Urban Re-Brew-Al -- Bringing A New Starbucks To The Central Area - A Hoped-For Jolt In Its Economic Reawakening - Involved Much Behind-The- Scenes Maneuvering

Sometime this week another Starbucks will open in Seattle.

Not a big thing, really. After all, Starbucks is everywhere, almost as famous for its ubiquity as for its double tall lattes and frappuccinos.

Starbucks is in Tokyo, Singapore, New York. Even Coeur d'Alene. At one busy intersection in Vancouver's trendy Robson district, Starbucks nearly has the corners cornered, with two coffeehouses diagonally situated from each other.

Most Seattleites don't have to go very far to get their daily fix, either. Throughout the birthplace of the Starbucks phenomenon, there are 43 stores scattered in shopping malls, office buildings and in every yuppie enclave.

But this latest Starbucks coffeehouse, in a brick building at 23rd Avenue South and South Jackson Street, will be the first in the Central Area, a neighborhood glaringly lacking some of the conveniences taken for granted in Queen Anne or Capitol Hill.

In the Central Area, there are no QFCs, no Gaps, no Barnes & Nobles. Some residents complain they can't even get pizza delivery. But now there's a Starbucks.

How the Central Area, a neighborhood that has long wrestled with an unshakable image problem, got its very own purveyor of gourmet java is a complicated story replete with behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing, political maneuvering and endless negotiations. The owners of one Central Area institution also see it as a tale of betrayal; a case of a corporate Goliath triumphing over David.

Ultimately, though, the opening of a new coffeehouse is an event less about Starbucks and business competition than about a neighborhood reinventing and renewing itself.

In the Central Area, historically impoverished of opportunities, having a Starbucks isn't just about getting a decent cup of coffee, as it would be most anywhere else. It's about catching up with the Wallingfords and the Madison Parks. It's about giving a reawakening neighborhood a badly needed shot of espresso.

A tempting structure

For nearly two years the new brick building at 23rd and Jackson has stood empty, a conspicuous but unnibbled bait.

It's a cleanly designed, contemporary structure suited for any upscale suburban shopping center. Costly touches raise it above the neighborhood's more utilitarian buildings: a trellis, flower planters, a clock tower with neon sculptures.

But George Staggers, who led the campaign to bring a coffeehouse to the neighborhood, knew that even with a brand-new building, talking a major coffee retailer into coming to the Central Area wouldn't be easy.

Staggers, a tall, genial man, is chief executive officer of the Central Area Development Association (CADA), a nonprofit community development agency that's one of the main engines driving the changes in the neighborhood.

Since it was founded in 1994, CADA has developed new housing and fixed up crumbling old homes, and kept old businesses from leaving while trying to bring in new ones.

In May, it took over the management of Promenade 23, the neighborhood's main shopping center, at the southeast corner of 23rd and Jackson, across the street from the coffeehouse.

"Most businesses are resistant to coming here," Staggers said. "They have a very outdated image of the neighborhood."

Coffee and conversation

For the newest building on 23rd and Jackson, the Central Area community wanted a coffeehouse.

At late-night community meetings and periodic neighborhood talks about future development, residents inevitably pined for a place that could sell decent coffee and give residents a place to hang out, Staggers said. As far back as the late 1980s, there was talk of trying to woo a gourmet coffee vendor.

It's a prime spot. Every day, 25,000 cars traverse that intersection. Twenty-third Avenue is a busy north-south arterial, and Jackson Street is a major thoroughfare that leads from the tony lakefront neighborhoods to downtown.

But even though it's envisioned by city planners as the bustling heart of one of the city's urban villages, at the moment 23rd and Jackson is still a corner waiting for better times. And the Central Area remains a tough sell.

Roughly defined, the Central Area sits north of Interstate 90, south of Madison Street, east of downtown and west of the Lake Washington neighborhoods. It has 35,000 residents within its 3 square miles.

Until recently, the site on which the coffeehouse was built was vacant, undeveloped property, a void in a neighborhood pockmarked by vacant lots.

"We've gone through 20 to 25 years of not having capital invested here, and it had a devastating impact on the livability of the area," Staggers said.

At one time, the intersection had been the thriving commercial center of a middle-class neighborhood of Italians, Jews and African Americans. It was also the center of the city's lively jazz scene.

But by the 1970s many of the businesses were boarded up. Many residents fled to the suburbs, leaving behind the community's poorest members, primarily African Americans. As part of urban-renewal efforts, the city bought up deteriorating properties and tore down buildings, with the idea of repackaging the land to sell to property developers. But poor economic times and high interest rates discouraged much development. Because of the large concentration of minorities living there, some also blamed the community's abandonment on racism.

The inner city's problems deepened with widespread unemployment, crime and drug dealing.

