High Point becomes history — before it's razed
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Over the past seven months, 12 students from Gary Thomsen's marketing class at nearby Sealth High School, armed with video cameras and audio recorders, telephones, computers, and a $10,000 city grant, have been working to document the history of High Point in a project called "The High Point Diaries."
People will know that High Point began as a wartime housing project for defense workers and their families, and that it sparked objections from neighbors hoping to avoid the project's federally mandated racial integration.
They will know about the zeppelinlike "defense balloons" that monitored the skies over High Point during World War II, watching for the attack that never came.
They will know that High Point soon became a tightly knit neighborhood, where doors were left unlocked at night, and neighbors could dole out a well-deserved spanking as easily as one's own parents.
The story of High Point — its 2,100 residents, 42 ethnicities and 60 years of history — is as important as that of any other Seattle neighborhood, some say even more so. Because the $200 million federal Hope VI redevelopment project threatens to change the nature of High Point forever, recording its past now is essential.
"It's capturing the last bit of High Point as it's been known for the last 50 years," Thomsen said. "It won't exist anymore — it'll be a different type of community."
It always was a place of movement and change: In an area that once held old-growth forest, apple orchards, dirt roads and salmon runs, the High Point projects were built to accommodate hundreds of shipyard workers and their families. The demographics changed over time from simply white and black to a stepping-stone place, where Vietnamese, Samoan, Cambodian, El Salvadoran families could work their way up, and out.
"You're looking at people trying to get a step up," said Ron Angeles, who grew up in High Point and was interviewed for the High Point Diaries. "It is, for most people anyway, a place to find temporary housing and from there, move on to better things. It's part of the American dream for many families: to find that house you can buy, to send your kids through school, to sacrifice a little."
Angeles is also the Delridge coordinator for the city's Department of Neighborhoods. He first suggested the project to Thomsen's class.
"I just thought that rather than seeing my old stomping grounds demolished and gone into history, we could come up with a way to preserve it," said Angeles. "(Hope VI) is really going to change dramatically what High Point is."
As the students began working on the High Point Diaries during the summer — interviewing residents, sometimes using student interpreters, reading old Seattle Housing Authority maps, learning how to use video cameras — many of them realized the neighborhood right in their back yard was not what they had thought.
Emily Spence, an 11th-grader at Sealth, remembered once running with her cross-country team in a loop around High Point, her coach saying, "Now girls, stay in pairs!" because of its reputation as a scary, crime-ridden place. But throughout all the interviews she and her classmates conducted, one theme emerged: To those who live there, High Point is not a "bad neighborhood," it is simply home, said Trevor Dang, a Sealth senior.
"Even though it's not as close as it used to be, it's still a community to them," Dang said.
He came to the United States from Vietnam with his family in 1992. He lives right across the street from High Point. Thomsen is impressed with Dang's drive to complete the project.
"You've got a kid who is still trying to master English, his family doesn't speak English at all," Thomsen said. "And here he is, going through Department of Defense archives and microfiche that takes him three times as long to understand."
Some of the original High Point residents Dang interviewed recalled being amazed at the newness of High Point, and reveling in simple amenities like plumbing.
"People came from all over the country to live here," Dang said. "To them it was amazing, it was a new beginning. I can relate to their experiences."
Elizabeth Boe is a freshman at the University of Washington who started working on the project while a senior at Sealth. She examined land records from the late 1800s and interviewed people who could tell her the exact location of every tree and pond from years ago, the name of every neighbor and every neighbor's child.
"It's interesting to see how one piece of land has passed through so many hands and changed from everyone who lived there, and how it will continue to change in the future. Hopefully through our project we can expose others to that history," Boe said.
Hope VI is a federal housing program that aims to replace "severely distressed" public housing in an effort to revitalize neighborhoods. The project, scheduled to be under construction for the next few years, will redevelop the High Point neighborhood with 1,600 new units of market-rate, for-sale, rental and senior housing, a new system of paths and open spaces, and community services, such as a new branch library and medical clinics.
The Seattle Housing Authority hopes the stigma of High Point as stand-alone public housing will be erased.
"People's perceptions, even back in the 1940s and '50s, was, 'Look at the folks who live in High Point,' " said Thomsen.
But Angeles doesn't remember any stigma; he has only good memories of a childhood spent in close-knit High Point. His parents were from the Philippines, but in the 1950s and '60s, the neighborhood was mostly black and white. Angeles played ball at the recreation center with kids who are now lifelong friends. Being "from the neighborhood" was a source of pride. When his parents found a house elsewhere, Angeles didn't want to move.
"Back then it was great," said Angeles. "I never felt poor. ... I think most of the kids in High Point didn't feel poor."
The High Point Diaries will be in the form of a 30-minute video documentary and a photography exhibition, scheduled for Feb. 11 at High Point Elementary at 7 p.m. The city's goal is to make the project accessible to the public, so students are now working to complete an interactive CD to be sent into schools, featuring music and a slide show of historical photos.
Caitlin Cleary can be reached at (206) 464-8214 or at ccleary@seattletimes.com.