Category: downtown parking

This is the latest post in a series tracking how downtown Olympia’s pervasive parking lots replaced historically dense, walkable blocks. These older, pre-car structures are actually the city’s economic engine, generating far more tax revenue per acre than suburban sprawl. Ironically, as car-driven climate change threatens to submerge 370 acres of low-lying downtown by 2095, costing over $600 million in our most productive land, we risk preserving car-dependent zones while losing the very core that funds our local government. To solve our structural deficits, we must look at our physical structures.

It is strange for an essay about a parking lot to start with a boy rowing a boat.

But imagine the sound of an oar in oarlocks, clunking up Eld Inlet and then down Budd. Now imagine what it took for a kid to get a snack: row five miles, store the boat, grab the dog, walk through downtown Olympia to wherever they sold licorice, buy the licorice, and row back home. Maybe stop by his grandmother’s hotel on the way.

That’s not how we live now.

Jerry Knox’s childhood was shaped by a slow, physically demanding relationship with Olympia’s landscape, long before he became one of the people negotiating the region’s freeway system into existence. The same system that remade Olympia, and eventually tore down his family’s legacy.

Jerry spent his early boyhood in a rowboat on Eld Inlet. His most famous family story is the five-mile row into downtown Olympia for a ten-cent piece of licorice, his dog Gyp sitting in the bow the whole way.

Throughout his life, Jerry owned various vessels: outboards, inboards, a double-ender called the Hunky Dory. At 18, his connection to the water reached a lot further than Eld Inlet. He worked as an engine room boiler tender on a voyage through the Panama Canal.

Jerry’s grandmother, Frances Knox, went by Aunty Frank. She built the Knox Hotel and ran it for decades, sitting at the lobby desk, hosting community events, making the building a center of civic life in downtown Olympia for almost fifty years. It’s now a small parking lot behind the State Theatre. While the Knox was one of many community gravity wells in downtown Olympia, today the spot holds no one in orbit.

Before Olympia, the Knox family farmed in Kansas. When their farm burned down, they loaded everything onto a chartered train car, family and belongings alike, horses included, and headed for Washington State.

In Hoquiam, Frances Knox’s brother-in-law, N.T. Loomis, met them and helped move their possessions from the train to a boat.

Then it all went wrong. Their boat capsized in the Hoquiam River before they could reach the end of tidewater. A whole season’s worth of supplies went into the current, leaving them nearly destitute, discouraged, at the edge of the wilderness they’d come so far to reach.

They survived on whatever they could salvage from the woods and streams. The image that stuck in the family’s memory is Frances at the table, serving her children dried carrots when nothing else was available. She had a fortitude that fit the frontier exactly.

The early years in Washington brought further tragedy. John Knox died in 1885, only a few years after their arrival, leaving Frances to raise six children on her own. She moved the family to Olympia. By the time she was looking for backing to build a hotel, her reputation for surviving hardship was so well established that she never had trouble getting it.

Before it became an apartment building, the hotel was a hotel first, obviously. It hosted travelers, and their comings and goings got noted in the paper.

When soldiers of the 91st Division stayed at the Knox before shipping off to the Great War, Aunty Frank took them for rides in her car. When they came back from the mud of Europe, they brought her a bronze statue.

It also had a kitchen. And in the first half of the 20th century, the Knox Hotel made space for all kinds of community events.

Thirty members of the Thurston County Women’s Educational Club gathered here at one point. You could hear them talking about things that matter. They’re talking about wealth. They’re debating whether it’s found in the bank or in the heart.

Mrs. Theodore Young spoke about school teachers who give themselves for the betterment of the community.

There were discussions on the necessity of legitimate rural gossip. They believe that women need to get together and talk just as much as men do. They believe in the helpfulness of social intercourse.

There was a violin solo by Miss Florence Holbrook. There was a song.

The residents had a tradition of placing joke gifts under the branches of the lobby Christmas tree.

The Knox was what we’d now call a Third Place.

Jerry’s grandmother and his aunt ran the Knox. Jerry was involved in a different branch of the family business.

Jerry’s aunt Charlotte, Frances’s daughter, took over the burden of management and held it for half a century. She was helped for a time by her niece Gertrude, Jerry’s sister.

Jerry’s father Clinton had built a garage beyond the hotel. After college, Jerry joined the family business, working in the garage, not the hotel. The family had been early adopters of the automobile, and that’s where the work was.

Jerry eventually left the family business and took his experience into a long career with the Department of Highways. He spent those years as a right-of-way purchaser for the I-5 freeway, the project that would contribute to the decline of downtown hotels like the one his grandmother had built.

The same boy who once measured distance by the pull of oars grew up to purchase the right-of-way for the interstate.

