Leave a Spite Mound for Them to Remember You By

BoingBoing has a post up today about homeowner holdouts: those citizens who refuse to sell their property to whatever development happens to be swallowing their neighborhood. Sometimes it's a mall and you end up with a lone house in the middle of a suburban parking prairie, sometimes it's a highway or a block-sized skyscraper--there are lots of examples in the BoingBoing post from all over the place, but two come courtesy of our area. First there are the houses that attempted to defy the regrading of Denny. Some of these "spite mounds" lasted for five years in Seattle:

From HistoryLink:

When property owners balked at selling, engineers carved around their lots, sometimes leaving houses stranded a hundred feet in air atop "spite mounds." These man-made buttes fell by 1911, giving Seattle a vast new tabula rasa upon which to sketch its urban visions.

Few things in this world would make us happier than seeing some Pike/Pine business weathering the condo storm from atop a spite mound.

The other example in the BoingBoing post is a Redmond home and chicken farm whose neighborhood got eaten by Microsoft:

A similar case but with a twist. When my former company, Microsoft, was building their Redmond West campus, they purchased an old chicken farm a mile or so from the main campus. The owner didn't want to move his parents however, so part of the deal was that their house could stay intact at the same location until they died. It's circled in red in the attached pic. As far as I know, it's the only private residence on any MS property.