Putting Parks First

By Molly Phemister

Let's give Seattle its due and call it a healthy region — both socially and ecologically. One reason may be its "edge condition," namely the fact that it sits on a ridge of land between a large freshwater lake and a major saltwater estuary, between the Cascade Mountains to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east. Its many ethnic groups intersect and overlap in this rich borderland, participating in a design-centric town with a history of grassroots innovation and social justice concerns, like Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.

All these tendencies come together in the city's parks and open space. The city makes us ask what a park is for. We know that parks are gathering places and natural spaces good for individual and collective mental health. But what about variations, like pedestrian-friendly streets or the miniscule parks known as parklets? Will these open-space innovations also help the mental health of their local communities? What about edible gardens and food forests?

Parks are important and Seattle is doing something right. A few factors have helped over the years: excellent timing, big thinkers, a collective willingness to fund big ideas, and a process that prototypes innovation and nurtures the capacity for collaboration.

From the beginning

Seattle's boom at the end of the 19th century coincided with public health concerns in East Coast cities, which emphasized the need for light and fresh air in all buildings and valued public parks and park systems for their social benefits. Seattle and Portland split the cost of bringing the era's most prestigious landscape architecture firm, the Olmsted Brothers, west. Seattle hired the firm to create a comprehensive park system plan.

The city had already begun acquiring park land, so much that when John Charles Olmsted arrived in 1903, the land for Lake Washington Park and Volunteer Park, among others, was already in hand. Olmsted's plan valued the natural beauty of the area and included the ambitious goal of building a park within a half-mile of all residences, plus a network of elegant boulevards tying the parks, existing and proposed, together. The city council adopted the plan tout de suite.

All Olmsted plans excel at preserving spots of high topographic intrigue (think "fun hikes" and "excellent vistas") and areas of unique ecological character. In Seattle, this meant preserving distant views and securing some of the old-growth forests that were fast falling to the logging companies.

John Charles Olmsted also understood the necessity for water reservoirs. Where they weren't already in place, he anticipated them, and thus, just as in his stepfather's design for Central Park in New York City, Seattle's early major parks each included a large water feature serving both function and aesthetics.

Olmsted's report, still highly regarded in Seattle, turned out to be only the first of several major citywide commitments to parks. In the 1960s, a series of bonds known collectively as Forward Thrust brought millions of dollars to the aid of the Department of Parks and Recreation. Landmark gems such as Gas Works Park and Freeway Park were built then.

As Seattle continued to grow, so did the pressures of development. By 1980, the hard-to-build slopes, historically a buffer between residential and industrial areas, were beginning to look more appealing as building sites. The neighborhoods balked at the loss of open space. In 1983, the city tried to soothe residents by saying "our open space is the window on the Puget Sound." The voters roundly rejected this notion, and public acquisition shifted to slopes and creek sides for a time.

In 1997, a sequence of 37 individual neighborhood plans sought to solidify a neighborhood-based identity and encourage smart growth. In almost every case, neighborhoods agreed to higher population densities but in exchange they wanted parks. In 2000, a levy passed to fund this request.

By 1999, it had become clear that DPR couldn't do it all. The Seattle Parks Foundation was set up to disentangle the private donations, to find more of them, and to manage them. "Friends of" groups are common for individual parks, and the foundation can be thought of as the "Friends of the Whole Seattle Parks, Recreation, and Open-Space System." As an independent foundation, SPF raises funds and advocates more assertively.

Cap and drink

More recent open space efforts involved the "lidding" of finished drinking water reservoirs. The federal government has required lidding since 2006, but Seattle brought itself into compliance even before the rule's formal adoption, starting with Capitol Hill's Lincoln Reservoir, now topped by the actively used Cal Anderson Park.

Jefferson Park also has a capped reservoir, and although the park system leases the lid for the ball fields, a skate park, and community center, Beacon Food Forest and its attendant P-Patch community gardens ride the western slopes of the cap, technically on Seattle Public Utilities land. (The P-Patch program is a project of the Department of Neighborhoods.)

Beacon Food Forest is ambitious: Besides the "browsing" portion, made up of trees and perennial shrubs that are available for public harvest, it has P-Patch annual gardens, a big compost bin, mushroom logs, and a demonstration garden, all radiating out and down from the central gathering and workshop space at the top. Interpretive signage by artist Molly Danielsson is displayed in five languages, emblematic of the diverse backgrounds of the neighborhood's residents.

Additional signage will be needed to clarify for visitors which portions are "open harvest" and which are P-Patches being worked and harvested by a particular individual or family.

A forest of funding

Local history is peppered with parks levies passed by voter referendum once or twice a decade. While the bulk of each levy is earmarked for specific acquisitions and building projects, a portion of it is always set aside to fund grants. This citizen-driven food forest initiative made use of almost every public granting program that the city has set up to incubate new community projects.

