Work to Begin on Future Home of Lower Columbia Pathologists’ Lab

The following story, written by Amy M.E. Fishcher, was published in the Daily News on September 2, 2009.

Construction is starting this week on Lower Columbia Pathologists’ new laboratory at the corner of 14th Avenue and Tennant Way, where the Longview Goodwill store formerly stood.

The 19,700-square-foot, two-story building will house Lower Columbia Pathologists, which studies human tissue specimens for disease, and NW Medical Analytical Labs, LCP’s blood-testing laboratory.

The combined facility will not be a medical clinic, clarified LCP general manager Kim Gilmore.

“We see patients there to draw their blood and to give results to the doctors, but we don’t have a clinic where doctors see patients,” Gilmore said Monday.

The lab is expected to be operating by late next spring or early summer, she said. LCP, which has been in business 55 years, began shopping around for another space because it was outgrowing its building at 1217 14th Ave. The company opened NW Medical Analytic Labs three years ago at 929 Fir St.

LCP decided to demolish the Goodwill store and donation center, part of which was built in the 1920s, because it would have cost more to renovate the buildings than to tear them down and start over, Gilmore said. Among other things, the buildings needed to be brought up to earthquake safety standards, she said. LCP bought the propertyin November.

LCP has applied for its building permit from the city, and contractor JH Kelly of Longview is beginning the preliminary ground work this week, Gilmore said. Architect Frances Villaseñor of TGB Architects, based in Edmonds, Wash., designed the brick and glass building.

LCP is owned by six local doctors and provides clinic laboratory services, nuclear medicine and pathology services.

Drawing courtesy of TGB Architects