For most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a newsstand stood at 3rd and Pike, Seattle's busiest downtown intersection. It took different forms over the decades, from a wood rack to a metal booth to a glass-and-steel hut, but it never left the corner. Then, on a Sunday night in March 2024, the Seattle Department of Transportation took it down.

The stand was founded in 1917 by Frank Turco, who led the Newsboys' Union, served as an AFL-CIO delegate, and sat on the General Strike Committee during Seattle's 1919 general strike. He ran for city council three times using the newsstand itself as his campaign headquarters. Ben Gant bought the business in 2002, in his twenties, when 3rd and Pike still had crossing guards at rush hour and roughly 30,000 people passed through the intersection daily. For years it worked the way a newsstand is supposed to: subscriptions, the P-I, the Seattle Times, a little tourist traffic.

Gant dates the corner's change to around 2016, when he began seeing more public drinking, more visible drug use, and needles on the sidewalk. By the time COVID hit, he'd closed the stand along with most of downtown. SDOT's response was a letter: reopen and operate the business, or lose the sidewalk permit. He reopened, but on different terms than before. Instead of selling papers, he started handing out Emerald City Resource Guides and food donated by Piroshky Piroshky. Working with King County, he also provided naloxone and referrals to shelter beds and tiny-house villages that were, by his account, almost impossible to actually secure. He estimates he personally witnessed one to three overdoses a day during that period.

By the time it closed for good, the newsstand had quietly become a place where people caught in downtown's homelessness crisis could regularly turn for help. Fox 13 Seattle reported that Gant distributed roughly 3,100 doses of Narcan from the stand and estimates he helped resuscitate 33 people. SDOT revoked the stand's street-use permit, number SUPSM0000299, saying the permit holder was out of compliance with its terms and that the structure itself was in disrepair. Gant disputes that characterization; he says he received a revocation notice in March 2023, appealed it, and was told in February 2024 the stand would come down sometime after March 3. He was not given an exact date. He filed court paperwork on March 1 to stop the removal, but a judge didn't hear the case before SDOT acted that weekend.

The structure itself weighs about 2,500 pounds. Gant was given 60 days to claim it and says he was never told where it was being stored. He's since started a fundraiser to try to get it back. He hasn't returned to the corner since the night he got the phone call that it was gone.

The stand's removal left a gap at 3rd and Pike, both where the structure stood and where people had come for food, naloxone, or a referral rather than a newspaper. Gant wants the newsstand back on the corner. He also wants its century of history acknowledged instead of erased.