HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.
Starbucks isn’t responding about the latest changes around the 1600 E Olive Way shop it has left empty on Capitol Hill.
The shuttered cafe is now a plywood monument to the coffee giant’s exit at the location. The company closed the shop, one of its largest, most expensive to maintain cafes in the city, this summer amid a swirl of controversy over its politics and labor tactics.
The move comes as the cafe and its surface parking lot has been empty and unused for months, leaving the property as a target for taggers and vandalism. Before the plywood, the setting made an opportunistic — and special effects enhanced — backdrop for a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate to take a few cheap shots at Seattle and Capitol Hill.
It looks worse, now.
