Is Googie Good?

Stephen Lee is not accustomed to being the center of attention. He heads the Seattle Landmark Preservation Board, an 11-member commission that typically receives three or four requests every two weeks to decide whether or not a particular building is worthy of landmark designation. His meetings usually attract a handful of attendees, if that many.

But when Lee and his board met for a routine meeting last week, four television crews, reporters from all the local papers and more than 100 community members joined them. The property to be considered: a shutdown Denny's restaurant in the city's Ballard neighborhood. "It was wild," says Lee, who describes the Wednesday night meeting as "the most excitement" he has seen during his six years chairing the board.

The crowd stuck around for two and a half hours to get the verdict: by a 6 to 3 vote, Seattle declared the former Denny's, built in 1964, a historical landmark, citing its importance as a local signpost; its swooping, Googie-style roof made it a distinctive marker of the neighborhood. "I truly think that it has a distinctive enough element in the community and its urban fabric that it should not be lost," says Lee, who voted in favor of saving the building. As a result, a lot of people are asking him, "What are you doing saving a Denny's?"

The battle over this particular Denny's has been brewing since the middle of last year when the building was nominated for landmark status. The controversy became more heated with last week's decision, a verdict that was largely unpopular among Seattleites, judging from the 200 comments left on a recent Seattle Times article. The majority did not take much pleasure in living in the city that landmarks a Denny's. "What a joke. Preserve an unstable boarded up, vacant building?" asks one reader. "It's going to just sit and be an eyesore for the foreseeable future."

The landmark status is particularly bad news for the property's owners. The real estate company Benaroya purchased the property in 2006 for $12 million. Now, their plans to develop a condominium complex are on hold as they begin to appeal the decision, a process that could take weeks, months or even years. "Here we are, having gone through the better part of a year without making any gains on the property," says Jack McCollough, the company's land use attorney. "With the time value of money and market changes, it can have quite a serious impact on us."

The same building that has inspired fierce opposition has also attracted an equally devoted group of supporters, largely community activists and preservation architects. They say that this building is a key example of Googie architecture, a movement from the 1950s and '60s that gets it name from a Sunset Strip coffee shop. That Los Angeles shop, designed in 1949 by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright's, features sweeping roofs, big windows and starburst and boomerang shapes—elements that came to be know as exemplars of Googie. Alan Hess, author of "Googie Redux: Ultra Modern Roadside Architecture," describes the movement as "an ultra-modern expression of structure in building intended to attract a clientele going about their day in an automobile." The style grew alongside the rise of car culture; the buildings' big, bright shapes were meant as signs to attract drivers—think McDonald's golden arches, which Hess cites as a classic example. Hess says that the Denny's building in Seattle has many of the requisite features—its "clean, abstract, sculptural" roofline shows, as he describes it, "aspects of modern sensibility, and a part of Googie. Part of the purpose is to make the building as its own sign."