Mountaineers' headquarters sold; apartments planned at Lower Queen Anne location

For a quarter century it has been the central gathering place for Seattle's environmental community. In a past life it hosted the king of Norway and countless lutefisk-and-meatball dinners.

Now, The Mountaineers' headquarters building at 300 Third Ave. W., formerly the Norway Center, has an appointment with a demolition crew.

The Mountaineers, a century-old outdoors and conservation group, sold the aging, three-story building last year. The 10,000-member club plans to move out this fall, into new digs at Magnuson Park.

Executive Director Steve Costie says workers could start tearing down the 58-year-old building almost as soon as he walks out the door for the last time. Avalon Bay Communities of Alexandria, Va., has applied to build a six-story apartment building on the site, at Third Avenue West and West Thomas Street.

If anyone is mourning the passing of The Mountaineers' clubhouse, they are doing so quietly. The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board decided unanimously last December that the L-shaped, Modernist building didn't warrant protection, that there were better examples in Seattle of both the architect's work and the architectural style.

No one in the audience disagreed.

Costie says he won't miss the old building: "I freeze every day. There's dirt on my desk from the old windows that aren't sealed. I fight the Mercer Mess every day."

Nor will Thomas Stang, 73, former honorary Norwegian consul in Seattle, who once served on the Norway Center's board.

"I don't have any feelings for the place," Stang says. "We said our goodbyes years ago, when we couldn't afford to keep it."

Still, tens of thousands of Seattleites have passed through the building's big wooden doors — to dance, get married, practice the Norwegian folk art of rosemaling, learn wilderness-survival skills or mobilize to save the planet.

"If an environmental organization was looking to hold an event of any size and they wanted it to be affordable enough for the grass roots to attend, then The Mountaineers was always the location of choice," says Steve Whitney, former regional director of The Wilderness Society and now a program officer with the Bullitt Foundation. "There's a lot of history there."

The Sons of Norway, Daughters of Norway and several other Norwegian fraternal and cultural organizations banded together in 1950 to build the 39,000-square-foot building. Cost: $225,000.

Slate from a Norwegian mountain was imported for the main entry walk. The mayor and governor attended the building's dedication.

The new Norway Center featured a 900-seat auditorium, a banquet hall, rooms for music and meetings, and a seafood restaurant — The Norselander — on the top floor, with a view of Elliott Bay.

By 1960, The Seattle Times reported, it was doing "one of the biggest banquet businesses in Seattle."

The building opened its doors to all. Ballroom dances on Saturday nights drew hundreds for decades. Boxing matches were a staple.

In the 1970s, the building hosted lectures on transcendental meditation, professional table-tennis matches and a Sephardic Jewish congregation's annual bazaar.

But the rental income couldn't pay the bills — or the property taxes. King County had begun foreclosure proceedings when the Norway Center board sold the building to The Mountaineers in 1983.

The Sons of Norway built a new hall in — where else? — Ballard.

The Mountaineers had lost their old Pike Street headquarters to construction of the Washington State Convention & Trade Center. Club leaders figured that renting out space in the bigger building would provide new income.

For years it did. One local publication once rated The Mountaineers clubhouse the best place in Seattle to get married.

The Seattle Repertory Theatre was a longtime tenant. Costie remembers walking into his office one day to find that playwright Neil Simon, taking a break from rehearsals, had expropriated his phone.

But as the building began to show its age, its appeal dimmed. Businesses stopped booking space for seminars after Sept. 11. By 2005, according to a club report, the meeting rooms sat vacant 75 percent of the time.

Instead of the building subsidizing the club, the club was subsidizing the building.

A year later The Mountaineers' board voted to sell and move to Magnuson Park. Costie says there were many reasons.

The property's market value was appreciating rapidly. Needed improvements to the old building would have cost $1 million the club didn't have. Parking on Lower Queen Anne is a chronic problem.

What's more, Costie says, "in terms of outdoor recreation, it really wasn't the best place for us to be."

"Magnuson gives us a chance to do things we haven't done before," Costie says.

One example: Instead of shuttling people who take the club's wilderness navigation and first-aid courses into the mountains to practice those skills, instructors will be able to use the city park at the new clubhouse's doorstep.

The Mountaineers sold the old building 14 months ago for $5.9 million. A representative of Avalon Bay, the developer, did not return calls, but permit applications show the company plans 196 apartments, eight live-work units, about 4,800 square feet of ground-floor retail space and underground parking for 245 cars.

The Mountaineers are spending about $4 million fixing up their new building at Magnuson, a former Navy motor-pool garage. It will include offices and conference rooms, a library, a meeting room that seats 500 and an outdoor-climbing plaza that will be open to the public.

Costie hopes it will become the environmental community's new gathering place.

As for the old headquarters on Lower Queen Anne, Costie says he will miss at least one thing about it: eating lunch on the third-floor deck on sunny summer days, looking out on Elliott Bay.

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com