Shuttered stores. New housing. What’s happening on Rainier Ave?

Each time Harry Yoshimura started to talk about Mutual Fish seafood market shutting down after 76 years, he was interrupted by someone calling on the phone or stopping by his store to say, “Thanks, and we’ll miss you.” One after another, until the interruptions told the story all by themselves.

“I don’t begrudge anyone retiring,” longtime regular Daniel Eiben said Sept. 15, poking his head into Yoshimura’s cluttered cubbyhole of an office on the store’s penultimate day in business. “But you guys are breaking my heart.”

For many Mutual Fish customers and Seattle residents, the Rainier Avenue South store’s permanent closure last month didn’t merely register as the loss of a single, beloved shopping destination. It felt like the end of an era on a stretch of road that’s currently undergoing a rapid and painful transition.

Founded by Harry Yoshimura’s late father, Dick, and then operated by Harry with his own son, Kevin, Mutual Fish was one of the last survivors among a number of longstanding establishments that made Rainier Avenue between Interstate 90 and Martin Luther King Jr. Way South unique.

As recently as 2015, the area still included the Imperial Lanes bowling alley, Remo Borracchini’s Bakery, an Oberto snacks store and Mutual Fish. Those are gone today, as are other businesses, like Rainier Farmer Market and Baskin Robbins, and new buildings are sprouting. Multiple causes have contributed, from City Hall zoning changes and COVID-19 to fires and generational turnover. Property crime has climbed on Rainier Avenue and three people were killed and six injured in an early-morning shooting outside a hookah lounge in August.

All those things and others were on Harry Yoshimura’s mind when he decided to put down his fillet knife, he said. Because Rainier Avenue is so long, incidents miles away from each other get lumped together in the news, hurting the street’s reputation, he said. Global warming has made it harder to source great fish, and the elder Yoshimura is also simply “getting older, tired,” he said. He and Kevin own the Mutual Fish property; they haven’t decided what to do with it, Harry Yoshimura said.

“A lot of it’s my fault, being that I wanted to take it easy for a little bit,” the 80-year-old said, adding, “It’s a combination of everything.”

The stretch looks very different than it did five years ago and, in another five years, it will probably look very different again. Several private schools have put down roots, a light-rail station is poised to open and a slew of new apartments are under construction, with more on the way. Some will be affordable, boosters note, and the growth may bring new businesses, with new customers. In the meantime, people are camping on and off Rainier Avenue in tents and trailers, despite repeated removals by the city.

“Everything is going through a change. It’s kind of sad,” Yoshimura said about the redevelopment. “That’s the way people want it, I guess.”

Not everyone, customer Storme Webber said after paying her respects at Mutual Fish to the friendly workers in overalls making precise cuts behind the counter; the walls adorned with old photos and marine taxidermy; the pink fillets glistening inside glass display cases on white beds of ice.

“The city needs to look at what its vision is,” Webber said, contemplating a Seattle without such stores. “Who wants to buy seafood from an app? But someone will make an app and some guy will get very wealthy from that and all these people will still be in the streets … We need a reset in this culture.”

“Old Seattle”

The version of Rainier Avenue that’s slipping away is one that dates to the first half of the 20th century, when many Italian and Japanese immigrants, themselves predated by Native American people, established homes, gardens and businesses between Beacon Hill and Mount Baker.

Once referred to as “garlic gulch” because of its Italian produce suppliers, Rainier Valley continued to blossom in the second half of the 20th century. Mutual Fish moved to Rainier Avenue from the Central District in 1966.

“We all kind of knew each other growing up, or our parents did,” said Larry Oberto, whose grandfather started the well-known sausage and jerky company. “We all went out of our way to shop at the neighborhood stores.”

As many other Seattle neighborhoods saw dramatic overhauls, including parts of Rainier Avenue (see Columbia City), this stretch mostly treaded water. Zoned for a gritty mix of retail and light industry, it retained some of its unpretentious, quirky and community-oriented character.

