Pergola has taken iron work and wills

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Pergola has taken iron work and wills

Friday, November 16, 2001

By SUSAN PAYNTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Some things Seattle needs. Rain, the Needle, and the pergola back in Pioneer Square.

And the pergola will rise again, just not in time for Christmas as hoped. Heidi Seidelhuber and Terry Seaman are literally betting the farm -- or at least their house in Hobart and all their worldly possessions on it.

When the Herculean task of reconstructing the shattered 91-year-old landmark from a thousand shards fell to them last January, the wife-and-husband team watched the cost of the project rise much faster than the pergola's toppled cast-iron columns and its crumpled canopy.

The entire equity of their third-generation Seattle company -- Seidelhuber Iron and Bronze Works -- did not cover the performance bond required to insure and guarantee the construction. So the couple anted up their home in rural Issaquah and all its contents, including their wedding rings.

"We've promised our house that we will complete the project," Seidelhuber told me this week, adding with a laugh that she doesn't plan to do any major redecorating in the meantime. If the bonding company takes the house they get it as is.

In truth, it's doubtful that even the daunting job of putting the historic Humpty Dumpty back together again will defeat this team. But the Santa Claus gleam that once twinkled in Terry Seaman's eye has dimmed. Last March, Seaman still believed he could pull the pergola out of Santa's sack in time for the holiday season. When the elegant old structure was struck and turned to rubble by a wayward 18-wheeler last Jan. 15, it fell with Christmas lights still attached.

Seaman's sugarplum vision was to see it up again for this year's carolers. After Mardi Gras riots, an earthquake, drought and desertion by corporate Boeing, he knew the city needed holiday cheer.

Now, he says, the Seattle Parks Department has practically issued a gag order on any further predictions.

It will be up again. Seaman just can't say exactly when.

By spring, the sections, clumps and tiny twisted pieces of the pergola had spread across half of the company's sprawling location south of Seattle. Now the project has nearly taken over the entire spread, each week bringing a new set of wrinkles to iron.

This week, it's the eaves, which seems fitting since weather brought a bounty of rain to test them out. What is not fitting is the angle of those eaves and gutters.

"I don't think the eaves were ever even," Seidelhuber said without showing even a hairline crack in her can-do calmness. The trick, as she explains it, is to get the "elevations" on all sides to line up with the fittings at the site. And to tilt the eaves just slightly so that water pours and doesn't puddle.

Last week the dilemma was dimensional. "We measured the site to see where the columns should be placed," Seidelhuber said. "But, when we started putting the cast iron together we discovered it was either too long or too short to hit those surveyed spots."

Her sneaking suspicion is that the pergola was never plumb -- or exactly vertical -- to begin with.

And then, of course, the ground it sat on sank along with the roof of the fabled Seattle Underground restroom that rests beneath at the corner of First Avenue and Yesler Way.

The roof of the old restroom, and the land above, sagged 5 1/2 inches. So, to the rescue, came Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire Inc., the Seattle engineering company that designed none other than the now-tragic New York World Trade Center towers.

"You can't put a pergola built to withstand earthquakes (not to mention 18-wheelers) back on a sagging foundation," Seidelhuber explained. So engineers structured a sturdy footing and Anthony Construction poured the concrete into which little holes have been etched to mark the places where the columns will stand.

Of course, that wasn't easy, either. A compromise was needed in order for all columns to fit. So Seidelhuber and company cut some clever swivel points into the steel skeleton that will support the pergola, sight unseen.

Compared with the excuses most contractors come up with to explain why a kitchen project is three months late, the problems presented by a fractured pergola sound pretty legit. And the pergola is coming together. Its columns and connections have been up and down and up again. And, as of this week, the battle to win back the west side of the structure has been won.

The project has been "really interesting" and "really hard," Seidelhuber said, adding that she and her husband can't allow themselves the luxury of looking at each other in bed at night and asking aloud what they got themselves into. "For a while it seemed a bit like the war on terrorism where you keep wondering, why can't we just go in and get those guys in the caves? " Seidelhuber admitted.

Then the war took a leap toward conclusion. And, each week, the pergola inches toward victory, too. Like MacArthur to the Philippines, it shall return.

Susan Paynter's column appears Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays. Call her at 206-448-8392 or send e-mail to susanpaynter@seattlepi.com.

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