Rainier Cold Storage Stock House, RIP

There's a nice little piece over at Crosscut this morning about Georgetown's Rainier Cold Storage Stock House (and the demise of), but just like the neighborhood opposition to the building's demolition, it's too little too late. To be fair, the building's owners broke their way through many walls (a much beloved building that defines a neighborhood, an official Seattle Landmark) with the wrecking ball of public safety: it's going to collapse onto Airport Way, they said. Demolish away, they were told. Demolish away they did and not enough people knew or cared beforehand to do much of anything to stop it.

Seattlest researched and wrote an article on the landowner's plans to remove Georgetown's crown jewel late last year in the hopes that some public consciousness of the impending demo would save the building. Unfortunately, the resulting article sucked and never saw the light of day.

A hundred years ago when exploiting cheap labor was, if not a novelty at least not yet down to a science in America, and fortunes could be made by supplying that cheap labor with cheap beer, a monument was erected in the Georgetown neighborhood. A brewery for the ages. Not that cutesy Tully’s thing, the real one, farther south along Airport Way. Six blocks of brick magnificence, the great west wall stands tall. It used to represent America’s vast thirst for intoxication and capitalism’s will to slake it, but now it’s the bulwark that protects Georgetown from the developing hordes that constantly, insatiably, chew up Seattle’s old buildings in favor of crudely-designed office buildings and cheap condominiums.

Georgetown’s rough edges have done a lot to keep the technology professionals and the land developers who serve them at bay, despite the neighborhood’s proximity to Downtown. Metal scrap yards and other openly industrial businesses thrive along Airport Way South. An elevated I-5 and BNSF sidings and Boeing Field squeeze Georgetown from the east and west, making it not the quietest part of the city, something which manufacturers and artists are more likely than others to put up with, or even embrace. It’s also not the easiest place to get to by car or bus, but that might change when Sound Transit’s light rail comes online. Soon the new line will start shuttling people from Downtown to Georgetown, allowing easier access to the bars and small shops and boutiques that line Airport Way, but also potentially opening the neighborhood to new development pressure. Jules Mae’s proprietor John LeMaster also owns the Tin Hat near Fremont and he’s seen that neighborhood go from a community of hippies, artists and marine industry to something entirely different. “I watched Fremont go south and I’m kind of concerned,” he said a week before the design meeting. “Condo owners seem to have a sense of entitlement once they’ve moved in and I don’t know if that attitude is compatible with a lot of the Georgetown characters.”

Who wouldn't jump at the chance to publish two thousand words of that?