If you took the old signs from Bellevue Ave E’s Harry’s Fine Foods, the young chef behind the project set to transform the former corner market into a new restaurant would like you to consider bringing them back.
“They’re the original signs. Maybe whoever took them will put them back over the fence,” Julian Huntley Hagood told CHS Thursday morning, still hopeful that the old signs for Harry’s and “ozen Meats” that hung from the 1910-built market might be hanging nearby on a Capitol Hill wall.
The signs were taken from the building sometime last week but, so far, haven’t turned up.
The project is currently in the midst of early construction and a land use process to allow the change of use for the property from market to restaurant. Hagood said he hopes to make the history of the corner part of the new life for the old building and the signs were a small, but important part of connecting the old Harry’s to the new.
If you have any information about the theft or ideas about where to find the signs, you can drop us a line at [email protected] or call (206) 399-5959.
UPDATE 10/4/15 8:58 PM: A neighbor passes along some not very clear pictures with a very clear description of what happened to the signs. Unfortunately, the mystery only deepens:
Attached are the grainy photos I shot the evening of Sept. 21, as the signs had been removed (I live across the street). Unfortunately, I’m a terrible photographer, and the window screens obscure A LOT, but feel free to pass them along. According to my iPhone, I took these shots at 7:32pm.
Since the people removing the signs were so obviously & carefully taking down the signs from the place, it never dawned on me that I was witnessing a theft, so I didn’t get the license plate details or anything of that nature.
Many fond memories of laughing at that “Frozen Meats” sign.
I live down the street and watched two guys w/ ladders taking them down and loading them on a pickup truck in broad daylight when I rode by on my way home. Don’t remember which day it was. Without them the building looks even more sad than it did before :-(
I saw two people in safety vests taking the signs down & carefully placing them in the back of a truck on 9/21/15 (I know the date, as I took a couple of very blurry photos of the sings in the truck…unfortunately nothing that could provide any real information). I assumed the signs were simply going to be refurbished, given how openly they were being removed.
i meant “signs,” not “sings,” of course…
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I just did!
Such a bummer, just thought they were off getting restored.
A week or so ago I briefly saw a flash light and silhouettes of people through the second floor window at 9 or 10 at night.
Earlier this year when no contractors had been by for months and the place just seemed completely abandoned I’d see people do weird things. Like a guy walking by one night that stopped to lightly kick the plywood where the front windows used to be seemingly to test how solidly in place they were, and another time a person walking around the building looking up at the open second story windows. Maybe it just looks like it’s up for grabs when it’s unsecured and in disrepair for so long.