What makes Ballard cool? A debate for the decades

This piece is from our latest This City Block series, which highlights stories from Ballard.

Did you know Ballard used to be nicknamed Shingletown? Despite growing up 10 minutes from downtown Ballard (and despite, since 2015, the existence of the Shingletown Saloon), I did not know this until very recently.  

In case you, like me, need catching up: Seattle’s early lumber mills were mostly around Pioneer Square and most did not survive the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Ballard became the new lumber hub and by 1905, two years before the neighborhood officially became part of Seattle proper, these mills were producing millions of red cedar shingles a year. Boom: Shingletown.

Wandering around Ballard today you see a lot more boutique storefronts than sawdust, so you’d be forgiven (I hope) for not knowing this history. But that past is still there if you know where to look. 

Follow the sounds of heavy machinery down Ballard Avenue toward the intersection of 17th Ave Northwest and Shilshole Avenue Northwest and you’ll find yourself at Ballard Millworks, a sustainable mill and wood shop that carries on Ballard’s lumber legacy, melding the neighborhood’s industrial past with its artisanal, eco-friendly present. 

But first you must face, without spending your entire paycheck, the final boss of modern Ballard: the “lifestyle store,” selling organic oil diffusers, artisanal jigsaw puzzles and $30 tea towels with illustrated maps of Puget Sound. From Market Street, zigzag your way southeast on brick-lined Ballard Avenue you’ll pass at least 10 lifestyle stores, or variations thereof. 

To be clear: I love these stores. I love their hanging plants and face serums named for constellations and organic onesies and astrology soaps and beautiful, teeny-tiny, cork-stoppered glass bottles filled with colorful matches, retailing for $16. I love each terrazzo incense-cone holder and piece of pristine ceramic, ranging in aesthetics from Danish minimalist to Japanese minimalist. 

But how did we get here? 

My Seattleite dad’s midcentury memories of Ballard are mostly about fishing. “Well, for one thing, Ray’s Boathouse used to be an actual boathouse,” he recently told me. He also remembers the wonderful French dip sandwiches near his father’s engineering firm in the Ballard Building, and a machine that took quarters and dispensed Pres-to-Logs, a sawmill byproduct. But mostly fishing.  

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s poking fun at Ballard thanks to the local comedy TV show “Almost Live!” and sketches like “Ballard Driving Academy,” about a driving school teaching Scandinavian senior citizens to always, always leave a turn signal blinking.

Thanks to a distinct, if ever-evolving, neighborhood flavor, Ballard has always been easy to lovingly rib. Especially now that the flavor is less fish, more fig + neroli. 

Jaimie McCausland opened one of my personal favorite lifestyle stores, Woodland Mod, in 2021, in what was once a Ballard Avenue machine shop. The airy space, which McCausland designed with her architect partner in shades of white and blonde wood, exudes a sense of Scandinavian coziness so perfectly Ballard you can’t imagine it existing anywhere else. “I have locals and regulars that come weekly, or on their lunches, that just like to walk through the space,” she said. 

McCausland sources Woodland Mod’s gorgeous products from around the world, and can tell you the stories behind them, from the Danish woman who created cleaning products to suit her fragrance sensitivities, to the Korean man who hand-forges knives out of recycled railroad spikes.

As a small business owner, McCausland said, keeping shelves fresh is a huge undertaking. “With the internet and social media, it’s easy for stores to suddenly all carry the same brands,” she said. “You’re like, how do I stay ahead? How do I find these small brands that no one else is exposed to through a marketplace that has thousands of wholesale subscribers?”

Fighting against that simple, add-to-cart curation is a challenge. “Travel is the best way: Go to the source and find those brands that aren’t in some massive marketplace,” she said. “I don’t want to see the same candle in four different stores.” 

But you will. Too many Ballard lifestyle stores seem to be our regional take on a “Shoppy Shop,” designed to feel authentically local, as much as to be authentically local. Some of them — particularly shops that are somehow hiking-themed but don’t sell hiking equipment — seem to have three primary interests: “camping,” “being cool parents who swear” and “fungi.” 

