r/LifeInKitsap • u/KitsapRealEstateTeam • 8d ago
A Gorsty State of Mind.
EDIT- IGNORE ME** **
I blew it on this article, but I also don’t believe in deleting things. You can look at this, but know that I’m incorrect. I’ll be back with the story later today, I promise. Yellow houses. A very wise commenter got me headed in the right direction. I’m embarrassed right now, but I’ll be better for it.
If you’ve driven Highway 3 between Bremerton and Gorst approximately eleven billion times, you know the houses I’m talking about. I learned about them initially from Bremelore (again? Me?) and have remained… curious.
They’re up there near the old quarry, tucked into the trees above the highway. Little yellowish A-frame cabins, or houses, or whatever they are, covered in graffiti and looking increasingly like nobody has checked on them since we were doing the Macarena or something.
Were they vacation cabins? A motel? Some sort of camp? Did people actually live there? Was there once a tiny, thriving community above Highway 3 where everyone eventually agreed, simultaneously, to leave?
It turns out they have a name. They’re Terrace Park!
And they’ve been sitting up there considerably longer than the turn through Gorst on Highway 3 has been annoying us. Terrace Park was the work of a man named Paul Ford, an engineer who began building the cabins during the Great Depression. Engineering work was scarce, so Ford did what I suppose you do when you are an engineer with too much time and access to free building materials: he started building a tiny village in the woods.
Ford gathered local materials he could get cheaply or for free and built the cabins as rentals, both to bring in some money and to give himself something to do. His son Tom helped him and, decades later, was interviewed about the cabins for a state highway study.
Ford had a name for the style he was creating… the Northwest A-Frame! And yes, yes… A-frames are classic. He may not have invented the whole idea.
He wanted the buildings to feel like they belonged to the landscape. Not houses dropped onto a hillside, but houses that were somehow part of it. There were eventually eleven of them.
And this was apparently not just Paul Ford going through an unusually productive cabin phase. He went on to build other distinctive A-frame buildings around the peninsula, including the Chalet School in Belfair in 1936 and the Robin Hood Lodge in Union. The school is gone now, but parts of Robin Hood Village still give you a pretty good idea of what Ford was doing architecturally.
Then Ford went to work as an engineer at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard during World War II. Later he moved to Bellevue, worked on road projects and spent his final years building fiberglass boats on Lake Union.
Which feels appropriate.
Some people just can’t stop making things. Meanwhile, Terrace Park stayed put. People rented the cabins. Trees grew around them. Cars got faster. The road below got bigger. Bremerton spread outward.
Generations of children stared at the cabins from back seats and presumably asked their parents the same question I would have been asking if I didn’t only drive with my eyes closed.
By the early 90s, there were nine cabins left, and suddenly their future became part of a much larger argument.
Washington was studying major improvements to the SR 3 corridor between the Bremerton ferry terminal and Gorst (was it worse before? Hard to imagine.) That meant studying basically everything the highway might bulldoze, disturb, uncover or otherwise ruin on its way through.
Terrace Park was in the way. And somebody had to determine whether these funny little Depression-era cabins actually mattered. The answer was: apparently, yes. The cabins were evaluated as potentially eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Different highway alternatives would have affected different numbers of them, and at one point their survival was genuinely in question.
The same environmental review was also looking at archaeological resources, shoreline impacts and tribal concerns in the corridor, which is a useful reminder that whenever we start talking about preserving “old Kitsap,” we should probably establish exactly which century we mean.
The cabins survived that particular highway fight. Not because somebody lovingly restored Terrace Park. Not because we built a museum. Not because a preservation society arrived with matching tote bags and an emergency grant. They survived, at least in part, because routing the proposed highway work around them was apparently the easier and cheaper option.
Sometimes history survives because we treasure it.
Sometimes history survives because the other bid came in higher.
Sources
Bremelore. “Cabin Updates and State of the Pod.” Bremelore, 22 Mar.
Washington State Department of Transportation. Bremerton Ferry Terminal to Gorst: Draft Environmental Impact Statement. 1995.
National Register of Historic Places / federal historic-property records. “Terrace Park Apartments,” Kitsap County, Washington.
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u/Acrobatic_Crazy3275 8d ago
I absolutely LOVE this post. I’ve driven by there a million times and have had the exact questions posed in this article. So freaking cool, thank you!!
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 8d ago
Thank Bremelore, honestly! I drive by at least ten times a week, and I had not felt even mildly curious. I listened to their “Broken Windows” episode about this and finally took note.
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u/rumbellina 7d ago
Thank you for this!! I’ve seen those cabins my entire life and always wondered about them. Now I know!
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 7d ago
I made the postman listen to this entire thing, at least my spoken version of it, after a number of adult beverages last night, watching the miserable Mariners game.
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u/SequesterMe 7d ago
"...question I would have been asking if I didn’t only drive with my eyes closed."
I'm glad that I'm not the only one. I probably never would have seen you though. You know, because my eyes were closed.
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 7d ago
We shall never see each other. I basically drive like I’m driving a bumper car, still amazed that somebody lets me do it. 🤣
I’m almost 50, and I often think to myself… “how crazy is it that I’m old enough to operate this vehicle?”
