Is the Carleton Avenue Grocery Seattle's oldest?

July 13, 11:09 PMSeattle History ExaminerBenjamin Lukoff

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Photo courtesy of JvA of Mid Beacon Hill, used by permission

A while back, Allan Phillips, co-owner of the Carleton Avenue Grocery in Georgetown, wrote to ask me if his was the oldest grocery store in Seattle. (Phillips owns the store with his wife, La Dele Sines. They are co-heads of the Friends of Georgetown History, behind which Phillips says Sines is the "driving force.")

Located at the corner of Carleton Avenue S. and S. Warsaw Street, it was purchased by Phillips and his wife in 2007. Before then, it had been "operating on the Slim Jim/malt liquor model." But, of course, that's not how it started out. Here's the Department of Neighborhoods' historic site record, indicating that the building was put up in 1904 as the Country Inn Roadhouse. This is what it used to look like.

The roadhouse was apparently converted to a grocery "by 1911." Phillips says he's not sure when it took its present name, but that it had happened sometime before the great Depression-era King County photographic property inventory, which was run from 1937 to 1940 by the Works Progress Administration.

(Incidentally, he also provides the history of the Carleton Avenue name: it was originally called Estelle Street, after Dora Estelle Horton, daughter of Julius Horton, after whom I assume S. Horton Street is named. [Estelle's brother, George, gave his name to Georgetown itself.] When Seattle annexed Georgetown in 1910, Estelle was changed to Carleton, after the surname she acquired having married Will A. Carle. Supposedly this was to avoid confusion with other streets in the city. Does that mean the Estelle Street near Mt. Baker had already been platted and named?)

Anyway, as I told Phillips — whose store, by the way, was featured in the last print issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — there isn't much on the Web if you're looking for old Seattle grocery stores. I did see that Wallingford's Durn Good Grocery was founded in 1912, but that gives Carleton Avenue at least one year on the Durn Good — plus the D.G. has moved, and the Carleton is still on the same lot. Wallingford's 50th Street Deli Market, which recently closed, might have lasted 90 years, but that's not quite good enough, either. [ADDED 8/31: Looks like the 50th Street Deli Market has reopened under new management.]

So — I said I'd ask. Does anyone know of any rival to the Carleton Avenue Grocery's claim to be the oldest grocery still operating in Seattle? Phillips discounts the Volunteer Park Café and Marketplace, built in 1905, as do I, since it is now really an eatery.

While you're thinking about that, head on over to Mid Beacon Hill for more lovely photos of the grocery by my former colleague JvA.