The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board voted 6-2 last week to reject a Mayfair Neighbors Association (MNA) effort to nominate four homes in the 2600 block of Nob Hill Ave. N. for landmark status, said Karen Gordon, a city historical-preservation officer. "The board decided they did not meet the criteria of the ordinance."
Three of the homes belong to the Seattle Country Day School, and giving them landmark status could have potentially blocked the private school's goal of demolishing them to make way for a planned expansion, conceded Sal Thompson, a member of the neighborhood association's steering committee.
The association has been battling the school over its expansion plans, but the goal of nominating the four homes for landmark status was not to block the school's plans, she insisted.
"If that was all we wanted to do, it would have been just the Seattle Country Day School homes," Thompson said. "We want to make the whole thing a historic district," she said of the neighborhood.
Indeed, the group had nominated six homes on the dead-end block on the north slope of Queen Anne Hill because they were all designed by Victor Voorhees and built in the 1930s, Thompson said. "We were allowed to talk to four," she said.
The four considered by the landmarks board were first nominated more than a year ago, but the other two were nominated only on April 4 this year, said Thompson, who added that was too late. "We got blindsided on a procedural issue."
What led to the nomination effort, said association member Bill Lillas, was that MNA chair Elliott Ohannes saw historian Kate Krafft taking notes and photographs of the homes last spring, and one of the homes belongs to Ohannes. "That's what really tweaked us to do it," Lillas said of the nominations for landmark status.
Ohannes, for his part, said the homes on the block have to be viewed as part of the neighborhood and that nominating them for landmark status would help preserve the neighborhood. He also denied the aim of the MNA was to block the demolition of the school-owned homes.
Gordon from the landmarks board said that landmark status is not a guarantee that the three homes would escape the wrecking ball. After all, she noted, historic buildings and structures in Seattle are torn down all the time.
But Ohannes wouldn't have minded if that was the case. "If that's the byproduct, so be it," he said.
A call left for comment from school head Michael Murphy was answered by an e-mail that said the school's "only" comment was: "Seattle Country Day School is pleased with the city of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board's decision denying nomination of four houses on the 2600 block of Nob Hill Ave. N. We believe the landmarks board weighed the information about the issue appropriately and we abide by their decision."
For Lillas, the landmarks board decision is just another example of what he says is unfair city treatment of the MNA concerns about the school.
"They don't even respond to us anymore," he said of the Department of Planning and Development in particular. "They think we're going to go away, I think, if we don't get any action."
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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