The new
sculpture in front of the bank building softened a bit the cold presence of the
geometric black box and its empty concrete square. Returning from the Army
after two years away from Seattle in 1970, I was shocked when I saw the
building for the first time. It was looming over my memory of a more gently-scaled city,
book ended by the two largest buildings when I lived in town, the Space Needle
and the Smith Tower. It took me years to accept the building. However, it quickly picked up a
new, softening brand connecting it to the city’s recent history, becoming “The
Box the Space Needle Came In.”
The success
of the Mirabeau, the la-di-dah French restaurant on top of the city’s newest,
highest building, spoke to an ambition of the city beyond airplanes and timber. Seattle was not yet the food town it has become, but there was good food at Rosellini’s 410 and El Gaucho in the downtown, Ray’s Boathouse out past
Ballard and at Canlis, overlooking Lake Union.
The opening
a few weeks earlier of another new French restaurant, the Brasserie Pittsbourg,
in the basement of the Pioneer Building on the original street of Seattle, Yesler
Way, the founding street of the Skid Road town Seattle
used to be, right on top of Henry Yesler’s first house. It told its many customers that Pioneer Square was developing its own presumptions after years of decline. It used to be that South of Yesler Street meant crime, prostitution and danger. Now, however, galleries like Linda’s were to become more the norm. But so were parking lots and torn down buildings, anticipating the coming of the Kingdome in 1972. Linda had high-end dreams for herself and the new gallery but also saw what she did as contributing to the stabilization of many of the lovely old structures in the square.
used to be, right on top of Henry Yesler’s first house. It told its many customers that Pioneer Square was developing its own presumptions after years of decline. It used to be that South of Yesler Street meant crime, prostitution and danger. Now, however, galleries like Linda’s were to become more the norm. But so were parking lots and torn down buildings, anticipating the coming of the Kingdome in 1972. Linda had high-end dreams for herself and the new gallery but also saw what she did as contributing to the stabilization of many of the lovely old structures in the square.
Fulton Hotel |
The growing
arts and food scenes in Seattle seemed out of place with what was really going
on in Seattle that year. The city was falling
on its ass. At the end of 1968, 103,000
people worked at the Boeing Airplane Company, most of them in the Puget Sound
region. When Linda Farris was readying her
gallery for the May, 1971 opening, 39,000 people worked at Boeing. The unemployment rate in the state was
well-over 17%. Food stamp applications
rose from 9,000 to 60,000. Housing sales
were off 40% and the value in them plunging.
Oh, and things down at the courthouse were not so good either. The new prosecutor was indicting the old
prosecutor, the leadership of the police department and a couple of city
council members in a police pay-off scandal. It was dreadful. For those of you who missed crooked government
and a recession that truly bit – and there are plenty of you – this was a real
recession and a big league scandal.
At the end
of World War I, the airplanes that founder Bill Boeing made from Sitka Spruce
and linen were no longer needed and its many contracts were cancelled. The company survived with a combination of
good technology and lots of luck. The
Boeing guys bet their future on a very fast boat, one that could outrun just
about anything and yet carry a substantial cargo. It was a fine technical accomplishment, but
one waiting for a market. Prohibition brought plenty of customers and wiped out Boeing's inventory of previously irrelevant fast boats. They also began creating an airline, United, that would soon run afoul of the US Justice Department.
The Boeing
of 1971 was hitching its star, and ours, to a couple of widely disparate concepts. One was the Super Sonic Transport, the SST,
or as Boeing called it, the 2707. A big
hanger across from Boeing Field had a representation of the plane bolted to the
wall, just lifting its nose to take off.
They were confidently building the mock up inside. But Boeing was not prepared to bet the
company on this amazing new airplane and asked for federal
participation. On March 24, 1971, the United
States Senate voted against putting federal money into the development of the
aircraft and Boeing abandoned the project.
The picture of the plane bolted to the wall was taken down, but for
years a ghostly, weathered paradigm of the thing was visible from Interstate 5.
The CEO of
Boeing at the time was a guy named Thornton Wilson, known as ‘T’. His board, the Chamber of Commerce and many
stockholders hounded him to diversify the company’s offerings. They looked, once again, at a fast boat and
tried to sell Hydrofoils, even building a couple of demos. A commonly held idea was that Boeing engineers
could do anything in any industry if they just put their technical and
management minds to it. Wilson recounted
a scouting visit to Boardman, Oregon, a sometime bombing range, where Boeing
was contemplating a huge, regional solid waste landfill through a purchase of a
small landfill on the site. He recalled
walking across the desert to where a tennis shoe flapped, half in, half out of
the gritty, sandy landscape. He kicked
at it, half-heartedly, and had no luck dislodging the shoe, covering his own wingtips
with a sandy, smelly dust.
