Officials in Seward, a small city harbor of just under 3,000 people located on the edge of Resurrection Bay on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, voted in favor of demolishing Jesse Lee Home for Children, a former boarding school for displaced youth run by The United Method Church that plays a role in the state’s history. Array even though it has remained in a complex state of deterioration for decades.
Jesse Lee House is where, in 1927, a seventh grader named Benny Benson designed, sewn and piloted Alaska’s first territorial flag.
Benson’s winning design, which then followed as the state flag, surpassed another 700 entries, all submitted through Alaskan schoolchildren, at a festival sponsored by the American Legion. After graduating from college, Benson used his $1,000 prize from the festival to move to Seattle and enroll in a diesel engine repair school. He later founded a circle of relatives and returned to Alaska to paint as an airplane mechanic. Benson died in 1972 at the age of 58, thirteen years after his drawing continued in 1959, as the official flag of the new state of Alaska. Its design, featuring 8 golden stars, seven small and one giant, forming the Big Dipper and Polaris, ranked fifth in design in a 2001 rating of 72 state, provincial and territorial flags in the United States and Canada through the Vexyological Association of North America. .
The Associated Press noted that Benson would be the user of Aboriginal descent to design a state flag.
As Benson’s legacy continues in several vital Alaskan locations named in his honor, adding an airport (Kodiak), a main street (Anchorage) and even a mountain in the Kenai Range, the Jesse Lee Home for Children, which has been deserted since 1964 after suffering significant damage in a primary earthquake, is where the Alaskan flag was born. With proposals to save and reuse the ruined orphanage/school that has been floating over the years but never materialized, it will now be razed after Seward City Council approved a solution this week to continue the demolition.
Only one board member voted against the resolution, through KTUU, an NBC associate in Anchorage.
“There’s a lot of history out there and other people are intrigued by the school’s history,” Trish Neal, president of the Alaska Association for Historical Preservation, said in an exchange with KTVA. “It’s actually a vital piece of history and you have to save it.
Built in 1925 with Stanley Shaw, founded in Tacoma, Washington, as an architect, the long-abandoned site, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, was included in the 2020 edition of Alaska’s top 10 most endangered historic homes. Association for Historical Preservation. List. The once extensive property, comprising two surviving buildings on the site that were not demolished in a time after the 1964 earthquake, was ceded to the city of Seward through United Method Church. It then moved to a number of personal owners before being sold to its current owner, the city of Seward, in 2019 after a subsidized plan through state grants run through the nonprofit Friends of Jesse Home to the site (rumor, of course, being pursued) at a charter school never materialized. Jesse Lee House survived as an establishment; moved to Anchorage in 1965 and eventually became the social services organization known as AK Child-Family.
Referring to the property, which is now surrounded by residential subdivisions, as a “great point of discord in a small town” and as “so deteriorated that even the top civic promoter refused,” the Anchorage Daily News as the site should be described, and the cases surrounding it, in 2012:
“Sitting on a hill overlooking Resurrection Bay is a giant reinforcement building, a desert orphanage with dark, empty windows. It’s scary for a giant scale that wouldn’t move to a film set, but it’s not a haunted Hollywood house. This is of course Jesse Lee’s old house.
“For some, Jesse Lee House is a historic gem, one of the few structural monuments in our young state and a birthplace of equivalent rights in Alaska. For others, it’s an asbestos-filled scourge that only wants to bring down a teenager. looking for strong emotions. But anyone who wants to do something. »
At this week’s long-observed council meeting, Seward Mayor Christy Terry said she was complete because of the demolition of the buildings, which she said would charge far less to restore and adapt them for new use. Removing all dangerous (or traditionally important) fabrics from buildings, followed by full demolition, would cost between $800,000 and $1.3 million. A government grant would cover up to $1 million. Terry, who called the site a “danger” who “waits for someone to come in and get hurt or killed,” said saving the broken assets would cost $28 million.
“It’s not the end of the interior, it’s not the structure for some use,” Terry KTVA said. “It’s $28 million just to make sure, you know, this structure can stay upright.”
In addition to voting in favor of the solution to demolish the historic building, City Council members also voted to erect a monument to the site in the future. However, the company’s counterfeit plans and related prices are unknown, and more subsidies are most likely to come into play.
“Seward is painted in a gentle way that we don’t respect our history,” Terry told the board. “We have the opportunity to maintain the history and legacy of a design that is very much for other people in Alaska, but that doesn’t mean we have to maintain the building.”
The vote followed an era of public comment, which the revisions on the construction’s fate were reportedly divided. Many Alaskans made it clear that they saw the ancient buildings as horrors that were to be demolished despite their role in the state’s history, while others lobbied for preservation and reuse as a museum, school or shelter.
Although Jesse Lee Home for Children’s existing buildings will now be demolished, those and other concepts will be discussed in a long-term public assembly on how to move forward with the remodeling of the site with a monument in place. At the Assembly of the City Council, Terry said that he had imagined the structure of a memorial pavilion at the wooden site recovered from the demolition or potentially a new public playground.