SEQUIM — The city’s tallest building, vacant for more than a year after housing a Mexican restaurant, has been sold and soon will be the site of another Mexican eatery.
Linda “Candy” Diesen purchased the iconic 85-foot-tall grain elevator at 531 Washington St. for $353,482 at a trustee sale March 13.
She plans to give the building built in the 1920s a makeover and put Baja Cantina — which was burned out of her property at 820 W. Washington St. on May 19 in an electrical fire — in the bottom of the building, where El Cazador once served food.
“We have been trying to get this building, and it just didn’t come about smoothly, so I kind of backed away and said, ‘If it is meant to be, we will end up with the building,’” said Diesen, who owns Tootsie’s restaurant just west of the grain elevator.
“We really didn’t think we were going to [get it], and then it just kind of shifted the other way, and I went to the trustee sale and nobody else was there.”
Martha and Jose Acosta, the proprietors of Baja Cantina, have been in a holding pattern since the fire while Diesen searched for a new building.
Diesen said it is her hope the new restaurant will be open for business — after the site gets a fresh coat of paint and is renovated — in time for the Sequim Irrigation Festival beginning May 1 and Cinco de Mayo four days later.
El Cazador, which occupied the ground floor of the elevator for 33 years, closed March 3, 2014.
The grain elevator was initially made available for auction April 27, 2014, but the auction was subsequently postponed several times by Whidbey Island Bank, formerly Heritage Bank.
Previous owners Hilda Rodriguez and Arturo Briseno of EC Sequim Properties LLC defaulted on an $800,000 loan taken out in 2008, according to records on file with the Clallam County Auditor’s Office.
About $1.05 million was owed by the LLC on the original loan, according to a “notice of default” dated July 3, 2014, posted on the property’s door.
Getting the keys to the historic building “was a real pleasant surprise, not at all what was expected,” Diesen said.
“I really truly thought, although I wanted it for a restaurant front location, other people might want it for the history behind the grain elevator,” she added.
“It is quite a fantastic building.”
The elevator was built next to the Seattle, Port Angeles and Western Railroad, a subsidiary of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific, according to the Museum & Arts Center in Sequim, or MAC.
“I believe there [were] additions built” in the 1940s, “but we have it in our records as being built in the ’20s, so we don’t have an exact [date], and neither does the county, because no permits” were issued at that time,” Judy Reandeau Stipe, MAC executive director, said Wednesday.
“Someday, that will turn up.”
By the early 1940s, the building was used by the Clallam Co-op Association primarily to store incoming feed for Dungeness Valley dairy farms and outgoing produce.
Last year, MAC trustees looked into purchasing the elevator to use as an arts-based community exhibit center and began a fundraising effort to do so.
“We started . . . taking pledges,” Reandeau Stipe said. “We did not really have an idea that we would move into there because we could not afford it.”
Reandeau Stipe noted that the MAC never took cash donations for the cause.
“We had pledges for just under $10,000. It was nowhere near” the amount needed to purchase the property, Reandeau Stipe said.
“All our pledge books are still here, but no cash was taken.”
Diesen said she will work with the MAC to ensure the building’s cultural heritage is preserved.
“There is a little bit of history on the wall in there right now, and I would love to find out more about it,” she said.
“I think it is a pretty impressive place and people are coming forward and saying, ‘yeah my grandpa worked there, my dad worked there.’ It is pretty exciting.”
Diesen’s goal is to restore the building.
“On the side of the building is the ‘Co-op’ faded sign, and [I have been] just playing around in my mind talking to the co-op or talking to the museum to see what we can do to restore that and just [keep it as] one of the beautiful sites in Sequim.
“It could use a little bit of help.”
Reandeau Stipe said the MAC is excited about helping Diesen with the building.
“She is a local businessperson, and we support her 100 percent,” Reandeau Stipe said.
“We just didn’t want someone to come in from out of town and tear down our grain elevator,” she added.
“I am just glad a local person got it. . . . I am just thrilled our elevator is not going away.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or at cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