“What the
hell am I doing here?” he told me he thought.
“This is not what we do at the Boeing Airplane Company!”
It would
get better and it did.
Linda’s gallery today is a deli that offers a really good sandwich and a soft drink for
six bucks. The trim is brightly colored
as it was while it was a gallery and a small plaque clings to the sandblasted brick.
The Linda Farris Gallery
1971 to 1995
On this site, many artistic miracles
occurred
Someone has
defaced the plaque but in the spirit of things, what the tagger said
is just about right. “How sad.” He could have been referring to the mis-spelling, but I prefer it refers to Linda's too short life.
Linda’s father was in the wholesale diamond business in San Francisco “My parents,” she said
in an interview, “emphasized that I could do anything, but really wanted me to
do nothing, marry someone and take care of children.” She saw that her dad was not going to entrust
the diamond business to a woman, no matter her business skill, but rather would
turn the business over to her brother. So,
Linda discovered art, political activism and a host of other things at UC
Berkeley.
She married
a commercial airplane pilot and exercised the benefits of that job by
travelling all over the world and getting first hand experiences at the best
galleries on the globe. Her pilot/husband brought her to Bellevue, but suburban life and Gallery East soon felt pretty small to her.
About to enter UC Berkeley |
She was
exceptional with the media. She had convinced
the Seattle Times to review her Bellevue gallery once the previous year and
had picked up two mentions in 1971, one ahead of the opening in May and another a November review in John Voorhees’ Visual Arts column. The following year her gallery was the subject
of Seattle Times reporting 80 times with an equivalent volume from the Seattle
Post Intelligencer.
Linda
was an organizer. She threw herself
into Festival ’71, an arts and music festival opened at the Seattle Center that
would become, over time, Bumbershoot. She
unsuccessfully tried to organize a Pioneer Square Gallery Association, but was
one of those organizing a gallery walk that is now a Seattle institution, “First
Thursday.” It is, today, the oldest art walk in the country.
Just as it
rescued Seattle with the discovery of gold in Alaska and Canada a couple of
years after the Panic of 1893, Alaskan oil came to the rescue after the Boeing
Bust. From his perch near the top of the
Seattle First National Bank Building, Bill Jenkins, Chairman of the bank since
1962, watched with great interest the rising up of the great, historic and
profitable Alaska connection.
Lawyers
and politicians in Seattle were working hard settling the Alaska Native land claims. They were creating the National Environmental Policy Act, an environmental law that would take some of the politics out of building the pipeline and an army of logistics people were staging shipments from Seattle to Alaska, everything from rebar
to Cocoa Puffs.
In 1975, as construction of
the Alaska Pipeline began, huge barges assembled in Elliott Bay beneath
Jenkins’ gaze. They contained a Rube
Goldberg collection of trucks, cranes, mobile homes, boats, the pipeline itself
and other necessaries to support one of the largest construction projects
ever. You felt that even a small breeze
would tip them over. Seattle First
National Bank was the 18th largest bank in the country and it had
money to loan for the booming oil industry.
The new oil
field growing to the North combined with the Mideast oil embargo to energize every
oil boomer in the country. One of the
most energetic banks was Penn Square Bank. It
was a drive through bank, all thick windows and pneumatic tubes and very little
cash in the back. Years later, when the regulators
came to take it over, they couldn’t find it in the bowels of an Oklahoma City
suburban mall.
Bill Jenkins |
In three
years, the bank lost nearly a half a billion dollars and Jenkins and his crowd
disappeared into an endless storm front of depositions.
Bank of America bought the bank for $150 million, just enough cash to
keep the Comptroller of the Currency from closing its doors. The CEO of Wells Fargo Bank in Los Angeles, Dick
Cooley, took over the bank.
