Here’s hoping the strong window display game will continue in the space (Image: Lifelong Thrift)
It will be a smooth transition and the launch of a new Seattle nonprofit dedicated to reuse and recycling as Magpie Thrift opens on Broadway this spring.
The new store will take over the Lifelong Thrift space — and mission — on Broadway. Continue reading
(image: CHS)
Lifelong, the Seattle nonprofit dedicated to helping those living with HIV, is shutting down its thrift division. A change on Broadway is coming but the old Lifelong Thrift Shop looks like it is being set for some vintage recycling with a new thrift entity lined up for the space.
The nonprofit said it is closing its thrift division in a Monday announcement. “We hope to carry on in the same space with a new name, unaffiliated with Lifelong and will be sharing details online and in our windows as they are finalized,” the announcement reads. UPDATE: Lifelong said it pulled down the announcement to update some information included in the post and will be making a new announcement soon.
Details on the timing of the change have not yet been announced. The Broadway store was Lifelong’s only retail location.
Business license filings show a new entity lined up for the 312 Broadway E address. The new thrift shop project includes current Lifelong Thrift director Tamara Asakawa, according to the filing. Continue reading
(Image: CHS)
This weekend, Seattle’s Punk Rock Flea Market will debut with an eclectic mix of music, food, arts and crafts, sneakers, skateboards, bondage gear, tattoos, prosthetic limbs, crystals, taxidermy, graffiti supplies, and fashion in its new short-term home on Capitol Hill’s 15th Ave E.
The market will now share the block with another interesting Seattle fashion concern settling in for an indeterminate amount of time on this Capitol Hill commercial strip lined up for big changes.
Thursday night, stylist Colton Winger and the team of fashion consultants that make up Cuniform debuted a new 15th Ave E brick and mortar home for the “personal and interiors styling agency.” Continue reading
(Image: Late Night Vintage Market)
(Image: Alex in the CHS Facebook Group)
The name Late Night Vintage Market pretty much says it all.
But the new addition to E Pike’s retail mix is a deeper cut of Capitol Hill history and a showcase of some of the spirit the neighborhood still touts but can’t always live up to — mass culture subversion, random, one of a kind experiences, and, perhaps the biggest loss of pandemic-era Pike/Pine, late night hours.
The market featuring multiple vendors and, soon, events from Shannon Mendoza and Jesus McCloskey is now open every night but Tuesday from 3 PM to “late” at E Pike and Belmont.
Mendoza says the market was born of McCloskey’s love for vintage and tested with pop-up events around Tacoma as they looked for a home for the project in Seattle. Just as one off-Hill space for the market fell through, Mendoza said the E Pike opportunity emerged. Continue reading
(Image: CHS)
Banana and crew (Image: CHS)
By Gabrielle Locke
While we’re thinking about Capitol Hill fashion and beauty that may end up being nothing more than plans due to the COVID-19 crisis, one neighborhood center of fashion, beauty, and more is doing everything it can to hang on through the pandemic and celebrate its 20th anniversary in style.
When COVID-19 first hit, Pretty Parlor owner Anna Banana turned to doorstep delivery to local customers, focused on her Etsy shop, and created an e-commerce store attached to her website — graceful but major shifts for a business that has been in motion since the turn of the millenium.
“In the beginning, I would do doorstep delivery and sometimes, if I knew the customer well, I’d pick them up a Dicks burger and friends, because why not!” Banana says of the early pandemic delivery effort. Continue reading
Ready to open in 2008 (Image: No Parking)
After more than a decade providing Capitol Hill with vintage treasures it didn’t know it needed to have, No Parking on E Pike is packing up its Brooks Brothers suitcases of collectible oddities and moving its store online.
Thank you Capitol Hill for 12 wonderful years! We are moving online. For now you can find us on Etsy – but stay tuned for a future stand alone website – and who knows, maybe another brick and mortar in the post-apocalypse!
