Bellingham Then & Now: The Herald Building

NOW

Many a student has been greeted in the WWU office on the ground floor of 1155 State St., many a Bellingham native has worked in one of the 140 offices throughout the building, and thousands of papers have been distributed from the presses formerly housed in the 16,000 sq. foot basement.  

The HERALD sign itself is also local icon, having been “informally used for navigation by mariners and aviation since it was first installed in 1926” (source). The bulbs were originally incandescent, then neon, and now the new aluminium letters (installed in 2018) hold LED lights that can change to any color for different holidays or community events, like Western’s annual Paint Bellingham Blue.

Though the name will likely remain indefinitely (and the sign will continue to light up the night sky), McClatchy, which owns the paper, actually sold the Herald building just over 10 years ago, continuing to lease the second floor offices to the Herald staff. Just this last August, the Bellingham Herald recently moved from its longtime home into new office spaces in Barkley Village, now located just a couple of floors above where the Cohen Group blogger writes these words.

THEN 

This series focuses on the Then & Now, with Then usually being the era of construction. While the 1920s in Bellingham is certainly a time period worth looking into, let’s dive back further, to another century, and discover that the roots of this block building on State Street are really found in European architectural trends from the era of the Crusades, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.

The building’s structure was built in the Late Gothic Revival style, a reflection of structures built throughout Europe in the twelfth century. This revival of the public’s taste for medieval structures swept architectural trends in Europe in the mid-1800s and found its way to the United States, marking a shift away from the long-standing Classical or Greek Revival trend (the style of many of the USA's federal buildings in DC).  

While used for houses as well, it became a popular design for churches and schools, echoing the grand cathedrals of yesteryear.  The most distinctive elements were the pointed arch shape in windows and doors, and steeply pitched roofs. Obviously the Herald building doesn’t have a  pitched roof, and instead of towers reaching for the sky, it’s a tall but stolid block of a building, with the angles and windows reflecting rectangular rather than pointed aesthetics. So where does the Late Gothic architecture play into this? The main entryway, with its pointed door is the first clue, and it points upwards to the main factor - the ornamented parapet along the crest of the building. 

So today, we drive down State Street and see this block building with big letters on the roof and all it means to us might be a Welcome to Western or a bunch of offices or a same-old feature of our, because we’re busy busy busy with modern life; but what we don’t realize is that building’s architecture is not just a Bellingham things; it’s not just ‘old’ (and really, only from our very young American perspective), it’s actually a Western American reflection of a mid 1800s style of architecture that blossomed across Europe, which was itself a revival of a legitimately old aesthetic from medieval times. 

And we’re blithely unaware of the fact that in 1764, the 4th Earl of Oxford wrote a book that initiated the rise of the Gothic novel genre, which included Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”, rekindled an interest in Arthurian romance, and expanded to include modern Gothic tales like Wuthering Heights and A Christmas Carol, in which the stone gargoyles of the 1100s are regenerated as the human terrors that live among us. 

And that The Hunchback of Notre Dame (written to “awaken a concern for the surviving Gothic architecture”) sparked an obsession with a revival of Gothic style in contemporary life. Along with the rise of Romantic nationalism, Gothic architecture elements were claimed by several different countries and the style appeared in churches, palaces and schools of the era.  And how even neoclassical-favoring architects began including Gothic details in their interior designs before shifting to refurbishing original buildings to their original glory, and building new ones in that style. 

And then it filtered down through the decades and across the Atlantic, making appearances in the West in the Woolworth Building and the Salt Lake City Temple, before trickling into the aesthetic of a Bellingham architectural firm in the 1920s.

So while with our young eyes we see a brick of a building on State St; those parapets and carved accents represent centuries of history, millions of dollars, and the human tendency to create and follow streams of thought en masse, which tendency results in a constant blending of the past with the present, of nationalism with collectivism, and of stories with stone.

Previously on Bellingham Then & Now: The Robert I Morse House has seen decades of changes, from its construction in the Gilded Age to its current usage as student housing.

Next up on Bellingham Then & Now: Wardner’s Castle was home to a tycoon who bought up dozens of lots in Fairhaven.

Sources

Gallagher, Dave. (2019). “With the newspaper staff moving, here’s what’s happening to the iconic Herald sign.” The Bellingham Herald. Link.

“Gothic Revival.” New World Encyclopedia. Link.

Shirley, Julie. (2019). “Bellingham Herald’s new space is designed for the digital company we’ve become”. The Bellingham Herald. Link.

“The Herald Building”. COB. Link.

Whatcom County Property Assessor: 1155 N State St. Link. Zraick & Murphy. (2019). “Notre-Dame Cathedral: Facts and a Brief History”. The New York Times. Link.

Images

Then: City of Bellingham. Link

Now: Cooper Hansley

Blog copy by Tiffany Holden