Retail History | Amazon — The Columbia Building at 1516 Second Avenue
· 1996-7
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Retail History | Amazon — The Columbia Building at 1516 Second Avenue
kevin
People look for the first Amazon in a Bellevue garage or a South Lake Union sphere.
The first downtown office journalists were told to find was here, at 1516 Second Avenue between Pike and Pine, in the building then called Columbia.
Amazon.com had launched as an online bookseller on 16 July 1995. The Bellevue rental garage where Jeff Bezos first set up desks is a rebuilt private house. This block is the public address.
A lease dated 1 July 1996 put Amazon into suite 400 of the Columbia Building. City energy records list the same lot as the Chromer Building, a 1906 walk-up at 47.6098, -122.3389.
When 60 Minutes filmed here in 1999, Bob Simon walked past a pawn shop and a needle exchange to reach a stained carpet and desks made from doors. The door-desk was already company lore: spend on the customer, not on the furniture.
The garage phase lasted months. The Second Avenue rooms lasted until the move to the Pacific Medical tower at 1200 12th Avenue South in 1998.
What stands on the lot now is still a low downtown building. The mechanism is the same one the camera caught: a catalogue business that outgrew a garage and took a cheap floor on a rough block rather than a campus.
Photo: downtown Seattle context, via Wikimedia Commons.
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