Greenfield’s Grocery Building Pt. 1
September 24th, 2008 @ 12:52 am by Cliffe | Sorted Historic Buildings
I had a chance recently to tour the Central District’s Greenfield’s Grocery Building with developer Ron Rubin of Central Space. The 1929 brick building (recently home to Dilletante Chocolate), located at 23rd and E Cherry, is undergoing a restoration in order to be used as a neighborhood coffee shop and other yet undetermined uses that will encourage pedestrianism and sidwalk oriented micro buisness. Contact Ron if you are interested in the building. Today we’ll look at the exterior of the building and I’ve also posted Part 2 with a peak inside. As you can see from the vintage photos below, the building once housed Greenfield’s Grocery and Barnes Fuel Company. The Barnes office concrete foundation and a pile of coal still linger today just around the back of the building. The exterior of the building remains in excellent shape. Click on the thumbnails for larger photos. Big thanks to Vintage Seattle reader Ron Rubin for the tour. Don’t forget to check out Part 2 of this feature where we venture inside.
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| 1930’s tax photo. | June 1944 photo of the building. |
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| Modern day view of the building. | Alternate angle. |
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| Southeastern corner. | Close up of brick and hand decorated tile. |
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| Along E Cherry. | Along 23rd. |
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| Back of the building. | Vintage photograph showing fuel company office. |
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| This concrete slab remains from the fuel company office. | There is also an old pile of coal remaining. |
September 24th, 2008 @ 8:21 am
Beautiful! Reminds me of the Third Place Ravenna building, which I believe also used to be a grocery store.
September 24th, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
Can’t wait to see the inside.
September 24th, 2008 @ 9:56 pm
It was a PCC.
I can’t believe that coal is still lying around!!
September 26th, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
I went to Garfield in the 80s, and remember well the building’s Dilettante incarnation–it was their test kitchen, so they sold their usual chocolates plus anything that broke coming out of the mold, etc. Huge slabs of mangled Santa Clauses, say, for cheap. Plus, during the lunch hour, pizza!
A coffee shop in that area would do tremendous business…though I’m wondering where the Dilettante has gone?
May 8th, 2009 @ 11:48 am
My grandparents bought the house (712 23rd Ave.) next to Barnes Fuel Yard in 1942 and the family became fast friends with Mr. Barnes and his family. When I was born in 1944 I spent the first six weeks of my life in that house until my mother could join my sailor father in Corpus Christi. Over the years we lived in the house a number of times. I remember Mr. Barnes as a tall elegant man who always wore a uniform of jodphurs and knee high black boots. When my brother started exploring the fuel yard as a toddler (1954) Mr. Barnes put up a chain link fence between our house and the fuel yard so that my brother wouldn’t fall into the coal pit. On really hot days in the summer sometimes he’d even bring us ice cream cones.
The Greenfield Grocery building housed a number of small businesses over the years including a dry cleaners and a shoe repair. If you lived nearby (or next door in our case) the merchants in the building were like a little village that knew who belonged where, and whose kids were out too late and needed to be sent home. The building does look a little odd without its “awnings,” but it’s great to see how well the exterior has held up over the years.
If I get back to Seattle one of these days, I’ll have to go check out the old neighborhood…