Pierce County’s famed ‘House of Tomorrow’ to be torn down. Some aren’t ready for goodbye

The irony is thick.

Roughly 80 years ago, Bert Smyser, a local character and visionary, aimed to design and build what he dubbed “the House of Tomorrow.” Accurately described as “a designer and sometimes-architect,” renowned for producing big-time Washington state displays at expositions and World’s Fairs in the 1930s, Smyser drew up a sleek “Streamline Moderne” style abode. It was completed in 1941 using what, at the time, was an advanced home-building material: plywood.

In retrospect, it looks like the work of a guy with big dreams standing in the wake of the Great Depression, staring into the future with all the optimism that fueled the baby boom, the Jetsons and the version of 1950s America that’s now pop culture. When it debuted, The News Tribune described it as “a home which is streamlined from front to back, from the ground to the roof, and is as modern as milady’s next fall chapeau.”

There was just one catch: Smyser, who’s most famous for designing what may be Tacoma’s grittiest landmark, Bob’s Java Jive, built his dream home on the edge of Clark’s Creek, an area prone to flooding. Throw in a factor that would have been nearly impossible for him to foresee — the local impacts of man-made climate change — and you get the idea:

Smyser’s “House of Tomorrow” — his grand, architectural ode to the future — was doomed from the start. And next year, according to Pierce County civil engineer Randy Brake, it’s expected to be demolished.

In government-speak, it’s the centerpiece of what’s called the Clark’s Creek Property Acquisition Project, which Brake oversees.

In lay terms, it means that the home — purchased by its current owner in 2008 — has flooded so many times, and racked up so many insurance claims over the years, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is ponying up roughly $600,000 in grant money to help Pierce County buy the place and then tear it down.

“It’s definitely unique,” Brake said of the property, which showed up on the county’s radar in 2015 when its exasperated owners inquired about their options.

“It’s just that the home is not located in a good location because of the flood hazard risks,” Brake added, “and that flooding trend is not getting better.”

Smyser’s House of Tomorrow

There’s a good chance Pierce County residents will recognize Smyser’s House of Tomorrow, even if they’ve only viewed it as a passing oddity along a rural stretch of pavement slicing through the outskirts of Puyallup. Located at 4907 66th Avenue East, it sits just back from the road, not far from the Milroy Bridge, a curiosity among the farmhouses and fields that surround it.

According to local historian Michael Sullivan, however, simply glimpsing the historic home through a car window fails to do justice to the story it has to tell. Its unique design captures a brief, rapidly disappearing era of boundary-pushing American architecture, he told me this week, while the man who built it might have an even more interesting tale to unfurl.

Together, Sullivan said the House of Tomorrow and Smyser provide a portal back to one of Pierce County’s wildest and most aspirational periods.

“He was such a curious designer,” Sullivan said of Smyser and his portfolio. “There were very few architects that were taking on this sort of design work that he was doing at that time, but it was an era where architects and designers and city planners across the country wanted to show off new ideas.”

There’s little doubt that Smyser’s work left a lasting mark in the community he grew up in. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Tacoma as a child, according to available biographical information, and by the time he was 16 was working professionally as a “window dresser” at local department stores, designing the displays that lured in customers. By the 1920s, he’d founded Smyser Display Service, going into the booming exposition and showroom display business for himself.

At the same time, Smyser was developing his own unique brand of architecture. In 1930, he celebrated the opening of his first building, the Coffee Pot Restaurant on South Tacoma Way, which a later owner would rename the Java Jive. More ambitiously, he was one of the driving force behind the Century Ballroom in Fife, an expansive music and dance venue that regularly hosted the likes of Duke Ellington, Nate King Cole and Cab Calloway before it closed in 1956 and burned down eight years later. He’s responsible for the New Exposition Hall in Tacoma, which most recognize today as the Tacoma Soccer Center, and as former News Tribune columnist Pete Callaghan wrote in 2012, he’s even credited with envisioning the Space Needle before the men behind the Space Needle envisioned it — only Smyser wanted to build it in Auburn.

Next door to Smyser’s Coffee Pot Restaurant, he also designed and built a workshop for his display company, which would come in handy down the road. In 1954 he was convicted of tax evasion, which he attributed in part to a 1941 fire at the workshop and the financial losses that followed, effectively putting an end to his career as a designer. In 1961, he reopened the rebuilt property as a motel.

Smyser died in 1987, at the age of 93.

His House of Tomorrow isn’t on Pierce County’s historical register or the National Historical Register list, although it meets the criteria for both designations.

According to Brake, Pierce County hopes to strike a fair-market sale agreement for the property in the coming months and begin demolition sometime after March 2024.

As a condition of the deal, future development will be prohibited.

Historic preservation concerns

Today, the notable mark Smyser left on Pierce County might be a distant memory for most people, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s ready to say goodbye to his House of Tomorrow.

Even if there’s broad acceptance that the property’s current location, smack dab in the middle of a floodway and a floodplain, is untenable, Sullivan, for one, believes the property’s path toward demolition raises serious questions about local historic preservation efforts.

As part of the memorandum of understanding that’s guiding the planned acquisition and demolition of the home, the county is required to document the home’s architectural and landscaping features before it’s torn down, Brake explained to The News Tribune. The agreement also calls for the county to produce extensive reports on the property and Smyser’s work, he said, as well as host an open house to the public, which will occur after it’s officially purchased and vacated.

Along with Pierce County, FEMA and the state Department of Emergency Management, Brake noted that the agreement has received the blessing of the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, the Washington Trust of Historic Preservation, the Puyallup Historical Society and the architectural advocacy group Docomono of Western Washington. The involved parties will work to save anything of historical significance before the House of Tomorrow is razed, he said.

Still, Sullivan argued that’s not nearly enough. He pointed to a 2018 analysis that recommended physically relocating the house to a safer location, and short of that, believes the project should involve professional deconstruction and salvaging, preventing truckfuls of wasted materials from entering the local landfill.

As we look toward the future, and even more of our historically significant landmarks find themselves in peril due to rising tides and the other impacts of climate change, it’s a situation we’ll surely face again, Sullivan suggested.

“My battle line here isn’t over preserving the building in its location. I’m more concerned about the precedent that’s set,” Sullivan said. “When a building is going to be lost and it does have historic importance, the public policy on that should be to conserve, and deconstruct and reuse and save the material parts of the history whenever possible.”

For his part, Brake said he sympathizes with such concerns. He’s been working on the project for many years now, and the one thing he understands is how complicated it all is.

He knows people have strong feelings.

He also knows FEMA determined that relocating the house would be too expensive and that the overall condition of the home after years of flooding might make it impossible anyway.

In the meantime, something has to give, Brake said.

As it turns out, the House of Tomorrow wasn’t built to last.

“A lot has happened to get to this point,” Brake said, by way of understatement.

“It’s been quite a learning experience.”