Walk down Phinney Avenue North past 35th Street this month and you will pass a building that has been, in order, a garage for streetcars, a garbage truck depot, an Army storage site, one of Seattle's first craft breweries, and a chocolate factory. Right now it is none of those things. It is scaffolding, new storefront doors, and a waitlist.
The Fremont Trolley Barn was built in 1905 to house up to sixty streetcars for lines running through Fremont, Ballard, Phinney, and Green Lake. When the city ripped up its trolley tracks in the early 1940s, the Army moved in for the war, then Seattle Disposal Company parked garbage trucks there for the better part of four decades. Redhook Ale Brewery took over in 1988, brewing here until 1998 before outgrowing the space and relocating to Woodinville. Theo Chocolate held it longest, running its factory out of the building for nearly two decades before ceasing manufacturing there in 2023 and closing the retail shop entirely in February 2025.
Now the 121-year-old landmark is becoming something it has never been before: six separate businesses under one roof, with three of them owned by the same company.
What's actually moving in
Here Today Brewery and Kitchen, which has run a taproom on Seattle's waterfront since 2022, is opening three concepts inside the old Theo Chocolate building this fall. Good Bones Coffee will handle mornings. Glitter Paw Lounge is the cocktail and snack bar. Marigolds is a small oyster bar built around a raw bar and pint-sized cocktail list. All three share one address and one landlord relationship, which is unusual for a stretch of Fremont that has historically been built on single-owner shops.
A fourth tenant, Muddy Goose, has signed a lease on a 5,100-square-foot unit for pottery classes and studio space with kilns, targeting an October opening. That would put a working ceramics studio inside a building that spent forty years storing garbage trucks and twenty more making chocolate.
Richard Leider, founder of Kirkland-based Trinity Real Estate, is the broker who pieced this deal together for the building's owner, East Seattle Partners. He told the Puget Sound Business Journal that the physical bones of the building are what made the whole plan possible:
"The building itself always lent itself to fitting in with the community and being flexible, meaning it had multiple entries, multiple storefronts. So, it was a good candidate for accommodating different tenancies."
That sentence is worth sitting with, because it describes something happening well beyond one address.
The pattern repeats down the street
Fremont has churned through an unusual number of storefronts in 2026, and the churn has a shape to it. On one side of the ledger: Caffe Ladro closed its doors on N 36th Street on March 31 after 26 years in the neighborhood. PIM, the combination coffee shop and bike shop that had served the Burke-Gilman Trail crowd, shut down abruptly earlier this year, citing Seattle's rising cost of doing business. Caked Goods lasted less than a year in its space before closing in April, having itself replaced the longtime neighborhood staple Simply Desserts. Dave Page Cobbler closed after 56 years when its owner retired.
On the other side: Snow Peak, the Japanese outdoor lifestyle brand, held its grand opening May 8 and 9 at the CornerStone Campus on Stone Way, its fourth North American retail location and first new store in over a decade. Balandra Tapas Restaurant opened March 19 in the space that had cycled through Robin's and Art of the Table. Baci Baci opened May 15 in the former ETG Coffee spot just east of the Lenin statue. Highland Espresso opened May 2 in the building that used to house PIM, and it already runs a second location in Montesano. The Picklr, an indoor pickleball franchise with roughly 68 locations nationally, opened in April inside the old Theo Chocolate warehouse next door to the trolley barn, making Fremont its third Washington location after Federal Way and Tacoma.
Line those two lists up and a pattern appears that has nothing to do with foot traffic or rent alone. The businesses closing tended to be single-owner operations that had run one thing, in one place, for a long time. The businesses opening tend to already have a second location, a franchise network, or in Here Today's case, three concepts opening at once under a single lease. Fremont isn't losing small businesses and gaining chains in the usual sense. It's losing operators who bet everything on one storefront and gaining operators who spread the bet across several.
That's exactly the logic Leider described for the Trolley Barn. A building with "multiple entries, multiple storefronts" isn't just easier to lease. It's built for tenants who want to diversify inside one address rather than commit their entire business to it. Here Today isn't opening one bar and hoping it works. It's opening three, so if the coffee shop underperforms, the oyster bar might carry it. That's a different bet than the one Caffe Ladro made when it poured coffee out of a single storefront for 26 years.
Why this particular fall matters
Timing puts an unusual spotlight on the block this month. Fremont Oktoberfest returns September 18 through 20, staged on Phinney Avenue North and North 35th Street, the same intersection where the Trolley Barn sits. Organizers are looking for more than 700 volunteers to keep the beer flowing across the weekend, in three to four hour shifts that come with free admission and beer tokens in exchange.
Anyone walking into the festival grounds this year will be walking past a building mid-transformation. Good Bones Coffee, Glitter Paw Lounge, and Marigolds are targeted for a fall opening, which means they may not be pouring drinks by the time Oktoberfest wraps, but the storefronts will be visibly further along than they were over the summer. Muddy Goose's October target lands just after the festival closes. For residents who go to Oktoberfest as a matter of habit, this is the year the walk there doubles as a preview of what the building becomes next.
It's a strange kind of continuity. The last streetcar pulled into that barn on April 13, 1941. Eighty-five years later, the same footprint is filling back up with foot traffic, just without the tracks.
What to actually watch for
If you live in Fremont, the useful thing to track isn't the individual openings, it's whether the building ends up filling all six planned tenant slots or settles for fewer. Trinity Real Estate has described the redevelopment as accommodating up to six tenants, with two leases signed as of this spring's Puget Sound Business Journal reporting and a third pending. Whether the remaining slots fill by winter will say something about how much appetite there still is for multi-tenant retail spaces in this corner of the city, versus operators preferring standalone storefronts elsewhere in the neighborhood.
The other thing worth watching is whether the pattern holds through next year's business roundups. If the businesses that keep closing continue to be single-location, long-tenured operators, and the businesses that keep opening continue to be multi-location or multi-concept, that tells you something durable about what kind of retail lease actually pencils out in Fremont right now. One building reopening under new ownership is a story. A neighborhood's worth of businesses following the same shape is a trend.
For now, the Trolley Barn sits behind construction fencing on Phinney, waiting for its coffee shop, its taproom, its oyster bar, and its kiln. A hundred and twenty-one years after the first streetcars parked inside, it's about to hold more businesses at once than it ever has.
If you're weighing a move into Fremont, or you already live here and are curious what a building like this means for the block around it, Tom and Rebecca know this neighborhood down to its storefronts. Contact us anytime to talk through what's changing in Fremont and what it might mean for you.
