Memorial Stadium's Landmark Status

Its status, according to the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board on October 5th, is just the memorial wall. From KIRO news radio (all bold mine):

“We’re looking at solely the memorial wall and its associated structures that support just the memorial wall and a 20 feet boundary of the site with not including structures on that site,” Ian McCleod, member of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board, said.

So I assume the City and the district will proceed. I am dismayed that it does not appear that the Board has formally asked the Superintendent to have public meetings about the design of the new stadium.

On October 4th, the Board had talked about landmarking the entire structure. From Feliks Banel's piece on KIRO news radio:

As KIRO Newsradio previously reported, Memorial Stadium was discussed at an earlier meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Board in August, when board members voted 8-1 to consider the entire 1947 structure – and not just the 1951 wall of names of Seattle Public Schools’ World War II dead – for landmark designation.

The process is clumsy, to say the least. The Seattle School District owns Memorial Stadium and has made it clear they want to tear it down. They paid a consultant to prepare what many preservation advocates would describe as an “anti-nomination” – or a document whose goal is the stadium NOT being designated a landmark.

Whether this is true or not, the landmark nomination for Memorial Stadium, which was submitted in June, is missing a stunning amount of basic historical information about Memorial Stadium. At their meeting in August, board members asked the consultants who prepared the nomination to address these deficits, particularly in the areas of concerts held at Memorial Stadium, as well as other public gatherings.

When the board meets Wednesday to consider the “anti-nomination,” there will be no one person officially advocating on Memorial Stadium’s behalf and encouraging the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board to designate the structure as a city landmark. As one preservation professional (who requested anonymity) said in August, the process is akin to a defense attorney advocating for their client’s execution.

For Memorial Stadium, which is already targeted for removal and replacement as part of a public-private partnership, it’s perhaps political or other subtle pressure that led to a staff report that reads like a kind of policy contortionism.

“The Landmarks Board Coordinator acknowledges the cultural history associated with this site, as a gathering space for community events prior to development, then as Civic Field, then as Memorial Stadium,” the staff report reads. “The coordinator believes the significance of this place may not be embodied in the 1947 stadium structure itself, but rather in the open, outdoor playfield area.”

Suggesting that the significance of Memorial Stadium is not in the structure but only in the field is a kind of bizarre hair-splitting, which also conveniently gives the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board a means of not standing in the way of the City of Seattle and Seattle Public Schools’ plan to replace the stadium.

However, extending this analysis to other potential landmarks the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board may one day have to weigh in on, one might be able to say that only the screen of a movie theatre is historically significant, and only the stage of a music venue is historically significant, or only the kitchen of a restaurant is historically significant.

The other thought is that in some future landmark designation process, the owner of a theater, a restaurant or a music venue who is opposed to landmark designation could just tell the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board “the significance of this place may not be embodied in the structure itself, but rather in the spaces inside. So it’s not a landmark. And so I’ll tear down the old non-landmark building and maintain those significant ‘spaces inside’ when I build a new thing in the exact same spot.”

This might set a dangerous precedent for any structure that comes before the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board for possible landmark designation.

I'll note here that the stadium itself was built before the Wall came about.

Many people in the Seattle area can still remember that Memorial Stadium played host to a public gathering of 10,000 people in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. That memorable gathering of those people in those 1947 grandstands was not mentioned in the school district’s landmark nomination for Memorial Stadium, by the way.

It could be argued this freedom to gather together as community members in those 1947 grandstands for sports, for music, and even for memorial services is exactly what those nearly 800 Seattle Public Schools alums were fighting for when they made the ultimate sacrifice in World War II. And, the case could be made for giving Memorial Stadium the “Climate Pledge Arena treatment,” to preserve the original structure, and create a newly imagined state-of-the-art gathering place in and around that should-be-considered-sacred 1947 stadium.

And if Seattle High School Memorial Stadium doesn’t qualify as a landmark – the fully functioning, structurally sound living, breathing and tangible symbol of this city’s promise to always remember and honor that sacrifice – no structure does.