It was sunny in Seattle on a recent Friday afternoon in May. It’s the kind of weather that Seattleites don’t tell people about, maybe for fear that they will drive up the prices for apartments even further than the influx of Amazon employees has.
It was the kind of day that fills up Victor Steinbrueck Park, the hilly space adjacent to Pike Place Market with views of Puget Sound and, on a clear day, the Olympics.
Members of the lunchtime crowd may not have realized, however, that the park they were enjoying might look very different in the near future.
That same week, the city of Seattle launched a public effort to redesign the park, a project that will force city officials to balance connectivity with the waterfront and tourist appeal with the needs of the people who use the park most often, namely Seattle’s Native American and low-income populations.
The project has been in the cards since 2008, when Seattle voters approved a Parks and Green Spaces levy that was meant to fund improvements to lighting, seating and the replacement of a children’s play area that was taken out of the park several years ago.
Testing revealed deeper structural problems with the waterproof membrane between the park and the parking garage that it was built on, requiring that everything above the parking garage be removed so that the membrane can be replaced.
Officials are also looking at the possibility of building stairs into the park to directly connect it with the larger waterfront project that’s currently under construction.
After the City Council signs off on the final design, the park will be shut down for construction between winter of 2017 and summer of 2018 when it would reopen, said David Graves, a strategic planner with the City of Seattle.
The need for such an extensive redo could be an opportunity to celebrate the Native Americans who have a connection with the park, said Colleen Echohawk, executive director of the Chief Seattle Club, a social services center for Seattle’s Native Americans.
Although called Victor Steinbrueck Park on paper, the space goes by another name: Native Park.
“There’s a sense of ownership,” Echohawk said.
Echohawk and clients of the Chief Seattle Club want to see that ownership embodied in the redesign of the park by including more Native elements such as artwork and space for cultural performances.
“We could be hosts of the park,” Echohawk said.
It would also provide the opportunity to remove two large totem poles that offend some members of the Native American community because they are not, in fact, Native. Local tribes did not use totem poles, but the pair at Victor Steinbrueck Park were carved by a non-Native artist named James Bender, whose other work was inspired by Native American culture.
The two poles are on top of the parking garage, meaning they will have to come down for the replacement of the waterproof membrane.
The removal of the poles will be part of a “broader conversation” with the Native community, Graves said.
“They’re not true totem poles, not representative of what people here would have carved,” Graves said. “But they do resonate with native people.”
Misty Carpitcher, a member of the Chief Seattle Club, lives in Steinbrueck Park with her teenage son. She’s excited about the new lighting because she thinks that it will make the park safer for her family.
“I want my son to be able to go somewhere he feels safe, and not be told that he can’t be a kid,” Carpitcher said.
Preserving access to the park for people of all walks of life will require a participatory planning process and attention to details, said Setha Low, director of the Public Space Research Group at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Gentrification of a public space happens in the details, such as the design of the new benches or placement of a potential children’s play area.
“It takes vigilance,” Low said. “Working with the designer and being clear that there’s a group that includes the homeless and poor individuals that are there.”