The Place We Called Holly Park -- Stories From A Community That Soon Will Be No More

The wrecking ball and bulldozers descended upon Holly Park on Wednesday to begin transforming the World War II-era public housing community. After more than four years of planning, negotiations, protests, delays and more negotiations, Holly Park is being demolished to undergo a $180 million redevelopment.

The 102-acre neighborhood with its look-alike homes and winding dead-end streets is being converted into larger, more modern homes with private yards and squared streets. The redesign is meant to eliminate the concentration of the very poor and the isolation it brings (median annual income of those in the complex: $7,000). Instead, it is to be a mixed-class development, with poor, working-class and middle-class people living side-by-side.

The demolition crews have begun changing the landscape of Holly Park. But the face of Holly Park has been transforming over the last 20 years.

During its first few decades, Holly Park housed mostly Caucasians and some African Americans. By 1975, Caucasians made up about 65 percent and African Americans 27 percent of the population - with Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and other minorities totaling only 8 percent.

By 1993, that 8 percent had soared to 49 percent, largely because of an influx of refugees and immigrants. African Americans increased to 33 percent, and Caucasian households dropped to 18 percent.

It was to capture these changes - and to document a community that soon will be no more - that the Wing Luke Asian Museum last year embarked on the Holly Park Oral History Project. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Seattle Housing Authority, the project has been interviewing former and current Holly Park residents.

"When people talk about public housing residents," museum director Ron Chew notes, "they talk about welfare queens and drug addicts.

"We want to give different people of Holly Park a chance to tell their own stories . . . to capture the struggles and successes of everyday people trying to make it in America."

These are excerpts from some of the oral-history project's interviews with residents:

Eltrina McCray: `One thing I liked . . . is that you knew everybody'

Eltrina McCray, 29, is the director of the Neighborhood House's Child Care Center at Holly Park. She lived in Holly Park from 1975 to 1979.

"About 20 years ago, I moved in with my grandmother after my mother died in '75. I was 7, about 8 years old. We actually stayed in here about three to four years before we moved around and ended up in High Point (a housing project in West Seattle). But I remember here really well."

How did your mother die?

"From what was told to me and reading her death certificate, the doctor was not authorized to do getting her tubes tied (after delivering her baby). He wasn't authorized to do the operation and he did, and everything got screwed up. She was given too much of the wrong medicine. And she ended up having a cardiac arrest . . ."

What was it like in Holly Park when you were growing up here?

"I remember in the neighborhood, they used to have a breakfast by - who was it? I think it was the (Black) Panthers. I remember going over there every morning . . . I remember the free lunch programs . . .

"One thing I liked about the community is that you knew everybody. . . . Probably pretty much all the children in the community knew each other because everybody just played together, being at the parks, being at Wing Luke, at Van Asselt, we just knew everybody. It didn't matter what culture, what race you were, they (adults) were looking out. It would be dark and we can still be out in the back yard or at someone's house in the cul de sac playing, and even today. My brother used to live here before he moved about a couple of months ago and I still bring my kids over to his house . . . I let them play with my own children, and it's dark outside."

How did you end up working back here at Holly Park?

"I started out as a teacher in High Point. It was so funny because the kids I knew, I grew up with their parents. Kids are looking at me, like, `How do you know me?' A lot of people in the community say, `Oh, Eltrina. I haven't seen you in 10 years.' I haven't seen you in 10 years, either. Wow! How's everything going?

"I never thought that I'd be back in this community teaching these children, my friends' children. I loved it. And I transferred from over there (High Point) to over here (Holly Park). Got a promotion and transferred and (now I'm) a supervisor here."

Does that make you feel strange that your old neighbors are still living here?

"No, it's not really weird to me. It still gave me that sense of community. To see someone you haven't seen in so many years and they're still there. I never thought of it as, `Wow, you're still here.' Nothing like that."

Do you think that having been a resident, you can relate better to the parents who bring their kids here? Or to the kids being raised here?

"I think so. Someone from the outside who hasn't been in a community like this, if you listen to everything that goes on or hear all the stories - `Oh, it's like this. It's violent, drugs and stuff' - and they get paranoid. `Oh, I don't want to be near something like that.' I don't feel that way at all.

