The historic Kerry Hall was worth saving – Seattle met

Some of the most savage memories It happened in my life in Carrie Hall. As a late teenager in the late 1990s, applying for colleges as a specialty for piano, it was a tour of the Spanish colonial revival building that captured the Cornish deal for me. I could see study among terracotta arches and cut Greek muses on the facade. Or lunch in the spring day colonnade, perhaps accompanied by a live soundtrack by my fellow music students. What a beautiful place to learn things.

Everything came true. The long nights in the studio rooms, classes for the ethereal choir, the virtuoso performances in the Poncho Concert Hall, the Long, Strange Conversations with Colleagues Music in The Stairs and the Colonnade. The wide corridors ring music. Increased territorial views of Lake Union and the space needle beyond it by the dance studios on the top floor. Probably a decade, after running out of cash and dropping out, I would have crept into the training rooms in Carrie.

Nelly Cornish, known as Miss Aunt Nelly to her private piano students, began teaching the instrument in 1902, but she was not just a piano teacher. At that time, she kept perfect, revolutionary, that no form of art could be isolated and that exposure to students to all artistic disciplines was a must for their education. The Cornelish school eventually took over the entire floor of its original house on Pike and Broadway, offering folk dance courses, French, erythmics, ballet and puppets among other disciplines – then exceeds space.

In 1920, after many campaigns, fundraising and organization of the community, a location was provided for the expansion of the School of Arts in a new specialized campus – only under half a hectare on Roy and Harvard Avenue Street. The Earth was broken into the Kerry Hall of New Year 1921. Architect Abraham Horace Albertson had previously designed the church of St. Joseph, the Northern Life Tower, as well as the Hall Condon and at the Lazarus at the University of Washington.

There is a popular idea that Kerry Hall is named after Cornish’s mother, but I am suspicious for two reasons: A. , collected several years earlier by the wealthy Seattle in response to the low students’ recording during World War II, raised money specifically for the construction of Kerry Hall, and the board includes a timber to an Albert S. Carrie. (Queen Anne Hill’s Carey Park is also baptized in his honor.)

No matter who was baptized, Carrie and his colleagues elite Seattle passed, and in 1921, Carrie Hall finally manifested herself on 710 Roy Street, nine blocks north of the campus of the stand. Built in the Spanish colonial style of the Revival, a three-storey brick building with an area of ​​31 900 square feet was later dressed in plaster on three sides and garnished with terracotta ornaments.

Carrie Hall came equipped with a 190-seat student performance theater at the eastern end of the building. As part of the non-existent non-profit purpose of Poncho, the entrance to the theater sits in Colonnade, and Kerry is one of the few buildings in Seattle who will include it-you have thought we will see more of them in such a rainy climate. In the yard, along with the colonnade, cherry flowers and a large red camellia bloom differently and to a very Spanish effect, with floral views peeking through the arches. The exterior of the building looks almost identical today, as it was constructed, the only differences being its colors – originally painted with peach, then pink, and now white – and the recent removal of the emblematic pair of American elm next to the main entrance, which were lost by the disease of the Dutch elm in 2023.

When Carrie Hall was completed in July 1921 and the Cornelish school moved, even with Miss Aunt Nelly herself, who lived in Penthhouse on the third floor with her adopted daughter Elena Miramova, they did not waste time expressing their indignation. That summer, a petition was distributed with the request to be closed on the grounds that the music pouring out of the building was a “public trouble for the neighborhood”. In December of the same year, the case with Corpse Found at Superior Court with chairman of Frater AW. A week later, a frame, who was interested in the arts, ruled in favor of Cornish, telling the neighbors to move to the countryside if they did not withstand the sounds of the city.

Enrollment flourished in the 1920s, although depression struck the Cornishka in 1929. In 1937, at 61, Nelly Cornish resigned as a director and moved to New York to live near his daughter; Their apartments turned into a dance studio. Cornish continued to expand, although Kerry Hall remained essentially unchanged over the years. Several houses on East Harvard Street were acquired for use for classrooms. The school became a fully accredited college in 1977, offering a bachelor of exquisite arts and a bachelor of music as a Cornish Institute. In 1983, the college bought the former Lakeside school six blocks to the north, next to the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Mark. The departments of visual art and theater were taken to Cornish North, also known as hemp, while dance and music remained in Carrie Hall.

In the early Aungs Cornish, he purchased several properties at South Lake Union, moving his headquarters to Lenora Square, freshly restored, seven -storey Art Deco office building. He sold the houses in Harvard, which were destroyed, and the Cornish northern campus shortly thereafter. Quite little Kerry Hall, still living dance and music departments, was the only remaining Cornish presence on the hill.

Last spring, I received an invitation from a Facebook group called “Save Kerry Hall”. Longtime Professor of Cornish Kim Machai, who taught me English and African literature and an entire class for Ulyses From Harvard’s magnificent houses in the 1990s, he sought help as Cornish announced his plans to sell the historical music and dance building. Makey has partnered with former Cornish Mags secretary, Oldman to try to distribute the word to possible benevolent buyers.

Although Makey has since retired and has moved to Europe, he has been teaching to Cornish for several decades and began campaigning brutally from the southern shore of Sweden to save his old workplace. Makei still had a great network and many current and former Corornish and graduates appeared in the group, expressing fears that the building would be gutted and turned into apartments or more bad, since only the facade was protected from its historic status S Everyone was somehow scared.

A student had taken place in April 2024 and a petition was prepared to preserve the building, arguing that the loss of Kerry Hall would displace students and local artists and would risk the preservation of the building as a cultural landmark. Last November, when Carrie Hall’s fate is still unsure, a preventive open house was held for the public to say goodbye to Cornish and others to think about their memories of the building and say goodbye.

It wasn’t necessary. The news was dropped on November 25, a week and a half after the open house. The Seattle Theater Group, who owns Paramount, The Moore and The Neptune, had bought Kerry Hall for $ 6 million. His plans were to use him as a center for public cultural arts, with arts education courses, rental spaces and public performances in the theater.

“Like someone who grew up in a community that has no opportunities for resources and arts, I am proud that Stg will turn Kerry Hall into a living place for people to feel at home and potentially changing life -rooted experiences in the arts.” , said Marizol Sánkchez-Best, Director of StG for Community Education and Community. A full events calendar are expected to be scheduled in Kerry Hall by summer 2025.

Two weeks after the sale in early December, Cornish announced his plans to merge with the nearby university in Seattle to expand the programs of fine arts aimed at science. Save Kerry Hall FB members were pleased, one calling the sale of Kerry Hall to Stg “The best possible news for our favorite building”, while expressing a little sadness for the structure of the college itself, which was dismantled through the merger.

My old English prof.

“I am pleased with the purchase of the STG from the Cornish History School -Kerry Hall. This addresses problems that bathe for* ever* in the history of Cornish. “

“100+ years old?” Makey wrote. “It’s a good run and Miss Aunt Nelly, in my opinion, will understand and approve these decisions.”