Welcome to the Downtown Seattle Target!

This store opened in July 2012 as one of the first three City Targets (Target's short-lived branding for their first smaller-format urban stores, though I'll note that this store is quite a bit larger than newer urban Targets like the Ballard one), though the building's history goes back much further than that. This store is built into the base of the Newmark Tower, a condo building built in 1991 (and which happens to be one of the ugliest major buildings in downtown Seattle). The space that Target occupies was originally home to the Pike Plaza mall, an early attempt at an urban mall that included a large movie theater but no other major tenants, and which, from everything I've seen, was a major disaster. This part of the city was not exactly a place that anyone would want to be back in the 90s, and the mall never took off. Most of the interior portion of the mall was quickly converted to office space for Washington Mutual, and stayed as such probably until 2008 when WaMu collapsed. A few exterior tenants did stay until Target moved in, but the dead state of this space can be seen in old Street View.