A Street buildings erased

YAKIMA, Wash. -- They stood for 100 years. They fell in a single day.

Sandi Westwood watched from across the street as the Yakima County-owned “A Street buildings” fell under the weight of a CAT trackhoe Monday.

For Westwood, whose father, Robert Saxton, had operated Robert L. Saxton Realty in the buildings for about 40 years, watching their demolition was like grieving.

“I’m very sentimental about the whole thing,” the 66-year-old Yakima retiree said. “My brother and I roamed the hallways behind those offices. We’d roam over next door to Hazel’s Candy. And we’d roam over to Clark Jennings and Associates — he was my father’s best friend.”

Westwood’s father, who died in 1991, occupied the corner office in the row of downtown Yakima storefronts from the late 1930s well into the 1970s, she said. Like a handful of other onlookers, she thought more could have been done to save the buildings.

“But I have to admit I didn’t really do anything either,” Westwood said. “I just didn’t believe it was really ever going to happen.”

In fact, it’s been in the works for a long time. The buildings, which over the years have housed restaurants, offices, a candy shop and a mortuary, saw their last tenant, the Lunch Box Cafe, leave in 2007.

Also in 2007, a county facilities task force recommended the buildings, on the corner of A and Second streets, be demolished so the underlying property could be “banked” for future county use.

When downtown advocates protested, the county commissioners voted to put off demolition and allowed developers to propose renovation projects — with the caveat that the buildings would revert to county control in 20 years to be demolished and replaced.

Yakima developer Diane Vance, who renovated the downtown Talcott Building, made such a proposal before determining it wouldn’t be cost effective. She determined that, including decontamination and asbestos removal, renovation would have cost $1.6 million, and she would not be able to make a profit during the 20-year lease term.

Commissioners considered the vacant buildings a liability risk, and in January approved a $125,000 contract with Russell Crane Service to tear them down.

That includes asbestos and lead removal, which has been done over the past two weeks, and removal of the chemical storage tanks underneath the building. That will be done after the demolition debris is removed this week.

County commissioners have scheduled a study session Thursday to discuss options for the site, which they plan to keep as green space in the immediate future.

“What we had there was some old, deteriorated, contaminated buildings,” county Commissioner Mike Leita said.

Approval of the demolition contract spurred another round of public outcry, including protests from the city of Yakima’s Historic Preservation Commission. Members of the commission faced off with the commissioners at a heated county meeting earlier this month.

The buildings were owned by the county but were located within city limits.

The preservation commission’s Jenifer Wilde-McMurtrie, believing she’d found a procedural misstep in the county’s environmental review, made a last-ditch attempt to save the buildings Monday morning. She thought the county had left out language in its last report related to the appeal process.

But, as city staff explained to Wilde-McMurtrie while she watched demolition begin from a second-floor City Hall office, the county had in fact met the legal obligations for a demolition permit.

“It just makes me sick to my stomach,” Wilde-McMurtrie said as demolition began.

Not everyone watching the demolition was sad to see the buildings go.

“The buildings had outlived their usefulness back in the ’60s really,” said Denny Herreid, 57, of Yakima.

Though Herreid used to have lunch occasionally at the Lunch Box Cafe, he said he’s not going to miss the buildings at all.

“I don’t think they really had any value architecturally either,” he said.

Linda Lidke, the owner of the relocated Lunch Box Cafe, which moved a block down A Street from the buildings, was similarly unsentimental about the demolition. The business is now located between First and Front streets.

“I was in that building for eight years, so I know what it was like inside,” she said. “It’s in really bad shape.”

Bad shape or not, the buildings and their century of history meant something to some people in Yakima, said Scott Irons, chairman of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission.

“Everybody (in the commission) is kind of in mourning right now,” he said, watching the last stages of demolition Monday afternoon. “An old building is like an old friend. And how you choose to treat it is indicative of who you are.”