Mixed use: You probably won’t be surprised by what the Capitol Hill corner once home to Piecora’s is set to become

(Image: BODYROK)

(Image: CHS)

Capitol Hill is dead. First, Microsoft killed it. Then, Amazon.

Now, pilates is here to finish the job.

Early paperwork shows that a key corner in the great wave of 2010s redevelopment that shaped modern Capitol Hill is about to go back into motion with a business at 14th and Madison for the first time since the legendary Piecora’s Pizza served its final slices in 2014.

Permits have been filed for a massive new pilates studio on the corner from the BODYROK franchise chain.

The business will be the first ever tenant of the street level commercial suites of the Chloe on Madison mixed-use development since the Ankrom Moisan Architects-designed project opened seven years ago.

Through its long wait for a tenant, the largest of the long-empty suites has been marketed as an ideal location for a ground-up restaurant project but BODYROK is making plans for a 3,280-square-foot studio in the space.

The ghosts of Piecora’s might be long gone by the time it opens. National developer Equity Residential purchased the 14th and Madison pizza property from the Piecora family in spring of 2014 for a whopping $10.3 million. Debra and Daniel Piecora paid $3 million to purchase the property twelve years earlier. Soon after the Equity sale, Piecora’s announced its final day. The old pizza joint and the rest of the commercial buildings on the block were demolished in 2015. The block then sat empty for a couple years before construction began and the new mixed-use apartment building finally opened in 2019.

Now, the block is finally set to have business activity again along this stretch of E Madison.

Across the street, the Tanager Apartments, a rare mixed-use construction project in the current inflation-throttled development environment in the city, has popped up, rising above the cluster of music clubs and bars it was designed to puzzle-piece around. Chop Suey, the Madison Pub, and 14th Ave bear bar Diesel remained open during the construction.

Meanwhile, Capitol Hill may not be completely dead. The Tanager’s first commercial tenant is lined up to be this coffee and cocktails project.

As for Piecora’s and BODYROK, the unlikely pairing of space if not time is part of one of the strange new directions for life on Capitol Hill. Over on 15th Ave E, the location formerly home to the equally legendary Canterbury Tavern is being readied for a MOOV movement and fitness studio.

Swapping red-sauce institutions like Piecora’s and the Canterbury for boutique fitness might read like a heavy-handed punchline, but seven years of dark storefronts is a long time to wait. As fitness studios take over beloved old taprooms and pizza corners across the neighborhood, Capitol Hill isn’t dead. It’s just sweating through another identity shift, this time, one high-rent square foot at a time.

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