WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

Four business structures have held the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Pike Street. The warehouse stable shown here was built in 1884. In the early 1890s it was razed for a brick business block that in 1904 was itself replaced by a six-story central branch for the People's Savings Bank. The standing seven-story precast-concrete parking garage dates from 1964.

	PAUL DORPAT

In the months of reconstruction that followed, most businesses were lodged temporarily in tents. Seattle Hardware was fortunate to lease from the Seattle Street Railway Co. an empty barn at the northeast corner of Pike Street and Second Avenue, where for five years the trolley company had stabled the 20 horses that took turns pulling its "bobtail" horse cars before they were replaced with electric cars in March of 1889.

After much scrubbing, the old barn was ready for selling oxbows, fishnets, plows, horseshoes, nails and such less than three weeks after the fire sent the salesmen scampering. In the year they stayed at this then-remote uptown location, the "Seattle Hardware family" managed to pose for this portrait beneath a canvas banner. In the summer of 1890 they returned to the Pioneer Square neighborhood where, in 1883, they had started in a storefront with a back door that entered onto Sara Yesler's rose garden.

The new lodgings were in the Colman Building at the corner of First Avenue and Marion Street until 1905, when Seattle Hardware moved into its own seven-story building. It survives — although the company does not — at the southwest corner of First Avenue South and King Street.