Bothell Sold Its Junior High to a Brewery. It Kept the Pool for Residents.

Most people who drive down Bothell Way NE past the old brick building with the art deco lettering assume it's just a hotel. A nice one, with a tiki bar and a movie theater, the kind of place you'd book for an out-of-town guest or a birthday weekend. What most residents don't realize is that when the city sold this building, it didn't walk away empty-handed. It negotiated terms that still affect anyone who lives here today, and a surprising number of Bothell residents have never used what the city got in return.

The building is the Anderson School, built in 1931 as Bothell Junior High and renamed in 1956 for its retiring principal, Wilbert "Andy" Anderson. The city of Bothell bought the property in 2009, then sold it to McMenamins in 2010. The redevelopment reopened in 2015 as a 72-room hotel with restaurants, a brewery, and a saltwater pool, all packed into roughly 172,000 square feet across five old school buildings. That much is public record. What's less understood is what the city asked for before handing over the keys.

What the City Held Onto

When McMenamins takes over a historic property, the deal usually ends at preservation. Old St. Francis School in Bend, Old St. Francis Theater, Edgefield in Troutdale: buildings saved, businesses opened, done. Bothell's arrangement went further. As part of the redevelopment, McMenamins signed an agreement with the city allowing Bothell residents to use the pool, and the back meeting room behind the Woodshop bar was built specifically for the community and is still operated by the City of Bothell, not by McMenamins.

That second detail is easy to miss because it's genuinely unusual. Most McMenamins properties treat their soaking pools as a guest perk, full stop. Anderson School is the outlier:

Nowhere else in the company's portfolio does a local government have a standing agreement for resident pool access. That's not a marketing gesture from McMenamins. It's a term the city negotiated before the sale closed.

The Room the City Still Runs

The meeting space behind the Woodshop doesn't show up on the hotel's Instagram or in the tiki-bar photos everyone posts from Nui Nui. It's a plain, useful room the city retained the right to operate, tucked behind a bar full of shuffleboard, pinball machines, and the largest spirits selection on the property. If you've been to a Bothell community meeting in the last decade and it wasn't at City Hall, there's a decent chance it happened here.

McMenamins' own tour guide manager, Caitlin Popp, put the company's approach to the building this way during the property's 10-year anniversary tour in 2025: "We really see ourselves as stewards of these buildings. It's not just preservation, it's giving them new life and inviting the community back in."

That framing matters because it's easy to read a converted school as a novelty, the kind of place you visit once for the theme and don't think about again. The negotiated pool access and the city-run meeting room say otherwise. They're evidence that Bothell treated this less as a sale and more as a long-term lease of civic function, with McMenamins picking up the operating costs.

What's Actually Behind Each Door

If you've never gotten past the parking lot, the layout is simpler than it looks from outside. The old cafeteria is now Tavern on the Square, a farm-to-table restaurant open daily. The former woodshop and science lab became the Woodshop, the pub with the games and the deep liquor list. Order a drink in the Principal's Office if you want the smallest, quietest room on the property. The old gym is now the movie theater and live music venue, its walls lined with vintage magician posters, including one from Carter the Great, a Houdini-era illusionist who apparently once passed through town. Upstairs from the pool, Nui Nui serves tiki-leaning food and drink with a view down into the water.

None of this requires a room key. The restaurant, bars, theater, and market are open to anyone who walks in, resident or not. The pool is the one piece that comes with a local rule attached.

The One-ID Rule

Here's the part worth sitting with if you live in Bothell and have never used it. The North Shore Lagoon, the property's 112-foot saltwater soaking pool heated to 88 to 90 degrees, is free for hotel guests and free for Bothell residents who show valid ID. Everyone else pays for one-hour public sessions.

That's a real, checkable perk with no catch beyond proving you live here. It's also the kind of detail that gets lost once a building becomes known mainly for its hotel reviews and Instagram angles. The pool building itself has two large wall openings and three roof openings cut into it during the renovation, so the saltwater is open to the outside air rather than sealed indoors, which is part of why it reads more like a lagoon than a standard hotel pool.

A Longer Legacy Than the Pinball Machines Suggest

The current pool isn't the first one on this site. Before the redevelopment, the building held a community pool where synchronized swimming coach Charlotte Davis trained two Bothell Olympians. Since the 2015 reopening, more than 27,000 children and 200 adults have learned to swim in the same water. That's not a fact McMenamins advertises heavily, but it's part of why the resident access clause makes sense as policy rather than novelty. The city wasn't just protecting a nostalgic building. It was protecting a place that had already produced Olympic-level swimmers and taught thousands of local kids to swim, and it wanted that function to continue under new ownership.

Put the pieces together and the picture of Anderson School changes. It's not simply a well-preserved historic hotel with a fun theme. It's a civic asset that changed hands in 2010 with strings attached, strings that still function 16 years later: a meeting room the city operates inside a private business, and a pool that treats Bothell residency as its own form of admission.

If you've lived here for years and never brought an ID down to the front desk, that's worth fixing on an ordinary weeknight, not a special occasion. The agreement was written for exactly that kind of use.

Whenever the conversation turns from daily life in Bothell to what a move here or a sale might actually look like, Mary Pong is the person Eastside and Bothell residents turn to for a straight, well-prepared answer. Schedule a consultation with Mary Pong.