Harrington Historic Preservation Commission

06/05/2025

Love this classic movie theater in another gem of a neighborhood 🎥📽️💎🧡

06/05/2025

Your Wheat Life photo: Adelle (4) and Milo (2) Timm from Okanogan visit Knapp Farms in Harrington.
Photo by Ace Timm.

06/05/2025

Congratulations on the beautiful restoration of the Craftsman era house in a gem of a neighborhood, bravo 👏🏽

Two weeks from today: SPA Summer Social at the Wright House
We’re gathering for our quarterly member social, and this one’s extra special:

We’ll be hosted at the beautifully restored Fred & Winifred Wright House, a 1913 Craftsman gem in the Cliff/Cannon neighborhood, now officially listed on the Spokane Register of Historic Places. (Check out her storied history in the HPO Nomination with all the tea here: https://properties.historicspokane.org/property/?PropertyID=2194 )

Bring a potluck dish or bottle of wine and join us for a summer evening of history, community, and old-house charm.

📍507 W 14th Avenue
🕠 5:30–7:30 PM
All members, friends, and curious newcomers welcome.

05/31/2024

05/31/2024

https://www.facebook.com/share/pZcACQ7NyYDVnqm6/?mibextid=WC7FNe

Couldn’t we all just use a little more cute in our lives? Are there people that don’t like cute things? If so, who are they and who hurt them?

My friend and colleague, Bernice Radle, is a developer in Buffalo and she has been upfront about her target when renovating buildings, and as she states, she aims to make them cute AF. I have been thinking a lot about cute lately and why we are doing such a poor job of it.

Cute was on my mind on a recent work trip. I was walking around a downtown and came across the cutest block. The buildings were all two-story, half-timbered, well-maintained mixed-use buildings. Each one had a shop of some type on the first floor and appeared to have occupied apartments or offices on the upper floors. This block was a tremendous bright spot in a downtown that had its challenges. This block felt like it had been plucked from a European village. These buildings appeared to all have been built around the same time and in the same style. The overall effect of a series of buildings that were similar but not the same and built with quality materials was extremely charming. It was cute AF!

What is immediately apparent to me about this block, or similar places, is that they are inviting, they are appealing, we are drawn to these places because they delight us, all of us. People flock to cute places because of how they make us feel. This in turn makes them appealing places for business owners. A restaurant or retailer is going to be more successful on attractive blocks since people are drawn to them. And in turn, the real estate becomes more valuable because the businesses located there are more successful. Being on a cute block will allow owners to charge more rent as well, as people to pay a premium for quality aesthetics.

This is the power of cute and it attracts us all.

Across the street occupying an entire block was a one-story all-black steel and glass building. It was not cute. It was the opposite of cute. It appeared to be evil. If not the buildings itself, the tenant certainly was malevolent. It was such a stark contrast from one block to the next, almost shocking. I kept asking myself, how did something like this ever occur? How did the community ever allow what all of us would describe as a scary building to be built adjacent to the most delightful buildings?

It seems that aesthetics aren’t all that subjective. Sure, there are preferences from one person to the next, not everyone will agree 100% on how things should look, but I think we are far closer in what we prefer than what we don’t. Case in point, everyone would prefer the block of half-timber buildings over the evil empire building. Everyone finds a block of two and three-story Main Street buildings superior to a one-story strip mall. Quality materials are visible and more appealing to the eye. Buildings closer to the heights of mature trees are more comforting. Buildings that are similar but not the same, that provide a repeating pattern without being redundant, satisfy our brains immensely.

Why did we ever get away from making things cute? What rationale could our communities have used to justify not building cute anymore? I know there might be some truck bros out there who would swear to not liking cute things, but I don’t believe them. Most of them decorate their trucks after all.

I really wish the concept of cute was more comfortable for all of us. I would like to see every city have a department of cute or at least a cute committee. Sure, grandeur in architecture is awe-inspiring, but it also tends to be very expensive. Cute doesn’t have to cost more, typically cute things are small. My favorite part of every town is the cute part, the small buildings and shops, the small streets and stoops.

Simply put, every effort put towards cute improves a place. Each hour spent making a community cuter is an hour that contributes to making that place more lovable, easier for people to grow an attachment to, and ultimately makes that place stronger. This is where we should be spending our volunteer time and how we should be engaging with residents. When someone asks how they can get involved, don’t send them to a meeting or ask them to join a committee, just let them know the best way they can help their town is by making it just a little bit cuter.

05/29/2024

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/ptRPnCXVbtEXXqdc/?mibextid=WC7FNe

Place has a power over us that we are rarely recognize. Our surroundings never stop adjusting our behavior and shaping our actions. We quiet down when we inhabit certain spaces, we feel more sophisticated just by entering a particular room. We walk where it’s walkable and drive where it’s not. We gather with one another in inviting spaces and we feel beaten down by blight and decline. No one is unique in this regard, whether we pay attention to it or not- our spaces shape us.

I was working in Eastern Washington recently and my hosts explained that they wanted to find out what the kids wanted, how could they entice them to remain in town. They wanted the next generation to stay and invest, to help the town revive, attempt to make it as good as it once was. The people I spoke with were cognizant that the community needed some care and attention, but at the same time there was a level of frustration that the youth of the community was not more interested. There seemed to be a disconnect between the two concepts they were communicating.

