Chimney service in Admiral, Seattle

Admiral's earthquake record is unusually concrete. HistoryLink's history of Lafayette School tells how the shaking of April 13, 1949 wrecked the 1893 brick building: three of its gables crumbled, bricks fell onto the sidewalk, and parts of its walls came out. The quake came during spring vacation. Only the gymnasium addition could be kept, and the younger pupils spent the next year at the new Genesee Hill School.

Fifty-two years later the neighborhood moved again. Writing up the 2001 Nisqually quake, a USGS open-file report describes soil shifting on the north side of SW Admiral Way, enough to disturb the piles some houses there rest on. And when Booth, Wells and Givler published their 2004 paper after surveying some 60,000 chimneys around Seattle block by block, they reported the damage tightly clustered, with West Seattle the clearest case.

The gables of a brick school and the top of a brick chimney fail for the same reason: they are tall, heavy and held only by mortar at the top. In Admiral we treat the upper courses and the flue tiles as the first places to look after any shaking, and we say plainly when what we see calls for a rebuild instead of a patch.

More designated landmarks stand in Admiral than in most of the peninsula. The 2022 Alki Elementary nomination lists Hiawatha Playfield, the Admiral Theater, the Sixth Church of Christ Scientist on 42nd Avenue SW and West Seattle High School, and names the 1910 Carnegie library nearby as historically significant. Changing the outside of a designated building, a chimney included, first takes the Department of Neighborhoods' Certificate of Approval, whether or not SDCI wants a permit.

For an ordinary house, the starting point is the 2021 Seattle Residential Code, which SDCI applies to houses, duplexes and townhouses up to three stories. Its R105.2 list exempts chimney repointing when the envelope is left alone, and small repairs whose combined value over six months stays under the threshold the section sets, provided no loadbearing support is touched. Beyond those cases we do not guess. Where a job may need a permit, we ask SDCI about your address first and put the answer in the quote.

West Seattle filled up fast in the 1940s. By HistoryLink's account, the war plants on Harbor Island drew so many workers that West Seattle had twice its prewar population, upward of 70,000 people, when the fighting ended. Schools show the pressure: in January 1945 Genesee Hill parents asked for a new building because Lafayette, Jefferson and Alki were overcrowded, and the rebuilt Lafayette, a 20-room brick school by John Graham & Co., opened in 1950, gained a wing in 1953 and reached 1,240 pupils in 1958-59.

Census figures for the ZIP code area that covers Admiral along with Alki, Genesee and north Seaview put about 16 percent of its housing units in the two decades from 1940 to 1959, on top of some 23 percent built earlier. Close to 5 percent of occupied homes in that area still burn oil as their primary heat, against under 3 percent citywide.

Fireplaces and furnace flues from those decades are now seventy years old or more. Clay tile that old may be cracked, and a flue built for an oil furnace is often too wide for whatever replaced it. When an insert goes into such a fireplace, Seattle's 2021 mechanical rules require the insert to be UL 1482 listed, with its label in place, and set by the book its maker supplies, and the liner we fit is sized to that unit, not to the old opening.