Change came when the city's economic fortunes began to reverse.

The most significant change in the Central Area has been the arrival of new residents, Staggers said. In the past decade, there's been a diverse influx, people drawn by lower property prices and the idea of living in the city, Staggers said. Some were suburbanites who got tired of the commute. In the one-mile radius around 23rd and Jackson, 42 percent of the residents are black, 32 percent white and 21 percent Asian, according to a 1996 market analysis of the neighborhood.

Realtors also began marketing the once-stigmatized CD differently. The area that wasn't so bad became Leschi, Madrona, Judkins Park, Garfield and Jackson Place.

Drawing businesses into the community, particularly big-name businesses, has been more of a challenge.

Along with CADA, the city has long been a key player in changing that.

"When people boast about their neighborhoods, they usually talk about the services that are available in their community," said Chuck Depew, deputy director of the city's Office of Economic Development and part of the wave of Central Area newcomers. "It revolves around the things that can be done in that community."

One of the Central Area's problems is its lack of a center, Depew said. Services are scattered throughout the neighborhood.

"The services need to be closer so they can compete more and draw people and feed into each other," Depew said. The competing centers all want the same services, but the neighborhood can't support them all.

For years, the city has promoted 23rd and Jackson as the center of the Central Area urban village.

When Promenade 23, the neighborhood shopping mall, was built in the late 1970s, the city helped with low-interest loans. The shopping center was seen as the hope for the community, but it foundered, unable to attract big-name retailers.

It was the renovation of Promenade 23 in the late 1980s that led to the initial efforts to draw Starbucks to the neighborhood, Depew recalled.

Starbucks decided not to open a store at the mall. At the time, the grocery that was the anchor tenant wasn't performing well, Depew said. Starbucks would, in effect, have had to play the unaccustomed role of being a main draw.

"They said, `Let us know when you have a better product,' " Depew recalled.

When Promenade 23 Associates, owners of the shopping center, developed the vacant lot across the street, the city again helped with financing. This time the city and the owners were determined to do things right.

"We wanted it to be a better quality than the market would bear," Depew said. "We recognized that if it was done privately, it wouldn't have been done as nicely."

They began with a brick building on 23rd that opened last year with Walgreen's as the tenant. The national drugstore, just starting to move into the Northwest, has a history of investing in urban neighborhoods, Staggers said.

"They know there's gold in them inner cities," Staggers said, smiling.

Construction soon began on a corner building, a space too small for most retail shops but just right for a coffeehouse or a deli.

The city and the owners decided to aim high.

"There was a general sense that we wanted to see a good-quality retailer there, someone whose name would mean something," Depew said. "That was one reason why people gravitated to Starbucks."

Walgreen's was seen as a good start, but the corner piece, because of its high visibility, was key. If the new project does well, it can be the spur that Promenade 23 failed to be.

The corner building was completed in the fall of 1995. But to get what they wanted, the city and the building's owners were willing to bide their time.

Wooing the java sellers

When a coffeehouse emerged as a top preference, the wooing of Seattle's java retailers began.

About a half-dozen major coffee retailers - including Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee and Tully's - were approached, Staggers said. They came to see the site, explored the neighborhood and heard the presentations.

The Central Area's promoters cited traffic statistics and the neighborhood's changing demographics. Then they mentioned the proximity to Mount Baker and the many Garfield students who often can be seen drinking coffee in the early morning. Then there were the area's workers, from places as varied as Washington Middle School and Gai's Bakery.

But the coffee retailers remained unconvinced. They countered with their own market analysis and said the neighborhood couldn't support the business. Staggers believes there was another problem: the belief among some executives that minorities simply didn't drink gourmet coffee.

"They had the old perceptions of the area as low-income, high-crime and lacking in pride in the neighborhood," Staggers said. "Those perceptions are not true."

Depew wasn't as sure that racism was a factor in coffee retailers staying out of the area.

"You look at 23rd and Jackson, with all the vacant lots, and you don't exactly get a warm and fuzzy feeling," Depew said. "Some people in the Central Area are quick to generalize about why companies won't invest in the area. They may be told that the market conditions are not right, and yes, sometimes that is a euphemism for something else. But sometimes it may just mean that market conditions weren't right."

For a while Tully's considered taking the building, but interest fizzled.

Last summer, Depew, confident that this time he had a better product, took Starbucks up on its earlier invitation.

"We felt that Howard (Schultz, Starbucks' chief executive officer) had wanted to do a store in the Central Area for a long time because he drives that way to work," said Depew. "We had to figure what it would take to get Starbucks to do business there."

The spread of Starbucks

In Yves Mizrahi's office in Starbucks' headquarters in SoDo is a wall filled with maps. In that room, Mizrahi, who is Starbucks' vice president of real estate and store development, plots the company's future.

