Lease Crutcher Lewis

Specialty: Pre-construction services and construction of various commercial, biotech, health care and educational facilities
Principals: President and CEO Bill Lewis, Operations Manager Mark Garland and CFO Philo Hall
Year founded: 1886; moved to Seattle in 1939
Local office: Seattle
Largest project in 2002:University of Washington School of Law’s $58 million William H. Gates Hall

Rendering by Callison Architecture Lease Crutcher Lewis is providing pre-construction services for a 1.9 million square-foot mixed-use project for Schnitzer Northwest in Bellevue.

Theodore Sive, director of marketing for Lease Crutcher Lewis, says one key to the company’s success has been diversity.

Four years ago Lease Crutcher Lewis, like many commercial contractors, was riding the wave of a surging economy. Office buildings were sprouting like mushrooms in springtime. That market has since dried up, but the company remains busy.

“We’re working in the same markets as we did in the boom years, but the percentage of each market has changed,” said Sive. Instead of building a lot of offices, the firm is busy with educational, medical and biotech facilities.

For educational institutions, Lewis is building William H. Gates Hall for the University of Washington’s School of Law, Seattle Pacific University’s science building and Mount Tahoma High School in Tacoma. It is also renovating five historic buildings on the UW campus in Tacoma.

On the medical front, the company is working on a slew of projects. Among them are the 307 Westlake Building, a biomedical lab and office building that Harbor Properties and Vulcan Northwest are developing for the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and Children’s Hospital; Interurban Exchange III, a Schnitzer Northwest development for Rosetta Impharmatics; serving as construction manager and owner’s rep for a $60 million addition to the UW Medical Center’s Surgery & Treatment Pavilion; and providing pre-construction service for Touchstone Corp.’s Ninth & Stewart Life Sciences Building, an 11-story biotech lab and office complex.

Lewis also is working on retail and office projects.

These include an 800-car garage with multi-level retail shell spaces at University Village. The company’s also working in the pre-construction phase for a 60,000-square-foot retail building at U Village.

For the Port of Seattle, Lewis is providing project management and superintendent services at Sea-Tac Airport. The company’s also providing resident engineering services for the airport’s subway. At Harbor Island, Lewis is constructing a $2.4 million crane maintenance facility for Stevedoring Services of America.

Lewis also is providing pre-construction services for Schnitzer Northwest’s Meydenbauer Block, a phased project of two hotels, three office towers, retail and a parking garage.

Emphasizing that he is not being smug, Sive said Lewis perhaps is the region’s only large contractor that has not made large-scale layoffs. “We’ve been lucky and smart,” he said.

Helping the company stay busy is its Special Projects Division, which handles projects of $10 million and under. Unlike some large contractors, Lewis will do shell and core work, Sive added.

He said that while the number of public projects — the new Seattle Library, federal courthouse and the renovated opera house at Seattle Center — likely will start shrinking as governments struggle with budget shortfalls, the work won’t go away entirely.

“I think more of it is going to be in infrastructure projects,” Sive said. These include the Seattle monorail and Sound Transit projects.

“I feel pretty good about the medium-term future,” he added.