99% Invisible - 130- Holdout

Episode Date: September 2, 2014

Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting up all over the community which had once been mostly single family homes and small businesses. Around this time, developers offered a … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1914 in Manhattan, the city government took ownership of an apartment building belonging to a guy named David Hess. They used a legal power called eminent domain, which allows governments to seize private property for public use, in this case they wanted to expand the subway system. Hess fought them and lost, and when it was all said and done, his building was torn down. And he was left with a triangle-shaped piece of property. And when Romans has triangle-shaped, he means the property has was left with was about

the size and shape of a very large slice of pizza. He was not amused. That's our producer, Katie Mingle. Later, the city tried to get him to donate his pizza-shaped property so they could build a sidewalk. He refused again, they built the sidewalk anyway, and in the middle of the sidewalk is Hesse's triangle, with a tile mosaic that reads Property of the Hesse State, which has never been dedicated for public purposes. In other words, get off my f***ing triangle, Jerks. It's still there, by the way, on the corner of Christopher Street and 7th Avenue in the West Village. People like David Hess, who refuse to sell their properties are called holdouts. An eminent domain only comes into play when the government wants your property for public use.

If it's a private development that wants your place and you refuse to sell, there's not much they can do. Although there have been cases where eminent domain has been controversially used for private development, but that's another story. In China, they call their holdout houses, nail houses. You may have seen some of the pictures of single houses sticking up like the head of a nail. Everything else around them, bulldozed and carved out. Basically, anywhere there's a lot of new development. There are bound to be developers who have plans to make lots and lots of money if they

could just get that one stubborn person to move. Which brings us to one of the most stubborn and steadfast holdouts ever. Edith Macefield. Yes, I always call her Mrs. Macefield. That's Kathy Malady. She's one of the only reporters who ever got an interview with Mrs. Macefield. A feat she achieved through unwavering persistence,

good manners, and proper attire. Later, I asked her, I said, what was it that made you decide to talk to me today? And she said, I liked your skirt. Edith Macefield lived in a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard. Ballard had once been its own little town until it was annexed into Seattle in 1907, so it had the feel of a small town, a lot of single family homes and small businesses. That started to change around 2005.

When development really started to sprout, there were condominiums. We started hearing some pushback from old-time residents in the neighborhood who felt that the neighborhood was changing too quickly. Ballard became so iconic of this type of super fast, high-density development that... When it happens in other neighborhoods, we call it the balladization of my neighborhood. So in 2005, when Ballard was in the middle of being balladized, a developer wanted to build a shopping center that would take up the entire block where Edith Maysfield had lived for the last 50 years. Edith Maysfield's house was in a more industrial section of Ballard, and her block was mostly

empty besides her tiny house. Just so you can picture her house. You know, when you're a kid and you draw a picture of a house, you're using a little square with a triangle on top. Then you put a little front door and a couple of windows on each side. That is exactly what Edith Maysfield's house look like. The developers offered her $750,000 for her house, which was appraised at about $120,000.

And as you can probably guess, she said no. And so they said no problem. We'll just build our mall around you, like literally all around you. Hi, I'm Barry Martin. I work in construction as a project superintendent. So I'm just the guy out there in the site making sure that you know it all gets done. Barry was hired to oversee the shopping center project and he'd heard that some ballard residents weren't happy about all the new development, but he wasn't too worried. I mean, it was just a job for me. You know, I didn't really think about it, you know, really one way or another.

He hadn't yet heard about E.F. Macefield. So when I got closer to where I was gonna start the project, my wife asked me if that was the one where there was a little lady down in Valorant to wouldn't move. I said no, that's not it, because, you know, these guys would have told me. I called them up and they said, oh yeah, didn't we tell you? Whoever said you can't stand in the way of progress has never tried to step over Edith Macefield.

The Ballard woman who refused to sell her little house to developers, the little old lady being bullied by developers. The story was classic David and Goliath. Edith Macefield versus the big bad developers. And Barry Martin wasn't super excited about all the extra media attention on his project. I'm thinking this is a lose, lose proposition because all she has to do is complain and tell somebody at the TV station

or on the newspaper, it'll be a really big deal. But even though the press was clamoring to talk to Mrs. Macefield, she wanted nothing to do with talking to them. Kathy Malady had been one of the few exceptions. Here's Mrs. Macefield, turning down help from a CBS reporter as she took out some trash in her front yard.

Do you want some help, either? No! Excuse me, she liked to be addressed as Mrs. her front yard. Do you want some help, either? No! Excuse me? She'd like to be addressed as Mrs. Macefield. Thank you very much. Later in the segment, he knocks on her door and you can hear a muffled. Go away. Is there any trouble away?

Okay. Unfortunately, that muffled recording of a cranky Mrs. Macefield is the only one we could find of her. She passed away in 2008, which we'll talk about more later. Well, my second day there went walking by Edith's house and she was out in the front yard with her flowers and her little dog that was blind. The workers started to demolish the few other buildings that were on the block and dig up a bunch of soil that was contaminated with lead.

And all the while their neighbor Mrs. Macefield went about her business day after day just like she'd always done. She'd get up in the morning and feed the birds and throw bird seed out on the sidewalk. Most of the time the bird seed would be there when we got to work. And if the bird seed wasn't there by 10 o'clock, we knew something wasn't right. If they didn't see the bird seed, Barry would knock on her door to see if she was okay. And she would usually yell at me to get the hell out of there and go away and leave her alone. And then I'd just tell her that, you know, okay, I'm just checking on you.

A lot of people thought that once the construction started in earnest, Edith Macefield would fold. The noise and the encroachment on her privacy would just be too much. The architects even designed the building in such a way that if Mrs. Macefield ever decided to move, they could easily incorporate the space where her house was into the building. But she didn't fold. The developers up to their offer to $1 million.

