Tower Records & Videos on Mer-cer Street closed its doors last Sunday after almost three decades conduct-ing business in Queen Anne. That doesn't mean the store has disappeared from the neighborhood forever, though.
Owners plan to reopen by Memorial Day weekend in temporary quarters across Mercer Street on the Seattle Center parking lot near the basketball courts and skateboard park off Fifth Avenue North, said Stephanie Gen-dreau, Tower's Northwest regional director.
The temporary store will be located in a prefabricated building in 6,500 square feet of space, compared with 11,000 square feet in the old location, she said. "So it's going to be a tight squeeze."
The new store will feature CDs and a full line of DVDs, but no cassette tapes and probably no books, Gen-dreau said.
The company hopes to find a permanent location close to its old one, although there is a chance a new store might be located in a mixed-use condominium and retail project planned for the store's former spot, she said.
Plans for a mixed-use project have been in the works since the 1997, when the lease on the city-owned parking lot next to Tower expired, Gendreau said. Tower Records owns the old building, but development plans were put on hold because of a lackluster economy, she added.
"This has been coming for quite some time," Gendreau said of the store's closing. Still, Tower's future has also been clouded since the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. However, the debt restructuring was triggered when 2 percent of the bondholders in the company objected to a plan to sell the company, she said.
The company emerged in record time from the bankruptcy the second week of March, Gendreau added. The restructuring included the closing of the Tower store in Bellevue at the end of March, she said, and the original plan to sell the business is still active.
"Our company is in the midst of looking for a buyer," Gendreau said. "I know there are several interested parties."
Queen Anne resident John Aldrich, who heads up security for the company's Seattle stores, was involved in closing the Bellevue store, and he will be involved in closing down the Queen Anne store and putting the leftover stock in storage until the temporary store opens. "It's been hectic as hell," said a tired-sounding Aldrich last week.
There are no plans to open a new Tower store on the Eastside, but the Tower store in the University District will remain open, he said. As for staffers at the Queen Anne store, they should be OK. "Pretty much everybody expects to come back," Aldrich said.
Negotiations with Tower about setting up shop on Seattle Center property are still underway, said Center spokesman Perry Cooper.
"It will be an overall fee for the whole time period," he said of the lease payments. Part of the deal will include the Seattle Center installing a curb cut so that Tower customers can get to the store, he said, and roughly 20 parking places will be reserved for shoppers. "For us, it's nice to be able to work out a deal for them to be in the same area."
There is another upside to the arrangement.
"This helps us from a revenue standpoint," said Cooper, noting that the Seattle Center parking lot off Fifth Avenue North isn't full all of the time.
Out with the old, in with the new
Nature, it seems, also abhors a commercial vacuum - at least as far as used-book stores are concerned. Twice Sold Tales is opening a new store in the Mercer Street location formerly occupied by Titlewave Books, said owner Jamie Lutton.
"I had always wanted one on Queen Anne," added Lutton, who owns the Twice Sold Tales store on Capitol Hill and is a minority partner in the University District store of the same name. But, she added, she didn't want to compete with Titlewave.
That changed when the longtime neighborhood fixture closed recently, and Lutton said she signed a five-year lease last week. "It's beautiful," she said of the space. "I'm in love with it already."
Lutton plans to stock a variety of genres, from science fiction to history to plays to poetry to mainstream titles. "I'll carry stuff people actually read," she said, "not what they think they should read."
Lutton said the store will open on May 1, and she estimates she will have approximately 7,000 volumes on hand. Lutton also plans to bring her cat, Amber, to the store.
News reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at 461-1309 or rzabel@nwlink.com
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