McMenamins’ new hotel to be decorated in Bothell history

  • By Jennifer Sasseen For The Herald Business Journal
  • Tuesday, August 11, 2015 2:47pm
  • BusinessBothell

It will be as if walls can talk when the latest McMenamins project opens its doors this fall at the historic Anderson School in downtown Bothell.

The stories of people and events of Bothell’s past and present will be told in artwork displayed throughout the school-turned-hotel-and-pub.

McMenamins senior historian Tim Hills has been digging up the tales and helping a team of artists bring them to life.

“It’s pretty fun and it’s one of my favorite parts of this job,” Hills said.

The idea is to make the school into a place where locals can point out grandma on the wall and out-of-towners can make of it what they will.

“You can delve into it as much as you want or as little as you want,” he said.

It’s a formula that’s worked well for McMenamins, which runs more than 50 pubs, breweries and hotels in Oregon and Washington. The business turns old buildings into entertainment meccas using artwork to depict the history of a place and its people.

McMenamins owns a handful of pubs around the Puget Sound area, but it hasn’t created anything in the area like what it’s doing at the art deco W.A. Anderson School, which was built in 1931 as Bothell Junior High School and renamed in 1956 after its first principal Wilbert Andell “Andy” Anderson.”

The $26 million project at 18603 Bothell Way NE is scheduled to open Oct. 15 and will feature a 72-room hotel, a 134-seat, first-run movie theater, three main bars and four smaller ones, a game room and a 112-foot-long saltwater pool that will be open for guests and Bothell residents.

Artists are hard at work painting wall panels for each of the bedrooms fashioned out of former classrooms, depicting in some way the people for whom the rooms are named.

The bed headboards will be painted to tie in with that theme, Hill said, and framed write-ups on the walls, similar to bookplates, will tell the story.

On one of the headboards, a pair of pink tennis shoes dangles over the American eagle in the U.S. Senate seal, a salute to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray.

Known in her state Senate days as “the mom in tennis shoes,” Murray grew up in Bothell as one of seven children, including a twin sister, and worked at the five-and-dime store her father ran on Main Street.

Another room will be named for the Willow People, American Indians who inhabited the Bothell area before loggers settled there in the 1880s.

The idea is to create a tapestry of Bothell’s history from pivotal leaders and events to the day-to-day happenings that shape a community.

“We really try to represent the experience of what it was like to live here,” Hills said. “So not everyone is someone who was a valedictorian and went on to great things after high school.”

One of the rooms will feature Dan Hall, who was Anderson School’s first custodian and also worked as a bus driver — an ordinary guy whose sudden death in the mid-1940s upset the whole community.

Known for his congeniality and honesty, Hall was so revered that people honored him with a wall plaque at the school and an annual emeritus award to the student deemed most reflective of his admirable qualities.

The city’s late football hero Harold “Pop” Keeney won’t have a room named after him, Hills said, but he will be portrayed on the walls.

He does have a sports field named after him, after all. Located adjacent to Anderson School, Pop Keeney Field is used by all three local high schools for sporting events.

Pop Keeney was a 1920 graduate of Bothell High School and a member of one of Bothell’s pioneer families who went on to become the high school’s first football coach, leading the Cougars to the state finals in 1923.

A daughter, Evelyn Keeney, married Lowell Haynes, who later bought the Union 76 station in Bothell.

Hills recalled coming across a photo of Lowell Haynes featured in a Union Oil Company newsletter announcing the deal. Following rumors the city might not support the station, Haynes was photographed at the top of a hill with the city of Bothell in the background. “The Town’s Behind Him” read the headline.

A longtime Bothell city councilman, Lowell Haynes was largely responsible for the city’s ownership of the land that today forms the Park at Bothell Landing.

Eldest son Al Haynes, who toured the under-construction McMenamins with his wife Carol this summer, said so many city leaders, workers and high-school students gathered at his father’s station, it was dubbed “Little City Hall,” and his father would fix cars at low-cost or even for free, if he knew the owner couldn’t afford it.

The outpouring of stories in Bothell has been “phenomenal,” Hills said. Some of them revolve around Al Haynes himself, who attended Anderson School along with future wife Carol Aries.

She lived on a farm in Woodinville at the time, but was bused to Bothell for grades 7, 8 and 9 at Anderson School.

She and Al met when she ran for class secretary and he for vice president; they both won. Later, she was a cheerleader and he was a football player—“an old stereotype,” she said, laughing.

She went on to become a social worker and he an English teacher, working first at Shoreline High School, where he also coached football and track.

Later he was vice-principal of Bothell High School for three years, then principal of Inglemoor High School and Bothell High School for about 10 years each. While at Inglemoor, in 1988, he was named state high-school principal of the year.

Now retired and living in Bothell, Al and Carol Haynes, 70 and 69, respectively, will be immortalized by having bedrooms named after them at McMenamins’ Anderson School. As will Lowell Haynes, who died in 2008 at the age of 85.

In addition, the courtyard around which the Anderson School buildings are clustered will be named Haynes Square, Hills said.

The “heart” of the whole project is an enclosed bar in this courtyard, “where it’s so small,” Hills said, “when you’re there, you have to talk to the people around you, because they’re right in your face.”

It’s an idea borrowed from the McMenamins’ Edgefield property in Oregon, Hills said, after the brothers turned an even smaller building into a bar and liked the intimacy it inspired.

“It was one of those lightbulb moments” Hills said, “where they said, ‘This is the best.’”

Those four words can also be used to describe how the 50-year-old Hills feels about his job.

“It was just the luckiest thing ever,” he said, when asked how he hooked up with McMenamins.

A native of Vermont, he describes his younger self as a “geeky kid” who, from the age of about 8, liked hanging around cemeteries and then tried to learn more about the people buried there.

He majored in history in college and got his graduate degree from Washington State University in Pullman in 1993, never really expecting to be able to pursue his passion.

“I got my degree in history thinking I wouldn’t get a job,” he said.

He did, working for an archaeological research company in the Portland area, where he and wife, Andrea, would sometimes hang out at various McMenamins sites.

“We always had a great time and just loved what they were doing,” Hills said. “But what I noticed because of my interest was, you know, there was not enough information available about the history of these places.”

So he sent a letter offering his expertise to the McMenamins, who were just starting work on Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, famous for its “floating floor” and for hosting such celebrities as Glenn Miller, Ike and Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye and the “godfather of soul,” James Brown.

The Crystal Ballroom “was just steeped in history,” Hills said, “so it was the greatest project to work on. And that was the start of it.”

In 1997, Hills published “The Many Lives of the Crystal Ballroom.” Later on, his research into the Hotel Oregon in McMinnville uncovered a 1950 headline about a flying saucer sighting, inspiring an annual UFO Festival.

As for Bothell, who knows? When the revamped Anderson School opens, Hills said plans are to hold a series of local-history nights, drawing on the wealth of stories from the community.

More stories will be told, he expects, and there’s no reason for the stories to end.

After all, Hills said, “there’s always more room on the walls.”

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