So long Halpins, Welcome Complete Suites

You would have to be about 70 years old to remember when Halpin’s was not located just west of Sprague and Bowdish since it has been there since 1949. I know that it has always been there for me and I was raised just up the road at Alki and Bowdish, until I was 7, in the same home I bought as an adult 20 years ago. I would guess that I have passed through the light  at Sprague and Bowdish more than any other intersection on Earth.

Actually I do not have to guess since we went up Bowdish to get to the family church each Sunday morning and Sunday night for the first seven years of my life. Just those 4 weekly trips added up to 208 and if you throw in the rest of the Vacation Bible Schools and other special occasions I was escorted to, they probably added up to 208,000. Between church and school, it seemed I spent most of my precious youth trying to stay awake or slyly slip in a nap as I was being taught hundreds of lessons that failed to captivate my attention.

If that were not enough to make Sprague and Bowdish my most visited intersection for life by the time I was 7,  my great grandparents lived a little further up the path at 12th and Bowdish. By the time I came along, Grampa Dean, a logger from Arkansas, was doing lighter work at Appleway Florist and Granny Dean seemed to always be babysitting me.

Probably the best and worst part about spending so many precious moments of my youth passing north and south through the Sprague and Bowdish intersection was the Dairy Queen located where the loan business is now. This was long before we had a Baskins and Robbins or anyone had ever heard of frogurt. Remembering how much I loved the Dilly Bars and Mr.Misty floats always made it the best intersection. Realizing we were not stopping to fulfill my fantasies, made it the worst.

Always there just beyond the queen was  Halpins, with its Treasure Room and its regal sign towering just below the massive red “H”.  It was there the whole time of my youth and adult life. In the old days there were six independent drug stores, which slowly dropped off one by one until there was just one. For several years Halpins stood alone, the remaining mom and pop drugstore, though they craftily survived by also becoming a gift store.

Times change as economics and advertising and the internet lead consumers  in other directions. But when an old tree falls , it makes way for another to grow up. The one bright thing concerning the loss of Halpins is that the large and mostly empty building will not be empty for long, which seems to be the fate of an alarming number of  buildings along Sprague over the past several years.

Brad and Julie Markquart, who opened their first Complete Suite Furniture store in the Valley in 1998 have bought the building and are busy remodeling the old Halpins into their 7th retail location and the lower part of the building into warehouse space. Obviously, they are go-getters and I hope their success lasts at least as long as Halpins’, longer in fact.

I root on all new business ventures  but I also mourn the favorites a bit when they close and I try to remember the ones from the past. The people and places we love do not go on and on like the roads we travel to get to them. But at least there is some kind of comfort, though it goes unnoticed and unappreciated mostly, from travelling along the roads and through the  intersections that were laid down long before my great-grandparents arrived in town, and will be here long after we are all gone.

Brad Markquart is hoping to open Complete Suites here in February.