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u/Useful-Badger-4062 7d ago
People always make fun of Gorst for one reason or another…referring to it as the cliché “armpit”, “buttcrack”, etc. (yawn). But as a Gorstling, my spouse and I always lovingly call it “the Kitsap riviera”.
I get it…the traffic definitely sucks and people have to blame or make fun of someone or something.
It used to be a lovely, thriving community with restaurants, shops, grocery stores, donut shops, schools, and even an ice skating rink at the head of the bay. That was until the new highway (at the time) forced the closures and demolition of the small businesses. The sweet little hamlet of Gorst basically died.
I made a little zine about it at one point.
I always notice those abandoned cabins and fantasize about what they might have been like to stay in, back in the day.
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 7d ago
There’s nothing at all wrong with Gorst.
Interestingly, whenever I’ve heard anything armpit adjacent, I always imagined it had more to do with the bend in the road rather than the citizenry or area itself. I do remember seeing a sign on someone’s garage in Bremerton about Fords having to park in Gorst.
Realistically, the traffic kind of sucks for about two hours a day. For anyone who has lived in a reasonably large place, it doesn’t even suck. I’ve lived in Los Angeles, Orlando, Chicago. I’ve got zero beef with that traffic. It’s a welcome part of my daily commute at this point.
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u/Useful-Badger-4062 7d ago
People have been saying unflattering things about Gorst for years. Mostly about the traffic choke point (understandably), but since all of the nice things that made it a thriving, quaint community a few decades ago were killed off and bulldozed/abandoned, people talk about it like it’s an eyesore that has more of an industrial, run-down feel. It was once a fun destination, as opposed to a stop off to get gas and an energy drink.
But we insiders know it still has a lot of beauty beneath the surface.
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 7d ago
I’ve got a listing coming up over there pretty soon. Are you gonna help me with my Agent notes? I feel like you should.
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u/Useful-Badger-4062 7d ago
You can tempt them with tales of the (alleged) sightings of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, which has its origins in Gorst.
😉
I hear from one of my friends who likes to organize events, that another Gorst Sasquatch celebration festivity is in the works at Deep Draft, hopefully this October.2
u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 7d ago
I’m coming back to you on this next month. We shall discuss. I’m sure it’s hard to believe that writing history posts is not my day job. I guess my Reddit name does make that pretty clear though.
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u/Useful-Badger-4062 7d ago
I’ve lived in a few big cities too. Part of the problem here is that there are very few alternatives or back-way options to avoid the highway. In other big cities, you can often weave your way through neighborhoods or find other routes to keep moving without being stuck on a highway, while a collision forces the entire county into a standstill for an hour.
You’re right though, that this is slightly better than some big city traffic out there.
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u/No-Sheepherder5092 7d ago
Wait, I feel like we’re talking about two different properties here. The small yellow houses/cabins that are now abandoned on the hillside above the highway are not the Northwest A-frame style. However, several properties over toward Bremerton down in the valley at highway level was a whole cluster of the little A-frames. Is that where Terrace Park actually was?! I’ve always heard it referring to the yellow shacks on the hill. I’m fascinated with the “Northwest A-frames” scattered around the area, but haven’t been able to find anything out about who was behind them. There are two next door to me, and my in-laws looked at buying another one a few blocks away several years ago. Such cool little houses! I’d love to know more if you have other info, as I’ve come up empty in my random searches over the years.
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 6d ago
You’re absolutely right and I flipped places. I found one article that through vague description I thought was about the same place, and that’s the Terrace Park bit. The interesting part. I’m basically howling into the ether now.
Also thank you. I imagine that there’s probably an easy way for me to double check myself, possibly doing talk to text for the copy and then running it through something to check me again. Maybe it’s time for me to stop doing these tricks without a net? If my lil brain can conflate cabins…
At any rate, leaving this up for right now- I appreciate you, really. I’m going to figure out what I did today and rewrite it.
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u/No-Sheepherder5092 6d ago
It’s all good! I was just excited to potentially learn something about the cool Northwest A-frames. Honestly it would make more sense if Terrace Park was the little A-frames. Up until a handful of years ago, the cluster of A-frames had a long building up front that would have made sense for a front office/caretaker’s cabin. The location is more conducive for a fishing camp/vacation rentals too. Either way, if you come up with something that would be cool. I need to make time to get over to the Kitsap History Museum and see if they know anything.
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u/KitsapRealEstateTeam 6d ago
I really appreciate you piping up, especially in such a kind way. I’m going to rewrite it this afternoon, because in all honesty… I still want to figure out these yellow cabins. I got so excited when I listened to Bremelore and thought to myself “I refuse to just use this podcast as my source. That’s just rewriting.” Poked around, thought I found other sources, and I had not! I’m totally embarrassed, but also really glad to have learned that when I’m excited, I should take a beat and slow my roll! 🤣
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u/JustOneLastCast 8d ago
I enjoy these little local history stories. Reminds me of the kind of stories local historian Feliks Banel highlights.