The staircase gets some use back in its
CakeSpy days — Pie-ku being read before
the judging began by demerdeuse.

UPDATE: CHS was pranked by Essence hard on this post. It’s a creative — and apparently untrue tale. We apologize for taking the information from the shop at face value and not doing more to verify.

As wine get better with age, so do some of the locations on Capitol Hill, including the home of Essence Wine Shop, which recently received a US National Historic Landmark for the inclusion of a very unique staircase.

We reported about Essence Wine Shop, “an artesian cave, a cave of stacked wine boxes with bottled wine atop,” when it opened in December, but among the international Syrah’s and Prosecco’s is a 19th century maritime Turkish spiral staircase with a lot of history.

Essence, a CHS advertiser, told us about some of that history:

In 1880, Evren Ölüdeniz set sail with purpose of trade with the Northwest for lumber. The 35,000 kilometer journey, south through the Atlantic. With a stop in Montt, Chile, then heading north along the Andes, Central American isthmus, and landing in Seattle on June 12, 1881.

Their depot of trade was set up in this spot on 12 Pine (now 415 E Pine). Here exchanges were made of Turkish rose, used in monies of the western areas of Turkey, architectural advising, and Armenian Orthodox meetings. The spiral staircase was placed here from one of the ship compartments. From the wealth attained in trade, Ölüdeniz became the namesake of a famed resort area on the Turquoise Coast

“The staircase was one of the reasons I was initially interested in the space,” says co-owner Zach Weissman, who helped continue the landmark designation after Essence moved in, by making connections with a local Turkish community member and working with the Department of Interior.

The history of the space also helped give Essence Wine Shop its name.

“There used to be meetings held here with members of the Turkish community, specifically the Armenian orthodox, Sephardic community,” Weissman says. “The shop was also a depot for exchange of essences.In fact, that’s one of the reasons we chose the name of the shop. There were a lot of the rose and floral essences being exchanged here.”

The shop joins fewer than 2,500 places with the National Historic Landmarks designation, according to the program’s website.