Why stop here
Since 1899, this Seattle waterfront institution founded by J.E. "Daddy" Standley has been part souvenir store, part free museum, and part trading post — home to Sylvester the mummy, totem poles, and a century of curiosities, still run by Standley's descendants.
Before you go
Hours, fees, access, closures, parking, and trail conditions change. Use the directions link to identify the managing agency and confirm anything time-sensitive before making a special trip.
The short tour
Listen in the car on the way, or on headphones once you are standing there. The longer history and the sources are below.
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The long version
In 1899, a 45-year-old former grocer named Joseph Edward “Daddy” Standley arrived in Seattle from Denver with an unusual obsession. His passion for oddities had started in childhood, when he won a book called Wonders of Nature as a school prize. By the time he moved west — seeking a lower altitude for his wife Isabella’s health — collecting had all but taken over his life.
His timing was perfect. Seattle was booming as the gateway to the Klondike Gold Rush, its streets full of prospectors, sailors, and traders heading to and from Alaska. Standley opened a curio store at Second Avenue and Pike Street, offering free admission to gawk at his growing museum of oddities while selling Native-made goods and souvenirs.
In 1904, Standley moved the business to the Colman Ferry Dock at Pier 52, planting it where boats from Alaska and across the Pacific tied up. Sailors, whalers, and traders became suppliers, bringing walrus tusks, carvings, and curiosities from their voyages. Around this time the store took its enduring name, “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop,” a wink at Charles Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop — complete with the slogan “We beat the Dickens.”
The shop has moved along the waterfront over the decades, relocating in 1963 to Pier 51 — into a longhouse-style building designed by architect Paul Thiry — and in 1988 to its current home on Pier 54, next door to Ivar’s Acres of Clams.
The shop’s most celebrated resident is Sylvester the mummy, acquired in 1955. By shop lore, two cowboys found him half-buried in Arizona’s Gila Bend desert in 1895, naturally dried by the sand — a story that has never been verified. What is documented is stranger: he is genuinely human, and when the University of Washington Medical Center ran him through a CT scanner in 2001, radiographers found a normal (if shrunken) brain and organs, a bullet in his lower abdomen that likely killed him, older metal fragments healed into his face — and evidence that his body had been treated with a preservative, suggesting someone deliberately prepared him rather than the desert doing all the work. He has since starred in a Smithsonian Channel documentary.
Sylvester shares the shop with a second mummy known as Sylvia, shrunken heads, a “Fiji mermaid” dangling from the rafters, narwhal tusks, whale jawbones brought back from Vancouver Island in 1908, and cases of oddities from two-headed calves to the Lord’s Prayer written impossibly small.
Standley’s biggest cultural footprint may be the totem pole. Poles were carved by northern coastal peoples such as the Tlingit — not by the Coast Salish tribes of Puget Sound — but Standley commissioned and sold them by the hundreds, helping fix the totem pole (accurately or not) as a symbol of Seattle. HistoryLink records that the shop became a major market for Native makers of moccasins, baskets — particularly finely woven Makah baskets — totem poles, and clothing, and that Standley built lasting relationships with the Indigenous craftspeople whose work filled his shelves. He also mounted a display of more than 1,200 items at Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909.
The shop’s guest register grew as famous as its merchandise. Documented visitors include Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in 1902, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Warren G. Harding, boxer Jack Dempsey, Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, Katharine Hepburn, and Robert Ripley of “Believe It or Not!” fame, who went on a shopping spree here in 1936. By the shop’s own account, the Seattle Star named it one of the “Seven Wonders of Seattle” in 1933.
“Daddy” Standley ran the shop until his death in October 1940 at age 86. His son Edward took over, followed by daughter Ruby and her husband Russell James. Grandson Joe James (1924-2016) managed the business for decades, and today his son Andy James and the next generation of the family carry it on — well over a century of Standleys and Jameses behind the same cluttered, wonderful counters.
Through fires, earthquakes, and multiple moves along the waterfront, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop has remained a Seattle constant: a cabinet of wonders, a trading post, and a monument to one man’s lifelong delight in the extraordinary.
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