Collecting fond memories of Seattle's Yesler Terrace

Mmmmmm. Brown gravy. Bill Francis' mouth still waters at the thought of it.

When Francis was a kid at Seattle's Yesler Terrace, back in the 1950s, his mother always made white gravy. So when he had brown gravy at a friend's house, it seemed like a treat. "I liked it because it was different," he says.

But what surprised Francis was that his pal, Larry Davis, had just the opposite perspective. "He had brown gravy all the time," Francis said, "so he liked coming to my house. For him, white gravy was different."

Sounds simple, but there was an important social phenomenon at work: Francis is white. Davis is African American.

By simply visiting each other's dinner tables — and being open to new experiences — the two learned more about the value of diversity than they could have in any lecture or conference.

Stories like that delight Jean Harris. They reaffirm her effort to collect and preserve oral histories from her fellow "alumni" of Yesler Terrace, the first racially integrated public-housing project in America. She plans to publish her collection in a book she'll call "From the Terrace."

"The way we learned about other cultures was genuine and real," said Harris, 65, a retired anthropology professor. "It was natural."

A couple of years ago, Harris was on the way to the funeral of a friend, fellow Yesler Terrace "alum" Glennell Exkano, when she decided that the stories of people who grew up in that sprawling housing project atop First Hill a half-century ago shouldn't be allowed to vanish into history.

"We were products of a special place and special time, and we have loyalties to each other even today," Harris said.

Underpinning that loyalty, Harris said, is knowing that even if you come from "the projects," you can still achieve success.

Consider that former Gov. Gary Locke, born in 1950, lived the first six years of his life in Yesler Terrace. And Jimi Hendrix lived there, too, for a while.

Harris isn't focusing on celebrities, though. She's gathering the stories of everyday successes: a bus driver, a schoolteacher, a paralegal, a maintenance worker, and she's nearly halfway to her target of 50 case studies.

"A cradle for me"

Completed in 1941, Yesler Terrace was the realization of a dream by Jesse Epstein, founder of the Seattle Housing Authority, to give low-income families comfortable and well-built — albeit modest — housing, and provide social services to help them move up the economic ladder. These weren't tenement towers, but low-rise homes with real backyards, modeled after worker homes in Sweden.

If you had stopped by Yesler Terrace in, say, 1956, you might have seen a skinny African-American girl with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, lugging around a cello case almost as big as she was. That was Jean Harris.

"Yesler Terrace was a cradle for me. I felt safe there," recalls Harris. "It's the place where I learned to believe in myself."

Besides housing and a supportive community, the development offered an array of activities: classes, movies and games, put on by staffers, volunteers and people from outside agencies.

Harris moved to Yesler Terrace in 1950, shortly before her 7th birthday, and was raised as an only child by a great-aunt she called Mama. Because they were the same gender, the two were initially allowed just a one-bedroom unit, but when Harris was in high school, the rules changed and she got what seemed a luxury: her own bedroom.

Yes, Harris acknowledges, poverty brought people to Yesler Terrace. But her memories, and those of her interview subjects, focus not on what on they lacked, but what they had.

"The first apartment that we lived in, I saw Mount Rainier off the balcony," she says. "So I had a sense that it was all right to live in a public-housing project, that it wasn't ugly, that I didn't need to be ashamed of it."

Yesler Terrace, she said, provided resources and role models which "helped me navigate my way in the world."

Even during her college years, when Harris lived on campus across town at what was then Seattle Pacific College, she returned home to Yesler Terrace on weekends because her college meal pass was good only during the week.

Changes on way

These days, it's a little harder to catch up with Harris. Since she retired from Highline Community College in 2005, she's been dividing her time between the Seattle area and Panama, where her retirement dollars stretch farther.

She'll be back in town later this month, and is still looking for subjects for her book. Most of her interviewees so far are African American, and she's hoping to broaden the ethnic mix but still concentrate on the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s.

Because she's only in Seattle part time, Harris hasn't closely followed current proposals for redeveloping Yesler Terrace, which would replacing existing housing with more contemporary structures.

Construction is unlikely to begin before 2011 and — because of the shortage of federal housing funds — is likely to be financed by selling some of the development's property, possibly choice view locations.

Some housing advocates have expressed concern that a redevelopment could cut the number of apartments or move low-income people out of desirable areas, concerns being addressed in a community planning process which has, as a guiding principle, to integrate economic, social or cultural groups.

Whatever is done, Harris hopes the area can continue to mix people of different races and backgrounds.

Her fondest dream, she says, is that her project might encourage the creation of a foundation or some other way for people who benefited from Yesler Terrace to "acknowledge that debt and be able to give back, so that those who live there now and in the future could have the kind of experience we had."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com