For decades, Columbia Funeral Home & Crematory greeted drivers, passengers, pedestrians as they entered Columbia City. The neon sign, “Columbia Funeral Home,” fixed on the side of the roof that faced Rainier Avenue, stood out against the old building, built in 1906, which was by all standards unremarkable: barrel tiles, dormers, veranda, clapboard siding. The sign, on the other hand, was shamelessly splashy and, at night, it seemed to float in the darkened air.
The sign was everything. It welcomed you to this old city with a feeling captured by these words: “Have a good time here, with the living. But before entering, please remember the dead. We are no longer in space and time, but we exist in your memories. Think of us.”
A city is truly lost when it forgets its dead.
The funeral home was destroyed in a huge fire, believed to be started by an arsonist around 3:45 a.m. on July 30, 2025. The iconic neon sign also met its end in this early morning fire. “We were really relieved that everyone was okay, and all the decedents and people in our care were okay,” says Russ Weeks, one of the owners of the funeral home, over the phone.
A year later, the arsonist remains a mystery, and the burnt building is still there (charcoaled by smoke and flames). It now stands as an emblem of its own death, not the dead.
But behind the skeleton of the funeral home, Weeks is still keeping the services it offered to the community alive. “We’re still serving about half the number of families that we served prior to the fire,” Weeks says. They’re operating out of a portable office trailer in the parking lot and a small second building that survived the fire. A replica of the green neon sign sits in the window. “Our staff has been tremendous. They’ve put up with many things… working in the cold or heat in a garage is not ideal.”
The Weeks’ family is only the Home’s most recent owner. They bought the business from the son of Wilbert Lewis, Paul Lewis, in 2006. The Lewis family bought the home from its original owners, Fred and Georgia Rasmussen, in the early 1950s. Before it was a funeral home, the property was the home of Leo Lassen, an announcer for the Seattle Rainiers baseball team. In 2002, the funeral home was the star of Six Feet Under’s Episode 4, Season 2 (“Driving Mr. Mossback”).
Weeks had originally planned to sell the property, listed, according to the Seattle Times, for $7.5 million. But the offers for it were so laughably low that he decided to rebuild the funeral home instead. They’ve already applied for a permit, but the earliest available appointment is in December. “You can pay an extra fee, and then they will put you on a list in case cancellations come up,” Weeks says. “But my thought is, why?”
We contacted Bryan Stevens, the chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections, to ask why this community landmark was stuck in city permitting limbo. “We always prioritize permits in cases of an emergency repair for fire damage. We rely on the applicant to tell us their circumstance so we can prioritize the intake and review of their permit to demolish and rebuild,” he said. Stevens then explained that since my email to his department concerning the funeral home, they have contacted “the applicant to help on prioritizing for repairing fire damage.”
“What we really need is a chapel,” says Weeks. “That’s what people want. A sacred place.” And hopefully, the sign will return and it will once again announce to the living of Columbia City that the dead are here with you. They will be here forever.
