Anyone over 50 years old will remember when downtown Bremerton was the major city in Kitsap County. Its downtown bordered on the Naval shipyard where over 20,000 employees went to work each day, it had multiple banks and office buildings and most of the major retail in the county. Downtown Bremerton was the home for a large J.C. Penny’s and Sears, it even had a small Nordstrom store, a Woolworth’s, car dealerships and two movie theaters, all in the middle of a relatively small downtown area. High school kids from all over Kitsap County would drive into downtown and cruse Pacific Ave on a Friday night. Bremerton was a busy and vibrant downtown.
The downtown began its decline in the late 1970s with the development of the Bangor Submarine Navy base in Central Kitsap, and the construction of a new highway that provided the opportunity for some Silverdale area developers to begin the process of building a major new shopping center. That became Silverdale’s Kitsap Mall, which opened in 1985.
Over a period of a few years all the major retail that had been located in downtown Bremerton moved to the new mall and surrounding retail plazas, the two theaters closed, and downtown eventually became a parking lot for shipyard workers. The news even got worse as word spread that the city’s beloved Harrison Hospital was exploring moving to Silverdale, which it eventually did, now known as St. Michael Medical Center on Ridgetop Boulevard…