"I see a lot of parents out here, the ones that I've met, are really trying really hard. Most of them go to school, trying to take care of their families, single families - similar to where I came from, so I know the struggles and stuff that they're going through.

"I always encourage them to go on . . . I've been there, too. They respect that, and I think they like to hear that. It helps."

Dai Giang Nguyen: His art is his gift to his community and country

Dai Giang Nguyen, 53, is a Vietnamese refugee who created "upside-down" art, an internationally acclaimed form that - literally and philosophically - turns subjects and ideas on their head. In a press release, he explains that upside-down art is about "the life of the homeless, the unemployed, the unhappy and the victims of violence in the world." It is also about opposition to "one-way" thinking. He has lived in Holly Park for three years.

He spoke mostly through a translator.

According to your resume, you were living in Moscow when Vietnam was at the height of war. How did you manage to be sent to Moscow?

"I study about art in Vietnam from beginning 1961. After I graduate high school of art, 1965, I continue to study college of art, 1966 to 1968. After that, when I study very good, they send me to Russia, Moscow." He graduated from art college there in 1974.

What got you interested in art in the first place?

Translator: "When he was 16 years old, his teacher told the students to draw a picture of a rose. All the students drew the rose from what it looked like facing them. But Nguyen drew the backside of the rose. The teacher recognized his potential, and thought his student would become famous for his unique perspective."

What did your parents do for a living when you were growing up?

Translator: "His parents were in business in Hanoi. Four or five of his 12 siblings were also artists."

What did you do when you finished studying in Moscow and returned to Vietnam?

"When I come back from Russia to Hanoi, I got (back to my wife and two children) but my family feel very different about life. My painting, I cannot develop. I cannot do what I want . . . I take my family, my brother, my sister to embassy Chinese. We want asylum political. This is 1980.

"One day, we were at the embassy Chinese. That night, police Vietnamese broke us and arrested us to prison. After that, I in prison seven years, three months, 19 days." This was around the time of border skirmishes between China and Vietnam, so his attempt to seek asylum was considered siding with the enemy.

What was prison like?

"Labor. Only labor. Not drawing."

After seven months in prison, his wife and children were released. Three years later, his wife married someone else. After he was released, he arranged to take his son and she kept their daughter. He thought it would be easier to raise a son than a daughter.

After prison, he could no longer teach art in the college. He was also scared of the government. He wanted to do his art, but he thought that if the government found out, he would be imprisoned again. He escaped from Vietnam to Hong Kong by boat so he could be free to express himself through his art.

When he got to Hong Kong, he was imprisoned again, from 1988 to 1990. By that time, all the refugee camps closed and countries were repatriating people back to Vietnam and sending them somewhere else.

After a couple of years, he was moved to a resettlement camp, where he could practice his art. He had an art show in Hong Kong and started becoming known. Newspapers published articles about him.

Immigration officials interviewed him and cleared his way to come to the United States.

Translator: "He heard about Holly Park through someone he met at a Tet (Vietnamese New Year) celebration at Union Station, where he was exhibiting some art. His new friend brought him to apply for public housing in 1992. He moved into Holly Park two years later."

Has the United States been what you thought it would be?

Translator: "When he came here, this country gave him the opportunity, the freedom to create his art, to do what he likes most in life . . . His art is his gift to his community and this country."

Doris Morgan: `You don't drink like I did and not have results from it'

Doris Morgan, 65, is president of the Holly Park Community Council. She has lived in Holly Park since 1978.

"My life hasn't been boring. Well, the first 30 years of my adulthood, I wasted. Totally. I think the next 30 years got better. I did something positive along the way in it."

At age 15, Morgan was already an alcoholic. Unhappy with her home life, she got married at age 16 to escape her family. Her parents got her marriage annulled, but Morgan did not settle back into adolescence. She hitchhiked to California, where at first she worked as a live-in nanny for a lawyer in Beverly Hills.

"I thought I had it made. All that ocean and sunshine. But everything has a price.

"I started living in the streets and earn money with my body. It wasn't like it was today, with perverts and murderers. Still, it wasn't a good lifestyle."

