Originally called the Orondo Recreation Club when it was built in 1922, the building design included a billiard hall in the basement, apartments on the top two floors, and a card room, tobacco shop and lunch counter on the ground floor.
During the 1930s, the basement was converted from a billiard parlor to Wenatchee's first sporting goods store.
There were eight complete apartments on the top two floors, along with a number of simple sleeping rooms. In the 1920s and 1930s, it housed Great Northern railroad workers and Rock Island Dam laborers.
The most exciting tenants of the Garland Apartments were the Wenatchee Chiefs professional baseball team. A farm team of the New York Yankees, and later, of the Chicago Cubs, the players occupied the upper two floors Garland Building built in 1922 during much of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Garland became the Chiefs' headquarters and was also known as sports headquarters for North Central Washington. People from all over gathered here to meet the players and catch up on the latest sports news. Current league standings of professional baseball and college football teams were kept up to date and posted daily.
The Orondo Recreation Club was a gathering place for card players and cigar smokers. Its cigar shop was considered to have the freshest product and the greatest diversity of any shop in the Pacific Northwest.