Memorial Wall — our 53rd Landmark: A Woman’s Design

The Memorial Wall looking southwest. Photo: Queen Anne Historical Society, March 2023.

On October 6, 2023, the Landmarks Preservation Board (LPB) designated the Memorial Wall at Seattle Center a city landmark. Going through the list of well over 400 designated city landmarks to establish the gender of their designers is beyond my pay scale. I bet though that this is the first city landmark designed by a teenage girl. It probably is the first one designed by a teenager of any gender and, I am almost certain that it is one of very few designed by a woman.

Marianne Hanson was a 17-year-old student at Garfield High School when she designed the wall which Seattle School Board minutes refer to as a shrine. She had responded to a competition from the board for a memorial to the Seattle high school students killed in World War II. The board planned to incorporate the wall as part of Memorial Stadium which was completed in 1947. Income from the Thanksgiving Day games at Memorial Stadium in 1947, 1948 and 1949 funded the $29,000[1] wall which was dedicated in 1951 when 19-year-old Marianne cut the ribbon.[2]

Marianne Hanson in 1952. Photo: (Unknown).

In her recent presentation to the LPB on August 16, 2023, architectural historian and architect Susan Boyle called out that the design’s neoclassical spirit echoes the façade of Carl Gould’s 1937 Seattle Art Museum.[3] That building, she said, would surely have been known by art student Hanson from trips to the Volunteer Park facility. As is frequently the case with suppositions about design influence, Gould’s influence on Hanson is not documented. Along with the gray limestone of the two structures, the niches that flank the museum and those at the memorial certain suggest that Boyle guessed correctly.[4]

As much as the young men who it honors, the simplicity of Hanson’s design enthralls me. The huge slab displays only the names of the 762 young men who perished capped by “Seattle High School Memorial Stadium” and Hanson’s phrase: “Youth Hold High Your Torch of Truth and Tolerance Lest their Sacrifice Be Forgotten. “[5]  Other than the fluted niches on either end of the wall, it is undecorated. Aside from the two engravings above them, no features distract from the overwhelming power of the names of those who died in service to the nation.

Hansen, who had no architectural training, did not do the formal architectural drawings for the wall. The minutes of the Seattle School Board of September 23,1949,[6] record the Maintenance Department prepared them and the cost estimate for the wall over the summer of 1949. According to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article published on Memorial Day, May 28, 2006, Hanson still owned the drawings she submitted to the competition.

In reading the list of the names on the wall, I am struck by the degree to which they represent a crosscut of Seattle’s wartime population. Because I am Jewish, was born in 1941 before the U.S. entered the war, and don’t want anyone to ever forget the Holocaust, I note the Jewish names on the wall. The 70 Japanese names engraved there are, however, equally compelling.  According to my friend landscape historian Koichi Kobayashi, the American government incarcerated the families[7] of those Japanese American heroes in camps at Minidoka or Manzanar from 1942 to 1945. We should never forget that egregious happening!

I appreciate the difficult decision that the LPB had to make in the instance of the Memorial Field and Wall nomination. Torn between enormous pressure from Seattle Center and the School District to tear down and rebuild the stadium with a design that integrates the facility into the larger Seattle Center campus and pressure from fervid historic preservation advocates, the board equivocated during its deliberations with some wondering if the playfield shouldn’t also be landmarked. Finally, only Marianne Hanson’s Memorial Wall received landmark designation.   

[1] Minutes of September 23, 1949, School Board meeting – Record 46. Seattle Public School Archives.

[2] https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/memorial-wall-could-become-just-a-memory-1204709.php

[3] Oral presentation at the LPB meeting of 2023.

[4] LPB081623MemorialStdmNOMPDF (www.seattle.gov)

[5] Apparently, Hansen wrote the phrase. https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/memorial-wall-could-become-just-a-memory-1204709.php.

[6] Minutes of September 23, 1949, School Board meeting – Record 46. Seattle Public School Archives.

[7] Kobayashi communicated in an email dated October 5, 2023, that his information about the names can from Densho, the archive dedicated to the history of the Japanese and Japanese Americans in the concentration camps.