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As Speakeasy grew, its offices were spread across two buildings in Seattle’s Belltown district. In the middle of 2005, the company sought to bring the entire group together under one roof, moving to a new high rise location overlooking Seattle’s waterfront.

The Insider: Speakeasy moving to downtown site

SAY GOODBYE TO BELLTOWN: After a decade in Seattle’s trendy Belltown neighborhood, Speakeasy is moving.

The Internet service provider opened one of the city’s first cybercafes at Second Avenue and Bell in 1995 — an early participant in an urban renaissance that brought dozens of clubs, restaurants and art galleries to Belltown.

A fire destroyed the cybercafe in May 2001, but Speakeasy continued to expand in the neighborhood with a headquarters and operations center in two separate buildings.
Now with 212 employees and 45,000 broadband Internet customers across the country, the company has simply outgrown the neighborhood, said Speakeasy founder Mike Apgar.
It plans to move into the top three floors of the 1201 Western Building this fall — downtown Seattle office space formerly occupied by Amgen.

“Belltown is thriving now. When we came here 10 years ago, it was kind of a ghost town,” Apgar said. “We will miss it, but at the same time we have got to have all of our employees in the same building.”

As a courtesy, Apgar said the company has been notifying neighboring Belltown businesses about the departure.

“Over 10 years you build relationships with a lot of folks, and some of them rely on our lattes and stuff like that,” he said.