(Image: King County)
The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods has quietly pushed back a landmarks board hearing on a 21st Ave property the city calls “a pivotal location in Seattle’s African American heritage” that has most recently served as work release housing for the incarcerated.
CHS reported here in August on the 108-year-old Phillis Wheatley YWCA building slated for demolition at 21st Ave and Denny and the city’s plans for a hearing on possible landmarks protections for the structure planned for this week.
The agenda for the Wednesday, September 4th meeting was updated without announcement in late August. The hearing will now take place in December. The city’s Department of Construction and Inspections that is pursuing the hearing and the landmarks board did not include an explanation for the change in the updated September agenda document (PDF).
The SDCI initiation of a nomination is an unusual step. In the majority of hearing in the city, property owners and developers either hoping to establish protections — or eliminate the risk — typically sponsor the efforts.
The 6,293-square-foot building had been used as transitional housing by Pioneer Human Services before its 2020 $1.75 million sale to developer Great Expectations. The company says it is planning Taxus House for the location, a proposed 49-unit apartment building just off E Madison with predominantly “eco 1 Bedroom” style units — “an ecologically and environmentally efficient one-bedroom apartment” that will each be about 325 square feet, the developer says. The development would reserve between 20 and 25% of it units as affordable housing.
The city argues that the building could be worthy of architectural protections as “a pivotal location in Seattle’s African American heritage.” It was first established as the “Culture Club” in 1919, and was “a central hub for black intellectual life, community gathering, black social justice and legal defense groups,” the city says.
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Is the developer joking with the name “Taxus House”??
I hope this doesn’t delay the project because that is ten to twelve affordable housing units just waiting to be built.
Put a commemorative plaque or informative sign on the new multiuse building and move on. For a city with as little history as Seattle has, it clings to it so tightly, the future may never get here. People will protest the relocation of a neon carwash sign while they gripe about their neighbors living in tents or sleeping in doorways and never connect the two.
Build up – but we need more family sized apartments!! Not everyone low-income/wealth is a single 20-something