After a nearly three-month-long dispute, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation (SPR) demolished the Black Lives Memorial Garden (BLMG) in Cal Anderson Park on the morning of Dec. 27, 2023.
Before dawn, about two dozen police officers, as well as Parks personnel and contractors, informed activists and unhoused residents living at the garden that it would be removed that day. They quickly got to work, erecting fences in a wide perimeter around the garden, while others painted over murals and graffiti on the bathroom buildings to the south of the garden. The department also used bulldozers and other heavy machinery to uproot the plants and till the soil. Garden beds that had been tended to for more than three years were destroyed, and within hours, all that was left was a big patch of dark brown dirt.
City employees first informed Black Start Farmers (BSF), the group that stewarded BLMG, about the pending demolition back in early October 2023. In response, supportive community members redoubled their efforts to maintain the site and revitalize it as a hub for mutual aid activism.
Oct. 24 marked the first attempt to begin the demolition process, with city employees bringing in heavy machinery to the site of the garden. However, a sit-in organized by activists successfully derailed their efforts. Over the next weeks, an uneasy standoff ensued, with the Seattle’s Unified Care Team (UCT) repeatedly displacing unhoused people who pitched their tents adjacent to BLMG, seeking access food and other mutual aid supplies that activists provided.
According to SPR spokesperson Rachel Schulkin, UCT conducted 76 sweeps of Cal Anderson Park in 2023. Public records previously reported on by Real Change showed the city received at least 159 complaints about encampments in the park in 2022. Records also showed UCT swept Cal Anderson Park at least 35 times in the same time period.
The support for BLMG and its unhoused residents proved to be a big thorn in the city’s side, particularly over drug use in the vicinity of the garden. According to activists, they were improving public safety in the area by providing much-needed supplies and administering naloxone to reverse overdoses on an almost daily basis.
In explaining why the city decided to demolish BLMG, Schulkin wrote in an email that “the temporary garden has created unsafe conditions for all park users,” citing vandalism of public bathrooms, public consumption of drugs, unauthorized camping and rodents. Earlier in December, SPR had welded the doors of the bathrooms shut.
Because of holidays, the activist presence at BLMG was significantly reduced on Dec. 27. Unlike previous times SPR had come in, supporters of the garden concluded they did not have enough people to organize a successful sit-in. Instead, they scrambled to support the homeless folks living at the site and rescue about a half a dozen plants. However, a majority of BLMG’s property and greenery were destroyed.
Saunatina Sanchez, a community member who has volunteered with BLMG, arrived at 6 a.m. on the day of the demolition to document what the Parks department was doing.
“I saw destruction,” she said. “I saw people taking the supplies that have been gathered for years by the community and putting them into a dumpster. I saw Caterpillar turf tillers and a John Deere tractor loader just moving the dirt around. They basically have taken a green space full of food and community support and turned it into a patch of dirt.”
Sanchez said the demolition was indicative of a broader top-down approach by the city toward community-initiated projects. She contrasted SPR’s approach to BLMG to her experience working on another p-patch project in the neighborhood.
“I have a good relationship with dealing with Parks when they feel they have control of the situation,” Sanchez said. “And it seems like if somebody with a position of authority doesn’t approve [of] or didn’t feel included in a project, it’s not considered valid by the city.”
For many supporters of BLMG, the demolition felt like an abrupt turn after they had received overtures from SPR’s advisory board at a Dec. 14 meeting. Volunteer commissioners floated the idea of holding a public forum in January to discuss the dispute.
From its inception, BLMG was politicized. The garden was established amid the Black Lives Matter uprising and Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in summer 2020. It was among the last visible remnants of that protest movement, alongside the Black Lives Matter mural on East Pine Street.
Sanchez speculated the police department resented the garden because it reminded them of the protests.
“It feels like it’s a personal vendetta by the police, because they are still upset that they lost control of our neighborhood for a month,” she said.
Elisa Chavez, a neighbor who lives close to the garden and has volunteered by distributing clothes to unhoused residents, said BLMG represented a positive outcome from CHOP, which has an otherwise complicated legacy.
“People say out of this … moment of uprising against police brutality, police violence; and out of all this community pain, came a garden,” she said. “Which is a really nice metaphor for making something good out of a painful situation.”
However, it’s clear SPR does not feel the same way, as the garden was never formally sanctioned; in the department’s statement, Schulkin wrote BLMG was “temporary.” There are no current plans to reinstate BLMG or any other garden at the site. Instead, the city hopes to restore grass and use it for large events.
In addition to a desire to repurpose the space, disagreements over the core purpose of BLMG were also a driving motivation in its removal. One of these contentious aspects was how it interpreted the memory of Black people who have died at the hands of police. From the beginning, the first plants sown were in honor of victims of police violence, and the garden was filled with memorial signs and dedications. But the garden also had a more ambitious scope, with a focus on promoting food sovereignty. Stewards planted vegetables, herbs and other medicinal plants. There was also a big focus on promoting progressive political causes and teaching history of Black and Indigenous communities.
However, the center of the garden’s controversy was over the direct support and regular meals handed out to community members, most of whom were homeless. A number of homeless activists were intimately involved in the creation of the garden in 2020. While activists argued that mutual aid for unhoused residents, who are disproportionately Black and Brown, is a good way to honor Black lives, others disagreed.
Ahead of the demolition, the city collected comments from a number of Black community members and family members of people killed by Seattle police officers who were critical of BLMG to justify the decision. Among the biggest complaints were reports of frequent drug use in the vicinity of the garden and a general feeling the area wasn’t clean or safe. Some also said they were not aware of or connected with BLMG, adding the garden didn’t represent them or it appropriated their pain. There is also an optical dimension to this critique, since the majority of pro-BLMG activists are white.
Orian Grant, an educator with BSF, said it was important for the group to acknowledge and address concerns and criticisms from other Black community members. At the same time, they said the city had weaponized divisions within the Black community to legitimize the destruction of BLMG.
“It’s just interesting that this identity politics strategy was utilized in a way to call out the fact that the space wasn’t inviting to Black people and that it was only there for drug use and that there were rats there,” Grant said. “That mischaracterizes the year-round use of the space; it mischaracterizes the impact that Black Star Farmers has made, not only for the community of Capitol Hill, but the Black community in Seattle. It’s a campaign; it was a tactic. I think it was effective in drawing us away from our community and creating more division in the Black community.”
Additionally, Chavez said she appreciated the safety concerns but, in her experience, she didn’t see much drug use at BLMG.
“I really didn’t see anything unsafe happening,” she said. “Being around Capitol Hill and downtown, people say ‘this is unsanitary.’ There’s definitely a lot of parts of the city that I would say are unsanitary.”
As of press time, the fences around what was BLMG are still up. SPR has previously indicated it will plant new turf on the site and that it was open to a memorial garden in a different part of the park.
Grant said BSF was grieving the loss of the garden and taking time to reflect on the experiences and positive impact of BLMG.
In a Dec. 28 Instagram post, BSF said that it is determined to continue the legacy of the BLMG and that the city of Seattle “can’t keep a garden, nor the people, from growing back stronger.”
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
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