Not gaga over googie

The Denny's restaurant building in Ballard is not valuable enough to be saved — at least, not with public money or through a process of involuntary landmarking. Its owner should be allowed to sell the property to developers of housing, which the city needs.

In voting 8-1 to nominate the boarded-up Denny's as a public landmark, Seattle's Landmarks Preservation Board is accepting the idea that this building, erected in 1964 as a Manning's Cafeteria & Buffet, is of historic significance. We think it is not.

We remember Manning's with some warmth, but not enough to create a public monument to it. It was not a forerunner to Starbucks, as one preservationist said in our pages; it is the antithesis of Starbucks. The forerunner of Starbucks is Peet's, based in Berkeley, Calif.

As for Denny's, that chain still has an outlet in Seattle, on Fourth Avenue South in the industrial district, and does not need to be preserved by municipal ordinance.

As architecture, the significance of the proposed landmark is minor. It is said to be an example of googie, a Jetsons-and-Tomorrowland style that used parabolic lines, starbursts and blobs. Googie was Sputnik-era rocket ship stuff. It reached its apogee in the garish light of Las Vegas and Southern California.

The boarded-up Denny's is not nearly as gross as archetypical googie. It has swooping lines, but so does a much better-known Seattle creation: the Space Needle.

The other problem with landmarking the old Denny's is the process itself. Involuntary landmarking amounts to a partial taking of the owner's property without compensation, for reasons that are at bottom political.

When the Seattle Monorail Authority wanted the Denny's restaurant for a monorail station, the agency condemned it and paid full price for it. It was not landmarked. Now that the proposed use is a 260-unit condo, advocates suddenly wax eloquent about googie.

It's an old Denny's, boarded up.