They didn’t want to just sell to anybody.”Īs it happened, Sindelar and Sher’s company had been casting around for the better part of a year for the site of their next store. PCC is a great organization, very concerned about legacy. “I think that’s what caused them to reach out to us. This second succession from PCC to Third Place Books is no coincidence, Sindelar explains. In particular, says Third Place Books managing partner Robert Sindelar, it will follow the template of the company’s second bookstore, which opened in 2002 in the original PCC store’s quarters in Ravenna. The Seward Park store will hew to that model. Sher, who famously rescued Elliott Bay Books and turned Bellevue’s ailing Crossroads mall into a community crossroads, has made a career out of putting “third place” principles into commercial practice. When PCC vacates the 7,200-square-foot store, probably in mid-July, sawing and hammering will begin on the shelves, woodsy paneling and café tables for the third of Ron Sher’s Third Place bookstores. A new buyer/occupant has appeared whose business strategy is, if anything, even more neighborhood-focused than PCC’s. Now the tale’s taken a differen turn - a sign of changing fortunes for Southeast Seattle and local bookstores. Once again, it seemed, Columbia City, the beneficiary of decades of city support and historic-preservation credits, had sucked the oxygen out of neighboring districts. Real-estate agents trumpet the distance to it in their listings. It’s the only place in Southeast Seattle that Real Change vendors regularly stake out. Who would fill the old space? Would it languish like the decrepit adjacent property, which PCC had tried and failed to acquire?Īs a neighborhood hub and bobo bastion, the store seemed irreplaceable. No wonder residents both cheered and shuddered when PCC Natural Markets announced that it would relocate its undersized, overperforming store in Seward Park to a site three times as large in Columbia City. And so, for nearly two years following the closure of Columbia City’s Bookworm Exchange (which sold mostly used books), this entire Seattle quadrant had not a single general-interest bookstore. And Southeast Seattle is doomed to be a shopping desert, shunned by major retailers no matter how many well-heeled consumers it has because it also has lots of not-so-well-heeled residents. For more than a decade two retail truisms have prevailed: Paper-and-mortar bookstores, especially cozy, community-oriented, locally owned bookstores, are toast in the Amazon age.
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