In the 1950s and early 60s, the freeways serving Renton and the rest of the region were still on the drawing boards or maybe a really big unpaved ditch in the case of I-5.
Anyone headed north to Seattle got on Rainier Avenue or Empire Way. They were the thoroughfares of a much simpler time, when traffic wasn’t as bad as it is today and those semis seemed smaller.
The long path of Rainier was a prime spot for businesses looking for exposure to all that traffic. So it made sense that the beacon of the Renton business community, the Renton Chamber of Commerce, should find a home there, too.
It didn’t hurt that the location for the new chamber building overlooked the Renton Municipal Airport, one of the birth places of modern commercial aviation.
Every 737 built has taken off in front of the chamber office. It’s parking lot is a tourist attraction.
But those days are coming to an end. Fifty years have gone by quickly.
The chamber’s lease with the City of Renton, which owns the airport that includes the land under the chamber, expired at the end of 2010. It was signed in 1960. Now the chamber has a month-to-month lease, paying about $3,400 a month to the city while it looks for a new home.
What exactly will follow on the chamber’s perch isn’t known, but it will have some tie to the aviation industry. And Renton’s thousands of visitors will have to find Lucille Crozier and the rest of the helpful folks at a new chamber office.
Lucille Crozier is the chamber’s receptionist. But more to the point she’s Renton’s unofficial hostess. Can’t find Jimi Hendrix’s grave? Ask her. Where is the rocker buried is the question she’s asked most often. If someone’s in the office, she hands them a map from a stack on her desk. (In case you didn’t know, he’s buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in the Highlands.)
She’s also asked frequently about Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and martial arts star Bruce Lee, but it’s hard to figure out their connection to Renton.
Lucy, as she’s more frequently called, has worked for the chamber for 20 years, after a 47-year career in banking. She’s 83. She loves her job.
“We are going to miss this place,” she says.
It’s safe to say others at the chamber office feel the same way. They’ll miss their view to history, from those huge picture windows that provide an expansive view of the airport and those 737s still dressed in green. Crozier once saw a 747 land at the airport.
Crozier has been to busy to watch all those 737s – thousands of them – take their maiden voyage. She’s greeting either in person or on the phone and handling myriad details for the chamber staff. She’s often the first face seen by congressmen, governors and state legislators who walk through the chamber’s doors.
She’s kept track of the chamber’s history. The chamber had about 350 members when she came to work in 1991; now it’s roughly 650 members. She’s worked for four chamber CEOs.
The chamber’s front door once faced Rainier Avenue; now the entry is off the parking lot.
Crozier’s current boss, Bill Taylor, is now deep in the search for a new home for the Chamber of Commerce. The search is concentrated in downtown Renton, for many reasons.
As a visitors center, the chamber needs to be downtown, he says
But where the chamber locates also sends an important message to the community, he said
“We see a lot of value in being in downtown Renton and feel our presence there will make a statement to businesses and the community that we have confidence in the downtown core and belong there,” Taylor said.
The chamber needs about 2,500 square feet; it wants to buy, rather than lease.
“We have looked at literally everything that’s out there,” he said. “There is nothing that is exactly right.”
He would like to locate at the historic train depot on Burnett Avenue, but at about 6,000 square feet, the building is too big, he said. A possibility is that owner Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railway would “split off a piece” of the building, he said.
“The good news is that I think we have the advantage of time,” he said. There isn’t a for-sale sign on the depot, he said.
The Chamber of Commerce was incorporated in 1924, but in 1909, businessmen met at the Melrose Hotel (now the Melrose Grill) to form a chamber “to advance the community’s interest,” according to a chamber history. At one point it was called the Renton Commercial Club.
Fast forward to the late 1950s, when business and community leaders mounted a fundraising campaign to build a new office for the chamber. Their names are memorialized on a large plaque in the chamber conference room. Taylor couldn’t pinpoint the amount raised.
What’s historically significant with the building is apparent almost daily, when a new Boeing jet flies off within ear shot, he says.
The business leaders agreed to turn over the building to the City of Renton after 50 years. There was a 20-year extension and then a 10-year extension that brought the termination date to Dec. 31, 2010. During the early years, the chamber paid $1 a year for its lease.
Owning its own building will help give the chamber some financial predictability, which a manageable mortgage would provide, he said. He doesn’t want to the chamber to face again the possibility of a move.
Denis Law, then a newspaper publisher, was on the chamber board when a 10-year lease extension with the city was signed. Now, as mayor, he hopes that famed perch to watch the 737 would somehow remain.
“People have watched an awful lot happen from that perch on the hillside,” he said.
AN HISTORICAL CORRECTION
The first 271 737s were assembled at Boeing’s Plant 2 at Boeing Field in the late 1960s. All the rest have been assembled in Renton. Thanks for John Middlebrooks for that correction.
