Target (or rather “City Target”), which had its “soft opening” on Wednesday, is the biggest new retail opening downtown since 1998, when Pacific Place opened and Nordstrom moved into the old Frederick & Nelson building.

It’s the first new downtown “department store” since Nordstrom expanded from shoes into clothes in the 1960s.

It’s the first “general merchandise” store downtown since Woolworth’s national demise, and the first in Seattle’s urban core since Kroger turned its Broadway Market site from a small Fred Meyer into a large QFC.

And it’s the first downtown toy store since the fall of FAO Schwarz.

It’s on a historic half block of Second Avenue between Pike and Union streets. That’s where The Bon Marché (sigh) occupied a series of buildings between 1912 and 1929. That complex was taken over by J.C. Penney, and housed that company’s biggest-in-the-nation store until it closed in 1982.

When the Newmark condo tower was built there in the 1990s, the original concept for the retail space was to have been a concourse of shops; an unofficial “New” annex to the Pike Place “Market.” Instead, a PayLess Drug store and a multiplex cinema came in, both short-lived.

Target announced in 2010 that it was moving into all three floors and 96,000 square feet. It’s taken that long for them to completely retool the space.

The company says it’s also spent a lot of time and money determining what merchandise to put in the place, which is about two-thirds the size of a normal suburban Target. (I’m sure the arrangement will be revised once the first sales figures come in.)

The lower (Union Street) level is groceries (and storage and parking). It’s strong where the nearby Kress IGA is weak (prices of packaged-food items) and weak where Kress is strong (meat and produce selection).

The main (Pike Street) level is women’s casual wear, drugs, sundries, office and school supplies (yes, there are downtown residents with kids).

Upstairs (connected by the same shopping-car escalator mechanism seen at the Northgate Target), there’s men’s and kids’ wear, casual home furnishings, DVDs, toys, and electronics.

And throughout on day one, downtown workers and residents strolled and checked prices and met up with one another.

City Target helps fulfill a longtime wish of civic leaders to better connect Pike Place to the retail core.

And it fulfills a slogan mounted on the store’s T-shirt and tourist-merchandise section: CITY LOVE.

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P.S.: I’ve mentioned it before, but the dysfunctional-family aspect of the Target company is always fun to relate.

Target was originally an outgrowth of (the now-Macyfied, alas) Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis. (Thus, the chain’s current “City” push is a return to roots of a sort.)

A scion of that family, Mark Dayton, is a prominent progressive Democrat. In 2011 he became governor of the great state of Minnesota.

Target’s current management spent a whole bunch of PAC money supporting Gov. Dayton’s losing (and virulently anti-gay) Republican opponent.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)