On a Saturday in early April, the sounds of indie rock wafted through the sunny streets of downtown Redmond. Aging hipsters like me, teens, and other community members had gathered outside the Old Fire House Teen Center to commemorate the building that had served as an all-ages venue and teen center since 1992. It was a safe haven for alternative and queer tweens and teens looking to hang out anywhere but at home or school.
After ordering its closure last March due to the presence of asbestos, lead paint, and other structural issues, in November the Redmond City Council voted 6-0 to demolish the building sometime this spring and erect a new one on its grave. The party and outdoor show was one last hurrah for a building that embodied so much of what made Redmond unique from any other Eastside suburb, a severing of an essential connection to its past. The vibe was funereal. People snapped selfies, chatted with long-lost OFH alum comrades, listened to local bands like Fight Milk play onstage, and watched a huge screen cycle through photos from the teen center over the years. Some teens from Save OFH, an organization fighting for greater teen involvement in the new building process, protested at parts of the event. The sleek condos built on all sides of the building seemed to loom over the scene, a physical reminder of what Redmond has turned into.
As I watched the sun set on the building that I spent ungodly amounts of time in while growing up in Redmond, I thought about the Jas who first stepped foot into the OFH in 2008: 14 years old, insecure, rocking bangs. With its terrible lighting, open hours after school, and calendar chock-full of music and art events, the Fire House made life in drab, suburban Redmond feel so much more bearable for teen me. While the city is promising a renewed vision for the OFH Teen Center, it still felt nauseating to know that 33-1/3 years of youth culture history will be razed into dust. That building felt like the Teen Center’s whole soul.
Trying to explain what the Fire House was and what it meant to my adult friends is like trying to desperately explain the emotional ramifications of a dream.
I learned about Juggalos from my friend Kyle, who gave a presentation on Insane Clown Posse culture in the OFH showroom. During the teen center’s summer concert series, 4 Alarm, I watched Perfume Genius play on the world’s worst piano while I ate a hot dog. Any time my fellow OFH teens or I wanted to do something silly and/or serious—like host a formal debate on whether Avatar (2009) was pro- or anti-colonialism—OFH staff supported us, helping it be the best version it could be.
“I started going around to places where young people hung out, to say, What is it that you want from your community?”
Key to that trust in our creative vision was a trust in us as people, not just as teens. The OFH was a space I could try on who I wanted to be in this world without the pressures of school or family or sports confining me. I felt in control of my interests, my body, myself. The building felt crucial to that trust. It wasn’t built with teens in mind and thus was not optimized for the usual surveillance that typically comes with youth-oriented spaces. When teens entered the quirky OFH building, staff treated them in good faith, allowing us to cook in the kitchen, hang out and annoy them in the office, play four square outside, and do homework in the showroom.
“Because it was a fire house, those are built [for people who] work 24-hour shifts, right? It has to have everything, and I think that made it feel like my house, or like hanging out at a trusted friend’s house,” said Max Ruhlman, a former OFH teen who also worked on the Teen Center staff in 2024. “You felt safe.”
In particular, the building represented a physical throughline to the past that feels ever more tenuous in our increasingly digital days. Walls of show posters were artifacts of a DIY past I remember yearning to be part of—OFH history was storied even 18 years ago.
“The Fire House felt like a pile of clay that you could mold into whatever you wanted it to be,” said Chester Anderson, a former OFH teen and member of Save OFH. “Whenever you came into the Fire House, you were joining its long history. You were leaving your fingerprints on the clay. No matter who else, you know, shaped it, it would still be part of it.”
Above all, the Old Fire House simply had an identity that distinguished itself from a lot of new swagless buildings and condos being thrown up across Redmond. It didn’t look like a mall or a luxury apartment building that could be in any wealthy suburb in any part of the country. The original OFH reflected its humble origins as a one-stop shop for the administrative needs of a mid-century logging town. The grubbiness was a feature, not a bug.
“Growing up in Redmond, just seeing everything genuine be stripped away and turned into more corporate blandness,” said Anderson, “the Fire House felt like the one place left that was still completely standing as something so unabashedly self-defined.”
The same can’t be said for the City of Redmond’s offering of an interim OFH: a single room inside the Redmond Community Center at Marymoor Village (RCCMV). The former OFH teens describe the vibes at the Imposter OFH as “corporate” and “bad,” leaving kids without access to the music studio and other programming. And because it’s in a shared building with other communities, it’s not a space solely dedicated to teenagers. It disturbs the fragile ecosystem that would make the space more inclusive to teens whose experiences may not mesh well with random adults hanging around.