Follow us here: Instagram: @noparkingonpike
In 2015, CHS talked with owner Billy Hutchinson about the shop and its treasures. “A lot of times people are buying the story more than the item,” Hutchinson said at the time. “The stories enhance it.”
The story behind Hutchinson and wife Linda Young’s decision isn’t just about COVID-19. Hutchinson tells CHS he was diagnosed with cancer last November and while his prognosis is good, he is immunocompromised. Running the store right now just wouldn’t be safe.
“it’s been a tough year for us,” Hutchinson said. “But we’ve hung together.” Continue reading
For Rachel McNew owning the type of store she, and she believes the community, wants means starting fresh.
New paint, new merchandise, and a new name — Rove.
“I think Rove will be a better fit for Capitol Hill because our biggest focus is vintage,” McNew said. “It’s not just your everyday vintage. I’m trying to curate more fashion-forward pieces, which I think will do better up here as well.”
By the end of the month, McNew plans to open the new store in the former Fox + the Feather space at 1507 11th Ave. Continue reading
(Image: REI)
This is the last time you’ll be able to rummage through 11th Ave’s Value Village for a Halloween costume — or a dookie brown leather jacket or some moccasins someone else has been walking in or a broken keyboard or a kneeboard.
The Capitol Hill thrift shop grandaddy is slated to close after the holiday, customers of the store are being told this weekend. A Value Village manager confirmed the closure plans with CHS.
The store’s last day of business is planned for November 7th.
UPDATE 10/25/2015: A spokesperson for the Value Village/Savers company has provided some additional information about the closure, telling CHS that the store has been renting the space on a “month-to-month basis” for years. So, why close now?
“Though unfortunate, certain business conditions have made it necessary to close our Value Village thrift store in the Capitol Hill neighborhood after a number of years of leasing the space on a month-to-month basis,” the spokesperson said. Continue reading
Lifelong Thrift’s Tamara Asakawa (Image: CHS)
The old sign will stay — kind of. Watch for a LIFELONG update later this spring (Image: CHS)
It fits like a hand in a glove. A second-hand glove. Lifelong Thrift is set to open on Broadway Wednesday morning bringing a most Capitol Hill next chapter to the former space home to Red Light Vintage.
“I feel like we’re a part of the old Capitol Hill,” Thrift’s director Tamara Asakawa told CHS Tuesday as she and her crew of 10 employees and a dozen or so volunteers put the finishing touches on the gigantic new home for the store.
The new Lifelong Thrift combines the spaces left empty by the departure of the much-loved Red Light and its sibling boutique Aprie and at 12,500 square feet and two levels will be almost three times the size of the thrift’s former E Union location.
In November, CHS reported that the prospect of higher rent combined with lower than needed sales was forcing the ownership of Red Light, acknowledged as the Hill’s oldest vintage clothing store, to leave Broadway. Lifelong Thrift was slated for an earlier opening but a complication over a move-in date caused a costly delay for the nonprofit. Asakawa said the pluck of her crew and volunteers helped keep things on track even with the added cost and work of dealing with storage and waiting for the spaces to open up for the buildout to begin. Changes inside are few — in fact, you’ll see many remnants of Red Light left behind. But you’ll also find an opened up space that better connects the two wings of the shop. Continue reading
Busacca (Images: CHS)
As Red Light Vintage prepares for one last liquidation sale on Broadway before leaving its space and making way for Lifelong Thrift, another source of recycled fashion and style is settling into Capitol Hill. Nestled atop Jai Thai on the western corner of Thomas and Broadway is Revival, a “one-stop-shop” boutique offering to buy, sell, and trade an array of items such as clothes, furniture, home accessories, and and jewelry.
Though the shop has been on the block for around half a year already, it still is somewhat of a “secret spot,” due to its above-street-level location, according to co-owner and San Francisco transplant Ashley Busacca.
“People are like ‘I live across the street and I had no idea you were here, when did you open?’ I’m like ‘six months ago!’” Continue reading
