'Real-life' house from Up is something to believe in – until it gets torn down

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/09/up-house-seattle-pixar-edith-macefield

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Nobody will buy Edith Macefield’s old house anymore.

Not then, when the 87-year-old woman refused a million-dollar offer from a shopping complex developer in 2007. Not now, after this gentrifying city told four potential buyers her home is no longer safe to inhabit.

The North Carolina bank that owns this tiny Seattle bungalow – with a national apparel outlet on one side, and an LA Fitness gym on the other – will donate it to the person who comes up with the best proposal by the end of the month for removal or restoration. Otherwise, this old house will be torn down.

Perhaps it would be gone by now had a local publicist not affixed balloons to its outside in 2009, a year after Macefield’s death, to promote the Pixar movie Up – a story remarkably similar to Macefield’s, about an elderly man who would not sell a house. The house looked remarkably similar to this one, with huge buildings rising on all sides. The man in the film eventually sailed his life away with the help of more than 10,000 balloons.

Soon the old house became “the Up house” – a real-life reminder of a Hollywood blockbuster, one that draws people from all over the world in the mistaken presumption that the house actually sponsored the movie. They tie balloons on a chain-link fence that keeps people from trespassing on the sliver of property cut from the shopping center.

They write messages on the balloons: “We will remember the little guy,” one passer-by wrote in permanent marker.

They write about Up: “Good movie. Good people.”

They write about fading blue-collar lives – this house has become an international symbol of a losing fight everywhere to preserve local properties against the encroaching big chain gym and apparel stores next door:

“Seattle’s last stand,” write the old-timers.

And so in the final days of the Up house, people have come to find meanings in it that are not real. Because Edith Macefield wasn’t fighting anyone; she just wanted to die in the house she owned for half a century. Up wasn’t based on her house or her life – Pixar’s film had been in production long before she turned down the million. Nor does the gentrification battle that has gripped Seattle for two decades have anything to do with this house here on Northwest 46th Street, in the heavy-industrial part of town.

“It was somebody’s home and eventually everybody wanted it to be something else,” said Barry Martin, the construction supervisor on the shopping complex, to whom Macefield willed her home. “Everybody has got to have something to believe in, and if that helps people get through their life or get through hard times, that’s OK. Because what they are going for is true. What they are going for is in their head.”

They come to the Up house in ways Paul Thomas still cannot fully understand. He is the Seattle real-estate broker hired by the bank, American IRA LLC, to handle the transfer of the house and an eventual sale of the remaining 1,550-square-foot lot.

Thomas also has become the unofficial caretaker of this little old house, putting on windows and a door after a recent attempted renovation left it without either. He has tried to explain to the passers-by, again and again, that it is not, in fact, the inspiration for Up. But people still believe, mostly because they want to.

“It’s like a pilgrimage,” he told the Guardian. “People go to a place and put whatever memories they need to on it. Everybody who goes there seems to have so many radically different reasons for going.”

Tatiana Reger, from San Francisco, wanted a picture because her mother refuses to leave her house, too.

Julie Haefner, who lives in Connecticut, wanted a photo of her parents in front of the Up house because she and her sister both had pictures of their own families; she wanted the complete set.

Sherry Bosch, visiting from Phoenix, came in the spirit of her niece’s Up-themed wedding; they had even asked guests to sign an “adventure book”, just like the one Ellie, the wife in Up, had for all her dreams.

“Thanks to you, Megan and Rob are sharing adventures,” Sherry wrote on a blue balloon.

When the publicists hired by Pixar asked Martin if they could tie balloons to the roof of the house, he said yes. As a promotion, the idea was genius: the parallel between the fictional Carl Fredrickson and Macefield seemed uncanny.

But Macefield’s stubbornness stood for a city rapidly losing its blue-collar roots, where the median price of a home jumped 18.9% in the last year, and the earners in the top fifth of the population make 18 times more than the bottom fifth. As rows of gleaming new office towers and luxury condominiums kept going up downtown, Seattle became two cities, with this little house in the middle.

Greg Pinneo, who bought the house from Martin after the will process, left his investment midway through when costs got too high. Four other potential buyers gave up after the city demanded costly earthquake retrofits.

Then one day Thomas, the new real-estate broker, was installing windows on the house when he heard a noise outside. A family from Idaho were at the end of their vacation and had time for one last attraction: the Space Needle or the Up house. The kids voted for the house. As a tribute, they tied balloons to the fence.

The next day, Thomas bought a big package of balloons and put several in a cup, tethered to the chain link fence that has been in front of the house since Macefield’s death, along with some Sharpie pens. People used them all up; he had to buy more when supplies ran low.

Macefield never enjoyed the attention she got for turning down that million for her house, Martin says, because she had just one wish: “She was doing nothing more than trying to live out her life, in her home,” he said.

In a city that loves to celebrate obscure anti-establishment heroes, here was someone who could not be bought – who had no desire for the money, and no children to whom she could bequeath it. She would rather someone build a shopping center on all sides of her home than move. Soon, a local tattoo parlor was engraving her name on people’s arms, and a group of locals started an Edith Macefield music festival.

Soon after Macefield died in 2008, the house was gutted. The walls, floorboards and support beams were pulled out and replaced with modern plywood. Only the old roof remains. When Pinneo ran out of funds, the bank and Thomas tried to find buyers with imaginative ideas for the house.

The most intriguing was a mother-daughter pie shop that would have had stained-glass windows with etchings of balloons. But city officials kept denying the mother-daughter team permits. Three other potential buyers abandoned attempts to buy the property after similar permitting issues.

“One thing I find incredibly aggravating is that several entrepreneurs encountered resistance from the city, and yet all over the city there are developers who raze single-family homes and build big towering apartments,” Thomas said.

One morning this week, Rick Sullivan drove about 20 blocks from his apartment to buy socks at Ross.

He tried to park across the street, but a car cut him off so he made a U-turn in front a fence, and suddenly he was staring at Edith Macefield’s old house behind it, telling a stranger a story about his wife Michele, who had a stroke one day last fall. Nine days later, she was dead at just 39. They lived in Minnesota, where he was a physical therapist and she was a communications executive at Land O’Lakes. They had lived in Malaysia for a few years and there were more adventures they wanted to have together. The last couple years she had been planning an around-the-world trip they would take.

When Rick Sullivan’s wife died, he couldn’t bear living in Minnesota anymore, so he moved here to the Ballard part of town, where the fight to preserve an older Seattle against the onslaught of apartment and condo complexes has raged hard. That morning he had been to the Verizon store and discovered that the pictures he thought he had lost of Michele were on his phone after all. Now he was talking about the around-the-world trip they would not take.

Had he seen Up? Did he know about Ellie’s adventure book in the movie, about her South American dream that sounded quite a lot like his wife’s idea for a big trip? Did he know how in the film, Carl had bought that vacation for his wife and on the day he was going to give her the ticket she could barely walk up a hill? And how, in the next scene, Ellie was in the hospital and the scene after that was in the funeral home? Did he know about the adventure not yet taken?

No, Rick Sullivan said, he had never seen Up. He stared at his phone, at the newly recovered pictures of his dead wife. For a moment, he was silent. Then he looked up.

“I think I have to go watch that movie,” he said. “Thank you.”

Then he left, first to buy socks for the empty closet in his lonely apartment, then to go find a movie he had never heard of, that people believed was inspired by a house just an accidental U-turn away.

But none of it, he thought, was an accident.

“I know I was meant to come here today,” he said.