“[The original OFH] has been hacked and transformed, so people that are hacking and transforming themselves are showing up there because it’s kind of junky and this assemblage of things. It feels safe and lived in,” said Seb Choe, a former OFH kid from my era who volunteered there a few years ago. “I think if a space is totally clinical and perfect and everything’s been thought out, you’re gonna get those types of people to show up. Not the people that really need it.”
Built in 1952, the Old Fire House first served as a combination city hall, fire station, and police station back when Redmond was a one-stoplight town in lumber country. After a brief stint as a YMCA, the building became the Old Fire House Teen Center in 1992 thanks to the efforts of founder Kate Becker, former Redmond mayor Rosemarie Ives, and dozens of cool Eastside teens. During the dark years of the Teen Dance Ordinance, when kids under 21 were basically banned from music venues from 1985 to 2002, the OFH hosted shows by the likes of Elliott Smith and Modest Mouse, fostering a scene for underage musicians and artists to play, dance, and make art, and a studio to record music. The kids wanted a creative outlet.
“I started going around to parking lots and 7-Elevens and parks, places where young people hung out, to say, What is it that you want from your community?” said Becker, who also cofounded Vera Project. “And they said, We just want to play shows. So we got busy making a show hall happen. [The youth] were very much a part of it from the very beginning. We figured it out together.”
The “together” part was essential. Crucial to making it all work wasn’t adults doing the top-down decision making, but rather, working with teens and actually listening to what they wanted. “The standard adult reaction to teens is to basically try to tell them what to do and think that they’ll fall in line,” said Chris Cullen, former OFH director, who was part of the Teen Center’s founding team. “That is not gonna happen.”
So when the City of Redmond swiftly shut down the OFH last year with just a two-week warning, teens were understandably upset that they had been blindsided by the city, and many felt cut out from the initial decision-making process. “It didn’t feel like we had any real power or say in anything,” said Wolfe Adriatico, who started going to the OFH in 2024 and programs music events at Soul Food. “It was mostly performative in the way that they dealt with everything. Which sucked.”
Redmond Parks and Recreation director Loreen Hamilton acknowledged the frustration. “I validate that, and I hope that we can move forward,” she said. But she added that the city is keen and committed to including teen voices in the design process for the new building. “Our real hope and desire is to be able to continue to be that safe space for teens that it has been for so many years,” said Hamilton. “And my hope is that we can prove that through the work that we do, knowing that we’re a city with processes to follow, and a lot of that is guided by both city code, but also state law.”
But others involved with the OFH are hesitant, citing the city’s lack of communication about the initial closure and the teen center more generally. Some are concerned that the OFH might suffer a similar fate to the Redmond Senior & Community Center, which was demolished, and then rebuilt as a community center for everyone—not just seniors. Others were worried that the city isn’t properly archiving the space itself, though Starlyn Nackos of Life Theater Media is collecting stories for an independent documentary on the OFH.
Still, some of the OFH advocates remain hopeful about what the future may hold for the new building. Becker, who was part of a stakeholder group working with the City of Redmond, said that rebuilding the teen center gives them a chance to make the space more accessible, get LEED-certified, and have a 50-year lifespan. But key to its success is replicating the dynamics that made the OFH possible in the first place—adults purposefully collaborating with teens to shape the future building. Kids need something that feels designed by and for them, not what an adult thought was best.
“I think that is something that Redmond is going to struggle to embrace as they build a brand-new, clean, expensive teen center. The young people are going to want to own it. They are going to want to make it theirs, and they will have to navigate that together—city officials and the young people who are wanting to come through the door,” said Becker. “We’ll have to figure out how to make that work.” A similar feeling is reflected in the youth who had to experience the city’s clunky handling of the situation—frustration, but optimism about the future. “I have faith in the competence and determination of all the people that are involved,” said Ruhlman. “As important as a building, especially this building, is, at the end of the day, it’s the people that make the community. It’s just a matter of whether or not the city is going to allow us to have a seat at the table and build the community that Redmond needs.”
For nearly 40 years, teens on the Eastside were lucky to have the Fire House. It’s only with time and distance that I have been able to see how important the teen center was to my psyche and creativity. As an adult, I still subconsciously look for third spaces like the OFH. When I was a kid, I just didn’t know how good I had it. That’s what makes the upcoming demolition of the OFH’s original building so distressing. With its destruction, the city loses an essential connection to its rich history of youth culture.
Current teens, OFH advocates, and the city will need to foment the special conditions that birthed the original Fire House into the world in order to construct a building that reflects the needs of the youth. This new generation of teens needs more unique, creative, trusting, and safe IRL spaces to work out their own sense of self when the future is looking bleak and on-screen as hell—the stakes are huge. Weird kids deserve weird places to hang, too.
