More changes for Capitol Hill groceries and the neighborhood’s community of corner shops as City Market has new owners in $7.5M land deal

(Image: King County)

Here’s hoping City Market’s signs will continue (Image: @sarah_f802)

A $7.5 million property deal will further change Capitol Hill’s grocery and corner market landscape. The new owners of 1722 Bellevue Ave at the base of E Olive Way as it curves off Capitol Hill are also taking over the much loved City Market grocery, according to city and state permits.

The changes for City Market line up with a May real estate deal to acquire the 1919-built, 5,073-square-foot grocery building from its longtime family ownership.

The new owners also operate a mini mart in Lacey, according to state records.

None of the involved parties including longtime City Market owner Kurt Vold have responded to CHS’s questions about the changes.

City Market fills an important spot in neighborhood shopping needs somewhere between large scale QFCs and Safeways and convenience marts and service stations. The shelves include grocery staples, along with limited fresh produce, and an offering of prepared foods and sandwiches. In fact, the Daily of Journal of Commerce referred to City Market as a “deli” in its brief on the property sale. Seattle’s City Market has operated independently and was not part of the larger “City Market” brand operated by Kroger.

In 2022, City Market’s closure of its Crystal Clean neighbor brought a deep round of nostalgia to the neighborhood as readers mourned the passing of the last laundromat on Capitol Hill.

The family of a late longtime Capitol Hill grocer will benefit from the sale.

Reynold “Rey” Gietzen owned the grocery before retiring to La Conner. According to King County records, Gietzen bought the property for $600,000 in 1988 from the owner of the also much-loved Malstrom’s Market that had made the old grocery building home.

The new Bellevue Ave grocery investors arrive two years after CHS reported on efforts to find a buyer for the property and its “Juno Capitol Hill” development plans for a mass timber mixed-use building topped with 98-residential units, including 58 studios, 21 “deep” one-bedrooms, 13 one-bedrooms and 5 two-bedrooms above a future home for the popular Bellevue Ave grocery and new underground parking.

The search for a buyer revealed details about City Market’s lease. According to the listing, City Market paid “$272,000/annually” plus triple net expenses of real estate taxes, building insurance, and maintenance. The listing said the City Market lease was to expire in fall 2025 with an option for a five-year extension. The sale to owners also taking over the market make those kind of contracts moot.

A rendering of the apparently scuttled Juno develop

The redevelopment project had been moving forward under hyped San Francisco-based property developer Juno but that tech veteran-backed company shifted its strategies away from acquiring and funding ground-up developments in volatile markets like Capitol Hill, to an asset-light, business-to-business structure focused on consulting and licensing the “Juno Mass Timber System.”

Today, the City Market redevelopment project’s future remains unclear.

Land use permits indicate the project’s Master Use Permit process achieved “Completed” status meaning the project successfully cleared the hurdle of its final East Design Review Board recommendation guidelines. But, after years of cycles requiring technical corrections regarding structural, zoning, and geotechnical aspects of the plan, the development’s building permit application was canceled.

For now, it appears the market’s new owners Balkar Singh Jammu, Ravinder Kaur, and Parminder Singh are content to be part of the neighborhood’s shifting grocery economy and community of small, independent, and sometimes vital corner stores.

City Market is located at 1722 Bellevue Ave.

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