“It’s never been [ritzy like] Bellevue, but it’s always had a nice cross section of everybody,” said Kevin Yoshimura, Harry’s son, watching all sorts of “fish people” stream through his family’s business to buy king salmon, Dungeness crab, black cod, halibut cheeks and mahi mahi.

For Cynthia Brothers, creator of the Vanishing Seattle social media accounts, stores like Mutual Fish, where people of different backgrounds regularly rubbed elbows, have become a precious, endangered species.

“When I think about what the term Old Seattle means to me, it’s these places,” Brothers said. “It might be a Japanese American legacy business, but the customers were folks from all races and backgrounds and incomes and ages. When a place like that goes away, it’s hard to replicate.”

Borracchini’s was similar, Brothers said about the legendary purveyor of birthday cakes. Even the Burger King had a bit of magic, despite belonging to a giant chain, she added. Functioning as a hangout for high school kids and an informal senior center, “It was accessible in that way,” she recalled, saying the sudden pace of change has shaken many community members.

“They don’t recognize their neighborhood anymore,” Brothers said.

What happened

One of the first longstanding businesses to disappear was Imperial Lanes, which closed in 2015 and was razed in 2018 to make way for private schools and housing. Giddens School and Lake Washington Girls Middle School were built on a piece of the property, opening a joint complex in 2019. Seattle JazzED and Community Roots Housing plan to construct affordable apartments above a youth music center on the remainder of the site.

The area in question is part of the North Rainier-Mount Baker “urban village,” one of more than two dozen neighborhood hubs that the City Council upzoned in 2019 to allow denser housing with affordable-housing requirements. Previously zoned for shorter commercial buildings, the new rules paved the way for apartment buildings with six, seven or eight stories.

Soon after COVID began, the neighborhood was ravaged by a series of late-night arson fires. Locally owned Rainier Farmer Market was struck multiple times during summer 2020 and was forced to close. Borracchini’s shuttered in 2021, with the “Cakes Decorated While You Wait” store citing a plunge in sales during the pandemic. Remo Borracchini was 90 years old by that point.

“Nobody buying a full sheet cake,” manager Traci LeCount said at the time. “Nobody buying wedding cakes. Nobody having office parties. …”

The Oberto store also closed in 2021, with the family selling properties on and near Rainier Avenue to the private Hamlin Robinson School, which now operates a multibuilding campus there. The Oberto family had already sold its specialty meats business to a large Canadian food company in 2018.

The vacant Borracchini’s building burned in 2022. The Burger King and a nearby 7-Eleven also shut down and burned, and the Baskin Robbins next to the 7-Eleven closed this year, as a homeless encampment grew on the block. All three stores have since been demolished, with the spot primed for redevelopment.

Trina Hunter, an outreach worker with REACH, said visible homelessness in Rainier Valley has increased as unsheltered people have been swept out of other areas, including neighborhoods to the north.

In 2015, the census tract that includes most of this stretch of Rainier Avenue and much of North Beacon Hill was 34% white and the annual median income was $48,000, per census estimates. By 2021, (the most recent estimates available), it was 44% white and the median income was $80,000.

Tuesday Talaga, who visited Mutual Fish with Webber last month, sees the closures of community anchors and the presence of people without shelter on Rainier Avenue as “the natural consequences of the direction we’re heading in, as far as capitalism goes, as far as gentrification.”

Another customer told the Yoshimuras: “I hope you’re not selling to some of these stupid developers, with these ugly buildings around here.”

Transition period

Some people are excited about what’s coming next to this segment of Rainier Avenue. Joe Ferguson, a real estate developer with Lake Union Partners, views the Judkins Park light-rail station scheduled to open at I-90 in 2025 as “a huge catalyst” for positive things in the area, he said.

Lake Union Partners is erecting more than 900 apartments on the east side of Rainier Avenue, replacing what used to be polluted industrial properties, Ferguson said. More than a third will be affordable, while the rest will command market rents, he said, calling the mix “really key” in a city that desperately needs more housing at all income levels. There also will be space in the new buildings for amenities like a supermarket, Ferguson said.

