The Burwell House
The Seattle Landmarks Board will consider the designation of a house on Capitol Hill’s Millionaire’s Row for official protection of its historic elements Wednesday.
The April 16th session follows the successful nomination of the Burwell House this winter. “It is challenging to find Arts and Crafts architecture in Seattle comparable” to the 1904-built 14th Ave E house, the nomination report on the property noted.
Situated on the southern end of the west side of Millionaire’s Row, the 6,570-square-foot house is within a few blocks of 11 properties designated for landmarks protections and the street as a whole won its listing in the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
In addition to placing the old houses under a review process for any significant architectural changes to their protected elements, the programs also make the properties eligible for grants-in-aid and the historic rehabilitation tax credit—which allows owners and some lessees to take a 20% income tax credit on rehabilitation costs.
The Burwell House has been owned by Bryce and Chris Seidl since the couple purchased the property for $775,000 in 1994. According to county records, the property was transferred into a Seidl family trust last spring. The Seidls are listed as the submitting party for the nomination application.
Historians say the Craftsman style structure has survived as one of the purest remaining representations of Seattle’s grandest homes of the period.
Landmarks Preservation Board Meeting (PDF)
Hybrid Meeting via Webex Webinar or Room L2-80 Boards & Commissions
Seattle City Hall, 600 4th Avenue, Floor L2
Wednesday, April 16, 2025 – 3:30 p.m.
Learn more here (PDF) about providing public comment and attending the meeting in person or online.
The board, meanwhile, recently added another new Capitol Hill landmark far from Millionaire’s Row. In February, the board designated the Belmont-Boylston “double house” at 1411 Boylston Ave for official city protections based on the structure’s “distinctive visible characteristics” in a decision that extends protections to the exterior of the building and surgically restricts future changes to “the interior stairs between the first and second floors and both sides of the demising wall.”
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The worship of the wealthy needs to end!
As we enter another era of struggle between the laborers and capitalists in the northwest, this is a really good clear-eyed read on the history of the actual people that built this city and region, not the people that exploited them!
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295750675/seattle-from-the-margins/
Seriously? An iconic beautiful old house that should be preserved and protected is equivalent of worship of wealth? For crying out loud *eye roll*
This is how they introduce themselves to the world on their website…
“Just south of the Volunteer Park Water Tower is a historic street referred to as Millionaire’s Row. On this section of 14th Avenue East, citizens that helped define Seattle and the Pacific Northwest built their homes in the early part of the 20th century. Most of the Millionaire’s Row houses still stand, and changes made to them over the years have been generally minor.”
Some of the people that built these homes were known fraudsters, many others stole and/or supported the theft of indigenous lands and the relegation of a second class of citizens to the southern half of the city unless they were employed live in help. (Literally the 5th ordinance passed in Seattle and a geographic pattern still in place today). The people that live in these homes want to celebrate them and the people that lived in them because it makes them feel important, meanwhile they go to pains to write historical accounts, submit documents that will be preserved in city records, and utilize city time and resources to make whitewashed claims about these same people and the homes they built. All this political will, time, and money could have gone towards civicily minded things, rather than naval gazing. The fact that we still celebrate neighborhoods called millionaires row from the last time income inequality reached these levels is astonishing and if rich “liberals” continue down this path there going to be celebrating the history of a fascist regime or find themselves on the wrong end of a revolution.
For the revolution, away from the rich, have you considered pooling your resources and purchasing a large plot of utopian land in rural Oregon? You just might be happier, leaving the city and the evils of capitalism, and really grit it to self sustainability.
No more rich icons in a land that you create.
The rich are buying up rural America too.
They came for the floating homes, then Mercer Island, now they are coming for the rural lands. Rich folks are buying entire mountains in Montana and blocking access to public lands so they can turn it into their own personal play areas while they continue to demonize the poor and push contract labor that is constantly replaceable. How can you not see history repeating itself?
I started to read your comment, but stopped because I knew it would just be one more far-left, anti-capitalist screed, so why bother?
While the wealthy are an issue. It’s actually the super wealth of a handful of people that is the issue. We have people with enough money to buy America. THAT is the problem. I few millionaires are not destroying America. “Millionaires Row” is simple a nickname. Like “Stumbletown”. Are we disparaging drunks now too? One street in Seattle is not going to make a difference. We got BLM painted in the middle of the street. It has done nothing. And neither will a few old houses.
While I appreciate your passion. We need to stay focussed on the big fish. Alienating everyone over relatively nothing? Poor strategy. Instead of calling out people. Call them in. Try to find a common ground if you can. I am with you. But it’s hard to build a coalition of purity.
Here’s a political cartoon from the International Worker in 1909 shortly after a visit to Seattle and the northwest. Ansel and the Seattle Hardware Company profited and gained their immense wealth by supplying this system of disposable contract labor.
This cartoon could easily be updated to modern times with the gig economy and a new wave immigrants being used as cheap disposable labor.
Millionaires rows were communities designed in the height of the gilded age to show prominence of an elite class and as a celebration of the unsustainable practices of wholesale resource extraction and violently suppressed labor.
we are gilded age on steroids currently. Reagan’s tax system has choked the life out of govt. and created the biggest wealth disparity the we’ve ever seen. I didn’t know all the details. I appreciate the education.
Are we talking about a house or the oppression or both? I am not convinced taking a wrecking ball to it is a good thing either. It’s a cool house. I mean, you’d have to level the entire block to get rid of the “millionaires row” moniker. Uber wealth has always been an issue. I have a lot of hope the kids will take charge and organise and vote en mass.
I never said that the house needs to go, it’s just this fetishizing of uber wealth and whitewashing of history in the midst of a fascist takeover by the currently uber wealthy that I find problematic.
This is an action of the Seattle city government, and the document is going into city records and will be a historical document sucked into LLMs like ChatGPT and become part of the historical narrative. That’s problematic when the document is littered with references to white, European ancestry and goes out of its way to say that natives didn’t use the specific area or that none of the deeds had racial covenants. They are writing the history the way they would like and utilizing city staff and time to do it.
Historic Seattle is a public development authority like Community Roots, SHA, and the newly created Social Housing Developer, albeit with a preservation mindset. I think a lot of the preservation they have done is great, but they have also done extremely little to help expand housing in the last 50 years and have instead protected many mansions in the process (including their headquarters). Historic preservation can benefit the masses, other cities do it but it’s a shame that a public development authority chartered by the city doesn’t really do that. Here’s a couple examples of large and smaller scale historic preservation that benefits the whole city.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillsbury_A-Mill
https://www.nps.gov/articles/sorrento-apartments-dc.htm