Award Winner: "Pioneering Columbia City coffee shop to close"

Third Place for Best Business Story in the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2006 Better Newspaper Contest Award This story profiled Kate Gill after she decided to close her pioneering coffee shop, Lottie Motts, in 2006 Seattle’s then beleaguered Columbia City. Gill opened her business in 1998 at a time when downtown Columbia City was known more for its social service non-profits and street-corner prostitution and gang-fueled drug dealing than the restaurants, coffee houses, clothing boutiques and theaters thriving there today. — “I was paying rent and I couldn’t move around [like the prostitutes and drug dealers]. I was just a good person trying to make a buck, too,” Gill said. “You couldn’t go in there and try to bust their chops. That’s where they did their business, and I was asking them to move out. They have a mobile business. It was kind of rough. The prostitutes really gave me a hard time.” —