To be blunt, the gift that they were giving to the students was a fixer upper. The generation giving the gift had not properly cared for what they had received from their parents, yet wanted the kids to love it the same, but that’s just not how things work.

We all fall into the habit of looking past things. We are all guilty of turning a blind eye at times to what we don’t want to deal with. I am sure each of us noticed blemishes we promised to amend when we moved into our homes only to find them unaddressed years later. The blemishes don’t go away, we just learn to live with them. This is understandable, but not without a cost. If too many of these blemishes remain, if too much maintenance gets deferred, the house becomes harder to sell, the value harder to discern, the price comes down.

A town is a collection of structures, those structures create a habitat for people. When those structures are allowed to decline, the value of the town follows suit. A place becomes harder to love when the maintenance is deferred. As the built environment falls into disrepair, the emotional attachment our communities depend on becomes considerably harder to foster.

The older generations have a context and a history to relate to, they are familiar with a time when things were different, possibly better. They were around when those buildings were not yet tarnished, their town functioned differently when they were kids, For most of us, our parents’ communities were exponentially nicer than ours. When they were young, people lived closer together, there were more places to go, more places to gather. For my parents, it was easy to walk to a park to play, it was easy to ride a bike to a friend’s or head downtown to shop. It was easy to make friends, to have some freedom, and to have some fun. We have taken most of that away as we rearranged our cities for cars, but we expect the kids to behave as if this never happened.

We aren’t just turning a blind eye to a lack of maintenance though, we are putting a piece of electric tape over the check engine light. We are being willfully ignorant of how we trashed our cities and instead of asking ourselves ‘how we can repair the damage we caused’, we are blaming the next generation for not loving the unlovable

04/03/2024

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/7Jr6Kz94dMuRJXyL/?mibextid=WC7FNe

04/02/2024

03/29/2024

01/30/2024

The Harrington Historic Preservation Commission will be meeting on Friday, February 2nd, 2024 at 5pm. We will be gathering at the The Harrington Haus for our quarterly meeting.

The Harrington Haus is an excellent example of adaptive re-use of one of Harrington's historic commercial buildings. This meeting is open to the public and is a no-host event.

We hope to see you there!

12/31/2023

12/09/2023

Ritzville Downtown Development Association Wins Outstanding Special Project Award at 2023 Excellence on Main Ceremony
Seattle, WA — At the Washington State Main Street Program’s annual awards ceremony, the Ritzville Downtown Development Association was honored with the Outstanding Special Project Award for its recent efforts to restore facades, awnings, and ghost signs across downtown Ritzville.
Operated by the nonprofit Washington Trust for Historic Preservation in conjunction with the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, the Washington State Main Street Program helps communities across the state revitalize the economy, appearance, and image of their downtown districts. Today, the Washington State Main Street Program encompasses a network of more than 70 towns and cities across Washington, including Vancouver.
Every year, as a cornerstone event of the annual RevitalizeWA conference, the Washington State Main Street Program hosts the Excellence on Main awards ceremony, honoring projects and individuals whose hard work and innovative efforts are making a difference in their communities and beyond. This year’s 2023 Excellence on Main award winners were announced on Thursday, October 5 at the Providence Academy ballroom, during the RevitalizeWA conference held October 4-6 in Vancouver.
The Outstanding Special Project Award is an annual award that recognizes great projects or activities that affect a downtown or neighborhood commercial district’s revitalization efforts. The Ritzville Downtown Development Association—which cut its place-saving teeth several years ago by restoring and operating the historic Ritz Theatre—has been named the 2023 Outstanding Special Project Award recipient for their work restoring facades, awnings, and ghost signs across downtown Ritzville. Altogether, the project encompassed the restoration of four building facades, installation of eight new cloth awnings, and repainting of 17 old advertising murals, otherwise known as “ghost signs.” Each ghost sign required research and brick restoration and is as historically accurate as possible.
Financing for the facades, awnings, and ghost signs was pooled from a mix of grants, private donations, in-kind contributions, building owner investment, and city tourism awards. The project was championed by Ritzville Downtown Development Association board members and local business owners John Rankin of Flying Arts Ranch and Linda Kubik of King Mercantile. Already the restoration efforts are bearing fruit for the community: while Ritzville continues to experience economic hardship, every building that has undergone these major renovations or upgrades is now occupied. The renovation of just one of these historic buildings led to a new business opening up downtown and led to that building’s owner buying two other buildings with plans to revitalize them. Upper-floor residential units have also been updated and occupied, with plans for more in the works.
“With these building improvements, the Ritzville Downtown Development Association has actively and intentionally fostered a culture of pride and possibility,” noted Washington Main Street Director Breanne

Durham at the Excellence on Main ceremony. “The community has recognized the improvements, and attitudes are shifting from discouragement to hope for the future of Ritzville, with downtown as its crown jewel.” Durham personally presented the Outstanding Special Project Award to Ritzville Downtown Development Association board members John Rankin and Linda Kubik, who were in attendance at the awards ceremony.
The Washington State Main Street Program applauds this year’s Excellence on Main award winners and the impacts they have made in their communities. For more photos of the award winners and of the RevitalizeWA conference overall, visit preservewa.org/revitalizewa2023-album.