Seattle's ‘Sinking Ship' garage in Pioneer Square appears closed
Pioneer Square's so-called Sinking Ship" parking garage - once deemed the "coolest" place to park in the nation, while also being the site of numerous violent incidents in recent years - appears to have closed.
A "no trespassing sign approved by Seattle police was recently spotted affixed to a chain-link fence blocking the lot's Second Avenue entrances, along with wooden boards blocking its entrances on Yesler Way. An attorney for the lot's operator, Diamond Parking, confirmed in a phone call Tuesday that the company no longer manages the three-story garage.
The closure, if permanent, could mark the end of a Japanese American family's tumultuous, decades-long battle to retain the famously tilted, wedge-shaped property that some have considered to be cursed.
It also comes just weeks after a man was killed in a gunfight inside the lot and as the property owners face a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the widow of a man fatally shot inside the lot in 2024.
The lawsuit alleged the property owners and Diamond Parking endangered people by leaving the garage unguarded and unsupervised, even as safety issues there worsened.
No one has said exactly what led to the Sinking Ship's closure. It's also unclear if closing the lot will reduce gun violence in the surrounding area, where late-night brawls have sometimes spilled out of nearby nightclubs and ended in gunfire in recent years.
The roughly 2-square-mile area surrounding the Sinking Ship saw 22 fatal shootings between 2020 and 2025 - about 11% of the citywide total for that period, according to Seattle police data. Other West precinct neighborhoods experienced far fewer over the same period, including 12 in the Chinatown International District, five in Belltown and three in South Lake Union, police data show.
Nevertheless, the garage's closure could mark the end of an era for the historic structure, which was built in the 1960s, where the landmark Seattle Hotel once stood.
Seattle Police Department spokesperson Detective Patrick Michaud deferred questions about the Sinking Ship to its owners in an email Wednesday, saying "any decision to close the business was that of the owner and not (police)."
Sinking Ship's family legacy
The quiet slab of concrete was a far cry from the vision Henry T. Kubota and his descendants shared for the property.
Kubota, a Japanese immigrant railroad laborer and hotel manager, bought the Seattle Hotel in 1941. The Pearl Harbor attack happened months later, and Kubota became one of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II. He returned in 1945 to manage his hotel, but an earthquake four years later damaged the building and led to its 1961 demolition.
A developer promised Kubota they would build an office tower on the lot, but stopped construction after finishing the parking garage. The Sinking Ship - a gray slab built into the block's slope to appear like the bow of a ship disappearing under a concrete sea - has remained there ever since.
After Kubota's death in 1989, his daughter, Doris, and her husband, John Fujii, took over the helm. They nearly lost the land during an eminent-domain battle with the Seattle Monorail Project, which tried to condemn the property in 2004 to build a station.
Fujii took his fight against the monorail all the way up to the state Supreme Court, and lost. The family ultimately won the property back a year later, when Seattle voters rejected the entire monorail project. The family has leased the lot to parking garage operators ever since.
"We won't give up. It's our family legacy. Curse or no curse," Fujii said in 2010.
Doris and John Fujii's three adult sons did not respond this week to inquiries.
Longtime owners, Doris Fujii and Irene Plosky, and their attorneys did not respond to inquiries. Daniel Shin, a Bellevue attorney and registered agent for Fujii and Plosky's company, HTK-Pioneer Square, did not agree to an interview.
John Fujii died in June 2019, six weeks after someone shot a man in the leg inside the garage around 2 a.m.
A month after Fujii died, someone else started firing a gun inside the garage at about 1 a.m., sending people fleeing from the lot's entrances, according to Seattle police.
History of violent incidents
In their wrongful-death lawsuit, attorneys for Marie Jeffers, 27, alleged the owners were aware the garage had been the site of numerous violent incidents in recent years but kept the lot open 24/7 without security guards or attendants.
This site was especially dangerous during the early morning as people left nearby nightclubs and congregated inside the lot, according to court filings by Jeffers' attorneys.
Jeffers and her husband, 29-year-old Javonte Isadore-Danning, drove into the garage on May 25, 2024, shortly before 11:30 p.m. The couple, who had gotten married about five weeks earlier in Spokane, planned to meet friends that night at a nearby nightclub.
But when a woman inside the lot started yelling at the couple and Isadore-Danning got out of the car, Caution Anderson, then a 17-year-old boy, allegedly fired at Isadore-Danning about 10 times, court records show.
Anderson fled but was arrested several weeks later. He pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and remains in custody at King County Jail on a $2 million bond while awaiting trial this June, according to King County prosecuting attorney's office spokesperson Douglas Wagoner.
Within the same year, Seattle officers responded to a separate shooting, a stabbing and a five-hour standoff with a man armed with a kitchen knife and a prop handgun inside the Sinking Ship, according to the Police Department.
Seattle police last summer requested a city attorney ask Diamond Parking to install security cameras and close the lot during the early morning hours, according to a city attorney's office spokesperson and a November 2025 court filing by Jeffers' attorneys.
Alan Pyke, a spokesperson for the city attorney's office, declined to describe the conversations, citing attorney-client privilege.
It's unclear how Diamond Parking responded to the requests, or whether the property owners were involved.
Jeffers' attorney, Brian Mickelsen, declined to comment on the ongoing wrongful-death lawsuit or make Jeffers available for an interview this week, but said her complaint and recent news coverage detail criminal activity inside the garage.
The Sinking Ship was apparently still open Feb. 1, when a fight broke out inside the garage around 1:30 a.m., and at least one person fired a gun. Mhaniq Wilkerson, 27, died from a gunshot wound to the head, according to the King County medical examiner's office. Another man was hospitalized with serious injuries, and two people were treated for graze wounds, police said.
By mid-April, all three levels of the lot were empty, the wooden boards covering its Yesler Way entrances were painted gray and a no trespassing sign fluttered from the chain-link fence on Second Avenue.
Correction: A previous version of this story included an incorrect name for the Seattle Monorail Project.
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This story was originally published April 17, 2026 at 6:39 AM.