As readers know, from time to time, we undertake what might be called "eminent domain tourism" -- visiting the sites of famous and infamous cases when we're in the neighborhood. Hadacheck, Kaiser Aetna, Nollan, Dolan, and PruneYard, for example.
Perhaps the best illustration of the "holdout" comes from Seattle (see this 2008 story from the New York Times for the backstory), and during a recent trip there, we went by the semi-famous "Up House" formerly owned by the late Edith Macefield, so named because in 2009, "Disney publicists attached balloons to the roof of Macefield's house, as a promotional tie-in to their film, Up, in which an aging widower (voiced by Ed Asner)'s home is similarly surrounded by looming development."
There's still some balloons tied to the fence, but the house has definitely seen better days. The Wikipedia entry tells us why.
The neighborhood is definitely in transition, from a somewhat grubby industrial and residential area to a commercial district. But despite the now run-down condition of the house, it still is jarring to see a modern commercial three-story building with a purposeful cut-out for a small home.
Ms. Macefield held out to the end, and even beyond.
Also of interest in Seattle is the neighborhood shown in the photo above (the part to the right of the square park in the middle. Known as the "Denny Regrade," this flat area was once a steep hill -- how inconvenient! -- until the city fathers and engineers literally washed it away. Try that today, folks.
Apparently, not everyone appreciated the regrade plan. Undeterred, the planners and engineers worked around the holdouts. Or, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote, "homeowners who didn't go along with the Denny regrade project had the hill dug out around them."
