We’re in Seattle, Washington, and this is not the façade of a store. But it was.

Here it was, as a storefront, just around the corner from its current location. This is a 2008 capture from Google Street View:

What is going on here? Seattle’s light rail came through here a few years ago, and this old storefront and a few other aging buildings were torn down for the station. But this record store and turntable repair shop was a neat, quirky, iconic business. So the city undertook a project to disassemble the entire façade, and reassemble it at the entrance to the light rail station!

Here it is, inside the station, as seen from the street:

“Seizing an opportunity to preserve a piece of the neighborhood’s historic fabric,” Sound Transit, Seattle’s transit agency, says, “we deconstructed the entire building facade in order to incorporate it into the new station. The result is what you see today.” The building was nearly a century old.

In 2012, Sound Transit contractor Moon Construction carefully removed the Vitrolite glass tiles, followed by the fragile neon tubes that outlined each letter on the curved canopy.

They next removed the Standard letters themselves and the remaining sheet metal features, and finally came the steel tees that supported the sign.

Throughout the process, they developed detailed drawings so that station construction contractors could accurately reassemble each piece when the time came. 

After six years safely boxed up in a Sound Transit storage facility, the facade elements re-emerged in 2018, when station contractor Hoffman Construction Company began to reconstruct them.  

A local neon shop—itself a dying breed—restored the neon.

You might wonder what the store actually was. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer profiled it back in 2007, a few years before its demise. The owner, who declined to give his age for the piece, doesn’t look young.

He was an old-school repairman:

With his wife, Sharron, [Jim] Goff runs what he says is the only business on the West Coast devoted to repairing electric-powered phonographs and selling needles and record-cleaning supplies.

Goff does the repairs on site, charging a flat $45 plus parts. If parts aren’t available, he’ll try to make them, and if the phonograph can’t be restored to perfect condition, he’ll at least try to make it usable. Estimates are free.

And he also sold a dwindling supply of records inherited from the previous tenant, which had occupied the space since 1931:

All of the store’s records are left over from inventory the Goffs bought from Kay and Millard Smith, whose Standard Records store occupied that space for 56 years, until 1987.

The stock is 80 percent gone, and when it’s sold off, “Well, we’ll worry about that when the time comes,” Goff said.

Goff started working for the Smiths in 1955, stocking shelves and opening mail in the record store. One day he started tinkering around with a turntable someone had brought in for repair and found he had a knack for it.

It’s a really cool story, and a really cool business. But obviously, the clock was ticking. This is not the kind of business that makes a ton of money. And dwindling stock of records and especially turntable parts doesn’t help. These types of businesses are probably better adapted to the internet today, where they can reach customers all across the country. But Goff didn’t use the internet; the piece reports that he didn’t even know how to use a computer.

So the business had reached its natural endpoint at about the time the light rail came through. In my view, what the city did in restoring and preserving the old façade was excellent, and should be a best practice in redevelopment of old properties with iconic signs or exterior features.

I think it’s important to allow things to change—“no transit in an urban downtown because there’s a cool one-story storefront there” means stagnation, not preservation—but I also think it’s important to acknowledge these bits of local color, these little landmarks. This is the best example I’ve seen.

If you’ve seen this sort of thing done before, let me know! I’d love to feature more examples of semi-preservation regarding this kind of historic but ordinary stuff.

Related Reading:

Signs of Change

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #13

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