A 115-year-old house which may have inspired the Oscar-winning Pixar movie Up looks set to be demolished, eight years after its octogenarian owner won a battle to fend off developers.
Edith Macefield made headlines around the world in 2006 when the 84-year-old refused an offer of $1m for her $120,000 tumbledown home in Seattle, Washington. Disney publicists tied multicoloured balloons to the property in 2009 to promote the release of Up, which features the similar storyline of a pensioner who refuses to give up in the face of encroaching development and soon sees high rise buildings leaping up to dwarf his home.
The property, at 438 NW 46th Street in the once run-down but now gentrified Ballard district, recently went through foreclosure and now faces an uncertain future. After Macefield died in 2008, there were hopes that her former home might experience a new lease of life as a coffee and pie shop to be named Edith Pie. But broker Paul Thomas told Seattlepie.com that a would-be buyer, a woman who planned to open the shop with her teenage daughter, had now backed out.
“It has become apparent that the age and condition of the house make it cost prohibitive for anyone to use the house in its current location,” he said in a statement. “The house will either be donated or demolished, then the land will be sold.”
In Pete Docter’s Up, pensioner Carl Fredricksen’s most feared enemy (at least until he uses thousands of balloons to lift his home into the air and set off for adventure in South America) is a sinister dark glasses-wearing construction boss who stares balefully from behind the old man’s white picket fence. But Macefield found an enduring friend in the real-life equivalent, Barry Martin.
Martin, a superintendent on the construction project that would have displaced the homeowner, was asked by Macefield to look after her affairs following her death. “There wasn’t anything spelled out to save it for posterity,” he said shortly after the pensioner died at the age of 86. “As a matter of fact, she just wanted to keep the house long enough to finish her use of it.”
Another home often compared to Fredricksen’s lonely property in Up, Vera Coking’s three-storey townhouse in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was finally demolished last year. Coking had fought a three decade battle with Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, and later entrepreneur Donald Trump, to stop the home she purchased as a summer retreat with her husband in 1961 from being swallowed up by multiple-story developments. Ironically, Guccione’s 1970s plan for a Penthouse hotel and casino failed due to lack of finances, and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino which eventually dwarfed the Coker property closed in September last year due to lack of business.
