By Matt Dowell

It’s ten years for Capitol Hill’s Chophouse Row on 11th Ave, but Liz Dunn of Dunn & Hobbes is quick to say that she and her team have been on the block longer than that.

“We’ve actually been here for 25 years,” she reminded us. “So it’s the ten year anniversary of just this last building that we added — but this whole complex I’ve owned for 25 years.”

Dunn purchased a cluster of buildings inside the 11th/Pike/12th horseshoe in 1999, then the beautiful brick building on the northwest corner of the block in 2014. They were redeveloped one by one over the years before the current form’s culmination debuted in 2015.

That’s when the Chophouse building on 11th Ave was added on top of an existing auto row-era structure. Office space was built inside that is now dedicated to coworking, the alleyway and courtyard inside the horseshoe opened, and multiple food and drink and retail spaces joined in. Chophouse Row was born. It followed Melrose Market’s footsteps — another successful Dunn & Hobbes redevelopment project that brought many small businesses into a single, shared, and life-filled space.

Dunn says that the cliche is true. In these developments, “the total is greater than the sum of the parts.”

“We probably have twenty retail, restaurant, and service tenants, so they really bolster each other as far as foot traffic, customers coming in, discovering, and getting what they need. It’s a nice little critical mass of stuff for people who live on Capitol Hill.”

The list of today’s tenants includes YVEY Salon, Sweet Alchemy Ice Creamery, Cake Skincare, Butter Home (no butter sold), Little Dog Garden, the Celine Waldmann clothing store, Bootyland Kids + Two Owls for kids clothes and toys, Good Weather Bicycle and Cafe, the Light Sleeper natural wine bar, and a PopRox dance studio.

A walk through the alley past the retail space, under the exposed steel from the old Chophouse structure next to the tall brick backside of the 1950s multi-story former auto row building on the corner of Pike and 11th says a lot about what drives Dunn’s style of urban development: a taste for what’s old and odd and a custodial care for small business.

“People love neighborhoods and love cities when they can feel the history,” she said.

“That’s not sentimental or whatever – I’m not a preservationist. The cities we love the most, we love them because they’re modern cities but the history comes out of their pores.”

Over the last three decades, Dunn worked to hang onto Pike/Pine’s history as it underwent massive development.

Dunn spoke of many recent housing projects that were built on top of historic buildings, including the Packard Building on 12th and Pine. In the neighborhood, if you build on top of an old building instead of tearing it down, you get an extra story of height.

The Pike Pine Conservation District is a policy Dunn advocated for when the neighborhood started feeling pressure to add housing quickly. Developers from outside the city came in and hoped to replace the old buildings with new structures.

“The owners who’d been here a long time wanted to find a win-win, so we went to the City and we made the incentives for not demolishing so attractive and the disincentives for demolishing so unattractive so that any national developer that came to this neighborhood would [keep the historical structures].”

She says that customers and business owners alike prefer the timeworn feel.

“I get calls everyday asking if I have space in one of the old buildings.”

“The small, local tenants that are creative, they want to be in old buildings because they’re just more distinctive. It’s easier for them to express their brand in a cool old structure than it is in a plain vanilla new one.”

“Heavy timber does speak to quality and solidity. But I also think people just have an emotional response to those materials that have a patina on them and have been there for a hundred years.”

The application of the conservation overlay district hasn’t been without challenges. Other developers utilized the program to create preservation incentive-boosted mega-developments that now span full blocks of Pike/Pine.

CHS images from Chophouse Row’s 2015 opening

Small and local businesses, Dunn feels, are equally important to a healthy urban fabric.

“We all want small local business for our quality of life, right? It’s kind of what defines living in a cool, interesting city.”

But she sees the challenges those businesses face and she feels it’s her job to protect them.

“Small business in Seattle is so disrespected compared to other cities.”

Transit is one issue where she feels their perspective is left out.

“I get my back up when people who know nothing about small business suggest we completely shut down car access because I can tell you that every single one of my businesses relies to some extent on people coming from other neighborhoods or from the east side.”

And, of course, there’s the issue of public safety.

“It’s really complicated and there’s a lot of ways in which I think the city and the county and the state have let us down in terms of finding paths to treatment and care for people who really need it.”

But it creates incredible difficulties for businesses, including “brutally consistent, daily shoplifting which may put at least one of my tenants out of business because they get hit every day by a couple of frequent offenders.”

She’s spent a lot of the last year working with the officers and leadership at the East Precinct.

CHS reported here earlier this year on the Dunn email that pushed District 3 City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth and Mayor Bruce Harrell to respond to growing concerns around street disorder and public drug use in the neighborhood.

“They have really stepped up in the last year. They’re really trying, even with their reduced numbers, to get out on the street and mingle with everyone who’s having a good time on Friday or Saturday night, or the business owners.”

“I’ll also say I think Capitol Hill is bearing the brunt of some displacement of challenges downtown.”

“We’re feeling it, International District, Chinatown, Little Saigon are feeling it.”

“I think that small businesses feel like if they complain too much they’ll be seen as not empathetic which is so not the case. They’re often afraid to speak out. That they don’t have a voice or there’s not a strong enough constituency.”

“But in Chinatown and the International District, they’ve been really vocal in the last month, telling the city, ‘This is so broken, we can’t bear this anymore’. I think Capitol Hill needs to do the same thing.”

Dunn plans to continue her work with the East Precinct officers and the city to advocate for small and local businesses along Pike and Pine.

This includes advocating for the formation of a new Pike/Pine Business Improvement Area that would take on litter and graffiti and would be funded by assessments on properties in Capitol Hill’s core nightlife neighborhood.

Dunn & Hobbes is focused on Chophouse, its 12th Ave Piston Ring neighbor, and the adjoining Baker Linen building at 11th and Pike. In 2019, the developer sold Melrose Market to Regency Centers, the same real estate investment trust that owns the Broadway Market shopping center, for $15.5 million.

CHS reported here in 2012 as Dunn renewed planning for Chophouse Row to transform the stretch of 11th Ave and incorporate the auto row-era bones of the Chophouse Studios building into a new complex of office space, retail, and restaurants designed by Sundberg Kennedy Ly-Au Young Architects and Graham Baba. The development had been on ice since 2009 when the global economic downturn froze projects across the city.

The development opened in May of 2015 and was celebrated with a grand opening on a sun-drenched June evening.

Chophouse, today, will continue to be a home for up and coming small businesses. Two new tenants are coming this summer to replace Plum Bistro and Plum Chopped on the 12th Ave side of the block.

“They are of course local family owned businesses that we are very excited about,” said Dunn.

Will there be another 10 years for Dunn at Chophouse Row?

“I mean, I don’t know if I’ll still be here ten years from now, but maybe!,” Dunn says. “I haven’t really thought it through. But I’m pretty attached to it.”

“This is where I am every day.”

Chophouse Row is located at 1424 11th Ave. Learn more at chophouserow.com.

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