Big Little News will be open through May 19th on E Pike
Freeman’s decade run on North Broadway will end this summer (Image: Freeman)
Two experiments in neighborhood retail are leaving Capitol Hill. One is closing shop for good. The other is making a change to cut expenses and incorporate its flagship store with the SoDo production facility where it manufactures its Seattle-tested raincoats and outerwear. Both will be open a little longer for one last minute browse or window shopping.
After a decade off north Broadway in the Loveless Building, outerwear designer Freeman will leave Capitol Hill this summer to combine “production and retail all in one spot,” the company tells CHS.
Meanwhile in Pike/Pine, Big Little News, the revival of the Capitol Hill newsstand born three years ago under the guidance of one of the most experienced booksellers in the city and a neighborhood business family of bars and restaurants, is also slated to close but on a shorter timeframe — you have until May 19th to visit the E Pike shop and peruse its “foreign and domestic magazines, newspapers and zines” and champagne(!) mix.
CHS reported here on the March 2021 opening of the shop from Pike/Pine LGBTQ nightlife entrepreneur Joey Burgess and Tracy Taylor, the general manager of nearby Elliott Bay Book Company. In the time since, Burgess and husband Murf Hall have grown their business family along with Taylor to include Elliott Bay and the Oddfellows Cafe.
As part of the closure of Big Little News, the company says Elliott Bay will pick up some of the spirit of the little news and magazine shop with expanded offerings at the 10th Ave bookstore.
There are still a few weeks to visit BLN. “Thanks to everyone who came by our little shop!,” the Big Little News closure announcement reads.
Up on northern Broadway, the timeframe will stretch into summer with plans for Freeman to moved to its SoDo facility by July. “[We’re] excited to give our customers a cool experience of seeing where everything is made,” Freeman says.
CHS reported here in 2014 as the store debuted. “We love how people in the neighborhood are stopping by and seeing what’s going on,” Scott Freeman, who originally thought about opening in Ballard before deciding on the north end of Broadway, told CHS at the time.
The neighborhood enjoyment of visiting and window shopping has lived on. CHS has received several tips from neighbors since the announcement about the planned move went up on the building’s windows.
Though high rents and tendencies toward large commercial spaces in new development can make opening here difficult, the spirit of experiments in small retail lives on around the neighborhood including projects like another HIll-based outdoor gear retailer Windthrow just off 15th Ave E.
Another challenge is competition from the continuing to boom Capitol Hill food and drink economy. CHS reported here on the latest “change of use” project with a planned new bar transforming a former retail and office space in E Pike’s Greenus Building.
There will still be room for more small retailers to give the neighborhood a chance. Big Little News is an example, born out of change from another beloved Pike/Pine retailer. CHS reported here about the change in the E Pike shop space three years ago as longtime Pike/Pine vintage business No Parking moved online. We will be watching to see what the next retail experiment in the space will bring.
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So sad about BLN–much preferred buying/discovering magazines there to Elliot Bay. I think this article points out two not-often-understood difficulties in being a retailer on the hill: hardly any of these new developments are set up for small stores and the spaces that are left become coffee/tea/wine shops every week.
But it makes sense…people here eat a lot more than they shop. I’m sure most residents of this neighborhood/city would be pretty content with shopping online for just about everything so long as they can continue to eat at another mediocre restaurant.
At another mediocre restaurant. And drinking culture is too expensive even for middle class earners.
What a bummer. Soon we’ll have two more empty storefronts.
The news stand hurts
The city should be paying these businesses to stay open or give them a break on B&O if nothing else. Now we’re just going to have more empty storefronts for the tweakers to tag and the Hill will continue to look like shit.
Not really a surprise. Landlords seem eager to leave gaping empty storefronts everywhere rather than lower rents to what smaller businesses can bear.
In many cases their loan covenants make it impossible to significantly lower rents, and the high insurance and property taxes (paid by the renter in a triple-net lease, not by the landlord) make the total rent bill gigantic.