News Tip

I have a news tip. It's about something that might not otherwise be entirely traditionally newsworthy, but in my opinion that's just so much the worse for the news and says nothing about its own merits.

There is a wall, though some could call it the remains of a wall, here in Everett that has persisted through many changes happening all around it including very much indeed changes that have directly impacted the material condition of the wall. But the wall persists and I am going to describe it to you and hopefully explain why I think it is newsworthy.

Before it was the domain of the Seattle Children's clinic, the plot of land on 13th street in Everett belonged to Everett Community College and housed its sports facilities, including a large field, tennis courts, maintenance building, and recreation center with an indoor pool, basketball court, weightlifting facilities etc. This plot of land was generally open to the public to use as they pleased, for baseball, playing with dogs, tennis, etc. You could walk or ride your bike to school at Whittier Elementary and back home through the parking lot or across the field to openings in the fence where Rockefeller and Oakes dead end to the north. 

There was a grassy hill with some blackberry bushes near the east side of the field where one could relax and even sled down when it snowed. And the maintenance building was such that the eaves of its roof reached just close enough to the slope of another hill that ran up to the alley in the northeast corner of the lot that one could lay a plank of wood from the hill to the roof at a near horizontal angle and use it to climb on top.

The doors to the main building, during business hours on weekdays, were generally open and anyone could just walk in and look around. There was a long dark corridor on the second floor which led past a number of locked doors (one with a rattling machine behind it) to a back entrance to the men's locker room down the stairs in the back of the building. This building was home to of course the school's basketball team, but also local children's recreational programs and served as a caucusing site during election years. I remember it hosted a native tribe powwow and also the pool was the site of Everett High School swimming home meets. I even recall one of those end-of-the-season soccer team pizza parties taking place in the upstairs classroom that had a bank of windows that looked out over the field.

In any case, it's not this building that I am writing to you about, but a wall behind where that building once stood. The building had this arcing support structure on its south side that curved up and over the pool area. It was all enclosed and you had no way of knowing that that's where the pool was. Though there were these sliding doors on that south side wall, which, though I never saw them open that I can recall, had a narrow slit such that if you peered through it, you could see into the pool area and literally make out the glimmer of the water.

These arcing supports served as a means to climb onto the roof of the building (to retrieve lost tennis balls or otherwise look around) and also arced high enough off the ground at a steep enough angle that you could ride you bike under them with ease. In fact, there was pavement all around the building that was wide enough to right a bike on (and cars in principle too, but they only occasionally drove behind the building). It's a shame there are basically no pictures of this building or the grounds as they were before the current state. At least not in a way that is readily accessible to the public who used to be able to explore and play and use the grounds. I have only my recollections, but they are of a vastly higher fidelity and accuracy compared to what an internet search results in. 

The pavement around the building was enclosed on the west side by a concrete wall maybe 4 or 5 feet tall. This wall held back a hill that sloped up another 10 feet or so and ended in a surface level parking lot where there now stands a multistory parking lot. On that sloping hill above the wall, there were assorted blackberry bushes and grasses as well as just some more or less level dirt where one could just relax with their friends and talk. I recall instances where me and my friend would prowl around the parking lot, looking for cars with appealing valve stem caps. We would unscrew them, all four wheels, and build up little collections of our favorites, and sometimes trade them or just admire them on the level dirt and grass above this wall on the back side of this rec center building.

Of course this was all demolished by the hospital to make way for what is there now. Though from what I understand, the Chestnut tree was intentionally left standing for beautification's sake, still there in the southeast corner of the lot. Though, and this is the newsworthy bit, part of that concrete wall that used to run along hill behind the main building also still remains. I (re-)discovered it on a recent little exploration around the lot. Where 12th street meets the lot on its west side, there is a wooden staircase leading down to the current parking lot. A version of this staircase has long been at this site. While facing west, you can see the remains of that wall to your right. It looks a little sunken and eroded, but it's still clearly there. The rest of the wall heading south is not clearly there unfortunately.

This, in addition to the Chestnut tree, seems to be about the only thing left from that previous recreation center, the last remnant physical evidence of what was once a beautiful multipurpose node of freedom in Everett. A node that has been destroyed along with the relaxed, flexible opportunities for unplanned ad hoc living that it afforded anyone who wanted to use it.

Like I said at the outset, I understand that this is not traditionally newsworthy, but so be it. In Rome or similar places, the discovery of remnants of arguably mundane day-to-day living from the past is uncontroversially newsworthy. And one could consider the discovery of this wall to be of a similar sort. Concerns that I can imagine about this being perhaps a little premature to be newsworthy seem at least to me to be missing the point, which is to remember. The point is not to intentionally forget something for a sufficiently long time before rediscovery. This is the sort of thinking that rends us, the living, from our only home and environment. Maintaining our collective memory is the truest news and something not dictated from on high, but gathered from below.

A Concerned Citizen