The Remarkable Life Of Edith Macefield And The House That Stayed

This is a tale of a property developer which bought a city block in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. The company’s plan in 2006 was to demolish the existing buildings to replace them with a shopping mall and a parking lot: hardly an unusual occurrence in any modern American city.

Despite being offered as much as $1 million for her humble home, Macefield’s mind was made up: she would not move. So just who was this stubborn octogenarian? It turns out that she’d lived a very full life, and her story is well worth telling.

We do have some tales from her teenage years as told by Macefield herself, although how dependable a narrator she was is very much open to question. Many of the sometimes barely credible facts about her life come from Barry Martin.

Writing on History Link, the self-styled “free online encyclopedia of Washington state history”, in 2015 Linda Holden Givens quotes extensively from the many tales that Macefield had told to Martin.

As Givens puts it, “Barry Martin listened to Edith's incredible stories. He was fascinated but felt like he was meeting someone from another planet”. One such tale was about an incident in Macefield’s life in 1935.

That elsewhere was England, where she traveled with an uncle, who seemed to be an influential man across the Atlantic. This relative would be able to find government work in the U.K. for Macefield despite her youth.

In fact, Macefield claimed, it was the famous jazz musician Benny Goodman who had given her a clarinet. These anonymous men that Macefield met felt that her clarinet playing would ideally suit her to working as an undercover agent in Nazi Germany.

Once in Germany, Macefield’s story went, she met Adolf Hitler himself on many occasions at his social events. She was introduced at one of those to a young fair-haired boy whom she believed to be Der Führer’s son.

Of course this accusation was accurate, and now Macefield apparently found herself imprisoned in the notorious Dachau concentration camp. There she was assigned to a barrack hut which she shared with Jewish children. But fortunately escape was at hand.

In the next chapter of Macefield’s life she reportedly moved between Germany and Austria and started an affair with an eminent opera singer who had been some 30 years her senior. He was called Richard Tauber: extraordinarily there really was a famed opera singer of that name in Austria.

Now settled in the U.K., she married a man called James Macefield who was from the northern English county of Yorkshire. This was in September 1939 when Macefield had been 18 years old.

Mr. Macefield was a man of means who owned a fig plantation in Africa and his family, including Edith and Boris, spent time living there. As if Macefield’s life hadn’t been improbable enough by this point, now someone gave her a castle in western English county of Cornwall.

Tragically Macefield’s son Boris died from meningitis at the age of 13. Her husband had also died, but she married again in 1958 to one Simon Genn in the Welsh city of Cardiff. He too died, and it was then that she returned to Seattle to look after her ailing mother at Whitewood Cottage.

This marriage to Domilini  was brief, since he was killed in an auto accident while the couple were honeymooning. So what are we to make of these extraordinary stories that Macefield told Martin about her life?

Another who tried to untangle the complicated web of Macefield’s life was a Seattle Times journalist, Jayson Jenks. He discovered that some of the stories Macefield told Martin were repeated in an “about the author” section in her self-published novel, which runs to nearly 1,200 pages.

After Macefield’s death she left all of her belongings to Martin — it seems that she had no living relatives. The construction worker gave a box of documents to Jenks who hoped to use the material to discover the truth about Macefield’s life.

Jenks described his efforts to research Macefield’s life. He went to meet some people who’d known Macefield, Gayle and David Holland. David said, “Did you hear the stories about how she was in a ballroom with Hitler? We don’t know whether to believe that one or not”.

After Macefield’s death, Martin had gone through her things, Jenks reported. He’d hoped to find “pictures or postcards from Europe — anything to verify that she spent time there”. But his search had been in vain. And Macefield had never talked to Martin about her three husbands.

In the box Martin had given him, Jenks did find three marriage certificates, one each for the wealthy Englishman Macefield, the Welshman Genn, and the Italian Domilini. Close inspection of those revealed some strange anomalies.

So we’ve established that Macefield was quite a character, and that she most probably was prone to fantasizing parts of her life, although the truth is that we can’t be sure which parts of her story are to be believed or rejected.

