The Pacific Northwest is undoubtedly beautiful, and Seattle has no shortage of public parks that double as nature-loving reprieves from the city’s crowds and noise. Discovery Park, Lincoln Park, Carkeek Park, Seward Park, they’re all full of winding, wooded trails beneath hundreds, even thousands of trees, with wide-open, grassy playing fields and access to the shores of Lake Washington or Puget Sound, where it’s not rare to spot seals playing or a pod of orcas on the hunt. It’s fucking magical!
What Seattle doesn’t have, though, are city parks. Parks where there’s no hiking, no trail biking, no whale watching—just a place to rest, to read, to people watch on a comfortable bench amid the city’s vibrancy.
Have you seen the public parks in Mexico City and Oaxaca? Their parks are phenomenal. They’re not huge, but they’re entire worlds, tucked into city blocks, among all the commotion. They’re full of beautiful brickwork, stone fountains, and public art. Paved paths are lined with shrubs, flowers, and new and old trees that provide shade to joggers getting in their daily laps or people strolling with their dogs. There are play areas for kids, and a few pieces of utilitarian but well-maintained exercise equipment for adults. And sitting is welcome! Iron benches are plentiful and bolted down—they can’t be locked up at closing time because the parks do not close. Instead, there is lighting throughout, and everything is usable long after sunset.
These spaces are so accommodating and accessible that generations of people have built their daily routines around them—enthusiastic instructors host Zumba classes, teens take dance lessons, and small marching bands practice their routines on the regular. Food carts and other mobile retailers are allowed to set up shop at all hours, only adding to the energizing activity and convenience. They’re the ultimate example of if you build it, they will come… to move, to eat, to work, to unwind right there in the middle of the city.
Seattle’s parks do not compare. Of course, attempts have been made. I’ve spent hours people-watching at Cal Anderson Park on my way home from work. I’ve seen people face off over the oversized chessboards in Occidental Park, and watched players get entertainingly competitive at the ping-pong tables in Hing Hay Park after grabbing some coffee and a Crunchy Cream Malasada from Fuji Bakery. I’ve also noticed the city’s half-hearted effort to establish little pop-up parks by placing a smattering of tables and chairs in places like Westlake Park, Belltown, and South Lake Union, but those are all temporary. Flimsy and foldable. I’ve had tables and chairs pulled out from underneath me by a park’s employee mid-bite, in some cases, after daring to linger a little too close to sunset. (True story! At least let me finish my Pastry Project sundae next time, guy!)
Instead of building up public spaces and investing in making them usable, enjoyable, even, with permanent seating and garbage cans and public bathrooms, our leadership has been shutting them down, too focused on eliminating any and all public areas where a person might dare try to loiter or rest. Months ago, three inner-city parks—Seven Hills Park, Lake City Mini Park, and the pavilion at Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park, which has been host to Seattle’s fun and colorful Mexican Guelaguetza celebration for several years—were temporarily closed for the remainder of the year. Oh, are people not using them as you intended, Seattle? Maybe that’s because the city has swept through every public space, eliminating seating, picnic tables, trash cans, and access to public restrooms (see related complaint here).
This isn’t a population problem. People are not the enemy. There are more than four million people living in Oaxaca, and more than nine million in Mexico City proper, and those major cities are still capable of building and maintaining these beautiful, bustling little parks, public (and free!) third places for people to come, alone or together.
Please. Katie Wilson, St. Rat’s bestie Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and anyone else who has the keys to the park palace, please, please invest in our inner-city public spaces. Don’t try to erase them. I want to be able to grab a coffee, wander a few blocks, and just sit and watch the city unfold in front of me. I want to quietly judge people for what they’re wearing and make eye contact with strangers’ dogs as they walk by. I want to sit and watch kids fall over while learning how to ride their bikes, because kids falling down is funny. I love that we have so many ways to escape the city’s madness. But I don’t always want to hike or keep track of when a park might close down. Sometimes I just want to sit on a real bench, in the middle of a real park, in the city I love, and soak it all in.
Um, Seattle has great parks all over. Green Lake, Gas Works, Olympic Sculpture, Magnuson, Volunteer, Alki, Golden Gardens, the arboretum, Lincoln, even urban parks like Occidental, Bell, Westlake. What are you looking for that you can’t find exactly? We have a plethora of all kinds of parks.
The problem with all of them is that some of the people who are in them belong in jails, mental institutions and rehab programs.
Either we build parks for these people in lieu of providing them real help or we build parks for the working citizenry who pays the upkeep on the parks. But these groups won’t cohabitate. It’s not safe. And so long as it’s not safe, people won’t vote to expand parks – they’ll do the opposite – favor closing parks to fight crime.
All of Seattles problems come down to losing rule of law for everyday “minor” offenses like theft and assault. Until that gets fixed, parks will languish.
No major European city allows public camping in parks:
Paris – Public camping is tightly restricted. Urban tent camps (often near canals or périphérique) are periodically dismantled.
London – Tents violate park bylaws (varies by borough but essentially universal). Police or park staff dismantle tent structures when discovered.
Berlin – Prohibits camping in Tiergarten, Hasenheide, and all municipal parks.
Amsterdam – Tents in parks (e.g., Vondelpark) are quickly removed.
I could go on and on. Homeless should be in shelters (god forbid even congregate shelter) not in parks.
And as @1 pointed out, parks are everywhere throughout this great city (but we do tend to favor a natural aesthetics over the colonial aesthetics of the structured European park).
I think we do have small park spaces like that – – on Capitol Hill, Louisa Boren Lookout comes to mind, or Thomas Street mini park, or Tashkent Park, or Summit Slope Park… There are some really cool small park spaces on the Capitol Hill side of Lake Union too. In a growing city though yeah there could always be more. But the city budget is a zero-sum game and all everyone’s screaming about right now affordable housing and homelessness. It seems like there’s zero advocacy for parks or so many other things (like the animal shelter where consultants found inhumane conditions, but no one seems to care about that either). I know of some examples where people have advocated for turning certain vacant lots into parks but are always told there’s no money.