Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 5, May 2003

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City People's offers 'weird mix' of home ware, hardware

By MATTHEW PREUSCH

It's hard to call City People's Mercantile a hardware store. A more traditional handyman (or woman) might wince at having weave through displays of chic cocktail sets or yoga mats to purchase some epoxy or a crowbar.

When Judith Gille and her partners opened the first City People's store 25 years ago they settled on the broader designation of "urban mercantile."

"It's always been some kind of weird mix of merchandise, between home ware and hardware," said Gille.

That peculiar variety of goods available at an "urban mercantile" means the store's customers must only cross a couple of aisles to find, say, heavy gauge chain by-the-inch and Zen Buddhist statuary. It's a combination that has met with a good measure of success.

City People's currently owns two outlets: one in North Seattle, located at 5440 Sand Point Way in the Laurelhurst neighborhood, and a store in the Madison Valley.

Gille, 50, a co-owner, manages the chain from her office in the Sand Point store. The chain's current popularity persists despite some recent bumps in the road. City People's closed two of its stores, in Fremont and Capitol Hill, since 2000. Gille said the chain's expansion had threatened to compromise its neighborhood feel, which Gille calls "pretty funky."

"We had I guess what you would call a retail mid-life crisis," she said, "We just spread ourselves too thin."

The Sand Point store opened in 1999 and includes a small garden center with flowers, herbs and potting accessories; there is a native plant sale scheduled for May.

And every holiday season both City People's stores do brisk business in their Christmas tree lots.

"I used to unload the Christmas tree trucks. I'm too old to schlep Christmas trees anymore," said Gille.

With the store closures and plans to sell the chain behind them, Gille said City People's is happy to settle back into its role as a niche neighborhood outlet. The smaller scale of operations means she and her co-owners can stay active in managing the business.

Gille, whose desk is hemmed in by stacks surplus art-deco clocks and applewood barbecue briquettes, said launching City People's first store, on Capitol Hill, was her biggest challenge.

When, in the late 1970s, she and her fellow entrepreneurs approached local banks for loans, they ran into some traditional biases about who should traffic in hardware.

She recalled one bank president who, before turning down their application, said, "So, you're the girls who think you want to do a hardware store."

"The doors were slamming faster than we could get our foot in," she recalled.

They were eventually able to secure a loan from a small bank whose president was female.

With the money they opened the first City People's, an 800-square-foot storefront on Capitol Hill, in 1979. Five years later, they moved to a larger space on 15th Avenue East. It closed in 2000.

The company's two remaining stores now draw some of the former Capitol Hill customers, said Gille. City People's hopes to continue to serve as a sort of upscale one-stop shopping center for surrounding residential neighborhoods, she said.