Courthouse form follows function
These are a few of the attributes given the stodgy old courthouse, which closes its doors today after 64 years as the hub of federal justice in Seattle. It will reopen in several years as the Seattle office of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The boxy, 11-story edifice — a tribute to its Depression-era Work Projects Administration genesis — is being replaced by a post-modern glass-and-concrete tower at Seventh Avenue and Stewart Street boasting three times the space. The new courthouse will open Tuesday.
While the judges, clerks and lawyers who labored in the cramped old building understand the need for a new courthouse, that doesn't mean there isn't nostalgia, even regret, at leaving.
"It's very sad," said Chief U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who was sworn in 23 years ago. "To a lot of us, this is home."
Since it opened in 1940, the courthouse has been a physical representation of the rule of law. Coughenour and Hillier both describe their awe in approaching the building from Fifth Avenue, the rust-and-ivory terra cotta building looming above, the words "United States District Courthouse" etched in stone above the doors.
According to the General Services Administration (GSA), it was the first building in the Western U.S. designed exclusively as a federal courthouse. It cost about $1.7 million to build, or one-hundredth what the new courthouse cost.
"You walk up those steps and that patterned cement to those doors and you get a thrill," said Hillier, who joined the Seattle Federal Public Defenders Office in 1975 and is now its director. "Your heart races. It feels like you're going into a courthouse. Even after all these years, I still get it."
The GSA, which oversees construction and maintenance of federal properties, describes the building as a "strong example of federal art deco in the modernistic style popular at the end of the 1930s and early 1940s." Its innovations included steel window sashes, stylistic aluminum grilles and light fixtures, and courtrooms sheathed in black marble.
The building is listed as a state and national historic site.
Among its most striking attributes is a magnificent two-panel mural in the foyer that contrasts the effects of good and bad government. According to a history of the courthouse, the artwork was painted in the style of 14th-century murals found in Siena, Italy, by Colorado artist Caleb Bach. It consists of two 9-by-5-foot panels depicting more than 100 allegorical figures.
The building contains five courtrooms and chambers for sitting and visiting judges, a small office for the U.S. Marshal, chambers for some members of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a law library and a clerks' office.
The old courthouse was renamed in 2001 to honor William Kenzo Nakamura, a Japanese-American soldier awarded the Medal of Honor in 2000 for bravery during WWII. The courthouse will be closed several years for rehabilitation, retrofitting and renovation. When it reopens, it will house the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose offices now are split between the Nakamura Courthouse and space in an office building downtown.
But it isn't simply the structure and what it represents that invoke these powerful feelings, Hillier said. The building recalls memories of the people who have passed through its cramped halls and visited its wood-paneled, high-ceiling courtrooms.
There was Mack Hansen, the tough old bear of a deputy marshal who clashed with Hillier over protesters in the courthouse, but was always "the perfect gentleman."
There was Jerry Diskin, a 30-year prosecutor who was Hillier's longtime courtroom adversary and personal friend.
Diskin died unexpectedly this summer and the federal bench in Seattle convened a special session for a memorial earlier this summer that filled the old courthouse's ornate eighth-floor ceremonial courtroom with hundreds of attorneys, prosecutors, judges, lawmen and others.
And there is the memory of Tom Wales, a tough-minded 18-year veteran prosecutor whose unsolved slaying in October 2001 remains an open wound to many in the so-called "federal family."
For many years, most federal agencies involved in administering justice were housed under that one roof: bankruptcy court, prosecutors, the marshals' office, probation and parole personnel, and the public defender. Many scattered to leased space in other buildings as the court expanded.
To Hillier, the old courthouse also evokes a time when justice was "more human and more humane." Criminal sentences were determined by judges, not through a mathematical sentencing matrix.
"It was justice on the curbstone," Hillier said. "I have a million memories here."
Coughenour points out that the Seattle courthouse is typical of courthouses built during the period. It is a miniature of the majestic U.S. District Courthouse on Spring Street in Los Angeles. It rose on the site of the old Providence Hospital, which had been built in 1873.
When the courthouse was dedicated in 1940, Seattle had just three federal judges. The Seattle bench today consists of seven federal judges and three magistrates.
According to a history of the Western District of Washington being compiled by Chief Deputy Clerk Janet Bubnis in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the federal district next year, the cornerstone was laid by Judge John C. Bowen, an imperious jurist who ordered 24 oak trees from his native Tennessee planted on its grounds. Each spring, Bowen would patrol the trees, looking for caterpillars.
Bowen's most significant impact on the courthouse, however, was his pet peeve: automobiles. He hated them.
"He considered them the bane of society," said Bubnis — and Bowen ordered that the then-new courthouse have no parking. To this day there is none, and even judges have to park on the street or in nearby lots.
The legacy of judicial interference in such matters, benign as it may be, continues with the new courthouse.
One charming aspect of the old courthouse, Bubnis said, is that its windows open. At construction planning meetings for the new courthouse, recalled Coughenour, the late U.S. District Judge William Dwyer would "get this wistful look in his eyes and talk about feeling the breeze or hearing the sounds of the city" through an open window.
"The rest of us would just sort of stare up at the ceiling and wonder who was going to take him on," Coughenour said.
Nobody did, and the new courthouse boasts what Bubnis calls the "Dwyer Legacy": The judicial chambers each have one window that opens.
Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com