Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

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Seattle is a city with a rich treasure of historic homes in its older neighborhoods like Queen Ann, Capitol Hill, Madrona and Montlake (among others). But like all cities with such an architectural heritage, it is under threat from development and skyrocketing land values. Homes built in the 19th and early 20th centuries were smaller than the preference today. With the enormous value of the land on which these homes sit and the added fact that the homes are undersized for the lots they sit on–you have a built in incentive for builders to come in, buy the home and land, tear down the house and build a big box in its place.

That’s what’s happening all over my Madrona neighborhood. I’ve already written a post on a teardown on 38th Avenue (A Seattle Craftsman Comes Crashing Down). Within a block of my home, a spec builder bought a small old house, tore it down and is erecting this monster (see right) in its place.

I’m happy to say that all is not lost in this war. Some homeowners actually make good, tasteful decisions that involve restoring their homes even as they remodel and update them to modern standards. I’ve enclosed a photo of a beautiful remodel on 36th Avenue in Madrona. This owner should be proud of the decisions he/she made to restore this home and add luster to its exterior and yard.

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If you’re like me, when you first visited Madrona (for me it was while house-hunting) you fell in love with its beautiful old homes, stately Cascades views and its wooded setting. After all, if you didn’t care about these qualities you could’ve found much more house at much lower cost by buying a suburban palazzo out in Issaquah.

One day last spring, I walked past a 1904 Craftsman home I had long admired only to see it being razed to the ground. The new owner intended to install a swimming pool and cabana in its place. I blogged about this incident in Another Seattle Craftsman Comes Crashing Down. The shock of this loss of such a beautiful old home in my neighborhood led me to explore what safeguards are in place to maintain and preserve our old housing stock. The unfortunate answer is that presently there is little that can be done. The destruction of this home and its replacement use was perfectly legal.

That being said, there are important ways to work within the community to educate our Madrona residents about the value of historic home preservation. At the February Madrona Community Council meeting, Beth Chave of the Department of Neighborhoods-Historic Preservation, introduced the issue to her audience asking it to consider the differences between a neighborhood like Madrona and one like Issaquah. Madrona has a long and full history, it has scores of fine old homes and woods and Cascades views. All of these constitute a treasure and we residents are stewards of that treasure. If we ignore or forget what we have then we stand a good chance of losing it.

So it is incumbent on us to learn about Madrona’s architectural heritage. In order to appreciate this historic legacy, we must inventory and study these great public buildings, Queen Anne Victorians, Ellsworth Storey homes and Craftsman bungalows. To paraphrase the historian George Santayana: “those who do not understand their history are doomed to lose it.”

Ellsworth Storey’s Epiphany Church
chapel credit: Alyssa Burroughs at
Historylink.org

Myron Ogden House credit: David Wilma

I’m pleased to note that there are two neighborhood buildings which have already been designated historic landmarks:

* Ellsworth Storey’s Church of the Epiphany chapel (1911),
3719 E Denny Way
* Myron Ogden House 1912), 702 35th Avenue
* Charles R. Bussell Residence (1892), 1630 36th Avenue

Charles Bussell House
credit: David Wilma

There should be more, and I’d like to encourage this process by calling for interested residents to join me in studying our Madrona architectural heritage. Some of the ways we could do this are:

1. choose a local public building and research its history and propose it for city landmark status.
2. work with private homeowners who wish secure landmark status for their homes.
3. compile a historic survey of neighborhood homes.

If you’d be interested in joining this effort or if you know of a homeowner interested in gaining historic designation, please contact me via e-mail at this site. Madrona needs your help if we are to preserve our local homes and heritage.

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Welcome to Madrona!

The Seattle Architectural Foundation hosted a Madrona neighborhood tour on September 20th. I’ve lived here since 1998 and have tried to learn as much as I can about my neighborhood. But this tour was an immense treasury of architectural history and appreciation.

Madrona’s first human inhabitants were Duwamish and Squamish Indians who hunted and fished along the banks of what would eventually be named Lake Washington. I was amazed to hear the tour leader say that there were once islands in Lake Washington (when the water level was several feet lower than now).

Queene Anne front door

In the late 19th century, much of the land on the downhill side of 34th Avenue was purchased by the Puget Land Company, which promptly built a lakeside hotel, trolley line from downtown, Japanese teahouse and other amenities, hoping to make Madrona an attractive locale for recreation. The trolley’s wooden trestle bridge that descended down to the lake along Yesler Avenue was in its day the tallest such bridge in the world. Eventually, homes were built, streets laid out and utilities installed so that Madrona became a residential neighborhood.

