Sue Lani Madsen: Deconstructing the future for Mary’s Place

It is hard to overlook the big white house at 104 W. Eighth Ave. on the way to the front door of Sacred Heart Medical Center. The challenge to saving “Mary’s Place” is location, location, location. To the dismay of Spokane historic preservation aficionados, Mary’s son and heir George Alex took out a demolition permit last year.

But there’s a spectrum of options spanning between the polar opposites of a wrecking ball or canonization as an historic artifact. Besides simple demolition, there’s relocation to a new site, selective salvage before demolition, or complete deconstruction.

That last option, deconstruction, is included in the 2021 Washington state Building Code as Appendix Z. It only applies if adopted by each local jurisdiction – which Spokane has not done nor should it. But deconstruction is a concept worth promoting without adding more red tape to growth and development.

Mary’s Place is the kind of place Appendix Z targets: a nice 1906 house but not particularly distinguished in a city with many fine houses built in the same era. Its once quiet residential neighborhood was long ago displaced by the regional medical centers sprawling across the formerly residential lower South Hill.

Its primary claim to historic significance is mere survival, thanks to two stubborn and strong-willed women. Sacred Heart’s Sister Peter Claver met her match in Mary Gianetsas, and the new hospital that Claver built had to be designed around the house that Gianetsas refused to sell short.

With rumors of the property being purchased to expand a parking lot, a nascent movement to “Save Mary’s Place” is forming. But healthy cities are not static places, and Mary’s Place is in the wrong place.

Relocation is not impossible, but a difficult option given the steep terrain on each side of Eighth Avenue and the distance to a suitable lot of adequate size. Demolition with salvage of readily recycled materials is common, but deconstruction goes beyond a few fixtures scrap metal to recapture materials like structural lumber and fine finishes.

Appendix Z defines it as “the systematic disassembly of a structure, in order to salvage building materials or components for the primary purpose of reusing materials to the maximum extent possible, with a secondary purpose of recycling the remaining materials.” The result is much less to haul to a landfill and much more salvaged for reuse.

Diamond Parking is sometimes cast as the villain in this sort of classic historic preservation stand-off, but they don’t own the building, according to Dan Geiger, vice president for Diamond Parking in the Spokane region. Geiger is a Spokane native who pointed out Diamond owns and carefully maintains the Paulsen Building and other nonparking real estate. “I personally like to see things reused and salvaged, not just destroyed. I will be looking to learn more about deconstruction. It’s an interesting concept,” Geiger said.

For Dave Bennink, seeing the massive amount of waste from the demolition of Bellingham’s Mount Baker High School was the inspiration for a new business. Since forming Re-Use Consulting in 1993, he has done more than merely advise people on how to make it work. “We’re not here just to talk about it, we actually do it and we use that experience to advise others,” Bennink said in an interview.

“We started our operation, had a store for the materials, learned how to do deconstruction so we could do it more affordably. We got better at it so now we know how to do it faster. It’s not a special service we have to charge more for, we’re set up to do this for a living and we’re on year 32.”

Kinley Deller, coordinator for King County’s Construction and Demolition program, was one of the people who developed the code language for Appendix Z and has shopped it around seeking municipalities to adopt it. “Portland, Oregon, adopted a similar code requirement about 10 years ago,” Deller said. “It originally applied to residential demolition for houses built in 1916 or earlier, then they amended and changed the threshold to 1940.” Deller said there are now 13 different deconstruction companies competing for the work, making it “the same cost as plain old demolition.”

Bennink cautioned patience. “If a city is thinking of adopting any kind of new mandates, we tell them it doesn’t just happen overnight. When we helped Portland get started, we had to train contractors on how to do it, then get the public educated on what is deconstruction and then let people know there’s a supply of reclaimed materials available that wasn’t there before. Contractors worry about being stuck with all this material. Changing the work landscape is precarious.”

Systematically taking apart a house does more than keep waste out of the landfill. It’s ultimately a conservative attitude, looking at a house as a resource to be mined for maximum return rather than a liability to be knocked over. Compare the quality of wood stud framing in a 1940s rancher to what you see in a lumberyard today and the value of deconstruction is obvious. It takes advantage of market forces to encourage growth of skills and products.

“Our role in training people is to shorten their learning curve, to teach contractors in 10 days what we learned over 10 years,” Bennink said. “Even the average well-built house deserves to be deconstructed.”

And Mary’s Place is above average.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.