Plus, they offered to find her a similar home somewhere else and pay for a home healthcare worker. She turned them down. A year passed, and the building around Edith Maysfield's house got bigger and bigger. The image of it was really something. You may have seen pictures of the house, especially if you're from Seattle.

The building powered 40 feet above her, you know, her little house was dwarfed fairly well. It wasn't just a big building sitting next to a tiny house. It was a big building completely enveloping a tiny house on three sides. The walls of the building were so close that Mrs. Masefield could practically lean out her window and touch them. As the building moved forward, the construction workers kept checking in on Mrs. Macefield and occasionally bringing her lunch from McDonald's.

She purportedly loved big and tasties and Barry kept dropping off business cards telling her to call if she needed anything. And then one day she finally did. I said that she didn't feel comfortable driving that day. And could I give her a ride to go get her hair done? You know, we got her in the car and started driving over there. And we were kind of talking about how, you know,

Ballard was changing. And sort of surprisingly, Edith Maysfield wasn't angry about the way Ballard was changing. She wasn't even angry about them all. They were building more or less on top of her house. She said, because it always changes. She said 20 years from now, they'll be tearing this down and building something else. She said, that's just the way it goes. I felt like she was happy that we were there. She said she didn't mind the noise. She said I was through World War II. That's Kathy Malady again.

And she didn't mind the attention from those young construction workers who walked by her house and waived to her or smiled or checked in a little bit. She'd been there for 50 years. At that point in time, she was 86 years old. Money didn't really mean much to her anymore. She couldn't move around very well.

She knew where everything was in her house. She had no reason to move. She didn't have any family, so getting the money so that she could leave it for her family didn't exist. Mrs. Maysfield didn't have any living family to leave any money to, and by the same token, she didn't have any family to help take care of her in her old age. Pretty soon Barry started taking her to all of her appointments, and then he started making them, and then he got concerned that Mrs. Maysfield, who was getting more frail by the day, was

going to burn herself on her stove. So... I just started swinging by there after work and making her dinner. She wouldn't get a microwave, so I guess I have to cook for her, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. Pretty soon, Barry was making her lunch and breakfast as well. One day I woke up and I'm making her three meals a day, and then I had to come in on Saturday and Sunday, because, you know, I had to come in on Saturday and Sunday because you know I had to make her meals.

Spending all this time together he got to know Mrs. Macefield pretty well. They listened to music together, watch old movies and Mrs. Macefield also had crazy stories about her past. She told me that she was a spy for the British government that she had been captured spine and they put her in decal. Then she escaped from there. She also said she'd taken care of a bunch of war orphans in England after World War II and on top of all of that, she claimed to know a bunch of famous people.

She told me Benny Goodman was her cousin and that she had met Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and he played saxophone and clarinet with him. cousin and that she had met Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and had played you know saxophone and clarinet with them. Her stories were so incredible that they were hard for people to believe but they were harder to dismiss than you might think. She came across to me as very sharp. She liked to talk a lot about the past, but she also watched the news and knew exactly what was going on. Very took care of Mrs. Macefield for nearly a year and a half, making all of her meals, visiting with her on weekends and after work. Sometimes she'd call in the middle of the night and tell him she'd had an accident and she needed him.

She had very few wishes, one she wanted to die in her house, you know, live out her last days in her house. But if I wouldn't have been there, at some point in time, they would have put her in a state-run facility. And there wasn't any reason for that. And then she's gonna be unhappy the last days of her life. And for what? When she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer

and began to die, she finally agreed to a home health care worker. But Barry became her power of attorney, the person she put in charge of her final decisions. Edith Masefield died in her house on June 15, 2008. She was 86 years old. She left her house to Barry Martin, the construction superintendent who became her friend

while simultaneously sandwiching her house between a trader Joe's and an LA fitness. After she died, Barry began packing up her house and he looked for things that would confirm Mrs. Macefield's crazy stories about her past. He never found anything about her escaping Dacau or caring for any war orphans. But he did find a Benny Goodman record with a written inscription that said, to my cousin Edith, with love, Benny. ["Betty"] After people found out that Edith Maysfield

had left her house to Barry Martin, there were some who called him an opportunist. Ultimately it's hard for anyone other than Barry to know what his motivations were. But for what it's worth, I did talk to a couple of the home health care workers who took care of Mrs. Maysfield before she died, and they both had a very high opinion of him. Said he was there every day when no one else was, and that he seemed to care deeply for Mrs. Masefield. Barry eventually sold Edith Masefield's house to an investor who had various plans for

it, none of which have materialized. And recently the same guy asked Barry if he'd be interested in buying it back. He said no. No, enough I did. Edith would probably haunt me for that. She told me to hold out until I got my price and then to, you know, use the money to help get my kids through school. The house is all boarded up now and no one's sure what will happen to it, which is sad to some people. But Barry says Mrs. Masefield didn't care what happened to the house after she died.

That she never really cared about the bigger story that the outside world had created about her. She had her own personal reasons for staying in her house, and they had nothing to do with that narrative. But whatever her reasons were for doing it, she stood her ground, and she became a symbol whether she wanted to or not. There's even a tattoo shop in Seattle that does a special tattoo in honor of the legacy of Edith Macefield. It's a picture of her little house, and underneath it, the word, steadfast. 99% Invisible What's Produced This Week by Katie Mangle with Sam Green span Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced at the offices of ArcSign and architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. If you follow me at Roman Mars on Twitter or the show on Facebook, you know that I'm in London right now. I walked 12 miles today along the times, and yesterday I visited the BBC and saw Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo do winter team live on the air. It was amazing. It was a dream come true.

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