A future built on our past.

Commentary by Rod Stevens.

If you stand in the lobby of the Bainbridge Island Historical Society and look across the street, you will see a house that was built in 1903 to house shipyard workers, and that was first inhabited by a man who made spars for lumber schooners. This is one of a handful of remaining historic houses that once made Ericksen Avenue one of the most charming streets In Puget Sound. But that charm is quickly disappearing. It turns out that the historic overlay zone for Ericksen Avenue, written under the current Mayor, is worthless when it comes to saving that house.

Up Eagle Harbor, another historic property is also threatened: but this threat is as much to future uses as to the remaining foundations and evidence of a cannery that used to send off barrels and bushels of strawberries. The City’s planners have declared that this place is one of no historic significance, and they are trying to return it to a pristine state of nature that would wipe out most of the remaining evidence of the cannery, and that would limit most of the future use to little more than picnicking and staring at the water.

Island historian Gerald Elfendahl believes the cannery site is highly significant historically, as a shipping point and dock and center of commerce, and, further that we should use this site in way consistent with its historic past. He and others propose creating a center for small watercraft that would be a kind of boathouse for the “rest of us”, for those of us who don’t have private waterfront docks out in front of their houses, like the Mayor. They envision a place where the community can come together around boats, building and repairing and launching traditional watercraft like those that people used to get around in here.

What could be a better use in a time when people are downscaling and trying to enjoy things that are more local than spending an afternoon on the harbor, perhaps in a boat that you have built with friends at a local woodshop next to the water? It seems more than coincidental, and to highlight the differences between that city and ours, that Gig Harbor, a place that very much values its maritime heritage, has the following quote at the top of its official May newsletter: “There is nothing— absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing, as simply messing about in boats.” The movement back to small watercraft is growing across the country, and there are already municipal boathouses in such places as New York City, Portland, Tacoma and San Francisco. The idea of locking off our waterfront is out of touch with the times.

There is some question of whether the planners are trying to put the cannery site off-limits simply because of the requirements of grants to which they are billing their salaries. If so, this would not be the first time that we have lost some of our sense of place here because of the strings that comes attached to such money. Remember that grants drove the proposal for a traffic circle at Madison and Wyatt Way, and that Randy Witt used the excuse of grant requirements to create long straight ribbons of concrete sidewalk down either side of High School Rd., even though local people wanted a more meandering and rural treatment. Recall that they tried to do the same thing with Grow Avenue.

People involved in protecting and building great places call these losses the “death of a thousand cuts”. Usually you don’t lose a place overnight. The loss comes incrementally, project by project. Around the corner, at the intersection of Winslow Way and Highway 305, developer Bill Carruthers plans to tear down the old building that used to have the ice cream store with a modernist building made out of glass, steel and concrete. (The architect calls these materials “timeless”. So is the plutonium at Hanford.)

Why is it that so many people live one way in their private lives, but have such different tastes or values when it comes to development,
particularly when this is in such public space?. After all, they are calling their project “Island Gateway”. Carruthers’ own house on Beck St. is in fact two linked and charming cottages, one historic, which fit right into the neighborhood. Perhaps his design simply reflects those of his clients, people who want to up an art museum to show off their private collection. Maybe they should go all the way and get in a really modern architect, like Frank Gehry.

They could call it the Experience Bainbridge Project.

Back at 216 Ericksen Avenue, it is a sad irony that one of the people who has offices there, and who will be displaced by the demolition, is Ryan Vancil, son of council member Debbie Vancil, and a land use attorney who specializes in representing community groups in land use fights. Ryan is typical of the kind of person who works in buildings like these: highly skilled professionals who have a choice of working elsewhere, but who choose a small-scale property because of its charm and location. Blackbird is less than a three-minute walk from his office.

Some people view historic preservation as an antiquarian interest, a kind of Antiques Road show approach to buildings and places, but beyond the simple pleasures of enjoying a place day to day, preservation contributes to economic development by building this kind of place-based economy. The skilled workers of today and tomorrow can live and work where they want, and they are drawn to authentic places, not those that have been recreated with a synthetic main street. This increasing focus on authenticity and community has helped bring back places like Camden, Annapolis, Santa Fe, San Juan Capistrano and Charleston. If we did this right, we could use areas like Ericksen Avenue to draw more professionals and companies here, creating additional jobs that would save people having to commute to Seattle.

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of taking the early boat to a job with a large firm in a tall building in downtown Seattle, you instead have breakfast with your family and leave your house at 8:30 or 9. You go downtown to a job with a small, creative company that has offices that front a garden behind a cottage on Ericksen Avenue. In the middle of the morning you move a meeting with your co-workers to Bainbridge Bakers. At lunch you join a friend for lunch, or bike over to the woodworking shop to get a few minutes in on a favorite project. At 6 p.m. you head home, and by 6:30 you are having dinner with your family, and you are still fresh enough to want to spend time with them after dinner.

Preserving and adapting historic structures is not difficult, but it requires curiosity and imagination and discipline to do so, and none of these qualities are especially evident at City Hall. We seem to suffer from a particular lack of imagination in our public life. The official plans are dull and lifeless, as if they had been lifted from an APA convention. They show no commitment to or passion for this place. There are tools out there, like the New Jersey building code, that have had a dramatic impact in fostering building reinvestment , but I doubt our planners even know these exist.

Hopefully the Mayor will soon be gone, but we can’t wait for her to go to start talking now about the future of the island. We need to start defining, today, what we hold most dear here, what drew us here or kept us here in the first place, and what would cause us to move away if it disappeared. This can be the basis for setting real priorities of how we use scarce governmental revenues, and even scarcer volunteer time. As a community, we also need to define a new relationship between the community and its government, that puts the community back in charge. We need to do this to protect our past, and to preserve this past in a way that makes for an even more interesting future. Only then will we be able to get government from actively circumventing what we want to achieve, and open the path for people like Gerry Elfendahl to create things that we will all enjoy using.

Rod Stevens
206-780-0553