Marie Little tells a story about a friend who got lost in the woods – in a spot that’s now the biggest mall in Snohomish County.
“One of our friends was renting a house over in the area where the mall is now,” said Little, a founder of the Alderwood Manor Heritage Association. “He decided he would go out and cut a Christmas tree. This was probably in the ’60s. He got lost out there.”
Been to the Alderwood mall lately? Getting lost is understandable, but not in the forest. And yes, the mall is being unofficially reborn as just Alderwood – one word shorter – but I’ll get to that.
Already a sprawling place, the mall is getting larger and glitzier by the day as work on the Village progresses. It will be a collection of upscale stores in an outdoor setting similar to Seattle’s University Village.
The Terraces, another new section, will have a 16-screen movie theater, new restaurants and a children’s play area.
As it grows from major mall to megamall, what do natives of the unincorporated community once known as Alderwood Manor think? They remember a pastoral home of poultry farms.
He’s only 46, but Kevin Stadler recalls his grandmother keeping cows on eight acres of pasture just north of where the mall was built in the late 1970s. He grew up nearby. Cattle were still there in 1976 when he graduated from Lynnwood High School.
The mall site, now part of Lynnwood, “I remember as great woods. It was a great area to go and play,” said Stadler, who lives in West Seattle and is president of the heritage association.
The group pushed for creation of Lynnwood’s new Heritage Park just off I-5 at Alderwood Mall Parkway and Poplar Way. Dedicated this spring, it has a restored car from the Interurban, the electric rail line that ran from 1910 to 1939. Alderwood Manor was a stop on the Seattle-Everett route.
Also in Heritage Park is the Wickers Building, a 1919 Tudor-style former general store that in its heyday gave no hint of Lynnwood’s retail future. The heritage group also rescued a 1917 cottage for the park; it once housed the superintendent of the 32-acre Alderwood Manor Demonstration Farm.
Little, 71, moved to Alderwood Manor with her husband, Warren, in 1951. They still live near the mall.
After old-growth timber was cut a century ago by Pope &Talbot Corp. and the Puget Mill Co., “alder trees started springing up,” Little said.
Around 1917, logged-off land was sold as 5- to 10-acre poultry farms, with the Interurban providing city access. The demonstration farm taught landowners from as far away as Chicago how to raise chickens.
It was the start of suburbia, even before Highway 99 paving was finished in 1927. Lynnwood, centered to the west on 99, “was a long way away,” Little said.
Lynnwood incorporated in 1959. The Alderwood Manor area was annexed into the city in the mid-1960s as I-5 was built.
With its car culture, “Lynnwood was maybe a little embarrassed about its chicken-farming heritage,” Little said. “What’s happening now with Heritage Park is that people are beginning to honor it.”
Little, who’s “not a shopper,” will never forget her first visit to the mall.
“I parked my car and felt so disoriented. I could see this homestead on the hill, it would have been the Hunter homestead,” she said, referring to a family that settled there before 1900.
At the mall last week, senior marketing director Tamera Wachter said although there’s been no official name change – “legally we’re still Alderwood Mall” – Alderwood alone will be used “for some of our marketing pieces.”
More than a mall, Wachter said, “it’s a shopping, dining and entertainment destination center.”
It’s so much more to those who recall what was.
“We’d like people to know there’s more to Alderwood than a mall,” Little said. Swallowed by Lynnwood, Alderwood Manor “exists in the memory of people who lived here and built a community.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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