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Steve Stroming – 2024 Council Award

Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 19, 2024. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature Steve Stroming, the 2024 Council Award recipient. 

Congratulations Steve Stroming!

Steve Stroming is receiving the Council Award in recognition of his career-long commitment to preservation and his impact on Historic Seattle.

Steve originally thought he was going to be a structural engineer, but after exposure to the architecture program at the University of Washington, he went on to earn a degree in architecture. Graduating in 1980 (a terrible time in the economy), architects were not hiring, so he went to work for a construction company instead. Historic Seattle is very glad he did!

Steve was first introduced to historic renovation during his early years at Rafn when he was assigned to the Coliseum Theater seismic retrofit and renovation project for what was to become Banana Republic’s flagship store in downtown Seattle.

“During that work, we found what we called the opium parlor. We were removing concrete slabs and eventually revealed a trap door that was opened, and there was this sealed off room that looked like it was probably used during the Prohibition days as a speakeasy. Walls were finished with beadboard. There were old utensils, loose change, and even campaign literature from a mayoral campaign in the early 1900s. It’s like, this is fun stuff! Add to that bringing the building up to modern standards. You’re inserting new structures for seismic retrofit, new mechanical and electrical systems. Then restore the finishes and finally it’s all done. The ultimate compliment is when people walk in and they say, ‘Well, what did you do here? It looks the same as before.’ That’s one of the real kickers with doing historic renovation. All this work and it looks the same.”

As the Director of Preconstruction Services and a Project Manager at Rafn, Steve had a supersized impact on two of Historic Seattle’s most difficult and consequential projects, the Cadillac Hotel, poster child for the Nisqually earthquake and Washington Hall. His early involvement and leadership on these projects were critical to ensuring that we succeeded when success was not a sure thing and failure was not an option.

Steve recently said, “I just got the bug. It’s like these are the kind of projects that I want to work on as much as possible. I was lucky to be able to direct my career at Rafn to focus on that.”

So, thank you, Rafn, for giving Steve the opportunity to steer his 32-year career in the direction of historic preservation.

And thank you, Steve, for getting the preservation bug.

Historic Seattle and the city of Seattle are both better for it.

Image courtesy of The Washington Trust for Historic Preservation

Max Genereaux – 2024 Community Investment Award

Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 19, 2024. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature Max Genereaux, the 2024 Community Investment Award recipient. 

Congratulations Max Genereaux!

If you step into an old bar and feel like you’ve gone back in time, then you’re experiencing a patina of place that’s hard to recreate. Authenticity is built over time and never rushed. Seattle’s legacy businesses (unfortunately, dwindling by the day) provide this link to the past and continue to be relevant, perhaps even more so these days. Whether out of nostalgia or wanting a place to connect with others, Seattle’s bar culture has a long history in our communities.

Historic Seattle honors Max Genereaux with a Community Investment award for his role in preserving and sustaining this culture through majority ownership of several establishments in Seattle. Max purchased Al’s Tavern in Wallingford in 1998. Opened in 1940, it is the quintessential neighborhood bar and that “has never tried to be anything more or less.” A more recent purchase in 2022 is the Rendezvous in Belltown. Unique for its historic film screening room called the Jewel Box Theater and private bar called the Grotto in the basement, it continues as a multi-use performance space today.

In Ballard, Max owns Hattie’s Hat, Sunset Tavern, and the Ballard Smoke Shop—all located in the Ballard Avenue Landmark District, where locals call Max “The Reviver.” One only needs to look beyond and around the historic district to see how the neighborhood has changed physically. As redevelopment marches on, Max and his business partners have managed to keep these legacy businesses around, serving as anchors for the community.

A March 27, 2024, Seattle Times article (“Why Ballard dive bars thrive in changing Seattle”) by food writer Bethany Jean Clement features Max and describes him as the “dive-bar savior.” She interviews Brad Holden, co-host of the podcast “Dim Lights & Stiff Drinks: The Dive Bars of Seattle,” and author of Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners and Graft in the Queen City, and asks him why some dives persist while so many others perish?

He responds, “It’s really the people.” What often happens is that many of the dive bars “have been on the brink of closing their doors for good.” “And then at the last minute, someone who appreciates the historical legacy of these places and why they’re important has stepped in, and basically rescues it by purchasing it and becoming the owner.” That new proprietor must appreciate the “true, original character of the place — someone who’s keen on preservation, not transformation to ‘a mojito bar, or an axe-throwing brewery, or whatever happens to be trendy at the time.’”

Fortunately for Seattle, there’s Max Genereaux. “I’m in for the long haul. I want to be 90 and coming down here.”

We’ll drink to that!

Image Courtesy of Erika Carleton 

Lawrence Kreisman – 2024 Preservation Champion Award

Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 19, 2024. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature Larry Kreisman, the 2024 Preservation Champion Award recipient. 

Congratulations Larry Kreisman!

