Kirk's vision for Kirkland was grand and specific. He had founded the Great Western Iron and Steel Company and envisioned a town built around heavy industry, modeled on the English iron towns he knew. The building at Market and Piccadilly reflected that confidence: its Victorian and Romanesque details, semicircular windows with radiating voussoirs, a decorated metal entablature with dentils and stylized brackets, and that distinctive candle-snuffer turret roof all announced permanence and ambition. The first-floor tenants were suitably prosperous for a boomtown: James Guptill and George Evans ran a dry goods store, and the Elder Drug Store occupied the other storefront. Both Guptill and Evans were building homes on Waverly Way during the construction boom. Everything pointed upward. Then the national economy collapsed, and Kirk's steel works never produced a single ton of steel in Kirkland.

After the Panic of 1893, Kirkland's commercial center drifted south toward the waterfront and the ferry dock. The Kirkland Investment Company was sold to Seattle developers Burke and Farrar, who shifted their focus to developing Kirkland as a suburban residential community in the early 1910s. Kirk's turret office was vacated; the upper floor was eventually converted to apartments. Downstairs, a succession of everyday businesses moved through: a butcher shop, a grocery store, a furniture store. In the 1920s, Market Street became state highway 2-A, the Eastside's main north-south thoroughfare, keeping the ground floor occupied even as the upper story declined. By the 1940s, the Eastside Furniture Company, owned by Kirkland's youngest mayor, Al Leland, operated from the space. The building endured, but barely. Decades of deferred maintenance left it teetering on the edge of demolition.

By the late 1950s, the landlord could not afford the repairs the building needed and demolition seemed inevitable. William Radcliffe, a local schoolteacher, saw something worth saving. In 1958, he rented the vacant upper floor for use as an art studio. Three years later, Radcliffe organized a group of local investors who called themselves the Peter Kirk Syndicate, and together they purchased the building outright. Their stated mission was to preserve the structure as a historic landmark and use it for the cultural enrichment of the community. The syndicate members donated their shares to form the Creative Arts League, which offered art classes and operated a small theater on the premises. What a steel magnate had built for commerce, a teacher had rescued for art.

The Peter Kirk Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and a full restoration followed in 1977 after the organization received federal tax credits. In 1991, the Creative Arts League was renamed the Kirkland Arts Center. Today KAC operates a nonprofit visual arts school offering ceramics, printmaking, painting, watercolor, and collage. From 2021 to 2023, the building received a seismic retrofit and roof renovation through a Building for the Arts grant. The exterior looks almost exactly as it did in the 1890s: the stretcher-bond brickwork, the tall arched windows, the metal finial atop the turret roof. The building measures 59 by 55 feet and sits on sloping ground at what was once Kirkland's most important intersection. Peter Kirk's steel town never materialized, but the building he raised from local clay and local ambition has outlasted every plan anyone ever had for it.