In fact, the tale of her refusal to give up her home is what made Macefield into a kind of celebrity. It was in 2006 that Bridge Group LLC bought almost the whole of the Seattle block that included Macefield’s home.

Obviously, Bridge Group wanted vacant possession of all the land they’d bought, but there was one hold-out who wouldn’t sell: Macefield. The company seemed to want to do the right thing, and it offered Macefield a price well in excess of the true value of the property: a handsome $750,000.

But the Bridge Group really wanted the land for its development. So it came back to her with an even more generous offer. Now it would pay $1 million for the tiny house. And that wasn’t all.

But still Macefield was having none of it: again she said “No!” So the construction work started around her home. That was when Martin came on the scene, befriending Macefield. Givens says, “Many people started viewing his relationship as a way to trick her into moving.”

Martin regularly checked up on Macefield just to make sure that she was okay. But he kept a respectful distance, only speaking to her outside her home. Even so, Macefield gradually warmed to Martin and began recounting some of those fantastic tales about her life.

After that first ride to the hairdresser, Martin became an important part of Macefield’s everyday life. Indeed, the compassionate construction worker took on the role of personal carer. He would do her laundry for her, shop for her and even cook dinner for her.

As 2007 rolled in and the construction continued apace around the walls of Macefield’s diminutive home, her story drew international media attention. Photographs of the scene made Macefield’s modest home look like a doll’s house compared to the concrete giants rising around it.

Doctors gave Macefield a scary diagnosis: she had pancreatic cancer, a condition which is all too often fatal within months. After diagnosis, some 75 percent of sufferers are dead within a year. Macefield was soon in severe physical decline, becoming increasingly disabled by the disease.

Although the doctors offered her treatment, Macefield decided that she wanted to let nature take its course. And she had very definite ideas about the death she wanted: she was determined to die in her home.

Macefield had actually made her own funeral arrangements 15 years before her death. There was a small service at a funeral home with about 20 people in attendance including some of the construction workers who’d been building around her house.

Martin had told Mulady that he wasn’t very optimistic for the future of the house because it was so dilapidated. In fact it was leaning over and Martin said, “I straighten the pictures every time I come over.”

But there was a surprise in store for Martin. It turned out that Macefield had actually left her house at 1438 NW 46th Street and everything in it to the construction manager. He sold it for $310,000 to a company called Reach Returns and used the cash to pay for his kids’ college fees.

So now the house would lie unoccupied and slowly deteriorating for some years. But there was one bright spot in the story during this period. In 2009 Disney-Pixar released its animated feature Up. In the movie 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen’s small home is threatened by developers.

Disney-Pixar spotted the similarity between Up and Macefield’s story as well, or at least its publicity department did. It swung into action and decided to promote the release of the movie by  — you’ve guessed it — tying loads of balloons to Macefield’s old home.

As a consequence of that film promotion, the house Macefield called Whitewood Cottage became known as the “Up House”. We’ve seen that some grandiose development plans fell through after Macefield died and so the house was simply left to gradually decay.

Strangely enough, Macefield wasn’t the first Seattle citizen to refuse all cajoling to abandon her home: there’s another case of a property hold-out that dates back to the 19th century. Kikisoblu, also known as Princess Angeline, was the eldest daughter of the Native American Chief Seattle.

Treaties were signed by the Suquamish and Duwamish in 1855 which gave the right to settle in Seattle. But local white Seattle residents refused to observe these treaties, and the upshot was that the Native Americans were never able to get what should have been theirs by rights.

This refusal to be moved on by developers isn’t just a Seattle phenomenon. In fact there’s a strong tradition of hold-outs in modern China. There’s even a name for such homes stranded by development. They’re called “nails,” presumably because the owners are hard to extract.

Macefield never planned to become a hero of the battles that often break out between property developers and local residents. Even so, that is exactly what happened, with many seeing her as a crusader against gentrification.