Seattle's small Department of Neighborhoods administers two series of neighborhood matching grants. A Small and Simple Neighborhood Matching Grant can be up to $25,000 and usually covers master plans, revisioning processes, and things like the development of historic walks and guided tours through a neighborhood. A Large Projects grant can be up to $100,000 and is intended to step up the efforts of fruitful small grant recipients in order to incubate the idea in greater detail and provide support.

Both types of grants require matches — either in money or sweat equity. One of the objectives is to build neighborhood capacity, including the healthy social cohesion necessary to setting and achieving a collective long-term goal. While Seattle's neighborhood matching grant system didn't seem novel to its developers, the program has now been emulated in Paris and Edmonton, among other places.

A more substantial Opportunity Fund is also set aside from each park and open space levy. An Opportunity Fund grant, paying up to $500,000, makes it possible to further projects that appear between levy cycles. Although they didn't receive anywhere near that amount, the ever-resourceful food forest team, led by Jacqueline Cramer and Glenn Herlihy, stretched their grant further by partnering with the University of Washington to gather the building materials (including several tons of "urbanite" rock, essentially hunks of broken concrete) and tapped the local AmeriCorps program to get the minor site grading completed.

A portion of city money for the Beacon Food Forest was earmarked for community outreach. Herlihy and Cramer met with community groups and hosted information and input sessions. Did community members get involved as a result of these meetings? No, the duo says, but they understood the project, felt respected, and seemed to develop some level of neighborhood pride for the Food Forest.

Meanwhile, success breeds success. The food-forest-on-public-land idea has spread not just to nearby Tacoma but also to Texas, Iowa, and beyond. It came to fruition in Seattle in part because of the innovative spirit of the town and in part because there is a planning process in place that encourages (and guides) citizen ideas through the phases of concept realization.

Asked what guidance might be offered to other cities working on similar projects, Herlihy suggested more clearly separating the public and private garden elements. He also noted that "designers need more time so they are not designing on the fly as the tree is being planted."

Strong points

Seattle parks sustain themselves through a "super strong public process," says Pam Kliment, a neighborhood planner and the liaison between the parks department and the neighborhoods department. "Everything you do in King County involves public outreach and inclusion." Her recipe for successful long-term collaboration: continuity of care (she's been there 16 years), a single point of contact on each side ("the person becomes a known resource"), and clarity about who does what.

Among other things, Kliment guides the design development process, which typically involves three public meetings. The brainstorming meeting is the collection of ideas, needs, and desires. The "three alternatives" presentation comes later, which can end in a collective assessment that some combination of the three is needed. The final schematic design presentation caps the public design process, but the attendant websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds need continuing maintenance as the team grinds through construction documents and breaks ground.

Public outreach must be paired with habitual interdepartmental collaboration within the city. Michael Shiosaki, planning and development division director in the Parks and Recreation Department, credits elected leaders for the interdepartmental efficiencies, noting that the Seattle voters favor these qualities.

Seattle is actively seeking innovation, in part by seeking innovative people. "Credit [for the excellent park designs goes] to the landscape architects, too, not just the citizen process," says Donald Harris, the parks' property and acquisition manager.

For a neighborhood-based project, the role of the Department of Neighborhoods is largely as funder and convener, not design team selector. The department administers the various grants programs and gathers the neighborhood groups for the projects. Pam Kliment, among others, will assist the neighborhood committee with the creation of an RFP, but it is the neighborhood stakeholders making the final decision about which firm will be selected.

Innovation

In explaining Seattle's capacity for innovation, Harris speaks of a triple bottom line in which ecological functionality, sociocultural impacts, and fiscal capacity are all considered when decisions are made. Instead of following a standard time line from drafting board to ribbon cutting, the city uses a broader "drafting board to X years of operations" calculation. That way, sustainable details have a fighting chance to show their merit.

Take Jefferson Park's new spray pad. Typically, spray parks are "flow-through" scenarios: New water comes into the system, gets sprayed on the kids, collected in the subsurface drainage basins, and shunted off-site. But in Seattle, ecologically minded neighbors wanted better sustainability.

Now an underground cistern captures water, which is reused for one week, and then a second pump drains the cistern into a downhill rain garden. The underground cistern and the second pump raised the initial construction costs, but the water usage savings over time are enormous.

In other words, there are ecosystem and materials concerns that underpin the technical side of innovation. Seattle's Freeway Park was innovative for its social implications — because it stitched a neighborhood back together — and for its physical location atop a freeway, a feat that required some technological advances and reapplications.

One famous example of technological and aesthetic innovation in town is the landmark Gas Works Park, designed by Richard Haag in the 1970s as a cap-and-cover reclamation of a brownfield site with astonishing views of downtown. The site was pristine when J.C. Olmsted recommended it for a park in 1903, but it was home to the nation's only coal-gasification plant from 1906 to 1956.

