Reborn community has shifted from exclusive to inclusive

By ED PENHALE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

It began nearly a century ago as a model community, an exclusive domain for the wealthy, a trim and proper setting with views, pleasant streets and an abundance of parks.

Heading into the next century, the Mount Baker community still holds favor among the rich, but it has become a model of another kind -- one forged by triumphs over racial prejudice, white flight, the massive Interstate 90 highway construction project, the Boeing bust and neglect that begot decay.

The American Dream thrives here in this Southeast Seattle neighborhood of pristine homes big and small on the ridge between Rainier Valley and Lake Washington.

"We have a tremendously diverse neighborhood," says Jackson Schmidt, president of the Mount Baker Community Club, believed to be the oldest continuously operating community council in the nation. "It is both ethnically and economically diverse."

African Americans, Asian Americans and whites live side by side in homes on streets with panoramic views, or in more modest settings at the bottom of slopes that ease into the lower-income Rainier Valley.

Children of all races, from the whole economic spectrum, walk side by side to and from the area's schools.

"If you want to see a cross-section of the United States, walk through the halls of Franklin High School," says Craig MacGowan, a retired schoolteacher who grew up in Mount Baker and raised his family there.

Buying power, not race, defines who lives where in this community. But Patience Cryst, who owns the popular Baker's Beach Cafe at Mount Baker's crossroads -- South McClelland and Mount Baker Drive South -- contends there are no borders.

"In a three-block radius, what you are looking at can change," she says about the community's housing stock, "but we all walk the same streets."

"It's a real neighborhood," says public relations consultant Susanne Rosenkranz, who with her husband recently bought a home near Mount Baker Park. "It has kids. It has old people. There are people sitting on porches, walking their dogs. There are lots of folks riding their bikes down to the lake. You see people all the time, and you talk to the neighbors."

Baker's Beach Cafe is a lunchtime haven for students from nearby Franklin High School. Sophomore Anna Scott sat among the chattering mob inside the cafe and said growing up in Mount Baker has been "really fun."

"We're all from different income levels, different races," she says. "But all the parents know each other, and everybody comes to the cafe."

Continued:

• Area's diversity neither new nor accidental