The Attic – 2023 Preserving Neighborhood Character Award

• September 15, 2023
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• Awards

Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 28, 2023. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature the Attic, the 2023 Preserving Neighborhood Character Award recipient. 

Congratulations to the Attic!

In the constantly changing urban streetscapes of Seattle, it’s the places that have been around for decades or more that help shape and maintain the character of a neighborhood. Central to any community are the legacy businesses that we all come to love. These “third places” bring us together. One such place is the Attic Alehouse & Eatery in Madison Park. The Attic has anchored the neighborhood at 4226 E Madison St since 1967, the same year the building was constructed, replacing a much older structure that once housed a bowling alley in 1907, then a shooting range transitioning to a bar in 1937. The Attic abruptly closed in early February 2020 before pandemic-caused closures. The historic bar’s longtime owner of 30 years, Mark Long, passed away in 2018. At this time, an interim ownership group stepped in prior to the current business owners.

Fortunately for Madison Park and Seattle, the Attic has survived as a legacy business and reopened in late April 2023, saved and resurrected by ESR (Ethan Stowell Restaurants) led by Executive Chef Ethan Stowell and Howard Wright, the Founder and CEO of Seattle Hospitality Group (SHG). The new owners purchased the historic watering hole, installed new hardwood floors, and made “facelift” improvements to the space. This new chapter in the long and storied history of the Attic celebrates many memories and great times and continues making new ones.

As described in a recent Seattle Times article, “Under Long’s stewardship, the pub turned into that proverbial third place, where softball teams hung out after league games. Many locals had their first dates there, and families hosted celebration of life events.” According to Stowell, “In the last 50 years, tons of parents have taken their kids here for their first beer. Watch Cougar and Husky games. This is like the neighborhood ‘Cheers.’”

The continuation of the Attic gives us hope because Seattle has lost and continues to lose so many legacy businesses. It’s these words by Ethan Stowell that caught Historic Seattle’s attention and why we honor the Attic with a Preserving Neighborhood Character Award, “It is a preservation thing,” Stowell told the Seattle Times. “We would like to see other neighborhood institutions continue on. If we can help with that, we would be happy to take that on.”

To that we say, “More please!”

 

Image courtesy of the Attic

Heart This Place – Madison Park Beach

• May 15, 2020
• No Comment
• Fun Stuff

By Brady Begin

To celebrate Preservation Month from home, we have launched Heart This Place – a new blog series from Historic Seattle staff. Each post will feature a different place that is significant to a member of our staff. In this installment, Engagement & Administration Coordinator Brady Begin celebrates Madison Park Beach.

I first visited Madison Park during the summer after I graduated from UW. I said the neighborhood was “honestly too cute for words,” but that didn’t stop me from coming up with cheesy Instagram captions like “city beach vibes” and nailing far too many hashtags to my posts like some sort of millenial Martin Luther.

I had taken a photo of a trio of surfboards near the bathhouse, which, in retrospect, cracks me up. Who surfs on Lake Washington? They were more for decoration than anything, an escapist aesthetic that inspired the collages you see below. Look, I’m no artist, but I wanted to do something creative for my contribution to Heart This Place.

While I’m lucky enough to actually live in Madison Park now, I’m quarantined at my family’s home in the suburbs because my apartment doesn’t get enough natural light to work from home (if the neighborhood is one big beach, then my apartment is a sea cave). I cut out images and text from old magazines that my parents were throwing out and mashed them up with two different photos of the shoreline.

The first is a recent photo of me walking along the beach, backed by a waterfront condo building. The second is a historic photo of the boardwalk and pavilions that once adorned the shore, before development of the Lake Washington Ship Canal lowered the lake’s water level and before a 1914 fire burned down the main structure – Beede’s Madison Street Pavilion. The historic images came from Pavilion days on Lake Washington, a post from the now-defunct Madison Park Blogger, which details the structures’ centrality to the burgeoning beachfront community between the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I’ll admit that I’m torn as to whether or not I think the beach would be better with the boardwalk and pavilions that once lined the shore. On the one hand, there’s obviously a lot of recreational and amusement value there. On the other, the beach we have know is more laid-back and its modesty generally reflects the slower, quieter character of the neighborhood. Regardless, Madison Park Beach is still a great in-city retreat for Seattleites in search of their own Margaritaville or Kokomo.

In a few months I’ll be leaving Seattle to attend graduate school at the University of Georgia. I’ll miss a lot of things, including this little slice of paradise here in Madison Park. I’m holding out hope that we’ll be able to gather safely before then so we can go out and enjoy Seattle’s many public shores.

Cheers to you, little beach village!