Odd preservation fight unearths slice of history

No question the old sanatorium evokes a lost era, when North Seattle was so rural that patients could go there for "rest, diet and quiet" in a woodsy setting.

If anyone might want to save this building — the faded Waldo Hospital — from the wrecking ball, you'd think it would be Nancy Waldo Smith. She was born there, 55 years ago. She's believed to be the last baby delivered by the hospital's founder, Dr. William Waldo, who brought 2,403 Seattle babies into the world and also was Nancy's grandfather.

Yet the other day, Smith stood outside the building her grandfather once called his dream come true, and gave a surprising verdict: "They should go ahead and tear this place down."

So goes one of the odder historic-preservation battles anyone can remember.

More than a thousand North Seattle neighbors have rallied to save an old hospital and a stand of 80-year-old trees. In so doing, they have resurrected the story of one of the city's early alternative-medicine doctors.

But some descendants of that doctor — as well as some leaders in the local landmark-preservation movement — contend the hospital doesn't deserve to be saved. It played a quiet role in city history, they say, but it wasn't important enough.

And if it is saved, some say, it will only prove that the past can be recast and the historic-preservation process commandeered to stop development.

It all started last year, when the current owner of the old Waldo Hospital building, the nonprofit boys and girls group Camp Fire USA, announced it wanted to sell the building and 1.6 acres at Northeast 85th Street and 15th Avenue Northeast.

The building has been used as Camp Fire's administrative offices since 1967, when the hospital relocated to Northgate (in part because neighbors opposed an expansion plan).

The prospective buyer is a developer who wants to tear down the 83-year-old building and put in 40 homes and town houses.

Neighbors leapt into action. To make a long story shorter, one thing they did was start researching how the hospital came to be.

What they found, they say, compelled them to nominate the hospital as a historic Seattle landmark. Whether it qualifies as a landmark is set to be decided by the Seattle Landmarks Board on June 20.

What's unusual is that the building doesn't have much architectural merit. It should be preserved, neighbors argue, because of the importance in the Seattle story of the man who built it, William Waldo.

Who?

That's what Barbara Maxwell wondered. She's on the Maple Leaf Community Council, a group that was alarmed about the development. She started sifting through old newspaper clippings.

"I went into this with an open mind," she says. "I wasn't just looking for a way to stop something. I honestly became convinced Waldo was a very significant person in the history of this city."

It's not only that Waldo was a well-known doctor in the early 1900s. In newspaper accounts he was said to have "sewed up" most of the city's North End during four decades of doctoring.

When he died in 1962, at age 77, a Seattle Times editorial said he was part of an "illustrious group, an honor roll of men who came here from other parts of the country in the years immediately after the First World War and whose successful careers contributed to and paralleled the rise of a great metropolitan city."

He also was an osteopath. He practiced a holistic branch of medicine founded in the late 1800s to treat the "whole body," a method that included manipulating the muscles and bones of patients.

Waldo built the hospital, Maxwell and others discovered, in part because osteopaths were barred from many conventional hospitals at the time. They were seen as quacks or rebels. Or at the very least, as competitors to the more conventional doctors.

Waldo Hospital was either the first or second osteopathic hospital in the Pacific Northwest (there's a debate about this). Maxwell is convinced the entire site, with its grove of 50 fir trees, is imbued with the spirit of alternative medicine.

"He purposefully put the hospital there and landscaped it to provide a recuperative setting," she says. "For our city, it's a signature example of someone who was using medicine and nature working in harmony to create a treatment."

If it was pioneering, it's been mostly ignored by the history books. Osteopathy wasn't that new to Seattle when Waldo arrived here in 1910. There were already 45 osteopaths listed in the city directory.

"Dr. Waldo may have had some prominence as a professional in the Seattle community during his lifetime, [but] he is not recognized as an important figure in either the history of American medicine generally or in the history of alternative medicine," wrote John Haller, an expert in alternative medical history at Southern Illinois University, in a letter to the Seattle Landmarks Board.

(His opinion was requested by Camp Fire, which doesn't want the building to get historic status because that might kill the current development deal.)

Neither does Waldo appear in a reference book on local medical history, "From Saddlebags to Scanners — The First Hundred Years of Medicine in Washington State." The author, Nancy Rockafeller, says she was aware of Waldo and his hospital but did not include either in the book.

But the curator of the osteopathic museum in Missouri wrote a letter saying Waldo was nationally prominent.

So how do we decide who rates as historically important and who doesn't?

There's no formula. According to Maxwell, 1,138 residents have signed a petition saying Waldo was great enough for them. When I was in the Maple Leaf area last week, I saw banners draped on a truck that read "Save Waldo." Neighbors have taken to calling the stand of trees "Waldo's Forest."

Yet his granddaughter believes Waldo is being used.

"I think they've co-opted my grandfather's story just to try to stop a development," says Nancy Smith. "Of course I think he was a wonderful man. His legacy is important. But his stature alone is not enough to keep this old building around.

"We're not talking about Abe Lincoln's log cabin."

History isn't just what's in the history books. It gets retold and revised to suit our current purposes all the time.

Regardless of what happens to the building, the irony here is that the neighbors who stand accused of using the historic-landmarks system for their own ends have nevertheless unearthed an interesting slice of Seattle's story. Without them, it might have stayed where it was, which was mostly forgotten.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.