Also: Watch out for an explosion of conversation-prompt card sets with names like Meeting Friends and Pillow Talk, chosen, I guess, to help Seattleites melt the freeze and be sociable human beings. On one recent shopping expedition, three shops even had the same sample card displayed for a set called Everyday Adventures: “Go to the zoo, without a child.” Silly! 

Taken as a whole, these items feel like artifacts of an artificially quirky, increasingly personality-less personality. Whimsically illustrated cards featuring two otters holding hands are the PNW version of “Live Laugh Love” and you will not convince me otherwise.

But I also love that these stores are not a Sephora or a Whole Foods: It might be a weirdly homogenous culture, but it’s our weirdly homogenous culture.

Visual vestiges of old, brick-lined Ballard are all around (exterior changes to the storefronts in the Ballard Avenue Landmark District are regulated to preserve neighborhood character), while under the hood, there’s not much old-school, blue-collar Ballard left. But Ballard Millworks proudly plants one foot in each world, bridging the gap between Old Ballard’s craftsmanship and New Ballard’s aesthetics. 

The Millworks operates on the former site of Seattle Cedar Lumber Manufacturing Co., once the biggest cedar mill in the world, said founder Alan Lamp. Lamp, who also owns the company Fluent Tree, co-founded the Millworks in 2013. That year, he bought his first sawmill to put to good use the trees he was taking down as an arborist. “You don’t want to waste trees that you could possibly make something out of,” he said.

Lamp also didn’t like seeing healthy trees cut down just to be made into furniture. Why do that when trees need to come down all the time for disease and safety reasons? When a giant sequoia’s roots started splitting the foundation of the historic Bittman House in Wallingford, for example, Lamp took out the tree and now a table made from a massive sequoia slab resides inside the home. 

“It feels really good to use trees that have to come down and turn them into something that could be an heirloom piece,” he said. 

Lamp’s process is simple, but it isn’t easy. After a tree is milled into planks, he explained, those planks must sit outdoors for one year for every inch of the plank’s thickness: a 3-inch-thick slab, for example, must cure outdoors for three years. Thereafter, the planks are dried for a few more weeks in a massive kiln — essentially, “a giant dehumidifier,” Lamp says. Once the moisture level in the planks hits 6%, it’s ready for woodworking. “If you don’t do that right, then [the wood] is usually worthless,” Lamp said.

Bespoke tables and benches are currently the Millworks’ stock-in-trade, but Lamp and his team are organically moving toward partnerships with local artists. Next door to the Millworks’ wood shop, metal artists Sarah Fetterman and Clayton Binkley hammer and weld and design. Binkley’s massive, undulating steel sculpture “Ghost Forest” will take shape in Ballard before moving to its final home at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Fetterman, a metal artist who also works in performance mediums, has used upcycled Millworks tree branches in works like “Lost in the Familiar,” her sculptural installation at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art last year. Who knows what future collaborations may hold? 

Robin Lovelace, a fine artist and woodcarver, met Lamp when he was pruning trees near her home. She asked if he had any extra birch wood; they came together over a shared love of wood and trees. Lovelace, who is of Northwest Tlingit and Tagish descent, trained through apprenticeships in Northwest Coast style formline design, and she and Lamp will collaborate on an art and furniture series to be released later in 2024 and in early 2025. 

“I’ve been inspired by the work of my ancestors,” she said. “And I have, in a different and multidimensional way, tried to keep formline design and Tlingit sculpture and art growing and flourishing in the present day.”

Blending her interpretation of traditional Native work with Lamp’s more contemporary aesthetic is a thrill for Lovelace, and there seems like no better place than Ballard for this collision of past and present. There’s something miraculous about cutesy artisan shops coexisting with crusty dive bars and storied music venues like Tractor Tavern, all on the red-bricked streets of a former Scandinavian enclave of shipyards and shingles mills. There’s no “authentic” Ballard; it’s all authentic Ballard. These collisions are what define it, and likely always will. 

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the date of the Great Seattle Fire of 1889.