Imus Family Leads Fairhaven’s Facelift
Ken Imus Develops, Promotes Historic District — and He’s not Done at 76!

Article by Barry D. Bowen
Photos by Jon Brunk

 

Fairhaven has changed dramatically over the last 30 years and the Imus family’s Jacaranda Corp. has played an integral role in that evolution.

The company now owns 40 properties and 12 buildings in the historic Bellingham neighborhood. Its tenants include many of the district’s better-known businesses — Fairhaven Village Inn, Village Books, Colophon Café, First Mutual Bank, Skylark’s Hidden Café and Jacci’s British Style Fish & Chips (the restaurant in the double-decker bus). Jacaranda also rents to jewelers, beauty salons, attorneys, authors and investment firms.

Whidbey Island Bank will be the fourth bank to locate in Fairhaven. The bank tentatively will lease space from Jacaranda while it plans a full-size facility.

Two new buildings are going through the permitting process and a theater is on the drawing board. Seven other properties exist in the family name. Owner and chairman of the board Ken Imus, together with his son Brad, who is president of the firm, see their work as a “labor of love” to restore a vibrant business district in Fairhaven.

 

Starting in a ‘hippie haven’

Ken Imus, 76, and his wife were born in Bellingham and moved in the early 1940s to California, where Ken shipped out with the Navy. After great success developing six automotive dealerships on both coasts and Hawaii, Imus started his first Fairhaven project in 1972. Thirty years later, he is still at it.

Despite some criticism, which he and Brad freely admit and freely dismiss, they consider their work a success in the making. Brad Imus moved to Bellingham from Texas in 1978 to function as a property manager. His father didn’t permanently relocate to Bellingham until 1997.

When Ken Imus began developing in Fairhaven in 1972, he says the area was derisively referred to as a “hippie haven” with many rundown buildings.

“It was the worst area in Bellingham — crime ridden, hippies, dogs, boarded-up windows. It was dangerous,” Imus recalls.

Fairhaven now has now reached a crucial threshold — a critical mass of business vitality — to serve the local community and to attract visitors, Imus states. Developing the district with such a balance has been a long and often difficult task.

Jacaranda finally built the Fairhaven Village Inn itself because hotel deals kept falling through and a hotel was an important element for visitors. Getting a hardware store back into the district was important to local residents and took many years but Fairhaven Hardware and Garden opened in a Jacaranda building earlier this year.

“We think the concept of Fairhaven has really changed. It has been a long road,” Imus remarks. “It is now a serious business district.”

He relates a conversation with a senior Trillium Corp. executive, who reported more people in the Seattle area talking about Fairhaven.

“You mean Bellingham?” Imus queried. The answer was no — they are talking about Fairhaven.

 

Spreading the news

Jacaranda is doing what it can to promote Fairhaven outside Whatcom County. Most of its advertising is done outside the area to brand Fairhaven as a great place to shop and relax, and to advertise the Fairhaven Village Inn. Local residents already know about Fairhaven and its merchants tend to focus their advertising on the local market, Imus observes. While advertising more in the Everett market and the Interstate 5 corridor south to Seattle, Jacaranda has pulled back on Canadian advertising due to the weaker exchange rate and the border traffic problems following Sept 11.

“We have been doing a lot of advertising out of the area to attract people to Bellingham and that has been working well,” Imus remarks. “I have a couple of tenants who recently report selling more product to Seattle-area customers than they do to local customers.”

He also reports a couple of stores indicate their revenues are up over last year despite the recession and post-terrorist climate.

 

On the drawing board

While the next big project for Jacaranda’s vision for Fairhaven is a theater, still in the concept phase, it does have two proposed buildings on paper and proceeding through the permitting process. The first is a two-story retail project without a working title; the second is called the Pavilion.

The two-story retail building is slated to be built on 11th Street between Harris and McKenzie. The first floor is already leased and Imus expects it will be completed near the end of the year.

The Pavilion, to be built behind Skylark’s restaurant, is designed to be a fun, frivolous building with a copper dome roof. This is part of a plan to extend the cobblestone path from Harris to McKenzie Street and create more traffic along that walkway, including benches along the path.

Also, Jacaranda is in the midst of refurbishing the Waldron Building, across from Wynn’s Drive-In at the corner of 12th and McKenzie streets.

