Downtown At The Crossroads -- Pine Street, Where All The Lights Aren't Bright

second of two parts

The awnings above the locked brass doors still say "Frederick & Nelson," as if the vacant nine-story department store is just taking a vacation and will be back soon.

Across Pine Street is the four-story building that once housed I. Magnin, its windows boarded up and decorated by graffiti. On another nearby corner is an empty store that until last year housed The Mediterranean, an upscale women's apparel shop.

Walk a few blocks down Pine, just past The Bon Marche, and there's an empty lot and a parking lot where two furniture stores used to be.

What happened to Pine Street? Not too long ago, this was the liveliest downtown retail street around, lined with thriving small shops and four of the biggest retail stores in the Northwest.

Today, Pine Street seems to be going in several directions, a reflection of downtown in general. There's one big traditional department store left - The Bon - and a busy modern mall - the 60-shop Westlake Center. There are gourmet coffee shops and a McDonald's.

Most of the remaining merchants aren't giving up on Pine Street. Yet.

"It was really the best place to be in Seattle for many, many years," said Philip Monroe, 55, owner of Philip Monroe Jeweler, across the street from the old Frederick's building. "I still feel that way, but something needs to be done quickly."

Something like Nordstrom moving its headquarters' store and offices into the bigger Frederick's building, which could trigger a retail renaissance in the area, Monroe and others say.

If Nordstrom moves, other retailers are expected to move into the Nordstrom store and, possibly, the surrounding area.

But a Nordstrom spokeswoman said it's unrealistic to expect the retailer to save downtown and that it would take a cooperative public and private effort to turn things around.

"We're just a part of that," said the spokeswoman, Kellie Tormey. "We don't see us as the torchbearer, but as just part of the puzzle."

Tormey said much of the fate of downtown hinges on what happens in the next year or two to the empty Frederick's and I. Magnin buildings.

Pine Street, the historic heart of the downtown shopping district since the 1920s, is at a critical point. On good days, when its stores, sidewalks and the plaza and park at Westlake are crowded, the decay that has crept in can be overlooked. It's the bad days, when panhandlers, loiterers and drug dealers seem to outnumber the shoppers, that worry merchants such as Monroe.

"A lot of people hesitate to come downtown. A lot of it has to do with what they have to encounter," he said.

Monroe fears that if nothing happens, Seattle's downtown may go the way of Tacoma's, where he worked in a jewelry store in the 1960s.

"I saw downtown Tacoma die store by store by store by store. I feel uneasy about it here too."

A STREET OF CHANGE

In 1950, when Pine Street was in its prime, it had five furniture stores and an appliance store. Today it has none.

The same year, when Northgate opened as one of the nation's first shopping centers, Pine Street had six women's apparel stores, five hat shops, four shoe stores, four furriers and four drugstores. Today, they're all off the street. Once there were five jewelry stores. Now there are two.

At one time, there were four major department and apparel stores on Pine - The Bon, Frederick's, I. Magnin and Nordstrom. Today only The Bon and Nordstrom remain.

Third Avenue just south of The Bon, a street that in 1950 was lined with women's apparel shops, now is mostly a collection of fast-food outlets, discount shoe stores, a Radio Shack and a survivor of its post-World War II glory days: the Lerner's women's apparel store.

"Business has died down a lot on Third," said Lealoni Glenn, Lerner's assistant manager. "But a lot of people go to Westlake."

Her grandmother, Katie Glenn, was part of the postwar crowd that found so much to do and buy in downtown Seattle.

Katie Glenn loved to shop Third Avenue, going to the dime store Kress (now Musicland), eating lunch at Woolworth's (now vacant) and going up to Frederick's (also vacant). At night, she enjoyed going to movies at such places as the Orpheum (site of the Westin hotel) and the Music Hall (now a vacant lot).

"It always seemed so nice and safe," said Glenn, 72, who now shops at Southcenter. She prefers the convenience and variety of the mall over downtown.

"It really has changed over the years. All the good, old stores are gone."

Well, not quite all.

THE LURE REMAINS

Pine Street shows that downtown still has a drawing power that no mall, outlet center, TV shopping network or mail-order catalog can match.

