Three Sisters Nelson Chevrolet, in business in Ballard under the same family ownership since 1920, closed its garage doors on March 13. Causes of death: the soft retail environment and the emergence of the NW Leary Way neighborhood as Seattle's next would-be hot redevelopment area. The closure leaves only two Chevy dealerships withinSeattle city limits (in Lake City and West Seattle), down from five in the mid-'80s.
The retail storefronts in the Melbourne Tower building at Third and Pike downtown were all vacated over the first and second weeks of March. The store spaces had long been part of one of downtown's last surviving down-scale strips, between the more establishment-approved attractions of the Convention Center and the Pike Place Market. But the office tower's managers had sought for over a decade to find a single, high-profile tenant for the whole of the building's main floor, and have finally found one in the Walgreens drug chain (continuing its steady push into the Seattle market). Thus, the five mom-and-pop merchants who'd been occupying the storefronts on short-term leases were herded out. They all found new homes elsewhere downtown, most of them at the former sites of more glitzy shops. Seattle Shirt Co. and Sneaker City are in the former Pike Street Trading Company space at First and Pike; Style Nails is in a former glass-art gallery on Third; Poster World is on Third Avenue South near Pioneer Square; and the Surprises clothing store ("Famous Urban Outfitter") will become Urbana on First near Stewart.
Rev. Frederick Alexander McDonald, 93, was born and raised in Seattle and attended the UW prior to his seminary studies; he became an Episcopal minister in 1934. Besides serving at churches in Centralia, Portland, Honolulu, and finally San Francisco, he was a U.S. Army chaplain in Europe during World War II, in Gen. Omar Bradley's unit. During that stint, McDonald collected pieces of stained-glass windows from war-damaged churches and synagogues. In 1999, he donated these shards to French artist Armelle LaRoux, who wanted to make 24 new window pieces from them. LaRoux has finished six of the works, which are on display at the Interfaith Center at the Presidio in San Francisco. As the center's newsletter described the project, "Fred talks about 'survival values,' about 'the deepest apprehensions of the holy,' apprehensions we can recognize in each other whatever the culture, whatever the religion. These apprehensions led him to sift through the dirt and retrieve his jewels, preparing for the day when the light would shine through them again, turning the sun's warmth into a rainbow of color." McDonald died March 10 from unspecified causes.
Albert Jeffcoat, 77, retired to Bainbridge Island in 1993 after careers in journalism and public relations in New York. In 1970 he founded the Manhattan Theatre Club, still one of that city's leading stage organizations. Jeffcoat died March 10 from colon cancer.
