Crossroads: A Turning Point for Downtown’s Freeway Park?

From Ed M. who sends this from postalley.org

By Mike James and David Brewster

Editor’s Note: Freeway Park is a much-admired design by one of America’s most revered landscape architects, Lawrence Halprin. The 5.2-acre park, which bridges the I-5 Freeway, recently earned a $10-million donation from the expanded Convention Center nearby. Both authors have been members of the Freeway Park Association, a neighborhood support organization.

---

David Brewster:

Mike, I know you live right by Seattle’s Freeway Park and are active in supporting it, so I’d like to understand how the Park is going to use the $10 million windfall gift from the Convention Center expansion. Will it be exciting and magnetic, or will it be, as I fear, all spent on repairing neglected features like those rarely-active fountains?

Mike James:

I’d say your fears are well-founded. The perennial reality of city infrastructure, parks included, is an endless catch-up to restore and maintain, rarely to re-invent. Take that windfall $10 million, subtract all the design/planning/development/permitting costs, and you get just $6 million for actual construction.  In Freeway Park now that dictates a focus on plantings, repair of benches and other furnishings, restoration of pavement and the several fountains, better lighting and signage, and perhaps even an actual working bathroom.  

To the extent there’s any enhancement beyond basics, we might also see a children’s play area, better storage facilities, and a staffed information booth.  Don’t even ask where we’d be without that Convention Center money.  I always compare the park’s needs to the endless pothole game along our streets.  We fill in the holes again and again, but hardly ever get to the repaving.

All that said, the thrust of the planning is to whip the park into shape, make it easier to find with better lighting and wayfinding, add enough event programming to lure people back inside — all meant to help people discover or re-discover an iconic urban space.

David:

You make a good point about the city’s chronic problems in funding infrastructure and maintenance. But I also have the feeling that Freeway Park is punished as an orphan, left to scrape up its own money. One problem is that it straddles First Hill and Downtown, so neither really thinks it has responsibility. That straddle used to bedevil police responses to gangs and crime, since the dividing line between the East Precinct and West Precinct was I-5 (right down the middle of the park). Another problem is the internationally famous design of the park by Lawrence Halprin and his associate Angela Danadjieva — a fame that makes alterations of the hidey-place architecture likely to become an international act of war. Lastly, some of the features such as the waterfall are very costly to keep operating. You usually don’t put a water feature right underneath trees that shed needles and big leaves. I will say this, however, none of these factors has stopped the Parks Department from lavishing attention on the landscaping. I greatly admire the replanting that was undertaken by that gifted landscape architect, Iain Robertson of the University of Washington, now sadly deceased.