Seattle’s Coliseum Theater and Egan House are hitting the market

Two striking Seattle landmark buildings — Capitol Hill’s triangular Egan House and downtown’s Coliseum Theater — are hitting the market.

The Coliseum Theater on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pike Street goes to auction May 28 with a $2 million starting bid, according to the auctioneer’s website.

The 36,904-square-foot, three-story theater, designed by Seattle architect B. Marcus Priteca, opened in 1916 as a state-of-the-art cinema, with a pipe organ and in-house orchestra that accompanied silent movies. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Board declared the theater a Seattle landmark in 1974, and the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places a year later. 

The theater closed its doors in 1990 and reopened as a Banana Republic in 1994 after undergoing an extensive renovation and a seismic retrofit. After the clothing store’s 2020 pandemic closure, the building was repurposed as an art gallery space and is currently occupied by the Monorail Espresso coffee shop and Actualize AiR, a woman-run art gallery and event space.

The fates of Actualize AiR and Monorail Espresso are unclear. A listing for the Coliseum Theater by Newmark real estate agent Bill Sleeth said the building’s ground-floor tenant is on a short-term lease, so a new owner could “implement plans with limited delay.” Sleeth, Actualize AiR and Monorail Espresso did not immediately respond to inquiries Friday from the Times. 

Another local landmark up for grabs is the Egan House, nestled at the bottom of a steep slope on the western edge of Capitol Hill. Also known as the “triangle house,” the two-bedroom, two-bath home was designed by architect Robert Reichert in 1958 and named after its original owner, retired Adm. Willard Egan. The home was designated a Seattle landmark in 2010 and is priced at $995,000.

Local architectural preservation organization Historic Seattle restored the building’s interior and exterior in 2003 and has maintained the building as a rental ever since. The organization buys and restores historical buildings like the Egan House to either rent or sell, using the income to buy other historical buildings that merit preservation, according to its website.

The organization took a “light surgical touch” to preserving the house, including restoring the exterior paint, fixing some mechanical, electrical and plumbing issues, strengthening the house’s structure with steel and repairing its broken deck, said Kji Kelly, Historic Seattle’s executive director.

Kelly called the Egan House an “outlier” as the only single-family residence in the organization’s portfolio.

Historic Seattle started planning to sell the house about 10 years ago to focus more on “community-focused” projects, Kelly said. But after years of tending to the home, Kelly called its upcoming sale “bittersweet.” 

“It’s like having a child go off to college,” he said. “If you care for something long enough, you start to get attached and it means more than a single-family residence off of Lakeview Boulevard — it becomes something more personal.”