Documentary for the City of Redmond's Old Firehouse Teen Center

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Overview

When a city decides to demolish a beloved community institution, the question isn't just what to build next. It's how to honor what's being lost. For the City of Redmond, the answer was documentation — a lasting record of the Old Firehouse Teen Center before the walls came down.

JSB Video was brought on through a competitive bid process to produce that record: a legacy documentary and social media series honoring 30 years of youth culture, creativity, and community at one of the Pacific Northwest's most quietly significant spaces.

• Project: Old Firehouse Teen Center Legacy Documentary & Social Series
• Client: City of Redmond Parks & Recreation Department
• Category: Documentary Film Production
• Sub-Category: Public Sector / Community Legacy / Social Media
• Location: Redmond, Washington

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Background & Challenge

The Old Firehouse Teen Center held its first show on September 26, 1992, founded by Kate Becker in partnership with the City of Redmond. The building itself is 73 years old — originally a 1950s fire station, later City Hall, then a YMCA before becoming the OFH. It grew out of a specific moment in Seattle's cultural history: the Teen Dance Ordinance, a city regulation that effectively shut young people out of Seattle's all-ages music scene, leaving an entire generation of youth with nowhere to go. The OFH became that place.

For three decades, it adapted to each new generation. Modest Mouse played early shows on its floor. The April 4, 2026 celebration featured live performances from The Hit, Mae Amber, Tomo Nakayama, Fight Milk, and Suzzallo. Hundreds of teens came through its doors each year, finding creative mentorship, community, and in many cases a sense of identity they couldn't find anywhere else. As KEXP documented in a 2017 oral history, the OFH wasn't just a venue. It was a cultural institution built by and for the teens who needed it most.

By 2025, the building had reached the end of its useful life. The City of Redmond made the decision to demolish and rebuild on the same site — a move approved by the City Council with an explicit commitment to preserving what made the OFH meaningful: teen voices, music space, and community ownership. Before demolition began, they wanted to honor what had happened inside those walls. Abatement completed June 8, 2026, with demolition now underway.

The challenge was layered:

• Create a lasting documentary record honoring the full 30-year arc of the OFH
• Capture the April 4, 2026 community celebration with hundreds of attendees
• Navigate a public-sector production environment with multiple stakeholders, contract requirements, and a compressed timeline
• Handle the emotional complexity of a community with deep, complicated feelings about the transition, including organized protest at the celebration itself

Our Role

JSB Video managed the full production lifecycle, from creative development through final delivery.

‍Pre-Production

Creative development began with stakeholder alignment across City leadership, Parks & Recreation staff, youth advisory groups, and community historians. One significant advantage of working with a public-sector client: governments are unusually transparent with their records. City meeting minutes, planning documents, archival photos, and historical materials were recoverable through public channels, which gave the production a research foundation that a private-sector project rarely has. That archival depth informed the documentary's structure before a single interview was scheduled.

Interview scheduling, archival content review, and coordination with multiple City departments ran simultaneously, all within the procurement and compliance requirements of a public-sector contract.

Interview Production

We conducted a multi-day interview series capturing the voices at the center of the OFH story. (Cameron Boher, OFH audio engineer and alum, was also featured in the documentary, bridging the historical and the personal) :

• Mayor of Redmond — civic framing and the City's commitment to the next chapter
• Kate Becker — OFH co-founder, on the origins and the legacy
• Loreen Hamilton — Parks & Recreation Director, on the rebuild decision and what comes next
• Laura Lee Bennett — longtime community stakeholder
• Freya — RYPAC youth president, representing the current generation's perspective

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‍Event Day Coverage

A two-person crew provided dual-camera coverage of the April 4, 2026 community celebration — a street closure event drawing hundreds of attendees. Coverage included live speeches, performances, crowd atmosphere, and candid community moments across the full event.

‍Post-Production

Full editorial encompassing the documentary cut, three social media series cuts in both landscape and portrait formats, accessibility subtitles, and an organized raw file archive delivered to the City for long-term use.

What We Made

‍Legacy Documentary (5+ minutes)

A narrative-driven film tracing the OFH from its 1992 founding through the community celebration and into the future. The documentary weaves together the voices of the people who built it, ran it, and grew up inside it — from Kate Becker's founding story to Freya's reflection on what the current generation is inheriting.

The film is built around a single through line: the Old Firehouse continually became what the teens of each generation needed it to be. That adaptability, and the question of how to carry it forward into a new building, drives the narrative from opening to close.

‍Social Media Series (3 cuts)

Celebration Recap (60 sec, landscape + portrait): Event day b-roll woven together with Cameron Boher's remarks and Freya's reflection on the end of an era.

Youth Perspective (90 sec, portrait): RYPAC president Freya on what the OFH meant to her generation and what she hopes carries forward into the new building.

The Future (90 sec, landscape + portrait): Parks & Recreation Director Loreen Hamilton framing the demolition as the beginning of a new chapter, and calling on the Redmond community to help shape what gets built.

All three cuts were delivered with accessibility subtitles, ready for City social channels.

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Production Approach

This project required more than production skill. It required the kind of relationship-building and editorial sensitivity that comes from a journalism-rooted approach to documentary work.

The OFH community had strong feelings about the building's closure. There was organized protest at the celebration event itself. Our approach throughout was to capture the full emotional reality of the day — the grief, the celebration, the complicated pride — without editorializing or making the tension a focal point. The result is a documentary that feels honest without being divisive, celebratory without being naive.

Working within a public-sector environment added its own layer of complexity. Contract routing, insurance requirements, vendor onboarding, and multi-stakeholder review processes all ran simultaneously with an aggressive production timeline. We navigated all of it without disruption to the creative work.

The civic dimension of this project wasn't separate from the creative work. It was part of it. Earning the trust of community members willing to speak candidly on camera required the same care that managing a public-sector timeline did.

Results

The completed deliverable package included a legacy documentary, three social cuts in dual formats, accessibility subtitles, and a complete organized raw file archive delivered to the City of Redmond for long-term use.

Zach Houvener, Deputy Parks Director at the City of Redmond, shared this after the project wrapped:

"I can't recommend JSB Video/Jordan highly enough. From start to finish, they were a pleasure to work with and consistently delivered great end products that exceeded our expectations. Jordan offered thoughtful guidance and creative direction when we needed it, and was just as willing to take our input and run with our vision when we had a clear idea in mind. That balance made the whole process feel collaborative and stress free — especially given our accelerated timeline and public-sector intricacies. I have full confidence in their ability to deliver, and would have zero hesitation working with them again."

— Zach Houvener, Deputy Parks Director, City of Redmond

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The Old Firehouse project is the kind of work JSB Video was built for. Stories that matter, communities that care, and a production approach that treats both with the respect they deserve.

Working with a public-sector organization on a community legacy project? JSB Video has deep experience producing documentary and event content for municipalities, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations across the Pacific Northwest. Explore our video services or tell us about your project.