The Capitol Hill preservation incentive-boosted, mixed-use development Pike Motorworks is so big.

How big is it?

Pike Motorworks is so big, It has taken six years for it to fill its E Pine-facing restaurant space in the block-spanning, 260-unit building also home to the Redhook Brewlab and a collection of businesses including Taku and Salt and Straw.

But six years after construction was completed on the project that rose on top of the auto row-era bones of the neighborhood’s departed BMW dealership, it looks like the development’s retail dreams of spanning from Pike to Pine are back on track.

According to permits filed with the city, work is underway to build out a 2,300-square-foot restaurant on the E Pine side of the project next to the northern entrance to the project’s faux-public courtyard. The space will look out onto E Pine across the street from the Seattle Central parking garage.

The paperwork has been filed under the building’s owner, Boston-based TA Realty which purchased the property for $128.3 million in 2019.

In that transaction, developer Arizona-based Wolff Co. cut its ties with the neighborhood after also cashing out of another preservation-incentive boosted project at 11th and Pine as it sold off the Sunset Electric development for $41.6 million. Wolff won big on major investments made under the Pike/Pine Conservation District’s incentive program. In 2012, Wolff paid $6.7 million for the poster-covered, empty building at the corner of 11th and Pine that eventually became Sunset Electric. It paid $14.9 million that same year for the old BMW property where it eventually developed Pike Motorworks —  just days before the property was slated to go to auction in a $9.8 million foreclosure.

$128.3 million here, $41.6 million there — what you really want to know is what is opening on E Pine. For now, that will remain a mystery. The various documents and permits for the early planning on the project list only a tenant improvement for a “Pike Motorworks Restaurant.”

This also brings the CHS Mystery Restaurant tally we are currently tracking to two. We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of what will put the overhauled Heath Printers Building to use on Boylston just off Pine.

Looking for clues? Magellan Architects, part of the team working on the new project at the Pike Motorworks, has a food and drink portfolio that includes local Brazilian coffee chain Kitanda’s southcenter location, a Redmond Indian restaurant, a Bellevue Brazilian steakhouse concept, one of the Ram Restaurant locations, a Burlington commercial development centered around a Starbucks, and, yes, “multiple McDonald’s locations.”

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