When the raze-and-redevelop movement called urban renewal hit Vancouver in the 1960s, ridding downtown of sagging behemoths that blocked the light of “progress” seemed like a fine idea.
While nobody has ever done a definitive study of the results, Brad Richardson said, many dozens of family homes surely were demolished. The only one still standing up for the historical Esther Short neighborhood south and west of today’s park is the Slocum House, a Victorian gem that’s become city property.
“The Slocum House is the only one we know of that was saved,” said Richardson, whose jaw dropped as he pulled up a neighborhood map from the 1940s and surveyed all the houses that used to be there, but were destroyed. “This is amazing. I’ve never looked at this before,” he said. “A ton of houses are gone. So much was lost.”
As the executive director of the Clark County Historical Museum and the designer of the museum’s popular walking-tour series — and a lifelong Clark County resident — Richardson is a living encyclopedia of tales and details about the people and happenings in the past that shaped our lives and landscapes today. Whenever he comes across a fenced-off lot or the rubble of a building, he said, he wonders about — and mourns — what’s been lost forever.
“Physical connection is so important to carrying stories forward,” he said. “If you want people to forget their history, tear out the built world and the living spaces.”
For example, a grand old home used to stand at 701 E. McLoughlin Blvd., a central location in pre-freeway Vancouver — until it got scraped off the landscape sometime over the past year. That was after it was noticed by Alexander Gall, who volunteers with the Clark County Historical Preservation Commission when he’s not doing pre-development archaeology work — hunting for buried artifacts and other evidence of the past — with an Officers Row firm called Archaeological Services.
When a developer or property owner wants to tear down an existing building, Gall has learned, both city and county demolition permit applications are as simple as can be. There’s no query about the age of the property, no box to check about potential historical value.
“Developers are savvy,” Gall said. “They know the first thing they need to do is get it gone.” And, after the building is gone, the county assessor’s office deletes all historical information from its geographic information database, including a building photograph and other details about the structure. That baffles Gall.
“Once the house is demolished, the records disappear,” he said. It’s even true when a property is officially repurposed from residential to commercial: all historical information vanishes from the county’s website. “As if the property never had any history at all,” Gall said. “Erased. Poof. Gone.”
Information medium
Alarmed at the loss of history from a rapidly changing Clark County landscape, Gall and Richardson have teamed up to propose what they believe is a reasonable middle way between preserving any and all aging properties, and letting old structures vanish without a second thought. Preserving everything is neither feasible nor desirable, they agree, but standing by while redevelopment literally erases places that still contain our story is just wrong. There’s got to be a happy historical medium, they say.
“A little subcommittee has formed on the Historic Preservation Commission,” Gall said. “We’re looking at other communities and wondering what models can serve us here as development is taking off again. We don’t want to be a burden to homeowners. But we do want information to be recorded for the future.”
Gall has his eye on an existing state database, nicknamed WISAARD — the Washington Information System for Architectural & Archaeological Records Data — as a place where all property records for about-to-be-demolished houses could go. “It’s statewide, and it’s publicly accessible,” he said — and, at the moment, it’s a broad-yet-shallow collection of little beyond basic identifying information (street address, construction date, no photographs) about many thousands of aging properties. That makes it a natural repository for more complete data, Gall suggested, such as pictures and descriptions and even written tales and oral histories that future property owners and historians would love to see.
The inventory “is a living thing” that could contain all sorts of historical stuff, Gall said.
Crucially, WISAARD is information only. “Being on the inventory doesn’t place any regulatory restrictions on the building,” Gall stressed. That makes it different than a historical register like the famous National Register of Historic Places, which comes with strict rules and standards about keeping properties historically authentic in every important respect. The Clark County Heritage Register isn’t as strict, but it works the same way — sometimes requiring owners to get a “certificate of appropriateness” before undertaking repairs or changes.
None of that is what Gall and Richardson are proposing. What they’re after isn’t total preservation, just handy documentation.
“You can’t preserve everything, but what’s wrong with documenting everything?” Gall wondered — especially in this new world of endless data storage.
Gall doesn’t mean literally everything. In the world of historic preservation, there are two levels of documentation. The simpler is reconnaissance: basic data and a few photographs. “Reconnaissance is almost a windshield survey, plus whatever you can glean from the assessor records,” Gall said. “It’s not exhaustive.”
Reconnaissance is probably appropriate for most to-be-demolished properties that are 50 years old or younger, Gall said. For properties older than that, more detailed exploration, photography and professional evaluation are often in order. That’s called an intensive, and Richardson recently did one with a Clark County Historical Museum volunteer at a significantly historical, previously unknown site in east Clark County.
Proebstel intensive
Earlier this year, an unexpected tip put Richardson’s resources to the test. Somebody called to say an aged home on Andersen Dairy property in Proebstel was literally falling apart. It was a home that the museum knew nothing about. “It sounded like an early home of John Proebstel,” a pioneer who became the area’s namesake, Richardson said, “but we weren’t aware of it. We launched a huge research effort, because it’s really significant for us not to be aware of an early house like this.”
The huge research effort turned up little beyond verifying that it’s an 1870s home, likely built by John Proebstel, Richardson said. “Nobody knew about it, but it’s an important part of the Proebstel story,” he said. “It’s very rare to find such an old home now.”
Jack Dunn of Andersen Dairy was gracious when the museum asked permission to visit and photograph the place, Richardson said. “We showed up to document everything, but we really didn’t know what to expect,” he said.
The trashed treasure they found is a good example of why preserving everything isn’t possible, but documenting everything is invaluable. The building may have gone up in the 1870s, but the structure that Richardson and photographer Chris Walsh explored showed generations of habitation, additions and abandonment, including signs of recent squatters. The structure itself, while on its last legs, remains an example of historic construction and design techniques that were great to document, Richardson said; the interior furnishings and extras include fixtures, wallpaper, artworks, family photographs and other memorabilia from earliest, later and probably last inhabitants (within the last decade or two). There’s even a fancy old upright piano on the ground floor.
“We were amazed at what we found,” Richardson said. “There were no records about this house. Nothing on any inventory or register. But because we’ve got these elements, we can start putting together a story.”
History is even easier to lose from rural properties and barns than city neighborhoods, Gall noted. “Farms are the first ones to go,” he said. “There are fewer protections and more improvised, unpermitted buildings and barns. Barns and farm buildings were once the defining, prominent feature of the landscape. Now they’re plowed under even more easily than homes.”
Raw materials
The value of local history may seem a little ambiguous — tough to quantify with dollar signs, especially with rents always rising and the need for affordable housing acute — but Richardson fields frequent queries from people for whom historical knowledge is priceless.
“People want to revel in the history of their homes,” he said. “They’ll often come in with questions,” either about the homes they live in and love right now, or about family homes that are gone. “If we have no documentation, no photographs, we can’t answer their questions. We can’t go back and help them figure things out.”
Richardson sees his job as collecting, preserving and sharing the raw materials of local history. “I’m a historian. I tell stories. When I see homes and buildings, I see life stories,” he said. “There’s something that’s part of the human condition that wants to see how things used to be and where we came from. But once that’s gone, nobody can see anything.”