Lawrence (Larry) Kreisman is a true Preservation Champion. For decades, he has played an integral role in protecting, celebrating, and elevating historic architecture locally, regionally, and nationally. Without Larry’s dedication and effort, the city would be a much different place. Larry was Historic Seattle’s Program Director for twenty years (1997-2017), where he developed an impressive education program for the organization during a period of significant challenge and change in Seattle. He brought significant narrative skills from his educational background in English literature, Fine Arts, and Urban Design.

He was here for the “birthing” of historic preservation in Seattle in the 1970s and has remained at its heart since that time. From the moment he enrolled in the University of Washington’s Master of Architecture program (graduating in 1980), Larry has made a lasting and meaningful impact on preserving the built environment. His graduate work included neighborhood inventory and architectural evaluation at a time when the City of Seattle was developing an ethic and a vocabulary for historic preservation.

He followed that track in a notable career including exhibit design, tour leadership, publishing, lecturing, and journalism. He wrote, co-wrote, and edited eleven books, including The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, Made to Last: Historic Preservation in Seattle and King County, and Tradition and Change on Seattle’s First Hill: Propriety, Profanity, Pills, and Preservation.

He served as the Seattle Architecture Foundation’s Viewpoints Tour Program Director from 1990 to 2003. He researched and co-curated “Blueprints,” the centennial exhibit for the American Institute of Architects Seattle and Washington chapters in 1994 at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI).

While regularly contributing featured articles on architecture and design to the Pacific NW Magazine in the Seattle Times, he also served an extended term as historian for the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board. In 1997, he received the Washington State Historic Preservation Officer’s Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Historic Preservation. In 2006, Larry became an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, Seattle Chapter.

Retired, but scarcely retiring, he has continued his work of advocacy and public education, most recently as a Rainier Club Honorary Fellow.

If you have been to even one of Larry’s programs, you are familiar with the passion he brings in connecting people to places that matter. His work has touched countless people, and Historic Seattle is grateful to Larry for all that he has given to the preservation cause throughout an extraordinary career.

Image courtesy of Historic Seattle

Historic Seattle & Indow: Spreading Preservation Awareness through Non-Traditional Means

By Kristina Damschen Spina

Indow is a Portland-based manufacturer of interior storm window inserts. Our inserts are designed to preserve a building’s original windows by improving their performance in areas of noise, drafts, and energy consumption. We are passionate about historic preservation, so we created a zine to engage communities around the issue.

A zine (pronounced zeen) is a small DIY self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, often produced via photocopier. The format of making zines—unencumbered by rules relating to form, function, or purpose—allows makers to share stories about anything. As preservationists work to expand the narrative on saving old places, make preservation inclusive, and reach new audiences, zines are one strategy you should add to your toolkit.

The Indow zine theme for 2021 is community sustainability and how we have managed to maintain a sense of community and place in isolation. When we announced this theme, we asked: “How do we celebrate a place when we cannot stand in it? How do we lift up a community when we cannot gather?” We are grateful for creative people like those at Historic Seattle, who answered our question by asking in return: “Who says you have to stand still in a place to celebrate it?” Historic Seattle’s bike tour of historic sites in the Emerald City, which they’ve been organizing for several years, is an ingenious way to safely gather people and honor the city’s old places.

This year’s Preservation Month Bike Tour offered three routes throughout the city highlighting the remaining Paul Thiry architecture. Thiry introduced Seattle to European Modernism, one of the subgenres of which is Brutalism, used widely in the communist countries of the Eastern Bloc. As a result, many Seattleites had difficulty warming to this new architectural aesthetic popping up in the city. Famously, a Thiry-designed home went on sale for $1 but was demolished after no one purchased it. While Thiry’s contributions may not be widely celebrated, they are part of Seattle’s architectural heritage, and we applaud Historic Seattle for teaching this part of the city’s history.

Did you attend Historic Seattle’s Preservation Month Bike Tour? Consider making your own zine to spread awareness about preservation in your community. Check out Historic Seattle’s submission to the 2021 Indow zine for inspiration. You can find this year’s Indow zine and all of our past editions on the Indow online zine library. Past zine themes include preservation and illuminating our cities with neon. Looking through our past zines will help to demystify the process of making your own. Watch out for our online zine submission page for an update on next year’s zine theme.

If you have a great idea for your zine, but aren’t quite sure how to get it off the ground, we got you covered. Take a look at the Indow Zine Resource Center to learn how to create your first zine. Be sure to watch the zine workshop for wonderful insight provided by the panel with members of the Indow marketing team and guests.

 

Indow is a generous sponsor of Historic Seattle’s 2021 Community Education & Advocacy Programming. This post is part of a series of guest blogs submitted by members of the Historic Seattle community.  The views and opinions expressed in guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Historic Seattle.

VivaCity: Summer 2021 – A Seattle History & Preservation-Related Reading List

Last month, in celebration of summer, we asked you to share what Seattle history or preservation-related books you recommend, or have on your summer reading list. Here is a list of all of the excellent titles that were suggested. Happy reading!

