March 11, 2024

From cashier's checks to cocktails? An old bank to find new life

Photo by Brian Miller [enlarge]

The bank was still open in the fall of 2020, when pictured, then closed the following year.

Just before Christmas, in a previously unreported downtown Seattle sale, a former KeyBank changed hands. The landmarked two-story building at 815 Second Ave. had been vacant for about three years.

The seller was the bank, which acquired it during the 1980s via its absorption of the Savings Bank of Puget Sound. The building opened in 1924 as a Bank of California.

KeyBank's broker in the nearly $2 million sale was Ryan Jones at Kidder Mathews.

The buyer was an LLC associated with Dhruv Agarwal, the local investor and entrepreneur who owns The Ruins in Lower Queen Anne.

With architect BuildingWork, plans have been brewing in recent weeks to convert the bank into an eating, drinking and events space much like The Ruins.

Including a small mezzanine level, the neoclassical-style building offers about 12,880 square feet, plus an over 7,000-square-foot basement with the vaults still in place. But it's a very impressive and mostly open void from the marble floors up to the skylights above, a distance of some 55 feet.

The new owner had been eying the bank since 2022, when a similar plan emerged under a different architect.

The bank's last restoration, circa 1982, was under the predecessor to CallisonRTKL. The skylights, which had been blacked out during World War II, were then restored and revealed anew. The bank, designed by John Graham, Sr., doesn't appear on the city's list of unreinforced masonry structures. Nevertheless, BuildingWork indicates in its permit filings that some seismic work will be done.

The bank is tucked between the Norton Building and Exchange Building, both with windows looking down on its roof below. But, per a prior broker's listing in 2020, it still has 34,770 square feet of air rights (development rights) to sell. The building was landmarked in 1987.