She married one of her "johns" and they fled to Idaho, where they soon divorced. She stayed on in Idaho, worked low-wage jobs and started marriage No. 3, which lasted for 12 years.

"He protected me. There are some men who need to protect a woman. They need her to be dependent on them. We ran into a problem when I sobered up and started getting well and taking care of my own affairs.

"Nothing in particular at that time caused me to sober up. We had adopted the girl (Dorothy) early." Dorothy was an 11-year-old from next door, whose father was thrown into jail for molesting her older sister.

"I had custody of her until she was 18. 'Til she got married, actually. That isn't how I lost her. I didn't lose her by law. I lost her because she couldn't deal with my drinking anymore. . . . Alcohol and drugs make you lose a lot of things: husbands, kids, houses, cars. You name it, I lost it."

She moved to Washington in the late 1960s and ended up in Seattle to live with her brother, sister in-law, Darlene, and newborn niece, Pat. Her brother abandoned the family and Morgan was left to care for Darlene and Pat.

She kept up her drinking binges until she ended up in detox.

"And they led me in like a little child. I had by then progressed to being a rip-roarin' wino . . ."

When you walked out, what did you decide for yourself?

"I really said, `This is it.' And I got myself straightened up. Fell in love with this little girl. Pat had a way of just wrapping me around her little finger in my heart, you know. And knew that I really had to make a decision if I was gonna commit to this long-term thing."

Darlene died, and in 1978 Morgan got custody of Pat and moved into Holly Park.

When you decided to sober up and commit yourself to Pat, what was your dream for yourself and for Pat?

"To get her through high school, graduate, and then to college so that she would have an education to do something with her life and not have to live like I did. My main dream was to get her through the teen years, that she didn't wind up being like her dad or myself.

"For myself, I actually wanted to be a paralegal . . . when my health broke, that's where I was heading, was getting my things together so I could get into college and become a paralegal.

She developed heart problems and arthritis of the spine. She was declared disabled in 1981 and now uses a wheelchair.

Did your health problems have anything to do with your alcoholism?

"Yes. Always. You don't drink like I did and not have results from it. . . . There was one drunk I was on for two years. And in it, I was in nine major car wrecks. Well, that does puts your traumatic arthritis in there, and causes some of the other problems."

Do you feel slighted for not being able to pursue your dreams? You finally got on the right track, and you couldn't go any further?

"No, not really slighted. If I do, then I'd have to blame myself. Consequences.

"I was housebound actually up until, it was probably in '89 that I got depressed, and '90. I think I told you how I came out of that depression. I didn't?

"There's a little boy killed out here. And he's 11 years old. And it was gang, we think that it was. And I watched him grow from a little bitty thing. And it just shocked me so bad that this little boy was dead. And I sat over there with my tolerance and my training and done nothing. Absolutely nothing for these children. And it made me sick. And I got up and went and got dressed and went down and talked to his mother. And she said, `Doris, don't let my little boy's death be in vain. You do something.' So that's what got me up and out in the streets again. And I started the youth center down here, the youth council.

"It gives me a good feeling that I know that you can be where I was at when I was 16, but you really can come through this. That there is a way for you to hit that wall, if people allow you to hit that wall, and come out of it and make something positive out of your life.

"And I guess that's the thing that I probably tell young people more than anything, is you can do it. It's possible. I don't care if you're a gang member. I don't care what you've been doing. It's possible to turn that life around and do something positive with it. I don't care how old you are. You can do that."

Enat Amare: Wiping away the connections to her native Ethiopia

Enat Amare, in her mid-30s, is a mother of four from Ethiopia. She has lived in Holly Park for five years.

"Nine years ago, I came to the U.S. It was wartime (in Ethiopia). I go running to Sudan . . . six days walking. No shoes. Shoes burn me so I throw away shoes.

"I go to Red Cross camp. I went to apply for U.S. It took four years to process."

Do you ever miss Ethiopia?

"My country - I have no dream. Others (political leaders) go, others come. It's the same. From my country, I'm abused. She don't have anything now. Something died. Ethiopia is already dead. Ethiopia, she is dead."

