Shelves are bare inside the Broadway Rite Aid as Capitol Hill is losing two drugstores and pharmacies to close 2023.
Monday is supposed to be the final day of business in the big chain drugstore that made its home in the one-time Broadway Theater building at the corner of Broadway and E Olive Way. The old neon marquee advertising store specials and the everlasting “COME GET SHOTS HERE” message is a neighborhood landmark.
The Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid chain has yet to confirm the closure with CHS. It seems unlikely they’ll get around to doing so now.
CHS broke the news on the plans to shutter the Broadway Rite Aid store along with the chain’s acquired Bartell Drugs in Broadway’s Harvard Market shopping center here in November. Customers and employees were caught fully off guard as were the big chain’s Harvard Market landlords. The stores weren’t on the roster of planned closures after the Rite Aid chain — which acquired the Seattle-founded Bartell Drugs in 2020 — filed for bankruptcy to settle federal and state opioid lawsuits. But additional closures have followed across the country — and here on Capitol Hill.
In Harvard Market, it’s not clear what will come next for the relatively huge Bartell Drugs space. We’re checking in with shopping center ownership about their plans.
The same goes for 201 Broadway E. The former theater and the old movie marquee that glows above the intersection are set to be darkened for the first time since the 1990s. The 1911-built, more than 5,000-square-foot building has been owned for decades by the Limantzakis family as part of commercial holdings across the city.
Just across from the busy transit, retail, and residential development of Capitol Hill Station, the corner appears to be a prime candidate for possible redevelopment. Next door, an eight-story project is being lined up for the All-Seasons dry cleaners property — after a lengthy soil remediation process. The family ownership of All-Seasons also owns the property and has continued to serve the neighborhood even as the project filings have slowly made their way through the Seattle development process.
The 113-year-old building is still being cared for with permits showing a plan for pressure washing and re-painting in the works just prior to the shutdown. For now, a key Broadway intersection will suffer a significant gap in its commerce and mix of activity.
Rite Aid has also not addressed what is happening to employees in the closures. Some have discussed the possibility of moving to work at other stores in the area though with the continued closures those options are dwindling.
Customers, meanwhile, are sorting out how best to get prescriptions filled while also lamenting the loss of stores where it was possible to buy some basic goods like socks or a greeting card. Customers who call the Bartell pharmacy line say their calls are now directed to Walgreens, a similarly troubled big chain that maintains a store on Broadway, a Pike/Pine pharmacy, and a store on 15th Ave E.
UPDATE: The Harvard Market’s Morris Groberman tells CHS the shopping center is already talking to possible replacement tenants for Bartell Drugs. “We have leads now to fill the market like we are filling other vacant stores,” he said. “Harvard Market has 277 parking stalls it will be a high demand location. Bartell did well with us — seems rite aid is pulling out from Seattle.”
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Totally normal business as usual .
Crazy that Rite Aid would swoop in, aquire a more loved competitor, and then immediately go bankrupt, bringing everything down with it.
I hope they find a replacement tenant soon. That Rite Aid was awful, but vacancy is worse, like the Starbucks closure a block away has shown.
Is there anywhere we can advocate for redevelopment proposals? We desperately need more dense housing around that station.
No, we don’t. Enough is enough. We desperately need to preserve at least some of the past.
There’s no past to preserve with this building. The fact that it’s old isn’t adding anything to the neighborhood. It’s not like when you walked into this drugstore you were transported to a bygone era. Whatever past was preservable here is long gone. Better to have something new.
Expected sadly. Rite-Aid has been teetering on bankruptcy for a few years. It was insane that they “bought” Bartells. When that happened I knew Bartells was done too. I believe the thought was that buying Bartells would prop up the dying Rite-Aid business model, but instead, it just took them both down. Sad.
But this spot on Broadway would be much better served with an apartment building with some street level retail.
Would be cool if the marquee could be preserved no matter what they do there
Sure would. Bring back the cinema! (I realize this is a pipe dream).
This has been a shitty year for locally grown businesses. First Theo’s gets bought out and their production line gets moved to Indiana. Now, we lose Bartells and Rite-Aid.
We stopped by the store on Saturday, as we walked in we saw two people blatantly shop lift stuff off the shelves. As in, they took an arm load of stuff and walked right out the front door.
Let us not kid ourselves about the reasons why these stores were chosen to be closed.
Cool fake story!
I hope you yelled after them and then called the cops. You did, didn’t you?
No point. People (criminals) who shoplift don’t give a damn about what other people think, and by the time the cops came they would be long gone.
The security guard that Rite-Aid had standing outside the door wasn’t bothering to stop anyone, so I wasn’t feeling that compelled to raise an alarm about it as well.
I did ask the cashier “so last day?” while watching a second person go out the door, she responded with “Monday”.