In this interview with Kay Bullitt, the second segment of an interview conducted on May 17th, 2004, the longtime Seattle preservationist describes how Historic Seattle, and preservation in general, evolved from the mid-1970s onward.
HM: So in the beginning, Historic Seattle was a small organization with a small staff...
KB: We started in the Smith Tower. The staff grew depending on what we were doing at the time. The Historic Seattle office was in several locations down in Pioneer Square for most of its history. There were times when people said we should move to the Good Shepherd Center, so we could be in our own place and not have to pay rent but we had so much activity going on in Pioneer Square and that area, people really didn't want to be based in Wallingford.
In the Good Shepherd Center's early days we were constantly losing money. Alan Black (on Historic Seattle's Council at the time) was really fed up with it. 'Why did we get into this thing,' he'd ask. But I'm glad we held onto it. And I guess there's more politics about that than anything we've ever dealt with.
HM: I'm assuming you've seen some progress in historic preservation in Seattle since Historic Seattle was formed.
KB: Initially we couldn't get downtown to agree to come under landmark regulations. But there has been so much change in people's interest, and their readiness to participate. The influence of some of the things we did.
There's just been so much improvement in the stewardship of housing throughout the city. Historic Seattle's work has made people much more aware of what they have, and much less ready to tear something down and replace it.
KB: The most exciting thing about Historic Seattle's work in the early days was the inventory of neighborhoods. That's when we had the most staff until very recently. I just loved all those books we produced about each of the neighborhoods.
Victor (Steinbrueck) walked with me and a group of students through one of the neighborhoods we surveyed, and pointed out interesting architectural details and houses that should be saved. I walked through the neighborhood recently and was pleased to see that two of the houses the kids picked out are still there. My son worked on that project too, up in Queen Anne. I loved that the city was sort of scornful of what we'd done because we used volunteers. But as Victor said, "people live in those neighborhoods, they see things that architectural students would overlook."
And there were a lot that were saved. In this neighborhood (North Capitol Hill), a house at the corner of Aloha wasn't an "A" but it was a "B," when the time came for Merrill Court to be built, we were able to save that house.
HM: That was a great project. There's an update of the city-wide survey going on now. It's a similar to the 70s model. There are a few preservation specialists that are training and coordinating teams of volunteers.
KB: That was a wonderful way to do it because it got people so interested in their neighborhoods. I think that was a major factor in the Central District. People suddenly realized that they had really good housing, good houses that should be saved.
HM: And that was during a period well before gentrification happened in the Central District. The description in the survey of the Central District is very interesting because there's a lot of evidence of urban renewal efforts in the Central District where they just razed a building in anticipation of something else or because old buildings were seen as a blight on the neighborhood. To this day there are still more empty lots in the Central District than in practically any other neighborhood because of that.
KB: And there's so much new building now. I've been working with the James Washington Foundation trying to save James Washington's house. The blocks around the house make up such an interesting little area because you've got the Gross House that belonged to the man who really developed the area around 23rd. It's still standing though its been altered, and then you have the Washington House and Homer Harris Park that's named for an activist who lived there in the 40s. He faced a great deal of discrimination. He wasn't allowed in the University of Washington, so he went to the University of Iowa, and then to Maharry Medical School, and then he became a doctor.
There's an apartment house at Thomas, I think, where African Americans stayed when they first came to Seattle. That was built back in 1906 at the time of the Alaskan Yukon Pacific Exposition because some people in the black community had been to Chicago and thought it would be very nice for people to come to Seattle to see, this but there wasn't any place for them to stay. So they built that apartment house that served as a way of entry for many people's families.
I hope we can save a lot of that.
HM: There's definitely an interest in it. People call Historic Seattle about various issues, but a lot of people are interested in tours of the Central District.
KB: In the early days, some people just wanted Historic Seattle to develop endangered, important buildings. They weren't interested in education and they weren't interested in advocacy. There was a lot of pressure from the Historic Seattle Council to just focus on real estate development. Now we're very much an educational and advocacy organization, but in the early days we were always being pressured to get into a project to save something, theaters and such. But the Council and the staff weren't ready to get into advocacy. We could do it as individuals though.
HM: Now more than half the board is very interested in advocacy and the other half are supportive of it.
KB: I guess I never was very good at being an advocate. I just couldn't understand why other people didn't appreciate what they had.
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