PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.

 

This will be the final holiday shopping season on Capitol Hill for neighborhood mercantile and apothecary SugarPill.

Owner Karyn Schwartz has announced she is moving and taking the store with her to Whidbey Island in 2023 after more than 11 years on E Pine just off Broadway:

There’s a lot of reasons why I will be leaving this perfect little jewelbox space on Pine Street, and believe me, I am just as heartbroken as I am excited for a new adventure. I’ve been in the gayborhood since 1989 and I have known some of you for just that long, while others of you are new acquaintances, and it’s going to be SO HARD to let go of that familiarity.

BUT – rest assured – SugarPill is not closing! She will be coming with me to Whidbey Island and yessss I will finally put a website up someday and anyway it’s not happening until some time from now but I know a lot of you only come in during the holidays and I wanted to give you a heads up so you make sure to stop by this holiday season!!

Schwartz said the timing of the move is lined up for early in 2023, also noting, of course, that this week’s news aligns with the full moon.

SugarPill debuted on E Pine in early 2011. “Small, dark  tincture bottles fill a massive wooden medicine chest behind the shops front desk — a disorientating product display for those accustomed to buying brightly packaged medicines emblazoned with ‘cough,’ ‘fever,’ or ‘joint pain,'” is how CHS described the shop during a 2013 visit.

After spending years in private practice as an herbalist, homeopath, and masseuse, Schwartz said she grew frustrated with the traditional client-patient relationship. Instead of having paying clients, she said the shop allows her freely consult with anyone who comes in the door. “All this herbal knowledge we should all know, this is stuff we should have learned in school,” she told CHS back then. “My great-grandmother was an herbalist, most of ours were, it just doesn’t get passed on.”

She also found time along the way to contribute occasional essays to CHS. “Even after all these years I can’t believe how lucky I got when I arrived here. I found a job in a lovely little café where I met the most incredible people, got involved with music projects and volunteer activities, and felt my roots dive deep into this place right away,” she wrote in one. “Yet it wasn’t until people I’d never met began to nod at me from across the street or until I started to recognize people who worked in places I had begun to frequent, or who rode the same bus that I did, or whose path somehow crossed my own on a regular basis, that I began to feel like I was really part of it.”

In 2020, just before COVID-19 hit, Schwartz was honored for her role in the Capitol Hill business community. She spoke honestly with CHS about the challenges of independent retail on the Hill. “I’ve got to decide this year if I’m going to continue,” she said as she spoke about the possibility of renewing her E Pine lease in the Hunters Capital-owned Broadway Building. “I have yet to make a dollar.”

SugarPill carried on with its mix of homeopathic remedies plus treats and gifts and weathered the pandemic when all the echinacea in the world couldn’t help. CHS stopped in to talk with Schwartz more in 2021.

Over a decade of business, the shopkeeper also made sure her store represented the neighborhood with displays and messages in support of LGBTQ causes and queer communities.

Now 2023 will mark the start of a new story for the apothecary and Schwartz.

SugarPill is located at 900 E Pine. Learn more at sugarpillseattle.com.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by SugarPill (@sugarpillseattle)

PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.