vgriff

Sunny Arms Co-op

Guys, after 20 years in our first home in north Seattle, we are moving! We are buying (fingers crossed) a unit in the Sunny Arms artist co-op just north of the Georgetown neighborhood in south Seattle. This page is for everyone who heard “you bought WHAT” and wanted the longer answer. Here it is, with pictures.

The Sunny Arms building, five stories of pale yellow concrete behind the trees
707 S Snoqualmie Street

The building

Five stories of concrete and old-growth fir at 707 S Snoqualmie Street, a block off Airport Way. Eighteen lofts, all owned by working artists. It’s a cooperative, not a condo building: the members own the whole thing together, and everyone who lives here makes things. Painters, sculptors, musicians, writers. There’s a freight elevator, a rooftop deck with a shared garden, and about a hundred years of honest wear on the floors.

The lofts were built out by the artists themselves when the co-op formed in 1989, so no two are alike. What they share: 12-foot ceilings, fir beams overhead, and rows of the same multi-paned windows the factory workers looked out of.

Building exterior with entry stairs
Street entrance with the yellow door
Yellow entry and exterior stairs
The blue freight elevator
Bike storage at the loading dock
Interior stairwell
Rooftop deck view toward the Seattle skyline
Rooftop deck with pergola
Rooftop deck table and planters

Inside

Photos from the real estate listing (and a couple from my own tour). It will look different with our own stuff of course.

Kitchen island and living space under the fir ceiling
Kitchen with white island and wood ceiling
Open loft with kitchen
Kitchen with pendant lights
Kitchen island with stools
Kitchen island
Kitchen sink under the big windows
White kitchen against a yellow wall
Living room with grey sofa
Living room under the wood ceiling
Living space with wood floors
Living area looking toward the kitchen
Yellow living room with blue chairs
Yellow living room, wide view
Big white studio with rows of windows
Studio wall of windows and radiators
Studio corner with windows
Studio with art on the wall
Studio with yellow wall
Work desk in the yellow room
Office nook with shelves
Orange bedroom
Bedroom with sliding doors
Bedroom windows
Bathroom
Bathroom vanity
Laundry

The history: boots, boxes, then artists

The building went up in 1907 as a shoe factory. The Washington Shoe Manufacturing Company, Seattle’s first shoe maker, ran it with the company name painted two stories tall across the concrete: MANUFACTURERS OF MENS, BOYS AND YOUTHS SHOES. Their line for kids was the Billy Buster, a steel-bottomed shoe sold in 1909 with the pitch “boys are boys and will be rough… buy him the Billy Buster and let him kick.” The ghost of that sign was still readable on the south wall thirty years later.

Archival photo of the building painted with The Washington Shoe Mfg. Co. signage, with Buster Brown Shoes memorabilia
The building in its shoe years, the company name running the length of both street faces. Water tower and all.

By 1936 the shoe machines were gone and the Puget Sound Paper Box Company had moved in. They stayed three decades. After they left, the building drifted: a string of paper and printing tenants, long stretches of sitting mostly empty.

Then 1989. A painter named Karen Guzak and a band of fellow artists bought the building and spent a year turning it into Seattle’s first artist-owned live/work co-op. The banks thought they were dreaming. The finished project won a City of Seattle design award in 1991, and Guzak went on to become mayor of Snohomish, which sounds about right for someone who talked a group of artists and a lender into buying a factory together.

And the name? The Sunny Jim peanut butter plant stood down the street on Airport Way, its sign famous to anyone ever stuck on I-5. The plant burned down; the name stayed. Sunny Arms.

Come see it

The rooftop has a cute little table and Georgetown has beer. You’re invited.