Strolling the commercial corridor atop Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood on a recent Friday afternoon, I catch a cappella voices booming down the block: Every woman, every man, join the caravan of love …
It’s the unlikely siren song flowing from the open doors of the Punk Rock flea market. This offbeat, itinerant bazaar has been popping up here, inside a former supermarket, four times a year since 2024, filling the 20,000-sq-ft space left vacant when a Kroger-owned QFC suddenly ceased operations and moved out.
The $1 entry fee hasn’t increased since 2006, when the first Punk Rock flea market was held in an abandoned basement bar across town. After occupying 13 other locations around the city, including a former post office, a former drugstore and a former strip club, it’s now settled in its current home in Seattle’s historically queer arts epicenter.
“The building was broken into several times and was in really rough shape,” says Jill Cronauer, chief operating officer of Hunters Capital. “So one of our biggest questions was, how is anyone going to take this space and make it work?” Okrent’s business pitch to Hunters included upgrading and securing the property as well as improving public safety by bringing life and culture into the neighborhood. Cronauer and her colleagues at Hunters were persuaded enough to take on the risk of a temporary tenant. “These guys are just so talented and creative and have such an amazing volunteer team behind them that they made the space what it is today,” she says.
In a city suffering from chronic vacancies and exorbitant rents, Okrent sees Hunters as an outlier, a real estate developer genuinely aligned with community needs.
“It’s rare that I have nice things to say about landlords,” he says, “but these guys have been fantastic.”
Click Here to Read the Full Article
Written by: Jonathan Zwickel, The Guardian
