Nordstrom Plans Tower Downtown -- $70 Million Office Building Planned On Former Music Hall Theatre Site

Nordstrom and Clise Properties today announced plans to develop a $70 million office tower on the site of the former Music Hall Theatre in downtown Seattle.

The building will be at Seventh Avenue and Olive Way, a short walk from Nordstrom's new flagship store under construction in the former Frederick & Nelson building.

The project will consolidate many of the retailer's scattered regional and corporate offices in downtown Seattle.

The planned 380,000 square-foot office building will rise 20 to 25 stories and is expected to be ready for occupancy in 2001. Nordstrom corporate employees will occupy about 90 percent of the building, said Brooke White, company spokeswoman.

The project heralds a new wave of office development planned for downtown Seattle. The last office tower built was the Second and Seneca Building, completed by Wright Runstad in 1991.

Nordstrom has 2,000 employees in its corporate and Washington regional offices in downtown Seattle. They are spread out in six buildings and wouldn't fit into the office space planned for the top floors of the new flagship store in the renovated Frederick & Nelson building, said White.

"As our company grows, we are quickly exceeding the capacity of our current office locations," she said. "We took a long, hard look at the low vacancy rate in the downtown office market and came to the decision that taking this step forward with Clise Properties was prudent from a long-term perspective."

Nordstrom and Clise Properties will share the cost of developing the office building, she said. Architectural details were not available. Construction is slated for late 1999.

Blake Nordstrom, Nordstrom's co-president, and Al Clise of Clise Properties planned to make the announcement at the Downtown Seattle Association's annual membership meeting this afternoon.

The Clise family owns the property, now a parking lot but once the location of the Spanish-baroque Music Hall Theatre. The theater was demolished in 1991 and the site was slated to be used for a 240-room hotel. But that idea was dropped when the real-estate market cooled.

White said about 800 corporate employees and all 300 members of the company's Washington regional team, including buyers, promotions staff and support personnel, will move into the top five and a half floors of the new flagship store, set to open Aug. 21, 1998.

Another 900 employees who work in Nordstrom's national corporate offices will move to the new office tower.

The new retail store will have another 600 to 700 sales, stockroom and restaurant employees, and occupy 320,000 square feet on the first five floors of the former F&N building and on the Metro bus-tunnel level.

Nordstrom has 84 stores in 17 states. It has 40,000 employees.

The Clise family is a longtime property owner in downtown Seattle and the Denny Regrade. It has owned the site at Seventh and Olive for about 70 years.

The Nordstrom-Clise tower is one of several new projects on the horizon downtown. In the past year, Martin Smith Real Estate said it wants to develop three office buildings on Second, Third and Fourth avenues south of Madison Street. The Samis Foundation acquired the Smith Tower as the focal point of a new office complex at Second between James Street and Yesler Way. And Nitze-Stagen & Co. is preparing to develop five new office buildings south of South Jackson Street.