Tour the Stone Cottage this weekend in West Seattle
Mar 9, 2022, 5:55 AM | Updated: Mar 14, 2022, 6:07 am
The group of West Seattle volunteers known as Save The Stone Cottage are offering tours of the distinctive structure this Saturday, March 12, in partnership with local preservation organization Historic Seattle.
Decorated by Eva Falk back in the 1930s, the residence sat along Harbor Avenue for a century before the property was purchased by developers a few years ago. Save The Stone Cottage, with the Southwest Seattle Historical Society serving as fiscal agent, was created by a group of neighbors who wanted to preserve the structure and find a new home for it. In August 2021, it was trucked a mile or so and put in storage on Port of Seattle property.
The roadside landmark was originally just a little wooden cottage along Harbor Avenue, with a drop-dead amazing view of Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle. But Eva Falk was apparently something of an iconoclast or bohemian, and sometime during the Great Depression, she decided to take her simple wooden house and decorate the exterior with stones.
“She horse-traded with homeless people from Hooverville, which was in South Seattle here,” said Mike Shaughnessy, one of the volunteers who helped lead the preservation effort. “These old-world craftsmen, probably European masonry craftsman, would come over, and they would do the stone veneer exterior finish on [the cottage] in exchange for homemade meals.”
And just where did all those stones attached to the cottage actually come from?
“Eva’s children, two of which are still alive, were 3 and 4 years old, and they were the ones who took wagons all up and down Alki Beach, all the way from the lighthouse down to, say, Salty’s, and they collected rocks,” Shaughnessy told KIRO Newsradio as he pointed out details of the unique home, now resting several feet above the ground on wooden blocks. “And if you’ll notice above the windows and the door frames, there’s a row of black rocks. And those were hard to find, so they had to selectively use the black rocks, just above the window frames, for accents.”
Eva Falk died in 1997 at age 92. Her family lived in the house until they sold the property to developers back in 2018. When that happened, pretty much everyone thought the little cottage was doomed.
That’s when a group of volunteers stepped in.
What Shaughnessy and his group did was convince the developers to give them the cottage. They then raised enough money via a GoFundMe campaign to, last August, carefully move the fragile landmark from its original location. An expert team of movers meticulously shored up the walls – and especially the stones – and then trucked the little house a mile or so from where it had stood to be stored on Port of Seattle property while the group secures a permanent home.
Save The Stone Cottage had been in talks with Seattle Parks and Recreation and local elected officials about finding an appropriate spot on public land, perhaps near the Alki bathhouse. Those talks were interrupted and delayed by the pandemic, and now some of the players have changed as a result of elections and other attrition – so the group is, in some ways, starting over again with the City of Seattle.
Meanwhile, says Shaughnessy, if a place on public land can’t be secured, they have do have a ‘Plan B’ involving nearby Salty’s Restaurant (where a famous Boeing artifact, from roughly the same era of the Stone Cottage’s decorations, once crash-landed).
“We’ve been in close contact with them,” Shaughnessy said. “They’d love to put it up near the sidewalk on the Salty’s property, and have it be a little walk-up fish-and-chips shack, which would be great.”
For any permanent location to make the cut, Shaughnessy says, it must meet Save The Stone Cottage’s three objectives, to “save the structure, keep it in its neighborhood, and keep it open to the public.”
Either way, Shaughnessy estimates the group needs to raise about $300,000 to complete restoration and move the structure to its ultimate permanent location, and welcomes tax-deductible donations from anyone interested in supporting the project.
Follow this link to register or for more information about this Saturday’s tour of the cottage.
You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.
