Tag Archives: preservation

The Bloch House is Capitol Hill’s latest landmark

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(Image: Marvin Anderson Architects)

The Blochs (Image: Marvin Anderson Architects)

The latest landmark on Capitol Hill will be a Tudor Revival style home that has stood on a corner across from Volunteer Park for more than 115 years.

The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board last week voted to designate the Bloch House at 15th and Prospect for landmarks protections of the structure’s exterior “and portions of the interior that include: the entry vestibule, foyer, main staircase, dining room, living room, study, rathskeller, and ballroom.”

The board agreed the house is “associated in a significant way with a significant aspect of the cultural, political, or economic heritage of the community, City, state or nation” and “embodies the distinctive visible characteristics of an architectural style, or period, or a method of construction. The board also declared the structure worthy of protections as an example of “an outstanding work of a designer or builder” — Congratulations, Clayton D. Williams and Arthur Loveless.

By the way, you’ve probably enjoyed some of Arthur’s other work in the neighborhood. Continue reading →

After 16 years on Capitol Hill, Kaladi Brothers Coffee is headed back to Alaska

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(Image: Kaladi Brothers)

Thanks to a CHS reader for the picture

There is finally a date for the end of one of the last of the Capitol Hill coffee houses as E Pike’s Kaladi Brothers is preparing customers for the change.

The only lower-48 location of the Alaska coffee chain will close at the end of July. A sign has gone up at the cafe with the planned final day of service listed as July 27th 29th along with contact information for customers who might want to send a last tip to their favorite baristas.

There is no plan to move or reopen, manager Erika “EZ” Zumwalt tells CHS.

The planned closure comes after years of limbo for the block since CHS first broke the news in August of 2020 on a planned redevelopment of the auto row-era buildings along this stretch of E Pike. Zumwalt said one timeline originally had the cafe moving out last summer but Kaladi decided to take the offer of another year in the space from developer Hunters Capital. Continue reading →

This old Capitol Hill building is probably not a landmark

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From the report prepared by David Peterson Historic Resource Consulting

It may be the unlikeliest of the remaining major auto row-era structures on Capitol Hill to be considered, but the boarded-up, 1924-built Olive Way Improvement Company building lined up for a likely future of mixed-use redevelopment will get its day in front of the Seattle Landmarks Board.

A required nomination hearing for the nearly 100-year-old complex at the curving corner of E Olive Way and Denny will take place next Wednesday. The meeting will likely be prelude to a demolition, or, at least, a gutting.

CHS broke the news in January that Guntower Capital, a holding company formed by executives at two Seattle-area real estate and development firms, was in agreement to purchase the half acre or so property once home to a mix of businesses including the former In the Bowl, the departed Bus Stop bar and Coffee Messiah cafe and a sprawling dog lounge charred in a 2017 fire.

Its history, of course, goes back much further but the commercial building constructed by an Olive Way focused developer as a retail and automotive garage structure has seen better days.

Still, it has its auto row charms including massive heavy timber trusses, old brick walls, and some remaining decorative flourishes along the E Olive Way facing retail segment “clad in buff-colored field face brick with terra cotta ornamentation.” Continue reading →

Last of the Melrose spite mound houses demolished on Capitol Hill

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This week above Melrose — thanks to a CHS reader for the tip and photo

The last of the Melrose spite mound houses is gone. The old hill it rose up on also could be hauled away.

Demolition crews this week did quick work of the 117-year-old Queen Anne-style home that long ago became office space above Melrose as the street became home to popular food and drink and shopping destinations like Melrose Market, Mamnoon, and the Starbucks Reserve Roastery.

The family behind Boehm Design Associates sold the old house and its 5,250-square-foot parcel smack in the middle of the entertainment district for $2.75 million in January.

The house wasn’t a protected landmark but it was certainly historical, surviving decades atop the last remnants of Pike Street Hill. Continue reading →

Seattle permanently eases approval process for small changes to its roster of 480 (and growing) landmark buildings

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Broadway’s Capitol Crest building was designated as a Seattle landmark in 2022

The Seattle City Council voted 8-0 Tuesday to keep approvals on small changes to designated landmarks in the hands of city staff.

The mayor’s office legislation will keep in place changes made during the pandemic to handle “minor alterations” on the city’s growing roster of protected landmark buildings like signage, awnings, storefront renovations and building systems upgrades with administrative review by city staff.

New construction, demolition and major redevelopment proposals will not be eligible for administrative review under the plan.

The city says the permanent change will allow faster approval of necessary changes and repairs to landmark structures by Department of Neighborhoods staff while allowing boards and commissions to focus on more important business.

