The miniature house-office of Blue Ridge Realty on the corner of 15th Ave. NW and NW 100th St. may be diminutive, but it is a historically and architecturally significant building in danger of demolition and presents an opportunity for important education about our city.

 

 

Name: Blue Ridge Realty                                           

Year Built: 1932

Address: 9925 15th Ave NW Seattle, WA 98117     

Parcel No.: 267560-0106

Plat Name: Gaffners Acre Trs E 63.06 FT                

Lot: 11

Original Owner: Blue Ridge Realty Inc. 

Original Use: Office Building

Architect: Unknown                                                  

Builder: Unknown

 

 

The Blue Ridge Realty office building is located in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Seattle and is directly adjacent to the exclusive all-residential neighborhood of Blue Ridge. Blue Ridge Realty is directly across the street from the main entrance to Blue Ridge. Today, the immediate surrounding neighborhoods (including North Beach, Olympic Manor, and Crown Hill) are almost entirely residential.  In 1932, much of the surrounding land was agricultural or recently subdivided and vacant. The building was owned by Blue Ridge Realty, Inc. and used as a real estate office from 1932 to 1992 (60 years), when it was sold to the present owners. Founded in 1930, Blue Ridge was a restricted residential community developed by W.E. and Bertha Boeing, notorious for its high prices and now-defunct racial restrictive covenant (Fig. 2).

 

The one story, wood-frame building is only 484 square feet. The exterior form of the office building resembles a single-family house. The building housed the real estate sales office for Blue Ridge when it opened in 1932.  Subsequently, the realtors who worked there could sell houses elsewhere as well. The building is set close to the street on both sides, with just enough space to park a car on the strip in front. The miniature front yard features trimmed shrubbery and a decorative white-picket fence with a matching lamppost. To the South of the building, a second paved parking space and large grassy lawn cover the rest of the lot. The front (east-facing) and side (south-facing) façades are punctuated by large windows with white scalloped trim. The entire building is clad in wooden shingle siding painted blue. Decorative white trim edges the gable roof, overhang, and door. Centered near the edge of the roof to crown the front façade is a row of one-foot high white dimensional letters spelling “BLUE RIDGE REALTY.” In late November 2013, the “E” of “BLUE” tipped backwards, the first major mark of degradation of the building.

 

 

Blue Ridge Realty is historically and architecturally significant as the real estate office for the Blue Ridge neighborhood and historically significant as a symbol of housing discrimination in the city of Seattle.  Constructed in 1932, it was one of the first buildings in the area, and marked a turning point from agricultural homesteading to residential suburbanization.  The tiny house with its large dimensional letters acted as both an advertisement and a destination sign for the housing development in addition to its functional use as a sales office.

 

Though intended as and used for an office building, Blue Ridge Realty was designed to look like a dollhouse in scale and decoration. It features symbols of suburbia such as scalloped trim and a nominal white picket fence. The building is an eye-catching exaggerated example of a storybook house that could (and would) be built on the home sites in Blue Ridge. Without pre-built homes in the subdivision, the developers of Blue Ridge sparked the imagination of potential buyers with the appearance of their sales office. Applying the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas, the building could be considered a “duck,” taking the form of the product it advertises.

 

Currently, the incongruous size and “cute” appearance of Blue Ridge Realty makes it a fond landmark to Seattleites.  It contributes to the specific quality of residential North Seattle, an area of the city largely void of distinctive commercial buildings.

 

Blue Ridge Realty is a significant symbol of the history of housing discrimination in the liberal city of Seattle, a narrative missing from common knowledge in our city. As the real estate office for a racially restricted community, Blue Ridge Realty was the place where potential home buyers were turned away for being “other than one of the White or Caucasian race.” (Fig. 2) Combined with redlining practices, such restrictive covenants were highly influential in the persisting patterns of segregation in Seattle. 

 

 

Future use for the Blue Rid­ge Realty building could include an interpretive exhibit explaining its significance. A constructive approach to the unjust history would be through the lens of truth and reconciliation pioneered by post-Apartheid South Africa. Another positive approach would be to raise awareness about current injustices and what can be done to prevent them, drawing inspiration from the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam. Implementation of this vision for Blue Ridge Realty could range from interpretive signage outside to an interactive house museum with permanent and rotating exhibits, school field trip programs, and other events. County documentation states that the highest and best use of the space would be commercial or service. Perhaps adaptive reuse of the building as commercial with an interpretive element will be ideal. Potential partners for an exhibit could be The Museum of History and Industry and History House of Greater Seattle as well as neighborhood associations such as those of Crown Hill and Blue Ridge.­­