LYNNWOOD – Bulldozers haven’t just demolished what city police call Highway 99’s infamous Rose Motel, they’ve also taken down one of Lynnwood’s oldest buildings.
The Rose, along with an old house behind it used by transients, was flattened this week to make way for a Lexus of Seattle dealership.
Plans for the 5.4-acre site between 202nd and 204th streets include a 35,000-square-foot showroom and parts and service departments. The $10.5 million project is expected to be completed in late spring of 2005.
The motel has had a bad reputation for years. It became rat-infested, and police made many arrests for drugs and prostitution.
But it wasn’t always that way. It was a nice place to stay when it was first built in 1951, May (Keltner) Bueing of Lynnwood said.
She is the daughter of Maynard and Rose Keltner, who built not only the Rose Motel but also the Rose Cafe next door.
“It was 1944 and my mother and her sister were taking a ride to the country. This was the country in those days, and a developer had this property for sale,” Bueing said. “She had been in the restaurant business all her life, so she decided to put $10 down on that whole corner.”
Then, Bueing said, her mother went back to their home in north Seattle and told her father, “I put some money down on some property, and I think we’ll move and start a restaurant.”
That’s what they did, building the restaurant in 1944 and the motel in 1951. They bought the entire corner for about $1,400, she said.
“I remember it was during the war, and my folks had a terrible time getting the materials to build it,” she said.
The family lived in a little house that had been behind the restaurant. Bueing, who was 12 at the time, worked in the Rose Cafe every day for five years.
“I remember it all very well,” she said.
Bueing didn’t carry the cafe-motel family torch, she said – “enough was enough, too much hard work.” But after some time out of state, she came back to Lynnwood to raise her family and still lives with her husband, Mar Bueing.
In 1952, Rose Keltner became ill, and the family sold the restaurant, and it was renamed the Chicken Roost Cafe. Her parents still ran the Rose Motel until 1954, when they sold it and retired to another house in Lynnwood.
What was the cafe eventually became a floral shop and is currently an accounting office, which isn’t part of the Lexus property, city officials said.
Over the years, Bueing and motorists sped by what was a deteriorating Rose Motel.
“It’s the sign of the times,” Bueing said about the condition of the motel before it was demolished. “It used to be one of the nicer motels around. It had what we called efficiency kitchens, which was nice at the time. We got a lot of people from Canada, and they liked to cook.”
But, like everything else, over time, things change.
She added, “It’s remarkable the buildings were still there at all.”
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