'The Quiet Place' is getting noisier

There's something telling in the fact that Woodway's newest public lands are behind a locked gate.

The 17-acre wooded preserve was purchased from developers in 1999, when this town of wooded roads and secluded manors lost a five-year battle to stop a big new housing development. The preserve may be used as an outdoor laboratory for schoolchildren. It could become a walking trail.

But until then, the sloping hillside, with old-growth Douglas fir and filtered views of Puget Sound, sits behind a black chain-link fence, off-limits to the public, mostly unmarked and undisturbed.

The town with the highest median income this side of Lake Washington — it's the fifth-wealthiest in the state — fiercely guards its privacy. To residents, it's a haven from the noise and congestion of suburbs next door. The town motto is "The Quiet Place," the local newsletter "The Whisper."

"When you get to Woodway, you relax," Mayor Carla Nichols said.

But to officials in neighboring Shoreline and Edmonds, it's a wealthy enclave of obstructionists whose sense of community ends at the town limits.

Woodway stayed on the sidelines last year as Edmonds, its neighbor to the north and east, fought a proposal for a regional sewage-treatment plant on the waterfront. A majority of the five-member Woodway Town Council argued that the $1.3 billion Brightwater sewage plant would be preferable to a 295-unit condominium project also proposed for the site.

"We felt betrayed," said Edmonds resident John Quast, a leader of a group opposing Brightwater. "All they were looking at was their own self-interest."

When Shoreline, Woodway's neighbor to the south, proposed a commercial and residential development for Point Wells, another site mentioned early for Brightwater, the Woodway council again said it favored a sewage plant over more people.

"We want this to remain a haven from the hectic world," Nichols said.

But growth is happening.

In 1999, the Central Puget Sound Growth Management Hearings Board ordered the town to approve the Woodway Highlands, an upscale development that will eventually feature 94 homes on 40 acres.

The first 43 houses — most listing around $750,000 — have already sold, and the developer earlier this month unveiled the Highlands' first estate-size home, a contemporary mansion of 5,000 square feet with high-end stainless-steel appliances, 4½ bathrooms and a four-car garage. It lists for $1.1 million — and has no view. That's above Woodway's median home value of $592,300 but below recent home sales of more than $2 million.

When the Highlands project is completed in 2005, Woodway's population is expected to grow from 990 to about 1,250, an increase of more than 25 percent. Newcomers are already raising questions about Woodway's sacred ways — its penchant for privacy, for instance, and its refusal to share its neighbors' concerns.

And as some of the town's original estates, with their parklike settings, are divided into suburban-size lots, Woodway may be forced to leave behind its woodsy isolation and become more like the cities pressing in on its sides.

The town's guiding philosophy is captured in a history of Woodway written by its wealthy founder, David Whitcomb Sr. His discovery in 1912 of a 320-acre tract between Richmond Beach and Edmonds, he said, marked the end of his quest for the "ultimate home."

Writing of himself in the third person, 20 years after founding the town, Whitcomb noted that even the rich, in cities, cannot completely escape urban blight.

"He realized that the city home, no matter how lovingly planned, how perfectly executed, or how thoroughly enjoyed, is eventually cramped by undesirable neighbors."

Whitcomb divided his property into lots ranging from 2½ to 40 acres, wrote covenants that required each house to be set well back from the road and then invited his like-minded friends to build the Tudor mansions or French châteaux of their dreams.

A magnificent setting

Dr. Ed Simons, a Seattle urologist, and his wife, Carol, moved into the former Whitcomb mansion in 1958 and raised seven children there. Carol Simons quickly punctured any illusions that they lived in a castle.

"A four-bedroom house with servants' quarters" is how she described the sandstone manor that opens onto an expansive lawn with a swimming pool and views of Puget Sound.

But they agreed that the setting was magnificent and that their children relished the house's grand spaces and the free run of the adjacent woods.

"It was a beautiful house. It was fun living there," said Ed Simons, who is now 80 and retired.

After 31 years in the mansion, he said, upkeep of the grounds became too much, and the couple moved to a smaller Woodway home, one set amid 2 acres of ferns and trees.

Simons, who is a member of the Snohomish County Planning Commission, said Woodway made a mistake when it fought the Woodway Highlands development. Many residents had warned the project could result in even greater density than the developers sought.

Developers Larry Sundquist and Mike Echelbarger, who both lived in Woodway at the time, purchased 60 acres on the eastern edge of town and in 1995 proposed building 86 luxury homes there. The town tried to limit the development to 42 homes on 10½ acres by declaring the remaining land environmentally sensitive. Woodway tied up the project for five years.