The 1903 Alaska-Yukon Exposition (housed where the University of Washington campus now stands) further popularized area when Lake Washington Boulevard was built to connect the campus to the lakeshore hotel and other nearby attractions. The Boulevard and many of its adjacent parks were planned by the Olmstead Brothers, who also designed the Boston Commons, Golden Gate Park and many others.

Madrona Queen Anne Victorian

Among its first residents were the Chinese who worked on the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the 1940s, this was the major Jewish neighborhood in Seattle (the first Jewish neighborhood was Yesler Avenue near Pioneer Square). By the 1960s, there was a strong African-American presence (though there were ‘White Only’ real estate covenants still in force in this neighborhood). The Black Panthers considered the area ‘friendly turf’ and even used the Madrona Playfield for military style drilling (imagine that!).

The tour leader told of a fascinating legend that Judge Alfred Battle, who built Battle House in a style reminiscent of a Southern plantation. The current owner of the house standing across the street claims that several decades ago a Seattle police officer built the home that he now owns. He claims that this his home contains an entry to a boarded up underground tunnel that leads to the Bussell House. Apparently, the Judge and police officer during Prohibition were bootlegging partners. This is a Seattle we don’t often hear about!

A great historical source about Madrona is Junius Rochester’s Last Electric Trolley

The preponderance of Craftsman style homes here attests to the early 20th century architectural style prevailing when many of Madrona’s first homes were built (1900-1910).
926 36th Avenue: a beautifully executed Craftsman historic restoration (with expansion)

Thankfully, many of these homes remain though a number of beautiful Craftsman have been torn down (or ‘desecrated’ in my view) in order to install megamasions (‘McMansion’ is a nice turn of phrase I think) in their place. For an example of such desecration, see Another Craftsman Comes Crashing Down.

I had a few quarrels with some of the specific information conveyed by the two tour guides; and with some of the architectural/critical approach of the guides. Before the tour, I asked the tour organizer if she would inform the tour leaders that I am especially interested in historic preservation issues (since we’re losing some of our best old local housing stock). I also asked my own tour leader during the tour if he would mention this topic. But there seems to be a prevailing value-free notion among at least some architects that you musn’t abuse the work of your fellow architects. For example, we passed the vintage Madrona gas station on 34th Avenue, whose current owner has assaulted the beautiful original Mission design by boarding up the arches in order to create new interior space. The tour leader’s comment on the renovation was (and I paraphrase):

While we recognize and appreciate the value of our historic buildings, we must also recognize that nothing in life is ever static. It is always a good idea to preserve our architectural heritage when we can. But there is also nothing wrong with change when it comes.

Madrona restored hearth

I thought it was a hazy, lazy cop out. Since the tour leader explicitly mentioned that he and others leading neighborhood tours never say anything bad about any of the homes on their tours for fear of possibly offending home owners, I began to wonder whether remaining values-neutral was a tendency common to the entire profession. Perhaps the architecture profession is a bit like other guild-like professions in which the practitioners band together to protect their own. If you live in close quarters with others of your kind you don’t want to sully your living quarters making it uncomfortable for both you and your fellows.

Another thought came to me which might explain this approach: an architect is always at the mercy of his client. He must please his client or lose the commission. Therefore, architects perhaps learn to tailor their ideas and attitudes more to please the client than to please themselves. I imagine that the life of most architects cannot be easy since very few have the liberty of a Frank Gehry to choose their projects. Very few have the liberty to make only the types of buildings they want to make. Maybe this makes architects very circumspect in expressing their true critical evaluation of the work of others.

Madrona Auto vintage gas station (‘historic preservation’)

At any rate, I think a values-neutral tour is a somewhat boring tour. I wish I could have heard a more critical approach to the architecture we were looking at. Not all of it can be good or great. I’d like to know about the good, the bad and the ugly.

The tour leaders made a few factual errors as well. While there may be many fewer madrona trees in Madrona than there were when Indians hunted here; to say that “few are left” in Madrona is an inaccurate statement that could be disproven by walking through Madrona’s greenbelt areas like the Leschi Natural Area (which I think of as in Madrona). Another comment that the only view of the List-Bussell House (and a poor one at that) was from the front is also not accurate. There are nicer and fuller views of the house from the street below it downhill to the east.

Despite my few caveats, this was an exhilirating and informative tour and I’m grateful to the Foundation for introducing Seattleites to their architectural heritage.

During the tour, which took place on a gorgeous, warm sunny fall day I took the following photos of Madrona interiors and exteriors:

Batchelder tile on Madrona Deli building facade

One of my neighbors wrote a wonderful meditation on historic preservations issues which I’ve included here (Seattle Historic Preservation). She notes that my own house built in 1906 has an unusual pagoda-style roof which might be attributed to the influence of the Chinese who lived in Madrona in large numbers at the turn of the century. For more photos of the interior and exterior of my home, take a look my Craftsman Home and Lake Washington galleries.

