Josh and Michelle Dunn sat in the lobby of The Melting Pot, the downtown Tacoma fondue restaurant, waiting for their dinner companions on a chilly March weekday evening.

Across Pacific Avenue, Tacoma’s main thoroughfare, the wall-sized door rolled up on an unmarked warehouse – nondescript save for the fresh, milk-chocolate brown paint job.

As a sedan waited to pull into the warehouse, part of an old neon sign – with just the letters “… MIER” visible – leaning against an inside wall caught Josh Dunn’s eye.

Could it be?

One hundred twenty years earlier, Dunn’s great-great-grandfather, Camille M. Pessemier, a Belgian immigrant, opened a “shoe house” in Seattle. Then in 1905, he and his brother Henry opened another one in a building he bought at 1342 Pacific Ave. in Tacoma.

For much of the early part of the 20th century, if you bought footwear in Tacoma, you probably bought it from the Pessemier Bros. stores. They operated two downtown stores. The Pacific Avenue shop carried mostly blue-collar workman-style boots. The 1122 Broadway shop, which relocated to 927 Broadway, stocked more daily and high-fashion shoes.

Historic photos of Pacific Avenue show the neon “Pessemier Bros.” sign above the entrance.

Eventually, in 1974, the last of the Pessemier sons, Walter, who kept the shoe business running until age 79, collapsed and died after mowing the lawn at his home near the University of Puget Sound.

His death brought an end to Pessemier Bros. shoes. His widow sold the building. His children and grandchildren captured a few pieces of memorabilia – the office roll-top desk, display tables from the front window, a perpetual wall calendar from National Bank of Washington, a couch, chairs, a shoe-fitting stool, some shoehorns.

“None of the kids wanted to go into the retail business,” said George Pessemier, Walter’s son, Dunn’s grandfather and a Lakewood entrepreneur now semi-retired. “Everyone was busy with their own lives.”

By 1987, after the City of Tacoma deemed the 1300 block of Pacific Avenue a derelict magnet for ne’er-do-wells, it tore the old buildings down in the name of “urban renewal.” The Pessemier Bros. sign disappeared.

Now Dunn, the president of a magazine publishing company, leapt from his seat at The Melting Pot and dashed across four lanes of rush-hour traffic and the light-rail tracks for a closer look inside the Pacific Avenue warehouse before the door closed.

Dunn’s hunch proved true. Sure enough. The sign he saw once hung over his great-great-grandfather’s shoe house.

And now it belonged to Dale Chihuly.

Yes, THAT Dale Chihuly, the Tacoma-born, world-renowned artist and glass master whose whimsical works adorn the downtown pedestrian bridge between Union Station and the Museum of Glass.

The warehouse across from The Melting Pot goes by the name TS1 – for Tacoma Studio 1 – among the work force inside Chihuly Inc. Two men at the warehouse seemed gruff and protective of its owner’s operations there but assured Dunn they would alert the head office to his interest.

Dunn, meanwhile, alerted David Pessemier, his uncle, George’s son and the unofficial family historian. David Pessemier had warm conversations with Chihuly staffers during the late spring, then couldn’t get responses to his calls.

“The family is VERY interested in getting this sign back into the family fold,” David Pessemier told me in an e-mail this summer. “Can you help us?”

Janet Makela, Chihuly’s media spokeswoman, called me this week.

Chihuly collects many things, including old neon signs. He has an affinity for neon. For those of you around Tacoma in September 1993, you might remember “100,000 Pounds of Neon and Ice.” Chihuly encased various colors of twisted neon tubing in 100 1,000-pound ice blocks displayed on the ice rink inside the Tacoma Dome. As the ice slowly melted over the two-day spectacle, it created free-form ice floes with the lit neon tubes poking out.

As people walked on rubber mats around the roped-off blocks, I sat in the grandstand for over an hour and just marveled at it.

But Chihuly has no immediate plans – involving ice or anything else – for the Pessemier Bros. sign, Makela told me.

He came by it a few years ago when Kevin Russell, the owner of the since-defunct Neon FX sign shop in Tacoma, called Chihuly to see if he wanted to buy it. Antique dealers who know of Chihuly’s collection habits often will call to gauge his interest in old neon that comes up for sale.

So it sat there in Chihuly’s TS1 inventory with racks of other collectibles – until Dunn’s fortuitous glance.

And now?

“Since Dale didn’t have any plans for the sign, but having since learned the Pessemier family has an interest in retrieving it and bringing it back into the family, Dale has decided to donate the sign to the Pessemier family,” Makela said. “Dale certainly understands the significance of something that is important in the family.”

The artist is also a generous gentleman.

“That is great news,” David Pessemier said.

And Dunn already has started to envision the space for the refurbished sign on a wall of his downtown Tacoma office – in the historic brick building that once housed The News Tribune.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com">dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com