Aqua Barn On The Block -- After 47 Years, The Riley Family Is Selling Its Recreation Landmark, Where Many Have Learned To Ride Horseback. But The City And Neighbors Object.

RENTON

Jack Riley recalls a time when he could walk down any street in Seattle and eight out of 10 people he'd meet knew about the Aqua Barn.

"We really prevailed," he says, recalling the 1960s heyday when his Renton business had 240 horses on more than 100 acres and a barn full of people country dancing every night.

People could pitch tents or horseshoes at the Aqua Barn Ranch. Children came by the carful for swimming lessons, horseback riding, summer camp, covered-wagon rides, rodeo shows and square dancing.

"Four point five million people went through our classes," Riley says, and thousands of others have eaten turkey dinners at Grandma Riley's Ranch Corral Cafe over the ranch's 47 years.

But the Aqua Barn is clearly past its prime. Soon, the business likely will be a thing of the past as well.

Riley, 75, and his family plan to sell 33 remaining acres of Aqua Barn land to developers, who want to build about 300 apartments in 12 buildings.

The city of Renton and ranch neighbors are protesting. They oppose the development for the traffic it would cause and the new people it would bring - practical considerations. But sentimentality lies behind most of the unhappiness about the change.

"I've been going there most of my life," says Aleishia Smith, 25, of Seattle, who rode there as a child. "It'd be hard to find another place like that."

The end of an era, says family

The Rileys call the sale of the Aqua Barn the end of an era, and not just because they've been running the business since 1951. They first opened a floating dance floor on Lake Union and moved the business to the country soon after.

The family ran a dairy farm on the Renton land for about a half-century before that, and Riley still lives in the original farmhouse, built by Arthur Denny in 1888.

But the Aqua Barn's historical legacy, the family says, lies in what it has done for local recreation. "We were kind of the start of everything," says Janette Carr, Riley's daughter and general manager of the business. The ranch was once synonymous with good, clean country fun.

"We'd rent a horse and then go to the pool," says Janette Lierley, 49. "Everybody went and there was no hanky-panky. You'd maybe sneak a little hand hold as a young teenager, but that was about it."

As development has snaked down the Maple Valley Highway, the Aqua Barn has become an anomaly. The old buildings are covered with peeling paint and for-sale signs, and the row of false-front stores is mostly empty.

Now it's mostly RV campers

People still swim in the indoor pool and eat at Grandma Riley's, but most come now to park their RVs on dusty gravel lots, where they sometimes stay for years. Welcoming them is a faded sign reading "Howdy Partner" and a life-sized wooden cowboy with his arm raised in greeting, his hand broken off.

Of the RV park, Riley says "It's our best source of income now," though his heart was in running the ranch. "That was the most rewarding," he says.

But the Rileys sold off the last of the horses a few years ago, along with about 33 acres of former pasture land now occupied by manufactured homes.

With Riley and his sister-in-law nearing retirement and Riley's wife recent moved to a nursing home, "we need to plan," Carr says.

They will make much more money selling the land than by running an RV park or horse stables, though the demand for equestrian activity is as high as ever.

"We get calls every day (even though) we're not in the phone book for horse riding," Carr says. "People say `Do you know where we could horseback ride?' and they'll say, `Oh yeah, the Aqua Barn.' "

Dance lessons, a church

When the horses left, "we diversified," Carr says. The business now is an amalgam of some things country and many things not: Fiddle players and belly-dancing lessons, a duck pond, hot tub and massage studio, a driving school and a Pentecostal church.

"It's run-down," says Paul Woerle, who lives in a manufactured house next door. "But it's better than 6- or 700 more people trying to get onto Maple Valley Highway."

The family plans to keep the Aqua Barn open at least another year, and they may open another RV park on a less-valuable site just east of the ranch.

Maybe, Riley says, the developers will move his house there, the last 40-acre piece of the family's original homestead. Or maybe they'll memorialize the business. "I'd be proud if they called them the `Aqua Barn Apartments,' " he says.

But the idea the Aqua Barn was built on is gone anyway, he says - for him along with everyone else.

In the Aqua Barn's early days, "I used the ranch as a plaything," he says. "Then I had to start making money."

Janet Burkitt's phone: 206-515-5689. E-mail: jburkitt@seattletimes.com