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My neighbor, Michelle Kellett read my post, Another Seattle Craftsman Comes Crashing Down, about the destruction of a neighboring historic home. As often happens when someone comes along to review your ideas, her meditations on the subject produced a more thoughtful and well-rounded perspective than my own earlier post. She adds great nuance in her discussion of the issues of historic preservation:

I, too, was distressed to see the Craftsman house on 38th torn down. It was a terrific shock to see the demo dogs there last week, though they clearly were salvaging everything salvageable.

But my reaction was nuanced by some neighborhood history as well.

We bought our house around the same time that the previous owners of the 38th St. house did, and like them, had to undertake repairs so extensive that the two houses were uninhabitable for months. They spent a great deal of money shoring up their house, and repairing it. Like our own house, it was determined to throw itself into the lake, and was prevented from doing so by the painstaking and expensive application of pipe piers, house-raising, etc. In addition, I believe they also replaced the foundation. They, like their next door neighbor, were young people made wealthy in the technology industry. In fact, after restoring the house to a degree of splendor it may never have possessed in the first place, they decided it was too small, and bought a bigger house elsewhere.

The house next door to the late Craftsman may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is an important bit of Seattle’s architectural history in its own right. Built in the teens or twenties, it is one of our rare stucco Romantic fantasies, compounded of equal parts French chateau, Italian villa and Spanish castle in miniature. This style was adopted by the wealthy of the era between the wars, especially in the West, and can be found in the work of Julia Morgan and, here in Seattle, of Fred Anhalt. It is characterized by its orientation to a courtyard rather than to the street, like its European antecedents (hence the small windows at the front); also by elaborate and very fine finishes throughout. Like the Craftsman style, it is more a meditation on an idealized past than the recreation of a style that once actually existed. I guess that’s a form of originality. The owner has meticulously restored its former glories (including a private chapel!), and has resisted needless and jarring “modernization” throughout.

I should say here that I have never met the owner, and know most of the preceding through my own interest in Seattle architectural history, and a tour of the house kindly given to me by one of the craftsmen working on the house shortly before she was able to move in. I do know that only a person of extraordinary means could afford such a restoration, and that only a person truly in love with her house would endure it.

I have very mixed feelings about the way in which the Craftsman was acquired and demolished. I am especially surprised that the demolition was permitted. I myself owned two neighboring houses on Phinney Ridge, one little better than a shack, and was told that the City would not permit the demolition of viable housing unless it were replaced — that is, I could not join the properties and tear down the shack to enlarge my yard. Perhaps she has had to expiate the demolition by replacing housing elsewhere in the city.

I also have very mixed feelings about the nexus of wealth, housing and history currently working itself out in our neighborhood.

Madrona has had its ups and downs. Very fine housing stock was built in the oughts through the teens here, sometimes replacing and sometimes side by side with more or less attractive and often very shoddy farmhouses. Were money and a lack of historical perspective a good or a bad thing then?

In good times the housing stock was repaired, restored and sometimes replaced. In bad times, it was left to rot, or left to whatever the inhabitants could afford in the way of repairs. In the sixties and seventies, most of these houses fell into the latter predicament. On the one hand, a shame. On the other, many families of very modest means were raised in these lovely houses with lovely views. Our own house endured hideous cabinetry, dreadful repairs and, mostly, criminal neglect. But that neglect and lack of means also did much to preserve the existence of these houses — their owners could not afford to tear them down and replace them. Would money have been a good thing or a bad thing? Some houses became so decrepit that, in fact, they had to be torn down — a particularly wrenching recent example was the Italian consulate south of us, whose owners, bless their hearts, donated the land for a public park.

The Craftsman on 38th had its own complicated history. Its former owners had the money and the will to restore a nearly uninhabitable structure. What if that money had not come along? The house would eventually have been condemned and ordered demolished. Or what if the “wrong” money had come along? We have all seen horrible re-muddles in our neighborhood, at every point along the economic scale: from the pathetic cheap fixes we continue to uncover in our own house to expensive horrors that are not easily undone by a later owner (walls added or removed, soul-destroying additions, weirdly wrong-headed roofs or siding or windows). In the Craftsman’s case, the right money came along to effect a beautiful restoration, and then even more money came along after that and took the whole thing down.

I have long admired your house — I especially love your unique roofline, with its pagoda reference, which seems to me to be an inspired conflation of styles for a Craftsman house sited in a city with such a strong Japanese (at the time it was built) presence. I am very grateful for your committment to your house and its neighborhood. If you’ve read this far, thank you for considering a few tangential thoughts on our neighborhood.

Michele Kellett