Jenkins demonstrating how to knot a tie with one hand |
Among
Cooley’s first moves was to sell his headquarters building to a Chicago real estate firm, JMB Realty and a partnership it had created. It sold for $123 million. (The building sold today, July 6, 2016 to a German real estate firm for $400 million.) Then, he turned
his eye to the company art collection. He
knew the art world some, well enough to know he needed a crackerjack
consultant. He had worked with the head
of MIT’s Fine Arts Department, Professor Wayne Anderson, who had
helped sell
and acquire art while Cooley was running Wells Fargo. He hired Anderson to assess the Seafirst art
collection and make recommendations.
Wayne Anderson |
The Moore
had been purchased by Seafirst in 1969 for $165,000. On August 28, 1986, the bank announced it had
sold the sculpture for $825,000 to a Japanese buyer who was planning to take it
out of the plaza in front of the building in two days. Everyone was caught by surprise. The mayor’s spokesman said that the city did
not own the piece, had greater priorities than the purchase of it and were mere
observers of a tragic event. JMB told
the city that they would replace the piece with concrete planters.
Among
Linda’s many phone calls that day was to Seattle's mayor. Charles Royer was elected six years after
Linda opened her gallery in Pioneer Square and he had known her for a long
time before the election. They had many mutual friends and
the mayor didn’t feel right about what was happening just a couple of blocks
from the Municipal building. The city
began frantically researching the permitting and other documents associated
with the building.
Charles Royer |
When she
arrived, she found several men from Artech, an art shipping company, along with
JMB Realty managers. Holly introduced
herself. They told her they were indeed
going to move the sculpture the next day.
Ms. Miller right then decided to implement an option she had talked
about with the mayor’s office the day the news broke, though no decision had
been made at the time.
“I think
you need a demolition permit,” Miller said.
“Let’s go down to my office and I’ll get you started. The permit costs
just $70.00,” she told them.
Fortunately, there were no lawyers in the JMB/Artech crew. Back at City Hall, while they filled out the
permitting form, she told them that she was posting a stop work order on the
site until the demolition permit was approved. The mayor, Linda Farris and her
artist friends had some time.
Henry Moore |
As in many
crises, the first words out are often the most damning. Seafirst would later apologize for playing
dumb, but the dumb part stuck.
A headline
writer topped a hard-edged editorial in the Seattle Times with “Expect
Ambivalence,” a play on the advertising slogan for the bank that year “Expect
Excellence.”
JMB doubled
down on its claim that it had “purchased no sculpture” by claiming that
Seafirst had actually sold it directly to the Japanese businessman.
Given these
openings and Linda’s amazing skills as a media hustler, details began to
dribble out, all of them affirming that JMB and Seafirst hadn’t exactly thought
this through, except perhaps the lying part. JMB had planned to replace
the Moore with several concrete planters.
But, the original building permit required some kind of art in the plaza. When originally constructed, Seattle First
National Bank transferred development rights from the plaza part of its lot to
its new building all of which allowed the bank to cover more of its lot and add
additional height. The sculpture was
integral to the approved shape and height of the building.
Finally,
JMB admitted that its argument for not having purchased the sculpture was based
on the fact that it had only purchased and exercised an option, a first refusal for the
sculpture. Certainly no actual sculpture
changed hands!
King County
tax people suddenly appeared, looking for the buyer. Given the climb in the sales price, the sculpture had been undervalued for many years and the county wanted to settle up.
The mayor,
with Farris and others from the art community next to him at a press conference,
announced a search for the undisclosed, mysterious buyer.
“Too bad
for Seafirst,” the Seattle Times wrote in its “Expect Ambivalence”
editorial. “Since a single
public-relations blunder may have undone much of the careful, patient
rebuilding of the bank’s image damaged in the energy loans fiascoes of several
years ago.”
Throughout
September, Seafirst and JMB stood up to the Farris led petitions and letters. She always had a good comeback for the fresh lies minted and exposed every three days or so.
On October
6, 1986, Burton Glazov, Executive Vice-President of JMB Realty of Chicago and
Seafirst called a press conference:
“We and Seafirst were both surprised and unhappy at the community upset over the news that the sculpture had been sold. That’s not good for anybody.” They announced they had purchased the sculpture back from the purchaser, whoever that was.
They said the piece would be gifted to the Seattle Art Museum, then starting to develop the Seattle Sculpture Park. Included was an option to move the Moore to the park, though the Seattle Art Museum said it had no plans to do so and has not done anything to move it there over the past 30 years. JMB and Seafirst didn’t announce the price of the object, but it turned out to be $2,000,000.
