Developers offered Edith Macefield a reported $1 million for her little house in Seattle. She said no.
It wasn't much of a house. Two bedrooms, about 1,050 square feet, built in 1900 in the old Ballard neighborhood.
Edith, a woman in her 80s, had lived there for decades. The land all around it was slated for a big new commercial complex.
One newspaper described it as a package worth about $750,000, including a bigger new house and her health care for life, for a home assessed at $101,000. Either way, Edith turned it down.
“I don't need the money. Money doesn't mean anything,” she told a reporter.
So the developers did the only thing left to do. They built around her. Concrete walls rose a few feet from her kitchen.
The man in charge of building those walls was a construction superintendent named Barry Martin. His crew worked within four feet of her house, and Edith had a reputation for being surly. Barry gave her his cell number anyway and told her to call if she ever needed anything.