Family won't sell to hospital

A private home in the middle of Sacred Heart Medical Center's campus will remain steadfast as the hospital continues to encompass it with expansion projects.

During the next three years, the new west wing addition will rise on land just southwest of the house.

Mary Gianetsas once owned the four-story home and resisted the hospital's offers to buy it for nearly 50 years. She died in 1991 at age 88.

Now it's her 70-year-old daughter, Dorothy Alex, who's refusing to sell.

"I feel for the hospital. They want it really bad," said George Alex, Dorothy's brother, who lives in Spokane and co-owns the home with Dorothy and another sister.

Dorothy Alex lived in the home as a teenager and moved back into it about 12 years ago.

"For some reason, whether sentimentality or something else, she's not quite ready to sell," George Alex said.

"And I won't be until I'm gone," Dorothy Alex confirmed this week, declining to say more.

The 25-room house has been in the family since 1944 when Pete and Mary Gianetsas bought it for $20,000.

Mary emigrated from Greece in the 1920s. She was the widow of Christopher Alex, George and Dorothy's father, when she married Pete Gianetsas in 1938.

When hospital administrators planned a new patient tower in the 1960s, they offered the Gianetsas family $200,000. The family turned down the offer, forcing the hospital to redesign the project to run north-south instead of east-west.

Pete Gianetsas died in 1971, leaving Mary to hold onto the house through two more major hospital construction projects.

Now her daughter continues a tradition that brought Mary Gianetsas fame. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran articles about the big house and the bigger hospital.

This week, Sacred Heart's chief operating officer, Mike Wilson, didn't want to discuss his latest attempts to negotiate with the family, other than to say that the hospital still would like to acquire the property.

Vince Nordfors, the chief architect of the latest construction project, said designing around the house led to interesting solutions, such as an expansion of a skybridge over Seventh Avenue into usable hospital space.

Future growth, however, will be even more challenging, said Nordfors, of Mahlum Architects of Seattle.

"I don't know how the hospital will grow in a major way," Nordfors said. "It's one of the last places contiguous to the hospital where growth could occur."

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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