Amare puts her palms together and makes a wiping motion. She wipes away any connections to the land she once called home.

Don't you want your children to know where you came from?

"Why? Ethiopia, she is dead. These children, they do good here. They don't know Ethiopia. Every day fighting. Every day war. Fighting over language, fighting over religion. Every century."

What kind of future do you want for yourself and your children?

"I have dream now. Now I want to try to take some training, help my children with speaking, reading . . . This country help me a lot. I say, `I love America.' I dream my children working in good job and doing good for this country. Maybe my children be doctors, be movie stars. I want my children be good generation. For me, I have no education, so I push them."

Having come here as a refugee, with no education, no English skills, how have you been able to survive?

"Families take care of me. That's what I like about this country. Many people support you. Any office, any business you go, they help you.

"They teach you language, help you understand and you become citizen with rights. Nobody throw you out and say, `No, she's refugee.' "

Helen B. Hicks: `Let's move you to a better place . . . called Holly Park'

Helen B. Hicks, 53, is the director of Tiny Tots Development Center, just two blocks east of Holly Park. She lived in Holly Park in 1956 and then again in 1967.

Why did your family leave Shreveport, La?

"We actually didn't come to live. We came to just visit my uncle whom we hadn't seen in about 20 years. He disappeared, and Red Cross located him in Seattle. So my uncle came to visit us in Louisiana and told my father, his only brother, that we should come to Seattle. It was a better place to live. . . . We all decided to come see the Northwest and we (were) thinking about moving but (had) not actually had our minds made up. And when my mother arrived here, she became very very ill . . . and they told her she would only have two weeks to live. She couldn't travel back on the train. We came by train because my father was a railroad man.

"Kids know everything now, but I was 12. My mother was pregnant. . . . I just knew she was sick, so when they told us she had two weeks to live, and she couldn't travel, we were stuck, and so my uncle found this old rickety house in Chinatown and we just moved in. On Maynard near that spice place. I remembered that it always smelled like spices.

"Oh, I hated this city. It rained every day and it smelled like spice.

"My mother found a pretty good doctor, I guess, and he told her that she needed an abortion. I never heard the word `abortion' before, but they just said that she needed to get rid of the baby and she would live.

"So she said that she was thinking about it even though she didn't want to do it, but he told her to come to his office on a Saturday and to come in the back door and that kinda alarm her, so she said no. `If I perish, if I die, I'll just have to die because (of) my religious beliefs. I don't want to do that.' So she decided to keep the baby, and we just were like around the bedside waiting for her die, but God intervene. We prayed and she lived and the baby boy, he was born. He's a fine musician now.

"So then our family, by her being so sickly, we hit some hard times because the railroad didn't want to hire my father. Said he was too old to be rehired up here. We were all picking beans and trying to make ends meet.

"For some reason, I took two of my sisters and I wrote a little note and I decided to go into the streets . . . and I talked to a police officer. I said that there was a family that needs help. I didn't say that it was us. . . . And so he said, `Well, go down the street.' He pointed me to the public safety building.

"I took the same little note and I was so scared because when I got in, (there) were all around me Caucasians, just everywhere, and I had never seen one Caucasian that close in my whole life in Louisiana. And they had this note and they were asking me all kinds of personal questions. `Where do your father work? What do you do?' I panic. I wouldn't give any answers and I guess it was a social worker. She kept us there all day and they were giving us ice cream and asking all these weird questions, and I just panic. I thought I'm in trouble now. My mother's going to really, really have it hard.

"And so this lady (came) back to the house. And, OK, my mother . . . was just vomiting, just really, really sick. And so she says, `I'm going to help this family.'

"And my mother says, `Who is this lady?' She was so afraid. My father says, `What is going on?'

"And so they took over . . . they said, `Let's move you to a better place. And the place is called Holly Park.' We drove, it seemed like to me just for hours, from Chinatown to Holly Park . . . Where is this place Holly Park?

"Holly Park was really pretty in those days. Flowers and everything and all. And I didn't understand, I had never seen apartments like this before.

"So we stayed six months only, thank God, but it was good experience. My father was hired (by) the Boeing Co. and so we bought a home on 26th and Judkins.

