By Katie Nelson
HIGHLINE TIMES

A brick house on Des Moines Memorial Drive, once inhabited by the YMCA, will be torn down and replaced by a Southwest Suburban Sewer District administrative building.

The house, built in 1928, served the Burien community as a YMCA up until 2008, when the Matt Griffin YMCA was built in SeaTac. Since then, it has been vandalized, according to Ron Hall, SWSSD general manager. The sewer district purchased the property in 2011.

“The house is structurally not strong, it’s unsafe … [the vandals] destroyed every possible thing in the house, they tore out all the wiring, everything,” Hall said. “We weren’t allowed to reuse that building because it sits within the wetlands there, so we could not get a permit to use that building.”

While preparations for the new building are already underway, not everyone is in favor of seeing the old home demolished. Burien resident Melissa Roush has been fighting to preserve the house as a historic landmark.

“It’s not just a beautiful old building. It has historical significance that you’re not going to find anywhere else in town,” Roush said. “Burien has no historical buildings. I thought that was pretty sad. Here we have an option, if we could work with the sewer district.”

Roush hopes to either keep the house as a landmark on its own or to convince the sewer district to operate out of the current building.

Cyndi Upthegrove, executive director for the Highline Historical Society, says that the house, despite its age, is not worth preserving for posterity because it does not meet the criteria for an historic building. She also mentioned that the historical society deals primarily with historical objects.

“We are not in the business of historic property or historic preservation: that’s a completely different topic. We’re here to tell the stories of the community more than anything else,” Upthegrove said. “Maybe she can buy the building. She wanted us to buy it, and I said no.”

Burien city councilmember Rose Clark said she initially supported saving the structure.

“I love old buildings, and so I was willing to go for it, but in talking with Cyndi, she indicated that the building does not meet historical standards,” she said. “And the bottom line is if it doesn’t have the criteria to be historical, then there’s nothing we can do.”

However, last week Roush received an email from Michael Houser, state architectural historian at the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, stating that the property does qualify for historic status. Roush views this as a leap forward in preserving the property, claiming it gives her enough clout to get the community and DAHP behind her.

“The state had no idea this was happening, and the state is saying they should have been contacted during that review process. There was no contact with the historical society to address these particular buildings that do have historical significance,” she said. “I could already have filed an appeal, I could have already hired a lawyer … but it’s very expensive to do that.”

Repeated attempts by the Highline Times to reach Houser were not successful.