Private schools are clustering in the area because they want easy access to freeways, buses and light rail, added Stacy Turner, head of school at Hamlin Robinson. The French American School of Puget Sound plans to develop a new campus off Rainier Avenue and move there from Mercer Island.

“This neighborhood was zoned for a lot of change and what we’re experiencing now is that change happening,” Turner said.

The new housing is “going to make the neighborhood so much better,” added Mark Mizer, whose Buddha Bruddah restaurant has seen almost 20 break-ins in recent years, he said. Rather than continue replacing smashed glass, Mizer has installed plexiglass outer windows. Though police come quickly when he calls 911, the area needs to be reactivated, he said, determined to stick it out on Rainier Avenue partly because his sales there are so strong.

That sort of siege mentality is also evident at Toshio’s Teriyaki, which has switched to takeout-only due to safety concerns, though nothing bad has actually happened at the restaurant to date, owner Yoko Wang said, passing chicken, gyoza and rice through a window. Saffron Spice general manager Fredy Ortega just installed a new security-camera system, he said.

Stewart Lumber & Hardware is still doing well on Rainier Avenue, almost 100 years after Ryan Young’s great-grandfather opened it, Young said, attributing the family store’s longevity to “our little niche of contractors and homeowners.”

But Shawn Mason, the owner of Dixon’s Furniture, got a scare last month when someone threw something through one of the store’s windows and ignited a couch, he said. Luckily, someone from a building called Hobson Place apparently saw the blaze and put it out, Mason said.

Looking ahead

Hobson Place sits at the center of the story, in a way. The complex is part of Rainier Avenue’s construction boom and, via apartments and a health care clinic, caters to people with disabilities who have been homeless.

Some neighbors have drawn connections between the complex and Rainier Avenue’s troubles, said Noah Fay, director of housing programs at the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which operates Hobson Place.

It’s been a hot spot for 911 calls and logged more misdemeanor assault cases than any other Seattle address last year, with 34, KUOW reported. A security guard who works in the community and wasn’t cleared to speak on the record said it seems like some of the people who visit the clinic, many dealing with behavioral health challenges, contribute to the area’s volatility.

But Fay said Hobson Place is the answer to — not the cause of — the poverty and addiction on Rainier Avenue. Without the apartments and the clinic, even more people would be living outside, in active crisis, he said. More interpersonal conflicts would be erupting, with less oversight and assistance, he said. Most 911 calls from Hobson Place aren’t violent incidents, Fay said.

“To me,” he said, Rainier Avenue is “a microcosm” of a dynamic playing out across Seattle, he said, where a skewed housing market is pushing vulnerable people onto the streets and making their suffering “more visible than ever.”

Questions about safety on Rainier Avenue and elsewhere are driving the race between incumbent City Councilmember Tammy Morales and District 2 contender Tanya Woo, with Morales emphasizing systemic solutions and Woo immediate actions. And they drove a conversation earlier last month at a community meeting hosted by Rainier Avenue Radio. Some crime stems from wounds like racism and interpersonal abuse, participant Mary Williams said.

“We continue to not deal with these traumas and these harms, and then we wonder why people are getting loaded and then going out and acting desperate and breaking into somebody’s car,” Williams said. “We need multipronged approach for a multipronged problem.”

Watching from the Eritrean community center where he serves as executive director, Issac Araya marvels at how quickly the area is evolving. When he and others established the center near Rainier Avenue, decades ago, zoning restrictions cramped their dreams. Now their property has been upzoned and their problem is security, with the center repeatedly broken into, he said.

Araya understands why some Rainier Avenue businesses have closed, but his center is a vital touch point for community members priced out of Seattle, he said. Thousands of seniors and children visit each week.

“It’s changed a lot and we can see it will change more,” he said. “Developers come, offering us money, and our answer is, ‘No, we want to stay.’ ”