Central Waterfront, Seattle - Piers and Buildings - Pier 70

Pier 70, at the foot of Clay and Broad Streets, now marks the northern end of the Central Waterfront. Beyond that are the Olympic Sculpture Park and Myrtle Edwards Park. Although the pier shed retains its historic shape, it was remodeled after a fire in 1915, remodeled again in the 1970s, and so heavily altered in the late 1990s—reclad with metal siding, all windows and doors modernized and many reconfigured—that (unlike the old Northern Pacific piers) it retains only traces of its historic character.

The pier was built as Pier 14 by Ainsworth and Dunn and completed in 1902 along with a warehouse across Railroad Avenue (today's Alaskan Way) that is now the Old Spaghetti Factory. Ainsworth and Dunn's Seattle Fish Company dated from 1889 and occupied a succession of Central Waterfront locations. Beginning with a retail operation on higher ground at Second Avenue and Pike Street, they established themselves on the waterfront at the foot of Seneca Street by 1893, expanded their business to include grain and feed, and built Pier 8 / Pier 59 (though not its current pier shed) in 1896. By that time they had canning operations in Seattle and at Blaine, Washington. Eventually they moved their entire operation to Blaine, but they owned of Pier 14 until at least 1920, taking on a succession of tenants. In 1905, the main tenant was the Puget Sound Wharf and Warehouse Company, in 1912, the American and Hawaiian Steamship Company and in 1920, the Dodwell Dock and Warehouse Company, operating it as a terminal for the Northland Steamship Company and the Blue Funnel Line. The Washington State Liquor Control Board used the pier as a warehouse during World War II, after which The Coast Guard used the pier as its Seattle base from 1946 to 1955, and visiting naval vessels moored on its north side.

Like the piers to it south, its historic uses were superseded by containerization, and it was remodeled to house shops and restaurants. Triad Development bought the pier in 1995, and in the late 1990s it was remodeled as a headquarters for Go2Net, which was merged into InfoSpace, and fared poorly in the 2000–2001 crash that followed the dot-com bubble. Immediately before that remodel, in 1998 The Real World: Seattle was filmed there. Because the Central Waterfront piers are not zoned residential, the building was officially a 24-hour-a-day film set for the shoot.