The eight-story Bon building, which opened in 1929, is the biggest department store in the Northwest.

The downtown Nordstrom store at Fifth Avenue and Pine is one of the biggest in its 77-store chain. Westlake Center packs them in with its 60 shops and 20 eating places. At one end of the street is the Pike Place Market, and at the other, the Paramount Theatre.

On a recent afternoon, Donna Duncanson of Redmond and two friends were on their way from Westlake Center to Nordstrom. Duncanson, who usually shops at Bellevue Square, said she was drawn downtown by the activity in the Westlake Park area.

Gazing at the mix of people hanging around and remembering the sound of the steel-drum band she had heard there the last time, Duncanson smiled.

"You miss a lot of this over in the suburbs," she said.

It was the suburbs that the major downtown stores went to in search of shoppers in the boom years following World War II. In 1946, Frederick's made the first move, going to what eventually became Bellevue Square. Four years later, The Bon helped open Northgate.

Downtown, the future still was bright, and both the Bon and Frederick's expanded by adding several floors to their massive buildings.

Why not? It seemed all roads led downtown. Literally. Until the Alaskan Way Viaduct opened in the mid-1950s, the main north-south highway - U.S. 99 - brought its traffic right downtown. The streets were a parade of traffic and shoppers.

ONE OF THE FIRST TO GO

The closing of downtown landmarks is nothing new.

Hallberg's Restaurant and Bakery, across from Frederick's on Pine Street, had been a downtown institution since the late 19th century.

A.W. "Bud" Hallberg closed it in 1960, a few years after the city turned Pine into a one-way street heading into downtown. The outbound bus stop was then moved to another street, and Hallberg lost the many customers who would drop in before boarding a bus for home, he said.

Business was already slipping at night, as fewer people were coming downtown to the movie theaters, said Hallberg, now 86 and living in Ballard.

When Hallberg's closed, it was the end of one era and the beginning of another - one that would see the closing of downtown landmarks become almost commonplace. Four major department stores have closed downtown since 1966 - MacDougall's (1966), Rhodes (1968), JC Penney (1982), Frederick & Nelson (1992) - in addition to the shuttering of the I. Magnin store in 1993.

"Every time a store goes, it hurts," said Sydney Rogers, owner of Rogers Clothing for Men, which had been on lower Pine Street for decades until a new development forced him out three years ago to a less-desirable site a few blocks away at Third and Union.

"You can't fight the shopping malls," said Rogers.

You can't even fight city hall, say some merchants, still bitter over a number of recent changes to Pine Street they say have hurt their businesses: a loss of on-street parking spaces, the closure of Pine between Fourth and Fifth avenues to create Westlake Park, and to Lou Kinner, the construction of the underground bus tunnel.

"It was a killer," said Kinner, 51, who runs Nelson's Sewing Machine Co., a 74-year-old sewing-machine and button store on Pine between Sixth and Seventh avenues. "It was a very tough time for business."

Kinner has a photo on his office wall of Pine Street looking like a war zone during the construction of the underground bus tunnel in the late 1980s. The work lasted three years.

The closure of Pine was a blow to some merchants on the west side of Westlake Park, said Jerry Rosenthal, owner of A-1 Furniture, the last of the Pine Street furniture stores in business. Motorists and bus routes were rerouted away to other streets.

"It helped Westlake mall, but we were hurt terribly by it," he said.

Rosenthal is not even on Pine anymore, but around the block on Second Avenue. He was forced out of his Pine Street location about six months ago when the building between Second and Third avenues was razed to make way for a parking lot.

Rosenthal said his old location between The Bon and Nordstrom Rack on Second Avenue was ideal because of the heavy foot traffic.

It's the presence of The Bon, Westlake Center and Nordstrom's two stores that is keeping the street alive during one of its most trying periods. And despite the signs of decline downtown, The Bon has no plans for leaving, said John Buller, a company official.

"Pine Street is very important to us. We put a lot of money in this store," he said, noting the $30 million renovation of the art-deco flagship store.

He said The Bon is concerned, but not yet feeling a sense of panic, about the big, vacant Frederick's store two blocks away.

"Eventually something will happen to it," he said. "It's in the right place."