"I had a second chance to live in Holly Park after I graduated from Garfield High School and I was married in '63. He was in the military in Germany. So we stayed in Germany for three years. He was going to be discharged within six months. So he was on the East Coast, and I came home (to Seattle) and he applied for Holly Park, and we were granted Holly Park again . . .and had a real nice experience. We still only stayed six months again, and we purchased our home on Beacon Hill. But I had two wonderful experiences in Holly Park, and I think it is just a real good place to have a good beginning. . . . Always look at Holly Park as a place to begin. Not to live there forever, unless you are handicapped or (a) senior citizen, but it is a good beginning."

Bunly Yun: Loing Cambodia - and leaving it becaus of war, famine

Bunly Yun, 32, is a father of three from Cambodia. He has lived in Holly Park for 10 years and helps coordinate Soccer in the Street, a youth program for four public housing communities.

Was this your first home in Seattle or Washington?

"My first place (was) nearby the Safeway that you see when you come here nearby Holly Park. I don't go anywhere, just live there maybe one year and I saw around me . . . Seattle Housing. I begin to apply to Seattle Housing and I get the place here and live here for 10 years. I love Holly Park very much because Holly Park gave me the good opportunity, safety. Since I live in Holly Park, nothing's happened to me."

When people who don't live here talk about public housing and read about this neighborhood, they think there's a lot of criminal activity here.

"It still has some, but it depend on the people living, cooperate together, get involved together. If people live nearby see something happen, report it right away."

Cambodia wasn't so safe when you left. What was it like during the 1970s and 1980s up until the time you left?

"I love my country, but I leave my country because there's war, because it's starvation, people's no freedoms, no school . . . I cannot survive without those, so that's why I leave my country to here. I want to see my country freedom, peace, probably I go back."

What did you do in Cambodia?

"Before the Communists took over, I was a student and I helped my parents to do . . . farm, big farm."

How long did it take between the time you applied to come to the U.S. and the time you actually set foot here?

"At that time, I live with my family. My family was reject by the U.S. My parents wait, just wait. They don't apply to other country but they just stay in the camp more than three year."

Do you know why they rejected your parents?

"At the time, because my parents, he answer not quite right. That's why the U.S. interrogator saying him was getting involved with the Khmer Rouge. But he doesn't. He answer wrong."

When were they finally able to come here?

"They come like in 1987, late 1987."

What was your first job here in the U.S.?

"My first job was dishwasher, it's a big machine at Space Needle. I loved that place. Wonderful place."

What kind of life did you picture for yourself here in America when you first came?

"I think I get stuck because I live in the apartment. There's no one give me the idea what I suppose to do because it's really hard to get to know what America can help me. What school, what job can fit to me? I don't know at all, I just go to school and study English."

How did you end up going to Seattle Housing Authority?

"One day when I live in the apartment, one Cambodian people, they walked across my apartment. . . . I don't meet my own people very often, so I catched that people. I let them visit my apartment. It's kind of sharing the information, how we survive in America. At the time, she told me she applying for SHA. It's a lot of chance to save the money, too. I think Seattle Housing is a lot better than apartment. And then I go follow that person to apply with the Neighborhood House."

When you moved into your first unit here with your family, what was it like compared to your old apartment?

"If I compare to apartment, big difference. I live in apartment with small rooms, only one bedroom, and the water tank is so small, I can only take one person at a time, other person have to wait. And the heat is not so hot. It's cold all the time. The kitchen always has problem. When I move to Holly Park, I get two bedroom. My kid can play and it's a warm place."

What else do you like about living and working here?

"The Holly Park community has diversity so I can work to help my own people who doesn't speak English and the other people also. I can get experience that I relate with society, with community . . . It (also) relate to my experience. I was a teacher more than three years (in camp). I always around with the kids. I think this is a big, major experience for me in the future. For the family surviving too, because I can get a job, I can work for the kids, to help the community, to help the society, to make the kids get out of the drugs. I hope this is my direction to go."

These excerpts are from interviews conducted by Carina A. del Rosario as part of the Wing Luke Asian Museum's Holly Park Oral History Project.