Downtown may lose its last hardware store

Downtown Seattle's last mom-and-pop hardware store could be ringing up its final sales.

At Rainier Hardware, hammers, handsaws and hex nuts share space with bottle openers, Chinese iron balls and kitschy souvenirs. The hardware store, under various names and owners, has been a fixture in the Pike Place Market since at least the early 1970s, a period of rebirth for the Market after city voters chose rehabilitation over the wrecking ball.

Store manager Tay Ha, 75, a grandfatherly Vietnamese immigrant who has run the business since 1987, says he'll close if the Market's Preservation and Development Authority won't renew his lease, which expires Sept. 30.

Ha has refused the authority's offer to swap his frontage space in the Stewart House — a prime spot between the original Starbucks Coffee and the Russian bakery Piroshky, Piroshky — for retail space inside the historic building.

While hundreds have signed a petition in support of Ha, the authority recently decided not to renegotiate his lease. One of the authority's top priorities is to increase its net revenue by 10 percent annually, and it has asked a few tenants during lease negotiations to meet sales targets.

"Our interest is greater than just collecting rent," said Carol Binder, the authority's executive director. "Our interest is providing a strong, vibrant market."

Every year, about 10 of the Market's 210 commercial tenants close down or sell, Binder said.

Long before the store became Rainier Hardware, it was Green Brothers Hardware. After voters passed the 1971 initiative to save the Market from New York investors, the city soon created the Preservation and Development Authority to manage it and later transferred the property to the authority.

The Pike Place Market Historical Commission, a city board, works at maintaining the traditional character of the Market's shops. It decides what tenants can sell and how they display their merchandise.

Over the decades, the store has changed owners several times, and each has chafed under the commission's ban on selling gifts and nonhardware items.

Before long, commission inspectors began citing the store for selling gifts, such as music boxes and bamboo bird cages. The commission allowed that decorative mugs, salt shakers, salad bowls and flower pots represented a "gray area" but insisted those could not be displayed prominently.

In 1987, Ha bought the business. The commission restricted the goods he could sell to hardware, hotplates, fans, radios, hairdryers, bookcases, desks, chairs and tables.

Three years later, the commission cited him for selling brass goods, metal sculpture and gifts.

In 2001, the commission gave Ha some relief, letting him devote up to 5 percent of his space to dinner bells, magnets, wind chimes and picture frames. Ha says he is prohibited from selling disposable cameras, a popular item in the Market, which the authority says draws 10 million visitors a year.

Fear among merchants

Last month, Market members and others rallied to his cause at the authority's operations committee meeting.

Ha's daughter, Mimi, speaking on her father's behalf, said he didn't understand that when he signed a two-year lease in 2004, it didn't contain an option to renew.

The family's supporters say they believe the authority violated Ha's civil rights by not providing an interpreter during lease negotiations. But Binder says Ha had never before requested an interpreter during previous lease negotiations.

Sharon Shaw, who sells stained-glass kaleidoscopes at a day stall, says merchants fear that their livelihoods will be threatened if the authority has the right to move businesses that don't meet sales targets.

"It's a major precedent that would be set," she said. She dismissed the authority's offer to move Rainier Hardware into a space formerly occupied by a stationery store. "If you move him into the other location, it's sudden death."

Merchants seek out Rainier Hardware now for plastic bags, rubber bands, glue, tape, gloves, extension cords and keys.

"He really friendly," said Pa Cha, a Hmong flower merchant who lives in Carnation. "Anything he don't have, he order. We don't want him to move."

The end?

Nationwide, small hardware stores have dwindled, struggling to compete with big-box stores like Home Depot, which opened in 1979 and now stocks 40,000 items on average.

Tweedy and Popp Ace Hardware Store in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood has existed since 1920 and today sells about 8,000 items. It has managed to survive by joining the Ace co-op and specializing in items needed for repairs in the old houses that surround it.

"This neighborhood has a lot to do with it," says employee Tom Hughes. "It's almost a political thing, resistance to Home Depot, the big-box, giant corporation."

The authority's Binder says a hardware store serves a useful purpose in the Market, but she isn't confident that someone else will try to open one if Rainier Hardware closes.

"Sometimes you can't stop the economics of an industry," she said.

"The hardware industry has obviously gone to the Home Depot model."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com