Among people I talked to about Linda was Judy Tobin. Judy met Linda in 1971, when both were new to town and wondering what would happen next. They became fast friends. When we talked, Judy cleared up a long ago mystery. Judy said that Linda really wanted a great relationship with someone. One evening, drinking wine and lots of it, Linda told Judy that she was going to date a thousand men until she found the right one, anticipating the Malcom Gladwell 10,000 hour rule which posits that you need 10,000 hours of doing something before you become truly expert.
One weekend night in the mid-seventies, a colleague, Doug Rives, called and wondered if he might bring his date over for some wine. Accompanying Doug was Linda Farris. We chatted away on the porch of the falling down rental in the Eastlake neighborhood. Finally, they said goodnight. A couple of months later, I asked Linda whether she was still seeing Doug.
“We just dated a minute,” she said.
Linda once showed me around her amazing house which she built in 1981. Then, interest rates were very high and Linda felt that she was getting priced out of Seattle home ownership. So, she hired the architect Mark Millett to build her a home with simple materials and lots of open space on many different levels. He did. It had one bedroom, one bath, 1200 square feet and two doors, one to the outside and a slider for the toilet. All in, she spent about $50,000, well below house prices at the time. Today, it carries the bad news message about housing prices in Seattle. Zillow says it is worth $700,000.
Linda and John |
Along the way, a tumor began growing in her brain and it consumed her life in 2005. Her friends said many goodbyes to her, like the plaque at the beginning of this story. But my favorite is the celebration that used a papier mache rendering of Linda for the gallery closing party at the Nippon Kan Theater. Done by artist Carl Smool and his friends, it got completely out of hand and grew to 16 feet. It was perfectly Linda -- a red polka dot dress and pink ankle boots and a yellow purse hanging from her arm. The piece required way too much candy so they only put the pinata candy in the purse. After Linda died, they floated the sculpture out on Lake Washington and set it on fire.
Jeff Jahn, a founder of PortlandArtNet, and an admirer, wrote in his eulogy:
“It was her frank honesty, over-the-top hustle and daring that made her more than just an art dealer but an icon of fearlessness. Of all the people I have met in the art world none has impressed me like Linda Farris. With no double talk, a deep trust in artists, crazy in the best possible way, constant risk taking and a probing intelligence...she stood out.”
For a woman who was so front and center in her life, it is surprising there are not a lot of pictures around in the public record. It is a lesson I have learned over many years. Even fearless people battle insecurities. She probably thought she didn't make a good photo and avoided reminders of being plain, as she saw it. But you should know she was, really, quite beautiful.
The author Louis Rowan is working on a book about Linda for publication next year.
Linda Farris, Oral History, February 26, 1975
Remembering Penn Square Collapse
History of Seattle First National Bank
Everything you ever wanted to know about Henry Moore
Linda Farris, Oral History, February 26, 1975
Remembering Penn Square Collapse
History of Seattle First National Bank
Everything you ever wanted to know about Henry Moore
She really has a good appearance and very photogenic too. And such a great lesson has delivered through your post. And I am glad you shared with us too.
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Linda once accused me "faking it" "you're just faking it" when I was hanging some pieces in her gallery. I measured to the point where I was going to place a nail but looked away temporarily to get the nail, etc. I'm a trained artist and could memorize the point on the wall by the various subtle surface texture features. Yes, it was a blank white wall, but not featureless. Linda"s eyesight was poor and she wore rather thick glasses, so she couldn't imagine that I could find the mark again. (We sometimes would make a very small smudge with a finger in order to find the spot again. We being Bert Garner & me.)
ReplyDeleteIt makes me smile to this day. I can still see her down at the bottom of my ladder looking up at me and saying "you're faking it!"
I wasn't.
BTW, I was on the front page of the Sunday P-I with "Vertebrae" - the Henry Moore piece. I bent over to read the Stop Work order and then heard the click of a camera behind me to my right. Walking away, the photographer intercepted me to get my name and ask why I was there. I told him I wanted to see it before it went away. He said the picture would be in the P-I the next day. So, Sunday morning I stopped in at a corner store to check the paper. I was on the front page with the Henry Moore piece. Like magic.
DeleteThe company called Artech was originally R. Bert Garner and Associates (Rolon Garner). For a while, it was just Bert & me. Foster-White, Linda Farris and others kept us busy.
Those were the days.
I'm retired in Arizona now.
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