The Terminal Building at Harris Avenue and 11th Street, which is home to Harris Avenue Café and Tony’s Coffee on the ground floor, as well as nine offices on the second floor, was built in 1888, making it the oldest commercial structure Fairhaven’s Historic district. That makes it 125 years old this year.
The building definitely displays it’s old world charm with multicolored trim and decorative cornice’s. The Terminal Building has been restored very closely to its 1889 appearance. The first floor of the building’s Harris Avenue side is gray painted wood with red trim, the second floor facade is brick. The two-story wood frame building was constructed 1n 1888, bricks shipped from the Orient, where used to cover the south and west sides of the structure in 1889 .
There are claims that the building was named after the town’s desire to become the end stop or terminal of the Great Northern Railroad, other’s says it was named by the owner in 1930 as a reference to where two electric street passenger railways intersected.
The top floor was once used as living quarters, while the corner shop at 1101 Harris was once a Saloon, a restaurant and barbershop, and the other ground-floor space, 1103 Harris, was a combination cigar store and billiard parlor.
The building has also been home to a grocery store, drugstore, café, and a shop with a soda fountain.
Top floor tenants have been lawyers, engineers, songwriters, bookkeepers and landscape designers, and most recently, counselors and therapists and Seth Fleetwood, an attorney and Bellingham City Council member.
The Terminal building is surely a big part of the history of Fairhaven