Fire destroys beloved market of Port Townsend's early days

PORT TOWNSEND — For starters, David Hamilton got a phone call at 3:15 in the morning. Aldrich's Market, self-described "oldest grocery in the state" and Hamilton's business since 1996, was on fire. The caller said he really needed to be there.

Then Hamilton's car wouldn't start. He called a cab, which took a while to get to his home 15 miles out of town.

"You know you're having a bad day when your business is burning down and you can't get down to watch," he said yesterday afternoon.

As it was, the city's entire Uptown neighborhood had a bad day, waking to see a beloved corner store and community focal point reduced to charred timbers. Hamilton got there in time to see the roof cave in — "it was a real sinking feeling" — and area residents felt pretty much the same way as they flocked by during the rest of the day.

"This is an institution," said Mark Bowes, a Jefferson County Fire District 6 commissioner who manned a public-information booth a block from the rubble. "It's been here 100 years, and people think about it as if it was an old friend."

Many passers-by were openly emotional. Bowes said one woman came upon the wreckage and screamed. The fire was first reported at 2:42 a.m. Minutes later, at 2:47, Mary Dean heard several loud explosions from her home a block away.

"I thought Indian Island was going up, it was so loud," she said, referring to the nearby Navy ordnance depot.

The first firefighters arrived at 2:51, and a total of 47 firefighters were soon called in from as far away as Sequim and Bainbridge Island. But the blaze spread too fast through the two-story clapboard building to be stopped.

Firefighters were able to protect neighboring buildings, including a four-plex in the back. No one was injured.

But two vacation-rental apartments were destroyed, as was the office of the Abundant Life Seed Foundation, a nonprofit that saves rare and heirloom seeds.

At noon, all that indicated Aldrich's was once a grocery was a Häagen-Dazs sign and a couple of crates of melons.

Bowes had no estimate of the damage but said Aldrich's was a total loss. Hamilton said the building had been insured for $900,000. The cause of the fire was unknown.

The building sat at the corner of Lawrence and Tyler streets on the hilltop section of Port Townsend known as Uptown, a historically well-heeled neighborhood in which ship captains and customs officials built massive Victorian mansions when the city was a leading shipping center and the Northwest's port of entry.

The structure was built in 1889 by the International Order of Good Templars as a meeting hall and storefront. The Aldrich family, which had operated a general store in several locations since 1885, moved into the building in the mid-1920s, said John Clise, a former Pike Place Market director who bought the market in 1983.

Clise recalled hearing stories of the Aldriches helping keep people afloat during the Depression, letting them buy on credit and pay back as they could.

"If you couldn't find something downtown, you could always come to Aldrich's and they had it," said Gloria Harper, who moved to Port Townsend in 1951 to teach high-school English.

"And they always let people charge their groceries," said her daughter, Karen Sedlak. "Remember those old-fashioned ledger cards?"

Like hundreds of other local kids, as a teenager she worked checking out groceries and stocking shelves.

"Aldrich's is truly the heart of Uptown," said Linda Yakush, co-owner of Pane d'Amore bakery, as the smell of burned wood from half a block away mixed with the scent of fresh bread. "I was just telling someone it's like part of my living room is gone. I literally go in there every day."

When he bought the store, Clise stopped running it as a general store and emphasized gourmet foods and wine.

Hamilton, who spent much of his life in groceries since bagging as a kid, bought the store in 1996 and said it would be his last job. He had doubled its sales since. He was having a great year, remarkable for a recession, and last month was the best in the store's history.

Hamilton acknowledged the store flourished by catering to the city's well-to-do.

"But we did get our share of the shed boys," he said, referring to workers who frequented the store for morning coffee.

Just last week, Don Robertson, a retired carpenter, had been telling his son-in-law, the manager of a big-box store in Northern California, that Aldrich's was "the greatest corner grocery store in the country."

Hamilton plans to rebuild. A more immediate concern is how the neighborhood will celebrate the Uptown Street Fair on Aug. 16 without Aldrich's.

"It's going to be a celebration of everything good about Aldrich's," offered Yakush.

Eric Sorensen: 206-464-8253 or esorensen@seattletimes.com