The real estate listing for the Kelly Springfield office space floors
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The big hopes of global office space giant WeWork leasing an entire Capitol Hill building went poof earlier this year. A smaller, West Coast office space giant is moving in.
Portland-based CENTRL Office has a deal for a new lease to take over the former WeWork floors of 11th Ave’s Kelly Springfield development, the preservation incentive-boosted, five-story office development that rises above the auto row-era bones of the neighborhood’s former Value Village.
CHS reported on WeWork shuttering the ambitious Capitol Hill location earlier this year amid the company’s massive bankruptcy.
The Kelly Springfield project from property owner Legacy Commercial and architects at Ankrom Moisan created three stories of new offices over the old auto row-era structure. That building was once the neighborhood’s Value Village and before that, REI, and long before that, the Kelly Springfield Motor Truck Company. CHS reported on the history and plans for the property in 2017 as the final designs for the project came together.
WeWork had plans to eventually have space for around 1,300 workers including the fourth floor dedicated to a workspace for Microsoft.
The Kelly Springfield’s ground floor tenant — a 12,000-square-foot golf bar from Five Iron Golf and Seattle rapper and links fan Macklemore — remains.
The rapid disintegration of WeWork has thrown Legacy’s commitment to office development in the neighborhood into question. It also owns the neighboring White Motor Company building. The landmark-protected auto row-era building has remained without a tenant in its upper stories after The Stranger closed its offices there. In 2022, Legacy embarked on a major renovation and overhaul of the property. The office floors remain empty above neighborhood nightclub The Rhino Room which is celebrating its tenth year of business in 2024.
The Seattle Times reports CENTRL will step in and put Legacy’s Kelly Springfield investment back into motion this summer as part of growth that has created new office and coworking spaces in Portland, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.
“Capitol Hill is an underserved office submarket and [Centrl] Office will quickly become a top choice for tenants looking to find a new, more exciting home,” a real estate broker who represented CENTRL in the deal told the Times.
There are no construction or business permits related to the deal and none of the involved companies have announced the new location beyond the information provided to the Times.
A CENTRL representative told the paper that while demand for coworking memberships has remained about the same as workers emerge from the pandemic, the demand for meeting space and facilities has soared.
If that is the case, tech workers and employees visiting the coming soon CENTRL Capitol Hill will have plenty to do. The building stands in the middle of the Pike/Pine nightlife entertainment district on a street with Queer/Bar and the art bar Vermillion for neighbors.
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Dumb. Needs to be housing on top and club/bar/social space on bottom.
Yeah half the offices downtown are empty as it is
Sadly would probably require a massive renovation to meet code requirements for residential.
It’d probably cost as much to redevelop the building into housing as it did for them to build it to start with, at this point.
Mixed use is great!
Seattle already has too much office space. If it can’t be adapted, tear it down and put up something useful like a Cuban restaurant because I’m tired of travelling to get good papa rellena. Maybe a crepe place, or an affordable gym. Perhaps even an artsy fartsy movie theater that plays a lot of foreign language films and maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show on weekend nights. Apartments for working to middling income people might also be nice.
There is literally an affordable gym across the street.
Not cheap enough.
It’s basically a brand-new building, and in good shape; tearing it down & rebuilding would be incredibly wasteful & would not allow for anything “affordable” to be moved in because developers have to know they’ll make money to spend money. Unfortunately, none of the above make any sense whatsoever (with the exception of a gym MAYBE, but it’d have to be expensive to exist in the building and, as others have noted, there’s literally a gym on the opposite side of the street) because the office space is all on the 2nd-5th floors and accessed by elevators; not a great arrangement for a crepe place or any other dining establishment really.
That said, there’s an “artsy fartsy” movie theatre just a block away on 12th! What was the last time you saw a film at NW Film Forum?
Ugh. I was tempted to just type r/woosh as I love it when people are overly pedantic and self-serious. But I bet they wouldn’t like that.
First of all, what makes you think the movie theater or the crepe place ideas were for me personally? When was the last time I saw a movie at that whatever? I don’t know, when was the last time you recognized a joke or flippant remark when you saw one? It certainly wasn’t when you were responding to my post.
The real point was that as office space, it’s a waste. The mayor has made it clear, he wants the downtown office space (I guess I stupidly assumed people paid attention to what the city government did, how silly of me!) filled and we’re a looooooong way from that, so the city is going to end up basically making them as close to free as possible to get people into those high rises downtown (can’t be humiliated when those soccer teams come to town for the World Cup you know?).
You know what they’re not going to do? Give you one penny’s worth of help for moving into Capitol Hill office space, so it’s going to stay vacant (or mostly so). The era of the expansionist start ups that are so flippantly confident they actually want to have offices on Capitol Hill is over and will be for some time. So I would argue that “but it’s new” is basically a sunk cost fallacy. So what? It’s useless, unless you really want junkie squatters to move in an burn it down, then by all means. But, I was thinking that if the developers can’t make it happen then the city that took land to build a streetcar that only billionaires wanted could just take it, because they can.
And boom! Cuban place, which is what I really wanted all along.
Could it be used as office space? Possibly, but I would bet dollars to donuts (or even doughnuts if you prefer) that it will remain underutilized. Downtown will just be made too attractive and Capitol Hill after CHOP is basically the Florida of Seattle now, why would anyone risk it in the new, tighter economy? We can’t even keep our grocery stores open.
Ya’ll realize filling this office space means more people on the hill during the day, which means more demand for lunchtime food options, which will help local restaurants both stay afloat or even expand their menus and hours.
The worst option is for a building to sit vacant and unused.