added the Honda line and offered the little 600 model only. I will never forget standing in the service desk line behind a rather large, elderly business man as he was told a Honda 600 was the only available loaner/rental unit that day. He thought he was being offered a motorcycle!!
About the curved street in the first picture, that probably was a temporary road used during the construction of Interstate 5. That road is actually straight. There were a lot of temporary alignments of downtown Seattle streets during the freeway construction. This particular site was the construction of an overpass for Olive Way over I-5.
That lot in the picture served as a small used car lot on the side of the Olive Tower apartment, across from the main dealership.
The Olive Tower was swankier back when new. Future U.S. Senator Warren Magnuson lived there while attending law school at the University of Washington.
The main building had a large cavernous storage room in the basement, accessed through a ramp on the side of the building. The service department was behind the showroom that spanned the front of the building.
I worked as a salesman at that Honda dealership in the 90s during my young adult failure-to-launch period. One of the other salesmen lived in the Olive Tower, which was for lower income people by then.
Thank you for this detail! Like Patrick, I was a bit perplexed about the topography, but a temporary setup makes sense. Remote lots like this tend to be challenging to place when we come across random pictures like this.
I tried without success to post a JPEG of a screenshot from Google Maps for you. If you search Olive and Boren in Seattle, that is the intersection for the branch at 1017 Olive. The main dealership is on the SW corner. The small sales lot is on the SE corner with the small grey shaded building being the Olive Tower (it has a surprisingly small footprint). The curve is Olive Way travelling eastbound from Boren. The construction would have been the overpass over I-5.
Here is another Seattle area Oldsmobile dealership from the mid 60s. I remember Chuck Olson’s distinctive A-frame dealership from when I was a kid. It was a Chevy dealer by then, but he got his start with Oldsmobiles. The A-frame building was long-ago remodeled, and it now is a Cadillac dealer for another company. Chuck Olson still exists about two blocks away selling Chevys and Kias.
’60 Olds $488… from an Olds dealer no less… those were the days!!
The Riach location at “15th & Pine” intrigued me as I had some experience with downtown Seattle and the Capitol Hill area over the years – but not since the early 2000s.
As the stamp on the ’59 Olds brochure illustrated above indicates, the 12th & Pine location had a street address of 1519 12th Avenue. That triggered a study of a map as I suspected it was in the notorious “Chop Zone” from the riots of May/June 2020. And it is right at the heart of it. The Riach dealership building is exactly the building that became the Seattle Police Department East Precinct location. It was gutted by rioters, abandonned by the police and eventually reclaimed and refurbished. A look at a current street view of the building, the now renewed East Precinct police station, reveals it is the same building that appears in the above 1944 magazine ad for Riach.
Who would have figured that the quirky little Honda would displace Oldsmobile as the family’s bread and butter franchise. It seems a million years ago when an Olds franchise was practically a license to print money.