Original Starbucks
— — the brown-sign storefront the green ones came from.
Not only on a wall.
“Not the founding storefront — that one was a block away on Western Avenue and closed in 1976 — but the one that has carried the name and the original siren logo since the move to Pike Place. The line forms early. The interior is narrow, the counter wood is worn smooth, and the espresso is pulled in front of you. The market shuts the street to cars by mid-morning.
Original Starbucks, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The store at 1912 Pike Place sits across the street from the main arcade of Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. Starbucks was founded in 1971 at 2000 Western Avenue, two blocks down the hill, and moved to its current Pike Place location in 1976. The market itself opened in August 1907 and is among the longest continuously operating public markets in the United States. The store keeps the original brown-and-black siren logo that the wider chain retired in 1987 when it redesigned to the green circular mark.
The market complex stands on the hillside above Elliott Bay and stretches across several levels connected by a wooden ramp system that drops more than five storeys from Pike Place down to Western Avenue. The Starbucks storefront occupies a narrow ground-floor bay in the Soames-Dunn Building, completed in 1918, a contributing structure within the Pike Place Market Historical District. The district itself was established by Seattle voter initiative in November 1971, the same year Starbucks opened two blocks south.
The store opens at 6 a.m. and closes around 9 p.m. seven days a week, with the longest queues on weekends and during the May-to-September cruise season. There is no seating inside; the interior is narrow and designed for line flow. Pike Place closes to vehicle traffic at 10 a.m. each morning, so foot access from First Avenue or down Pine Street is the simplest. The market's daystalls open at 9 a.m. and the lower levels at 10. The fish counter is a few doors south.