The former Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) building in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District will soon be offered for sale, The Seattle Times reported.
The building, on 815 Seattle Boulevard South, is now known as Inscape Art. The investors who bought it plan to list it for sale this year, according to Brian Mayer, vice president of investments at the commercial brokerage Marcus & Millichap.
Mayer’s firm will list the property. He said, “There’s no plan and intent to try to vacate these tenants or hurt that community in any way” while the building is for sale.
The five-story building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, was a detention and processing center for immigrants in the early 1900s, including Chinese immigrants during the Chinese Exclusion Act, and during the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
It was vacated in 2004, purchased by the investors at a 2008 auction, and then converted into leasable arts space in 2010. Including the basement, the building is 76,600 square feet and sits on a roughly one-acre lot.