In the end, the regional growth-management board ruled that the town is in an area designated for urban growth by Snohomish County and must accept density of at least four houses per acre — three times the number of houses the developers originally proposed. But Echelbarger and Sundquist, frustrated in their dealings with Woodway, sold their interest to another developer, and both moved from the town.

"It was horrible," said Echelbarger. "They said: 'We're special. We're Woodway.' Well, they're not special."

Many Woodway residents see a similar threat to Woodway's density and privacy in the 295-unit Point Edwards condominium project proposed for the former Unocal tank farm in south Edmonds.

Ed Simons estimates that the 10 condo buildings, three stories each, would add hundreds of residents and thousands of cars to Woodway's tranquil roads.

"It can't help but have an impact," he said.

In his free time, Simons putters in his wooded yard, transplanting saplings and cultivating Chinese camellias. The sky shows in patches through 100-year-old firs. The only noise is the wind and the chattering of a few birds.

To some extent, he said, Woodway deserves its reputation for reclusiveness.

"This isn't a coffee-klatch neighborhood," he said.

The antithesis of privacy may be a new housing development. In the Woodway Highlands, the new houses lack the deep setbacks of the rest of town. And without the softening effect of mature plants and trees, the big houses duplicate themselves one after the next like an advancing army.

Before Bob and Jan Parks prepared to move from Lake Forest Park to the Highlands in August, they had no idea where Woodway even was. The only comparable developments, they said, were on the Eastside, where many residents deal with stubborn commutes across Lake Washington's congested bridges. The only bridge in Woodway is a graceful 1929 span across Deer Creek, a landmark known to locals simply as "the bridge."

Dark enough to see stars

Bob, a manufacturer's representative who works from home, and Jan were immediately charmed by many of the town's traditional ways. Woodway posts its Town Council minutes and meeting notices in kiosks along the winding roads. The town owns a chipper truck and rents it to residents after windstorms. The Parkses noticed that on clear nights, Woodway was dark enough to see stars.

So dark, in fact, that they often overshot the entrance to the neighborhood. Jan called Town Hall to inquire about getting a streetlight there and was told it would violate the town's darkness ordinance. Nor were floodlights allowed on private property if they could be seen from the street.

When Jan tried to check out a book at the Edmonds Library, she was told she couldn't get a library card because Woodway had voted against joining the Sno-Isle Regional Library System.

Still, the Parkses said they'd choose Woodway all over again.

"You can hear the foghorn, the train, the ferry," Bob Parks said. "We really like it here."

By contracting with other jurisdictions to provide police, fire and some other municipal services, Woodway keeps its costs low. Town residents pay some of the lowest property taxes in the state.

Nichols, Woodway's 56-year-old mayor, got involved in Woodway at the height of the controversy over the Highlands housing development, a project that she said "deeply polarized" the community.

In an effort to salvage something for the community, the 15-year resident wrote grants to purchase some of the 60-acre development for permanent open space.

Nichols pointed out the neighborhood around Woodway's small, circa 1960 Town Hall: The homes are midcentury ramblers with carports or one-car garages.

In 1958, as new subdivisions in Edmonds and Shoreline pushed toward Woodway's forested borders, the town annexed several blocks of these classically suburban houses to swell its population to 400, the minimum for forming a town then.

"Everybody thinks of Woodway as nothing but big houses. It's not," Nichols said.

As she drove along the winding roads at 25 miles per hour — the posted and enforced limit throughout town — Nichols pointed out a pasture where sheep still graze with views of Puget Sound, joggers and walkers along the quiet roads, and the absence of any commercial businesses or signs.

Real-estate agents must get a $50 annual permit to post open-house A-board signs in the public rights of way. Even anti-war signs must be posted on private property, out of sight of the road.

Nichols, who like Woodway's council members receives no compensation for her job, has been praised by residents for her hard work and conciliatory style. But the battles with Edmonds over the Point Edwards condominiums and with Shoreline over the future of Point Wells may test her resolve.

"The challenge is to balance private-property rights with community goals," she said.

A tour around Woodway ended at the gate to the new nature preserve. Nichols unlocked the gate and offered to show off the woods saved from developers, but the stroll inside the fence ended after six feet, the distance recently cleared by Boy Scouts.

When Nichols refastened the lock, she gestured to the forest, with its mossy logs, thick salal and pileated woodpeckers nesting in rotting snags.

"We're so protective of this," she said, and her sweep took in the whole town.

Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com