HERE’S ANOTHER BATCH of mini photo features on recycled and “restored” buildings around town, plus one building that thankfully hasn’t been “restored” to anything, at least not yet.
Almost eight years later, some clueless out-of-towners still expect to find Seattle crawling with the sorts of aimless young slackers and garage-banders they think they remember from Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles–even though the film’s episodic vignettes mostly involved four very clean-cut young adults who were getting real careers underway whilst undergoing assorted relationship misadventures. The movie’s principal exterior location was the Coryell Court Apartments, already a familiar sight due to its prominent location on the #43 bus line.
This utilitarian brick industrial building on Western Avenue was originally a box factory. Then it housed job-printers Frayn Publishing. Then it was a warehouse for Northwest (now National) Mobile Television, a former KING-TV subsidiary that provides remote trucks for televised sports events. Now, it’s luxury condos (with two additional floors of penthouse “lofts” just added on), plus those two additional occupants every non-demolished old Belltown building seems to be getting–a restaurant and an architects’ office.
KIRO-TV was the last of Seattle’s original TV stations to go on the air, debuting in 1958 (a full decade after KING). For its first 11 years, it operated from this former church building atop Queen Anne Hill, adjacent to its transmission tower. During those years, it was a solid #3 in local-news ratings, and depended for profits on network shows and the still-legendary J.P. Patches local kids’ show. The building’s current tenants include an aerobics center and an Italian restaurant.
While the main entrance of the Bethel Temple evangelical church was “modernized” in the 1950s, the rest of the building’s facade (and much of its interior) remains from the building’s original use, a public swimming pool or “natatorium” (it used salt water, piped in from Elliott Bay and heated). The church already sold the land it had owned across the street, where World Pizza and several small galleries had been, for condos; now it’s preparing to vacate its own building. The developers promise to maintain some of the old natatorium facade in the new building; preservation activists want the whole thing saved as a historic site.
TOMORROW: Hedonism as a non-revolutionary stance.
ELSEWHERE:
