A shabby symbol of civic nostalgia departed Seattle in early March. With the aid of tugboats, the decrepit, art-deco era Kalakala ferry made its way to a temporary home in the Olympic Peninsula's Neah Bay; its latest owner, Steve Rodriguez of Lost Horizons, promised restoration.
The ship's departure from Puget Sound originated in a financial maelstrom that blew the nonprofit Kalakala Foundation into bankruptcy and now threatens to wash over Fremont's legendary arts community.
The Kalakala connection
Riding out the center of the storm is Seattle sculptor Peter Bevis.
A resident of Fremont since 1979, Bevis conceived and built the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry in 1981. Three years later, during a commercial fishing trip to Alaska, he had his first glimpse of the Kalakala sitting in Gibson Cove, abandoned after years of use as a crab and fish processing plant.
"I looked at the Kalakala as one of the sculpture projects the foundry worked on," Bevis recently mused. "I'm not involved [anymore], although I have a deep desire to see the Kalakala succeed. I can't seem to quite let go of that."
Considering Bevis' history with the ship over the last 20 years, his emotion is easily understood. After his initial sighting of the broken-down vessel, Bevis began seriously attempting to return the Kalakala to its home waters in 1988.
Seven years later, in 1995, Bevis felt the foundry was self-sufficient enough for him to dedicate large amounts of time in Alaska toward cleaning up the abused ship with the help of several fellow Fremonters.
By 1998 Bevis and his crew had removed 700 tons of debris from the Kalakala, re-floated the vessel and towed it down to Seattle amid an intense amount of fanfare.
However, with the 2001 terrorist attacks, the implosion of the dot-com industry and the subsequent drying up of venture and charity capital in the Seattle area, the Kalakala Foundation's fund-raising efforts sank.
In a contentious move, the foundation voted Bevis off the board and tried to swim to the surface off its deepening debt, but failed and plunged into bankruptcy and a resulting liquidation of assets, mainly the sale of the ship to Rodriguez. The largest debtor bearing the brunt of this decision is Bevis.
"Technically, the bankruptcy wipes out the debt, but I gotta wait. I gotta pay my mom. I gotta pay my sister. There are guys I owe back wages to who came out of Fremont and went up to Alaska. There's an Alaskan guy I owe money to. He moored the boat once we got her floating," an exasperated Bevis said.
After handing his accountant a box of receipts and financial documents relating to his lengthy effort to bring the Kalakala back to Seattle for restoration, Bevis notes he has an estimated $1.8 million in debt.
The foundry is Fremont
"When I borrowed this money, I particularly promised my mother if it doesn't work out, I'll sell the [Fine Arts Foundry] building, I'll pay my debts and I'll be square with the world," Bevis asserted.
Making such a financial move has not been easy for Bevis, and it may be even harder on the future of Fremont's arts community.
Before launching full time into the Kalakala project, Bevis busied himself with erecting one of Fremont's most striking and unique pieces of public art: the award-winning Emile Vinkoff sculpture of Lenin salvaged in Slovakia.
Brought to the state by English teacher-turned-entrepreneur Lou Carpenter, the giant sculpture lay abandoned in several large pieces in an Issaquah cow pasture after Carpenter's untimely automobile accident death.
Carpenter's mother contacted Bevis about the sculpture, and he took it off her hands and into his foundry's cavernous workshop for repair, assembly and display preparations.
"Without the foundry, and without Peter, [the Lenin statue] would have never happened," said longtime foundry resident and papier-mâché mask guru Roger Wheeler. "Peter built [the foundry] from the ground up. He tore down the [three] houses that were here by himself with a crowbar! He poured the foundation and worked with a structural engineer. He didn't even have an architect."
The eclectic personality
A Fremont resident since 1956, Wheeler has seen the rise of the neighbor-hood's eclectic and artistic personality. For the last 10 years he's also been living in the found-ry.
With 12 apartments, the foundry provides local artists a unique place to live and work, Wheeler said, especially considering it has good southern light exposure, solid concrete construction, a bridge crane for manipulating large art projects such as the Lenin statue, a bronze casting facility capable of creating life-sized sculptures and a gallery to sell and display artists' work.
Aside from the Lenin statue, Wheeler states the foundry helped create several of Fremont's renowned institutions and traditions.
"The Fremont Arts Council had kind of gone to sleep in the mid-198's, and there were meetings here trying to get the juice back into it," Wheeler said.
Aside from playing a crucial role in reviving the arts council, Wheeler states all of the early Solstice Parade events and Trolloween parties were held at the foundry.
"It's kind of a hub," foundry resident and photographer Jon McDer-mott noted. "It draws artists."
A dubious future?
"I've really neglected the foundry and its building maintenance. I'm really behind on that," admitted Bevis admitted. "To get the Kalakala home, I really looted the building maintenance fund."
Hammer and nail problems aside, the larger issue is the fate of the foundry after Bevis sells the building to relieve his Kalakala debt. He contends that, so far, there is no guarantee he's been able to make with any of the prospective buyers to ensure the foundry serves its current purpose. Whether this means the building will be demolished under new ownership or gentrified to the point of being cost-prohibitive for artists to live there has yet to be seen.
To this point, Wheeler views the foundry as a "very rare animal" and a stronghold of the Seattle arts community.
"Do you know the part of the castle called the keep? It's the last holdout for the families of royalty. It's the most fortified part," Wheeler said. "So, that's kind of the way I see the foundry."
Every castle has its enemies, and McDermott feels if the foundry falls to the threats, he perceives it would be a huge loss to the community.
"There's a definite difference in a lot of the new architecture that's coming in. Fremont has always been known for being a little bit wild, for doing things their way creatively and politically," McDermott said. "The attitude that's moving in I find much more homogenized, much more forced. There's no communal commitment. The more high-tech it gets you don't have that connection anymore. It's like everything is business. The focus has changed from community to making money."
Whatever the foundry's fate, it's worth noting the bad luck that has dogged the Kalakala ever since its arrival in the Puget Sound region more than five years ago seems to be tainting Bevis' efforts to rise from beneath the ship's debt.
To date, he's had five offers for the foundry, but he's being sued by the third-highest bidder about the foundry sale. The case goes to court in December.
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