PORT ANGELES – The owners and employees of the Cornerhouse Restaurant and the Downtown Hotel in Port Angeles have been informed that their building will likely be torn down at the end of the summer to make way for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s new hotel, possibly sooner.

In April, Cornerhouse owner Joanne Albertson was offered a maximum lease extension of six months, or through September. The lease also says that if the demolition of the adjacent building, set to begin sometime this Spring, structurally compromises the building she’s in, then she may get a 30-day notice to vacate.

Albertson, who opened the Cornerhouse in 1986, says her employees have been informed.

“We’ve been forthright with them and they know you know, and they’re pretty loyal. A lot of them have been with me since day one. Several have retired from there. So they’re all worried about to the year, you know, we’ll all move on from there, but it’s just just an end of an era. I guess like…out with the old in with the new. On one hand, I understand it and on the other one… it’s very scary. You know, it’s the ending of a business…that’s worked hard for 33 years.”

The news came as a bit of a shock to Albertson, who was under the impression, before seeing the new lease, that there was no plan to demolish the building in the foreseeable future.

Michael Peters, who’s consulting on the project, says the current design for the new hotel does not include building on that lot, but they’re concerned about what will happen to it when demolition and construction begin.

“We’re just hedging a lot of bets here. The tribe has not made a decision that that building is coming down in the next six months or the next six years, but as everybody knows that’s an old building and as we start construction on the hotel, we’re going to be driving pilings. We’re going to be removing dirt. We’re trying to figure out how we support that building as we dig out the 2,000 tons of dirt to remove the contaminants. And so we’re just thinking,  what happens if we get in there, we start pounding pilings, that building becomes unstable. What’s it going to cost us to take that building down? We hope to have that information in the next week or so, and that’s a decision that the tribal council will have to make at some point.”

The man hired to manage the new hotel, Robert Utz, is confident Albertson will be in business at least through the summer to take advantage of the busy tourist season, but he also spoke about the reasons the Tribe might want to look at taking the building down before completing hotel construction.

“I think it would seem logical to anybody, you know involved in the process. Now that that parcel of land is available to the Tribe is the most logical to do that for many reasons. For view, for accessibility, lessen the inconvenience of downtown congestion, you know with another project. So again, that’s that’s what’s all being considered in the design/plan stage.”

Earlier this year, the tribe bought the building that houses the restaurant and hotel as well as an adjacent building the contained the former Necessities and Temptations. Those parcels are adjacent to property bought late last year from the city of Port Angeles. They plan to build a multi-story four-star hotel at a cost of around $24-million. That property is contaminated with petroleum pollution from former uses that should take about two months to clean up.

(Below: Site of new hotel being staged for demolition.)