There's a U.S. map, with its few remaining Starbucks-free states left unshaded. There's a map of the world and the Pacific Rim markets the company covets.

In the usual order of things, it is Starbucks, with its 1,200 stores, that finds the sites it wants to pursue, doing so only after extensive market research and financial analysis augur good business ahead.

But because of Starbucks' success, and a growing reputation for corporate civic citizenship and do-good projects, it's not unusual for others to approach the company.

Around the country, and closer to home, the company has begun entering struggling neighborhoods, including the Rainier Valley. Last year it gave a boost to SoDo, a neighborhood south of the Kingdome, when it chose the former Sears Center as its headquarters.

But after initial interest in the 23rd and Jackson site, Starbucks last December reached the conclusion that the market wouldn't support a store there, Depew said.

Starbucks, like most coffeehouses, relies on pedestrian traffic, and the company's analysis found the Central Area falling short.

When it was pointed out that the intersection was busy with cars, Starbucks questioned how likely it was that drivers would stop for coffee.

"They had to think about whether they would we get a fair return at the site versus a store in Issaquah," Staggers said. "They were looking at it from a financial perspective."

The building's owners, however, weren't willing to give up. They redoubled their efforts to find a coffee vendor, Staggers said.

The community councils, meanwhile, were starting to wonder why a tenant hadn't been found. There was the concern that momentum was fading and that having an empty building would attract vandalism and graffiti.

Interest from elsewhere

While the coffee retailers resisted, the lure did hook some unexpected interest.

In a storefront at Martin Luther King Way and East Cherry Street, Rosie and Woody Jackson have parlayed a small fish restaurant into a Central Area institution.

Over the years their Catfish Corner has garnered numerous awards and rave reviews from critics. Five years ago, Mayor Norm Rice gave the Jacksons one of 10 Outstanding Small Business Awards, praising them for "providing diversification, strength and unique character."

But the Jacksons know their success has been hampered by their location, which is too small and requires more improvements than their landlord is willing to make.

Just before Thanksgiving, Woody Jackson found Catfish Corner a new home.

He'd seen the empty building for more than a year. When work on it finished, he waited to see who'd move in; he assumed the building already had a tenant.

When he saw the building still empty in late November, Jackson approached the owner, Jimmie Sumler, to express his interest.

Jackson, a 53-year-old Louisiana native, recalled the meeting with a rueful smile: "That was the start of our six-month excitement plan."

At the initial meeting, the Jacksons learned that Starbucks was looking at the site. Weeks later, the Jacksons met with Sumler again, and learned that a Starbucks move seemed unlikely.

The Jacksons believe they were then given the green light to prepare their proposal. They worked out a business plan and talked to the Small Business Association and to a bank to line up financing. Woody Jackson even hired an Issaquah interior designer.

They were warned, though, that CADA still was pushing to have a premier coffeehouse take the site.

In mid-January, Ed West, the Jacksons' accountant, met with a CADA staffer to discuss Catfish Corner's intentions and to find out why there was resistance.

West said he also was reassured that the deal with Starbucks seemed unlikely, and that Catfish Corner would likely get the building. They even talked about including a story announcing the move in CADA's quarterly publication.

The Jacksons told customers they would be moving to the new site, showing them the designs they'd made.

Holding out for Starbucks

But work on winning over Starbucks never stopped.

Early in the new year, another round of meetings was arranged.

In February, the city gave CADA money to do a marketing video. Community leaders, meanwhile, became more involved.

Spurred by CADA, they began a letter-writing campaign and circulated petitions. CADA and its board members also attended community council meetings to urge others to join in the effort.

Many did. Mizrahi said he and Schultz both received a barrage of calls and letters from prominent local residents, including church leaders, company heads and school administrators. Even Mayor Rice, a Mount Baker resident, made a pitch for Starbucks.

Another meeting was set up with Schultz and Mizrahi. Armed with the video and the letters, Staggers and CADA's board members made their case. CADA mentioned the housing starts and the projects that were in development. Staggers shared a map of the city showing the location of existing coffeehouses. The map indicated the company's success in penetrating the city - except for a large, conspicuous hole in the center.

Depew, meanwhile, told Starbucks that if it was considering opening a coffeehouse in the Central Area, the city considered the 23rd and Jackson site preferable to some other peripheral site.

Schultz agreed to take another look.

With another chance at Starbucks, CADA pulled out all the stops - even decorating the building with Starbucks logos during a visit by company officials.

A deadline is set

The first week of March, the Jacksons heard the owners were tired of not having a tenant, and had set a March 21 deadline. If Starbucks hadn't signed by then, then Catfish Corner could begin negotiating a lease.

The March 21 deadline came and went without any news.

Then West received a late-night call from Sumler asking if they could meet. West called Woody Jackson, who said he was already in his pajamas.