The city’s roster of protected properties has reached 480.

 

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Set to be replaced by affordable development and with a complicated history of women’s health, Broadway’s Wilshire Building considered for landmarks protections — UPDATE: Rejected

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From the nomination packet

The Seattle Landmarks Board is slated Wednesday to decide if the 119-year-old gabled parapets and semicircular bay windows of Broadway’s Wilshire Building are worthy of consideration for protections that could complicate a seven-story affordable apartment project planned to replace it.

The board will take up the nomination of the 200 block Broadway E commercial and apartment structure in an afternoon session to decide if the two-story commercial building home to the shuttered Jai Thai restaurant, a collection of businesses including a Mud Bay pet supply store location, and 14 upper floor apartment units should move forward in the landmarks process. The property’s owners were required to pursue the review as part of the city’s development process.

UPDATE: With many of its features significantly altered over the years and lacking an architectural and cultural history compelling enough to sway the vote, the building was rejected in the nomination process by the board Wednesday and will not move forward in the process, clearing the way for an easier path to demolition.

Old timers will remember it as the Broadway Rexall. CHS reported here in January on the historical significance of the old building and the affordable Broadway Urbaine project planned to rise on the block with its fast track through the city’s design review process thanks to its hoped-for addition of much-needed affordable housing. Continue reading →

Project to document — and sometimes protect — Capitol Hill’s midcentury modern apartment buildings gets boost

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Camellia Manor (Image: Lana Blinderman)

The Capitol Hill Modern project led by photographer Lana Blinderman and historian Tom Heuser focuses on documenting and protecting Capitol Hill’s midcentury modern multifamily residential buildings and the relatively affordable housing they have provided for decades, has wrapped up it first phase and is moving on to a second phase that will expand the research and, they hope, set the stage for expanding the effort across Seattle..

“These are the types of buildings that allowed people to live here and create the culture on Capitol Hill that we so love,” Blinderman said. “It’s the working people, it’s the queers, it’s you know, people of all walks of life.”

Through a new grant received from King County 4Culture, Heuser and Blinderman will research and photograph 28 more midcentury architecture buildings in the second phase of their project. Continue reading →

Landmark-protected and waiting for its next life, 11th and Pine’s White Motor Company building undergoing major overhaul

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Under construction at 11th and Pine (Image: Alex Garland/CHS)

Saved from redevelopment as a major grocery store in the heart of Pike/Pine by the city’s landmarks protections and thrust into history as a catbird seat to the 2020 CHOP protests as Seattle Police tear gas seeped through the building’s drafty windows and into the eyes of the few remaining journalists at alternative weekly The Stranger before its move from the neighborhood, the old White Motor Company building at 11th and Pine is undergoing a full overhaul to “beautify,” restore, and upgrade the 104-year-old structure and put its upper stories back into use with new tenants.

A representative for the building’s owner Legacy Commercial tells CHS the work underway now through the end of November will restore the building “and make it high energy at the same time.”

Windows are being removed and replaced as systems work is done throughout the three-story building. Meanwhile, the exterior will be restored “with the same colors” and original terra cotta rosettes — removed when the building was being lined up for possible redevelopment eight years ago — will be reattached.

Legacy’s goal is to reinvigorate the building and attract new tenants for the upper story office floors. Continue reading →

After six years, Pike Motorworks mega preservation project finally adding an E Pine restaurant

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Before and after in the 700 block of E Pine

The Capitol Hill preservation incentive-boosted, mixed-use development Pike Motorworks is so big.

How big is it?

Pike Motorworks is so big, It has taken six years for it to fill its E Pine-facing restaurant space in the block-spanning, 260-unit building also home to the Redhook Brewlab and a collection of businesses including Taku and Salt and Straw.

But six years after construction was completed on the project that rose on top of the auto row-era bones of the neighborhood’s departed BMW dealership, it looks like the development’s retail dreams of spanning from Pike to Pine are back on track. Continue reading →

As Seattle questions block by block preservation, Capitol Hill’s Millionaire’s Row already has its place on the National Register of Historic Places

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The Eckstein Estate of Millionaire’s Row

By Elizabeth Turnbull

It was a quiet victory. Last year, Capitol Hill’s Millionaire’s Row neighborhood, which spans from 14th Ave E to Volunteer Park, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places — a designation that has brought a greater sense of importance to the street.

It was also part of an increasingly questioned movement to win protections and historic designations for certain areas and blocks of Seattle, raising questions about equity in a city struggling with rising costs and increased displacement. Continue reading →