Preserving A Modern Past -- Bellevue Moves To Protect Those Things That Are Part Of Its Soul

The men's Wednesday lunch is always the same at the Meydenbauer Bay Yacht Club. Steak, salmon, salad, french fries, enjoyed by Eastside boat-owning gents old enough to remember a thing or two.

That's one sort of tradition.

The building itself, dating from 1906, is another.

First known as the Wildwood Park Dance Hall, it was reached by courting couples via excursion ferryboats. After Lake Washington was lowered and the boats couldn't dock, the couples faded away and the building became a roller rink.

In 1933, a local whaler bought it for a home and added two stories, and in 1946 the yacht club bought it. The building was redesigned in 1961 into a colonial-revival style mansion, painted white with columns and blue shutters. It hasn't changed since then.

And maybe it won't.

The club is number 15 on a survey of 50 Bellevue places and buildings that have some kind of cultural or historic significance, and potentially should be protected. Also on the list are an 1883 cabin, an old Baptist church the city plans to make into a teen center, the house of the teacher with the longest career in the state, the McKee building in Old Bellevue, the Puget Power building and the Vuecrest subdivision.

"One building we looked at but did not include was the Burgermaster," said Caroline Tobin, a Seattle preservation expert who contracted with the city to do the survey.

"Everyone thought it was so amusing that we were considering it. We were on `Almost Live.' We wanted to include it - it's an example of a kind of roadside architecture - but it's not 30 years old."

The idea of the survey, funded last fall with $20,000, came in large part from City Councilwoman Margot Blacker, Bellevue Historical Society past president.

"It's all about looking into whether there's stuff worth saving around here," she said. "The reason we did it, we have no inventory of what's of value in this city. We just don't know."

Added Tobin, "It's a way of documentation before more is lost. In Bellevue, there isn't a lot left."

What's worth saving has proved highly subjective in the past. The Union S High School, the oldest large public building in the city dating from the early 1900s, was demolished some years ago because it sat smack in the middle of land being developed as the downtown park and, the City Council decided, was too expensive to move.

That was a defeat for Blacker and the historical society, but they won a round when the council decided to rehabilitate the Winters house, on Bellevue Way, for park use at a cost of more than $1 million. The pink, "Spanish eclectic" house has since become the only Bellevue site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

People also disagree about Old Bellevue, where some of the city's heritage, in the form of ramshackle buildings from the 1930s, is slated for demolition to make way for new development.

Bill Lagen is the grandson of a man who owned two properties on the list: the yacht club and the Meydenbauer Bay Marina, which was once a winter harbor for whaling vessels. Lagen, 69, knows a great deal of local history, yet he's unenthused about the survey.

"It seems to me we ought to be looking forward, not looking back," he said. "There's really nothing to preserve." As for the marina, he said, "It's only a dock with a warehouse."

Lagen said the City Council should spend money on parks, not old buildings, but then attributes his statements partly to cynicism. "Nobody knows the history and nobody cares except a little bitty core of people," he said.

"The history I think is extremely important. I find myself as time goes by becoming more and more cynical. I've dedicated all the archives of the whaling business to the UW, but nobody cares. A hundred years from now somebody will look at it and say, `What's this?' and won't be able to make head nor tail of it."

Historical inventories are often the first step in a process that ends with ordinances to preserve old buildings. But such an outcome is far from assured. "That's the next process, to go through it politically," Blacker said. "We can do nothing. Even if we do nothing it's of tremendous value to the city to know where its historic resources are."

The city could then ask King County or federal authorities to place some of the sites on historic registers.

Even that, Blacker added, "protects nothing. Where you get protection for things is at the local level. We could decide that we need to preserve our history. We could set up a historic commission and a designation process. We could set up ordinances."

Blacker was enormously pleased with the consultants' work, she said, except for one glaring omission. "The Burgermaster should be on there. I really feel that."

