Welcome to the Belltown Bartell!

This store opened in late 2019 as part of a new Avalon apartment tower, making it probably the last Bartell store to open before they were bought by Rite Aid in 2020, a deal that seemed doomed from the start. Sure enough, it closed just over four years later in late 2023, during Rite Aid's first bankruptcy. So it seems fitting to post this now, with Bartell on the brink of extinction due to Rite Aid's re-bankruptcy. 

And it seems fitting that this is the only Bartell I ever got around to photographing. This was built on the site of the infamous McGuire Apartments, a 2001-built apartment tour that was demolished in 2011 due to defective construction leading to structural defects that were, depending on who you asked, either potentially catastrophic or severely overblown (as tends to be the case, the truth seems to have been hidden behind endless lawsuits). I talked to someone who worked on the building's demolition a while back when he was doing a training class at my work, and he had some fun stories including setting off car alarms by "accidentally" dropping an elevator car from a high floor, something I sadly haven't ever been able to find proof of. I remember the building being brought up as a cautionary tale several times when I was in college, too.