PORT ANGELES — Landing’s Restaurant, an anchor of downtown waterfront business, has been padlocked, and its operator does not expect it to reopen.
Sandi Hartman, who has run the eatery since it started as a fish-and-burger bar 23 years ago, said she owned rent to Paul Cronauer, owner of The Landing mall that houses the restaurant.
However, she also accused Cronauer of going into competition with her by opening Wine on the Waterfront on the mall’s second floor and an espresso bar on its first story.
Hartman said she was locked out of the restaurant at 5 p.m. Wednesday, but was allowed to retrieve personal possessions Thursday morning.
Hartman said Cronauer had raised her rent from $4,570 to $5,070, and she had agreed with him on a payment plan.
The situation was complicated, Hartman said, by remodeling work she said had forced her to close her restaurant’s second floor for a week and move its operations downstairs.
When she began moving bottles of liquor and kegs of beer to the first story, she said Cronauer apparently feared she was moving out of the restaurant and padlocked it.
Paul Cronauer was out of the country and unavailable for comment, but his wife, Sarah Cronauer, provided a statement to Peninsula Daily News that said:
“On Monday . . . the management and staff of the restaurant began moving items out of the business and posted a sign stating that they were closed.
“The following day, they began moving out items such as equipment, liquor and food.
“As owners of the building, we were concerned that they were in violation of their lease.
“At this point, they have not informed us of their intentions, but we look forward to a satisfactory resolution of the situation.”
Hartman, however, said she had spoken to Paul Cronauer on Wednesday night and tried to talk out their differences.
It was never her intention to close Landing’s, she said.
“We had just brought down our Christmas decorations,” she said.
$350,000 a year in wages
With the restaurant goes a $350,000 annual payroll, she said, for a work force that ranged from 34 employees in the summer to 11 in the off season.
“I feel so bad about all the employees,” she said.
“I had one gal who worked there 12 years.”
That waitress, Ellane Machenheimer , said she’d been injured and unable to work at Landing’s the past five weeks.
“I was ready to go back next week, but there’s no restaurant to go back to,” she said.
“I’m going to probably have to sit out the winter. Jobs are scarce right now. I’ll just have to go on unemployment until I can go back to waitressing again.”
Hartman blamed Paul Cronauer’s remodeling the mall for damaging her business, but she added that a declining economy had made itself felt throughout the Port Angeles downtown.
Trio of traffic snarls
The recession got a head start, she said, with the replacement of the Eighth Street bridges starting in the summer of 2007, the tearing up of downtown sidewalks last summer and construction of The Gateway transportation center.
The perfect storm of traffic snarls “put the kibosh on everything,” Hartman said, “and it’s just dead.”
Restaurant owners also are bracing for the annual raise in Washington’s state’s minimum wage from $8.07 to $8.55 per hour in January.
“That’s going to really kill the restaurants,” she said.
It could be a cruel winter, Hartman added.
Some downtown businesses are “waiting for the Christmas season, because these are little boutique-y stores,” she said.
“If they don’t do well at Christmas, they’ll be closed January and February.”
Terry Roth, owner of Odyssey Currency Exchange and president of the Port Angeles Downtown Association, wasn’t as pessimistic as Hartman, but said some stores might not survive until spring.
‘Worse winter’ forecast
Reduced tourist traffic due to last summer’s spikes in gas prices cut some businesses’ head counts of customers by up to 40 percent, he said.
“We have a couple of businesses downtown that didn’t have a good summer, and they’re going to have a worse winter,” Roth said.
“We’re going to have casualties just because of the nature of finance and business.
“There will be a couple of more stores that won’t be here in June.”
In addition to his currency exchange, Roth managed the Northwest Duty Free Store in The Landing mall until September, when the Seattle-based store closed.
Its owner plans to reopen it aboard the ferry MV Coho.
Other businesses plan to wait out the recession, Roth said — at least for a while.
“They’re going to stick it out and see where we as a business community are going.”
As for Hartman’s restaurant, Roth said, “I think Sandi has tried everything that she could.”
And as for Hartman herself, at 70 she has no plans to start anew.
“I’ve been fighting this for 27 years,” she said, referring to the restaurant and three other businesses she owned at one time or another — all of them in The Landing mall.
“I’ve put in at least $300,000 of my own money in the last few years,” she said.
“I’ve tried my best.”
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Reporter Jim Casey can be reached at 360-417-3538 or at jim.casey@peninsuladailynews.com.
