By Pepper Fisher
PORT ANGELES — The fate of the former Lincoln Elementary School building on 8th Street in Port Angeles was a hot topic of conversation in 2023, which culminated in November with the board of the North Olympic History Center (NOHC) announcing it was moving ahead with demolishing it.
It’s not the outcome anyone wanted, given the original dream of turning the 107-year-old masonry building into a museum. But since 1991, when the NOHC first acquired the building, several close inspections made it clear that the facility is not safe to occupy without a huge investment of cash and, according to Executive Director David Brownell, even that wouldn’t solve one fundamental issue.
“Not having 10-12 million dollars to rehab the building on hand, even if somebody dropped a check that big in our lap, to operate a museum of that size is 100-150 thousand dollars a year. Our entire operating budget is around a hundred thousand dollars a year. So, it’s sort of, even if we could save the building, it’s beyond the scope of us to operate a museum 12-and-a-half thousand square feet.”
So, the move was made to put it on the market and find the right investors to take it on, at a price tag of zero dollars. But, despite a nationwide search, they haven’t received any viable proposals to safely rehabilitate the property.
That’s led us to alternative number 3, demolishing the building in a way that would allow for the maximum recovery of salvageable materials. Brownell says there are some elements of the old building that they intend to hold onto for the benefit of posterity.
“The fabric of the structure, you know, most of the second story was pretty much gutted. Entirely reframed. It’s got some really nice big glue lam beams and other materials. So, we’re going to save, for example, the iron gates, and the one’s with the colts. We’re going to save pieces of the building that we hopefully can reuse in the future. Either, sort of in a standalone, or incorporating them into some sort of new construction, and sort of honoring the structure.”
Since demolishing a 12.5 thousand square foot brick building is a massive undertaking, the plan is to try and find someone to do the work in exchange for one very valuable asset that will be left behind.
“What we’re trying to do, because we don’t have the resources to pay for a full demolition, what we’re looking to do is, we have an acre of real estate to the north of the school building. And so, what we would like to do is, once we have an idea of exactly what the cost of the deconstruction/demolition would be, to work out some way of exchanging the equivalent amount of that real estate in exchange for the service of having the building taken down.”