His job was to acquire the land for the new freeway, clearing the path for the infrastructure that will bypass the downtown core, buying the property that will become pavement. He was a diplomat of the very speed that makes the slow hospitality of his grandmother’s hotel unnecessary. The rowboat is gone. The physical connection to the inlet was replaced by the high-speed interstate.

This is the same highway that let Lacey grow, that some say destroyed Tumwater’s historic downtown, and that changed our community forever. It made the human scale of a boy rowing into town impossible to imagine in everyday life.

It’s a shift you can trace in Olympia’s own history: from a city where five miles was a significant physical journey by water, where people could walk or bike to a community gathering at the Knox, to one where that same distance is a few minutes on a concrete artery.

Before Interstate 5, the Knox Hotel was sold in April 1945 to W. M. Tompkins of Tacoma.

The Knox family had already made the transition to a full-time apartment building. Charlotte Knox had stepped away. Aunty Franky passed in 1943. The buyers, the Tompkins, were themselves a signal of what was coming. Before buying the downtown hotel, they’d spent three years running Auto Courts, the roadside lodging that would eventually replace the traditional urban hotel.

In its last twenty years, the newspaper mentions of the hotel shift from clubs holding meetings and Christmas parties to untimely deaths of elderly residents and crimes. Like the Carlton a couple of blocks over, the Knox had become naturally occurring affordable housing.

A place like the Knox gets affordable when the original family that treated it like a community institution is gone, and the building just gets older and cheaper. People need a place to live, and some can’t afford much. Places stay affordable because they’re old and nobody’s investing in them. They’re rare now because modern codes outlawed the features that made them work: shared bathrooms, tiny rooms. When these buildings sell, the cost of bringing them up to code forces rents up and out of reach for the people who need them most.

Then comes January of 1966. It’s a time of stormy protests at City Hall. Residents won a fight against the widening of Carlyon Avenue. They’re worried about their property. They’re worried about losing their neighborhood. And they’re able to defend it, or what they think it is. But the momentum of the car is too strong for the Knox. City engineers are focused on arterial improvements and right-of-way problems.

In the middle of all this, the Knox Hotel is razed. The sturdy three-story concrete structure meets the machinery of Franz Schlottman. The building that stood for over half a century is reduced to rubble. The Daily Olympian calls it being “mauled with kindness.”

There’s no kindness in a wrecking ball. There’s only the need for more space.

The site is prepared. It’s cleared of its history. It’s flattened. It becomes a parking lot.

We are at least a decade into a counterrevolution in downtown Olympia. Urban Olympia LLC is systematically tearing up old surface lots and replacing them with housing. This brings us to the history of Block 46 of Sylvester’s Plat. The eastern portion of this block is currently on the developer’s list as they plan for a five story apartment building on what used to be a patch of concrete. For a hundred years, this block served as a laboratory for our ambitions. It shifted from a muddy shoreline to an industrial rail hub, then to a stagnant field of parking, and now toward a high-density residential future.

To understand why a five story apartment building is rising here, you have to look past the surface of the parking lots and into the dredge spoils of 1910.

The Disappeared Shoreline

In the late 19th century, Block 46 was essentially a frontier of the tide. The 1891 plat shows a few single family homes and a duplex, but the geography was different back then. Before the city was tamed by engineering, this was the edge of the Swantown Slough. It wasn’t a scenic beach with sand. Instead, it was a muddy shoreline much like the mudflats you see today near Buzz’s Bar and Grill on Mud Bay Road.

The transformation of this block was dictated by the Carlyon Fill of 1910 and 1911. Dr. P.H. Carlyon was a dentist and mayor with a relentless vision for the permanence of Olympia. He spearheaded the dredging of 2 million cubic yards of material from the bottom of Budd Inlet. This massive slurry was pumped behind bulkheads to create 29 blocks of new upland, including the area right next door to Block 46.

While the fill added land to the east, it fundamentally changed how people used Block 46. By stabilizing the area around downtown, the project allowed the Union Pacific to stretch its tracks across the city to reach a new terminal. The block was no longer a quiet residential edge. It became a strategic corridor for the Olympia Branch spur line.

Rails and the 1959 Disaster

By 1915, the Union Pacific had established a permanent foothold. They acquired a local startup line to connect downtown to the mainline at East Olympia. This 7.4 mile spur was the lifeblood of the city’s early 20th century economy. It carried beer from the brewery, plywood, and timber products.

Most noteable to us today, you could board the train in downtown Olympia and ride to Seattle, Portand or Tacoma. Passenger rail service has been lost to us for decades, but we can imagine how twice a day service by modern rail would have felt 110 years ago.

The presence of the rail line carved through the heart of Block 46. By the 1947 Sanborn maps, the domestic character of the block was starting to fade. The oil industry arrived on the east side. Maxwell Oil and Gull Oil established a footprint right next to the tracks. Yet, a surprising amount of housing stuck around on the south and west upland portions. Remnants of that era still stand today as the last two houses on 7th Avenue.

