On November 18, 1997, the restaurant commonly known as The Blob is torn down in Seattle. Located on lower Queen Anne Hill at the corner of 1st Avenue N and Roy Street, the structure – which resembles a melting igloo – is removed to make way for condominiums.
Rounding the Corners
The Blob started out as a boxy structure, built in 1946 to house Clyde’s Cleaners. In the 1950s, Paramount Cleaners moved in and operated there until the 1970s, after which the building became home to a variety of restaurants, none of which achieved any success.
In 1984, the building was purchased by Los Angeles developer Anthony Dadvar, who had a flair for “free-form architecture and functional sculpture” and was looking to open a Mexican-Spanish restaurant called Isla del Sol. For some odd reason, Dadvar attempted to transform the structure to make it look like a dwelling in Baghdad, but ran out of money.
The building, which most people began referring to as The Blob, sat unfinished and boarded-up until 1990 when Brian Hauff, a restaurateur from Vancouver, B.C., opened Orestes, a Greek restaurant. At first, business was brisk due to people’s curiosity to finally eat inside the white stucco structure, but after novelty wore off, customers stopped coming.
Son of Blob?
Orestes closed a few years later, and The Blob briefly became a cowboy bar, but that business failed too. The doors were closed and the building never reopened.
In February, 1997, the property was bought by Motion Financial Services of Vancouver. When they announced plans to demolish the structure, a few Seattleites mourned the loss of one of the city’s more quirky structures. But there were many who considered it an eyesore, especially those who owned nearby businesses or apartment houses.
After its demolition in 1997, The Blob was gone for good, although there are some who joked that it only mutated into the Experience Music Project, a much larger blob-like structure which opened at the Seattle Center in 2000.
