Ye Olde Curiosity Shop

Ye Olde Curiosity Shop is a store on the Central Waterfront of Seattle, Washington, United States, founded in 1899. It has moved several times, mainly within the waterfront area, and is now located on Pier 54. Best known today as a souvenir shop, it also has aspects of a dime museum, and was for many years an important supplier of Northwest Coast art to museums. As of 2008, the store has been owned by four generations of the same family.

In 1933, the Seattle Star named Ye Olde Curiosity Shop one of the "Seven Wonders of Seattle", the only shop on the list. The other six Wonders were the harbor, the Ballard Locks, the Boeing airplane factory, the Seattle Art Museum, the Pike Place Market and the University District's Edmond Meany Hotel (now Hotel Deca).

The shop was founded in 1899 by J. E. "Daddy" Standley (born February 24, 1854, in Steubenville, Ohio). He had already traded somewhat in curios and Indian goods as a grocer in Denver, Colorado. When he moved to Seattle in 1899 because his wife's health required a lower altitude, he encountered a boom town supplying and benefitting from the Klondike Gold Rush. He founded the business in 1899. An exhibit at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (A-Y-P Exposition) in Seattle drew tourists, scholars, anthropologists and collectors and was enormous publicity for his already somewhat famous shop. It also won Standley a gold medal in the category of ethnological collections.

Standley's shop presented a jumbled mix of curiosities and significant art objects. He collected and sold what came his way, but also had local Native American artists make objects to his specifications. He sold genuine Tlingit totem poles, but also replicas by carvers descended from the Vancouver Island-based Nuu-chah-nulth tribe, who were living in Seattle, and even inexpensive souvenir totem poles made in Japan. A flair for the bizarre and grotesque led him to include items such as shrunken heads from the Amazon (some of them definitely genuine, others probably not).

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