The most violent chapter in the rail history of the block occurred on Friday, March 13, 1959. A 900 ton segment of rail cars was left uncoupled and without brakes at the Tumwater border. The cars hurtled downhill and gained terrifying speed. They smashed into the Union Pacific Depot at over 60 miles per hour.

You can imagine living in of the houses on Block 46 as the rail cars flew buy and then hearing the unimaginable noise as they destroyed the depot.

The crash killed an employee and leveled a significant portion of the station. Though the depot was eventually rebuilt, the event marked a slow turning point. The industrial intensity of the rail line began to wane. It left behind underutilized land that would eventually become the hallmark of our 20th century downtown, the parking lot.

The Era of Stagnation

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the history of Block 46 became a story of divestment. Local families began selling their interests. Diamond Parking moved in and acquired two lots for vehicle storage. The Union Pacific eventually sold its interests to developers. The parking lots were leased specifically to various state agencies as they looked to keep their employees heading downtown by car.

In recent years, much of the block had settled into a low-value equilibrium. It was mostly asphalt. It generated a modest $7,000 annually in property taxes for local government. This was the stagnant parking lot phase, contributing very little to the city’s vibrancy or budget bottom line.

The Legion and Jefferson Project

Today, at least some of the asphalt is being torn up for a five story, 84,449 square foot mixed use development represents the first major residential investment on this block in a generation. It will house 91 units above ground-floor commercial space. The design uses a brick warehouse aesthetic that nods to the industrial past of the neighborhood.

Building here is not easy. Because the site sits on the soft silts of the historic shoreline, the foundation must rest on piles.

It is also fueled by a controversial financial tool called the Multi-Family Tax Exemption.

The Math of the Tax Gap

Critics often frame this tax exemption as a giveaway to developers. However, the fiscal reality of Block 46 suggests a different story.

Currently, the parking lot pays $7,000 a year. Once the apartment building is finished, the assessed taxes will jump to at least $100,000 (a best guess I arrived at by looking at a smaller apartment building nearby). Under the eight year exemption, the city essentially foregoes the $93,000 tax gap to make the high density project viable. This results in a short term loss of roughly $744,000.

But the math changes in year nine. The moment the exemption expires, the building begins paying its full $100,000 share. It takes only eight years of full payments for the city to repay its original investment. By year 17, which is less than two decades into the life of a building meant to last fifty years, the tax debt has broken even. Every year after that, the building generates 14 times the annual revenue of the original parking lot.

The But For Reality

This leads to a central mystery of urban planning called the “But For” test. Would this housing exist without the incentive? For decades, new housing in downtown Olympia was almost nonexistent. If a building isn’t built because the math doesn’t work for the developer, the city doesn’t lose millions in potential taxes. It simply continues to collect $7,000 a year from a parking lot. You cannot lose taxes on a building that does not exist.

What we don’t often ask is the impact urban sprawl has had in the “But For” context. But for building Henderson Boulevard from the interstate down to Eskridge, would Southeast Olympia exist the way it is today?

But for widening Mud Bay Road after Cooper Point, would the west side have grown the way it has? We don’t often talk about the subsidy that exists for suburban sprawl, especially as it reaches out into the woods in isolated pockets of neighborhood level development, but it does exist. So squinting at an eight year tax exemption instead of a permanent subsidy seems rich.

Beyond the property tax, we have to consider the hidden math of density. Ninety-one new households mean hundreds of people buying groceries and dining at downtown restaurants. It is also far cheaper for a city to provide services to 100 people on one city block than to 100 people spread across suburban sprawl.

The transition of Block 46 from a mudflats shoreline to a rail through-way, then to a parking lot, and finally to a residential hub is a microcosm of Olympia itself. The exemption isn’t a permanent subsidy. It is a deferred revenue strategy to speed through the parking lot era. The city is accepting a short term plateau to guarantee a massive, permanent increase in the tax base for the next half century. On the corner of Legion and Jefferson, we are finally trading the stagnation of the 20th century for the density of the 21st.

This is the start of what I hope to be a long-term project. I want to track the history of parking lots in downtown Olympia. They’ve become a dominant land use type. I made a map that shows just how pervasive these empty spaces really are.

It hasn’t always been this way. A few examples remain, but our blocks were historically covered in buildings. This density was a social good. Mixed uses like housing, workshops, and shops were tightly packed together. Everything was walkable because we didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have cars.

There’s another side to this that we don’t talk about enough. These dense blocks are more economically productive. They generate more tax revenue than suburban lots or big box stores. It’s a bit of a hidden truth that cities end up paying for the services of suburban and rural residents. Parking lots just eat away at the economic health of our local government.

