William Boeing launched development of neighborhood

By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Like the name of Blue Ridge, the curving streets have a southern twang -- Valmay, Bayard, Woodbine, Belgrove -- reportedly because the wife of William Boeing's realtor, Hugh Russell, hailed from the land of Dixie.

Boeing initially bought the 200 acres north of Ballard for timber. After it was logged, Boeing launched development in the area by building five brick "castles," as residents now refer to them, which sit high on Northwest Blue Ridge Drive overlooking the Sound.

They sat empty for the first few years, initially because of the Depression and later perhaps because the executives may have preferred not to live next door to their workplace colleagues.

Donald "D.R." Drew was a Boeing executive who did settle in Blue Ridge, though not in the brick houses. The Drews, D.R. and Dee, built a few homes in the area and finally settled just down the hill from the "castles" in a modern, gated home featuring an indoor pool.

Whenever Bob Hope came to Seattle, he and his family stayed in Blue Ridge with the Drews.

"Dee was like a movie star," recalls Mary Bleakney, who along with husband, Mel, lived across the street from the Drews. "She had all these elegant dresses and just had that flair, you know, in the way she carried herself."

But the Drews are long gone today and nobody's seen Bob Hope hanging around Blue Ridge lately. The Bleakneys were some of the first "regular" folks not connected to Boeing to build in Blue Ridge, having started their home back in 1937.

Many others have since moved in, filling in the niches between the homes of the elite, so that today the community Bill Boeing built is pretty jampacked.

Longtime resident Larry Linnane says the first road cut into what was to become Blue Ridge was built during Prohibition by one of Puget Sound's leading bootleggers (and former police officer), Roy Olmstead.

"Olmstead put in the road, now 28th Avenue Northwest, so he could land here and bring his liquor down to Ballard," Linnane says. Olmstead brought liquor from Canada and landed on the beach because, at the time, it was remote.