1 week until Landmarks Board considers West Seattle Junction’s Hamm Building

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The agenda is out for next Wednesday’s Landmarks Preservation Board meeting, which will include consideration of the Hamm Building in the West Seattle Junction as a potential city landmark. The board will meet at 3:30 pm in the Boards and Commissions Room at City Hall downtown; if the estimated time for the agenda items before this nomination run as projected, it will be about an hour and 45 minutes until the board gets to this nomination (4:45 pm). The public is welcome, and there will be a time for public comments, which also can be sent via postal mail (this notice explains how). The Hamm Building is on the northwest corner of California/Alaska and is best known as home to businesses including Easy Street Records. From the 54-page nomination document, which you can see here, the “statement of significance”:

The Crescent-Hamm Building is a pivotal commercial building in West Seattle. Completed in 1926 during a decade of rampant growth, the building remains a familiar visual anchor at the center of “the Junction,” West Seattle’s most prosperous business district. It was designed by the prolific architect Victor W. Voorhees at the behest of W. T. Campbell, a highly successful local developer and community booster of the period. Although altered in minor ways, the building retains typical massing, spatial arrangements, and distinctive terracotta detail of a 1920s business block.

If the board gives its approval to the nomination, it would have at least one more meeting to consider formally designating the building as a landmark. Meantime, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society also is proposing landmark consideration for the Campbell Building on the northeast side of the same intersection; no date set yet for its consideration by the board.

7 Replies to "1 week until Landmarks Board considers West Seattle Junction's Hamm Building"

  • Jeannie December 28, 2016 (9:14 pm)

    Is there an email address where I can submit my comments in support of the preservation? Not many of use still use snail mail!

  • Jeannie December 29, 2016 (2:18 am)

    For some reason, the link for Peder Nelson on the SWSHS didn’t work, so I emailed clay.eals@loghousemuseum.info, also with the Historical Society. 

  • Clay Eals December 29, 2016 (11:25 am)

    Tracy and Jeannie, comments can be submitted directly to Erin Doherty, historic preservation coordinator for the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board, via her e-mail address: erin.doherty@seattle.gov.

    Erin encourages all such comments to reach her by early next week so that she has time to forward them to the board members and so that the board members have time to read the comments prior to the Wednesday, Jan. 4, hearing.

    Thanks for the one-week reminder story, Tracy, and for allowing us to clarify that e-mailed comments are welcome, and we will add this clarification to our Junction landmark web page at http://www.loghousemuseum.info/blog/we-love-the-junction/.

    Clay Eals, executive director, Southwest Seattle Historical Society

  • Steve January 4, 2017 (1:39 pm)

    No way that building should be considered a landmark.

    • Jim January 4, 2017 (8:34 pm)

      Why? Must everything now look like a ticky tacky contractor box like the current trend, made of cheap materials with painted panels to make it look interesting, which just make it look more cheap and badly designed. It’s a virus here in Seattle and just cheapens the city. Don’t get me wrong, I am totally in favor of progress, but this city will accept the worst designs just to make a tax buck.

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