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.