“We’ve done some structural work over the years and will do a little more this year,” says Brad Imus, who concentrates on the property management aspects of the business.

But a movie theater is Jacaranda’s most ambitious idea. Fairhaven previously had two movie theaters, but they closed after multiplexes opened in Sunset Square and Bellis Fair malls. Recreating a theater has been a longtime dream for Imus. Indeed, going back to 1975, the still unfinished building — now slated for demolition — behind Sycamore Square had space designated for movie screens.

Imus wants to build a brick theater — a new building with a few ornate flourishes — something at the opposite end of the spectrum from the somewhat plain chrome-and-glass multiplexes that will blend with the image of “historic Fairhaven.”

One thing Imus wants for the theater is a grand, classic marquee. He has been acquiring pieces from old theaters for many years, such as the plaster work that surrounded a theater screen and overhead and side-wall light fixtures.

Imus concedes that Fairhaven cannot support a facility as large as downtown Bellingham’s Mount Baker Theater, nor can it compete with the marketing dollars of Regal Cinemas’ multiplex theaters in Bellis Fair and Sunset Square, but he is convinced there is niche for a successful theater in Fairhaven. And since the city designated Fairhaven an historic district, Imus says Jacaranda is protected from a competitor building a contemporary, multiplex, box-like theatre.

Jacaranda hired architect John Stewart, who designed plans for remodeling the Mount Baker Theatre. Stewart also designed a two-screen theater — the format anticipated for Fairhaven.

The two-screen approach enables one screen to offer arthouse films and the second to show popular second-run movies. Contemporary multiplexes book films well in advance and hold to a set schedule in order time releases with studio marketing budgets. That means there are many films pulled from screens when there is still demand to see them and those are the films Jacaranda’s undisclosed operating partners expect to get.

Because the business focus of Fairhaven leans toward entertainment, a theater would complement restaurants and shopping by encouraging people to “come to Fairhaven and make an evening of it,” Imus says.

 

Development disagreements

Although Jacaranda recognizes that the historic designation of Fairhaven protects its theater plans from the most likely competition, the company also sees itself as enduring anti-business bureaucratic regulation. Imus sees the struggles of downtown Bellingham as a result of poor decisions over an extended period of time.

During a previous city administration, Imus offered to contract with the city for a Fairhaven development plan, He also envisioned developing the Whatcom Creek area in a manner similar to the San Antonio River Walk, with restaurants, shops and hotels. The Fairhaven development concessions were denied and the downtown development plans were not embraced. Jacaranda now has no development plans outside Fairhaven.

That said, Imus believes the area would greatly benefit from a vital downtown business and professional district. While he doesn’t disagree with the goal, Imus is both frustrated with and amazed by the millions of dollars each year that he says Bellingham dumps into its downtown and Old Town districts.

One of the strategies Imus advocates is building a second-story parking deck over Railroad Avenue to offer inexpensive all-day parking on top and short-term covered parking underneath.

The first prerequisite to revitalizing downtown however, is to “clean up the streets” of undesirable elements that hang out there, he says. Fairhaven went through the same thing, Imus recalls, “and Grandma and the grandkids aren’t going to go shopping there until that is done.” He recounts that Fairhaven was hurt for a long time by transients, making it difficult to get quality clients and build shopping traffic.

Putting subsidized housing downtown is one counterproductive example that Imus cites. “Bless their hearts — these people have no discretionary income. How is that going to revitalize downtown?” he asks.

Imus laments the demise of a pro-business city council and invested heavily in the last round of local elections. He says liberals running the city and the City Council may be nice people but they don’t understand business and don’t control arbitrary bureaucrats.

“It doesn’t take long to build a building. We can build in three, four months max,” Imus says. “But it takes from eight months to two years to get one through (Bellingham’s approval) process. We sit, and sit, and sit.”

The problem with the delays is not merely the frustration, but the risk that introduces to development. Conditions can change a great deal in two years, Imus says, so what looks like a great project when you begin may be timed poorly for market conditions when you finally get all the approvals to complete construction and open the doors. The two buildings Jacaranda constructed before the hotel was just that experience, he laments.

While the past hurdles were significant and future reforms are uncertain, Jacaranda points to its tangible accomplishments as a job well done — the triumph of a labor of love.