UNIVERSITY WAY, known to all as “The Ave,” is Seattle’s historic “second downtown.” And, even more than the real downtown, it seems to be always lurching from one crisis to another.

In the ’70s, it was the loss of many chain merchants.

In the ’80s, it was the invasion of many new chain merchants, driving out some of the small businesses that had survived (or taken opportunities from) the loss of those previous chains.

Now, The Ave faces a new batch of retail desertions. It’s already seen the disappearance of McDonald’s and The Limited in the past year. Now Jamba Juice, Disc-Go-Round, and Pier 1 Imports are shuttering their doors.

But the biggest surprise was the abrupt end of the Wizards of the Coast Game Center and its adjacent Dalmutti’s restaurant annex.

Wizards began in 1990, and in ’93 released the ever-profitable Magic: The Gathering role-playing card game. It bought up Dungeons and Dragons maker TSR, and then scored a massive coup with the North American rights to the Pokemon cards.

But its HQ in a nondescript Renton office park was ill-suited as the locus of a growing recreation empire. So it launched the U District storefront in May ’97 as part gaming store, part arcade, and part Ground Zero for organized social RPG gaming (particularly its Magic tournaments).

But in late ’99, just before the Poke-craze went bust, Wizards’ owners sold out to Hasbro, the toy giant that’s bought up everything from Scrabble and Monopoly to Playskool and Super Soaker.

Hasbro and Wizards, and the rest of the toy/game biz, had a rough year in ’00. Wizards’ founder Peter Adkison quit. His successors, and Hasbro bigwigs, decided Wizards’ 100-or-so mall-based retail stores fit its new marketing strategy, but a mini-Gameworks with a bunch of card tables in the basement didn’t.

The store’s end means the loss of a clean, high-profile focal point for a hobby traditionally (if unjustly) associated with male social rejects holing up in groups of their own kind, at the back tables of the school library or in a bachelor apartment strewn with beer, Tostitos, and XXL-size T-shirts. The place had also been a real-world symbol of Seattle’s status as a major center of fantasy/sci-fi fandom.

But its loss also deprives The Ave of what, for a few years, had been a third “anchor” retailer (after the University Book Store and Tower Records).

While the loss of some of the district’s chain-run stores and fast-food outlets present more opportunities for small businesses, the availability of the Wizards storefront (fashioned together from former Penney’s and Kress spaces) represents a greater opportunity. It could be divvied up into a marketplace of booths and small shops; perhaps even with an SF/F theme decor. (It could even have stalls specializing in spells and “strength points.”)

NEXT: Makeovers gone wrong, part 2.

ELSEWHERE:

• Our pal Michael Wolff talks about the recent efforts “to consolidate the media business just as it is in the process of fracturing into a hundred million pieces….”