Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 5, May 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Wallingford's history series

By JAMES BUSH

It's just a little house off North 45th Street which has been converted to an office and is now targeted to be removed for more intense development.

But 4422 Meridian Ave. N. is familiar to longtime residents as the former home of the Wallingford neighborhood's first library.

Helping neighborhood residents and other Seattleites to see the community's historic side is the purpose of "The Year of Wallingford," a 12-month promotional and educational campaign co-sponsored by the Wallingford Chamber of Commerce, Wallingford Community Council, and a neighborhood alliance called WEaving Wallingford.

The Wallingford neighborhood traces its history back to 1893, when Corliss P. Stone platted the Lake Union Addition. The area was annexed into Seattle in 1891, but had just 1,500 residents in 1900. Over the next two decades, the district's population swelled to about 20,000.

"The Year of Wallingford is kind of the culmination of two historic preservation grants," says Wallingford resident Karen Buschow, who serves as treasurer for the chamber. "The idea is really just to spend this whole year learning about our neighborhood and get people involved in these preservation projects."

A $2,000 County grant funded the transfer of an existing neighborhood history slide show onto video, the compilation of a neighborhood history chronology and bibliography, plus the recent lecture by Seattle historian (and Wallingford resident) Paul Dorpat at Hamilton Middle School.

Meanwhile, Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods is funding neighborhood historian Tom Veith's creation of an inventory of neighborhood buildings with historical significance. Depending on how you draw the lines, the Wallingford neighborhood probably contains about 8,000 structures, he says. "So far, I've looked at 1,600 or 1,700 of them. By the time it's done, I will have looked at every building in Wallingford."

Veith will make the cut down to 500 "historically interesting" structures, based on age (at least 40 years old), historical and architectural significance, and the integrity of the structure (how much it retains its original form). He should finish the process by this fall.

Perhaps a quarter of these buildings will qualify for an official Seattle inventory of historically interesting buildings. "The city is trying to build a citywide inventory to make sure that [structures] that are not necessarily landmark-quality but of local interest don't suddenly disappear," says Veith.

Folke Nyberg and the late Victor Steinbrueck compiled similar inventories for several North End neighborhoods for Historic Seattle in the mid-1970s.

How the Wallingford Library got its start in an old house is an interesting story. The home was the residence of Florence Wilmot Metcalf, a member of one of the neighborhood's prominent families. After Florence's death, her sister, Alice Wilmot Dennis, donated the house to the city with the proviso that it be used as a library for 30 years. The community was asked to raise $2,100 half the cost of retrofitting the building as a library. A drive to sell $5 charter memberships raised the money in less than two months.

The building opened Sept. 9, 1949, with Katherine L. Lund appointed as the first librarian. Circulation peaked in 1958, according to annual reports, then declined before rebounding in 1969 and 1970.

The city finally moved the library to a rented space in the 45th Street Clinic (housed in the former Wallingford Police/Fire Station) in 1985 and sold the house for $77,000, far less than the $138,000 it cost to renovate their new space.

The Wallingford Library remained one of the city's smallest branch libraries and was targeted for closure by budget cutters in both 1990 and 1992. Neighborhood opposition stayed the city's hand both times.

A new library space was included in the Fremont Public Association building, located a block west of 45th Street Clinic. It opened January 29, 2000.

Veith says the original Wilmot Memorial Library will certainly make his inventory, but he isn't sure it would qualify for city landmarks protections. The building will be considered for landmark status once the owner applies for a demolition permit, he said.

"My job is not to decide if its a landmark or not," says Veith. "My job is to find buildings we need to think about before we start [demolishing] them."