The City Council will hear a presentation on the survey April 12. Historian Lee Pendergrass will discuss the historical overview he wrote to help place the buildings from various eras in a larger context.

Pendergrass's work, Blacker said, was "very moving. It could set you right into the strawberry field."

Pendergrass started with the native Americans first in the area. Yarrow Point, now an expensive enclave, was once a burial ground for the Sammammish River people, he said. White settlers did not establish claims until 1869, when William Meydenbauer, a baker who made soda crackers, built a cabin on 40 acres in future downtown Bellevue.

Pendergrass traces the city's development through frontier times, through the early 1900s, when baseball teams and churches arose, and through its agricultural phase - lasting until the 1940s, after the Lacey Murrow Bridge was built and the Freeman family built Bellevue Square. He continues through incorporation of the city in 1953, annexations, the building of the Evergreen Point Bridge in 1963 and Overlake Hospital in 1960, to the present.

He makes special mention of African Americans who worked in Newcastle's coal mines in the 1890s and devotes a whole segment to Japanese-American farmers, although he mentions in his summary that local histories have provided scant details.

"Instead, local historians have focused on the efforts of white settlers to transform Bellevue into an urban metropolis and praised city leaders for balancing growth with the preservation of open spaces and other amenities associated with rural life," Pendergrass wrote in a draft summary.

"While the contributions of individuals such as Meydenbauer, Ditty and the Freemans should not be discounted, it is important to recognize that their achievements did not come without a social cost which included evacuating the Japanese Americans to internment camps, which gave whites the opportunity to claim Japanese land for little or no cost."

Tobin will present a slide show of the 50 sites selected, which include properties dating from the 1880s to the 1950s. The sites, picked from 112 reviewed, had to be at least 30 years old; illustrate some aspect of cultural, political, economic or social history; be associated with the civic life of the community; possess architectural qualities (such as being representative of a style, period or method); and be authentic, original and exhibit integrity.

In Bellevue, integrity was a problem. "A number of buildings have been moved, a number have been remodeled," Tobin said. "That does compromise the integrity."

Some of the 50 sites may seem funny, Tobin said, but Bellevue's architectural legacy has to be viewed in perspective, not compared to Seattle - which, after all, doesn't fare that well compared to Boston or Rome.

"This was a farming community," she said. "It wasn't a place where people were building major structures."

Modest as they may be they have significance to people like Blacker, who, incidentally, is from Canada.

Virginia Lowder, the yacht-club manager, also likes the idea. She submitted the club for consideration and can't see how it could be harmful to have it listed, even if there were some sort of preservation law.

"It's the perfect thing for it."

----------------------------------------------- BELLEVUE HISTORY WORTH PROTECTING

Among the 50 sites selected on a survey of Bellevue places and buildings that have some kind of cultural or historic significance are:

-- The Burrows Cabin, the oldest structure in the city - a log cabin built by Albert S. Burrows, who arrived in the area in 1882; now on 112th Avenue Northeast.

-- The Philbrook House, built in the 1890s, one of the few Victorian-style structures in the city; was a restaurant in the 1920s and '30s, on Main Street.

-- The homes of Charles Bovee, Bellevue's first mayor and of Frank Odle, who retired in 1968 after 55 years of teaching.

-- Wright's Barber Shop, built about 1930 on Main Street; still there, still a barber shop.

-- Japanese Packing Plant - built in 1933 in Midlakes area as cooperative storage shed for Japanese-American farmers; recently remodeled.

-- Highland Community Center, built during the Great Depression, part of a federal government project.

-- Overlake Blueberry Farm, 1947.

-- Vuecrest subdivision, 1947, one of the first modern subdivisions in the area; winding streets to take advantage of views.

-- Puget Power Building, 1956, the first structure to exceed Bellevue's three-story height limit.

-- Washington Mutual Bank, built in 1956 on Bellevue Way and an early adaptation of the international style in banks featuring more baroque styles of neoclassicism and art nouveau.