The Last Brick Builder -- Mutual Materials Keep Its Nose To Grindstone And Endures As Sole Manufacturer In State

NEWCASTLE / BELLEVUE

Think Northwest buildings and you think wood.

But when Seattle burned in 1889, only one building remained in the city center, and it was made of brick.

City fathers then mandated a fireproof downtown, and a California mason heeded their call.

The Northwest's biggest brick manufacturer was born.

More than a century after the Great Seattle Fire, family-owned Mutual Materials trudges on. The brickmaking part isn't thriving right now, but unlike most West Coast brick companies, it hasn't crumbled, either. And in an industry where consolidations and closures are common, survival is no small thing.

"There used to be a brick company in every town," says Betty Lynn Sprinkle of the Brick Industry Association in Reston, Va.

Climate, natural resources and architectural styles favor brick in the Southeast and on much of the East Coast, where the business still is booming.

In Washington state, "there were 400 brick companies in the 1920s," says Gary Houlahan, Mutual Materials co-president and great-grandson of founder Daniel Houlahan. "Today, there is one."

Mutual Materials is making the bricks for Safeco Field, the Seattle Mariners' new stadium. The University of Washington's Red Square owes its look to the company, as do parts of Seattle's Pioneer Square and the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Odds are pretty good that the Bellevue-based company has a piece of any given brick structure in Washington.

The baseball-stadium deal notwithstanding, Houlahan says the brick business has been in a slump, from which it is starting to recover. It turned off one of two kilns at its anchor plant in Newcastle a few years ago.

Mutual used up all the clay in Clay City, near Eatonville, Pierce County, and shut its plant there. But the company bought a Spokane-area plant about the size of Newcastle's in 1990, as well as one in the Portland area in 1993 and is not yet operating up to capacity.

Houlahan, 51, doesn't seem too worried. The company has weathered worse, from hard economic times to an eviction from its Beacon Hill site in the 1950s to make way for Interstate 5. The Houlahans then found the Newcastle site, 54 acres near a rich vein of red clay on Cougar Mountain.

And in the cavernous Newcastle brickworks with its tangle of metal catwalks and assembly lines, it doesn't feel like slump time.

The plant produces 326 bricks a minute - 10,000 bricks per worker per day. Clay shoots through seven-ton wheels for grinding, through mixers for wetting and through vacuums for extracting the air. It's hard to tell which machine produces the churning staccato, because the noise is everywhere.

The men, grabbing and stacking newly sliced bricks a half-dozen at a time, wear headphones and move quickly and in near-perfect sync. A cloud of steam hangs over the bricks, heavier because they are wet; and only when they stop coming down the line for a minute do the workers wipe their foreheads.

Houlahan says it's the hardest labor in the plant. He worked there summers as a teenager, then left the business, becoming a certified public accountant to avoid what he calls "the incompetent boss's son" image.

But he didn't stay away for long, rejoining the company in 1978. "It's in our family culture," he says.

Bricks are simple and utilitarian. Love may seem a strong emotion to feel for them, but the Houlahan family loves bricks.

When he sees a brick building with a bad color blend or haphazardly cut pieces, Houlahan cringes. When he sees a good brick covered with paint, he winces.

His own house, he is embarrassed to admit, is made of wood. "It was low-priced and only five minutes from work," he says. "But that's no excuse," he added, not altogether kidding. His late father never would have lived in a wood house.

Many brick companies are owned by families, sometimes for generations, and brickmakers tend to be traditionalists.

Mutual, though, has made some changes. It has added to its repertoire over the years, offering hollow-core bricks, shaped bricks, various kinds of synthetic stone - "a lot of things, but all solid," Houlahan boasts. It is a major manufacturer of interlocking pavement and concrete block, and has marketers and sales staff to actively pursue big projects, like the stadium.

That willingness to change partly accounts for the company's resilience.

Many in the city of Newcastle think the plant likely will move in the next few years, possibly even sooner. Officials in the little Eastside city have talked of a shopping center like Seattle's University Village or a retail-office-residential complex on the brick-factory site. The 5-year-old city wants to develop a business district over the next several years, and some officials say the site, just east of Interstate 405 on Coal Creek Parkway Southeast, is a logical place.

Houlahan says he wouldn't be surprised if the plant was not there in 15 years or so, but for now, "we have no plans to move."

He's sensing a brick comeback, too, as earthquake fears persist.

"If the Big One hits Seattle, this is the safest place to be," he says of his Bellevue headquarters, a single-story haven of reinforced brick. "This puppy ain't ever coming down."