Pagliacci Pizza is now open in Madison Valley, and they’re giving away free slices until 5 p.m. today (Thursday) to celebrate.

As we reported previously, Pagliacci’s newest shop is at Madison and Lake Washington Boulevard in the lot formerly occupied by Spotless Cleaners. The new restaurant is the city’s only LEED certified pizza shop, according to Pagliacci.

Delivery service will begin at 5 p.m. Thursday following the day of slice giveaways.

The location actually has some historic relevance for the pizza company:

As we get ready to open our newest location in MadisonValley, we thought we’d share a little bit of the site history with you.  Because even as the new location itself will be a first (Seattle’s first stand-alone LEED certified pizzeria – making it one of the most environmentally friendly restaurant spaces in the city) the property it occupies has a story to tell, too.

The property, which is at the corner of Madison Street and Lake Washington Blvd, was actually home to Pagliacci’s first Commissary (where we make our pizza dough, pasta dishes and popular Pagliaccio dressing), 20 years ago. We later moved the commissary – first to a location on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and then to its current location on Capitol Hill.

At one point, the Madison property housed a dry cleaner gas station, amongst other things. While these businesses served the community well, they both left their own environmental footprint on the land, and before we could even break ground on the new location, we had to invest in site cleanup to ensure the property was safe for us to occupy, and was safe for the surrounding community.

But let’s go back even further.  Did you know a train line once ran through the Madison Valley? We didn’t either, that is until our architect, Richard Floisand, began researching the site.  One of the things he found was that a train trestle ran above the Madison property, and the property itself was the likely location of one of the supports that held the trestle up. This meant that the property included a lot of fill material left over from the 1920’s.  And this also meant that we had to put a lot of effort into stabilizing the land so that it could safely house our newest location for a long, longtime.

Seattle is a relatively young city, but Madison Valley is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, and we’re happy that we get to play a part in its future.  While it took a lot of work to get the site ready, it gave us a chance to learn about the site for our newest location.  We’re looking forward to opening our doors very soon, and to becoming part of this community’s fabric and ongoing history for years to come.