Developers have filed early plans for a new seven-story mixed-use building at the corner if 14th and Union where a cluster of food and drink businesses has already faded away over recent years and one of Capitol Hill’s remaining light industrial spaces will be turned over to the ongoing demand for new housing in the neighborhood.

This corner of Capitol Hill redevelopment will play out in a slightly different order than most. This time, bars, restaurants, and the craft distillery that called the property home in recent years moved away before the plans for demolition arrived.

According to the early permit filings from Euclid Development and the Capitol Hill-based architects and Board and Vellum, the former La Panzanella bakery property recently home to businesses including Oola Distillery, gay bar Union, Restaurant Zoe, and Bar Sue will be demolished to make room for a seven-story, 80-unit mixed-use apartment building, with commercial space at street level, and underground parking.

The Daily Journal of Commerce was first to report the new permit paperwork.

The new building joins plans for E Union that make the street’s run up and down the backside of Pike/Pine a remaining center of development activity. Across the street, affordable developer Community Root Housing has plans for an 8-story, cross-laminated timber apartment building. Meanwhile, plans have been in the works since 2019 for a seven-story, 37-unit apartment building and adaptive reuse overhaul of the landmark Knights of Columbus Building at Union and Harvard. Another Union project next to Optimism Brewing is completing construction and ready for new commercial tenant Capitol Hill’s Seattle Dentistry to open soon.

For the northwest corner of 14th and Union, Euclid Development and Seattle-based private developer T.J. Lehman boast a portfolio of projects from “garden apartments to mixed-use highrises” including “affordable and elderly projects in addition to market rate development.”

The property remains held by the Pasciutos, the family behind the much-loved La Panzanella bakery that called the corner home until the mid-2000s.

Built in 1963, the bakery complex marks one of the last corners of light industrial use in a neighborhood that was dominated by auto row businesses and architecture in the early 20th century. Craft spirit maker Oola put the zoning to use in joining a small wave of microdistilleries opening on Capitol Hill in the 2010s but finally gave into real estate and cost pressures and moved to Georgetown during the pandemic.

The move followed more exits from the E Union property. Last September, Capitol Hill Southern-flavored Bar Sue lost its lease. Meanwhile, gay bar Union had previously announced it was exiting the building two years after it took over the former Restaurant Zoe space for a four-block move down Union near Broadway. It reopened there in March.

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