Think about what we lose to sea level rise. If we don’t act by 2095, downtown Olympia will lose about 370 acres. That’s over 600 million dollars in value based on 2018 data. The land in low-lying Olympia is worth about 1.6 million dollars per acre. Land outside the flood zone is worth less than a third of that. The land most likely to be lost is our older city. It’s the part built before cars. It’s ironic that we’ll probably keep the car-dependent parts of town while the rising tide, caused by car pollution, takes the most productive core.

And, in an era of nearly every local government dealing with structural deficits, it’s worth looking at the literal structures causing the problem.

Scandal and Padlocks at the Hotel Carlton

My first case study is the gravel lot at State and Columbia. If you look at old Sanborn maps, you see a vibrant mix of life. There was a metal shop, a second-hand clothing store, the Salvation Army, and several restaurants. The main anchor was the Carlton Hotel.

The building started as the Carlton House. It stayed that way for a couple of generations. In 1891, it was the center of a local scandal. A seventeen-year-old girl named Lizzie Jacobs was taken there for safety after a failed elopement. Her suitor, John Beggs, got into a fight with Lizzie’s mother and knocked her to the sidewalk. The couple fled in a horse-drawn carriage before an officer stopped them.

By 1902, the place was renamed the Hotel Carlton. The new manager wanted a first-class establishment to show off Olympia’s prosperity. By 1908, you could get breakfast or dinner there for 25 cents. But things took a turn during Prohibition. In 1931, a lawsuit claimed the hotel was bought specifically to be a liquor joint. A federal court issued a padlock order. The hotel was forced to close for an entire year as a penalty.

By 1933, the owners tried to move past the legal trouble with a new name. The final chapter came in 1947, when it was called the Hotel Hutson. That August, the city ordered the building to be torn down. It was seemingly the end of a structure that had been a part of the landscape for decades. And that is where the history of the building goes cold. But before we continue, I want to talk about something else.

Naturally Occurring Affordability

If you look at old crime reports and news snippets from before 1947, it’s clear the Carlton and the Hutson were housing people who were down on their luck. It had become what we now call naturally occurring affordable housing. Nobody set out to build low-income housing here. It just happened because the building was 50 years old and rundown enough to be cheap.

We saw the same thing a few years ago with the Angelus Hotel at 4th and Columbia. These places stay affordable because they are old and lack new investment. They are rare now because modern rules make them impossible to build. Features like shared bathrooms or tiny rooms were often prohibited by modern codes. When these buildings get sold, the cost of safety upgrades is so high that the owners have to raise the rent. That moves them out of reach for the folks below the working class.

Even when we build on top of old parking lots, using more liberalized rules that allow for building in a way that we could 100 years ago, we have to wait decades for that cycle to restart. This creates a conflict between fixing up the city and keeping it stable for residents. The city effectively subsidizes its own gentrification. We trade historical affordability for a modern landscape that is legally and financially inaccessible to the people who live there now.

The Housing Crisis and the City Fathers

Back in 1947, the city certainly didn’t care about low-end housing. They ordered the Carlton torn down despite a massive housing shortage. This was after service members from Fort Lewis and McChord Field started flooding Olympia. The crisis was so bad that people were renting out converted chicken coops.

Even with that level of desperation, Olympia’s leadership rejected federal housing funds. Local landlords actually celebrated the decision with New Year’s toasts in 1943 because they knew it meant they could keep the rents high. They were happy the city turned down the money. The mayor who rejected the money made a half-hearted public appeal for landlords to keep rents low, but it didn’t do much. At the same time, the city was moving to destroy Little Hollywood, the shantytown on the edges of the Deschutes Estuary. The city knew there was a shortage, but they still opted to tear down what little housing existed.

The Ghost of the Carlton

Even with the demolition order, buildings didn’t vanish immediately. Aerial photos from the fifties still show a building at that spot, but not the angular-roof version that was the Carlton. There was also a newer flat-roof building used by the Olympia School District. It seems the old hotel address was absorbed into the school district offices.

In the 1970s, the location started hosting a senior center. A local nonprofit found a good deal in the abandoned school offices. Seniors would go there to pick up bus passes well into the 1980s. When the senior center finally moved across the street to the modern community center, the Carlton’s footprint was finally gone into a parking lot.

We decided after the 1940s that cars were more important than anything else we could do with the land. But it’s heartening that the Carlton survived long enough to be used for something good. It helped educate children and support seniors before it finally became a lot for cars.

Looking at this gravel lot today, we don’t necessarily see a place to leave a car. We can see the lost economic vitality that could be funding our services. We can see the naturally occurring affordable housing that we regulated out of existence for decades. We can see the choice we made to trade a vibrant, productive community for a flat surface that contributes nothing to our future, exempt the moral backing of climate change and sea level rise.

It took nearly a century for the wrecking ball to finally win at State and Columbia. Now, we are the ones living with the quiet, expensive consequences of that victory.