Community

New owners propose to demolish 126-year-old house and cabin in Millville district

Posted on August 18th, 2026 By: Ted Kenney

Kris Yetter wants people to know one thing about the waterfront property at 3509 Harborview Drive that she and her husband, Aaron, bought for $2 million in March: They don’t plan to build condos there.

When the couple visits the site in downtown Gig Harbor’s Millville district, she said, strangers approach. They ask if the small, 126-year-old house and even smaller cabin standing inside a white picket fence will be torn down and replaced with high-end multi-family housing.

No condos are proposed on the long, narrow site that stretches from Harborview Drive, along Novak Street, all the way to the waterfront.

New owners plan to demolish a 126-year-old home at 3509 Harborview Dr. Photo by Ted Kenney

No condos

But significant changes appear to be in the works there, including the loss of two of the city’s oldest structures. The house and cabin are historic through their age and their connection to the Ivanoviches, an old Gig Harbor fishing family.

Last week, the Yetters requested a pre-application conference with the city. At such a conference, they can brief officials on their preliminary plans and learn about what they may develop on the site.

The project description filed with that application calls for the removal of the two structures and construction of a single, much larger new house. “We’re going to live there,” Kris Yetter said in an interview.

The Yetters also stated in the application that they intend “to subdivide the parcel at the earliest available opportunity, and create a vacant 6,000 [square foot] parcel” at the corner of Harborview Drive and Novak Street.

Greg Spadoni took an impromptu tour of 3509 Harborview Dr. recently. Here’s what he saw.

Long-time residents and historic preservationists expressed sadness, but little surprise, upon learning of the site’s likely redevelopment. To Lita Dawn Stanton, the city’s former historic preservation officer and secretary of the Skansie Netshed Foundation, the impending changes at 3509 Harborview highlight that there is “no protection whatsoever” for historic downtown buildings.

The Ivanovich family

The Ivanovich family patriarch, Mato, immigrated to Pierce County from Croatia in 1910. He worked at the Tacoma smelter before joining a cousin and friends who fished commercially, according to a history published on the Skansie Netshed Foundation’s website. Mato Ivanovich operated some 13 boats over his 50-year commercial fishing career, according to his obituary published in 1970.

The house and cabin at 3509 Harborview Drive predate Mato Ivanovich’s arrival in America. Property records say the structures were built in 1900. Francis Ivanovich, Mato’s grandson and owner of the property until recently, said his family believed the buildings actually went up in 1897.

Either year makes the buildings old, by Gig Harbor standards. A 2008 inventory of more than 150 of the city’s historic structures shows only five of them pre-dating 1900. The same survey gives “Rokich, Antone, House” as 3509 Harborview’s historic name.

Property records analyzed by Gig Harbor Now columnist Greg Spadoni show a Roko Privinich acquiring land that included the property in 1902, and Mato Ivanovich buying 3509 Harborview from Privinich in 1948.

The Ivanovich family home (and netshed, which still stands) was a few doors down at 3617 Harborview. Mato and his wife Maria rented the house and cabin at 3509 Harborview to others, while Maria’s vegetable garden occupied the unbuilt western portion of the property, Francis Ivanovich said.

‘Absolutely a jewel’

Ken Malich, a former Gig Harbor city council member and commercial fisherman, was born in 1946 and grew up across the street from 3509 Harborview. He recalled camping with friends on the wooded waterfront parcel next to the Ivanovich’s rental property and having a buddy whose family rented the house. “It was the first place I ever saw television,” he said.

Over the years, Ivanovich relatives stayed in the cabin when visiting family in Gig Harbor, Francis Ivanovich recalled. But today the Ivanoviches are gone from the city. Mato’s son Peter, a professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, inherited the property when Maria died in 1994. Francis, in turn, became owner of it when his father Peter died in 2019.

Francis Ivanovich, 63, said he has fond memories of visiting family in Gig Harbor as a youth from the Midwest. He would stay for two or three weeks every summer, sometimes fishing aboard his Uncle Frank Ivanovich’s boat, the Equator.

But his work as an electrical contractor leaves him little time to focus on managing a rental property 2,000 miles away, Francis Ivanovich said.

“It’s absolutely a jewel but I could not keep it. Taxes are absolutely outrageous — it’s being taxed like it’s a million dollar condo,” he said. (Actually, 3509 Harborview’s 2026 assessed value is $1,778,100 and annual property tax is $15,199.12, according to the Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer’s website.)

Gig Harbor native purchased home

Kris Yetter, the property’s new co-owner, lives in Yarrow Point, a tiny Seattle suburb on Lake Washington, north of Bellevue. But she stresses that she is, in fact, a Gig Harbor native with deep roots. She graduated from Gig Harbor High School and is part of the Finholm family that has been here for four generations, she said.

“This is not the story of developers coming in, or new people from out of town,” she said.

3509 Harborview Dr. is the purple rectangle on this map. Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer map

Yetter said the existing house at 3509 Harborview was built over the property line shared with the property to the south. Regulations concerning this “non-conforming use” would prevent any owner from making significant changes to the house without resolving the property line issue, she said. Francis Ivanovich and Ken Malich confirmed the property line overlap.

County records put the size of the existing house at 976 square feet, while recent for-sale listings say 1,306 square feet (that may include the cabin). Some listings call it a “farmhouse.” The 2008 historic buildings survey describe its architectural style as “vernacular,” which means built by local people, using traditional methods and local materials.

In its place, the Yetters propose to build a new 2,738-square-foot residence with four bedrooms, an attached 2-car garage and a below-grade basement.

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Plans remain uncertain

The Yetters hope to subdivide the property “at the earliest opportunity, according to the pre-application conference application. But even that is not a definite plan, Kris Yetter said. “We might split it. We don’t even know.”

Diagrams from a site plan filed with the city of Gig Harbor.

Whatever they build will be compatible with its surroundings, she said. “The Millville waterfront district is very strict, so the house will look very similar to what’s there,” she said.

The tall Douglas fir tree on the property next to the waterfront will stay, she said. After removing the existing house and cabin, the couple wants to “rebuild what we can and have it look like it’s been there forever.”

A photo of the home from the Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer’s Office.