In what is almost a real-life caricature of the battle of the single homeowner against the huge corporation, Edith Macefield refused to sell her home to a developer planning a major retail outlet, who then built around. This week Ms. Macefield died.
"It was in 2006. I had written a column about how old Edith had refused to leave her tiny home in a filthy, industrial Ballard neighborhood, saying 'no' to a nearly million-dollar buyout offer from a developer."
"Her house was valued as a worthless tear-down by the government. But to her it was priceless."
"Edith died Sunday, at 86. She died in the tiny cottage she had refused to leave, not for a million bucks."
"'She got what she wanted,' said Charlie Peck, a longtime friend. 'She wanted to die at home, in the same house, on the same couch, where her mother had died. That's what she was so stubborn about.'"
"He said she was never trying to stick it to The Man. Or to make any larger statement against development or money or anything else."
"The tiny house in the industrial flats once was part of a row of picket-fence-lined cottages along a working-class street. That was old Ballard."
"Today it sits walled in on three sides by what will be a five-story health club and a Trader Joe's. New Ballard."
FULL STORY: Edith Macefield and her house were symbols of Old Ballard
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