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closeMICHAEL SULLIVAN
For every daunting problem there is an answer that is simple, obvious and entirely wrong. It's hard not to recall Mark Twain's quip when reading the recent "Our View" editorial calling for the clear-cutting of historic buildings on Bellingham's working waterfront.
The Waterfront Advisory Group, Port of Bellingham, city of Bellingham and all of us who care about the future of this region, are facing an extraordinary point in history. After a century and a half of industrial separation, downtown Bellingham is about to inherit a public waterfront edge.
With almost 100 acres to work with, this truly is a historic opportunity that no one has seen before and none of us will see again. In fact, there is no other comparable waterfront redevelopment scenario on the entire Pacific coast. With that in mind, we should be cautious about taking irreversible steps.
The Puget Sound Pulp/Georgia Pacific property, as it is today, provides an authentic narrative of Bellingham's working past, one written in brick, steel and timber.
It's a diary of thousands of lifetimes and life works. Lumber jacks skipped across log rafts in cork boots to collect a paycheck from Bloedel Donovan, and paper makers were there to pull the switch on the last run for Georgia Pacific.
Before we toss away the remaining built environment on site, and commit to a "scrape and master plan," there are some important considerations.
First, the generality that all of the historic brick buildings are built around heavy machinery and laced with pipes and industrial waste is simply naive and inaccurate. The massive board mill building is beautifully constructed of specially fired heavy brick masonry with an internal steel frame supporting expansive open floors. Like several of the buildings, it's an excellent candidate for adaptive reuse and the cost of development would not have to include ground disruption and cleanup, demolition permitting and costs, landfill impacts for demolition debris and the environmental impacts of site preparation for new construction.
Next, the suggestion that industrial buildings are inferior to office and apartment buildings as reuse candidates should be tested against the University of Washington Tacoma campus. Today, a thriving campus community fills a cluster of historic brick industrial structures in a completely reanimated section of downtown Tacoma.
Rather than waiting for implementation of a grand master plan, the lower costs of creative reuse and the quicker time to market with unique leasable space would bring eager entrepreneurial pioneers to the G-P site.
In fact, the guiding value of selectively reusing historic buildings and infilling with well designed, contextual new structures, may not only be the best approach, but the most satisfying for those that want to see a diverse mix of uses, people and architecture on the waterfront.
In Everett, the Port Authority began the industrial redevelopment of a 65 acre central waterfront tract in 2006 by designing an ambitious, architecturally homogenized master plan. Working with a single developer, they are going for a completely contemporary mega-plan that, when implemented, will represent a specific point-in-time construct. This plan includes condos, retail and commercial buildings and infrastructure made as a unit, aging as a unit and largely disconnected from the complexity of the city above.
Bellingham can follow a more thoughtful path with its waterfront. The historic buildings and structures on the waterfront have immediate appeal to the segment of the development community experienced in rehabilitation and adaptive reuse projects using historic tax credits and other specialized financing tools. New international building codes and green building standards are helping to define the market and broaden interest in such projects. That interest should be explored thoroughly before we take the irrevocable step of scraping the site.
The waterfront property offers ample square footage for both new construction and adaptive reuse projects and the existing historic patterns of streets, wharfs, view corridors and building forms are meaningful, authentic and hardly in need of conformance with an overriding urban renewal style master design.
It might not even be wrong to keep the simple, obvious carrot colored terra cotta tanks right where they are - just so we don't forget.
Michael Sullivan is principal in Artifacts, a historic preservation and architectural consulting firm. The firm wrote the cultural resources section of the Environmental Impact Study of the Georgia-Pacific site. Sullivan is also a state advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and an adjunct faculty member at University of Washington Tacoma.
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