There's Energetic New Life In A Forgotten Neighborhood

Wednesday is Salsa Night and the music is thumping at the normally mellow Wellington Tea Room.

The squarish room, rich with decorative lace, mirrors and floral print wallpaper, has been converted into a miniature disco, with a live DJ and makeshift dance floor covering the gray carpet.

The tea cups have been replaced by wine glasses.

The Victorian elegance that pervades The Wellington in daylight has been transformed by a syncopated beat, swift feet and waves of swinging hips.

This is the epicenter of a neighborhood on the rebound.

A decade ago, few outsiders patronized the businesses in Columbia City, a collection of turn-of-the-century wooden and brick storefronts along Rainier Avenue South in the valley between the Mount Baker neighborhood and Beacon Hill. Certainly, not many came here to kick up their heels.

Many old-line businesses in the once-thriving district had closed and boarded up their windows as people turned to shopping malls and large chain stores. This discouraged even neighborhood residents from patronizing the small businesses that remained open. Drug trafficking and prostitution also were serious problems.

It wasn't an ideal environment for new businesses.

"Some people, when I came here, said `Why do you open a business here? We are dead,' " recalls pharmacist Anne Truong, who started her now-successful Columbia Pharmacy in 1985. "It was sad."

But the outlook is slowly shifting as businesses such as The

Wellington and community-development organizations help bring new life to the main commercial strip. Suddenly people are using words like "up-and-coming" and "trendy" to describe an ethnically diverse, mostly working-class district that was all but forgotten until a few years ago.

Buoyed by success that has come with being part of a local economy, the area's residents and merchants say they are determined to prevent Columbia City from declining again, even in the face of an slowdown in economic growth throughout the Puget Sound region.

Business groups have started a weekly farmers' market in the summer and Beatwalk, a periodic neighborhood music festival. Both events have lured people back to the area, while helping unify the district's merchants.

"At night, there was absolutely nothing going on down there," said Darryl Smith, a Windermere real-estate agent and chairman of the Columbia City Revitalization Committee. Smith also started the Beatwalk festival.

"Now, it's most definitely a sought-after place to live, and what follows is entrepreneurial investors and homebuyers coming in and wanting to take advantage of the opportunities."

Gwyn Baker opened The Wellington six years ago when few were betting on a revival in Columbia City. The tea room took off, drawing everyone from celebrities to Boeing executives to professionals from as far away as Issaquah.

Today one of the district's most vocal advocates, Baker says it's important that as the area grows it maintains the diversity and small-town feel that attracted people like her in the first place.

"As I look around at what's going on in the area, it's exciting," said Baker, who owns a home with her husband near the commercial strip. "But I don't want the community to get lost in the shuffle."

Many of Columbia City's residents, a mixture of Asians, African Americans, whites and Latinos, low-income and well-off families, also work in the area and have close ties to the neighborhood.

One of South Seattle's largest employers, Furon Advanced Components Division, has been based in Columbia City at Rainier and South Hudson Street since 1955. The 145-employee company makes plastic covers for medical devices and decorative panels for computers, as well as air-duct components for Boeing aircraft.

"A great deal of our employees come right out of the community," company spokesman Robert Bogue said.

In the past, the company's fortunes hinged mostly on Boeing, but the next round of planned aerospace layoffs won't be as much of a factor, Bogue said.

He estimates the company can triple its business in the next three to five years by marketing more heavily to the computer industry. That's good news for employees and for the surrounding merchants whose sales are helped by the plant.

As for Columbia City, it will continue to be home for Furon, Bogue said.

"We've had opportunities to leave this area many times, and we've have chosen to stay here," he said, noting the large labor pool and the low cost of building space.

Newer businesses display a similar devotion to Columbia City.

On the heels of The Wellington's success came La Medusa, a "Sicilian soul food" restaurant that opened three doors away about a year ago. The restaurant, co-owned by neighborhood residents Lisa Becklund and Sherri Serino, has earned raves from critics, and it is often packed on weekends.

"The opportunities are here because it's affordable, but there's also a community here that's strong," said Becklund, whose grandparents also lived in the neighborhood. Becklund and Serino, who have owned a home south of the commercial strip for four years, say the economic slump in Columbia City galvanized the community and inspired residents to push for changes.

Bob's Quality Meats, one of the oldest meat markets in Seattle, has always managed to weather economic ups and downs. But something's been different this time around, says James Ackley, who took over the market with his son, Abraham Ackley, when his parents retired in April.

"It's definitely on a great upswing now - everybody's positive," Ackley said. "There's a pride, a community spirit, as strong here as any place I've ever seen."

While people are happy to see Columbia City get the attention from outsiders they believe it deserves, there's also an underpinning of resentment that it took so long to be noticed by the city's premier businesses.

Now there is talk that Starbucks will open a new store somewhere along the strip. It already has a location to the north at the recently revamped Rainier Valley Plaza.

Two years ago, the nonprofit community revitalization group known as SEED (South East Effective Development) persuaded Seattle-based Taco Del Mar to open a store in Columbia City.

Taco Del Mar co-founder Jim Schmid said store's sales have grown steadily over the last two years, and the company expects that trend to continue.

SEED also is renovating eight apartments in the old Columbia Hotel at Rainier and South Ferdinand Street.

The restoration has paved the way for another success story, Lottie Motts Coffee Shop, which occupies the corner storefront below and has already become a popular neighborhood gathering place.

Kate Gill, a paralegal who has lived in the area for four years, left her law firm to start Lottie Motts in June.

Gill says local merchants have had to do things other business districts take for granted, such as clean out curbside storm drains by hand, in order to spruce up the strip. But it has been worth the effort.

She credits businesses like La Medusa for opening the district to the rest of Seattle.

"A successful business like that always buffers other businesses," Gill said. "It's a really strong reason for the locals to come down, and for people in the North End and West Seattle to come in, too."

While customers at Lottie Motts debate everything from statehood for Puerto Rico to the quality of different types of gravel, few have struck up conversations about layoffs at Boeing or the economy, Gill said.

And so far, steadily rising rents, home prices and commercial-lease rates apparently have not displaced any of those who have survived the rough times.

As for the business district, which hit rock bottom some time ago, there's nowhere to go but up, the merchants say. Community leaders would like to see an independent bookseller on the strip, maybe a movie theater. Word is spreading that a downtown restaurateur is looking to start a new eatery in the neighborhood.

"Once you move down here and start doing business here," Gill said. "there's no other place to be."