"I thought it'd be good news," Woody Jackson said. "Why else would you call that late?

At Starbucks, though, the concerted effort was starting to have the desired effect.

"The numbers don't come out perfect," Mizrahi said. "But they showed us that the community really wanted to support it. That really impressed us."

In some cities, Starbucks focuses first on its core target, often the downtown areas, and then spreads outward to develop those sites in a second wave, Mizrahi said.

"What we're increasingly trying to do is expand our reach into communities that in the past we'd not looked at," Mizrahi said. "Given that this was our home base and given the development at the site and the effort by CADA, we felt we owed it to the community to make this center happen."

The company's success in opening a coffeehouse farther south on Rainier Avenue also helped to convince the company.

As Starbucks began to warm to the Central Area site, Staggers said Tully's, which had earlier considered the site, again expressed interest.

"In January, everyone still said no," Staggers said. "But in March, both Starbucks and Tully's said yes."

The project got one more boost from another bit of fortunate timing.

Rice, who was among those who called Schultz and had urged him to be "as creative as possible to make the project happen," made another pitch.

While at a dinner at Palace Kitchen, the mayor learned that Schultz also was there. He went over to greet him and urged him again to seriously consider the Central Area store, Depew said.

"It was completely a fluke, but, of course, it'll confirm everyone's suspicions about how things are done in this city," Depew said. "It was just good timing, real fortuitous."

Shortly after, Starbucks committed to going into the Central Area.

The disappointment lingers

Woody Jackson had walked into Sumler's offices in the Promenade 23 shopping center in high spirits, anticipating good news.

"I said I hope he wasn't going to make an April fool out of me," Jackson said. "That's when he said Starbucks took the corner."

Months after that turn of events, Rosie Jackson is still disappointed. "Everything was in place," she said, shaking her head. "It was almost embarrassing. Now when people ask us, we say we're still looking. This whole thing was a trip."

The push to bring a coffeehouse to the Central Area still puzzles the couple, and they're most angry that a Central Area business was passed over in favor of an outsider.

"If you have an organization that's supposed to help the community, then you have to start at home," Jackson said. "You fix your own house first and then bring in the new furniture."

West believes Catfish Corner was shut out because it simply didn't fit into the new Central Area being envisioned.

"They wanted to give it the yuppie image," West said. "They wanted to bring in outside investment to give it that persona, and they don't think that Catfish Corner would give it that yuppie persona."

The Jacksons were offered another site at another development a block away, but they weren't interested. For a while, Jackson contemplated legal action, but chose instead to move on.

"Rather than fight for something that someone didn't want you to have, I wanted to go to a place where people want us," he said. "We just sat back and took the whuppin', and that's all right. We'll be all right."

Adding to the diversity

The deal with Starbucks was signed in early April, and a "Coming Soon" sign went up in May. Staggers, who was surprised by how long it took to find a tenant, was pleased and relieved at the project's outcome.

The coffeehouse will add to the business diversity of the neighborhood, Staggers said.

"Starbucks will attract people to the community, and once they stop they'll patronize other businesses," he said. "It may bring people into the community to live here and shop here. People like a variety and they like a lot of choices. They didn't have those choices before."

Starbucks also hopes that its presence will help the Central Area.

"We feel very strongly about this," Mizrahi said. "This is our home base. We want to be an impetus for development in our own city. The store still has to be self-sufficient and economically viable. But there are other rewards."

In its history, the promise of revival has come to the Central Area again and again without ever fully materializing. But this time it may actually happen.

This fall, construction will begin on a $2.5 million two-story retail and commercial building next to the Starbucks and Walgreen's. Throughout the Central Area, more than $70 million in residential and commercial projects is planned for the next few years.

Because of Starbucks and Walgreen's, it should be easier to find tenants for the last building on the project, Depew said.

Although more upscale tenants will be targeted for the project, Depew said home-grown businesses won't be priced out of the area because the south shopping center, with its lower rent, can serve as an incubator.

Not all the changes involve large construction. Just as important are the intangibles.

Depew, who moved into Leschi Ridge a decade ago, said taxis no longer balk at driving him home when he gives his address. And friends and family no longer ask: "How can you live there?"

Depew envisions a bustling district in the heart of the Central Area someday, and on that promenade will be a coffeehouse where residents leisurely pass the rare sunny day: a place to see others and be seen.

"This place can become a community node, the living room for the Central Area," he said. "A coffee shop could help start to create that."

Staggers is working on just that.

At the company's request, Staggers is giving advice on ways to make the coffeehouse into a true community focal point. He talks excitedly about plans for a bulletin board and jazz performances, and using the space for small meetings.

"This is quite a coup for the Central Area," he said. "It's a real move up for the neighborhood."