Haag sought to honor this industrial and cultural history through the strategic preservation of iconic elements of the infrastructure that once dominated the site. The idea of preserving such "ugly" aspects of local history was repellent to many in the 1970s, but that notion has since gained international prominence. Examples include Landschaftspark in Duisburg Nord, Germany, and Zhongshan Shipyard Park in China's Guangdong Province.

Funding shifts

Although voters are often happy to support something shiny and new, the operations and maintenance budgets for older parks may suffer. In early August 2014, Seattle officially adopted a funding method that nearby Tacoma has been using since 1907: a metropolitan parks district.

Such a system sidesteps the state-mandated cap on the total municipal levy by allowing the city to levy an entirely separate tax expressly for the park district to do its work. Cyclic bonds and levies are no longer the bulwark of park funding. That permanent funding source frees the park district to improve the fiscal sustainability of the city's park system, partly through an asset management program.

Among park district opponents were some staunch parks advocates who voiced concerns about lack of direct voter oversight. Others opposed the reality of a new tax (the current increment is small but it can always be raised) and the authority the statute grants this new entity.

Seattle's not a top-down bureaucracy kind of place: The 1990s-era bottom-up planning efforts led to the "relocalization" of neighborhood amenities (chiefly, libraries and community parks). Seattle understands itself to be a "city of neighborhoods" and as such strives to balance interneighborhood connectivity with intraneighborhood "character development" through excellent parks, public artwork, and other placemaking details.

Everyone's involved

In Seattle, high-quality public open space is not solely the purview of one agency. Seattle Public Utilities and the DOT also have programs for improving overlooked spaces. Well before the Beacon Food Forest broke ground, the Street Edge Alternatives project was under way — also stewarded by the SPU.

The first of these is 2nd Ave N.W. between 117th and 120th streets, completed in 2001. This "wiggly" residential street was an early prototype created to study how alternative street-edge configurations might impact stormwater runoff.

An 11 percent reduction in the paved surface area from a typical street, along with increased plantings and the addition of bio- retention cells, has reduced runoff there by more than 90 percent, all while increasing open space in the street right-of-way. Summing up the city's stance toward innovation, Juliet Vong, president of Seattle's landscape architecture firm HBB, dryly calls her home city "not totally risk averse."

Belltown

Just north of downtown is the Belltown neighborhood, the most densely populated part of Seattle. Despite its meager open space ratio, the neighborhood is popular with restaurant-working, bar-hopping 20-somethings and car-free retirees, but unpopular with young families, who move out because their children have nowhere to play. Could a more pedestrian-friendly feel to Belltown help?

When Seattle City Light started ripping out a large pipe under Bell Street, a parks employee saw the potential to piggyback on the construction. Six years later, the new Bell Street Park is less pedestrian mall and more woonerf. It takes the edge elements of a classical plaza and unfolds them along a linear corridor, challenging the common form of a park (no grassy lawns or ball fields here) while seeking to offer park functions (especially social interaction and a slowed pace of life).

"Repurposing streets to make them . . . safer, more usable and hopefully more attractive is a noble objective," wrote Mark
Hinshaw, FAICP, former architecture critic for the Seattle Times, in an essay on the Seattle news site Crosscut.com. (Hinshaw is also the author of "Seattle 3.0" in this issue.)

Noble, but perhaps not totally successful in Bell Street Park. Rather than truly opening the street for pedestrian occupation, the curb was flattened and marked with a host of stand-ins (bollards, in-ground plantings, flowerpots, tables, bike racks, and some very capable-of-being-smacked-by-a-car benches) to hold the line between cars and people. Pavement color patterns, lost under the street furniture, attempt to clarify what's parking and what is not. For now, the as-yet unprogrammed Bell Street Park is a comfortable street to jaywalk, but not quite a park.

In contrast, Seattle's Occidental Park, located in the historic Pioneer Square district, is a narrow street-turned-simple-plaza sporadically inhabited by delivery trucks. The park is visually continuous from storefront to storefront, and pedestrians dominate.

Truth be told, postoccupancy evaluations and upgrades ought to be more the norm than they are; comparatively, Seattle seems to excel at them. It's willing to try something new and fall short, figure it out, and try again. Total risk aversion will keep a city from ever creating a Gas Works Park or a Freeway Park, or from hiring its own John Charles Olmsted and taking on that ambitious plan.

Molly Phemister is a freelance writer, graphic artist, and permaculture landscape designer.

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Resources

Images: Top — The nine-acre Olympic Sculpture Park was a former industrial site and contaminated brownfield until the Seattle Art Museum transformed it into an outdoor sculpture museum and beach — one of many green spaces in downtown Seattle. Photo by Robert Wade. Middle — The Beacon Food Forest and its P-Patch community gardens share seven acres on the western slope of Jefferson Park's capped reservoir. Glenn Herlihy tending to plants in the food forest. Photo by Molly Phemister. Bottom — Gas Works Park doesn't try to hide its industrial past. The old boiler house is now a picnic area and the former coal-gasifaction plant's exhauster-compressor building is now a children's play barn. Photo by Molly Phemister.

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