Spin Control: Of mice and memories – a look at Olympia’s old press houses as history makes way for progress

With cherry trees in blossom, a large magnolia shedding its petals outside the east entrance to the domed Legislative Building and the 105-day session into its final two weeks, it’s clearly spring in Olympia.

But nothing suggests the death and rebirth of the Easter season more than the removal of the old press houses to make room for a new office building for senators and legislative staff.

The slowly shrinking permanent press corps was removed from the century-old structures about a year ago and relocated in the lower level of the Legislative Building. The two press houses – which were, in fact, originally built for residential purposes, not offices – stood empty and forlorn for months while preparations for a $174 million campus modernization project were finalized.

On a recent lunch hour, some of the previous press house denizens were invited back to their former quarters for a chance to say a final farewell by donning hard hats and swinging a sledgehammer to start the deconstruction of one of the buildings.

The whacking of some porch pillars was hugely cathartic, and proved that most of the journalists should not quit their day jobs or attempt work with their hands that involves anything other than typing.

Republican senators and their staff were also moved from the nearby Newhouse Building, a two-story brick box with a leaky roof built in 1934 by the Works Progress Administration as a temporary office building.

Temporary buildings on the Capitol Campus aren’t quite as permanent as a temporary tax, but nearly. The Newhouse Building is also being dismantled, although the name will be resurrected for the new building. Let’s hope no one will call it the New Newhouse.

The press buildings were frame structures, one a Craftsman bungalow named for its earliest owners, the Carlyon family; the other a square duplex named for Elizabeth Ayer, the groundbreaking architect who designed it. After being occupied by reporters, however, they became known as the Blue House and the White House, respectively, the former for its fading exterior color and the latter for John White, a longtime Associated Press correspondent and famously hard-nosed newsman.

That building was white, however, and the confusion with the name proved advantageous at least once. In 2012, former House Speaker turned presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich stopped in Olympia to speak to the Republican lawmakers in advance of the upcoming caucuses.

Mobbed in the hallways by reporters shouting questions, his staff attempted to head off any interaction by saying it was too crowded and too hard to hear. They almost had him pulled away when someone suggested a sit-down news conference in “The White House.” Gingrich’s eyes lit up, apparently at the prospect of being ensconced in any White House, and quickly agreed.

He did balk, probably wisely, at sitting on the sketchy couch in the front office. U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, in a previous visit to that same room, wondered about a suspicious smell, which may have been the couch or something malodorous just outside. Afterward, when the press hoped to have Murray come by for a question-and-answer session, we emphasized it would be in the Blue House.

The Blue House had a large, L-shaped front porch that was the scene of several end-of-session parties in which legislative interns sometimes had too much to drink and had to be admonished by senior legislative staff to behave. It had a fireplace that was not usable and a chimney that shed a hunk of bricks and mortar that fell through the roof and ceiling, into the Seattle Times office during the Nisqually Quake.

Deer grazed on the lawn and slept under the branches of the fir trees. Squirrels foraged in a Japanese maple on the building’s east side and looked in through the window. But not all wildlife was benign.

A colony of yellow jackets set up shop one summer next to the front steps, another at the short end of the porch. Rodents are a problem on the campus, and there were rat traps in the basement and along the foundation outside. A mouse once gave birth to a litter of hairless pink babies in a reporter’s desk drawer.

The exterior paint was fading when I moved into The Spokesman-Review office in the Blue House in late 2009; the state never refreshed it, so the building might have been more appropriately named the Gray House by the end of the next decade. The office window was obscured by dirt and pollen when I arrived and was never cleaned by the maintenance staff; when it neared opaqueness, I brought down a bucket and some rags, and cleaned it so I could see out. A crack in the side window was “fixed” with duct tape.

The building had not a stitch of insulation in the attic, but made up for it in the winter with a radiator that worked overnight to turn the offices into a sauna each morning.

Both buildings were on historic registers, which probably staved off destruction for a time. After the Legislature approved the nine-figure construction project, the state tried to find buyers willing to lift them off their foundations, load them onto a flatbed and move them to a new location. Despite some initial interest, there were no serious offers.

They were spared the ignominy of a wrecking ball or bulldozer and are being dismantled almost piece-by-piece, with people salvaging or reusing as much as possible. Cabinets, doors, even a kitchen sink are reportedly finding new homes, and the deconstruction crew cut lengths of old 2-by-4s into blocks as mementos for the former occupants.

The houses were once filled with dozens of reporters. When they were closed, the full-time press corps numbered seven. It continues to decline, although some of the reporting is being replaced by websites and blogs, many of which don’t require an office on campus. Or any office at all.

At some point, a shiny new four-story building will have risen on the land, and the press houses will be a faint memory. The new building will have secure doors and energy-efficient windows, plenty of insulation, a variety of rooms for various purposes, an appealing façade on all sides, and (let’s hope) a roof that does not leak.