Building Tradition: Pan-Asian Seattle and Life in the Residential Hotels by Marie Rose Wong

The Cayton Legacy – An African American Family by Richard S. Hobbs

Crossing Puget Sound: From Black Ball Steamer to Washington State Ferries by Steven J. Pickens

Distant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson by Jeffrey Karl Ochsner and Dennis Alan Andersen

Emerald Street – A History of Hip Hop in Seattle by Daudi J. Abe

The Forging of A Black Community Seattle’s Central District, From 1870 Through the Civil Rights Era by Quintard Taylor

The Gang of Four: Four Leaders. Four Communities. One Friendship by Bob Santos

Gay Seattle by Gary Atkins

Ghosts of Seattle Past – An Anthology curated by author/editor Jaimee Garbacik

The Good Rain by Timothy Egan

Hill with a Future – by Jacqueline B. Williams

High Voltage Women Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Light by Ellie Belew

I’m Down by Mishna Wolff

Jackson Street After Hours -The Roots of Jazz in Seattle by Paul De Barros

Lost Seattle by Rob Ketcherside

Madison House by Peter Donahue

My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain by Aaron Dixon

My Unforgotten Seattle by Ron Chew

Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place by Coll Thrush

Nisei Daughter by Monica Stone

Olmsted in Seattle: Creating a Park System for a Modern City by Jennifer Ott

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and The Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor

The River That Made Seattle A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish by BJ Cummings

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas by Tera Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross

Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners and Graft in the Queen City by Brad Holden

Seattle’s Women Teachers of the Interwar Years: Shapers of a Livable City by Doris Hinson Pieroth

Shared Walls: Seattle Apartment Buildings 1900-1939 by Diana James

Skid Road – An Informal Portrait of Seattle  by Murray Morgan

Sons of the Profits by William C. Speidel

Too High and Too Steep by David Williams

Tradition and Change on Seattle’s First Hill: Propriety, Profanity, Pills, and Preservation by Lawrence Kreisman

Women In Pacific Northwest History edited by Karen J. Blair

 

BOOK LISTS

https://santorinidave.com/seattle-books

https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/list/share/117997230_seattlenonficlibrarians/638579298_seattle_picks_washington_state_nonfiction

https://www.thestranger.com/books/feature/2016/01/27/23481851/books-about-seattle-that-everyone-should-read

 

 

Leadership Transition

Historic Seattle Announces Leadership Transition

Brooker-KellyHistoric Seattle announces that Kathleen Brooker recently stepped down from her position as the organization’s Executive Director on January 1, 2015. Ms. Brooker has transitioned into a new role as Director of the Historic Seattle Preservation Foundation to manage the completion of the organization’s capital campaign to restore Washington Hall, a historic community gathering place and current large project of Historic Seattle. In addition she will be working closely with the Foundation as it develops new initiatives for 2015.

“It has been a wonderful experience to lead this organization for the past seven years. It has been a pleasure to watch the growing support for Washington Hall, the 1908 Landmark that has been the focus of our preservation efforts during this time,” said Kathleen Brooker. “We have expanded our advocacy, outreach and easements work, and completed our restoration of the Good Shepherd Center. But I feel my biggest accomplishment has been to work effectively with an experienced and professional Historic Seattle Preservation and Development Authority Council and to build an extremely talented and hardworking staff. It has been a lot of fun, and truly satisfying.”

Ms. Brooker was Historic Seattle’s fourth Executive Director in 40 years. Prior to coming to Historic Seattle in 2008, she served as Executive Director of Historic Denver for 15 years. She took on the leadership role at Historic Seattle during the depths of the recession, steering the organization through challenging times. With her national credentials and breadth of experience in preservation leadership, she promoted collaboration and community partnerships, worked to improve organizational operations, increased membership, and directed attention to advocacy.

At its December 2014 meeting, the Council of the Historic Seattle Preservation Development Authority (HSPDA) adopted a leadership transition plan that named Kji Kelly as the new Executive Director effective January 1, 2015. Mr. Kelly has been with the organization since 2005, serving in different capacities, first as Asset and Property Manager, then Director of Real Estate, and since 2014, as Deputy Director. He brings extensive knowledge of the organization’s operations and expertise in real estate and construction management, specializing in restoring, adaptively re-using, and maintaining historic structures. As Executive Director, Mr. Kelly plans to further integrate HSPDA’s three major program areas of education, advocacy, and real estate. In addition, he plans to develop the Foundation to stimulate and attract economic support to save and adaptively re-use more buildings throughout the region.

“Historic Seattle is delighted to welcome Kji Kelly as its new Executive Director,” said Michael Herschensohn, HSPDA Chair. “During her seven years of outstanding professional service, Historic Seattle’s departing executive director Kathleen Brooker guided the organization’s work including preservation efforts for Washington Hall that will return it to community use. Kji brings to Historic Seattle the skills of a talented negotiator and a practicing preservationist. The Council looks forward to dynamic leadership from Kji and the completion of the Washington Hall capital campaign this spring, which Brooker will continue to lead as part of this seamless transition.”